Skyrim mod The Forgotten City to launch as standalone game this year

What started out as a fan made mod for Skyrim has now become a complete game in its own right, as The Forgotten City comes to consoles and PC.

Bethesda’s Skyrim owes a huge amount of its success to fan mods, from fixing bugs and improving the graphics to adding silly extras like Thomas the Tank Engine and posh mudcrabs. Some fans went much further than that though and created their own expansions, with The Forgotten City being the most famous.

The Forgotten City isn’t actually set within the world of Skyrim but uses the underlying graphics and technology to create an entirely different setting and story in Ancient Rome.

A story so good that it won a national Writers’ Guild award and has had over 3 million downloads as a mod.

How much it’ll sell as a paid-for, standalone game remains to be seen but its elevation to standalone game really shouldn’t be surprising given how important mods have been for some of gaming’s biggest titles.

The entire MOBA genre, which includes League Of Legends and Dota 2, sprang out of the mod scene for Warcraft 3 and Starcraft, and Half-Life enabled a whole generation of first party titles using its technology.

The standalone version of The Forgotten City is described as a ‘re-imagining’ of the mod and has you trapped in a secret underground city where 23 ‘lost souls’ are killed if anyone breaks a secret Golden Rule, before time rewinding and everything starting again.

You play as a time traveller unexpectedly transported to the city, who has to work out what’s going on and break the loop. So… nothing like Skyrim at all really.

The Forgotten City will be released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC this summer from publisher Dear Villagers.

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