An Interview with DarkElfGuy

I had the honor of interviewing Morrowind modder DarkElfGuy for my article on the strange world of Oblivion New Lands mods. The raw text of the interview follows.

A world of adventure beckons in Morrowind.

Why do you think Oblivion’s New Lands mods never took off in the same way Tamriel Rebuilt and Beyond Skyrim did?

I think there’s two big main factors that contribute to Oblivion’s lack of big landmass projects compared to Morrowind and Skyrim, namely difficulty and timing. And when I say difficulty, I mostly mean quests, but asset creation is also a big limiting factor — or at least it was back in the late 2000s.

On the surface, Oblivion is actually arguably the better platform for building and creating landmass mods, at least compared to Morrowind. It has several advantages over Morrowind when it comes to the CK — actual world spaces, dynamic water heights, baked in groundcover. When it comes to landmasses, Morrowind is stuck with a single world space, which every landmass mod shares, leading to inevitable overlapping conflicts, as seen in this nearly 20-year old map of major landmass mods.

Unsurprisingly, this means that Oblivion, in terms of raw numbers, does actually have far more landmass mods than Morrowind.

But it’s also true that not many of those are the big, sprawling projects that Morrowind is known for. There’s nothing really comparable to Tamriel Rebuilt or Project Tamriel for Oblivion. At least, not in the same playable, content-rich state. There’s plenty of dead projects for Oblivion, even Tamriel Rebuilt briefly tried to develop Hammerfell, but a good terrain editor does not a good province mod make — at least, not by itself it doesn’t.

Pretty cities and wide expansive landscapes alone are not enough to make a good landmass mod, you need dialogue, lore, new quests and adventures — and here Oblivion runs into the big brick wall that is voice-acting. The way Oblivion is setup, quests practically require voice-acting in order to blend in with the rest of the game, and this is a hurdle that modders have historically had a hard time getting past.

Now, if AI voice tools had existed when Oblivion was released, we’d probably be having a very different conversation about Oblivion landmass mods (setting aside for now the ethics of using AI voices), but they didn’t, and that, coupled with the need to create higher quality assets, proved to be too formidable a barrier for most projects to get past.

In comparison, Morrowind has a lower barrier for entry — new assets don’t need to be as high quality as those for Oblivion (though this is arguably changing somewhat with modern Morrowind graphics standards), and Morrowind has text-based dialogue, which is far easier to write and design quests for. Indeed, Morrowind is probably the strongest entry in the series when it comes to quest mods, even compared to Skyrim, there is a prodigious amount of questing content for Morrowind, and that is largely due, not just to a lack of required voice-acting, but also to an easier to use dialogue editor (to clarify, easier to use doesn’t mean it isn’t also extremely tedious — both things can be true at the same time).

Tamriel Rebuilt especially is still chugging along all these years later, and there are other massive projects like The Azurian Isles in the works for Morrowind, whereas most of Oblivion’s New Lands mods are largely unfinished, abandoned, or haven’t been updated since 2009. Why do you think that is?

This quest development advantage can be seen with Morrowind’s big landmass projects — Tamriel Rebuilt, Province: Cyrodiil, Skyrim — Home of the Nords — they all have a ton of quests. Tamriel Rebuilt alone has over 900 quests, more than The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim combined. And that’s only possible because of the easier tools available for quest development in Morrowind.

Now, the other factor is simply a matter of timing and technological leaps. While Oblivion was released only 4 years after Morrowind, it represented a massive technological leap forward, with physics, NPC schedules, full voice-acting, combat and everything else. Compared to Morrowind’s Construction Set, the CK had a steeper learning curve for those coming from Morrowind, and the end result is that while many Morrowind modders made the jump to Oblivion, quite a few ended up returning to Morrowind modding after a year or two — either due to being unable to create the kinds of worlds and stories they wanted to with the Oblivion CK or because they simply preferred Morrowind’s more alien world as a setting to work in.

Comparatively, Skyrim was released in 2011, 5 years after Oblivion, and in terms of the CK, the technological leap forward this time was considerably more modest, it was far easier to go from the Oblivion CK to the Skyrim CK than it was to go from Morrowind’s CS to the Oblivion CK. And big modding projects take time to develop, no matter what platform you’re building them on. Tamriel Rebuilt was started in 2001, but their first major release wasn’t until 2006, 5 years later.

Oblivion projects simply didn’t get enough time to breathe before the next big thing came along and sucked up all the oxygen. Morrowind’s saving grace with Oblivion was that Oblivion was such a completely different beast from Morrowind, both in terms of technology and world design, that there was still a significant draw to keep modders interested and avoid the jump. Oblivion had no such luck. I imagine if you were to look at a timeline, a lot of big landmass projects would’ve been abandoned around the time of Skyrim’s release.

Special thanks to DarkElfGuy for this interview. You can learn more about him by checking out his YouTube channel.