Article by Andy Chalk

Mark Morgan may not be as "instantly recognizable" as composers like Jeremy Soule, Jack Wall or Jesper Kyd, to name just a few, but to a certain subset of gamer nerd-dom he's easily the equal of any of them. He has more than a dozen titles to his credit in a career that began in 1995 with Dark Seed II, but there are three in particular--Fallout, Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment--that established him as one of the most unique and memorable talents in the business.

And yet Morgan's work in videogames represents only a slice of what has been a remarkably varied and successful career in television, film and even as a member of the band Starship. "In the mid-nineties, I was working mainly in television when an agent friend, Bob Rice, heard the score I was doing for a network show called Prey," Morgan recently told me. "He thought that vibe might translate to videogames and introduced me to a few developers. After doing a couple of games, I discovered that the medium offered a great opportunity for me to explore my goal of writing a score that was minimal, immersive and put the player emotionally inside the game."



His soundtracks for Fallout and Planescape are particularly distinctive because the developers specifically wanted to avoid a conventional orchestral score. "Although Planescape: Torment had some orchestral elements, it still came from an ambient place in order to tell the story, whereas Fallout was simply a very dark ambient game," Morgan said. "The developers knew they liked the ambient vibe, so based on some of my prior work they approached me to explore the possibilities for these games. With Planescape: Torment it was a conscious decision to be more thematic but keep it ambient."

Yet after 1999, the year in which his work appeared in both Planescape and Civilization: Call to Power, Morgan effectively fell off the face of the Earth, at least as far as gamers are concerned. He provided some music for the Giants: Citizen Kabuto soundtrack but otherwise appeared to have moved on to other things. It would be ten years before he returned to games with EA's 2009 release Need for Speed: Shift.



"During that decade, I found myself writing music for television again. Then out of the blue, Charles Deenan, who I had worked with at Interplay and was now at Electronic Arts, asked me to contribute some tracks for Need for Speed: Shift. I had always wanted to do that genre of game, so I jumped at his offer. Soon after, I was offered Prey 2, which I co-wrote with a fellow composer, Jason Graves," Morgan said. "The experience rekindled my love of writing for games. And luckily, soon thereafter I got a call from Brian Fargo, for whom I had worked when he was CEO of Interplay. He was now running inXile, and asked if I wanted to work on Wasteland 2, followed by Torment: Tides of Numenera. Since I had worked on what were essentially the prequels to both of those games, I was thrilled to revisit them."



Morgan said his approach to creating game soundtracks is "collaborative" but the specifics of the process depends on the individual game. He cites Miles Davis, Peter Gabriel, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Trent Reznor as some of his many influences, and added that architecture, specifically the Minimalist and Modernist movements, has played a huge role in his work and "profoundly influenced" how he writes music.

"I am moved by the simplicity in modern architecture. With its space and restraint, you can see it all without being detoured or interrupted by things that don t matter," he explained. "To borrow a quote, 'Subtle enough to not intrude, but bold enough to not become irrelevant.' That s kind of my goal. As this relates to games, I want to effect the player in subliminal ways by keeping them in the moment."

He also allowed that his rather sudden re-entry into the field is driven in part by the emergence of a strengthened indie sector, which has rekindled his interest in gaming. "With the advent of crowd-funding, smaller independent developers can make the style of games that avid gamers want to play. Without the constraints of 'corporate-think,' this freedom translates to the music as well," he said. That gamer sensibility is reflected in his participation in a third game, Stasis, a far more modest Kickstarter project he asked to take part in simply because he thought it looked cool.



"When I first saw the visuals I was hooked. The creators of Stasis, Chris Bischoff and his brother Nic, have such a passion for their game it was infectious," he said. "After seeing their teaser on Kickstarter, I emailed Chris to see if they had a composer. He emailed me back that they didn t, so I talked him into letting me do it."

Despite his early association with the franchise, Morgan said he hasn't been asked to take part in the next Fallout game, although he'd "love to do it" if he could. Neither is he aware of the status of Prey 2, which he is no longer actively involved with. "I don t have any idea of how the gameplay was working out but visually it seemed really cool. I loved working on it, but for me personally I felt I hadn t quite found the sound of the game yet. Before we delivered the final score I had always planned on reworking almost all of my tracks and adding the vibe I thought was missing, but I never got a chance. There were also quite a lot of time gaps between portions of the writing which, to be fair, does happen in many games, but I wish the process could have been shorter and more focused. That said, I think if you played Jason Graves' tracks and mine as a whole score, it had the makings of an interesting soundtrack."



As for the future, Morgan said he's never really sure what it holds, but he sounds happy about his recent resurgence in games. "A lot of the music I m asked to do style-wise is a departure from what I do in TV, so it s really satisfying from a creative point of view," he said. "I also love the fact that, at least with the games I m working on at present, I'm asked, 'Can you make it even darker?' That always works for me."

So far it's worked pretty well for us, too. Of the three game projects Morgan currently has on the go, Wasteland 2 is expected first; no release date has been announced, but it's well into beta testing. Stasis should come next, nearer the end of the year, while Torment: Tides of Numenera is slated to arrive in 2015. To find out more about Mark Morgan and his music, hit up markmorganmusic.com.

Sometimes it's difficult to have a surname that can double as an adjective for uncontrollable, mindless violence. Especially when your job is to report on games, which are exceptionally good at making enemies that are characterised by their uncontrollable, mindless violence. The overuse of the word 'savage' in gaming is a completely unwarranted defamation of my ancestors. After all, they were only responsible for around 28% of maulings in the UK's West Midlands area. Still, the damage is already done, so here's the "Savagery" trailer for Skywind, the excellent looking Skyrim mod that aims to fully recreate Morrowind.



The natural question, then: when's this out? Not for a while, it seems. In the comments of that video, it's creators set out only the vaguest of release targets. "For everyone asking, there is no final release date. We're not just being jerks and not telling you, it's just hard to say at this point. It's estimated for late 2014, but it all depends."

In fact, it's so not currently ready, that the makers are no longer allowing downloads of the current alpha stage. That's because the footage from the video is of the next planned build. The current one did little more than let you move through the terrain and interact with certain objects.

Even though it's still a long way off, the amount of activity that's recently been revealed about the project leaves me hopeful that it will eventually be finished. Previously, we've seen trailers showing just how pretty its environments are, and a lengthy video detailing how many people are involved in bringing Morrowind to a new home.

School can be a drag, especially when a bunch of atomic bombs have turned your classmates into flesh-eating ghouls. This week, however, class is back in session in the Afterschool Special mod for Fallout: New Vegas, which lets you take an abandoned, decaying schoolhouse and transform it into an awesome high-tech base of operations, with a lab, a crafting center, a health station, and best of all, the CIMS: an awesome computer that can sort, organize, and store all of your worldly possessions at the touch of a button.

(Please note, the picture above of me decapitating a Fiend's attack dog with a laser rifle doesn't specifically have anything to do with the mod. It's just more exciting to look at than a picture of a schoolhouse.)

Afterschool Special (originally released a while back but recently updated with some new tweaks and features) takes place in Springvale, which is based on an actual town in Nevada, and focuses on Springvale School, which is based on an actual school in Springvale, Nevada. The in-game school isn't much to look at: just another rotting, dilapidated building in a world full of them.

Hopefully the interior of the real school is a bit nicer.
That is, until you come along. Poke around in the rubble until you find a scribbled journal entry, and you'll discover that a fellow named Paul Edgecomb had some plans to renovate the school, but the guy he hired has since gone missing. Paul lives nearby in a small repair shop with his Ghoul buddy Dean, and offers you the chance to take over the renovations and inhabit the school yourself. It's also worth noting that the custom voice work done on Paul is incredibly well done: it feels authentic and fits perfectly into the game.

This isn't simply a matter of Paul handing over the keys to the school: you've actually got to roll up your sleeves and get to work. First, you ll need to empty out the junk that litters the school floor: busted wood, desks, chairs, and other odds and ends. Being something of a jerk, I decided to dump it all in my neighbor's yard, and was a little disappointed when the desks and chairs, instead of falling into a big messy pile, just hung motionless in the air for some reason. Then I realized that a bunch of desks floating in your yard would probably be even more annoying then a pile of them. That made me feel better.


Why are these desks hovering in mid-air? Just another mystery of the Wastelands.
Once the place is cleared out, it's time to mop the floors. Two notes about mopping the floors. First, you'll be happy to know you don't actually have to mop the floors, you just have to press a button and the mod tells you that you've mopped the floors. Second, I am actually disappointed that I didn't get to literally mop the floors. Something about mopping the floor in Fallout, I dunno, it just seemed like it might be fun. How often do you get to mop in a video game? Not terribly often.
The next step is to gather some of the goodies for your new pad, like toolboxes, lockers, and other items. They will become part of the centerpiece of the restored school, the CIMS, or Computer Inventory Management System (more on this in a bit). Paul is nice enough to give you some clues as to where to look for the items you'll need, and you'll also wind up doing some random scavenging and visiting traders to fill your order. Or, you might just root through people's houses and hope they don't get too upset.


It's not what it looks like! I just killed this guy so I could steal his stuff! Okay, it is what it looks like.
Once the interior of the school is in good shape, you'll need to restore the building's electricity to power the lights and computer system. The mod is actually quite detailed in this respect, and I wouldn't be surprised if the mod s creator was an actual electrician. In additional to gathering some electrical components and batteries, you'll need to find a spare solar panel, which means another trip out into the world to hunt down the gear you need.


Surely they'll never miss it if I take just ONE of these.
You think this place looks high-tech? Well, wait until you see my setup:


Even in the post-apocalypse, it's nice to be eco-friendly.
Once you've gotten the power running, you can finally use the new CIMS, and discover what a great time-saving device it is. Typically, when my inventory is full, I'll waddle over to some container in my house and start dropping things into it, being careful not to store things I want to keep on me at all times. This isn't difficult or anything, but it tends to take a while, requiring a lot of scrolling and clicking and thinking, and then retrieving items out of the box, which is stuffed with a bunch of everything, also takes more thinking.


Punch a button on that computer, and your belongings are all neatly sorted into those lockers.
With the CIMS, you just walk up to the computer and ask it to sort any category you want. If I want to unload all my crafting supplies, I just tell the computer, and boop, all my crafting supplies are neatly stored in one location. Do I have a bunch of extra sets of armor or clothing? Beep. Same deal. Do I have 28 different guns I'd like to keep but not carry with me? Do I want to figure out which to sell and which to save, but I don't want to do it right this second? Click.


Want to empty your pockets into neat, labelled collections? There's an app for that.
When I want to do some crafting or peruse weapons or whatever, it's just a matter of opening the correct labeled storage spot. Couldn't be easier. Once you ve got your CIMS set up, you can also purchase other improvements for the school: a healing station, a crafting oven, a science lab, and a workbench. You don t have to stop there: further quests can lead you to repair the old, busted fence outside and add a garden and picnic area, essentially turning the schoolhouse into a schoolhome.
As you can tell, this isn't a massive, dramatic, or even particularly dangerous mod (unless you run into some random enemies while scouring the world for parts). It is, however, a great add-on, good for those who have run out of things to do, or providing something enjoyable to work on while taking a break from other, more strenuous quests.
The end result is a comfy and extremely useful base of operations in Springvale, with the inventory management system, an extraordinarily comfy bed that gives you the well-rested perk after just an hour s sleep, and a custom map marker for easy travel. There s even a switch on the outside of the building that, when flipped, toggles between the school's vanilla version and modded version. And, like I said, the voice work is surprisingly great.


The best kind of school: one with no annoying kids in it!
Installation: Download the latest version here. Drop the contents in your FNV data folder and make sure the mod is checked when you begin. Then head to the schoolhouse and find the note in the rubble. The only issue I noticed was the CIMS occasionally couldn't sort items that were added by other mods.

It seems like everyone in Skyrim keeps a journal. Bandits, smugglers, fishermen, necromancers, and even serial killers all obsessively document their lives. Yet the most interesting person in Skyrim - that Dragonborn character - does not. It's time to change that, with the Journal of the Dragonborn mod. Take notes, jot down reminders, keep a diary, and record your exciting adventures for posterity, all from right there inside the game.

That last part - writing your journal entries inside the game, while playing - is especially appealing. I often take notes while I play Skyrim just in case I wind up innocently murdering dozens of people, but it either requires having my laptop crammed onto my small and already crowded desk, or alt-tabbing out of the game, which can occasionally cause a crash. I guess you could also use the Steam interface to open a browser window, but you won't have the Steam interface if you're using the Skyrim Script Extender, which I often am. Either way, being able to use an in-game journal to take notes, or read them later, is really convenient.

As for the actual point of keeping a diary while playing, well, I can think of several. Just a couple weeks ago I was looking through my old saved games and I came across one with a level 12 character named Mags. Obviously, I d put in at least a few hours with her at some point in the past couple years, and looking through her quest history I could see she did some of the Winterhold College quests. She also looked like kind of a badass.



Problem is, I can't remember a damn thing about who this character was or what sort of goals I had for her. Her personality, her loyalties, her alignment, her back-story... I honestly can't recall. Plus, she was just standing up on a mountain, and I have no idea where she was headed or what she was doing whenever it was I decided to take a break.

This mod means I can avoid that in the future. It'll be great, years from now, to load up an old character, open their journal, and read the details about who they are and what my plans were for them, in case I've forgotten. Instead of staring blankly at a forgotten character, wondering who they were, I'll be able to pull up something like this:



The journal is also useful for general day-to-day reminders. Has this happened to you? You re leaving a dungeon, loaded with so much loot that picking up even a single mushroom will render you immobile. You can t fast-travel because some mudcrab or slaughterfish has spotted you from a mile away, and you don t feel like wading into the water to deal with it, so you have to spend some time actually running through Skyrim for a change. Along the way, you spot something interesting: maybe a camp, maybe a cave, maybe just an interesting looking spot on the map, something you want to remember specifically, in a way that a map marker just can't capture.



Speaking of loads of treasure, here's another use for the journal if you're a massive slob like myself. I have an Orc character who owns every house in Skyrim and has stuffed each house with several dozen mounds of loot. For a while I was being careful: putting weapons in racks and armor in wardrobes and valuables in chests, but after a while, I just started running into whichever house was closest and dumping a giant pile of treasure on the floor before running back out.



Not only am I deeply ashamed of my haphazard hoarding, I occasionally need to actually find something specific that I dumped somewhere. For instance, I collected dozens of dragon bones and scales, and later it took me hours of house-scouring to find them when I finally wanted to do some crafting. I also have a special enchanted set of armor that allows me to carry more loot, which I of course dumped somewhere in a random loot pile. Now, at least, when I do something stupid like that, I can write it down.



So there are plenty of practical uses for the journal, but if you really want to do some role-playing, you can also use this journal as, well... a journal. Record your adventures. Write down the things you do. Keep a faithful diary of your heroic and exciting life. Export them from your game so you can read them whenever you want. Send them to someone. (Don t send them to me.)

>As for how it works: the journal opens up with a simple hotkey (X) and lets you type right there inside the game. You can save your entries, edit old ones, or delete ones you no longer need. There's a couple of choices on appearances, and a few different Skyrim fonts to choose from. You can also move the journal interface around the screen, re-size it, and change its opacity. It even enters the in-game date for each entry for you. Pretty cool!

Installation: You can subscribe via the Steam Workshop link or download the mod from the Nexus and drop them into your Skyrim data folder. You'll also need the Skyrim Script Extender and SkyUI installed. If you want to export your journal, you'll need a mod called FISS: it will let you save your journal as a .txt file.

My Skyrim character is simultaneously the head of the Mage's Guild, top dog of the Companions, a mid-tier operative of the Thieves Guild, vaguely acquainted with the Dark Brotherhood, the saviour of the entire goddamn world, and a werewolf. And yet, for all of those many achievements, I don't have any actual power or respect. Despite housing vastly more players than a sole person's Skyrim campaign, The Elder Scrolls Online will offer a role hitherto unachievable: that of Emperor.

How do you become the ruler of the Imperial City? Why would you want to? TESO's game director Paul Sage has revealed all in an interview with OXM. Much as in real life, becoming Emperor involves travelling to the relevant country and beating up a lot of people.

Kill foes, heal allies and controlling keeps will build your Alliance Points. If your Alliance takes control of all the keeps around the Imperial City, the player with the most of these points becomes Emperor. "Players who become Emperor will get a full skill line that they keep throughout the rest of their lives in The Elder Scrolls Online," Sage said. "It won't be easy to become Emperor, but we think people will be glad they worked for it."

So no making proclamations to your people, or bothering unassuming prisoners about ill omens. Still, you will be a better fighter because of it, even if you will lose some of your bonuses when you're finally deposed.

The Elder Scrolls Online will be released on the 4th April.

After last month's "Call to East" trailer, I doubt anyone would have dismissed Skywind's aim to port Morrowind into the Skyrim engine as an easy task. Now, though, the Skyrim mod's first official development diary will give you an idea of the epic scope of the project, and the ambition and dedication of its 70+ team of volunteers. And all so you don't have to go back to the third Elder Scroll's angular and low-poly giant mushrooms.

The diary reveals some of the difficulties of crowbarring that windiest of Morrows into the Skyrim box. For one thing, the elder game's technical limitations mean that landscapes are unusually barren. As a result, the team have had to fill in the gaps - increasing the detail of the world in order to make it feel more alive.

For all the effort involved, it should lead to a better mod overall. I'm always a little suspicious of straight engine remakes, especially when older PC games can usually be modded into a much improved state on their own terms. But a complete re-imagining, with the team's own personality stamped into the final release, will hopefully mean a mod that can both please Morrowind's fanbase, and also provide a fresh experience.

The developers of Skywind are currently looking to bolster their already sizeable ranks of volunteers. To get involved, or to just find more information on the project, head over to the official development forum.

Skyrim is a beautifully vast and sweeping game. Also vast: the possibility of its modding potential. The nomadic fans of Morrowind are crossing those rolling plains of creation, as part of their quest to settle within the safety and shelter of this newer game's engine. Their journey started just over a year ago, and now - while still far from the home stretch - they've made great progress. They've even released a trailer showing just how far they've come.



Skywind is currently on version 0.91, and, according to its makers, still very much in alpha. "You can move around the world, interact with a few things, but the full content of questing, gameplay and many other various elements are not part of the game yet," they write. "These Alpha releases are more for getting people interested, inspired and up-to-date with development so they can help with the project."

Nevertheless, it's a fantastically ambitious project that appears to be progressing nicely. You can download Skywind from the Morroblivion website, stopping only briefly to appreciate how great the word "Morroblivion" is. To play it, you'll need both Skyrim and Morrowind (along with the Tribunal and Bloodmoon expansions) installed on your computer.

Thanks, RPS.

Internet. Internet never changes. Which is why, once again, we're having to cross the irradiated wasteland of rumour and speculation. There's a chance - remote though it may be - that Bethesda are readying the broadcast signal and preparing to announce Fallout 4 to whichever isolated pockets of humanity care to listen. Of course, there's also a chance that this is nothing, and that Fallout fans will be left to starve on a diet of broken, empty dreams. It's how they would want to go.

The first clue was the emergence of the website TheSurvivor2299.com. It's a countdown site, ticking down to the 11th December, and featuring the logo of the series' Vault-Tec company. The site also plays a Morse code signal, which translates to '11-12-13'. A WHOIS lookup of that site shows that, apparently, it was registered by Bethesda's parent company Zenimax.

So far, so good, but a number of factors cast doubt on the site. You can find a great rundown of evidence for and against the site's legitimacy on the Fallout Subreddit, but, to summarise, it was both registered by a different company than Zenimax usually use, and is using a different, self-branded DNS. Eyebrows were also raised at the date, which is in the dd/mm/yy format so beloved by myself and my countrymen.

Of course, the counter-argument is that Bethesda have done this to foster such uncertainty - with believers citing when Blizzard did a similar thing with one of their viral teaser sites. It's also worth nothing that the 11th December is the date of the VGAs, an award ceremony which is known for its game announcements. And for being embarrassing to watch. People have also pointed out that of course they were going to use dd/mm/yy, because 11-12-13 looks cool.

We're not done yet. There's another twist: a Fallout 4 trademark has been registered by Bethesda Softworks. Even that's far from definitive. A recent EU trademark for Half-Life 3, supposedly from Valve, was later removed when it turned out to be a hoax.

Given all this, we turned to Bethesda in the hope that they could act as the Geiger Counter against these deadly rumours. Their response? "No comment". Make of that what you will.

No matter what upcoming plans Dishonored developer Arkane Studios has hidden in a velvet-lined box somewhere, it looks like CryEngine will be a part of it. A recent hiring push by the Austin-based Arkane and Battlecry Studios for artists and programmers to work with the Crytek game engine has surfaced, pointing to a project separate from the Unreal Engine 3-based Dishonored.

Dishonored publisher Bethesda's VP of marketing Pete Hines had already described the first-person stealth action game as a "franchise" back in July, but it's unclear if the CryEngine project is tied to that game or not. Arkane has offices in both Lyon, France as well as Austin and we know from the push for more designers that at the very least the Austin branch has a CryEngine game in mind.

While much depends on the what game artists and designers have in mind, the choice of game engine can influence the look, feel and scope of the final experience, not to mention its development process. Notable current and upcoming games that use CryEngine technology include Star Citizen, MechWarrior Online, and of course, Crysis 3.

Hat tip, IGN.