The modders behind Skywind have released its first gameplay demo in a year, showing off how an original Morrowind quest has been expanded and improved for this hotly-anticipated fan release.

Skywind is Morrowind recreated in the Skyrim engine. It's been in the works for quite some time now, but the volunteer developers continue to make progress, as the video below shows.

The video sees the player picking up a quest in the city of Sadrith Mora, NPC dialogue, voice acting, exploration, dungeon crawling in a multi-level dwemer ruin alongside a companion (Imperial Larienna Macrina), and a boss fight against a Daedroth called Hrelvesuu.

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Ah, Quake. Id Software's hugely popular PC first-person shooter came out in the US on 22nd June 1996, courtesy of publisher GT Interactive. And now, as Quake approaches a quarter of a century of existence, owner Bethesda is giving away the game that started it all free to anyone who signs in to its launcher from now until the end of the QuakeCon at Home event.

Yes, the Bethesda launcher is yet another launcher for your PC, but this is Quake. QuakeCon at Home ends at 3am UK time on Monday 10th August.

In a Quake retrospective published in 2011, Jim Rossignol discussed the influence of Id's game.

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There's no such thing as too much cheese, in my book, so if you share this sentiment then boy do I have the Skyrim mod for you.

Published today on Nexus Mods for both the Legendary and Special Edition versions of Skyrim, Cheesemod For Everyone introduces over 150 new varieties of cheese to the land of Jarls(berg). The fun doesn't end there, however, as the mod also sends the player on a quest to collect all the cheeses, with a daedric artifact reward once all 202 objects have been found. It's a fondue fork that can turn enemies into wheels of cheese, if you were wondering.

To embark on this quest, the player will first need to complete Sheogorath's first quest (The Mind of Madness) to enter the Pelagius Wing and pick up the stale cheese crumb next to the book Cheeses of Tamriel. To keep it lore-friendly, cheeses from other areas of Tamriel are placed next to NPCs from those regions, while many can also be purchased from vendors - with some exclusive to certain cities or points of interest. New lore has also been added in the form of special cheese notes and journals, which appear on some of the more unique cheeses "to explain how they got there".

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Ah, Nipton. It's a town no Fallout: New Vegas player can forget, namely because it's full of burning corpses... and much, much worse. All of which gives you a good excuse to go on a murder spree against the Legion, in an episode that feels rather Heart of Darkness. Maybe that was just me.

Anyway, it looks like you'll eventually be able to re-explore the wonders of Nipton through a remake mod in Fallout 4 on PC, as the mod team behind Fallout 4: New Vegas has released a new video showing the approach up to the town.

The mod project, which has been underway since August 2017, released a clip of some gameplay in September 2018 - but we hadn't seen much since then in terms of video footage, aside from a small preview of the Anti-Materiel Rifle and a very authentic bug involving Doc Mitchell's head. This time, the mod team has shared a preview of what the remake mod's dialogue will look like, along with the new voice acting - which quite accurately depicts the sort of euphoria you probably would experience from winning the Legion's lottery. Judging by the loading of that 10mm pistol, however, I wager Oliver Swanick did not live much longer after that.

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Dishonored, developer Arkane Studios' sublime stealthy action-adventure series, is getting the tabletop RPG treatment later this year, courtesy of Modiphius Entertainment.

The Dishonored Roleplaying Game, as it's known, will initially be released in the form of a 300-page hardback Corebook, containing everything players need to begin their steampunk-inspired adventures across the Empire of the Isles.

According to Modiphius, the Corebook features an in-depth look at Dishonored's world, its history, and its people, plus a comprehensive storytelling guide. The latter includes rules for playing as various roles - which range from "grim assassins and rugged criminals, to intrepid explorers and stoic crown loyalists" - alongside antagonists and story hooks for inspiration.

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Skywind is back with a new video - and Morrowind looks better than ever.

Skywind, perhaps the most ambitious mod in development right now, recreats Bethesda's much-loved 2002 role-playing game Morrowind in the newer Skyrim engine. It's a mammoth undertaking, and the group of modders behind the project have been working on it for years now.

The video, below, is a developer video series and a call to arms for help from volunteers who may be able to push Skywind over the finish line.

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Glitch speedruns can provide incredible insights into the way games are made - and more importantly, how they can be broken. Awesome Games Done Quick, the speedrunning charity event, is in full swing this week - and one of the most amusing runs I've seen so far is by the ever-entertaining speedrunner tomatoangus, best known for his Fallout anthology runs - including sex% speedruns. Yes, you read that correctly.

Having recently changed his name from tomatoanus to the more family-friendly tomatoangus ("the g is silent," he says), yesterday tomatoangus took the floor to show everyone his Fallout anthology speedrunning skills. Although he ran overtime, finishing at 2:16:21 instead of the 2:05:00 estimate (thanks in part to missing the Radaway right in front of him), the run was incredibly entertaining and informative - with tomatoangus sprinkling in fun facts to keep viewers engaged. This is a hole you'll want to go down.

One of the biggest revelations for me (aside from learning you can push Liam Neeson into dialogue triggers with a Nuka-Cola truck) was that Fallout New Vegas' end slides aren't actually a cutscene: instead, the player is placed in a small room facing a projector screen. After enabling player controls in the command console, tomatoangus walked behind this to display Ron the Narrator standing behind the slides, talking through the script. "You can kill him and drag him off, but then he just slides in from the other side - he doesn't want to leave," tomatoangus said. Now that is dedication to the job.

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Shirley Curry, better known as the Skyrim Grandma, is set to appear in The Elder Scrolls 6 as an NPC. But before then she'll be available to play in Skyrim via a mod.

Shirley will be available as a Skyrim follower as part of Shirley - A Skyrim follower mod, which received a teaser trailer this week and is due out on Nexus early 2020, according to a reddit post from one of its creators.

So, what can you expect from Shirley in-game? Unique commentary on locations and situations and unique interactions with the player. Initial updates will expand the commentary. Shirley's combat style in the game reflects her combat style during her let's plays: a classic barbarian using two-handed weapons, wearing light armour plus archery for ranged attacks.

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The Elder Scrolls is one of the most illustrious sagas in video game history, which is perhaps why Skyrim has been ported to everything short of a calculator over the last eight years. However, although Skyrim and its predecessor Oblivion are vast oceans containing a wealth of wonderfully intricate curios, their oft-overlooked older sibling Morrowind is a bottomless lake, its boundless depths plummeting into the territories of magic, secrecy, and the unknown.

Since Morrowind launched in 2002, players have been exploring its every nook and cranny, desperately seeking to unravel its most intimately hidden secrets. Perhaps the most accomplished of these Morrowind mystery hunters is Redditor OccupyTamriel, who has discovered countless hidden treasures buried in Morrowind's deepest recesses.

"I started playing Elder Scrolls when a very dear friend of mine told me about the series," OccupyTamriel tells me. "I needed a lot of time to get used to Morrowind - the sheer complexity of the world and the mechanics, the invisible per-attack dice roll, and just being lost and making no progress were extremely off-putting."

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Quake 2 is over two decades old and yet the id Software classic is one of my favourite games of this year, radically re-invented from a visual perspective thanks to the ray traced remastering from Nvidia's Lightspeed Studios (based on original work by Christophe Schied). It's one of the most impressive examples of hardware-accelerated RT and thanks to the new 1.2 patch released a few days ago, a phenomenal game now looks a whole lot better.

One might think that Nvidia would simply move on from the Quake 2 project and concentrate efforts on the ray traced upgrades for other titles that are being worked on behind the scenes, but the improvements to the 1.2 upgrade are quite profound - and the most noticeable change comes from upgraded art assets. While the original Quake 2 RTX launch used physically-based variants of Quake 2 XP textures, not all of them appeared to receive the same level of love and attention. A key focus for the 1.2 upgrade has been to re-assess many material properties and get them looking just right.

Metal and how it interacts with lighting has changed immensely. The original release had metalwork that appeared to lack much in the way of specular properties, so even with the hyper-realistic path traced lighting, the material looked more like stone than metal. It's all change in 1.2, with art changes that dramatically change and improve many scenes. There are micro-level improvements too. For example, the original remaster's shotgun shells in ammo boxes use matte materials that show little differentiation between the box material and the shells themselves. Version 1.2 now sees individual cartridges exhibit metallic sheen and emphasise the coloured metals on the jacket.

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