The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Enlargement Mod

[Khursh]

A few years ago there was a nice modder who released an Oblivion x2 mod. It essentially doubled the size of the terrain. Play testing this mod made me realize something very interesting (and perhaps it was just my own perceptive predisposition), having realistically proportionate terrain made the game feel better and more immersive. Suddenly forests felt like forests, miles like miles and the distances between cities made sense. (He also made a x4 version that I adored but it didn't load the objects like the other version did.)

[MACALL]

I am wondering who else would be interested in doubling, tripling or quadrupling the size of Skyrim to realistic proportions. It would be great for players who love immersion. And most importantly, if we can make this a project early on there will be more mod support for this later if it was released. You could potentially have a lot more area to 'plug-in' content from other modders. And it would, in my mind, be a big hit to most PC gamers I would imagine. I anticipate the Skyrim modding community to outclass Oblivion's.

[Irene-I]

I would love such a mod. Skyrim is great, but the world does feel kind of small, never overwhelming. When I stand outside Whiterun and look towards some place that seems far away on the map, it's always rather close by in the world itself. But I saw that the Oblivion x2-mod had to increase the size of everything, including chairs and flowers and stuff? And that kind of ruins the mod IMHO. I just want more empty land between all the places, as in real life.

[DougWison]

I'm not exactly certain why they did that part, but a modder could go in and manually reset everything I'd assume. Maybe it was just for references so they knew how much area used to be covered? Obviously things like chairs and flowers aren't that big of a deal, but maybe it was more keeping track of city outlines and such. That's just my guess though. I would love the x2 but everything else normal scale, which I assumed was going to be the final intent whenever they got that far. That way the world would be so much vaster. After all, if everything is double size, including the objects and - presumably - the player, there'd have been no point to double anything in the first place.

[Ashley Parker]

The program he wrote did all of this automatically and yes it doubled the size of the objects, but it was a potentially simple fix to use the editor to make the object size equal "1.0" again. The only downside is you needed to do it manually. The upside was that everything was essentially "in place" and that did help a lot. Instead of needing to redo everything from scratch you could just resize objects and replace them. This was tedious but the end product would have been worth the effort.

[Shae]

I had this question too before I started to test the mod. Surprisingly your brain doesn't notice that rocks and trees are twice as large. Everything still looks very natural and believable. The only touch ups I would do are some minor landscape tweaks and also perhaps put more trees in certain areas. That was one of the problems with the x4 mod. The terrain would load, but LOD didn't work properly with mountains and the renderer had trouble with landscape at certain heights. I was hoping this might be fixed with the Creation Kit however, as it still felt like a believable landscape.

[Wyl]

I'm sure someone will get the ball rolling on a Tamriel Rebuilt style project for Skyrim, though I am assuming the TR project for Oblivion is still unfinished. For the TR team to take on Skyrim would be pretty mind-numbing after all their hard work. Still, with all the assets they've created I'm sure a simple port over to Skyrim wouldn't be too big of a deal (for models, textures, animations, landscapes). Rewriting the quests, recreating the NPCs and creatures and all the other stuff may be a potential pain in the ass though.

[Bubboy]

SkyrimX4 would be great, even with potential precision problems around the extreme points of the map. I did try (and plan out) something like this with Skingrad, and it definitively leads to more believable towns. For example, my map of SkingradX4 had about 300 buildings (and fields inside the town walls, as it should be!) with 1500-2000 inhabitants in total. That's enough for a (small) medieval town.

[mbangali]

Would certainly be nice to have, but unfortunately it's an impossible task and would be a huge compatibility nightmare even if completed. Instead of increasing the size of an already existing worldspace I would rather try to add the adjacent provinces or at least parts of them. That takes more than enough time already if done right and actually adds content instead of spreading out content that already exists.

[LotusN]

This is something I have been thinking about for a long time, really surprised to see a thread saying almost exactly what I would in the OP! In short, I would love this. Your point about modders taking advantage of it is really important - remember how cramped cyrodil got? How many things modded in the same area? All those patches? They could all be alleviated somewhat, but only if the mod worked perfectly. And for the life of me I can't see how to make it work nicely.