Balmora - Seat of Power of House Hlaalu

With this mod, I close my series on the three big cities of Morrowind.

What’s this in a nutshell?

This uses Magnificent Balmora/Izi Cities – Balmora and Balmora redecorated (for the interiors) as a base, combines ideas from my Balconies mod, from Rooftop apartments and expands some ideas that were already present in vanilla but never really exedcuted properly by Bethesda.

MY TAKE ON BALMORA AND DESIGN PHILOSOHPY

A PREMISE

Balmora doesn’t need to be expanded and can’t be expanded properly anyway.

Differently from Ald’ruhn and Sadrith Mora, which in Vanilla feel like little towns, Balmora is already decently sized.

Hlaalu architecture also requires a certain symmetry of placement to feel natural, which takes a lot of space. This means you can’t really expand Balmora properly without editing the landscape a lot and without destroying the vanilla footprint completely. This is particularly relevant as Balmora goes into the Bitter Coast on one side and to the Moonmoth fort on the other.

So, even if the idea at the base of mods like Epic Balmora and City of Balmora is theoretically sound, it’s simply impossible to execute properly (unless you don't really care about staying vanilla friendly...)

So, if I didn’t really expand the city’s footprint, what did I do?

Let’s talk about this.

As it’s usually the case with my town overhauls, concept art was the inspiration, with the firm belief that preserving vanilla aesthetics and design should always be a priority.

For any seasoned player Balmora feels like home and I don’t want to change that.

Let's take a look at the concept art drawing for Balmora.

FIRST KEY POINT

As you can see from the concept art drawing, Hlaalu architecture builds vertically, with balconies and staircases and I believe Bethesda would have pushed into this direction but many things were cut from the final release for performance issues.

I used ideas from my Balconies mod and Rooftop apartments to enhance the idea of verticality.

This also works as town expansion that doesn’t necessarily require to place new buildings around but simply switching to different models while expanding the interiors.

In total, there are 12 new interiors but only 4 new buildings.

SECOND KEY POINT

While vanilla makes it obvious that Balmora is divided into a poor side and a rich side, the idea simply wasn’t expanded enough.

Izi (who's mod served as a base for this one) did a fantastic job to make the rich part of Balmora feel more separated and richer, but the poor side was mostly untouched.

So, I did my best to rework the poor side of Balmora. The buildings here have been placed closer to each other, an additional row of buildings has been added and I s