Main Quest overhaul suspending development
Effective today, I’ve made the decision to suspend development of the Skyrim: Extended Cut Main Quest overhaul.
When our core contributors and I began working on Skyrim: Extended Cut during the pandemic, I had a lot to learn about modding. I had ambitious ideas that I was excited about and I ended up getting ahead of myself, recruiting contributors and promoting the mod before the necessary groundwork had been put in place. After those early mistakes led to delays and uncertainty, I wanted to avoid repeating them. Extended Cut: Saints & Seducers was developed with a clear scope, released on schedule, and received very positively by the community. Our team and I learned a lot from that experience.
I’ve spent the last few years trying to reconcile the lessons we learned from ECSS with the extreme ambition of the original ECMQ project. Many of those early ideas proved unrealistic and had to be cut to keep the mod’s scope in check, which hurt our contributors’ creative momentum and eventually stalled development. While a few attempts to resume work were initiated over the last few years, the truth is that our hearts haven’t really been in it now that the project has become so far removed from its impractical original vision. Our contributors also just don’t have as much time as we did in 2020 due to the increasing demands of our careers and families. For the foreseeable future, I don’t expect this to change.
Extended Cut has become an important part of my life, and many of our contributors and community members have turned into close friends. The time, effort, and dedication our team and I have poured into this project over the years has made this reality difficult for me to accept. However, my sentimentality doesn’t outweigh my responsibility as project lead to acknowledge when it’s necessary to let go and give our community closure. I’m truly sorry to disappoint our supporters and remain grateful for the support you’ve shown us over the years.
- Catir
Is the team disbanding?
No. We’ll continue to update and maintain Extended Cut: Saints & Seducers and work on other smaller-scope, more realistic projects that we’ve kept on the back burner for the last few years. Members of Team EC will also continue to release mods independently.
Is there any information available about the team’s future projects?
Our future projects will be announced when they’re in post-production, similarly to ECSS. We’ve learned from experience that this is the responsible approach to take when announcing mod projects.
Will development of ECMQ be resumed?
The suspension of development should be considered permanent unless our team indicates otherwise.
What will happen to the parts of ECMQ that were already finished?
There are a broad variety of quests, locations, and other content that are at different stages of implementation, but they aren’t necessarily in order or even from the same draft of the story, mostly aren’t functional outside a debug environment, and certainly aren’t in a stable state for end users or particularly comprehensible to outside developers. Our team is considering isolating and releasing certain individual components of ECMQ as standalone mods, and seeing what can be done about sharing things like story ideas from different drafts of the mod for those who are curious.
What will happen to legacy Patron benefits?
We remain grateful to our Patreon supporters from the early years and have retained the list of legacy custom character names for use in future projects.