Responsive Quest Design

With Extended Cut - Saints & Seducers, we learned that players appreciate when quests let them approach objectives in ways that aren't necessarily 'intentional'. There are a lot of places where this kind of player creativity can be encouraged in quest design, and the lessons we learned about how to do so well have been passed forward to Extended Cut. For instance, what happens if a player wants to get through a dungeon stealthily and avoid enemy encounters? What happens if you want to ditch your follower and hike up to the Throat of the World alone? Now, these gameplay-oriented decisions are more supported by the questline, and some can have consequences that affect later quests. We can't always adapt to everything the player can do--especially when you factor in third-party mods, which we aren't able to account for--but we've found that it's often worth our time to review our quests to see where we can add contingencies for players who want to approach situations in a way that fits their character's personality and gameplay style. We hope that this additional work will help contribute to EC's main quest feeling like a true RPG experience that rewards players' character choices.

Increased Consequence and Risk

We found that players like their choices to have significant narrative consequences, especially when it impacts major characters. While expanded choice and consequence has always been a core goal of EC, we've made an effort to go even deeper in acknowledging the player's decisions in ways that impact outcomes for your companions and other significant characters. For example, some of your companions might be at risk of serious narrative consequences--and even death--depending on your decisions, whereas in earlier story drafts, this risk was less present. We hope that this additional work will help players feel like they have a more complex and consequential relationship with their companions and with other characters in the mod.

Race and Faction Awareness

We found that players responded very positively to quest content that acknowledges their choice of race and their membership in the game's various factions, both of which are important parts of a Skyrim player character's role-playing identity. Where appropriate, we want to add dialogue, awareness, and occasionally even unique choices and outcomes that are related to these choices--after all, Skyrim is a very different place for a Nord than for a Dark Elf, and a scholar of the College of Winterhold might have different insight to contribute than an assassin of the Dark Brotherhood. While EC is not overhauling the game's factions in its initial release, we do want to make sure that players feel as though the main quest is aware of their identity and affiliations. We hope that this additional work will help make that awareness more prevalent throughout our storyline.

Expanded Vanilla Characters

When development on the mod was first begun, our team was hesitant to touch several vanilla main quest NPCs because replacing their voice acting was determined to be impractical at the time. To work around this, we had designed a range of original characters to help us work around replacing these vanilla NPCs. As our team has expanded and we've built up a cast of exceptional voice talent, we have become more comfortable with re-voicing vanilla NPCs where it is needed to improve the questline, and so we've removed most of our original characters from the initial story draft now that they're no longer necessary to keep the plot moving in place of vanilla characters. Now, players will be able to enjoy content like deeper discussions with Paarthurnax atop the Throat of the World, bantering with Master Neloth in the depths of Nchardak, and schmoozing with Elenwen at the Embassy party. While the mod still contains a variety of original characters--most notably our companion NPCs, who will be integral to your Extended Cut experience--we've placed significant priority on using deeper, more strongly characterized vanilla NPCs in place of original NPCs wherever we can. We hope that this additional work will bring out the potential of iconic Skyrim characters who were held back by minimal dialogue and character writing in the vanilla main quest.

Tighter Narrative Scope

Our early story drafts contained a few story arcs that were adaptions of side quests in the vanilla game that we felt would make for interesting supplemental additions to the main quest on top of the vanilla game's core story beats. Over the last year, we've reviewed this content and determined that the amount of time and effort required to implement much of it would have been very high compared to the tangible benefit it would have for the core plot and characters. Tying this content into the rest of the main quest proved challenging for our team, and we've decided to remove a significant number of these supplemental quests in order to focus on improving our core story arcs and building upon the quests present in the vanilla and Dragonborn main questlines. Most notably, we've removed the sections of the Extended Cut storyline that would have overhauled the Forsworn Conspiracy arc and Mephala's Daedric quest as part of the main quest. With the removal of this content, we're able to add additional content to other quests that allows us to make them longer, deeper, and more complex while reducing the overall development burden on our team by removing unnecessary quests. There are still a few vanilla side quests that have been integrated into the main quest, either directly or as personal quests for companion characters. We hope that this additional work will help narrow the scope of our mod to create a tighter narrative experience and prioritize our core development goal: improving the vanilla storyline's choices, challenges, and characterization.

Fewer, Better Bosses

In Extended Cut - Saints & Seducers, we wanted to include an advanced, multi-stage scripted boss battle in the form of Thoron, the final boss of that mod, in order to get a feel for implementing this type of custom boss fight. We were able to successfully create an engaging and unique battle, but it took a lot of time and metaphorical duct tape to pull off. We've learned that making a scripted boss fight isn't something you can commit to lightly: every one represents a long and difficult challenge that's as unique as each potential boss is. Therefore, we've decided to focus on quality over quantity in this area: while there are fewer bosses with custom mechanical scripting than in our earlier story drafts, the advanced bosses that you fight in the story will have polished and dynamic multi-stage fights that should be a lot of fun for players. Special attention has been given to the final confrontation with Alduin, which makes for a very disappointing battle in the vanilla game--we want to make sure that it feels and plays like the climactic showdown it deserves to be. We hope that this additional work will make the main quest's boss battles more polished and memorable, even if there are fewer of them than in our original draft.

Deliberate Level Design

Creating levels, and especially large exterior world spaces, is a challenge for any modding team. While Extended Cut doesn't require a sweeping worldspace like the Shivering Isles of Extended Cut - Saints and Seducers, reflecting on the challenges of world and dungeon design have made us aware that it's important to carefully prioritize where and why we're committing resources to level design in our mod. While several vanilla locations, such as Bleak Falls Barrow, have been completely overhauled, many locations in Extended Cut will be best served by making subtle improvements to their existing level design. Notably, we have removed the planned Northwind Keep Blades headquarters location in favor of an improved Sky Haven Temple, as advances in modders resources and our own capabilities have made us more capable of working with this location instead of needing to construct an alternative Blades headquarters. The additional benefit of this approach is that it increases compatibility with other mods--something that mod users can always appreciate. We hope that this additional work will allow us to devote our level design resources to the places where overhauled locations will have the most impact, and that will be the most fun for players to explore.

Seamless Systems

Players let us know that they preferred systems that don't feel out of place with the rest of the game. Therefore, a few of EC's features that had previously been very formal systems based on other RPGs, such as a numerical "approval" scale for follower characters, have been abstracted into subtler systems that don't feel out of place in the wider Skyrim experience. We hope that this additional work will help Extended Cut feel even more like it always belonged in the game, which is one of the most important goals we've set for the project, since we want the quality standard of our mod to be on par with, or better than, Bethesda's original product, and never make the player feel like their immersion has been broken.

Quality of Life

As modding capabilities and best practices have advanced over the last few years, we want to make sure that we're doing our best to make our mod accessible and easy to use for players. For PC players, we plan to include a Mod Configuration Menu so that players can customize certain settings, including an option to enable and disable "breaks" in the main quest encouraged to give players time to explore and complete side content without being pressured to rush through the main quest; an option to enable gender-neutral dialogue for players who would prefer to have NPCs refer to their character with gender-neutral wording; and settings to help easily synchronize and manage integration between Extended Cut and certain third-party mods. We'll also be adding functionality to automatically detect certain hard-to-catch incompatibilities that affect NPCs so that players can easily understand, report and resolve these conflicts, which was a problem that many players ran into with Extended Cut - Saints and Seducers because of the way vanilla quest overhauls edit existing actor records. We hope that this additional work will help make EC easier to use and install, and more accessible to as many players as possible.

Video Previews

Our first video showcase, EC Gameplay Preview: Bleak Falls Barrow, was a successful event at Creation Mod Con 2023, and we were glad to be able to show a full-length version of this preview on our YouTube account soon afterwards. We were thrilled at the positive reception to this feature and plan to share more of these 5-10 minute video showcases with our community throughout the year, showing off gameplay, quests and characters from across the Extended Cut storyline.

Expanded Character Pages

Early in the development of Extended Cut, our team posted promotional character features with information about the new and vanilla characters present in the mod. We've now hidden those character features in anticipation of the launch of a new section of our website that will have longer, more detailed, and more accessible character pages that are both easier for the community to browse and easier for us to update and expand as needed. Similarly to the old character feature program, we'll be excited to announce the launch of the character page section of the site and to share each new character entry as more are added to the index.

Release Date Announcement Trailer

When we've determined that we're ready to announce a release date that we're confident in, we want to let the community know in a big way--a major trailer that will drop shortly before the release of Extended Cut. This will be our biggest promotion yet and will mark a shift from our quieter development-period promotional cycle to a busier pre-release promotional cycle, and we'll be excited to share it with you when the time comes.