Skyrim - Civil War Overhaul Mod

A talented modder called ApolloDown has restored cut content based on the civil war that was cut from Skyrim before release. The mod can be downloaded from the nexus.

I have painstakingly restored the civil war in the spirit of what Bethesda intended, before they decided to ship the game half-done. This feature restores battles for Morthal, Markarth, Falkreath, Fort Greymoor, Dawnstar, Riften, and Winterhold - and puts them all back in the game.

Skyrim's civil war is a much bigger animal than you could possibly imagine. The underlying framework of the civil war was designed to be a completely dynamic series of campaigns for holds, incorporating elements of strategy and diplomacy to bring your opponent down. In the planned version, it's my guess that the designers were going to create some kind of map menu for the player to decide which hold he wanted to hit next, and allow the enemy to counterattack as well. Regardless, each hold was to be won by doing up to TWELVE RADIANT QUESTS, as opposed to up to TWO in vanilla skyrim.

There were quest rewards, series of dialogue, and it was far more dynamic than any other kind of radiant quest in Skyrim. Dialogue was recorded, scenes were created, and scripts were set up. Somewhere along the line, likely in the last stages of development, the devs look like they ran out of time and could not complete the dynamic campaign. So what they did was hardcode the gears of this radiant masterpiece to ONLY allow a very limited set of quests that operated entirely linearly.

Just let that soak in for a sec. The civil war is nothing more than a facade.

Therefore, in order to restore the civil war, I have certain challenges that I must constantly fight off:

1) Rebuilding broken parts - Much of what is behind the civil war is epically huge and dynamic and prone to bugs. It has also NEVER been updated by Bethesda. That means I have the work of multiple patches ahead of me for every new function I use.

2)Building parts that weren't complete - Much of the coding and quests for unused material looks like one day the devs just got up, went out to get a pizza, and never came back. This is probably the easiest thing to fix, because I already know where they were headed, and am basically already there, with a few holes to fill in.

3)Building things that were referred to, but never built - This is pretty easy for me to do, as it gives me total creative license on how to use the assets that were left behind. Unfortunately, I need to get the basic framework solid first before I spend my time adding to its accouterments.

4)Tearing down the "vanilla civil war" - The vanilla civil war is a problem, because all it really is is the hardcoding of the dynamicism of the original design. To put it in car terms, Bethesda decided to only let the car go one way. A normal person would say, "Let's just use one of those U lock things to hold the steering wheel in place." However, Bethesda, wanting to make it absolutely error proof (I assume to keep the console kiddies happy), decided to BLOW TORCH THE AXLE TO THE FRAME AND TEAR OUT THE STEERING WHEEL. Then let a family of badgers nest in the hole left behind by said steering wheel, because badgers. This is the hardest thing to work against in making this mod, because while I can just flip a switch and turn on a quest, it usually breaks EVERYTHING when it runs up against the vanilla civil war.