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. The Forgotten City is due to come to the subscription service on October 28.This post kind of spoils (but not really) some of the Skyrim quest mod The Forgotten City.īethesda open world RPG games have developed certain quest tropes. Given its award-winning status and its newfound popularity as a fully-fleshed out title, it was perhaps inevitable that it would be made available in other capacities. However, this latest development suggests that the mod/game is something that subscribers to the Microsoft service have been waiting for. The Forgotten City was not originally due to come to Game Pass. RELATED: Xbox Announces 20th Anniversary Broadcast Players are tasked with exploring the city, which is under the protection of the gods where if anyone commits a crime, all citizens are punished and turned into gold. It tells the story of a city that now lies in ruins.
The mod was originally released for Skyrim in 2016, before being launched as a full game earlier this year. The Forgotten City is among the list, which outlines just how popular it is among the community. Now it appears that this former mod will be coming to Xbox Game Pass.Īccording to a report, Xbox Game Pass will be adding yet more games to its roster, seeing out the remainder of October. It has earned its creator a Writer's Guild Award, with its intricate time loop narrative. However, probably one of the most ambitious and popular fan made add-ons for the game is Nick Pearce's The Forgotten City which is now a standalone game. Some modifications implement tweaks, fix bugs, or add new content.
Since The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim came out in 2011, it has seen no end of mods that have kept the game fresh for the last ten years.