Initially reports suggested the turf war between Minecraft-makers the Mojangs and Skyrim-makers the Bethesdas over the former’s forthcoming online card game Scrolls had been settled broadly reasonably. However, Bethesda’s own statement on the matter yesterday revealed that it isn’t as simple as Mojang getting to make Scrolls unhindered and Bethesda ending up with the trademark for a common English word>.

Here’s a new kicker: “The terms of the settlement bar Mojang from using the Scrolls mark for any sequel to the current card game, or any other video game.” (more…)

Skyrim might not be broken, but it is a bit cracked. There’s never been an open-world that didn’t crumble at the edges of a simulation, and Bethesda’s Nord land is detailed with a fine filigree through its stony butt. Patches will help, and Bethesda have done a lot of good work to keep the game ticking along, but with all those dragons stomping around, sometimes backwards, the mud has been loosened. Thanks to Steam Workshop, the act of modding Skyrim is phenomenally easy: all you need to do is select a mod in the system’s list and it’ll be integrated into the game. There’s also a few from the venerable Skyrim Nexus as well. While we wait for both Bethesda or these guys to pack the mud back in place, there are a few tweaks you can make to the base game, gleaned from the Workshop’s finest fiddlers. They won’t be as fancy as adding monocles and top hats to mudcrabs – I’ll be getting to those in a later article – but they will strengthen Skyrim’s core and fix a few glaring errors and inconsistencies. (more…)

Over Christmas I drew up a list of little things about games that have always intrigued, interested, or appealed to me. I’ve been adding to it over the past couple of weeks, and I’ll be writing about these little nuances of gaming in the coming months. These are just idle musings, but I hope you’ll find them to be food for thought. Today’s is about the odd joy in seeing AI entities getting into a fight.> (more…)

I keep meaning to write about how remarkable the Skyrim Steam Workshop is, but it seems everyone knows: since the launch last week, the workshop has served over two million mods to Steam users. To put that in perspective, that’s a gigaquad of proto-Peggles. I’m still going to write nice things about how you can basically build your own game with it, but only after I’m done watching Bethesda’s multi-part tutorial on how to use their Skyrim Creation Kit to make and bundle mods for the Workshop. (more…)

Fus Ro My! This is the second Skyrim video of the day that’s had me all wibbly. Bethesda‘s Todd Howard was on stage at the Dice Summit yesterday, and talked about an internal, company-wide gamejam Bethesda held: the Skyrim team took a week off from carving out individual fork tines and working out the perfect cloud wisp equation to make whatever they wanted for Skyrim. There’s no guarantee we’ll get to play with the results, but the buildable houses with skeletal butlers, Thief-style water arrows, combination spells, mahoosive Mudcrabs, and much more all look amazing. I’m considering starting a Kickstarter that’ll fund my trip to sit outside Bethesda for a month holding a sign that just reads: “Do It!”. Video is, you know, down there.

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Alongside the Skyrim Creation Kit and the HD Texture Pack that was officially released last night, Valve added their own little addition to Skyrim: Fall of The Space Corp, Vol. 1 adds Portal 2′s jittery little Space Core to the Nord world, voiced by the man that holds the patent on all gaming voiceovers, Nolan North. It’s both proof that clicking things in Skyrim’s Steam Workshop works just like they said it would, and that Valve’s punmasters are missed a trick by not calling him Nolan Nord. When you add the mod to the game, you need to find him. Here’s a video I made that shows you how. (more…)

The long-awaited Skyrim Creation Kit is out, and it’s come with the rumoured High-Resolution Texture Pack all the kids wanted! The game’s also 33% off on Steam in the US and UK at the moment, if this is what you were waiting for.

Get modding!

File under ‘extremely vague online reports that we’re honestly not going to take entirely seriously until there’s more proof’ and ‘oh, that would be lovely, and just the idea of it happening is enough to move me to post wanton rumour-mongering’ and ‘how to immediately upset a load of modders who’ve spent months diligently Photoshopping new high-res textures in pursuit of prettiness and online fame’.

Some news we managed to not report: the Skyrim Creation Kit, i.e. the official omni-mod tool, is ‘on track’ to land on Steam tomorrow. That’s according to Bethesda’s lead person-spoker Pete Hines, who teasingly added that “we also have a special surprise with it. What could it be?” Well, a few folk have dug up partial, alleged> evidence to suggest that it’ll be high-res textures for the PC version of the game. Probably not accurate: but, oh, oh! Imagine if it was…

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The beta version of the latest Skyrim patch is now on Steam, though Bethesda have warned, in tones dripping with sulphur and doom, that “Apply the update at your own risk.” Anything could happen! The Earth might split asunder! Vampires might eat your fingers! Sickly cats might become weirdly fixated upon you! Or, more likely, you’ll hit a load of bugs and/or your savegames will go all squiffy. (more…)

There’s so much to see and do in Skyrim that I might make a mod to hide half of it. I keep getting distracted by bears fighting dragons fighting the Forsworn, when all I really want to do is harvest some Nirnroot. Next week I’ll be able to start the long process of unfunning it when the mod tools, The Creation Kit, are released, alongside patch 1.4. You can pretend you were born on the first of January and look here for the full patch details. Read it in Max Von Sydow’s voice, for greater effect. (more…)