Skyrim - Going Beyond Skyrim

GameInformer has a new article showcasing and interviewing the makers of a mod called Beyond Skyrim.

Beyond Skyrim is a fan-made, unofficial expansion pack for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which aims to allow players to visit every corner of Tamriel. A goal as ambitious as this is no easy undertaking, so we talked to community modder Will Hillson about how the team came together and how they’re constructing environments that have never been featured in a game before.

How did the project get started? How many people are involved?

I suppose that the idea of recreating the whole of Tamriel has existed ever since Bethesda released its first modding tool with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind back in 2003. But Beyond Skyrim itself was started in a discussion thread on the Bethesda Forums back in 2011, during the run-up to the release of Skyrim. We originally envisioned it as a talking shop for separate projects working on building different areas of Tamriel, so that we could co-operate and avoid duplicating work. But it’s grown to become much more than that. Today, Beyond Skyrim is a full-blown collaborative effort between six autonomous teams working on different areas, all of which are housed together in a dedicated section on the Skyrim modding website Dark Creations.

When do you expect this project to be completed?

We’ll progressively release in several stages. To keep the file sizes under control, each nation is going to be released as a separate package. We are currently working on the regions, which directly border Skyrim, and once that is completed, we plan to slowly spread out from there to the rest of Tamriel. All being well, we are aiming at releasing these first slices of Tamriel in the first half of 2014.