Gameworlds have become ever-more lavish, but has there been a dark price paid for this? Craig Lager believes so. Production values are up but these worlds don’t seem to react to players’ actions as fulsomely as they once did, he worries – are we allowing games’ strange logic to take us for granted? But there is yet hope. Frowned at: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dragon Age II, Skyrim. Smiled at: The Witcher 2, Dwarf Fortress, Outcast. Please note these are Craig’s views, not necessarily those of RPS.>

In my version of Human Revolution, the police station should be surrounded. There should be SWAT teams, negotiators, probably even an evacuation zone. Adam Jensen’s face should be being projected from every single screen that litters Detroit’s streets as Eliza explains him as being a more-than-prime-suspect in a new, horiffic incident. An hour ago, she would explain, Jensen asked for access to the police morgue and was declined. Now the back door has been broken into, and a path of corpses and hacked computers lead to the morgue in which a body has been clearly tampered with. Instead, Jensen walks into the main lobby and is greeted with “Hello”. (more…)

So, that’s close to a week of Skyrim under our collective belts of minor loafing, which means we’re hitting Skyrim content saturation point. Or we will tomorrow, anyway. Maybe. In the meantime: what have you all been doing in Skyrim? I spotted Alec installed new poll software, which means I can have a go at doing a poll to find out! Yay. Actually, I mean I’d been planning to do a poll anyway, but was too confused by the poll plugin. Anyway… What have you spent the majority of your time doing in Skyrim? Vote below! (more…)

Aka ‘Dragonbotherer’ aka, ‘Biff the magic dragon (in the face)’.>

I feel that I achieved an awful lot in the three and half days I had to review Skyrim (as documented here and here, but at the same time there was far more I just didn’t have the time see/fight. Foremost of those was the main plot, with my long and happy experience with earlier Elder Scroll games having me convinced that the best course of action to get an accurate sense of the game was to immediately go off-piste and do my own thing. That is, I maintain, the real reason people take to Elder Scrollses, and particularly why they end up playing them for hundreds of hours, until their wives leave them, their abandoned children miserably grow into psychopathic adults and their pets die of love-starvation.

While it was always my intention to tackle the whole dragonborn thing afterwards, there has been… let’s call it ‘debate’ within the towering obsidian walls of Castle Shotgun about whether I’d done the right thing or not. Well, now I’m a decent way through the campaign, my game-world is littered with sky-lizards and everything that crosses me is getting a good old shouting at: so, is this the one true Skyrim experience?> (more…)

If you’ve been looking at your own version of Skyrim, and then seeing the images that likes of DeadEndThrills have been putting out (pinched one from there for the image above, sorry Duncan!) you might be forgiven for wondering how you can push the game beyond its prescribed options. There are ways. (more…)

Brink: a most curious beast indeed. I’m still not entirely sure what I make of it. While I wish it had done quite a few things a little differently, I’m heartened to see that it hasn’t been left to die: a forthcoming update will better turn it to the not-so-tender mercies of community-centric play. Clans and tournaments will be the focus of the patch – the kind of stuff that perhaps should have been there in the first place, but hindsight is 20/20, as my Dad so helpfully observes several hundred times a year.

You’ll be able to create a clan, recruit members, create some sort of no doubt nightmarishly ugly clan symbol, manage things via a dedicated profile page and, of course, wage war on other clans. They deserve it, the rotters.

(more…)

I suppose we’ll need to come up with some sort of battleplan about how we cover Skyrim mods, given about fifty more of them crop up every time I blink. A round-up a little later down the line would only be sensible, but in the meantime this particular one is just too fine to pass up. Skyrim’s map – one of several sources of interface-based ire for Jim – presents the game’s world as one grand vista, but what it can’t do is show you much in the way of what’s actually at the place you’re thinking of visting. The Map In Full 3D mod is the Google Street View-aping answer: enabling that curious scrollwheel finger of yours to zoom right down to the ground and pan across the main open-world part of the game. It’s NPC-free, but it’s a spectacular way to have a bird’s eye view of a splendid world that’s almost as chilly as Southern England is today. I CAN’T FEEL MY TOES. (more…)

I’m sorry our weekly comparison of the top-ten best-selling games on Steam with the top ten best-selling PC games at UK retail is a day late. I was busy standing by the side of a motorway waiting for a tow-truck yesterday. If only I’d stayed indoors and played more Skyrim – a lesson we can all take something from, I think.

So, what will prove to be the best-selling PC game of last week? Can you guess? Of course you can.

(more…)

Ah, this meeting brings back memories. Childhood days, alto wine, romance! My life was wrapped around the quests. Her name was Lydia. I met her at the Stormreach Castle in 4E 201, marked down from 4E 241.

Ahhhh, Lydia. She was the most glooooorious creature under the suns. Marie, Ajira, Akorithi. Rolled into one.

(more…)

Oh, Skyrim.> I really am so> enamoured by your peaks, and your misty valleys. Oh, what a beautiful world, filled with possibility and with cheese. Oh, Skyrim, let us bask in the the spook of your ghosts and squirm in the horror of your catacombs. Let us be gleefully smacked about by giants and devoured by dragons. Let us steal hats and trade them for unexpected potions. Oh, Skyrim.> There’s so much to you that there are even ants crawling on this log! Blimey.

And then we bring up the menu. Oh, Skyrim>.

(more…)

I am posting this link almost purely for the benefit of RPS contributor Richard Cobbett, whose aversion to spiders in games is such that he’s forced to play Skyrim while dosed up with a medical team on standby, just in case his heart gives out. Sadly the mod is only a crude fix for now, and replaces spiders with awkward stuffed-looking bears. There’s a crab alternative if the bears look too stupid. (They do.)