Faction and Travel Integration: The Big Ol' Decision

After several weeks of gathering feedback and intense discussion, TR has come to a decision on how to proceed with faction and travel integration.

Travel Integration
As we have learned in the discussions following the status update, moving the edits to vanilla travel lines to TR_Mainland will create far more problems than it could solve. For that reason, our changes will remain in TR_Travels, a seperate plugin. These edits are projected to include the following changes:

  • Some vanilla travel hubs will lose vanilla destinations in favor of TR ones. This will be most applicable for the Ebonheart and Telvanni ship masters.
  • Travel destinations will include both TR_Mainland and TR_Preview locations, no matter how complete these locations will be. As a result, some travel lines will be dead ends or lead to content not fully playable.

Therefore, the only revision to TR_Mainland will be the removal of the Bal Oyra silt strider and the Tel Ouada ship master and their applicable travel routes. For those who still want to use these, a separate plugin called TR_TravelsReverted will be included. This can be loaded along with or without TR_Travels, though of course it would not include any destintions that lead to Vvardenfell.

Faction Integration
All TR factions will be rolled into their vanilla counterparts, making use of the same IDs and ownerships. TR_Telvanni will become vanilla's Telvanni, etc. The factions' progression will no longer be artificially split between Vvardenfell and Mainland.

This is the only change that will be handled directly by TR_Mainland. Other changes will be handled via a separate plugin, tentatively called TR_Factions, which will be available for download at all major mirrors of TR:

  • The endgame questlines of the factions, including obtaining Hortator votes, will be tweaked to account for the mainland.
  • Faction rank requirements will be increased to account for the additional content provided in TR. As an example, more quests may need to be completed to obtain ranks. This is projected to happen some years into the future, as after a review of the currently implemented quests, it was decided TR does not yet offer enough questlines to make a sizeable impact on progression rate.
  • Dialogue changes, such as faction NPCs acknowledging events on the mainland as well as on Vvardenfell, will also be kept to this plugin.

Comments

New changes.

alva_the_wanderer's picture

I have a question regarding new plugins. Will it still be possible to run TR without TR_Travels and TR_Factions? If so, what will happen then? Will vanilla faction progression routes (except Telvanni, as far as I can see) be preserved? For example, I have a quest that modifies Morrowind main quest (Julan 2.0 by Kateri). I believe it would be impossible to run it with the changes that you've just mentioned. And what about the changes to Telvanni faction? Will they interfere with mods changing Morrowind's main quest? Since you said earlier that you are going to try to make as small changes to vanilla content as possible, the new update makes me worry about my game setup. And my second question is: will the travel route through Almsivi/Divine Intervention from Sadrith Mora to Ranyon-ruhn be preserved for those who do not use TR_Travels?

Thanks in advance, and thank you for your amazing mod, can't imagine running Morrowind without TR anymore.

Yes, it will still be

Atrayonis's picture

Yes, it will still be possible. If you load TR_Mainland, you get TR_Mainland. No travel options to the mainland and the faction-aligned NPCs will just give you more quests.

I don't see how Julan would be incompatible with TR_Factions. Does it change the late faction questlines beyond giving them a bit of unique dialogue filtered to Julan himself?

Changes to Telvanni will not interfer with the main quest, beyond you having to convince a few more councillors that you should be Hortator, and later (!) being given the option to pursue Indoril and Dres Hortatorship as well.

TR_Travels will barely change from what it is now, so if the travel route you think of works now, it will keep working.

Thank you.

alva_the_wanderer's picture

Thank you so much for your reply.

I actually do not know how much Julan mod changes faction questlines besides that it changes the main quest somehow, since I haven't played through the mod till the end. But if you say that the plugins are optional, I believe I got my answer. Anyway, I'll just make sure to backup saves and test it out once the new update is out. Looking forward to it.)