The beta version of the latest Skyrim patch is now on Steam, though Bethesda have warned, in tones dripping with sulphur and doom, that “Apply the update at your own risk.” Anything could happen! The Earth might split asunder! Vampires might eat your fingers! Sickly cats might become weirdly fixated upon you! Or, more likely, you’ll hit a load of bugs and/or your savegames will go all squiffy. (more…)

There’s so much to see and do in Skyrim that I might make a mod to hide half of it. I keep getting distracted by bears fighting dragons fighting the Forsworn, when all I really want to do is harvest some Nirnroot. Next week I’ll be able to start the long process of unfunning it when the mod tools, The Creation Kit, are released, alongside patch 1.4. You can pretend you were born on the first of January and look here for the full patch details. Read it in Max Von Sydow’s voice, for greater effect. (more…)

Every game has at least one mod that will push their fans to the brink of uninstallling and having a shower. This is Skyrim’s, I fear. We should have known it was out there, we should have protected ourselves. But it’s too late. I’m sorry. (more…)

The UK Writers’ Guild Awards took place at the end of 2011 but the American guild like to time their ceremonies a little closer to the Oscars so that they can fall into Awards Season, which isn’t actually a season at all. You may remember that a man named Gillen was nominated for the UK award, along with Ed Stern whose script for Brink received a nod. The winners were the writers of Enslaved though and that doesn’t exist on PC so we neglected to mention its victory. A belated round of applause to Alex Garland and Tameem Antoniades. So, who has received a nomination from the American guild? Read on.

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The RPS Hivemind is still recharging, the major nodes soldered directly into the towering soul-capacitors necessary to sustain their thin simulacrum of consciousness for another 12 months. Fortunately, an errant pustule has attained basic mobility, and opted to present you with artifacts from the Shotgun archives to help see you through until our resurrection. First up, a return to the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, with a haphazard diary series written by Alec back in Summer 2009 during a obsessive revisit of the game that many still feel is Bethesda’s finest hour. It’s a tale of hats, spider-dwarves, assassin-besieged home ownership, grand burglary, poorly-designed forts and existential crisis, in a land far, far stranger than Skyrim. (more…)

I can’t entirely attest to the efficacy of this performance mod for Skyrim as framerate is about the one problem I haven’t had while playing TES5 on my main PC, but it did seem perhaps a little smoother on my puny laptop. The creator reckons it can add a performance boost of around 40% in CPU-dependent scenarios; for instance, around 10 frames per second to chug hotspots such as the lovely waterfall-based city of Markarth. It’s been achieved, apparently, by fixing an alleged tiny oversight on the part of Bethesda. (more…)

Oh thank flipping goodness, Skyrim inventory mods are appearing. Big thanks to Rick Lane who let us know about SkyUI, which does wonders for the ridiculous inventory system with which Bethesda saddled the game. It’s not perfect, mostly because a giant great image of the item still dominates the screen, but it’s a darned site better than it was before. For instance, you can see everything on the screen without having to scroll until your fingers fall off.

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Well goodness crikey, Skyrim seems to have snuck out a micro-patch. Running the game tonight an odd thing was happening – important texts from bodies were automagically opening when I looted, rather than waiting for me to pick them up and dig them out of the inventory. A change! I cried at the screen, and checked the version number. It’s now 1.3.10.0, and it seems there’s a bigger reason for the update: the game now supports 4GB of RAM.

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I’m still waiting for per-platform breakdowns that will confirm the PC version of Skyrim is as number oney as the all-formats result is, but this we do know: Skyrim is officially the number one videogame in the Christmas UK chart, outselling every other game over the last seven days. That means eight years of Activision and EA Chrimbo-list dominance comes to end in one fell, dragon-based swoop. (more…)

Officially official: Skyrim is officially the fastest-selling title in Steam’s official history. And that’s official. Neither Valve or Bethesda are giving specific sales figures, but Bethesda have claimed that the Skyrim PC outsold any other PC game in North America three to one in its first month. It’s been a success elsewhere too: across all platforms and all territories, the dragon-bothering game has now racked up 10m in sales.

Said Valve’s boss of business dev, Jason Holtman, to Industry Gamers: “Skyrim is the fastest selling title in Steam’s history. Bethesda’s commitment to and understanding of the PC as a gaming platform shows in the great review scores, spectacular launch, and continued high player numbers that Skyrim has received. We are delighted that Bethesda chose to use Steamworks to support Skyrim both at retail and digitally.”> Let me, ah, just pick him up on part of that. (more…)