Week in Review: August 7th - 12th

This has been a pretty slow week, unfortunately. I've been feeling a bit under the weather this last week which made audio-recording somewhat difficult, as a result several videos have been postponed until this next week, which will hopefully also give me some time to fill in some remaining gaps in our Episode 64 lineup.

That said, we did officially announce the 2017 Morrowind Modding Madness team-based competition, along with unveiling the new Tower of Madness for this year's competition, and by the way, you can actually download a copy of the 2017 Tower of Madness today. I'm making it available as a public resource, so feel free to use it in any of your own mods. The one exception here, of course, is that you cannot use the Tower of Madness in a Morrowind Modding Madness submitted mod, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, you can download the new Tower of Madness here, and basically in the tower's current form, it's just a cosmetic addition to the landscape in the northern Ashlands. It might make for a good quest or dungeon location though, plus it's pretty easy to move in case you have a better spot for it.

Keep in mind, if you plan to participate in Morrowind Modding Madness 2017, you have until September 1st to post your team name and your team members at one of the team registration threads (Morrowind Reddit, TES3Mods Reddit, Morrowind Nexus, GHF, MMS Forums). Best of luck to all of the contestants!

Moving on, in other news we added another 128 mods to the Mod Testing Database this week, bringing our total to around 530. If you missed that in our last news post, you can find a link to it here (password: tester001). In any event, nothing terribly exciting was added this week, the majority of mods tested were rejects or "Maybe?" entries, and overall only 10 mods were added to the "Great" quality-level category with zero mods making it to "Excellent". Still, there's a few interesting mods that were added, so do feel free to explore the database. We'll continue adding new mods daily, so check back often!

As for videos, we really only had two new videos this week, the Morrowind Modding Madness 2017 announcement, and the Tamriel Rebuilt 16th Anniversary podcast. Ideally I would've liked to get more done, but again, my voice wasn't particularly strong this week, and I was really counting on finding at least one higher quality mod to fill in our Blast from the Past slot for Episode 64. Better luck next week I suppose.

Speaking of next week, we have our current planned video schedule for this week down below:

Oblivion Mod of the Month - June 2017:

Short Summary: This was supposed to air last week, but got delayed, and essentially we have all of the raw footage for this already, so the video's pretty much on schedule for this week. Currently we're doing audio-recording and script writing, and everything should be finished and uploaded by Wednesday.

Morrowind Modding Showcases - Lyithdonea Alpha Preview:

Short Summary: Again, this was delayed, Lyithdonea is a pretty massive landmass so it's taking me a while to collect all of the video footage for it. I'm actually debating how to do the narration for this one at the moment, given that Lyithdonea is largely exterior-complete, I'm thinking of narrating only part of the video and then doing a scenic tour of some of the landscapes and locations instead of a full narration. That would certainly be easier on my voice. This will probably be released on Friday either way.

Morrowind Modding Showcases - Episode 64 - Solstheim-Themed Mods

Short Summary: We've begun audio-recording for this already, but we're still behind in filling a few gaps, most notably the "Blast from the Past" category. If Episode 64 gets delayed again, it'll be because of that "Blast from the Past" slot, since we need mods of "Great" or "Excellent" quality to fit into that slot, and we just haven't found any yet. Hopefully once the mod-testing database is a little more fleshed out, this won't be quite as big of an issue going into the future..

Morrowind Modding Interviews - Darkelfguy

Short Summary: This was an interview hosted by Melchior Dahrk back in July as a special 3-year anniversary interview with myself, Darkelfguy. So far this 100 minute interview is still on track to be aired on Sunday, August 20th, and will hopefully represent a return to regularly airing modder interviews going into the future.

That's pretty much all I have for news this week. I've also started recording a new batch of Let's Mod Morrowind videos, with the aim of getting about 20 minutes of footage done a day, but at that rate it'll still be a few weeks before we have anything that can be put into a new episode on the channel. In any event, hopefully this week will be better for getting videos finished and released on schedule, and I'll be back with our next news update on Sunday, August 20th.