#SKYRIM MOD THE FORGOTTEN CITY FULL#
#SKYRIM MOD THE FORGOTTEN CITY PROFESSIONAL#

'That sounds a bit sad! I'd say I was a legal professional who always enjoyed telling stories, and who was lucky enough to find an even better outlet for them.' 'I think itвЂ™s fair to say my job left me with some unused creative energy,' Pearce said, though he politely refuted my suggestion that he had been a frustrated writer the whole time. He hired a programmer, Alex Goss, and an artist, John Eyre, while also collaborating with a selection of specialists - a composer, a community manager, a couple of animators from Bioware and Obsidian, voice actors, trailer makers, a couple of historical consultants - and securing a publishing deal. It made sense.'Д«uoyed by the response, Pearce recruited a small team to turn his mod into its own game. 'So, I sent out a survey to 200 fans of the mod asking about their views, and 93% of them were excited about the idea of a standalone game. 'In 2016, Kotaku published an article saying The Forgotten CityвЂ™s story was 'ambitious enough to be its own game,' and then some of the guys from League of Geeks (Melbourne-based developers of Armello) encouraged me to re-imagine the mod as a standalone game as well. 'I loved making the mod, but IвЂ™ve always considered it a rough draft of what it could have been,' he reflected. The mod has been downloaded over three million times and won Pearce a National Writers Guild Award in Australia in 2016.

#SKYRIM MOD THE FORGOTTEN CITY FULL#

Over the next three years, The Forgotten City grew from a dull Dwarven hallway into a sprawling underground city that would play host to a time-travelling murder mystery told via a non-linear 35,000-word screenplay, full voice acting, and an original orchestral score. The rest of it just sort of evolved from there.' I Fought the Law 'That thought prompted the idea to allow the player to travel back in time to interact with the people who used to live there. 'I remember looking at it and thinking it was just another big empty ruined place,' Pearce said. He didn't know it at the time, but he had laid the first stone foundation of what would eventually become The Forgotten City. When Bethesda released the SDK for Skyrim in 2012, Pearce taught himself to mod, studying tutorials online to at first build a Dwarven hallway, which evolved into a large underground city. The next big moddable game to come along was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. 'I decided to have a go at my own mod when the next big moddable game came along.' 'In 2011, I played a mod called New Vegas Bounties from a modder called someguy2000 and it was a revelation to me that a mod could be as good as an official DLC, or maybe even better вЂ“ and a vehicle for world-class storytelling,' Pearce recalled. By 2011, he found himself working as a lawyer lobbying the government for regulatory reform. He played games on and off all his life, and as a kid had even taught himself enough programming to make his own 'virtually unplayable' games on a venerable IBM 8086 PC. Ten years ago, Nick Pearce worked a full-time job in Melbourne, Australia as a Regulatory Strategy Advisor at what he describes as a big tech company. In Pearce's case, heвЂ™s not trying to celebrate all those late nights working but rather they seem borne of his attempt to make up for lost time. Honestly, I was surprised to discover it's even physically possible, but it is.'Д¬runch is an omnipresent labour issue in the games industry, and the developers that produce good games while crunching do so despite the time spent crunching, not because of it.

And I certainly would never allow my staff to work hours like that. 'To be clear, that's something I wouldn't encourage anyone to do, because it's not healthy or sustainable. 'I've spent the last four-and-a-half years working 80 hour weeks with no real holiday, which I guess is about nine years worth of work,' he said, notably without giving the impression that he is boasting about it. As the project wraps, Pearce is quick to acknowledge it's remarkable he hasn't taken a tumble and lost that last life given the level of crunch he's willingly put himself through. Transitioning to full-time development has enabled Pearce and the Modern Storyteller team to rebuild The Forgotten City from the ground up, using the Unreal Engine and overhauling every aspect of the original creation. He estimates he devoted about ten hours a week, every week for three years, to the mod. Reaching this point has been quite the journey, one that began around a decade ago when Pearce first started working on the mod in his spare time. Their first game, The Forgotten City is a time loop mystery set in ancient Rome based on Pearce's incredibly successful Skyrim mod of the same name, and itвЂ™s all but finished for a launch later this month on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. And neither have his collaborators in the tiny three-person studio known as Modern Storyteller.

Skyrim mod the forgotten city