What is Gategate?

There's a popular mod for Skyrim called Open Cities that is made by a modder called Arthmoor. Open Cities gets rid of the loading screen between the game world and each of the major cities by transferring the cities to the main game world, allowing for a seamless transition between city and wilderness. Towards the end of June, Arthmoor released an updated version of Open Cities that added standing Oblivion gates to each of the major cities. These gates stand out because they're large and are placed in the middle of each city. They also look like shit and have terrible textures. They don't even make sense from a lore perspective.

A lot of people didn't like this and wanted Arthmoor to remove the gates or at least make them optional but he refused, saying he wouldn't compromise his "artistic vision". This led to lots of arguing and bitching between people who didn't want the gates forced upon them (everyone), and a group of "veteran modders" (including Arthmoor) and their associated entourage of supporters. These supporters very often stated how thankful we should be that these talented demi-gods, with their vast, arcane knowledge on modding, would even bless us with an ounce of their talent, and without them the entire community around these games would fall apart and die because literally nobody else can do what they do (no, really, people were actually saying this).

Goon Upmarket Mango took Arthmoor's mod, removed the Oblivion gates, and put it up for download on the Steam Workshop with full credit and praise to Arthmoor.

Arthmoor flipped the fuck out.

He railed against what he called a "stolen mod" and called Upmarket Mango a thief and a liar who was in on a conspiracy to drive him away from modding and Destroy Modding Forever. He also called Something Awful a warez site and a den of pirates and thieves. He went on to caused a lot of noise on the Bethesda forums, and after a few days Upmarket Mango's version was banned from the Workshop.

After that, goon Ardeus released a patch for Open Cities that removed the Oblivion gates. This patch required Arthmoor's Open Cities and in fact wouldn't even do anything without it. Additionally, the patch used absolutely no resources from Open Cities. It is a completely independent, third-party mod. Everybody is happy, right? Not quite.

Arthmoor went on the offensive, saying our (modding) days were over, that he's going to sue Something Awful, and that we better watch ourselves because THE GUILD will be coming after us. There was lots and lots and lots of internet-lawyering to be had and eventually both Ardeus and Arthmoor got in contact with Peter Hines, a community manager for fucking vice president of Bethesda, who ended up siding with Ardeus on the issue. Arthmoor was obviously not happy with this and it seemed like he was going to implode at any moment. On the Bethesda forums (and other places) he was going on and on about what a dangerous precedent Bethesda had set by siding with Ardeus and how we damned goons ruined the community. He painted a dangerous world (using lots of sensationalist language) where mod pirates delivered precise and tactical strikes against people using virus-ladden mod bombs, and the esteemed modding community would be gripped in a cold war where both sides stockpiled these virus-mod-bombs until eventually it all blew up and we'd all die or something.

Arthmoor didn't implode like we'd all though he would and eventually things calmed down and Arthmoor even "authorized" an Official Gate Removal Patch to be made by one of his supporters with the warning that he will not be supporting it and that people should only use this authorized patch because other, unauthorized patches are in fact likely to break your game.

Throughout the whole episode, Arthmoor often stated that his Oblivion gates were in fact lore-friendly, adding that Bethesda only programmed, modeled, and animated the gates crumbling into pieces after being closed because... I don't know, who cares? Arthmoor's word is law and even Bethesda is subject to it. He even wrote an incredibly spergy rant about how Bethesda is wrong about their own game:

Arthmoor posted:

    Why are there dead Oblivion gates in the cities now?

    While the gates in TES4 were shown to collapse into their debris piles, the only known reason for why the physical parts vanished is because that's just how the animation was done. All gates used the same resource file so they all collapse the same way. Further, the gates that you as the player close down are done via removal of the sigil stone power source. So when those close, they're doing so under a controlled set of conditions and the physical portal withdraws as per whatever designed system the Daedra use for that.

    When Martin pulls the Akatosh avatar bit at the end of TES4, whatever gates were standing open would have had their dimensional bridge abruptly severed, and I believe that would result in the physical manifestation remaining behind since it was NOT properly shut down. The end result of this should logically have been a series of gates still standing but with no portal. This was limited by how the scripting works to call their shutdown code though. All it did was instruct every gate to run the reverse animation. The code was also supposed to have caused all the debris everywhere to vanish as well but that doesn't happen, nobody reported it as a bug, and Bethesda didn't care enough to fix it.

    So there ought to be various gates all over Tamriel that were left intact, including gates within cities. 200 years isn't long enough for solid stone to crumble into nothing. It is long enough for those gates which aren't being marginally maintained by those near them to become overgrown, cracked, damaged by weather, wars, etc. Could be up for debate as to weather the Nords would leave them sitting around like this or not, but there's nothing in the lore that says these couldn't simply have been left there as monuments to the Crisis.

    Even here on Earth we build monuments to incredibly painful events in our history - like the WWII memorial at Pearl Harbor where they left the sunken ships in the harbor and turned it into a national monument. The statue representing the Battle of Iwo Jima. Whole museums dedicated to WWII history, and other wars fought as well. Battlefield memorials for the Civil War are everywhere. People even reenact these battles on a regular basis.

    Arguments of it being feature creep don't fly either. No more so than a smelter in Riften where none exists, or gatesmen who open the gates for you if you're on horseback. These gates add a touch of uniqueness to the mod, and pay what I believe is an homage to TES4:Oblivion as one of the best games of its time. They are not active portals and nor are they eyesores. They're not even in your way.

    Still not happy? Thomas Kaira has created a patch to remove the gates. Keep in mind that use of this patch is unsupported by me. Any problems arising from using it will be ignored. His is the only authorized patch, any others have been produced without permission and are likely to have game killing bugs in them. Any mention of an unauthorized version will be reported.


Oh, and uploading any other Open City mod, whether you made it yourself or not, will probably get you banned on the Nexus now. Hooray for hugboxes!