We love our Skyrim mods here at TheGamer, but one of those mods stands head and shoulders above the rest. The Forgotten City takes the normal Skyrim experience and completely tosses it out the window in favor of a murder mystery. You’re no longer an adventurer but a detective trying to figure out what killed everyone in a cursed city.
The Forgotten City told a dark, non-linear story in an underground city, but it was still a Skyrim mod. The city looked like it was an ancient Dwemer ruin, the models were all off-the-shelf Skyrim characters, and you could still grab a bow and murder everyone from the shadows if you really wanted, although that sort of limits your dialog choices.
Mod creator Modern Storyteller eventually won an Australian writer's guild award in 2016 for The Forgotten City as well as Mod of the Year from ModDB for 2015 and Skyrim Nexus's File of the Month award for October 2015. And now the award-winning mod is about to become its own stand-alone game.
Things are a lot different than the Skyrim mod. Rather than a Dwemer ruin, you play as a time traveler sent back to an ancient Roman city 2000 years in the past. The city has been cursed by The Golden Rule whereby if even one person sins everyone turns into a golden statue. Since you come from the future and the city is full of golden statues, you know that someone out there has sinned and it's your job to find out who.
The Forgotten City gets a huge upgrade from Skyrim's engine thanks to Unreal Engine 4 and a development grant from Epic Games. Modern Storyteller also consulted with Obsidian's lead animator Shon Stewart to create The Forgotten City's dialog animation.
Development went far longer than Modern Storyteller expected with a few delays from its initial reveal at the PC Gaming Show at E3 2018, but the delays have turned out to be blessings in disguise. It allowed Modern Storyteller to consult with historians and archeologists to make sure the ancient Roman city has an authentic look, and it also allowed him to consult with Obsidian lead animator Shon Stewart to vastly improve the game's facial animations from the 2020 trailer.
And now we have a release date. The Forgotten City arrives on PC (via Steam), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, and PS5 on July 28. A Switch version is scheduled for Q3 2021.