The inevitable bumper edition of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been scheduled for a June 7 release. The Legendary Edition bundles the core game with the Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn DLC. It will also benefit from the perks update 1.9 ushered in, including a new Legendary difficulty level, tweaks to allow ongoing leveling of skills, and all manner of bug fixes as detailed here. So if you passed on the game the first time around for some reason, then now's probably a better time than any to dive in.

The news follows Bethesda's announcement that the core Skyrim team is moving onto other projects, marking the end of an era. Minor updates and fixes will continue, but, as we reported last week, the team's focus has shifted to the next major release, which Bethesda describes as their "biggest and best work yet."

 

 

In Skyrim, while you were shouting down dragons, dicing up Daedra and fast-travelling up a bloody big mountain, did you ever stop to wonder what it would be like to pack up adventuring and go live as a Jarl? Probably not - their life appears to be a repetitious bore of sitting on a throne, wandering to bed, going back to the throne and occasionally making a pompous speech. But, if untethered from Bethesda's engine, they could get up to all sorts of political and military mischief. That's the aim of Elder Kings - an Elder Scrolls themed mod for Crusader Kings 2.

It's set before Skyrim. In fact, it's set before all the Elder Scrolls games, taking place in the Interregnum period of the Second Era. Supposedly, it was a time of petty bickering and tribal warring - which makes for a perfect Crusader Kings setting.

The mod promises 25 races and cultures, with unique bonuses for each, as well as new traits, events and diseases - adding vampirism to CK2's already eclectic range of ailments.

It's still early in development, although the recent 0.1.1 patch has fixed a fair number of bugs from launch. You can download Elder Kings from ModDB.

It starts with a dizzying shot of barbed wire. Then we see a glimpse of an LP—The Moonbeam Trio, directed by George Shackley. A quick Googling reveals that the Library of Congress has recordings. Then we see sheet music from Bach’s Air on the G String, and it's back to barbed wire. It's a four second Vine video tweeted by Bethesda Softworks. What it means is for us to futilely wave speculation at, but we're suckers for a puzzle, so why don't we try?

Air on the G String comes from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, and gets its name from the violin and piano arrangement by August Wilhelmj, a German child prodigy. You can actually hear Wilhelmj—or a violinist suspected to be him—play a different song via the medium of wax recording.

Air on the G String is Wilhelmj's claim to fame, and one of Bach's most famous works. If it all sounds very Fallout-ey, Bethesda Softworks VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines says, "Guess again."

Alright, we will. If we take The Moonbeam Trio to be a nod to the 1930s and 1940s, Wolfenstein is a decent bet, but let's go even deeper. Air on the G String and the Moonbeam Trio have something in common: violins. Rearrange "Vine Violins" and you get "I involve sin," so clearly we're talking about Doo—wait, that's stretching too far, isn't it?

There's no way to know for sure what Bethesda is teasing, but conversation motivated by curiosity is fun, so we'll let you take it from here:

The core group at Bethesda Game Studios announced on the studio's blog today that they will be leaving the jagged, snowy climes of northern Tamriel behind for an unknown location. While minor updates and fixes to Skyrim will continue, the bulk of the development focus is being shifted to the next major release, which they hope will be their "biggest and best work yet."

Skyrim was in pre-production from 2006, well before the release of Fallout 3, so the team at Bethesda has spent almost seven years in its shivering sandbox. "We’ve invested so much of ourselves into Skyrim and will never truly say goodbye to it," the blog reads. "We loved hearing your stories, your in-game triumphs, and your suggestions."

All told, Skyrim received a similar amount of content as past Elder Scrolls games. Bethesda seems pretty set on the "two big expansions, and a handful of smaller stuff" model when it comes to TES. As for what this new project is, the most obvious answer would be Fallout 4. Then again, it could be something completely new—which we haven't seen out of Bethesda proper since the studio as it stands today was founded to work on Morrowind in 2001.

If you still pine for the Nine Holds, the modding community will likely maintain a steady flow of new Skyrim content until the heat death of the universe (or, possibly, TES 6).

On the strength of this trailer, we can be fairly certain that The Knife of Dunwall, the second piece of Dishonored DLC, is going to live up to its name. In fact, for a man trying to forget what he's done to the Empress, Daud seems to be going about it a in a funny way: doing what he did to her to everyone else. A guard? Stab him! A man with a top hat? Stab him! Another guard? Summon an assassin to stab him! The Outsider? Stand around while he tediously waffles about nothing.

Oh well, you can't always stab what you want.

Daud's road to atonement might be questionable, but this mini-campaign looks like an enjoyable return to Dunwall. There are new districts to explore, a tweaked ability set to play with, and new enemy types to tackle. You can read more about what to expect in Tom Senior's hands-on preview.

The Knife of Dunwall is due out April 16th, and will cost £7.99.

Dishonored's first major story DLC, Knife of Dunwall, is just under a week away. Steam has updated our install directories with about 700 megs of Daud, and with it has come the names and descriptions of all of the add-on's new achievements. Note that these do contain spoilers, so read with caution.

Just Business
Get the information you need from the Rothwild Slaughterhouse

Missing Pieces
Meet with Thalia Timsh, the Barrister's Niece

Well Connected
Purchase all of the Favors in The Knife of Dunwall

No Regrets
Complete The Knife of Dunwall in High Chaos

Redemptive Path
Complete The Knife of Dunwall in Low Chaos

Whisper Ways
Complete The Knife of Dunwall without alerting anyone

Cleaner Hands
Complete The Knife of Dunwall without killing anyone

Rats and Ashes
Attach an arc mine to a rat, resulting in a kill

Message from the Empress
Perform a drop assassination from atop the Empress statue in The Knife of Dunwall

Stone Cold Heart
Speak with the statue of Delilah Copperspoon in Timsh's estate

This confirms that Knife of Dunwall will include the original campaign's chaos system, and therefore, presumably, multiple endings. It looks like those of you who thought you were safe on your Ghost/Clean Hands high horses have some more work cut out for you. If the wait is just too much, remember to check out our meaty preview of Knife of Dunwall from last month.

I've never been much of a reader in the Elder Scrolls games. When I come across a stack of books, I'll just drift my cursor along the spines, looking for any that are high value, either to collect and sell or to briefly crack open on the off-chance they provide me with a skill point. Today, however, I'm in the library of the College of Winterhold, opening and examining every single book I can find. This change in reading habits doesn't represent a sudden interest in lore or knowledge. I'm chasing an achievement.

This is due to a mod called Achieve That! which adds over 100 unique achievements to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. More importantly, it adds tangible rewards for achieving them in the form of small bonuses to relevant attributes.

Achievements in games are kind of a mixed bag. Often they seem to result in pointless busywork that can distract players for hours as they chase milestones for the simple reason that the milestones exist. Sometimes the busywork can interesting enough: in Bioshock Infinite, peering into all of the game's telescopes and kinetoscopes for the "Sightseer" achievement will give you a broader view of the city and insight into its history. Other times, chasing achievements can even turn you into a better player: Team Fortress 2's "Hot Potato" achievement, earned for deflecting projectiles with the flamethrower's airblast, will help make you a better Pyro.

The achievements that shipped with Skyrim are neither interesting nor helpful, mainly focusing on the completion of quests or the act of leveling up. They're not even interestingly named. The achievement for getting married, for example, is called "Married." Wow. Achieve That! provides achievements that are relevant to different styles of play, names them well, and rewards the player with relevant bonuses for completing them.

For instance, an achievement called Treasure Hunter challenges you to loot 150 chests, something the average player will probably accomplish in the course of the game anyway, and provides you with a +10 to your carrying weight. The reward feels perfectly relevant to the task: walking around with trousers heavy with loot would probably cause you to eventually grow stronger. Another achievement is called Local, which kicks in after spending a full month in the frosty climate of Skyrim, and gives you a +5 toward your frost resistance. (Spend six months or a year in Skyrim, and gain +5 more for each.) Makes sense: if you spend enough time in the snow, being frozen will eventually lose some if its sting.

At least 1,745 of them were asking for it.

There are general Skyrim-style achievements as well, but they also have appropriate bonuses. Completing 50 quests for A Helping Hand or 100 quests for Famous Hero gives you a small bonuses towards finding better prices in stores, as you become more well known in Skyrim. Discovering 150 world locations nudges up your movement speed by 5%, unlocking 300 locations gives you an additional 5%.

As for you dastardly types, you have not been overlooked. Steal 10 horses and receive a small bonus to your sneak skill. Kill 30 innocent citizens, and get a bonus to your damage. Backstab 500 times and your one-handed damage will increase. Escaping prison 15 times will boost your sneak, lockpicking, and pickpocketing skills as you grow from a lowly jailbird into a career criminal.

Now there's even more of a reason to stuff everything you find in your mouth.

There's also a category for professions, with achievements and bonuses for crafting, enchanting, and  mixing potions and poisons, as well as some random achievements for plucking butterfly wings, hunting rabbits, and even the simple act of eating food. Here's a full list of the achievements and rewards. And hey, should you feel that the attribute bonuses are cheating or making the game too easy, but still want to track your progress and chase milestones, you can always disable the rewards themselves.

Achieve That! seems to be intended for new or lower-level characters, but I'm trying it out with my level 43 Orc, Braul (previous exploits here and here). After installing and enabling the mod, and watching all the achievements I've already gotten scroll by on my screen, I decide to chase one of the book-reading achievements. As I said earlier, I'm not much of a reader, and Braul has only read a handful of books during his 206 days in Skyrim. I head to the library at Winterhold, run by an Orc named Urag gro-Shub, and start nosing around.

After reading some loose books piled around the library, I move on to the bookcases, though I'm dismayed to find that they're all locked, along with the display cases. I hunch over sneakily, hoping to pickpocket the librarian, only to discover that he doesn't have the key. Well, at least I have money, so I buy everything Urag gro-Shub has for sale, read them immediately, and sell them back to him.

Behold: Stealth.

I still haven't reached my milestone, so I start lifting and reading the books on the tables. Naturally, in my haphazard race to absorb as many books as I can, as fast as I can, I accidentally wind up stealing one instead of simply closing it. This doesn't go over well with gro-Shub. Though the act of stealing a book only comes with a 1 septim bounty, it apparently carries a death sentence from the librarian, who immediately begins throwing magic in my face.

Jeez, man. It's not like I took a book into the bathroom with me.

You can probably guess how the rest of my quiet library excursion goes. My follower, a powerful wizard I picked up in Solstheim, isn't fond of nerds shooting ice magic into my nostrils and goes full-on meltdown, summoning a flame atronach and blasting the librarian with fireballs.

Boy. That escalated quickly.

Of course, the librarian is one of those unkillable characters, and while he's quickly beaten into submission, he just catches his breath for a few moments, and then he and my follower start up with the magical bombardment again. Meanwhile, I'm just innocently trying to read whatever books are lying around as their song of ice and fire turns the room into a cloud of debris.

Eventually, gro-Shub flees up some stairs and my follower chases him, allowing me to quietly finish my achievement in peace. The library, meanwhile, has seen better days.

The lesson: NEVER READ.

Installation: It's a snap. Just download and drop the two Achieve That! files into Skyrim's Data folder. HOWEVER! You will need both the latest version of SkyUI and the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE) to make it work. (If you're into Skyrim mods, you've probably got both already working.) For characters over level 20, you'll need to enable the mod from the Mod Configuration Manager (MCM) tab on the main menu. Below level 20, the mod will automatically be enabled when you start, but you can still adjust the settings from the MCM tab.

Doom 4 will eventually emerge from development hell, but exactly when is still uncertain. Bethesda Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations Pete Hines tells Kotaku that id's Doom 4 team has started over on a "new version" of the game after being unhappy with the initial quality of the game.

"An earlier version of Doom 4 didn't exhibit the quality and excitement that id and Bethesda intend to deliver and that Doom fans worldwide expect,” Hines explains. “As a result, id refocused its efforts on a new version of Doom 4 that promises to meet the very high expectations everyone has for this game and this franchise. When we’re ready to talk about the Doom 4 id is making, we will let folks know.”

A couple years ago, rumors swirled of an "indefinite" delay to Doom 4 over the tepid response to Rage's release, though Hines called the reports "bollocks" during that time. Hopefully id has settled on its final design direction for Doom 4's makeover. And hey, if it needs help, we've got plenty of ideas.

At night, Dishonored's sprawling city of Dunwall looks particularly magnificent. Lit windows dot a canopy of angular roofs and spires, and stacks continuously belch out whale-oil smoke—a signature of the city's bustling industry. It's easy to forget about Corvo Attano's errand of revenge and simply drink in Dunwall's details, but Arkane's journey building Dunwall was a far more elaborate process. At a GDC talk (via Polygon), Art Director Sebastien Mitton describes how experiencing "the life of a city" visited by the team eventually shaped Dunwall's culture and identity.
Arkane trekked to well-known cities such as London and Edinburgh because of their mixture of preserved historical buildings and new construction. Instead of confining themselves to tourist routes, the team set a destination point and bee-lined for it using backstreets and alleyways. Mitton says such a method was instrumental in picking up on the essence of a city over simply gathering volumes of reference photographs.
"Making trips is not just going into a location and taking photographs of textures and more textures and more textures," he explains. "It's to feel the city, feel the life of the city. To be on location, to talk to people."
Mitton goes on to say Dishonored's artists were careful to pick up on subtle nuances during visits such as street light behavior to help furnish Dunwall with small touches of personality. Capturing a city's "mysticism" was the ultimate goal, Mitton states.
A more striking change for Dunwall's design was a shift from its original setting in feudal Japan. Arkane ultimately felt that its unfamiliarity with Japanese culture wouldn't align well with its intentions, so it settled on a "gap" between a 17th century appearance and a 20th century technology level. Mitton also brings up period artists such as Jean-Eugène Buland and John Atkinson Grimshaw as important sources of material.
We'll soon blink about its rooftops in the Knife of Dunwall DLC, but I hope for more subsequent adventures in the city and beyond—there's a whole Empire of Isles to explore.

Beyond Dunwall's detailed architecture and snippets of lore spread through its cobbled streets, Dishonored racked up acclaim for its steep non-linearity and free-form areas for players to fashion their own means of completing objectives using as much subtlety as desired. During a panel at GDC yesterday (via Polygon), Arkane co-Creative Directors Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith embraced this concept of player agency in games, saying, "It's all about guiding and attracting, as opposed to dictating the player's path."

"If you're making games that involve just doing the one thing that is the only thing that you can do to move forward, and then doing the next thing that is the only thing you can do to move forward, it really doesn't feel as creative or as rich or as interesting to us," Smith said. "So, giving the player the ability to look around and make choices in many different ways on many different axes at any given time is a big deal."

Dishonored's various components such as traps and enemies "listened" to the player's interactions with the world and reacted accordingly. Snatches of overheard conversation or tattered journal pages make up part of a "pull-based" narrative system to keep the player exploring and encountering new discoveries by themselves.

One example Arkane used was Corvo's ability to summon a swarm of rats—instead of popping a bunch of rodents out of thin air, the ability hinged on the existing presence of rats during a mission. The amount of rats plaguing the city, in turn, is determined by how many corpses Corvo leaves in his wake on a lethal playthrough.

"The benefit of this is that this is not the designer saying, 'Hey, turn the page and read my little story and follow my path. This is us abdicating that and giving it to the player, saying, 'Player, you tell us where you went, you tell your own version of the experience.'"

Though I loved Dishonored's limited approach to player direction, I think it's important to keep in mind that, as linearity generally continues to be a bad word, a full-on open-world design doesn't suit every game. Arkane's own efforts struck a balance between a hands-off style and dropping direct reminders of the multiple choices available to you, and that's probably the best compromise for ensuring players will find their own experiences in their in-game journeys.