WIP map in Oblivion

Lol idk why I'm starting this blog thingy, but ig it's for a few people i know 😆

I blame quarantine for this, as I probably wouldn't have gotten so into this otherwise, since it seems so overwhelming. I'm sure it's easy for others, but it's like information overload for me, and takes me forever to learn how to do things, and even following the excellent guides and tutorials out there (which I super appreciate, thank you!) I still have to keep my own notes, dumbed down to 'for dummies' to explain it back to myself in the simplest of terms since I know I'll forget, especially if I take a long break and come back to it, having almost completely forgotten all I learned.

But this is something I've been working on, not for any real reason, but just to see if I can do it, I guess. I know there's plenty of people who hate stuff like this, and get angry like "Why do people try to insert other fandoms into Elder Scrolls like this? Can't you be original and create your own content for the game, that's lore-friendly and actually fits in?" And I get it, that's totally fair. But I'm not doing it to be an insufferable weeb, just using Oblivion as a thing I can shoehorn other stuff into... I fully enjoyed vanilla Oblivion as a kid, it's my favorite Western game. It just so happens that it was the first game on PC that I discovered had a tool made by the developers, the Construction Set, that allowed *you* to change the game, and people made all kinds of awesome things for it. I downloaded plenty of mods from the Nexus, but never gave it a try myself until much later. 

I know Oblivion is so old, and most people moved on to Skyrim (those lucky enough to have a computer that wasn't a potato), so why learn to mod Oblivion now? Isn't that weird? Sure, I guess so. But Oblivion is a game that I always come back to, it's like home. Even if I didn't try much modding back then because it seemed beyond me, I want to give it a go now. And I want to combine it with other things I like, just because it's enjoyable to me. I'm the kind of person who usually has to use other things for inspiration, doing fully original things is hard for me. I can sketch something while looking at a reference and get really close, but trying to draw from just my imagination is still difficult. It's the same thing with modding for me 😕

LoZ is my other love, I'm probably obsessed with it if I'm being honest. But anyway, this is BotW's Hyrule in the CS currently. All I've done is make the shape of the actual land, nothing's textured yet, no trees/grass/rocks/plants etc. I will probably try to generate those at some point so it'll look decent, and that'll probably be it. I doubt I'd ever have the patience to actually go in and hand-place objects like buildings to really flesh it out 😔