I have recently been assisting Chef with Narsis interiors, while also looking back at the stylistic critiques of TV’s interior and exterior situation and both have an issue with planning, neither release had or has, strong narrative planning. Neither TV nor Narsis have questlines drafted at present. 

TV also suffers from the late addition of imperial cult stuff that doesn’t mix with regional concepts interfering with their original concepts, I refer here specifically to Hlan Oek having an imperial knightly order guarding it, when it was conceptualised as a dunmer smuggler haven, though , the cult of Arius near Ald Iuval does not mix with the local factions or history either, its just kind of random in general.

Then on top of that any plans for TV at present need to ignore Narsis being right next door, which is frankly causing issues on both the questing and interior fronts as people try to add things to TV in order to offset Narsis’s absence in the release, as well as a lack of coherence for the area as a whole, none of which is helped by the fact that TV doesn't have a centerpiece that can be pointed too to anchor it:

• Hlan Oek: the crime lord being able to control multiple towns would be noticed easily, and so is a poor villain outside that Hlan Oek itself.
• Othmura: Simply too small.
• Ald Iuval and Ald Marak: due to how weak they now are cant provide any threat to the Hlaalu or have the ability to recover so are stuck as a sideshow attraction for the release.
• Ud Hleryn: Too close to Narsis and too far south to be a strong connector for the rest of the region.

And the only dungeon suitably large is Padruma’s maw, but that only affects lake Andaram, so it couldn't anchor the entire TV release.

For Narsis’s part, while Shipal shin is a visually stunning release, it is sparse of dungeons and towns to direct quests towards, meaning a lot of Narsis quests would naturally tend to go north into TV anyway, which would be complicated if all that region’s dungeons and landmarks were already being used in quests.

It has been suggested in irritation before, (and I personally voiced against it several times with that) but I now believe it is time to seriously consider merging the TV and Narsis releases together, with the express purpose of making a coherent release.

Instead of trying to come up with five regular length faction questlines in a region that doesn’t support it, in a release few people are enthusiastic about working on, we instead have that content be from Narsis, with the guild halls in TV only needing to support minor questlines of 2-3 quests each as supplementary material. Those smaller questlines could be given to less experienced quest devs as right now they have little to work on, and with smaller quests to get practice on they will have a chance to gain the experience needed to lighten the load on our more experienced devs by working on questlines etc. As it stands, all our important quests are relying on very few, but busy and overworked, experienced devs with no way for new people to join those ranks. This means that this merge could improve TV and Narsis, as well as streamlining quest development for other releases in the future. 

Another department who will benefit from the extra time are assets, since we still need the assets for Othreleth woods to fill out western TV and TV’s own assets remain full of technical and stylistic issues needing more time to iron out. Much like quests, this also provides good opportunities for encouraging new asset devs with smaller and low stakes claims, rather than how most region assets are currently coming with a large upfront burden of expectations.

I can see some people thinking “this is just DoD all over again” and that is a fair complaint, but this is actually coming from seeing the problems with how DoD has ended up. Andothren was supposed to be the quest hub for an entire release, but it's questlines don't currently tie its regions together, which can be blamed on half of Roth Roryn being under Kartur or Armun being too far for logical overlap or SVM being almost entirely forgotten about, but these are issues that should have been addressed well in advance, but weren't so we are stuck playing catch up. We have a city that is a huge amount of work to implement, that isn't benefiting the majority of its release. TV and Narsis are suffering an adjacent issue, questlines that should have wider scope in regions organically tied together, but are arbitrarily separated, making them disjointed and constrained from reaching their potential.

This obviously will be longer to work on before producing a viable release, so in the short term I understand it being a blow to morale and indeed more than a little spite and doomsaying to go on after, but long term this will take the pressure off all departments and make for a better release.

There are two stop gaps to make it so we are still releasing content during the multi-year development stretch.

First, the Sundered Scar Redo. This was explicitly low-quest when it was being proposed for TV, and that would remain true of the merged TV-Narsis

A more ambitious, though still constrained option, would be a Southern Aanthirin/Lake Andaram release. Hlan Oek has the most “planned” content of any TV city and at present the dynamic with its crime lord would make for a fairly straightforward thieves guild questline that could be based out of Almas Thirr. Revisiting Almas Thirr itself would provide an opportunity to add more quest givers and potentially new guilds as well, giving the release more meat. The Dreugh of Padrumas Maw is another quest hook this region could finally make use of, capping off “Shadow under Airmrah”

Along with both of those we also have a backlog of quest material on the browser that has been languishing on the browser for too long, notably the Old Ebonheart Tourney quest/line that was teased all the way back during the release but still hasnt had a good window to be worked on, which this breather window would provide us with.

- Proposed split in the tv file

We know quest development is the bottleneck for a lot of content, but right now we have no way of expanding our pool of devs. This merge would improve both Narsis and TV overall, by eliminating consistency issues that have arisen from having the two very related areas released separately, and give new quest devs who want to join the project something to help with. Which could in time lead to a much healthier number of experienced devs. Therefore this merge would not only improve the areas it affects; by upgrading Narsis to a hub of quest activity rather than a strange outlier, bringing TV up to a greater standard with a coherent design and roadmap, and generally freeing up space and time for all our devs, but it also has potential to improve the development of the mod as a whole in the future.

-credit to Jack for proofreading and suggestions.

-credit to Wolli for further proofreading