Winter Summer is coming. Hmm. It doesn’t have the quite the same power as “Winter”, does it? Shorts and flip-flops are hardly solemn. Basically, if you’re a season that encourages Cliff Richard songs, then you’re definitely not scarily atmospheric. You are lacking in portent. Which means that this impressive tropical overhaul of Skyrim might change the tone of the game. The dragon shouts will be a bit less gruff and a bit more “Fus Ro Ice-Cream!”. Instead of the aggressive mammoths, they might be frolicking in the meltwater, squirting each other with trunkfuls of water and grabbing tails. My magical renaming software is suggesting “Far Cryrim” as a suitable alternative, because Tropical Skyrim Overhaul is too boring for such a sunny delight. (more…)

After, ooh, hours of speculation, Bethesda has revealed the details of the next Dishonored expansion pack. The Knife Of Dunwall takes a parallel peek at the Dishonored storyline. And because Alec masked spoilers in the previous post, I’ll do the same. If you have Dishonored on your Steam wishlist, go there right now and stare wistfully. Everyone else, I’ll be over there. *blinks* (more…)

This shouldn’t really get its own post grumble grumble because it’s just a tease grumble grumble, but if I only give it a couple of lines there’s no harm done. Wait, did I just hear the sound of kitten being killed? WHAT HAVE I DONE?

We’ve been waiting forever* for proper Dishonored DLC – story stuff, meaty stuff, not just challenge map stuff. As previously announced this appears to star… oh, spoilers, of a sort, if you continue. You have been warned. (more…)

If you’re anything like everyone else in the world, you’ve probably put at least 347,867 hours into Skyrim. Now you’re pressed up against the level cap, face like a grape about to burst against its impenetrable ice. Yours is the hardest life. But soon, you’ll never have to stop leveling ever again. In short, legendary levels will “effectively remove the overall level cap.” Also incoming: a new legendary difficulty mode to match. But how will it all work? Well, wouldn’t you like to know. And you can, but only if you’re capable of braving the notoriously merciless difficulty of the unforgiving realm beyond the break.

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Dragonborn, the second major Skyrim expansion (third, if you count Hearthfire) arrived on PC this week, after an unfortunate two-month wait from the Xbox version. I’ve unearthed my old character and dragged him off to the island of Solsteheim for adventures anew. Was it worth it? Hearken to me now, traveller.> (more…)

Bethblog has word that the Rage tookit has arrived on Steam, along with some serious documentation to speed would-be modders on their way. Carmack has some advice, too, tweeting: “Doing significant work will require patience, because internally we use a 300 core renderfarm for megatexture creation.”

It’d be interesting to see what people could mod in using existing assets, though. If the toolkit gave enough access to get at the inventory and so on then I think there might be a true open world sandbox/economy game in there waiting to get out. But maybe not. Either way, significant work will require patience. And an enthusiasm for Rage.

I’ve totally missed the critical reception to Skyrim add-on Dragonborn, but operating on the no news is good news principle I’ll presume that people aren’t generally wanting to kill it with fire. Or maybe they’re still locked in shocked, appalled silence. I’ll find out very soon, as the PC version of the Morrowind-set, dragon power-boosting DLC is now available. (more…)

SWTOR got it wrong – oh so very wrong – but here we are once again, looking at a mega-bucks MMO that could> make World of Warcraft wriggle around uncomfortably, like it’s wearing underwear a size too small. Like it or not, Skyrim is a game which crossed to The Other Side, that strange and terrifying world of people who play games but don’t follow gaming. Y’know, Normals. As such, Bethesda’s upcoming massively multiplayer monster-stabber The Elder Scrolls Online has at least a chance at a very big audience, not purely the MMO-educated. We shall see!

Today’s big news, though, is that Bethesda have opened up beta sign-ups for TESO, and they have a fancy-pants new trailer too. Guess where I’ve put that? (more…)

Just before Christmas, Nathan wrote a piece asking for a conversation about the role gaming violence plays in our lives. And as so many have when discussing the topic, he featured an image from Dishonored at the top – a man getting stabbed through the neck. For Joe Houston, the former Arkane developer who created that stabbing scene, this was the prompt he needed to give his own perspective on the subject. >

Whenever I’m clicking my way through game industry opinion articles, I tend to get hung up on pieces about video game violence. This is mostly because the image plastered across the top of the post is a screen grab from Dishonored. You know, the one where a member of the city watch gets his jugular opened in a first-person blast of arterial spray. But it’s not the shock of that image that stops me. No, I pause because I’m the guy that wrote the code to make the player do that in the first place.

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They did. They absolutely, utterly, completely modded a new world into Skyrim that’s based on Super Mario. Super Skyrim Bros. adds a new instance into Skyrim, so you at least won’t be converting all of Bethesda’s chilly wastes to the blocky nightmare you see here. Just a corner of it. A nightmare of question mark blocks, coins, Goombas, Koopas, secrets, and even Bowser. Want to see it in action? You’ll need sunglasses and a quiet room to lie down in after. I’m about to hit my sofa and hide under some cushions. (more…)