With all open-world games, using Oblivion and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as prime examples, there's an argument for waiting until the modding teams have had their way with the game before gamers should hit the play button - but it's not always easy to mod a game. So I went and spoke to a selection of the top Oblivion modders and asked them; "what do you want from Bethesda to make modding Skyrim easier?"
1. Developer support
Ethatron of the Oblivion Graphics Extender, wanted the Bethesda developers to both be allowed and encouraged to come onto the modding forums and help out modders. DragoonWraith of the Feral Instinct mod agreed, also asking for help writing up the documentation, which he's done almost single-handedly. As Saebel of Sneaking Detection Recalibrated said, "there are a whole slew of people who, for free, are more than happy to jump in, figure out what's wrong and fix it for them, without them spending a dime" - so making it easy for those people is a no-brainer. Marshmallow of the Extended Game Mechanics mod expanded on this, "A clear yes/no, go here not there, compensates for hours, days or weeks of trying to figure things out. Guys, learn from your sister company id. I could probably ask John Carmack himself how to hack Rage up."
2. An unlimited world
Vorians of the Unique Landscapes mod tells us why they need an unlimited world. "Oblivion became overcrowded as almost all mods were created within the original game's playable borders, and since the world was already small and crowded even before mods, everybody's mods overlapped." Overlapping mods is a recipe for crashes. He continues; "A landscape which doesn't look much the same wherever you are in the world (the Oblivion Unique Landscapes mods were desperately needed due to a bland wilderness), and cities which aren't the size of small villages would be most pleasing too." Notably, he points out that there was no reason to have the cities separated off; "Enclosing the cities in Oblivion within massive walls and transferring into separate worldspaces was unnecessary in Oblivion (except for the Imperial City); the mod Open Cities Classic proved that having the city content in the main worldspace had no negative impact on gameplay smoothness and framerates, so hopefully the cities will be open like they were in Morrowind."
3. Making terrain
Despite the amazing efforts of the 22 individual mod teams that hand-crafted the Unique Landscapes pack, editing terrain in Oblivion isn't easy, especially if you want to make large amounts of land quickly. Elder Scrolls lore guru TOYB is hopeful. "We're all hoping that the region generator tool is coming back, given it allows small teams to generate vast areas of landscape with much less effort than it would take to do by hand (as we were limited to with Morrowind)." Wollibeebee (working on a Game of Thrones mod for Skyrim) also felt that the current tools for editing the landscape were too limited. "We don't want just paint texture, drag and smooth options. For example, we'd like a new "brush" style, some special rough-rock ground that actually looks rocky that could be used for cliffs and mountains. It would be simpler and merge better than just placing meshes."
4. Go further than just supporting modders
This is about more than mod-support - it's about incentivizing too. Tripwire Interactive, makers of Red Orchestra II, gave early access to their game code to select modders so that, within a few months of launch, there will be highly-polished mods available, distributed and updated through Steam. Paradox Interactive have gone even further. KhadirgroGhurkag of Unique Landscapes pointed out that they allow modder teams to license their older engines for free, behind an NDA. If they like it, they'll be your publisher. They've already published several games from this model, including Arsenal of Democracy; if Bethesda gave the same support to, for example, the huge, impressive Nehrim mod, then they'd have a free, cheap top-quality expansion on their hands - again, without spending a penny.
5. Model importer
At the moment, getting new models (that is, rendered characters, buildings and so on) into the game is difficult. DragoonWraith asked for a model importer for the big animation and modeling programs - at the moment, modders use the NifSkope editor. Modeller Washington (of the Waalx Animals and Creatures Elsweyr Anequina animal mod) agreed: "Yes, in terms of tools and support, an official model and animation importer/exporter for popular modeling software would be very nice. For Oblivion it was expected, but we never got it, unlike Morrowind."
6. Dialogues & People
As we all know, the dialogue in Oblivion was undermined by the awful, shiny potato-faces saying it, but as Vorians points out: "The NPCs in Oblivion all sounded the same as there weren't enough voice actors used, so it would be nice to find that Skyrim NPCs all sound unique. Also perhaps they will have a little more to say (even if what they say has no relevance to the game) and don't just repeat the same things the last NPC you spoke to said." Quest mod creator bg2408 said that "If I think about it, the dialog system could use some enhancements. Making it so we're able to arrange and view dialog in trees, not having a merely alphabetical list of responses. Creating complex dialog with our current tools is certainly possible, but a lot more complicated than it needs to be."
Finally, at the moment, the Oblivion engine doesn't support non-spoken dialogue natively, as Baarda explains; "Having silent dialog built in (in Oblivion we need to create silent voice files by external programs to have the dialog readable) would be great. Of course, some kind of automatic speech would be great, but that is totally out of reach. And would likely sound very odd." Morrowind curator and Better Beggers developer Povuholo agreed; "NPC dialogue needs to stay on the screen for more than 2 seconds if no voice acting is provided. In Oblivion and Fallout 3/NV, if you add new dialogue to the game without voicing it, the game would give you only 2 seconds to read the dialogue before it skips to the next bit. And nobody reads that fast."
7. Collision and animation system
At the moment, modders (and developers) don't have total control over the animation of characters, hence the sometimes hilarious animations of characters in the main game. Saebel explains; "We'd like to be able to capture every bit of action that characters make. In Oblivion there are gaps. For example, you can know whether a weapon is equipped or not, whether it is drawn or not, but there's no obvious way (to my knowledge as of yet) to capture the action of drawing or sheathing the weapon." Marshmallow expanded on this; "With the ability to control every animation, every kind of action would be possible, like climbing, crouching, doing side jumps. But it would also require a much better collision system."
8. A real scripting language.
At the moment, all coding is done in a proprietary language, which hasn't been documented properly. Abo of the RealisticFatigue mod said "At least 40% of my modding time has been spent figuring out and working around the limitations and undocumented or buggy behavior of the scripting language. Another 30% has been spent reverse engineering the undocumented game engine behavior (in particular, how fatigue, encumbrance and movement are affected by game settings), and only 30% on actually making my mods." Several participants suggested Lua, Python or even C++ as alternatives, arguing that way you'd actually be learning a useful language. "Having a proper scripting language would be a lot more inviting for people with programming experience" said Emptythe of Dangerous Trespassing.
9. Bug-fixing!
Though the modders have found a lot of bugs in the original Oblivion code, Bethesda has only fixed one of them. Ian Patterson of the Oblivion Script Extender explains that bug; "We discovered and identified a bug in form ID allocation that would cause the dynamic object ID counter to wrap around from 0xFFFFFFFF to 0 instead of 0xFF000000, causing the game to crash when a dynamic object is allocated in the wrong range." Um... and for the non-programmers? "It's a guaranteed "time bomb" that will eventually crash the game, even unmodded, even on consoles. It was enough to make them notice. Other issues, for example the broken .lip generator in the editor or the hundreds of issues fixed by the unofficial modder-created patch, haven't been addressed." Vorians agrees "Oblivion still contains a number of unpatched bugs so even without mods it isn't the most stable of games: adding mods just adds to the potential instability of the game, so hopefully Skyrim won't be prone to crashing at the slightest upset."
10. A mod manager.
More important than all of these requests is making it easier to use mods in the game. Ian Patterson requested that Bethesda don't use the Steamworks CEG-protection, as it makes it hard to integrate and doesn't stop piracy anyway. "If they use it, then making tools like OBSE will be difficult-to-impossible... CEG-protected games don't completely decrypt their code segment at runtime, so you can't patch code without decrypting the code manually. For reference, taking a look at my Steam folder, CEG has been used in L4D2, Portal 2, Shogun 2, Deus Ex: HR, and Civ 5, plus probably other things I don't own as well. These were all available (illegally) with the protection removed within 12 hours of release, so it isn't a practically effective protection method." As Ubisoft keep finding out, primitive copy-protection like this doesn't work and just angers your community.
So, there's the modding community's requests for Skyrim help. Let's see if Bethesda is listening...