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Building the World

Submitted by Schwerpunkt on

Bloodmoon and Tribunal. I know these DLC are slated for development quite a while after Skywind is finished and released, but Solstheim and Mournhold exist despite the player not having access to them. I think it'd make sense if NPCs mentioned details about those places long before they're actually developed and released as extensions of Skywind.

Soldiers in the Imperial Legion should mention that they're happy not to have been stationed at Fort Frostmoth because of a village of crazy Nords to the north, living trees, rumors of werewolves, a giant ice castle, "goblins", etc..

Ordinators in Vivec should mention that, despite how tough and unforgiving they are, High Ordinators are even more impressive and Her Hands are on another level entirely.

Regular NPCs could mention the Dark Brotherhood, some in the Imperial Legion (positively) and Ordinators (negatively) could talk about Royal Guards, various NPCs could mention a museum in Mournhold that purchases artifacts if you have them equipped, etc..

I'm pretty sure Bethesda did add dialogue to vanilla Morrowind NPCs with the release of Bloodmoon and Tribunal, but it was easy enough for them because there was no voice acting. Since all the NPCs in Skywind are going to have voice actors, I think it'd save time and a few headaches to get the voice actors to do a few more lines of dialogue now instead of waiting months/another year and hoping they'll still be around to do it then.

 

Also on the subject of world building: dragons. Bethesda has added lore to TES since Morrowind was released, some of it dealing with Morrowind (Vvardenfell). One of the biggest additions (elaborations, really) were dragons, which we now know made their way to Morrowind only to be slaughtered by cliff racers. I doubt it'd make any sense for any living dragons to still be in Morrowind, but it'd certainly be reasonable to come across skeletons in a few places (mountainous regions and caves, along with Solstheim when it's added).

Some may want to point out that dragons disappear when you kill them in Skyrim, but that's only because the player in Skyrim is Dragonborn. The reason burial mounds and the skeletal dragon in Labyrinthian exist is because whenever dragons are killed by non-Dragonborn, their skeletons remain. That means all the dragons killed in Morrowind would have left their skeletons behind. Arguably, most of them would have been dug up/collected by now, but given that many of the Dwemer ruins are somehow still teeming with valuables, it's reasonable to assume that a few dragon skeletons are laying around still, half covered by ash and dirt.

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We're already written 10,000 new lines of dialogue for morrowind NPCs. Some of these lines may cover what you have mentioned. Dialogue has been finalized at this point of the project. :)

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If you've already done it, that's great.

If not, I'm only suggesting you do the lines now while you're already doing the dialogue for the Morrowind NPCs instead of waiting another year and finding out those VAs are no longer available, that's all.

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As I said, dialogue is finalized. We had volunteers generate interesting new content along similar banter. Not all of the what you've suggested has been written but at this point this step is complete and we've moved on. Interesting suggestions though! Here's what we have for new content if you're interested: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D1HF9IelOuawoIKhC-obmct56R25BvtUurcrXSttwqY/edit?pli=1#gid=0

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That's all banter, correct? How about conversational trees then, in order for the player to gain access to information about other parts of Vvardenell? Or responses when the player asks if they've heard any rumors lately, or the happenings of the area they're currently in?

Not all dialogue can be finalized if you guys are still working on major aspects of the game. Surely there's some room for new dialogue to be added.

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Morrowind already has latest rumours in the vanilla game. We are not attempting to add more content to this area. Our goal has only been to flesh out areas of the game that lacked content altogether, such as street banter found in skyrim but not in any way in morrowind. We already have close to 40,000 lines in Skywind and the existing idle banter we have written up will take awhile to be fully implemented as is.

All vanilla morrowind dialogue is indeed finalized except for for the most necessary of changes, mostly due to quest based dialogue omissions (but these are about as rare as cyrodiilic unicorns). The only aspect of the game that isn't done that would affect VA is how we're handling skills but we're leaving the vanilla lines about short swords, spears etc and either they'll make sense in the final release or be cut post VA recording (or possibly re-recorded for the few trainer VAs we can get a hold of again).

In short, your idea is cool but skywind already has tons of content and what your talking about adds unessential flavour to the game that most players wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the existing latest rumours lines. I'm not saying in an ideal world it wouldn't be great to have it, it's just the time has come and gone for these sorts of projects. Scripts cannot be touched much once they are assigned for sanity's sake.

The only area I can see something like this sneaking its way into Skywind would be through the proposed random encounters. If you're truly die hard to get them in, these scenes use new NPCs that dont have finalized scripts yet. We could also use someone to implement these random encounters. nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

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