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Legoless: Redpill me on Beyond Skyrim: The scope is huge - is it feasible? What kind of progress has been made? Are there many contributors?

Sarthes Arai: We're a project with the goal of recreating ask provinces of Tamriel in Skyrim. Currently, High Rock, Cyrodiil, Elsweyr, Black Marsh, and Morrowind are being developed, together with the island of Roscrea and an Atmora mod.

Sheogorath: *ahem* Thras.

Sarthes Arai: Sorry, and Thras. Black marsh is in more or less development, but I think Summerset isn't.

Sheogorath: For some reason I thought Black Marsh wasn't being worked on. Of course I'm most hyped for Elsweyr.

Sarthes Arai: [Black Marsh] isn't completely dead.

Legoless: So are the landmasses done first like Tamriel Rebuilt? What's the approach being taken?

Sarthes Arai: I can only tell from the Morrowind department, and we have a full heightmap and are currently creating assets and then locations. Cyrodiil will soon (TM) release their Bruma beta.

Legoless: Interesting. Is Morrowind taking inspiration from ESO or TR?

Sarthes Arai: Yes. Actually both. We're like "TR with ESO on top of it". Since I haven't actually played TR, I can't tell how much conflict there is.

Legoless: Was the project started pre-ESO, or was that a decision?

Sarthes Arai: We've redone much of our stuff because the what was there when the new leadership took over was... not really good. (Speaking only for Morrowind now). We definitely take both sources into account. And especially I am one who always says "but ESO..."

LasurArkinshade: Speaking for the Cyrodiil team:
We do level design (landscaping) in tandem with everything else, like quest design and art assets
We have a lot of paper-design done for quest content, even for cities and regions that aren't in-game yet
And yes, our major inspirations are, in order of priority:
- The singleplayer games from TES3-5
- ESO
- Well-respected/high-quality 'unofficial' sources like TR

Legoless: So the landscaping is done as needed?

LasurArkinshade: I mean, it's always the first step in getting content into an area, but yes. Our landscapers are generally far ahead of the other departments. For instance, we have a lot of work done on the Gold Coast, West Weald and other regions of Cyrodiil, yet no implemented quest content in those regions yet, since our quest devs are hard at work getting Bruma ready to ship.

Legoless: Is there any kind of overlap with Skyblivion?

LasurArkinshade: In a sense. We benefit from some of their technical research - e.g. they have a guy called Aerisarn who shares a lot of cutting-edge information on the way behaviour files work.

Legoless: Like, are those assets imported from TES4 or are they custom made?

LasurArkinshade:None of our assets are imported from TES4; All custom made.

Legoless: Wow

LasurArkinshade: Which is part of why our work with Skyblivion isn't all that significant - Skyblivion, as it stands, relies a lot on TES4 assets. At least, to my understanding.

Legoless: Yeah

LasurArkinshade: Also, fun fact: Our original soundtrack is over 3 hours long.

Legoless: Does that include the music in that Gold Coast video? cuz that was ----in awesome

LasurArkinshade: Yes. We have a few more tracks that are publicly released. (https://soundcloud.com/danielran/beyond-skyrim-cyrodiil-lost-glory)

Legoless: Is it SSE compatible?

LasurArkinshade: Bruma will be released on classic and SE Skyrim, as well as the Xbox One version of SE. After Bruma we may go SE-exclusive, since the SE engine allows us to push the boundaries a lot more in terms of NPC count and draw calls/amount of objects in one location. Doing justice to places like the Imperial City would be very difficult on the old version. Bruma already stresses the old engine to its limits - we had to do a few graphical 'downgrades' to get it running even to an acceptable degree.

Legoless: Xbox One?? Impressive.

King Feraligatr: Unlike TR and other MW related landmass add ons, which have less stressed engine, the MetaCthulhuP, and OpenMW; Beyond Skyrim seems far less likely to get anywhere. Skyrim has a way more stressed and finicky engine, has to deal with Papyrus, does not have the same cult status and following as MW, is harder to mod than MW, and much more.

LasurArkinshade: Are you basically trying to say that Beyond Skyrim will fail because we'll push the engine too far?

King Feraligatr: In some ways yes.

LasurArkinshade: Well, I'll answer a few of those things:
1)Papyrus isn't really a problem. It's just a scripting language, a fairly powerful one at that. The only issues that excessive modding can cause in terms of Papyrus arise as a result of having lots of mods that are pushing constantly-running or frequently-updating scripts through Papyrus at once, e.g. Frostfall and similar survival mods. The vast majority of what we do with Papyrus is simple one-shot quest scripting, like setting quest stages and spawning actors, and that's not remotely stressful to the scripting engine

2) The only meaningful engine limitations we've run into are:
- Limits on the size of worldspaces, which we've resolved by splitting into only one or a few provinces per worldspace instead of having them all in one
- A limit on the amount of forms the CK can load at once without running into bugs - we've resolved this by editing the Beyond Skyrim .esms using a stripped-down version of Skyrim.esm

3) As for cult following -
Morrowind has a larger cult following, yes, but Skyrim has a much larger non-cult following. It's a massive game with a huge audience. We have a much larger potential audience than TR does, just by virtue of that. I have a hell of a lot of respect and love for both TR and for Morrowind, but the Skyrim audience is indisputably larger. I should also note that the province teams are independent, Beyond Skyrim is more of an umbrella project than anything else. It's not like we're all working on all of Tamriel simultaneously, that'd be insane. I work on Cyrodiil and care only about Cyrodiil. Cyrodiil isn't delayed or harmed in any way by the other province projects, so it's not this impossibly ambitious behemoth that it might seem like on the outside

MetaCthulhu: Are you going to have a quest or something that crosses borders at some point, or is everything going to be self contained?

LasurArkinshade: We can't do much in the way of cross-border quests due to the aforementioned form limit that prevents us from loading too many esms in the CK simultaneously. But we might play around with it a bit, depending on what we can wrangle. That said, all of that would have to come at the end of a province's development, once they have the free dev bandwidth to work with other province projects on that stuff. What we do have are references to other provinces e.g. in Bruma you'll see a few references to what's going on in Morrowind that we co-ordinated with the Morrowind team. One of the reasons Beyond Skyrim as an umbrella project exists in the first place is to allow us to make sure we have consistent lore etc.

MetaCthulhu: I believe a couple of the other large Skyrim projects have interesting licensing arrangements for their assests, what's Beyond Skyrim's stance on sharing assets with other projects?

LasurArkinshade: We have released some of our assets as modders' resources and have negotiated a few asset-sharing arrangements with other projects in the past. The issue that we often run into when negotiating those arrangements is that not many projects are creating the assets that we have need of. Skyblivion is largely reliant on ported TES4 assets, for instance. If they were creating custom material we'd be very interested in collaborating on stuff with them, but to my knowledge they aren't.

MetaCthulhu: What sort of story does Beyond Skyrim have as far as quests go right now?

LasurArkinshade: Every province's storylines are completely independent, since the projects are independent. The goal is to have a full complement of side quests and questlines that's comparable in density to a Bethesda game.

Larrian: While the Provinces work together to ensure consistency, we still have unique and different storylines.

LasurArkinshade: For Cyrodiil we know what our two major questlines will be, one of which will involve Ayleids and the other will involve politics, and then we will have guild/faction stuff for the major factions (Fighters Guild, Synod/College of Whispers, Resistance, Thieves Guild), and then obviously all the side quests you'd expect. We already have all the side quest content implemented in Bruma, so we know how much work it takes, but it's not insurmountable.

Larrian: Just because Skyrim catered more to a casual crowd, doesn't mean that Beyond Skyrim will be a terrible project, that will fail, for example, BS:MW is taking advantage of Skyrim's advanced quest scripting tools to expand and make the Province more RPG-esque than Vanilla.

MetaCthulhu: Can you expand on that, or is that a secret?

Larrian: We have dialogue skill checks, pretty extensive dialogue. We're taking advantage of aspects of Skyrim's engine that Skyrim didn't

MetaCthulhu: Is the check based purely on skill level, or is it a probalistic check?

Larrian: It depends

LasurArkinshade: I direct the quest design and writing for the Cyrodiil project, and in all my time working on it, I will tell you this truth that I've uncovered:
The thing that makes or breaks a quest, as long as the fundamentals, like a good dialogue system, are there, is the ability of the designer to spin a good story with well-structured dialogue trees that have well-written dialogue copy that is well-voiced, and a decent degree of non-linearity + good structure + choices and consequences. None of these things are hindered by Skyrim's engine. In fact, they are helped. Morrowind uses an archaic keyword-based system of dialogue and has essentially no facilities whatsoever for any complex staging or events. It's not even possible to have two NPCs talk to each other in Morrowind, at least not without significant tomfoolery on the back-end.

MetaCthulhu: Is there anything you wished Skyrim's engine did have though?

LasurArkinshade: Hmm... not sure. Most of the limitations that Skyrim's engine has for modders are outside my wheelhouse, like a fairly archaic lighting engine and a poor pipeline for 3D artists. The quest system is really, really awesome. Probably more powerful than any other editor I've ever used.

King Feraligatr: I will say the alias system is amazing.

LasurArkinshade: Yes, the alias system is a marvel of engineering. And honestly, Papyrus lets you do a lot very easily. It's a powerful language, just prone to issues when you use it in ways that it's not necessarily intended for e.g. constantly-updating survival mods. I mean, yeah, it's limiting for really complex stuff that's basically trying to engineer new core game mechanics (Like the aforementioned survival and needs mods), but for quest stuff it's great.

MetaCthulhu: So what is the performance hit from adding such large landmasses?

LasurArkinshade: None. The game only loads a 5x5 grid of cells around where the player is stood. While you're in Skyrim the game isn't processing anything to do with any other provinces. Some of our locations are more demanding than vanilla, of course, just due to the density of objects and actors.

King Feraligatr: Not much anyways. There still seems to be a bit of processing for NPCs in far off places. At least, "Unique" NPCs.

LasurArkinshade: That depends on persistence.

King Feraligatr: Ah yes, the persist location...... Something that makes placing out more NPCs harder than it was.

LasurArkinshade:If a quest defines an NPC alias as a specific reference rather than as a unique actor, that actor also becomes persistent for the duration of the quest

MetaCthulhu: Does the project have a higher percentage of essential NPCs than vanilla?

LasurArkinshade:Probably about the same. If anything, at least for Cyrodiil, we're trying to minimise the amount of essential NPCs. Fallout: New Vegas is a major design inspiration for us, and it had 1 essential NPC.

King Feraligatr: Protected NPCs or no protection at all is best for most quests and promotes better quest making and writing. "Oh [&@%!]! The player can actually break our quest!". Standards rise then, hopefully. The Protected flag was a damn nice addition.

LasurArkinshade: Yeah, we use the Protected flag to prevent quests getting locked off because of an overzealous wolf killing a quest NPC or whatever.

MetaCthulhu: Has that been an issue in the past?

LasurArkinshade: Not really, but that's because we used it as appropriate from the beginning.

King Feraligatr: I'm guessing the difficulty of BS is vanilla level, if not a bit higher?

LasurArkinshade: Yes

MetaCthulhu: How many NPCs have been added in Cyrodiil alone, if I may ask?

LasurArkinshade:Well, depends. If I include every actor record, including things like generic bandits, obviously a hell of a lot. If I only include unique NPCs... Somewhere around 80 in the city of Bruma. More when you add the rest of the county to it. We haven't put NPCs in-game in other regions yet, since we're focused on getting Bruma ready to ship.

King Feraligatr: Pretty impressive numbers by Skyrim standards

MetaCthulhu: Yeah, more than Whiterun [73]

King Feraligatr: Are you including generic guards?

LasurArkinshade: No. I mean, this is off the top of my head, I haven't just done an accurate count or anything. The major population centres in County Bruma are:
- Bruma (city)
- Applewatch
- Greenwood Meadery
- Frostcrag Spire
Aleswell is also right on the border of the county but isn't accessible in the upcoming release due to time constrainsts

MetaCthulhu: When is release by the way?

LasurArkinshade: At this point we're just recording and implementing voiceover, fixing quest bugs/doing polish, and fixing wilderness navmesh for Bruma, ss well as dealing with minor art etc bugs as they occur. Definitely this year, probably before the end of summer this year, but no hard release date promises until we're sure we can make it. Don't want to disappoint people with delays OR release unfinished because we rushed to hit an arbitrary deadline. Right now we have 3500 lines of VO left to record out of 30,000 total.

MetaCthulhu: 30,000?

LasurArkinshade: Yes

King Feraligatr: Navmeshes seem like such a pain the ass. It's one of the many reasons I don't make my own cells. I could make pathgrids, easily. Navmeshes are much more complex and don't allow for dynamic pathing off the navmesh.

LasurArkinshade: You can kinda do dynamic navmesh by spawning navcut activators to block off areas of navmesh, but yes.

MetaCthulhu: You all recorded 30,000 lines of dialog? Holy hell.

LasurArkinshade: Yes. I'm very proud of the voice cast we assembled. Got some very awesome talent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5rN4GqdOjA

^ Behind-the-scenes of the voice recording process. Just one of our actors, admittedly, but still. The actor in that video is Steven Kelly [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4794684/] who's actually in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Admittedly he got cast by winning their online audition competition, not because he was on the casting agent's speed-dial or anything. But still.

MetaCthulhu: How many voice actors have you had so far?

LasurArkinshade: Just over 20 that we're in contact with. Bruma might have slightly less just due to scheduling issues, haven't done a full count since we cut a few voicetypes.

MetaCthulhu: Has time and scheduling been a big issue?

LasurArkinshade: Not really. Just that a few of our actors were cast so late in development that we didn't have room for them in Bruma, and one of our actresses has had to step away due to illness, but not a big concern overall. We've been lucky to cast a lot of very talented actors who are also very reliable. Many of them are professional or semi-professional, so it's not just a hobby for them. While that does mean they often have to record for us in between paying work, it has the advantage that they don't just disappear. We work with actors who've been in Dragon Age (as I mentioned), as well as a few other games like Wasteland 2, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Apotheon, Heroes of Newerth, SMITE, etc.

MetaCthulhu: The logistics of this whole thing is just blowing my mind.

King Feraligatr: TR manages. And MW is a more complex beast than SR (lore, world, story, etc. wise).

LasurArkinshade: While I love TR, I must point out that they don't have to bother with voice acting. And it's actually more fun than you might think. I'm actually the voice director so I work with the actors, and often we get to do live sessions to direct them, which is very fun and often leads to hilarious outtakes. And even for the actors where we don't do live directed sessions, they're very professional and generally not a hassle.

King Feraligatr: Do you ever miss the simpler engines which make it easier to get a better product out? It seems like you have worked them and and you might miss them. I do more complex stuff for MW as it's easier to do more complex stuff in it.

LasurArkinshade: Never worked on Morrowind mods, actually, so I can't really compare. I don't find voice work to be a problem, though, for two reasons:
1) It's really fun to work on it and to see it all come alive with VO
2) It doesn't bottleneck the rest of development
You can test quests with no VO fine. It's not like art assets, where level design has to sit around waiting for the architecture to be available, or whatever

MetaCthulhu: What's up with Valenwood? Does it not have a projected assoctiated with it?

LasurArkinshade: No project associated with it - there was never a strong project that formed around it back when Beyond Skyrim first started up and since then we've implemented a rule that any new province projects must exist and be going strong outside of Beyond Skyrim before granting them entry; to prevent endless failed attempts at starting up inactive provinces from draining resources and talent from all the other projects. Valenwood is an especially challenging province to work on due to stuff like migratory tree-cities - that's what torpedoed a lot of the other projects, they could never settle on ways of portraying those sorts of things within the engine.

MetaCthulhu: Does entry into Beyond Skyrim offer any perks to speak of?

LasurArkinshade: Well, it grants people publicity by virtue of name association, and it grants access to BSAssets.esm, which is our cross-province assets esm that contains a lot of assets to work with. And obviously it means that a project can collaborate with our province teams to ensure lore consistency etc. Since we have to write a fair amount of in-house lore and storytelling on top of the official stuff.

MetaCthulhu: How many assets do you have?

LasurArkinshade: God knows. I have no idea. Well, for instance, we have a whole Ayleid ruin dungeon tileset that's cross-province, since Ayleids did settle outside Cyrodiil, as per the lore
As well as lots of trees and other flora.

MetaCthulhu: You have a functional city, and over 30,000 lines of dialog, I can imagine it's not slim pickins.

LasurArkinshade: A lot of people are skeptical about us for many of the reasons you described, as well as some others. I enjoy talking to people about those concerns - both to learn what their fears are to avoid making those mistakes, and also to help address whatever concerns I can.

MetaCthulhu: Do you mind if I type this up as a transcript and post it on the UESP forums? A few people there might be interested in it.

LasurArkinshade: Feel free - although I don't want it to seem like I'm somehow trying to pimp out the project shamelessly. But if you think people would be interested in seeing the transcript, sure.