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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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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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…)