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Skyrim mugshots give us a taste of race
Which race will you play in Skyrim? Well, you can get a jump on that by checking out these pre-set renders of different races in the game. If you're anything like us, you're already picking out just the right one to blow up and put on a T-shirt. Or maybe you're a coffee mug person?
Seen@Gamescom: The Skyrim blimp
(Click to embiggen) Having a sit-down meal this evening out in Cologne, during this crazy Gamescom week, enjoying something other than delicious Turkish take-out for a fourth night in a row, we noticed a blimp. No, wait, a Skyrim blimp. If only it breathed fire like a dragon! The blimp was there to grab the attention of the crowd below at the Gamescom street fair, which had adorable Mario star balloons. So adorable. %Gallery-131224%
Skyrim will feature Steamworks support, also an adorable dog
A recently released packshot of the PC version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim carried a Games for Windows masthead, leaving some of the gaming community worried that it would also use the Games for Windows Live DRM system. Apparently, that's not the case: Bethesda's Pete Hines confirmed to PC Gamer that it wouldn't use GFWL, and the company's official Twitter account double confirmed that it would instead implement Steamworks. That is, like, so much confirmation. If you don't really care about things like PC DRM solutions or, um, PCs in general, you might find the screenshots posted below a little more scintillating. There's a picture of a dog in one of them! A wonderful, wonderful dog. %Gallery-131028%
Team Fortress 2 gets to play with classic QuakeCon weapons
Team Fortress 2 just had a futuristic weapons update with Dr. Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators, and now Valve is going old-school. To celebrate QuakeCon 2011, which kicked off yesterday in Dallas, TF2 is getting a bevy of Bethesda and id Software gear as part of the QuakeCon Steam Sale (a different deal each day!). The following items correspond with different daily deals, but are all available through 10 a.m. EDT August 8: "The Original" Quake rocket launcher (Soldier), free with Quake IV purchase The Wingstick, based on a RAGE weapon (Engineer), free with RAGE pre-order The Dragonborn helmet from Skyrim (Heavy), free with Skyrim pre-order The Anger hood from Brink (Sniper), free with Brink purchase/ownership A Fallout Pip-Boy (Engineer), free with Fallout: New Vegas purchase/ownership
Skyrim collector's edition comes with unlimited dragons, plus one
Bethesda producer Todd Howard has already confirmed an "unlimited number of dragons" in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. At QuakeCon, Howard revealed the Collectors Edition for the title, which comes with a 12" statue of the dragon Alduin perched on a dragon wall. That's one more dragon than you get with the game alone -- or infinity plus one dragons -- making the CE a mathematical impossibility. Other, less troubling bonuses include a 200-page "coffee table" artbook, and a making-of DVD. It'll be available on the game's November 11 release date at the only slightly less than infinite price of $149.99 US/ €149.99 EU/ £129.99 UK/ $199.99 Australian. And don't forget to pre-order, because if you're splashing out this much for Skyrim stuff, you're pretty much guaranteed to want that cloth map too.%Gallery-130058%
Get roasted alive by dragons in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's Comic-Con trailer
The latest Skyrim trailer from Comic-Con has dissuaded a lot of our fears about the newest entry in The Elder Scrolls series. It's good to know that shambling aimlessly through an endless wilderness will still be a major part of the game, for instance, and that we'll still feel a smug sense of self-satisfaction as we callously off a complete stranger with a skillfully placed arrow from the shadows. It also looks like we're going to spend a large majority of our time being set ablaze by dragons, which may or may not be karmically related to the amount of time we spend shooting arrows out of shadows.
Skyrim DLC to have more of an 'expansion pack feel'
They say you can't have too much of a good thing, but Bethesda certainly put that to the test with its seemingly unending releases of downloadable content for Fallout 3. Project lead Todd Howard said that the developer has learned its lesson, and those who play the studio's next game, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, should expect heartier, less frequent updates. "Right now I can say that we'd like to do less DLC but bigger ones -- you know, more substantial," he told AusGamers. "The Fallout 3 pace that we did was very chaotic. We did a lot of them -- we had two overlapping groups -- and we don't know what we're going to make yet, but we'd like them to be closer to an expansion pack feel." In short, expect huge horse armor collections this time around, in every size, shape and hue imaginable.
Skyrim pre-orders include a 'premium quality' map [update]
Bethesda is preparing a Skyrim pre-order bonus that will remind fans of the PC role-playing roots of the Elder Scrolls series. If you pre-order the game, you'll get ... a "feelie!" Specifically, a "premium quality world map" will be "automatically" included with your copy. We're just going to assume that "premium quality" means "cloth." It just wouldn't be right to fully nerd out over an old-school RPG without the thrill of unfurling a limited-edition cloth map. It's getting pinned to our wall in either case, we're thoroughly ashamed to admit. Update: Possibly in response to a certain material-obsessed blog post, Bethesda updated its own post to note that the pre-order map is "a high-grade material that has a feel similar to burlap, and will be available in North America and Europe."
New Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim screens prove wishes don't come true
We stared at these new screens for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for like five minutes, and wanted the game to come out today as hard as we could. We called the store, it wasn't there. Wish all you want, children of the world: No one is listening.
Well, at least we won't run out of dragons in Skyrim
As if the concept of defeating just several dragons in Bethesda's forthcoming Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim wasn't enough to get your dragon-murdering blood going, maybe this little bit of info from producer Todd Howard will: "There is an unlimited number of dragons" in the forthcoming game, he told Norwegian magazine Gamer.no (according to a fan translation on Bethesda's forums). Not only will dragons appear in scripted encounters, but they'll also be randomly generated in the gameworld. The translation also notes that "all dragons speak" in the game, with Howard fu rther explaining "it's actually what they do when they are spouting fire." He hinted that some dragons will be able to communicate with the player in "the common tongue," though we're distinctly worried about what happens when a dragon can't remember the "common" word for something. Does he try to pronounce it in dragon, and accidentally set ablaze whoever he's speaking with? Either way, it sounds dangerous.
Skyrim 'mostly a DirectX 9 game,' PC mods could make it to consoles
In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Bethesda's Todd Howard discussed the differences between the PC and console versions of the studio's upcoming RPG, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim -- or, rather, the lack thereof. "The game looks the same," Howard said, though he later added, "With the PC, the texture sizes are going to be as big as you want to make them, and you can pump the resolution up, obviously." As far as the visual nitty-gritty (yes, that's a technical term), Howard explained that Skyrim is "mostly a DirectX 9 game in terms of how the shaders work." Sure, that may mean that the game could lack some of the technical punch of DX11, but there's an advantage to Skyrim's platform neutrality. Speaking to Edge, Howard said that the user-generated content authored by the game's PC players could be made available to console gamers, as well. "We'd like to see it happen, because it works, it's how we made the game," Howard said. We'd like to see it happen, too -- but only if it results in us getting those pretty environmental updates, and not the creepy ones that make everyone so very naked.
Skyrim preview: Sky's the limit
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim looks superb. I don't think I'll be alone in saying so -- Skyrim was the only title presented at Bethesda's "BFG 2011" press event in Park City, Utah last week to elicit a round of applause. The hands-off demonstration began with the player character, Dovahkiin (Dragonborn) strolling down a detailed mountain path in Skyrim, the northernmost province of The Elder Scrolls' fictional continent of Tamriel. The game takes place some 200 years after the events of Oblivion, and dragons have mysteriously emerged in the world once again.%Gallery-121459%
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim still unconcerned about giant flying beasts
We were worried that you couldn't get through another day without the reassurance that, somewhere in Maryland, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is being made -- even before the SkyNET Kinect sequel! And yes, it still looks incredibly impressive. And maybe inspires us to want to fight dragons. Maybe. %Gallery-120207%
New Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim footage is better than we deserve
We thought we couldn't be more excited for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but the just-debuted first in-game footage for the game has proven us terriffically, comically wrong. Dragon fights? Beautiful environments? The kind of score that makes you want to leap out of your chair and just LARP? It's all here. Come with us after the break. Come, have a boner ... or a lady boner.
Bethesda proves it's really serious about Skyrim baby name contest
Bethesda wants your baby to be named Dovahkiin if it's born on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's launch date of November 11, 2011. The company is offering up an unspecified prize pack for those who take up the challenge. We frankly thought it was a joke until an update today to the company blog specified one of the prizes up for grabs: A Steam key granting free access to "every ZeniMax/Bethesda game - past, present and future - for life." Note to the sort of parents who would name their kid Dovahkiin for free Bethesda games: If we were making a list of the times when it would be the least prudent for you to have a baby, the day the new Elder Scrolls game comes out would be like, right near the top. Just right up there. "My parents were great," said 10-year-old Dovahkiin in 2021. "I didn't meet them in person for the first few months, but after that, they were swell. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have three appointments to be savagely beaten during recess today, because my name is Dovahkiin."
Bethesda releases fresh Skyrim concept art
We don't know what you have in the way of weekend plans, but ours have just been made. You enjoy your bars, your temples, your massage parlors; we'll spending our time writing fan fiction about this very Nordic batch of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim concept art that Bethesda just released. Take the above image, for example: What treasure could so entice this viking that he'd be willing to do battle with a bear with tentacle legs? ... We don't know right now, but we've got the whole weekend to come up with something. %Gallery-116324%
New Skyrim screens show off ugly beasts and not-ugly humans
We've had to suffer four whole iterations of the Elder Scrolls franchise featuring characters with gaunt and terrifying faces. However, a recent flood of screens from OXM UK and PCGames.de give us hope that Skyrim's NPCs won't be quite as upsetting to gaze upon. Check out the new Skyrimages below.
Harry Partridge is pretty excited for Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
We're not going to say the news of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had the same effect on us that it did on Harry Partridge -- actually, we doubt anybody could be as excited for something as Harry is for Skyrim. See what we mean by checking out the video past the break!
Skyrim's 'dragon shouts' explained
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim director Todd Howard recently revealed one of the ginormous RPG's fresh, new mechanics to Game Informer -- he also inadvertently provided us with the name of our new speed metal band. They're called "dragon shouts," and they're extremely powerful enhancements to your other combat powers which you invoke by -- you guessed it -- shouting certain sets of three words from a long forgotten Draconic language that you and few others can comprehend. It's like Esperanto! It's exactly like Esperanto. There's plenty of info about the lore of this ability in the Game Informer article, but the takeaway is this: Players will collect these power words by slaying dragons and absorbing their power, or by finding and deciphering ancient runes hidden in the depths of the deepest dungeons. So, yeah, Bethesda has basically put Pokémon in our Elder Scrolls. We are doomed once this bad boy comes out on Eleven the Eleventh of Eleven.
Bethesda confirms Skyrim mod support, will release Creation Kit
Bethesda's fifth Elder Scrolls game, like Oblivion before it, will allow for extensive player customization, according to the developer. "We've always been impressed with what the community has done with our tools," a rep for the company said on its forums, revealing, "Like the Elder Scrolls Construction Set for Morrowind and Oblivion, we plan to release [a] Creation Kit so you guys can mod Skyrim." The immediate predecessor, Oblivion, has seen countless mods -- everything from new characters to online play. We can only imagine what the Skyrim community will manage to create while we wait for Bethesda to finish the most ambitious Skyrim mod, Fallout 4.
