The story was his, but ownership is a tricky subject in contemporary art. His original effort became the first mod to ever win a Writer’s Guild award, but it was still emphatically that - a mod, developed using a toolkit provided by an intensely rich and corporatocratic publishing behemoth. For Nick Pearce, game director at Modern Storyteller, hurdles started to appear before he was even at the gate, let alone out of it. That might sound paradoxical - it is - but it’s why video games are, in a sincerely accurate sense of the term, one of the closest things we have to modern magic. But to borrow a term from history, this long and arduous evolution - magnificent as its final form may be - was nothing short of an odyssey.Īcross the board in game development, there are an innumerable amount of hurdles that are both insurmountable and necessary to conquer. Now, almost six years later, The Forgotten City has somehow managed to supersede its origins and become one of the most unequivocally impressive games of 2021. Back in late 2015, a sprawling and ambitious Skyrim mod set in an ancient underground metropolis launched to unanimous critical acclaim.

A soldier wearing the weathered scepticism of war-privy eyes a farmer with a drive for democracy in a veiled dictatorship designed to drown it a vestal priestess who knows more of the gods than any god-willing mortal should even comprehend.

Skyrim the forgotten city