Lordbound Interview: From A “Portfolio Piece” To A Massive Skyrim Mod

Kiria: My name is Kiria, and I’m sometimes known in the Skyrim community as CatPancake. I’m one of two current team leads for the mod. I originally joined the team about four years ago as a Tech Artist and somewhat of a Modding Generalist. Now, I keep the project organized and running, handle task assignments, recruitment, 3D modeling, and Creation Kit work. So… still a generalist, just now with more responsibility.

Kiria: It started as a need and a series of fortunate mistakes. The original team leads, Neshkor and Arcky, were game design students at the time, hoping to create an impressive portfolio piece to help them find a job.

They started the project as an “Orcs against Wizards” conflict, with what they planned to be a relatively small map with very few locations.

As the industry changed and their familiarity with the Creation Kit increased, they found themselves inspired to create higher-quality environments and quests, especially compared to those in the original Skyrim. As the years went by, the project grew in scope and ambition, as many volunteers came on to leave their mark on our little piece of Tamriel.

Kiria: While the mod was constantly scoped down to increase the chances of completion, the original leads bit off more than they could chew. Instead of a portfolio piece, the mod became a learning project for aspiring game developers.

At least 25 people would join the team, gain experience and connections, and enter the game industry – though you could argue the final number is closer to 40. While getting team members employed was always the goal, it also created the issue of a reliable output. As the best team members found employment, it was expected they would leave the team to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

In an ironic twist, the hobbyists proved more reliable long-term than the aspiring professionals, who left to have successful game development careers of their own, working on franchises such as Halo, Horizon, and even the recently released Helldivers 2.

Kiria: In order to maintain compatibility with other mods and the vanilla game, Lordbound’s changes outside of the Druadach Valley world space are minimal. The only changes we’ve made to Skyrim herself are the NPCs that will give you the introductory quest to begin the mod and the entrances to the Valley.

The actual events in Druadach are partially affected by the events in Skyrim, with characters remarking on the choices you’ve made during your playthrough. Lore accuracy was important, which is why we maintained a long internal timeline to see how a place like Druadach would be shaped and affected by all the events in Tamriel’s history. We hope that Lordbound will provide something special for both casual and hardcore Elder Scrolls fans alike.

Kiria: The player will be able to access the mod simply by walking to our new entrances and will be notified of these locations during a typical Skyrim playthrough. It will be very hard to miss. Let’s just say it doesn’t hurt to be friends with the Orcish Strongholds.

Kiria: No, quest mods don’t really affect game performance, and certainly not in the vanilla locations. We have aimed to take advantage of improved PC specs and performance that have become normalized since the game’s original release, so our own areas might be slightly more performance-heavy than the base game – but still fairly minimal, especially in 2024.

Kiria: At peak, there have been as many as 35 active team members. Currently, we’re a somewhat smaller but more focused team.

Kiria: With overall limited documentation and few peers working on mods of this scale, there have been quite a few. One of the earliest was in 2015, shortly after the mod was started, and that was getting quest merges to work alongside the Creation Kit’s version control system; we ended up having a team member write a custom script to run for this.

Working remotely also has its own challenges when it comes to setting up our pipelines so that team members can download the mod and perform updates without too much hassle, and some really janky setups that we had to create to deal with the legacy (Oldrim) Creation Kit limitations.

The release of Skyrim Special Edition / Anniversary Edition was also a unique challenge. After initially planning to close out development on the original Skyrim release, we eventually realized that the mod would be much better served by the significant performance upgrades that came with SSE. But converting a mod of this size was fairly time-consuming, with a ton of small things that needed to be corrected. A quick example is the water flow information added by SSE: because some small rivers and streams actually gained water currents, a dungeon where an NPC is supposed to follow you became impossible to complete because the NPC kept getting trapped by a tiny stream of flowing water.

Kiria: Depends on your definition or what you consider as “development hell.” Since the beginning – for better or worse – we’ve taken the stance of “it’s done when it’s done, and we aren’t going to cut things for an artificial deadline.” Obviously, that’s allowed for what most reasonable people would consider to be a very long development time. There have been slowdowns and breaks for sure, but the mod has mostly been in active development since its initial announcements.

Kiria: Yep, we’re targeting an end-2024 release date. We’ve made the official announcement on our Discord server recently. While nothing is ever guaranteed, we’re working very hard to achieve a 2024 release date and have planned our velocity the best we can in order to achieve it.

Kiria: For consoles, it’s not likely. The only limitation that would keep it off of Xbox consoles is the file size, which is likely to exceed or be very near their limit of 5 GB. If there’s a way we can manage it, we’ll do our best to figure it out, but we would need to do more research to see if that’s a limitation we can work with, given the scope of the mod.

For Playstation, probably never. Sony doesn’t allow external assets in their mods, so no new scripts, custom-voiced NPCs, new meshes and textures, etc. Without these, the mod couldn’t be half of what it is.

We aren’t looking into anything like the Creation Club at the moment since we have no interest in ever charging for Lordbound; it will always be free to players.

Kiria: I think with each new game, we’ve gotten more and more mod potential, either from memory limits being removed, novel systems to work with, or just more asset variety and fresh eyes on the game and modding sphere. I hope the trend will continue going forward. However, the modding community can take quite a while to mature and create some of the amazing tools we’re used to having in Skyrim, so I expect it could be a while. But that’s pure speculation.

Kiria: We’ve spent a long, long time and collectively hundreds of hours building this mod, and we really hope players will enjoy it!

Lordbound is always recruiting team members. In particular, quest writers and scripters, interior cell designers, and visual artists. Join our Discord for our current recruitment needs or to follow along with updates.