Got an hour to kill and a hankering to do some sightseeing in Cyrodiil? If you find yourself in that rather odd situation, then I recommend you have a look at the new Skyblivion gameplay trailer.

Skyblivion, as the name suggests, is a remake of the 2006 Elder Scrolls RPG Oblivion in the more up-to-date and visually impressive Creation engine that powered the 2011 Elder Scrolls RPG Skyrim. It's very much akin to Skywind, a similar resurrection of the 2002 Elder Scrolls RPG Morrowind, which I think generally gets more attention because it's so much older and thus in more dire need of a facelift.

The Skyblivion world looks quite a bit emptier than I recall the Imperial Province being, although it has been an awfully long time since I was last there. It's also very early in the development process: The YouTube description says the video is taken from version 0.2 of the mod, which among other things lacks a "navmesh" that guides NPCs and keeps them from wandering into places they're not supposed to go. "Navmesh needs to be done if this is ever going to be in a playable state with quests," the mod makers said in a comment. "This is a huge task considering it has to be done by hand and Cyrodiil is huge."

The mod is apparently progressing toward a public release of version 0.3, but there's no indication as to when it might be ready. For now, enjoy the view—and if you want to find out more about what's going on, or even chip in to help (Skyblivion, as Destructoid notes, is being created entirely by volunteers) you may do so at The Elder Scrolls Renewal Project.

Skyrim mods are a varied and numerous bunch. Some add new weapons and spells; others fix and tweak systems; the vast majority give Lydia new hairstyles. Occasionally, there's another type: an unbelievably detailed and complex quest chain, complete with new locations, quests and dialogue. The Forgotten City is from this latter category, and it's shaping up to be a fully-fledged expansion to Bethesda's four-year-old RPG.

"The Forgotten City is a lore-friendly expansion to Skyrim with a dark, non-linear story in which you'll discover and explore an ancient underground city," explains its creator. It's designed as a murder mystery, in which players must search for clues, interrogate suspects and fight monsters. And also travel through time.

The mod will boast 1,200 lines of dialogue, 30 new characters and a moral choices that can lead to multiple different endings. It's an undeniably impressive undertaking.

For more on the mod, head over to its ModDB page. The Forgotten City is due out in October.

Skyrim's got NPCs like a dragon's got scales. Which is to say: it has many. Spend a bit of time with them, however, and you'll start to realize that Skyrim's NPCs are a bit dumb. They're not strategic masterminds, they're often foolhardy, and they don't really do much with their spare time. The Immersive Citizens mod is here in an attempt to give their brains a bit of an overhaul in everything from fighting, to choosing not to fight, to everyday activities.

First off, the survival instincts of NPCs has improved, in as much as they now actually have some interest in not dying. If you've ever gotten into a skirmish in a city, you know what I'm talking about. Not only do guards come running, but regular unarmored citizens foolishly brandish weak-ass daggers in a misguided effort to take down the famous and ultra-powerful Dragonborn. What are they thinking?

They're not thinking, of course, but now they'll at least make a little logic check before going toe-to-toe with you. They'll compare their level against yours, check the status of their health and determine their resistance to physical damage. If the odds are stacked against them, they may choose to flee, and even try to hide in a random location like a nearby house, mine, or tower. 

I stirred up some trouble in Whiterun to try it out. Even though the guards swarmed me, none of the townies did, even a couple who had real weapons. And why would they? I'm famous because of all the dragons I've killed. You don't fight me unless you have to (or you're paid to).

Don't worry, this doesn't apply to all NPCs, so not everyone will run simply because you're a high-level character. Most NPCs have been assigned ranks and personalities by the mod. While some will flee when they sense they're overmatched, others will still try to fight you to the death no matter what, and some will try to improve their odds by retreating from a fight to allow themselves to heal, then returning to continue the skirmish.

Some NPC combat styles have been tweaked as well, particularly among those who attack at range like archers and mages. Rather than simply giving up their ranged attacks when you get close, they'll work harder to keep you at a distance and use cover if there is any.

 I tried this out on some bandit jerk and he was definitely making an effort to keep me away from him, backpedaling a lot and edging out in and out of the doorway to the fort we were fighting in. Good for him! Also, he's dead now.

When you're done killing NPCs, head to the nearest town, where you may notice the citizens have gotten a little more interesting. Local hunters will actually loot the animals they kill, priests will spend time praying, and citizens will actually leave their towns for errands or pleasure, even choosing to ride horses if they're planning to travel a good distance. If it starts raining they'll move indoors, they'll have more frequent conversations with each other, and they'll even shop in stores, so for once you won't be the only customer in all of Skyrim.

There's a really massive list of tweaks and changes on the mod page. The mod is a work in progress, and there are some more changes on the way. I've played with it a bit, and a lot the changes are very subtle, but I have witnessed some of this enhanced behavior and it does make a difference.

The mod requires Dawnguard and Dragonborn DLC to run.

Bethesda was the first—and, as it turned out, the only—developer to take part in Valve's blink-and-you-missed-it experiment with paid mods on Steam. Given how it defended the practice, it's not unreasonable to expect it'll be at the head of the line again, if and when Valve ever decides to give it another shot, and that the next opportunity could well come in the form of Fallout 4.

But for now, that's not in the cards. "How long was the online payment system? 24 Hours? I can only speak for the present time, but currently there are no plans for a payment system," Game Director Todd Howard told German site Spiegel Online. The interview was Google translated from the original German and is thus a little rough, but the sentiment seems fairly straightforward, and Kotaku says it checks out.

It isn't terribly surprising that Bethesda isn't looking to get back on that particular horse, at least right away. As the studio pointed out in April, paid mod sales made up a tiny percentage of its total Steam revenues, even over a weekend during which Skyrim was free. More to the point, Fallout 4 is only five months away; that's exciting—just 145 sleeps until Fallout day!—but also still pretty close to the first failed attempt. Why saddle yourself with that kind of baggage if you don't have to?

Bethesda Softworks and Titan Books released the first volume of The Elder Scrolls Online: Tales of Tamriel earlier this year, and it must have been a reasonably decent success, because The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is about to get the same treatment. The Skyrim Library, Volume 1: The Histories, the first of three planned books in a "lavishly illustrated and produced" set, will be out later this month.

The Skyrim Library will tell you all there is to know about the Nordic land of Skyrim, including its history, cultures, creatures, and myths. The books will be feature text taken from the game on factions, heroes, creatures, dragons, and more, and punch things up with original lore and official art as well.

Not everyone is going to get wound up about lore books, naturally, not even a set as nice as this. But die-hard fans of The Elder Scrolls, and Skyrim in particular, are probably going to be at least a little bit tempted by it. The hardbound, 232-page volume will set you back $35, and is expected to start shipping on June 23. Preorders, if you are so inclined, may be placed at the Bethesda Store.

In this, the next leg of Skywind's tour of a remade Morrowind, we see Seyda Neen—the town our protagonist arrives in, fresh off the prison boat, at the start of the game. "Our 3D artists have recreated and re-imagined this iconic town with updated buildings and clutter," explains the trailer's description.

Skywind is a remake of Morrowind, for Skyrim—reimagining the locations, enemies and quests and placing them in the most recent Elder Scrolls game. This is just latest in a number of environmen previews for the Skyrim mod. Head to our Skywind tag page to see more.

For the past few Junes, right before one of the busiest gaming weeks of the year, we ve taken a moment to imagine the E3 press conference that PC Gamers deserve. It s become one of our tiny traditions (along with Chris questionable behavior in survival games). Mostly it s an excuse for us to publish something entirely detached from reality before we fly to Los Angeles and publish every scrap of gaming news and opinion that our bodies will allow. It s therapeutic to daydream about Gabe Newell materializing atop a unicorn through a fog of theater-grade dry ice to announce Half-Life 3.

We get valuable stories, videos, and interviews out of E3—you can imagine how handy it is to have almost every game-maker gathered under one roof for a few days. But it s no secret that the PC doesn t have a formal, organized presence during E3. Generally speaking it s the time of year when Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo jostle for position about who can create the most buzz. Despite being a mostly exciting few days of announcements, E3 has never given the biggest gaming platform in the world an equal place at the table.

That s our collective fault, not E3 s. One of our hobby s greatest strengths is the fact that there isn t a single owner. The PC has no marketing arm, no legal department, no CEO to dictate what should be announced or advertised. And thank Zeus for that. The fundamentally open nature of our hobby is what allows for GOG, Origin, Steam, and others to compete for our benefit, for the variety of technologies and experiences we have access to—everything from netbook gaming to 8K flight simulation to VR.

Everyone involved in PC gaming has shared ownership over its identity. One of the few downsides of that, though, is that there isn t really a single time and place for PC gaming to get together and hang out. We love BlizzCon, QuakeCon, DreamHack, Extra Life, The International, and the ever-increasing number of PAXes. But there s something special about the pageantry of E3 week, its over-the-top showmanship, its surprises, its proximity to Hollywood. And each June, even as we ve jokingly painted a picture of PC game developers locking arms in a musical number, we ve wanted something wholly by, for, and about PC gaming.

Well, hell, let s do it.

For the past few months we ve been organizing the first ever live event for PC gaming during E3, The PC Gaming Show. Tune into our Twitch channel on Tuesday, June 16 on 5 PM and you ll see a spectrum of PC gaming represented on stage: a showcase of conversations, announcements, hardware, trailers, and other stuff that makes PC gaming great. We ve been talking to everyone we know, big and small—if there s a game or developer you want to see—tell us! So far, Blizzard, AMD, Bohemia Interactive, Boss Key Productions, Paradox, Dean Hall, Tripwire, and more have signed up to be a part of this inaugural PC gaming potluck (Paradox has promised to bring nachos), and we ll be announcing more participants as we lead up to June 16. And hey, the endlessly friendly Day[9] is hosting. We love that guy.

We re sincerely, stupidly excited about this. The PC gaming renaissance we re all living in deserves a moment of recognition during the biggest gaming expo of the year—it s about time! Listen in on Twitter and on our Facebook page as we share more details leading up to June.

[Update: Despite Bethesda publishing this post defending paid Skyrim mods only an hour ago, the program has since been pulled from Steam following discussions with Valve. The original story can be found below, we'll have more as it breaks.]

To put it lightly, the rollout of paid Skyrim mods on Steam hasn't been without pain. An awful lot of people think mods should be universally free, a point they're making by gumming up the works with silliness; others have objected to the relatively small slice of the pie—25 percent—that mod makers will earn on the sales of their creations. But Bethesda says its early discussions with Valve confirmed "quite clearly" that allowing mod makers to earn money on their work boosted both the quality and the quantity of the mods available to gamers.

"We have a long history with modding, dating back to 2002 with The Elder Scrolls Construction Set," it wrote in a new Bethesda Blog post. "It s our belief that our games become something much more with the promise of making it your own." There are downsides: The availability of mods is one of the reasons Oblivion was re-rated from T to M, "costing us millions of dollars," it continued. Even so, "while others in the industry went away from it, we pushed more toward it."

The initial discussions between Bethesda and Valve actually began in 2012, and right from the outset it insisted that the Marketplace had to be open rather than curated. "At every step along the way with mods, we have had many opportunities to step in and control things, and decided not to," it wrote. "We wanted to let our players decide what is good, bad, right, and wrong. We will not pass judgment on what they do."

The post confirmed that Valve gets 30 percent of all mod sales, which it described as "standard across all digital distribution services." Bethesda itself takes 45 percent, and the mod makers gets the remaining 25 percent. But it denied that the relatively steep take represents some kind of "money grabbing scheme," noting that mod sales, even during the past weekend when Skyrim was free, made up less than one percent of its total Steam revenues. At the same time, while the 25 percent cut "has been operating on Steam successfully for years," it left open the door for adjustments, saying, "If it needs to change, we'll change it."

Most people don t know, but our very own Skyrim DLC has zero DRM. We shipped Oblivion with no DRM because we didn t like how it affected the game

As for the long term impact of paid mods, Bethesda acknowledged that there is the potential for damage but said most of the implications are positive. "Not only do we want more mods, easier to access, we re anti-DRM as far as we can be. Most people don t know, but our very own Skyrim DLC has zero DRM. We shipped Oblivion with no DRM because we didn t like how it affected the game," it wrote. "There are things we can control, and things we can t. Our belief still stands that our community knows best, and they will decide how modding should work. We think it s important to offer choice where there hasn t been before."

Our own Tyler Wilde gave some early opinion on the good and bad of paid mods last week, and we also published a guest editorial on the matter from a modder earlier today. Meanwhile, Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman and Gabe Newell have weighed in on the matter, but despite their positive takes the petition demanding an end to paid mods has climbed to more than 130,000 signatures. Offering choice is good, but this is clearly going to be a hard sell for both Bethesda and Valve. 

[Note! I wrote this column on Wednesday due to having a shortened week. So, this was written before all the recent controversy over paid mods for Skyrim. And, it just so happens, the creator of this mod is Chesko, same creator of the now-removed paid Art of the Catch mod. Do I have great timing or what? Anyway, this is still a neat (and free) mod. You can grab it from the Nexus.]

There's something oddly enjoyable about camping in a game. Walk off into the woods, erect a tent, build a campfire, and sit and gaze at the flames as the world around you slowly grows dark. It's serene, comforting, and a nice change from all the dragon slaying and dungeon crawling.

Skyrim has a few camping mods already, most notably Frostfall, which brings a harsh and challenging survival theme to Skyrim. The Campfire mod, however, is more about simply creating an immersive and enjoyable camping experience.

Through the use of some new survival spells, you begin by gathering materials like deadwood, branches, and stones (bring a woodsman's axe with you). You don't have to manually hunt around for materials—I kinda wish you did, actually—but you select the item you want to gather, and then you're told how much you found. A little time passes each time you search, to represent your gathering efforts.

Once you've done some gathering, you can place your campfire on the ground in front of you. It'll be a fragile campfire, which won't last long, but by adding kindling to it, it'll level up into a better campfire, suitable for a few hours of cooking. Feed some more fuel to the fire and it'll grow bigger, providing a comforting warmth that will give you a bonus to skill gains for the next several hours. Your followers can also join you in sitting by the fire.

In addition to campfires, the mod comes with some camping gear, like tents and tanning racks (these were in Frostfall as well, I believe). Campfire also has backpacks that dynamically represent your camping gear. For instance, if you have a bedroll, cooking pot, and axe, you'll see these items on your back. How cool is that? While Campfire is not currently compatible with Frostfall, it sounds like the next version of Frostfall will support it.

You can use Campfire without SKSE and SkyUI, but as always, those two mods will enhance your experience and allow you to customize your settings. Interestingly, you can also download a devkit for Campfire if you're interested in creating your own custom camping gear. There's even a few tutorials to help you get started.

In yet another sign that the universe is unfolding as it should, yesterday's announcement that Valve will now allow modders to sell their creations on Steam has led to an influx of "protest mods" with high prices, low content, and some admittedly amusing descriptions.

Take, for instance, the Extra Apple mod, currently priced at $35. It does exactly what it promises: adds an extra apple to the counter in The Bannered Mare. Or the Rubbish Bucket DLC, which provides a bucket for your rubbish—or at least it will, when it's done. Currently it's in Early Access, and instead of a bucket it's just a pile of wood on the floor. But you can put your rubbish on it! As long as you've installed the Rubbish Mod, that is, which will set you back another $3.

And there's the Literally Nothing mod, which speaks for itself.

To clarify, these mods are not actually available for purchase just yet. As Valve explained yesterday, new paid mods must first be posted without a purchase option, in order to give the community time to examine them and call out any abusive or stolen content. And while some of the mods in the queue appear legit—Light Armor Clothing, for instance—the bulk of them seem intended to make a statement; some, like the Micro Transactions mod, even include a link to the petition calling on Valve to drop paid mods altogether.

A few of these mods are funny, but they also have the potential to gum up the works. Some are obviously not meant to be taken seriously, but with others it's much harder to tell: The Chicken Companion, as an example, is literally a chicken wearing a Dragonborn helmet. It looks legit (and awesome!), but... well, it's a chicken in a Dragonborn helmet. You tell me.

The maker of the Rubbish mod said it took him about 30 minutes to learn enough of the Creation Kit to get the job done, then add the items and upload it to Steam. That's not an especially heavy investment of time, which means that if enough users are sufficiently committed to the cause, they'll be able to bury the system with crap in relatively short order. Bethesda stated that neither it nor Valve will be curating the mods for sale on the workshop. While they may be relying on the community to flag objectionable mods, in the end, they may have no choice but to step in and police the mods themselves.