I am creating this thread to get some overall feedback and eventually some assistance/guidance for the new total enhancement mod I will be developing. I have played the game with few mods and with many. All of my experiences thus far with Skyrim have been great.

On that note however, I know we all agree that, in order to keep the game relevant until TES 6 comes, we as a community need to breathe new life into our beloved Skyrim. There have been many great mods I have enjoyed playing, however there have also been many that caused much frustration; this mostly due to either conflicts with other mods or things that break the vanilla Skyrim experience by making main quests unplayable, etc. What I am aiming to create is an epic total enhancement mod that will add some of the best overall ideas I personally have with how the game should play, and some ideas that other have/had.

There will be no mod copying/stealing in the creation of this, as that is completely unfair to those that have dedicated their time in creating their works of art. Not only is copying cruel, but it would also pose a great deal of hardship just converting everything to work with the system that will be created in this mod. I plan on fully investing my time into the creation of this to get the first prototype up and running in the next 2-3 months at a maximum.

Seeing as this will be a total enhancement mod, I would first like to get some opinions from you guys as to some of the greatest mods and ideas you have played around with so we can start building a comprehensive list of features that need to be built in. For instance, just know that the entire Perk tree system will be getting overhauled. With that in mind, it would be great to hear from others about perk tree systems they currently like and why, but also, any perks/additional tree ideas you may have as your own,

I think having to install 800 different mods to get the overall experience you want is a bit of an overkill, and even with great programs like Mod Organizer and Wrye Bash, it is still relatively hard to keep track of everything. I want to solve that by making one complete whole system that will encompass all of the small mods we have come to love, but also incorporate features from some of the biggest and most complex. Putting these all into one modular package, where the user can decide what they want to install so as to customize their Skyrim experience to their liking,

I know this sounds incredibly daunting, and it is; but I however am a dedicated TES fan and have a passion for anything design related. I work in engineering and my overall learning ability is extremely flexible. Any thoughts on this project would be greatly appreciated.

PS: If you feel like dropping a line just to say this will miserably fail or is a horrible idea, well...feel free to do so. I would like any criticism you can give just to see what the community thinks as a whole.

If you are wondering what my modding experience is, I will just say this. The reason this was started was because of all the conflicts I was getting by installing many of the popular mods I enjoyed playing. So for months I have been quietly crafting away at getting pretty much all of the most major mods out there to play together all at once. I have never released any patches of edited esp files because I did not want to encroach upon what the other modders were doing with their respective works. So for now, my build of Skyrim runs most of the game changing mods you have all come to know that have many conflicts with eachother...but simultaneously. I did all that work just to learn the modding process as a whole before I would finally get to starting this project. Again as I said, I will not be copying any of the files from the mods I have used. Anything I have already edited was only to teach me how to get around all the tools and their abilities.

*shrugs* Its certainly possible to do. FCOM (Francisco's, OOO, and a few other major mods rolled into one package) for oblivion had a very complete overhaul. But then again I believe they asked for permissions and included other mods.

The most important thing IMO is modularity. If you're, for example, overhauling the perks, have the magic overhaul in a separate plugin - if someone wants to use another mod for that, they could just disable your plugin that covers magic. I realize that with another mod affecting magic the game might become unbalanced, because your vision was, for example, to make everything weaker and the other mod actually buffs magic, but still - have it in a separate plugin. That's very important for some users.
A good example of that would be ACE, unfortunately it hasn't been updated much for a while The other big mod, SkyRe, is not modular enough for me.

I wish you luck in developing the mod, and if it succeeds, I definitely hope to try it if it's done well.

I just think as whole, it would be much better to create a system that the community has the control of development via polls and feature discussions. So many times I see great mods have some really awesome ideas suggested, but overall they just get dropped or are never implemented the way the suggester intended. I would like to alleviate that by adding features that the community wants and votes on. We will get an overall database of features setup that will be the core of the mod and it will be expanded from there.

The other thing is implementing from other mods that are good, but pretty outdated can be an issue to.

You could not be more correct, and modularity will be key in the initial design phase of this. ACE is a great example and it is modularity like that in which I will be striving for.

OK, I'll take a stab here, and offer you my personal thoughts on overhaul mods in general. Generally speaking, I don't use them - ever. Why? because I think the overwhelming majority of them go way too far in the amount of changes they make to the game. I prefer a more gently modded experience that stays true to the developers vision, but that's just me.

But my advice would be to make your changes as modular as possible - meaning either separate esp files broken down in a logical manner. Or, make it configurable and/or customizable by the player in game, so they can pick and choose what features they want to tweak, and come up with settings they like for their own play style. I'll give you an example with another Beth game. Arwen created a mod called Fallout 3 realistic tweaks, and the early versions of her work were amazing as far as I was concerned. However, the more iterations the project went through, the more feature creep began to set in, and I felt like the overall experience suffered from trying to pack too many changes into the mod.

Then, a really great customizable version of Fallout Wanderers Edition (FWE) that was awesome and made some really neat changes to Fallout 3, BUT the thing that made it so good was that I could pick and choose what I wanted to use, and even configure that to my liking. I think if one overhaul got it "right" those guys did. You'd do well to follow their lead in my opinion.

Edit: Lol, partially ninjd by Ershin.

Thanks! I will look into those mods right away. I do agree that the player needs to be able to customize the whole experience. I do not wish to ruin anything Beth has done with this awesome game, I only intend to enhance its playability. The customisable modular structure will be the first thing laid out so as to create a uniform file system to make this work as seamlessly as possible.