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…)

First: we do not know what the Skyrim DLC will be. I’m not pretending otherwise. But Todd Howard has been musing upon the nature of add-on chunks for the game of swords and shouting, and while he’s obviously PRing to some degree, it sounds like the thinking is along ambitious rather than cyncial lines. Bethesda are looking at “ways to make the game better, not just have more, because the game is so big,” Howard told Joystiq. “So we’re going through ideas right now, and processing everything people are doing in the game, and trying to think of ways that we can improve it.” I would take fixes and thoughtful improvements to abilities and world behaviour over another chunk of quest-littered terrain any day. (more…)

What exactly is going on behind our backs in the lands of Skyrim? Eh? EH? The answer is below.

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Recently, I maxed out pickpocketing in Sykrim. The top perk for doing this is that you can even rob items that people have equipped. This includes, for some reason, their clothes. Yep: they do not notice you removing their clothes.> It’s a handy way of making heavily-protected enemies a little less tough before you go in for the kill, which is about the only reason I can think it was included.

It’s also a way of humiliating an NPC populace that has absolutely no idea it’s being humiliated, and would continue to treat me politely even though I could see their nipples. My cause was clear: every single citizen of Whiterun must be stripped to their underpants. It took me one long, strange evening, but I did it. Welcome to the naked city. And they had no idea of their own nudity. Or did they? Talking to them, I started to get the funny sense they knew what was going on after all… (more…)

We’re loving Skyrim. Nary a spare second of our spare time isn’t spent hacking and exploding our way through it. But we’d really like it if it worked properly. Bethesda’s patches have so far been peculiar in the extreme, seemingly making the game more broken, or just fixing the last patch. With new additions breaking mods, and introducing backward flying dragons, I’d like to suggest that future patches maybe strike a bold new direction and bring in some improvements. But what improvements? Below is a selection of what we think Bethesda needs to do to make Skyrim be the game it deserves to be.

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