Skyrim has received a rather hurried patch 1.3. How do I know this? Because my game of Skyrim just crashed to desktop for no given reason, and on trying to restart it, Steam’s patcher kicked in. Maybe it will fix random crashes to desktop?! It does offer “General stability improvements”, who coincidentally was a man I served under in the army in the 1940s. So have they addressed any of the litany of issues on everyone’s lists? Well, if the books not sitting correctly on the bookshelves was one of yours, then you’re a winner! If not, well, then maybe not so much.

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The year’s big guns have all been loosed now, and Christmas wallet-raiding is fully upon us. So, which games will be cleaning up on Steam and at Uk retail? Skyrim, MW3, AssRev, or another challenger? And is the resurgence of Splash Damage’s last game enough for me to justify saying ‘Byte vs Brink’? (more…)

Following a couple of not so great patches, Bethesda have cheered me up immeasurably this morning by sending word that in January they will be releasing the Skyrim Creation Kit.

PC players will be able to download for free the same development tools we used at Bethesda Game Studios to create Skyrim.

That would be enough to make me punch the air quietly in triumph but it’s not all. The tools will tie in to the Steam Workshop, allowing for easy upload, collection and browsing of mods. When I read that bit I did a small celebratory dance. Mid-way through I stopped though, convinced that this was a cynical move to control modding by making it exclusive to a specific platform.

Prefer to use existing modding sites? Not a problem. You’ll still be able to upload/share/access Skyrim mods on fan-created mod sites.

Dancing again. Full details below.

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Brink’s forthcoming clans and tournaments update is being celebrated by a free weekend on Steam, says Bethesda blog. The game is going to be free to play all weekend, this weekend. If you play for free this weekend you will also be able to purchase the game permanently for 75% off at any point during the weekend. That weekend apparently runs from “10 AM PST today… through Monday at 10 AM PST.” So that’s what’s happening with Brink this weekend.

I’m not a wizened grumblepuss who only enjoys the oldest of RPGs, honest I’m not! I’ve even finally managed to play some Skyrim this week and that’s probably the newest RPG in the world. Unlike most people, I haven’t actually done very much yet; instead I’ve been tinkering around to see how far I can push it before my computer starts weeping tears of molten graphics card. Mostly visual tweaks but there’s some lovely stuff here. To round things off, my favourite new Mount and Blade mod, which I mentioned before its release and now urge you all to download. Urge>, you hear?

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This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I’ve gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below. >

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So. I lost a bet with myself. Now I owe myself fifty quid. Thanks a bunch, Internet. I was certain, absolutely certain>, that the majority of you would have pursued mostly wizardly activities in Skyrim, what with all the magic and the magic college and everything. But not so. The majority of the twenty thousand people who polled in our Skyrim survey played as warriors, with mages (21%) coming in second. Amazingly, assassins and thieves were neck and neck for third place with 14% each. There’s a 13% bunch of hangars on who couldn’t actually figure out what they’d spent most of their time doing of course, but then this is> an Elder Scrolls game, so perhaps we’ll forgive the ambiguity.

Ooh, I can feel another poll coming on. Any suggestions?

As noted in this post (via here), Skyrim contains much of the rest of the continent of Tamriel in rudimentary form outside its mountains. bBorderRegionsEnabled=0 in Skyrim.ini and no-clip on does the trick. Thanks, commenters. There’s a huge heightmap out there, well beyond view distance, down into Morrowind, Cyrodiil, and Hammerfall. It’s a bit buggy, mind and seems unstable once you’re out of skyrim. Looks like it’s just a chunk of the world rendered around Skyrim for view-distance authenticity, rather than any possible expansion.

See this hat I’m wearing? The one with the dark tuft at the top? You should be afraid when I wear this hat. Very afraid. Because this hat means I’m grumpy>. But it’s okay, I’m not grumpy at you. I’m grumpy at unidentified tech sorts at Bethesda Softworks who last night released the first patch for Skyrim. A patch whose only effects was to limit what we can do with the game. It was released without fanfare or explanation, but forums swiftly figured out its purpose.

The 18MB downloadette is essentially there to stop the game from running without Steam: the main executable is now tied thoroughly into Valve’s security, unreliable offline mode et al. Nothing remarkable there, save for the surprising fact that it was at all unbound at release, but one of the upshots of this is that we’re now limited from faffing about with said executable. Most particularly, the large address aware third-party patch that enabled Skyrim to use more than 2GB of system RAM.

Update: a new LAA workaround that apparently does the job without altering the exectuable! Phew. Now can we have official> support for all our lovely RAM please, Bethsoft? (more…)

Let me begin by saying this is not a spoiler. This is a random sandbox event caused entirely by something I did, and is in no way scripted into the game. Your Lydia could live forever. So…

There are few NPCs in games that have inspired me to write a song. Well, there’s one. And her name is Lydia. This is the story of her death.>

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