Skyblivion is a massive project that intends to port Oblivion into Skyrim's advanced engine. The modders are planning to port all environments and quests over, though in its final form you'll be able to pick and choose the parts you want. 

"This includes all enhancements developed by the team such as our Landscaping Overhaul, Interior Overhaul, City Overhaul, Weapon/Armor Overhaul and much more," reads a post on the Skyblivion site. 

The project has been in development for years. Back in February we got a look at the Imperial City at the heart of Oblivion's map. For an earlier work-in-progress view, check out one of Skyblivion's teasers from back in 2016.

The final mod will be free, and is designed to be compatible with the Skyrim Special Edition. You'll need to own Skyrim, Oblivion and their DLC packs to install the final mod. There's no release window at the moment. It's a volunteer-driven project, so progress can be irregular, but it's come a long way since Skyblivion started way back in in 2012.

For me, the best Skyrim mods transform the realm's aesthetics. Be that by way of weather overhauls, lighting ENBs, or, my newest favourite, BuzzDee84 and PhenomFazMFQ's Ultimate HD Fire Effects SSE. 

I've a particular fondness of the dark arts in high-fantasy RPGs, and the College of Winterhold is always my first stop during new playthroughs of Skyrim. As always, the best way to show off mods of this calibre is with pictures. 

Courtesy of the project's Nexus Mod page, here's a collection of before and after shots, magic spells in motion, and conjured Atronachs for your pleasure:    

Ultimate HD Fire Effects SSE is more than an update of its Oldrim counterpart, with a host of nips and tucks—including improved smoke patterns, over 20 new textures, several meshes and 4K-8K resolution support. 

Fancy that? More information on Ultimate HD Fire Effects SSE, including installation instructions, lives on its Nexus Mods page.  

As reported by Sam Horti over the weekend, this mod turns Skyrim into a tropical rainforest. PlayerTw0's wonderful Real Rain SE, on the other hand, turns the climate controls in the opposite direction—giving us realistic rainfall like never before. 

With the simple goal of making rain "as real as possible", Real Rain overhauls the game's rain textures to become more random and natural looking, "while making the rain denser without any FPS lag or bloated save files." 

Likewise, PlayerTw0 says they have tested the mod extensively to work with and without ENB settings—which in turn prevents the mod's downpour from being too bright at night, or too transparent during the day. 

First introduced to the original Skyrim a few years back, Real Rain SE brings the project to Skyrim Special Edition. Its latest update looks better than ever, which its creator says is best complimented with Climates Of Tamriel, True Storms and Dolomite Weathers. 

At present, PlayerTw0 is working to introduce custom rain styles, such as "tetrisrain" and bloodrain. 

More information on Real Real SE can be found on its Nexus Mods page. There, creator PlayerTw0 says it'll "make you run for cover and get a dovahbrella."

Earlier this year, I wrote about PsykotikKrymes' The Doppelganger Follower—a mod which lets you add yourself as a companion in Skyrim Special Edition. The creator's latest venture, Clone Conjuration, takes the idea one step further by letting you conjure an army of self-styled clones. 

Whereas as The Doppelganger Follower offers a permanent follower, Clone Conjuration summons twins of the Dragonborn to lead into battle. Court Wizards sell it, bandit mages drop it, or "if you're impatient", says PsykotikKrymes, the spell can be obtained from the food table in Dragonreach—"in the room with the cooking spit". 

Clones replicate your spells and shouts, but not your armour.

Furthermore, version 2.0 of Clone Conjuration comes with a twist. 

"2.0 adds a spell called Conjure ????," explains creator PsykotikKrymes. "This spell is fun but a gamble, when you cast you might conjure a giant, or a rabbit, goat, horse; but you also might get Ulfric, a Greybeard or a mud crab. It chooses from over 30 different NPCs/creatures when cast and still [uses] NO scripts."

Have fun with that. More information on PsykotikKrymes' Clone Conjuration can be found on its Nexus Mods page. 

Beware of giant donuts.

The timeline of the Elder Scrolls universe is divided into four ages—except there are also two ages before those, and one of them is entirely non-linear and yet somehow manages to contain a sequence of events in which supernatural beings come to existence from nothing. And then, at later points in the timeline, this timeless primordial chaos leaks through into the physical world and recurs, like reality itself is having an acid flashback.

The Elder Scrolls games have a complicated history, is what I'm saying. 

That's part of what makes them appealing to a certain kind of player. They give you the surface stuff of big, freeform open-world fantasy roleplaying, but if you want to dig for it there's more to find. There's even a recurring theme of the game's internal histories being contradictory because they're told from biased viewpoints, as if they're predesigned to be fodder for competing fan theories.

This timeline presents a broad overview of things that happen on the world of Nirn, and also puts the games in order. Each of the mainline Elder Scrolls RPGs is separated by years, sometimes a lot of them, and The Elder Scrolls Online confusingly leaps back in time to fill in a gap. You don't have to know this to enjoy them, but then you don't have to read the books and yet some of us do it anyway. Getting a handle on the history and metaphysics is entirely optional, but it adds to my enjoyment and maybe if you take a dip into it, it'll add to yours too.

The Dawn Era 

There are multiple creation myths in The Elder Scrolls, but the easiest one to grasp is the Anuad, because it comes in a handy children's version. According to the Anuad the first two beings to exist when everything else was void are the brothers Anu and Padomay, who represent order and chaos, light and dark. Where the light and darkness mingle Nir is brought into existence, and both brothers fall in love with her. She loves only Anu, however, and their coupling brings into existence 12 words. In his jealousy Padomay kills Nir and destroys the 12 worlds, but Anu saves enough of their fragments to create one: Nirn.

Anu and Padomay fight a final time, and where Padomay's blood falls it creates the demons or Daedra, while Anu's blood creates the stars, and where their blood mixes the gods or Aedra are made. That's the kid's book version.

Among the first of those gods is Lorkhan, a trickster, who convinces the Aedra to create the mortal plane, while the Daedra go off to make their own planes within Oblivion. Some of the Aedra realize Lorkhan isn't being upfront about the cost of this creation, that they'll have to sacrifice much of their own power in the act. They leave for Aetherius, a plane of pure magic, allowing magicka to leak into the world through the holes their departure leaves. Other Aedra step back to resume their godhood, becoming the Divines. According to human myths the gods then create mortals, while the elves believe some Aedra stay permanently to sacrifice their immortality and become their ancestors. 

But before that, the Aedra convene to determine how Lorkhan should be punished for tricking them. Akatosh, dragon god of time, builds the Adamantine Tower on the continent of Tamriel to be their courthouse. Lorkhan's punishment is to have his heart torn out, and it forms the Red Mountain on the island of Vvardenfell.

That's just one version of the story of course. The in-game book called The Monomyth is a handy collection of competing creation stories.  

The Merethic Era 

Known as the Merethic Era because it's dominated by the Mer, a.k.a. the elves, this period of 2,500 years begins with the construction of the Adamantine Tower and ends with the founding of the Camoran Dynasty. In between, the elves travel to the continent of Tamriel when their homeland of Aldmeri is lost, settling in different areas. The Dwemer take up residence underground, the Altmer on Summerset Isle, the Bosmer in the forests, the Chimer (who later become the Dunmer) in Morrowind, and the Ayleids take slaves from the local human population and found the Ayleid Empire. The Orsimer are corrupted by Daedra and become the orcs, while humans from the northern continent of Atmora also emigrate to Tamriel under the leadership of Ysgramor. 

Ysgramor's creation of the runic language allows human recorded history to begin, ushering in the First Era and some actual dates. 

The First Era

0

King Eplear unites the Bosmer wood elves, founds the nation of Valenwood, and begins the Camoran Dynasty. 

143 

Harald, a descendent of Ysgramor, is crowned first High King of the Nords and declares Windhelm the capital of his nation, Skyrim. 

240 

High King Vrage the Gifted of Skyrim begins a campaign of conquest in various elven lands, taking High Rock, all of Morrowind except Vvardenfell, and parts of Cyrodiil, most of which is at this time held by the elven Ayleid Empire. 

243 

Human slaves in the Ayleid Empire rebel and take control of the White-Gold Tower at its centre. Their leader Alessia declares herself first Empress of the Cyrodillic Empire, goes on to formalize worship of the Divines, and is later declared a saint.

369 

A dispute over who will be crowned High King of the Nords leads to the War of Succession, and the Nordic territories outside Skyrim take this opportunity to begin struggling for independence. 

416 

The Chimer and Dwemer unite to drive the Nords out of Morrowind. 

700 

When the Chimer learn the Dwemer are constructing a golem called the Numidium powered by the Heart of Lorkhan and that this "brass god" is intended to become a blasphemous new deity, the peace between them is broken. They go to war at the Battle of Red Mountain, during which the Dwemer vanish—an event that's never explained. 

The Chimer lord Indoril Nerevar, favored of the Daedric Prince Azura, dies under mysterious circumstances, for which Azura curses their people to be transformed into the Dunmer or dark elves. (There's a lot going on here and you should honestly just play Morrowind for a much fuller explanation.)

792 

The land of Yokuda is destroyed and the survivors flee to Hammerfell, where they eventually become known as the Redguards. 

950 

The city of Orsinium, capital of the orcs, is attacked by a union of neighboring kingdoms. The siege lasts 30 years, after which the city finally falls and is razed. 

1029 

High Rock joins the Alessian Empire. 

1200

A monotheistic sect of anti-elf extremists called the Alessian Order, who have dominated the Alessian Empire since the fourth century, attempt a ritual to separate the elven god Auriel from Akatosh, the Dragon God of Time (the two are closely connected, and possibly just aspects of the same being viewed by different cultures). This goes so wrong that time shatters and the non-linearity of the Dawn Era recurs in an event called the Dragon Break. For 1,008 years time ceases to function properly.

This is all just a theory, and an alternate theory states that a clerical error left official records blank during this period.

2321 

Western Cyrodiil attempts to gain independence from the Alessian Empire in a decade-long conflict called the War of Righteousness.

2703 

Invaders from the land of Akavir land in Tamriel, forcing Cyrodiil to unite against them, forging the Second Empire and beginning the Reman Dynasty. 

2714 

The Second Empire conquers Valenwood. 

2811 

Reman II goes to war against the Argonian lizardfolk, and their home of Black Marsh becomes an Imperial province. 

2920 

A truce between Morrowind and the Empire is broken when a Dunmer fortress is sacked. In response the dark elf assassins guild, the Morag Tong, murder Reman III and his son. An Akaviri Potentate takes over and declares the end of the Reman Dynasty and the beginning of the Second Era. 

The Second Era

230

The Mages Guild is formed by Vanus Galerion after he leaves an older magical fraternity called the Psijic Order. Galerion opposes the practice of necromancy, and proposes to make magical items and potions available to the public for a price.

283 

Potentate Versidue-Shaie declares martial law across the Empire, beginning 37 years of warfare that leaves the Imperial Legion the only military force of any strength in Tamriel.

309 

The Khajiit cat-people found the province of Elsweyr by uniting two minor kingdoms. 

320 

In response to a rise in banditry due to the absence of military forces beyond the Legion, the forerunner of the Fighters Guild is founded. 

324 

The Morag Tong assassinate Potentate Versidue-Shaie. 

430 

Potentate Savirien-Chorak and all his heirs are assassinated, bringing the Second Empire to an end. Historians dispute who was responsible but what do you want, three guesses?

431 

No longer protected by the Empire, the rebuilt orc capital of Orsinium is sacked again, this time by the Bretons and Redguards.

567 

The Daggerfall Covenant unites High Rock, Hammerfell, and Orsinium, and the orcs are given the right to rebuild their capital one more time. 

572 

A second Akaviri invasion captures Windhelm in Skyrim but is defeated after being trapped between the Dunmer and a united force of Nords and Argonians. Morrowind, Skyrim, and Black Marsh sign the Ebonheart Pact to make this temporary alliance permanent. 

580 

Elsweyr, Valenwood, and the Summerset Isles unite as the Aldmeri Dominion.

583 

Start date of The Elder Scrolls Online. 

852 

Tiber Septim begins the Tiber Wars in an attempt to unite the nations of Tamriel and form the Third Empire.  

864 

Start date of The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard. 

896 

Tiber Septim uses a rebuilt Numidium to complete his conquest of Tamriel, destroying the golem afterwards. Then he declares the Second Era over. 

The Third Era

38 

Tiber Septim dies. Followers of Talos believe he ascends to godhood. 

119 

Pelagius III, later known as Pelagius the Mad, becomes emperor. (He's worth a mention just because his hip bone forms the basis of a fun sidequest in Skyrim.) 

172 

Start date of An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire. 

249 

The Camoran Usurper invades Valenwood. 

399 

Start date of The Elder Scrolls: Arena. 

405 

Start date of The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall.

417 

The Numidium is rebuilt again. Something about this powerful artifact's use results in another brief Dragon Break, called The Warp in the West, during which the Numidium is seen in six different places at once, fulfilling the aims of different factions. (This conveniently makes all six potential endings of Daggerfall canon simultaneously.) 

427 

Start date of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind.

433 

Start date of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. 

The Fourth Era

5 

In Vvardenfell the large rock containing the Ministry of Truth that hovers over Vivec falls, devastating the city and causes floods and landslides. The Red Mountain erupts. 

22

The elven supremacist faction called the Thalmor take over Summerset Isle, and the high elves leave the Empire. Within a decade they take Valenwood as well, beginning a new Aldmeri Dominion. 

98 

During the 'Void Nights' both moons, Masser and Secunda, vanish from the sky. The Khajiit, who are bound to the Lunar Lattice and whose children have adult forms determined by the phase of the moons they're born under, are particularly distraught. When the Thalmor take credit for the moons' return, Elsweyr agrees to join the resurgent Aldmeri Dominion. 

171 

The Aldmeri Dominion demand tribute from the Empire, as well as the banning of Talos worship, the ceding of a significant portion of Hammerfell, and the disbanding of the Emperor's order of spies and bodyguards, the Blades. Emperor Titus II refuses all demands, and the Great War begins. (The singleplayer campaign of The Elder Scrolls: Legends takes place during this war.)

175 

The Aldmeri Dominion and the Empire sign a treaty called the White-Gold Concordat, agreeing to enforce a ban on Talos worship.  

201 

Start date of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.

If you managed to make it all the way through this, why not follow it up with Major events in the Fallout timeline?

Modders have been hard at work updating Skyrim mods to work with its Special Edition re-release, and you will be—or at least should be—delighted to hear that Ravelen's Sinister Seven mod has officially made the jump. Originally released in early 2015, the Sinister Seven adds seven powerful NPC assassins that hunt you down as you level up, injecting a little tension into the main story. 

"Each of the seven unique assassins is at least twice the player's level and will track them down across the map," Mnikjom, who helped update the mod for Skyrim Special Edition, writes on Nexus Mods. "They're also imbued with unique abilities outside your normal Skyrim bandit and thus may result in unusual battle tactics to win the fight. Some may be more challenging to particular player archetypes, others less so. They may show up when you're sleeping, when you're exploring a cave, or just on the road. You can try to fight them or run into the wilderness, which should buy you some time, but don't expect them to give up." 

Normal assassins will also show up periodically, but the killer seven are the mod's main selling point. By default, the boss assassins will show up every two levels once you reach level 12, though you can tweak the mod's values to make them more aggressive. Defeating the assassins earns you custom masks with unique enchantments, as well as two armor sets.

You can find download and installation instructions on Nexus Mods.  

My favorite Skyrim mods are usually ones that alter the flow of the game, or add more character personalizing options. Every time I reinstall Skyrim, Alternate Start—Live Another Life is at the top of the queue. I'm much pickier about quest mods. Adding new story to Skyrim means new writing and voice acting and those are hard things to get right—Enderal managed it, mostly, but it's a rare exception. One of my favorite narrative mods, Sea of Ghosts, gets around the problem by focusing on new locations that are empty, a string of spooky islands.

The Forgotten City, however, does not shy away from new characters. It's a quest mod that adds an entire settlement full of new people, fully voiced, with their own stories all wrapped up in one overarching plot about time travel and human nature and the role of law in shaping a society. It's ambitious is what I'm saying. It even has its own original score.

As for why I'm playing a mod from 2015, a standalone version of The Forgotten City was announced at E3. It'll be a re-imagining, one that takes away all the specifics of the Elder Scrolls universe, changing the characters and the endings but leaving the basics of the structure in place.

I feel pretty confident that having played the mod won't ruin the standalone version, because there's a lot about it that's specific to Skyrim. Once you enter the city (by traveling back in time to a point before its fall), you find that it's divided along familiar lines. The Imperials run things while the Nords do the work, and although there are a couple of non-humans the beast races aren't visible at all. One of the inhabitants turns out to be a member of the Dark Brotherhood, and one's an Imperial soldier who wants to escape so he can get back to fighting Stormcloaks. It's a place entirely cut off from the rest of the country—once you enter it, jumping down a hole in a cave, you can't leave—but everybody's brought their existing prejudices with them.

In spite of all that tension, The Forgotten City should be a place of peace. All the people here, whether they deliberately escaped Skyrim or just blundered down the hole, are under the jurisdiction of the "Dwarves' Law". This place was built by the Dwemer, and they left behind a safeguard for anyone who took up residence after them. If anyone in the settlement sins, the whole population will be punished for it. Fatally.

Having seen the city's future, you know that's about to happen. Something's going to set off the magical punishment left behind by the dwarves and you've only got a limited time to figure out what it was and prevent that from happening. Fortunately, you can make multiple attempts. If you fail you can go back to the moment of your arrival, starting another time loop armed with everything you've learned. There's even new dialogue to take this into account, including some funny stuff when you try to convince someone you know what they're going to say next.

As well as getting to know the people, you get to know the location as well. It doesn't seem huge at first. There's a palace, a single district and a lakehouse, but there are other places to unlock and secrets to find. The limits to the area mean that you learn your way around properly, and eventually figure out where everybody lives and how to navigate it at speed. It's the characters I keep thinking about, though. The two researchers happy to have this opportunity to dive into understanding the Dwemer, even if they can't share what they learn. The paranoiac who correctly believes they're all in danger, but responds to it by wandering around with an axe like a maniac. The self-declared jarl who sounds like someone doing an impersonation of Patrick Stewart, and the merchant who swears he's honest, and the cynical healer who hates being stuck in the Forgotten City but says it "Could be worse, though. You could be living in bloody Skyrim."

It's maybe a bit ridiculous that all these people got here by just jumping down a hole (OK, one of them was pushed), but having them stuck together in one place where they all know each other makes for much more interesting interactions. The Forgotten City feels like an argument in favor of constrained locations, for how great open-world games can be when they focus on depth rather than width. And that's why I'm looking forward to the game it eventually becomes, once it cuts the ties to Skyrim and transforms into something new. 

You can chart the progress of PC gaming in many ways: the force of a shotgun; the substance of dialogue; the scale of an RTS. 

But behind all the obvious stuff, wafting leafily the background, is the humble tree. And trees are important. They tell us more about the inexorable march of progress than gunfeel ever could. Firstly, because they illustrate the lengths developers will go to immerse us in a game by adding extraneous detail we might ignore. And secondly, because ‘gunfeel’ isn’t even a word. 

Join me, then—a digital lumberjack, armed only with a Collins Gem copy of All You Need To Know About Trees and 11 synonyms for wood—as we learn to tell frond from bough in the history of trees in games.

For more hot tree-based content, head over to James's piece on where trees come from in games, this piece ranking chopping down trees in survival games, Tim's ode to the trees in Firewatch, Chris painting 100 trees and this interview with a Skyrim modder photographing lots of trees. Holy what, why does this website like trees so damn much?

Early days: roots manoeuvre 

Genus Maledictis

An interesting-to-someone-who’s-spent-too-long-looking side effect of the simplicity of early games is that trees are more than set dressing. In some titles, they’re the closet thing you have to an enemy. Examples of this go back to the ZX Spectrum. In 3D Deathchase, for example, you foolishly ride a motorcycle through a dense forest and trees are the only thing that can kill you; you’re not so much chasing death, as driving directly into it. The looming threat of these homicidal trunks is lessened somewhat by the fact they look like IKEA table legs, which also explains why my BJURSTA Extendable gives me night terrors. It was a formative time.

Pinus Chillaxus

To find a PC-specific example of an early tree, we need to scamper forward to Skifree. Most of us remember it for that bastard yeti, but it’s likely trees were responsible for more anguish. They’re sad, mean, twisted little saplings that poke out of the snow, threatening to cut short your perfect slalom in an eruption of bark and shattered bone. They resemble a prison tattoo of a child’s drawing of a tree, and are more memorable and threatening for it. If it isn’t already there, burn this image into your mind right now—we’ll need it to compare with The Witcher 3 later on. 

The '90s: Copse Out Conflictus ridiculam

As graphics improved during the '90s, the gaming tree burst into life: think of this like blossom season, with the swollen buds emerging into a fantasy of colour and shape (so long as the colour is green and the shape is treeish). Lovely 2D foliage is everywhere, but 1993’s Cannon Fodder can be singled out for being so absurdly generous with its jungle. Even the box art is aggressively green, like it wants to fight you for not being made of leaves. At the time, snaking between those lurid branches felt like being in Platoon. And then there’s Mortal Kombat 2’s living forest, which brought trees literally to life in 1995. You could argue this planted the seed for other lumber-based elements in fighting games—like Tekken’s possessed wooden training dummy, Mokujin, or Forest Law—but only if you’d spent too long researching trees in games.

Prunus puzzlus

‘Enough of your 2D fronds, you bunterish copse enthusiast!’, you probably cry. And you’re correct to do so. We need to examine 3D trees to understand how far we’ve we’ve still got to go, and Myst gives us a useful example. Now, Myst is a pretty game. But the trees here look more like wizards’ hats than actual foliage, and that’s a different feature altogether. Rocks, buildings, skies: all wonderful. But if you want realistic woodland, you’re going to have to wait, or click onto the next page.

Elsewhere, we’ve got the likes of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Its leafy illustrations look smart, but they are all suspiciously similar. This is a great place to take stock, though. No series demonstrates coppice development quite like the Elder Scrolls. It’s the gaming equivalent of Understanding Tree Improvement 101 (if we ignore the brief diversion to the Mushroom Kingdom in Morrowind). We’ll come back later.

Turok: 1997’s Dinosaur Hunter was also impressive. Looking back, it felt like you were pushing past endless fronds in thick jungle. But 21 years later, those palms look rather lonely poking out of that misty landscape, like Jurassic Park via Silent Hill.

Bellum Blowupem

And while we’re still in the 90s, let’s stop off at Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines. This provides a great contrast to the snotty green smears of Cannon Fodder, and puts five years of progress into context. The variety of greenery is impressive enough to recall the tiny trees available at those quietly sinister model train shops. We’re not at the actually-looking-like-real-trees stage of development yet; but they do look like models of actual trees, and that’s something.

The '00s: Wood you kindly?

Maxis Decimus Deciduous

Remember the dark days of page one, and 3D Deathchase, when trees held dominion over men, motorcycles, and men on motorcycles? Well, 2000 was the year the woodworm turned. The Sims gives us control over trees, letting us purchase, plant, and gently rotate trees in a way that signals our ultimate triumph over nature. Large or small, indoor or outdoor, alive or dead: every type of tree is ours to manipulate. And, in a further act of ghoulish humiliation, The Sims even lets you decorate a murdered tree in the name of Christmas. Mankind’s victory is absolute. 

Then there’s Halo: Combat Evolved. Released on PC in 2003, the first Halo captivated people with grass you could stare at for days—but the forests are equally appealing. Thick forests in Halo (the level), menacing vines in 343 Guilty Spark, icy pines in Assault on the Control Room: Combat Evolved has more types of tree than it does guns.

Spectatus Tropicana

And now things get real. The branchmark by which every other game that followed would be measured, and, back in 2004, easily the most realistic jungle ever rendered. Hang gliding over Far Cry’s indecently dense foliage felt like nothing else: the dream of a hallucinating druid, trapped inside your home computer. It was reason enough to spend all your money on a PC powerful enough to play it at maximum settings, and few technical leaps forward since have felt quite so overwhelming. If only Far Cry’s mutants looked as good. 

Settingus Maximus

The forest moon of Endor from 2005’s Star Wars: Battlefront II deserves a quick mention for bringing to life one of the most recognisable woodlands in cinema, and World of Warcraft offered a variety of forests that still feel nourishing now (as well as the ability to turn into a tree if you’re a Druid). And, in 2006, the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion showed us an overwhelmingly lush Cyrodiil. But we can’t linger here too long; 2007 is waiting. The All Ghillied Up level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare shows trees reclaiming the shattered landscape, and wins extra points for basically letting you play as a tree. And Resident Evil 4 set the standard for bark detail in games—yes, it’s a thing. Leon could probably take rubbings of those things. But once again, Crytek steals the show with an unparalleled PC classic. Crysis lets you shoot down trees, making the foliage tangible, and on max settings it still looks better than most games now.

Arbor Hominem

And finally for the 2000s, we pay homage to Harold. Perhaps not the most realistic tree in games—and certainly not the most handsome—but he does give us one of the best sidequests in 2008’s Fallout 3. 

The '10s: Barking orders

Pinus Draconicus

Progress in the 2010s is harder to spot. Partly because the advancements are more subtle, and partly because Crysis still looks better than everything. But The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, released in 2011, at least makes it easy to see how far the series had come in terms of herbal fidelity. Skyrim is a love letter to the nordic spruce; a landscape of leafy grottos, autumnal forests, and those majestic, lofty pines. You can even chop logs and use a sawmill, reminding us of man's largely one-way relationship with trees.

Scribo Misticus

Minecraft’s blocky forests were a visual somersault backwards, but they did let us interact with wood in ways that meant crafting mechanics would be a part of every game for the next 200 years. You can punch, chop and reshape wood, and there’s a fine variety of planks on offer—it’s like B&Q, but with fewer pigmen. If you haven’t made a treetop retreat in Minecraft, you’re playing the game wrong. Another standout is Alan Wake, released on PC in 2012, which delivered deep, misty forests that are as atmospheric and evocative as they come. We also had the Kmart/Lidl Twin Peaks of Deadly Premonition a year later, which helpfully undermines my earlier point about everything in the 2010s looking great. And then there’s Proteus, also released in 2013, which reminds us that trees don’t have to be meticulously detailed to look striking.

Apocalyptus Herba

As we approach the end of our forest bathing stroll, we return again to Crytek, who accidentally made the first Crysis so pretty that everything that’s followed has looked guff. Crysis 3 is almost an exception, but the foliage has lost some of its depth and lustre, even though the game is set in a post-apocalypse when nature has reclaimed the cities of humanity—perhaps in revenge for the humiliation suffered in The Sims. Battlefield 4 also has excellent foliage, but you were probably too busy flattening buildings and complaining about the linear campaign to notice. 

Gusty Venefica

And finally, we come to it. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the sort of game you stop playing just to watch the trees. When you first reach Velen and see those weatherbeaten leafy landscapes, you feel like dragging your rambling relatives to your 4K monitor so they can appreciate the glory of nature without going outside. And CD Projekt Red clearly love a good thicket, as evidence by the variety on offer: we’ve got hanging trees, sacred trees, dead trees, possessed trees. No game has ever featured boscage in so many starring roles (I told you I used a thesaurus). Cast your mind back to the grasping shrubs of Skifree, and revel in 22 years of planking progress.

But also: it still doesn’t look as good as Crysis. 

Whether it’s an Easter egg, a joke character, or just a little nudge at a competitor, developers love slipping the odd reference to other games into their own. Sometimes though, they go beyond just slapping a Dopefish on a wall or quipping about a ‘doomed space marine’, and we get to see our heroes stride into entirely new, often completely inappropriate new worlds.

Here are a few of our favourites, along the ones that caused the most ‘wait, what?’ blinking on discovery. 

Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Jedi

Yes, he can hold his breath underwater for ten minutes and quip his way through any sword-fight… but only The Force Unleashed II let him try his luck with a lightsaber. Turns out that you don’t need a sharp wit if you’re waving around two of the universe’s deadliest glowsticks and aren’t afraid to use them. Guybrush Threepkiller is so famous in-universe, he even has his own statues. We’re almost positive that’ll be brought up at some point in the next movie. After all, Rey does need a new teacher. Just as long as Elaine never finds out about it. 

Final Fantasy makes history in Assasin's Creed

Obviously, everything in the Assassin’s Creed series is meticulously researched and true to life, especially the alien gods and the time Ezio punched the Pope. Write it all down in your history homework! Which means that, while aliens might not have built the pyramids, they definitely got up to a bit of chocobo racing on the side. That’s according to this crossover, where Assassins ended up in Final Fantasy XV, while its villain ended up pounding sand for a bit before being dragged back to his own game by a hastily summoned Bahamut. There’s even a stuffed Moogle lying around in case you feel lonely after they’ve gone, and some fancy weapons to keep and confuse archaeologists for a few thousand years. Along with that Stargate, obviously. 

Commander Keen hangs about in Doom II

There’s a few odd appearances in Doom 2, including the severed head of John Romero as the end-boss, and a trip back to Wolfenstein 3D in the secret levels. By far the strangest thing though is what lies behind those: former id star Commander Keen… murdered and hanging from meathooks. The story goes that Adrian Carmack was the childkiller in question, having chafed at making cutesy games instead of enjoying himself with blood and guts. However, that was not enough to get rid of the boy-genius forever, for both John Romero and Tom Hall have confirmed that Commander Keen, real name Billy Blaze, is in fact Wolfenstein hero BJ Blazkowicz’s grandson… and father to the Doomguy. What a strange family tree. 

Earthworm Jim digs into Battle Arena Toshinden

He’s the world’s mightiest worm! He fights aliens! He travels galaxies! He gets flattened by a lot of cows! And he’s one of the few 90s mascots to actually be awesome, starring in two excellent platformers, one surprisingly good cartoon series, and… well, let’s not mention the sequels. Like Bubsy, 3D was not kind to Earthworm Jim, though unlike Bubsy, people actually cared. His most successful jump into the third dimension turned out to be this Easter Egg in the PC version of Toshinden, where with the help of his super-suit and a really big club, he was finally able to make the future of gaming eat dirt. Pound them into the ground. Bury himself in glory. Be cut in half and yet… no, wait. Not that one. But it was still as good as fans were going to get.

Everyone plays Poker Night at the Inventory 

Easily the most ambitious gaming crossover in recent memory… and it’s all about hanging out between games. Telltale’s Poker Night series combined, amongst a few others (deep breath) The Heavy from Team Fortress 2, Max from Sam and Max, Strong Bad from Homestar Runner, Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade Adventures and also some webcomic whose name we forget off-hand, GLaDOS from Portal, Brock Samson from the Venture Bros (not a game, but never mind), Claptrap from Borderlands, Sam from Sam and Max replacing Max from Sam and Max, and Ash from The Evil Dead. Phew.

They weren’t great poker games, but that wasn’t really the point. It was about the banter between the different competitors as they sat back and shot the shit without the customary heavy artillery. We could also have had members of the cast from The Walking Dead and Back to the Future, but they were deemed unsuitable for the atmosphere. They didn’t want anyone crying, or any kids seeing Doc and Marty in a sweary environment. A pity. When the game revved up, they could have seen some serious shit.

Portal 2’s Space Core invades Skyrim 

When Bethesda showed off DLC for Oblivion, it was horse armour. And everybody laughed. Come Skyrim, the laugh was far more positive. One of the earliest additions saw the exiled Space Core (spoilers for a decade old game there) crash-land in Tamriel, still just as eager to explore SPAAAAAAAACE. Going bizarrely unnoticed by the locals, all probably fretting about that whole dragon invasion thing, it came crashing down in a plume of smoke. Pick it up and it still kept blinking and talking in your inventory, delivering… well, not very varied dialogue. In summary:  “Space. Space. Space!” And yet, still it was less annoying than all those guards and their epic tales of glory curtailed by the sudden impact of a ballistic stick to the lower-leg.

XCOM defends Civ V: Brave New World

What does XCOM do when there are no aliens to fight? Apparently, they learn to ****ing shoot straight. The XCOM Squad in Civ V is an elite tactical unit that gets the job done, air-dropping into friendly territory and laying down the law. Specifically, Thou Shalt Not Screw With XCOM. In the absence of aliens, they have their eyes set on "Giant Death Robots," and are happy to act as shock troopers or defensive units while they watch the skies and await their destiny. But since there are apparently no aliens interested in Earth during the Civ games, they’re probably going to be waiting a while. Should have taken the flight to Alpha Centauri.

Princess Rosella favours Leisure Suit Larry 3

Sierra On-Line loved its in-jokes. Not one but two sequels (this one and Space Quest III) ended with the characters somehow finding their way to the developers’ own offices for a chat with studio leads Ken and Roberta Williams, with Larry also taking trips to a Westworld style factory where adventure heroes are rebuilt after every stupid death, complete with King’s Quest’s King Graham being readied for duty, and finally showing up in the Old West for a cameo in Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist. By far the strangest cameos came at the end of Leisure Suit Larry 3, where the trip to Sierraland involved trekking through scenes from games like Police Quest and Space Quest 2, before meeting Roberta Williams directing a particularly annoying scene from King’s Quest IV, in which Princess Rosella is trapped in the slobbery mouth of a giant whale. Strange.

Frank West covers Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

He’s covered wars, you know. But oddly, Dead Rising’s original and best hero doesn’t seem to know how to cover himself in this odd outing. Despite Lost Planet being set on a frozen world, everyone’s favourite photographer show up not only without his camera, but also without his trousers. Somehow avoiding hypothermia, he runs around in nothing but underpants, while still managing to rain destruction on the armies of insects happy to not have to peel their food for once. What a trooper. 

Scorpion goes mental in Psi-Ops

Fighting game characters are probably the most cameo-friendly of all, whether it’s a full game like Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, or bonus combatants-without-a-k-because-that’s-how-it’s-spelled in the likes of Injustice. But they show up in other games with curious regularity too. Lightning god Raiden for instance showed up in Unreal Championship, while invisible fighter Reptile could have popped into basically any game. Ever seen a flicker on your screen playing, say, Fortnite? As far as you know, it might be him.

But still, this was an odd one. Even though Midway was the publisher of both MK and Psi-Ops, it’s a bit of a leap from fighting game to third-person action game. Sadly, just wearing his palette-swapped ninja outfit didn’t actually make you the world’s clingiest fighter. He still had to swap out his “get over here!” attack for regular guns. On the plus side, having to beat every character in the game two out of three times would have gotten pretty darn tiring.

My least favorite sensation in all of gaming is when I'm playing an RPG, and I pick up a weapon, or a breastplate, or an incandescent bauble of no obvious importance, and suddenly my feet cement to the floor. My character is over-encumbered! I have to spend the next few minutes on the pause screen, deciding which knick-knacks in my inventory to leave abandoned on the side of the road. Once spry and light again, I continue my adventures deep into the murky chasms of whatever fantasy world I'm exploring, until inevitably I find another item I want and the exact same thing happens again. 

I am not alone in hating encumbrance. It's a source of constant annoyance for gamers everywhere, to the point of achieving meme status in certain communities. And yet, it's still common. Bethesda makes two of the most popular single-player franchises around with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and yet we've all crossed our weight limit and hampered ourselves in the middle of a fight with a rowdy sect of Super Mutants. CD Projekt Red is one of this industry's few near-universally beloved studios, and yet Geralt always seems to be one looted corpse away from completely losing control of his body. There are cases where it makes sense, obviously—of course Dark Souls has an opaque encumbrance system, given all its other intentionally draconian quirks—but it certainly seems weird that such a despised mechanic is implemented, and re-implemented, over and over again.

Why do big games, particularly open world games with thousands of objects that can be picked up and examined, so often turn to a mechanic where fun goes to die? I figure there must be a reason. I'm constantly in awe of just how much work it takes to create videogames, and generally, when I find something to be stupid and unintuitive, I'm willing to hear the experts out. There must be some method to the madness, right?

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, game director of The Witcher 3, outlined a few arguments for encumbrance when I emailed him. The first is probably the most obvious: Immersion. "Having a limit to how much equipment Geralt can carry plays a part in making the character and the world around him more believable," he says. "Yes, you’re playing as a professional monster slayer. He’s very strong, stronger than normal humans, due to experiments and mutations witchers have to endure throughout their rigorous training. But even then, Geralt has limits. It’s a small touch that packs a lot of punch for the role-playing aspect of an RPG."

Tomaszkiewicz tells me that he believes the fundamental purpose of an RPG is to embody the central character fully. That's why, he says, some players choose to unequip all of their armor before taking Geralt for a dip in a river or a lake. "They want to live the fantasy the game is enabling them to live, while keeping the experience as close to authentic as possible," he explains. It's the belief of CD Projekt Red that functions like encumbrance, while occasionally annoying, add up to a world that feels more consistent.

Oscar López Lacalle, lead designer of the survival game Conan Exiles, offers a similar justification. Exiles is different from The Witcher, in the sense that it packs a crafting system that heavily relies on resource harvesting and management, which makes it a pretty natural fit for a weight limit. But Lacalle tells me that the team decided to opt for an encumbrance mechanic, rather than a traditional inventory page, because it opened up the flexibility—and yes, the authenticity—of how you fleshed out your character.

"For example, we can set items like explosives to be artificially heavy because that makes players think on the logistics of sieging rather than just bringing unlimited explosive jars or trebuchets to breach any wall while still being able to fight at peak capacity," he says. "We can also say that all our core resources are much lighter than specialty items to enhance the feeling of rarity and the relative worth of items when compared with each other. This becomes an important factor in situations like coming back to your base loaded with riches, or relocating your base to a new location in the map. In general, it's a powerful tool to enhance and promote certain aspects of the game without adding other, more aggressive limitations."

That's just the front end of things though. Tomaszkiewicz highlights a number of  behind-the-scenes issues that make encumbrance systems necessary for a healthy experience. He mentions how too many items can clutter the UI, and that adding a limit helps "manage the chaos." Also, you can't ignore the fact that every piece of inventory takes up a sliver of memory, and for a game like The Witcher 3 that already asks a ton of your hardware, developers need to be frugal. "You've got to keep in mind what might happen performance-wise when players hoard insane amounts of items."

Lacalle swears up and down that encumbrance systems are not designed to make players uncomfortable. Instead, he hopes to simply coerce us into interesting choices. Exiles was specifically designed around the remaining weight a character will have access to after equipping a basic set of armor. What you do with that remaining space hollows out your place in the world, and your role in guilds. When he frames it like that, it sure sounds a lot more dynamic than simply choosing a class.

"We made heavy armor and certain weapons heavier—because we wanted to steer them towards the fighter archetypes—and certain materials heavier or lighter depending on how many are needed for typical activities and how rare they are supposed to be," he says. "For building pieces, we made them lighter than their material parts because we wanted players to commit to converting materials instead of amassing tons of raw resources, with a few hand-picked exceptions like Altars and Wheels of Pain. Finally and most importantly, sprinkle in some design voodoo (lots of testing and iterating) until it feels good!"

It's true that sometimes you don't know what you really want, and as much as it might sound fun to jog through The Northern Kingdoms with Geralt sucking up loot like a vacuum, I'm willing to admit that I might be misguided. However, it's clear that the world at large is not convinced.

Websites like Eurogamer and Motherboard have dedicated blog posts instructing on how to turn off encumbrance, ostensibly because there are so many people on the internet googling for answers. A mod that gives you infinite carry capacity in The Witcher 3 has been downloaded over 30,000 times (it's the third-most popular Witcher 3 mod on the Nexus). The "100x your carry weight" mod for Skyrim has been downloaded 380,000 times. The developers I spoke to are all reasonable people who make good points, but it's hard to shake that fundamental feeling that encumbrance only slows down our fun.

All that being said, maybe there's a way to make encumbrance better without completely purging it from the code. David J. Cobb has spent the bulk of his modding career tinkering with the nuts and bolts of Skyrim to create a more realistic, more demanding weight system, and he makes a strong point about how encumbrance is often poorly implemented. There's never any warning when you're about to become over-encumbered in Bethesda games. Your momentum comes to a screeching halt after you add one extraneous item to your inventory. "Like carrying hundreds of pounds of gear effortlessly, only to stop completely in your tracks because you decided to pick a flower on the side of the road," he says. He argues that instead of creating immersion, that breaks immersion.

Cobb came up with a set of checks and balances called Cobb Encumbrance that add progressive penalties to your speed and stamina as you add more weight to your character. Essentially, it's an uber-hardcore interpretation of the core Skyrim fantasy. Personally, that doesn't sound like my kind of thing, but it also feels a tad more honest than how most other games deal with encumbrance. Maybe it's not the answer, but it's certainly an answer. 

"The encumbrance mechanic has to be viewed as part of the broader experience," says Cobb. "It influences and is influenced by everything around it."

Thumbnail GIF via the delightful Skyrim animation above by Ferhod.