Enderal: Shards Of Order - Mod Interview

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Bethesda interviewed Johannes, and Nicolas of the Sure AI team on their Beth Blog.

How many folks are working on Enderal?

Nicolas: Altogether, we’re 14 people on the core team, of which around eight spend a lot of time on the development. Then, there are a lot of external contributors, mainly 3d artists, and, of course, voice actors and a German recording studio, 2day Productions, who help us with the localization.

For fans of Skyrim, what do you think players will appreciate most about Enderal’s world?

Johannes: Enderal has a different feeling, a different “flair” in comparison to Skyrim – which also results in it feeling more like a separate game than a mod. We spent a lot of time on the creation of an interesting world, and in total, I’d say that Enderal´s world is a little bit more “European”, especially when it comes to cities and locations. We draw a lot of inspiration from medieval places and cities in Germany and Europe in general. There’s also something hidden everywhere, be it a quest, an interesting sight or a dungeon – that altogether makes exploring Enderal a lot of fun.

What would you say is radically different about Enderal when compared to Skyrim?

Nicolas: The story and leveling/skilling mechanics. The story, because it puts, in general, more emphasis on “mature” themes — as in politics, philosophy and psychology — and the the leveling system because Enderal has no level scaling and learning-by-doing anymore. Instead, the player has to traditionally gather experience points to level up, which can be done by killing monsters, exploring, completing quests, or being witty in dialogue.

That allowed us to reward the player for a variety of accomplishments, rather than just combat. When leveling up, he (or she) then gets skill, perk, and crafting points which he can use to improve his character. The “perk system” has also been entirely overhauled — to the point that we use a custom menu coded in flash instead of the beautiful “star-menu” – and is now a mixture between a traditional class-system, which still has all the advantages of a sandbox-system.

To sum it up: While fans of Skyrim will also like Enderal, it is different. You could say that it is a traditional RPG mixed with hand-crafted design and a beautiful, open world to explore, tactical and challenging combat, and an emotional, psychological story that differs from the usual.
More information.
 
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I'm very glad to hear that they are overhauling the experience system. Skyrim, though fun, never really rewarded you for exploring the world. It's a pretty fatal flaw in any open-world rpg.
 
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Sounds great! I quite enjoyed Nehrim, so I'll definitely be checking this out. Interesting to see their approach with the dungeon design this time around given the improvements of the dungeons in Skyrim in general when compared to Oblivion. Thanks for posting.
 
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This sounds good but I will wait till I play it to judge :)

Btw unlike some people I really thought skyrim was ok. Mind you it was heavily flawed and had a fair share of bugs but the only thing that really annoyed me was that your actions did not shape the world. The main story forces you to make radical world changing decision and then you go into town and nothing is different. Everyone treats you exactly the same. That aspect really bug me - oh also the leveling/skill system in all the games (mor, obliv, sky) was pretty crap. At the end of the day you seem to end up with a uniform character that has very little difference no matter what path you take to get there.
 
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I liked Skyrim but only for the combat and exploration. The RPG system itself too present over time and it's hard to ignore the weaknesses. If it had a stronger story and lore like Morrowind I could overlook it. But 60 hours was the limit for me.
 
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Yea I think we said the same thing :) I will say that at least with DA:I the story events seem to evolve the interactions (which was one thing I hated about skyrim) though it was not quite as evident as I would have expected. I hear witcher 3 will do a much better job here but that might be more hype than reality - have to wait and play the game to see how it goes :)


I liked Skyrim but only for the combat and exploration. The RPG system itself too present over time and it's hard to ignore the weaknesses. If it had a stronger story and lore like Morrowind I could overlook it. But 60 hours was the limit for me.
 
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I have no doubts that Enderal is going to be amazing. If they capture or expand upon the magic that went into Nehrim, we could be looking at something very special. This is the one that hopefully takes this team to the next level and lets them create games as a true business, with unique IPs and fully produced RPGs.

Good luck to SureAI. Can't wait for this one. :)
 
The story of Nehrim, at least in English, was terrible. Everything else was pretty good to awesome. I'm anxious to see how the English translation has improved. Level design was masterful in the first mod. I never finished because I could not stand the character that I was supposed to assist. I wanted to kill him and he was made unkillable.
 
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