The Forgotten City does two clever things with its quest systematization:ДЎ. (See this cumbersome quest state chart for 'Pheeble Will' (New Vegas) where they need a quest state for every possible permutation.)Д«ut a big multi-modal multi-state dense quest is exactly what The Forgotten City is! So how does it get around all that? In this way, the design of the quest stage system encourages linear quests with shortcuts, but it would be hard to get a make big multi-branching non-linear quest with lots of different state combinations fit into this system. from stage 20 to 10, which would obviously not make sense for most of Skyrim's quests anyway. The exact numbers are a bit arbitrary and sometimes the player skips stages, but you generally don't go backwards, e.g. So a player might start on stage 10 ('go to the dungeon'), then progress to stage 20 ('kill the vampire in the dungeon'), and end on stage 40 ('the vampire is dead'). A quest can only be in one active stage at a time. If you're not familiar with Bethesda's narrative design tools, every quest is internally made of numbered 'quest stages'. The Forgotten City also does some interesting stuff with presenting progression and choices to the player. Screenshot of The Forgotten City quest stages, as seen in the Skyrim Creation Kit editor interface Still, this is probably the only Skyrim mod ever that critiques the total inadequacy of Skyrim's crime system. Would it be a sin to deal drugs? Is it a sin to be a homophobe? Is threatening someone with violence, itself, a form of violence? What justice is there for sexual assault survivors? The mod invokes these questions only to shrug it off, but honestly I doubt any video game could seriously address even one of these topics. So you begin wondering, what counts as a 'crime' or 'sin', and what's the difference? This is a political question the mod almost embraces, with disappointing results. But in The Forgotten City, if you murder anyone, even without any witnesses, then your crime will always unleash total apocalypse and fail the entire mod. It escalates Skyrim's existing crime systems, where normally you can murder non-essential NPCs freely if there's no witnesses, and even then, you just pay a cash bounty or go to jail. If anyone 'sins' by attacking or stealing anything, then the city's ancient robots mysteriously come to life and incinerate everyone. Here's the general premise of the mod: this underground city lives under strict capital punishment / martial law. It's a philosophical thought experiment that ends up being about nothing, boiling down to 'decent writing for a video game', but I'm more interested in its small innovations and quest design techniques. I won't go too much into detail about the story or plotting I also wasn't really impressed with it. It takes a few hours of wandering and talking to learn about each character's reason for being trapped, and about half of them have problems and relationships to solve. If you haven't played a Bethesda RPG, 25 NPCs is a lot that's about as dense as medium-tier city in Skyrim. The mod adds a large underground city with ~25 fully-voiced NPC inhabitants, all with their own backstories, houses, and AI schedules.

the retail version of Skyrim conspicuously doesn't have any comparable dense quest, so The Forgotten City sort of fills this gap. It reminds me a bit of Whodunit (Oblivion), Tenpenny Towers (Fallout 3), Beyond the Beef (Fallout New Vegas), and Diamond City Blues (Fallout 4). After playing it, I think The Forgotten City exists within a different open world quest tradition of complex 'dense quests' with many characters and possibilities in a small space. I heard about the popular Skyrim mod The Forgotten City after their E3 2018 retail remake announcement. Naturally, this provokes heated debates among fans, such as this epic two year 500+ post multi-thread argument about which NPC was ultimately truthful in Skyrim. One trope is the conflicting stories quests like Two Sides of the Coin (Oblivion), In My Time of Need (Skyrim), and A Business Proposition (Elder Scrolls Online) which present two NPCs with conflicting stories and no real way to discern who is right, so you just have to pick a side and hope you feel good about it. This post kind of spoils (but not really) some of the Skyrim quest mod The Forgotten City.Д«ethesda open world RPG games have developed certain quest tropes.

The forgotten city mod walkthrough