Instead of focusing on a single mod, as usually happens in this column, I thought I'd try a roundup of the most promising mods I spotted this week. Below, you'll find a Witcher-esque notice board modded into Skyrim, a parachute ejection system for GTA 5 (inspired by Just Cause), new bounty missions for Fallout: New Vegas, a new way to build at night in Cities: Skylines, and an long-awaited visual overhaul for the original Deus Ex.

Notice Board, for Skyrim

Inspired by games like The Witcher, this Skyrim mod adds a notice board outside every major town in Skyrim. On it you'll find new radiant missions and one-shot quests to complete, including bounties, rescue missions, monster hunts, and different types of fetch quests. Via Nexus Mods.

Revision, for Deus Ex

Seven years in the making, this mod overhauls the environments and soundtrack of the original Deus Ex. It includes reworked geometry and architecture, increased visual complexity, and a brand new score. You can find out more on the mod's official site, and download it on Moddb.

Parachute Ejection, for GTA 5

This mod will bring a little Just Cause action into your GTA 5 game. While driving, you can eject from your speeding car—via parachute. You car will then explode, naturally. Also, you don't have to be content with drifting to the ground because your chute has jets. Of course it does! You can also hop onto your car's roof while it's speeding, just like Rico. Via 5Mods.

Enhanced Mouse Light, for Cities: Skylines

Trying to build at night in the new After Dark expansion can be a pain, and if you don't feel like toggling off the nighttime mode from the menu here's a nice alternative. The mod makes your mouse pointer glow like a flashlight so you can actually see what you're doing. You can even customize the color and how intense the light is. Via Steam Workshop.

Bounties 3, for Fallout: New Vegas

This is the third and apparently last of the Bounties mod series (you can find the first two here and here) for FNV. It comes packed with even more missions to track down and eliminate the dirtiest denizens of the desert. Via Nexus Mods.

Everyone loves a good murder mystery. Time travel is a crowd-pleaser. And mods that don't just tweak a game but add hours and hours of new content? I'm talking about The Forgotten City, a Skyrim mod that's been in the works for several years but is now available, and features those tantalizing elements plus an original score and over a thousand lines of custom dialogue. You can watch the launch trailer above.

The mod, created by Nick James Pearce, takes place in a sprawling underground city, one you'll need to explore to uncover its secrets. What's more, you'll need to explore it along multiple timelines as you travel through a time-warping portal in order to investigate a murder. Interrogate the city's inhabitants, learn their secrets, fight enemies, solve puzzles, and make choices that will have consequences on the story.

Sprawling, ambitious mods like The Forgotten City can sometimes run into trouble when modders either don't provide custom voice work, or try to do it themselves. In this case, however, there's a cast of over a dozen actors from all around the world contributing their voices, so pull that arrow out of your knee and get adventuring. You're in good hands when it comes to the score as well, and you can listen to the original soundtrack, by composer Trent Moriarty, here on Soundcloud.

Unfortunately, this is a rare Mod of the Week where I haven't personally played the mod I'm pushing on you. I'm currently plagued with PC hardware problems (it's been narrowed down to either to faulty memory or a dying hard drive). Still, we took an early look back in July and were impressed, and it definitely looks like one to try.

The mod is designed for characters of level five or above, though the modder recommends you bring a high level character, as some of the story "responds to your character's individual history." He also recommends you don't bring a follower with you, as this is a solo adventure.

You can get The Forgotten City here at Nexus Mods. If you've been playing it already, let me know what you think in the comments. (Though please try to avoid spoilers!) 

Back in July, the right honourable Philip Savage told you about The Forgotten City, an ambitious Skyrim mod that tells a murder mystery in an ancient subterranean city. It fits with existing Elder Scrolls lore, which is nice, it boasts an original orchestral soundtrack, 18 voice actors and over 1200 lines, and features a non-linear story set across multiple timelines—and, oh yeah, this hugely exciting mod is out now.

Moral dilemmas, puzzles, and multiple endings are also things to expect, over the course of The Modern Storyteller's 6-8-hour-long adventure. Get it from ModDB here, or Nexus Mods here, or the Steam Workshop here, and be sure to watch the launch trailer above.

Once, the early Fallout RPGs were available on GOG. Then Bethesda and Interplay had a big fight, and Bethesda gained full rights to the Fallout series. Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics all promptly disappeared from GOG and Steam, and then—months later—returned to Steam only. That was it for the epic saga of The Company Who Owned A Thing. Until today.

GOG and Bethesda have finally struck a deal, and the Fallout games are back in DRM-free form on the distribution service. Also, GOG is now selling a number of other Bethesda-owned classics—all DRM free. Two of these new old games are being made available digitally for the very first time.

Here's what's now available:

• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Game of the Year Edition
• The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard
• The Elder Scrolls: Battlespire
• Quake (includes Mission Pack 1 and Mission Pack 2)
• The Ultimate DOOM
• DOOM II + Master Levels for DOOM II + Final DOOM
• Fallout
• Fallout 2
• Fallout Tactic

A number of deals are also available throughout the next week. Purchase all three Elder Scrolls games, and you'll get a 33% discount. Purchase all three Id games, and you'll get a 33% discount. Purchase all three Fallout games, and you'll get a 66% discount. Finally, purchase any of the above games and you'll get The Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall for free.

The team behind the Morrowind-based Skyrim mod Skywind has released an update video, to let everyone know they're "still alive and working just as hard".

The video runs through a few of the locations and creatures that those who've played Morrowind will recognise, but updated for the Skyrim engine: places like West Gash and Bitter Coast, and creatures like the impressive Kwama Forager and the adorable Guar Pup. 

There's also mention of AI schedules and town clutter, which should serve to make this fan version of Morrowind feel a little more alive than the original. You can also see that intent in the trailer release back in March that shows the reimagined Seyda Neen, the starting town from the game.

We don't yet know when Skywind will be ready and available, but when it does come out you'll need legitimate copies of both Morrowind and Skyrim to run it.

Skyrim's taverns. They're cozy, they're comfy, but to be perfectly honest, there's not a whole lot to do in them except run in and sell a load of collected crap to the innkeeper and maybe knock a few things off the tables as you rush back out.

The Tavern Games mod aims to change that by adding two dice games, a card game, a board game, and even lottery tickets to Skyrim's inns and pubs. Just walk up to anyone in the tavern and begin a conversation, and there will be a dialogue option to play a game. Provided they have enough money, they'll agree to play. I mean, what else do they have to do besides sitting silently while eating comically large loaves of bread?

The games are relatively simple, and there's no animation when you roll the dice or play the cards—they just appear on the table—but it's still a nice way to spend a few minutes and try to win some cash. Here are the table games:

Prophet's Dice

One player rolls two dice, and then guesses if his opponents roll will be higher, lower, or equal. If you bet on equal and win, you receive triple the payout. Get it wrong, and you lose triple your bet.

Dice Jack

One player rolls two dice, and the total of that roll is multiplied by three—let's call that new total the Jack. After a coin flip to determine who goes first, the two players roll dice, trying to get as close as they can to the Jack without going over. If you bust, the other player wins. Hit the Jack exactly, and you win twice the bet.

The Battle of Heroes

A card game. Each player draws and plays three cards with numbers on them between 1 and 10. Add them up and that's your Hero Power for the round. At that point, you can choose to roll the dice up to two times to add to your Hero Power, though that dice roll costs gold which goes directly to the other player. In other words, you have to balance how much you stand to lose by rolling against how much you stand to win by having a higher Hero Power than the other player. Granted, it ain't exactly Gwent, but at least you can attempt to cheat.

Talk to the innkeeper and you'll be able to buy a rulebook for these games for a couple Septims. You'll also be able ask the tavern owner to play a board game with you.

The Daedra Challenge

This is probably the simplest game: dice rolls happen automatically and your pieces move around the board by themselves, attempting to get to the center first. Land on an arrow and you slide to the spot the arrow is pointing. Land on a skull, and you're asked a multiple choice question. Get it wrong, and you go back to the start. If you win, you get a gift from the innkeeper.

Lottery

If you're looking for straight-up no-skill gambling, you might try purchasing a lottery ticket. Open it in your inventory to see if you've won, and if so, redeem it with an innkeeper. Prizes can be any number of things: gold, a spell book, potions, ingots, and even several nights of free room and board. I won two ingots! It was my lucky day.

Of course, if you know one thing about the rabble haunting Skyrim's taverns, it's that they don't exactly have a ton of gold, so most of the games you play will be of the low stakes variety (unless you yourself are just starting out and don't have much cash of your own). I did find a gambler named Gambler in the tavern in Solitude, however, who had a decent amount of Septims. He no longer does, thanks to a couple games of Dice Jack.

You can subscribe to this mod in the Steam Workshop, or download it from Nexus Mods. It also requires the Skyrim Script Extender, which can now be found in the Workshop, or at its official site.

Remember that ambitious total conversion mod for Skyrim we covered earlier this year? Well, it's still in development, and while no release date has been confirmed just yet, the video above is the most substantial look at the mod in action I've seen yet. 

Skyrim Enderal is developed by SureAI, the same team responsible for Nehrim: At Fates Edge, which was a total conversion project for Oblivion. It's well worth reading our interview with the team, where they discuss the logistic issues that abound when creating a hobbyist, non-for-profit mod that will (hopefully) rival the vanilla campaign.

Thanks to VG247.

Given the success of Skyrim—and the upcoming release of Fallout 4—you might hope that Bethesda would have plans to announce a new Elder Scrolls RPG in the near future. Not so, according to Bethesda's Pete Hines.

During a chat with Dualshockers, the studio's VP of Marketing explained that Bethesda was still working on Fallout 4—a process that takes the entire studio's focus.

As such, Hines doesn't believe we're close to hearing about a new Elder Scrolls game. In fact, he believes it will be a "very long time" before the team is ready to talk about what they have planned after Fallout 4.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given how close Fallout 4's own announcement was to its release. Skyrim was launched in late-2011, and it was only two months ago that Bethesda confirmed the existence of their next game.

Thanks, VG247.

Have you ever wished that Skyrim looked more like a Disney animated film, or maybe a Looney Toons classic? A Redditor by the name of UniqueUses has you covered: A mod called Toon Skyrim, which replaces the game's realistic-ish look with something more like Bugs Bunny might see after being clocked in the head with an apple.

"I'm basically making my own potato texture mod, with an enb and weather that goes with it to help hide that ugly lod," he wrote in the Skyrim Porn subreddit. "I like the potato texture style, but I think a lot of fixing up needs to be done for it to be playable. So I'm going to attempt to make things like signs and faces readable but still fit the potato style. For example, certain puzzles need to be seen, so I'm going to edit those."

"Potato texture," as Kotaku explained, is a flat, low-detail graphical style that's sometimes useful in getting games to run better on low-spec hardware. In this case, however, it doesn't sound like performance will be improved much because of the mod's use of an ENB, a sort of post-processing mod that adds additional effects to the game, but also places increased demand on hardware.

"All I'm doing is making the textures very small and then using an enb. So if textures size is a problem for somebody's pc then performance will go up in that area," he said in response to a question about Toon Skyrim FPS rates. "However enb's are very demanding. Turning off the ambient occlusion could make it at least break even with vanilla skyrim I imagine."

The mod isn't out yet, but the pre-release screens look fantastic. UniqueUses said he plans to upload the mod to Nexus Mods as soon as he's got the bugs worked out.