I have a number of mods that I am in the process of designing in anticipation of the Creation Kit, and an idea occurred to me that could be interesting. I'd like your opinion.

Timescale, for those unaware, dictates how many minutes elapse in-game for each minute of actual elapsed time. The default value in Skyrim is, I think, 20. (I've read about a dozen different numbers and haven't yet checked my own game.) The core concept here is to have the timescale value slide based on recent actions of your character.

Perhaps you have just committed (allegedly) a "crime" (which is entirely subjective, of course.) Nazeem is dead. Sadly, Ysolda was a witness to your action and is off to tell the guards. You have one hour to find her and take care of the situation. Timescale slides down to 1, and now you are playing in real time. Go find Ysolda in the next hour or earn a bounty. After an hours has elapsed, timescale slowly slides back up to 20.

Perhaps you have been traveling Skyrim and have stumbled upon a random cave leading deep into a mountainside. Deciding to go exploring, you enter the cave. Timescale slides down to 10, letting you explore in leisure without spending days of time.

Or, a dragon roars and lands right in front of you, we slide the timescale down to 5 or so as we enter "combat".

I'm more interested in this concept in the context of the first example, building the mechanic into quest chains or tying it to specific actions to support something like removing evidence of a crime. Also, it's worth stating that I would expect to display some informative message to the player about the change in timescale so they know what's going on.

Thoughts?

It'd most likely have to be done with the script extender, but yeah. I'd actually really love this.

Glad to hear the positive comment.

Conceptually, I'm operating under the assumption that anything that can be done via the console should be doable via scripting. I haven't worked with modding any Bethesda titles since Morrowind, so I'm a bit behind on the capabilities of the last generation of construction set or how robust scripting has come to be. With Morrowind, there were many things I tried to do that were limited by the scripting language available. I would expect that things have evolved since then. However, I've run across the various script extenders, which is a pretty awesome unofficial effort. I'm confident that I will be able to do it, even if I need to implement support for it via script extender myself.

Things like this were done with New Vegas. It doesn't need a script extender.

I wonder if the triggers for music could be hijacked to help control this. Since the game seems pretty aware of when to play what music, i'm sure those same cues could be useful for timescale control. Just a thought.

btw, +1 for this idea, I wanted it in Oblivion too.

since you can do this already manually through the console you could simply do this yourself to "RP" the game more as all except the extra quest thing you mentioned is possible as of release.

Note that the original elder scrolls games expected you to spend months or years of game time on the main quest. ("Fast travel" for example, would set the clock forward based on how far you traveled.)

Maybe an alternative approach here is make sure that time passing is not catastrophic.

wasnt there a mod that did this or something like it for oblivion? im going to go check.


ah here it is

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27352 - TheNiceOne

I made one of the ones for New Vegas, it didn't require a script extender at all, the code's pretty simple for the most part. And this time around there don't seem to be any altered-timescale related bugs - NV was riddled with them, dealing with them was 90% of the work that went into the mod.

Yeah, that would be my biggest concern with such a mod. Implications of changing timescale and what effects it would have on the various NPCs and events happening.

Sounds like a pretty cool idea though. I personally wouldn't want to know when it was changing though. So, if you go through with this mod, it would be nice if you could release a version that doesn't let you know when timescale is changing, or put in a toggle.

Having the timescale decrease in dungeons, combat, and possibly in towns would be good. I think having the 20:1 while traveling the world is fine though, as it is supposed to simulate long distance traveling.

I'm curious to see what, if anything, is significantly impacted by changing the timescale value.

I am thinking of three-ish levels of messaging for changes in timescale. Immersive, Information, and off. Immersive could be something like "Time seems to slow as the gravity of your action settles upon the moment." Information would be something like "Time scale has moved from {x} to {y} minute(s) per real minute elapsed." Off, obviously, would disable the messages.

I don't have any intent of changing the default timescale value -- I think it's fine as is for most exploration and general wandering and puttering about. I will likely include an option (disabled by default) for adjusting fast travel timescale with a default value of 30:1 when enabled.

Thanks for all the other input, too, especially the link to the Oblivion mod. I'm going to look over that closely before working on my own for Skyrim.

I would love this!

In addition to the existing suggestions, I'd want to be able to set a custom timescale for the NPC dialogue menus. Having a normal conversation shouldn't take hours. One place that the default timescale was really jarring was when I first escaped from Holgen and talked to the NPC I was with. We escaped around noon, and by the time I was done asking him about dragons, Ulfric, the Legion, and what he had for breakfast, it was already dark.