“No, Skyrim offers fantasy… dragons, magic, etc. fantasy isn’t for everybody but there’s no denying its general appeal”
If you removed every fantasy element from Skyrim aka
1.100% of those damned annoying, flying/fire & ice breathing lizards
2.supernatural creatures like Werewolves/Dragons/Rikelings/Dragurs/giants aka 99% Skyrim’s beastiary
3.Eliminated Man beast NPCs like Khajiit & Argonians
4. Redesigned/cut off all Mer race ears and reshaped their racial features to look more human
5.Kept the religious aspect of Divine/Daedra whorship, but removed the direct interaction of immortal meddling in the affairs of mortals; reduce this to a political, religious and cultural feature the way KCD implements it
6.Redesigned all quest lines to downgrade god mode Daedric/Aedra articfacts to KCD’s simple treasure hunting dynamic
7.Kept the Civil War and Dawnguard factions to provide NPC/player support of historical events occurring in the MQ the way KCD employs NPC armies/guards
8.Kept the Bards College and transform it into a Minstrel’s guild the player can join as sandbox side quest
9.Transformed the magic wielding Mage guild into a 15th century alchemist’s guild
10.Reassigned all natural & trained magic wielders to being mortal alchemists/healers of varying experience
11.kept the TG/DB and Companion guild factions intact and allowed player freedom to join
12.kept all faction related side quests, radiant quests, random NPC quests, and random world encounters
13.Restrict all fantasy elements in the MQ (like the DB’s journey to Sovengarde) in a dream sequence (for obvious realism purposes) and finally
14.Strip the player of all their dragon shouts, god mode/pre ordained Harry-Potter-save-the-world champion megalomania (as was nicely done with Henry from the start of KCD) then
you would actually have a respectable–albeit generic–medieval simulator with Skyrim. And that’s BEFORE you start to add any re-balance, overhaul or realism based mods the likes of Frostfall/Campfire, Repopulated Skyrim Hell Edition, RND, CWO, CACO, Wet n Cold etc etc.
Spot on. Again, if KCD is to transcend what Skyrim continues to offer players, then this will be the way to do it. But I’ll never vet WH until they honor their former comittment to release modding tools to the community. If they fail in in this endeavor, KCD will become DOA for me. Because the dev will NEVER be able to match the degree of content, innovation or resourcefulness that the modding community can provide. It simply wouldn’t be cost effective for any dev to compete in terms of man-hours against the modding community. And produce the high quality mod content the likes of Beyond Bruma series, SkyOblivion, Skywind, Falskaar, Fight the Thalmor etc etc. that I’ve seen on Nexus to date. Nevermind the hundreds of Adult/nudity/sex fetish mods which are taboo because of the game’s ESRB rating which the dev is accountable for. Leading industry devs like Bethesda (with billions more in resources) can attest to this fact. Bethesda’s #EpicFail to deliver on the Fallout 4 season pass was proof of this. Only 50% of the entire season pass was worth the money IMO.
And the longevity factor. The modding community is what keeps fan base addicted and commited to playing the game. The modding community is what has provided the dev millions in savings in FREE ADVERTISING & MARKETING. From the continuous production of high quality content 4+ years aka long after game release. Devs like Bethesda would’ve long moved on to the next project (in Beth’s case Fallout 4) to keep the studio profitable for the Publisher. It’s only recently that Bethesda has tried to tap, monetize and control the modding community (through sly creation of the Creation Club. May this abomination be damned to epic failure). Looks like they failed to learn from Valve’s fiasco on Steam I guess. Despite this transparent skull duggery, it couldn’t hurt WH to follow the same path Bethesda has in setting up a universal mod forum. Mods are the only way KCD will be kept alive as a franchise moving into the future IMO.