Trivia / Beyond Skyrim

• Approval of God: Bethesda featured Beyond Skyrim on their official blog, expressing admiration for the ambitious scope of the project. They also promoted the Bruma pre-release on their twitter and interviewed the Beyond Skyrim: Morrowind team for one of their "Monthly Modder" features.
• Doing It for the Art: Of course, this being a mod project, the developers cannot legally profit off of it, but otherwise the whole project is very much in keeping with this, as it is evident that the developers are making it out of passion and their love for The Elder Scrolls series, and judging from the Bruma pre-release they are very dedicated to make it feel both as high quality and as much in the series' spirit as possible. And they are making it free for anyone to download.
• Dummied Out: The Bruma pre-release came with the quest "All the Wrong Places", where the player would play The Matchmaker for the lonely farmer Benuni Alfena and the mage Galarynn, eventually culminating in their wedding. But the quest was not completely implemented and therefore rendered inaccessible in the release version. The full Cyrodiil release is, however, slated to restore the quest to be fully playable.
• The Other Darrin: Sheogorath and Hermaeus Mora are slated to play somewhat recurring roles, due to one of the project's voice actors, Daniel Hodge, being capable of doing some uncannily good impressions of the characters. Even Wes Johnson, Sheogorath and Hermaeus Mora's official voice actor, has expressed admiration for how well he is able to pull it off.
• Schedule Slip: The Bruma pre-release was originally set for a Summer 2014 release, but when that time came around, the development team felt that the mod in its then-current state was both short on content and the content that was in it need more time be polished, and so they pushed back the release to a later, unspecified date. Finally, in June 2017, the team announced that the release would happen in July, and they did indeed keep the time.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The teams had originally planned to release the mods for both the Legendary and the Special Edition versions of Skyrim. Support for the Legendary Edition was, however, eventually deemed unfeasible as it meant the teams had to work on two separate sets of resources (porting models between LE and SE can be a somewhat finicky process) and the LE Creation Kit had technical problems with handling the size of the mods, and so development ceased on that version in January 2022, with all the projects continuing as Special Edition only.
  • The project briefly had teams which planned to make both the regions of Valenwood and Alinor, called Valenwood: The Wilds Remain and Alinor: The Blessed Isle respectively, but these ideas were dropped relatively early on due to a combination of a lack of manpower and because the developers felt that the limitations of the Skyrim engine effectively meant that they couldn't do justice to how these places were described in the lore. This position has since been revised somewhat; while the developers have noted that the upgraded engine for Skyrim: Special Edition has made potential Valenwood and Alinor projects much more feasible in a technical sense, lack of manpower still remains a major obstacle in them getting them off the ground. Though, eventually, a Valenwood team became part of the project again.
  • Beyond Skyrim: Thras amicably left the project due to their ambitions conflicting with the project's stated goals to not alter gameplay. They then became an independent mod titled Thras: the Coral Kingdom.
  • A project to create Esroniet, Cathnoquey and Yneslea, three islands between Tamriel and Akavir, called Lost Isles: Towards a Dragoned Sea, was in the planning stages but fell through early on due to some undisclosed internal drama within the team.
  • Before merging into one large Iliac Bay project in 2015, High Rock and Hammerfell were in development as two separate projects, named High Rock: The Direnni West and Hammerfell: The Forge of Warriors respectively.
  • The Morrowind pre-release, The New North, was originally also going to include the Telvanni Isles, but it was decided that much more work was needed to get said islands "right", so they were eventually cut from the pre-release and will first be seen in the full release of Morrowind.
  • The Elsweyr team's pre-release was originally going to be an Updated Re-release of the famous Moonpath to Elsweyr mod named Moonpath Reborn, made with the blessing of the original mod author. Unfortunately, the project lead had to withdraw due to some undisclosed real life issues, and so the team instead decided to make The Greater Rim their pre-release. The team has, however, also stated that they still have permission to use the contents of the mod and they might at some point recreate the quest line in their version of Elsweyr.
    • The Greater Rim pre-release was originally set to include the cities of Riverhold, Orcrest, and Rimmen. It was later scaled back to just cover Riverhold and Rimmen.
  • Originally, the Cyrodiil team had plans to include a 5th candidate the player could back for succession who would be part of the existing Mede dynasty, but said candidate was found to be too likable, and given that doing so would likely cause players to side with them each time, it was decided that while they will feature in the plot of the mod, the player won't be able to back them.

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