Last Friday, the Polish spotted a Skyrim: Legendary edition. We’ve spent the best part of the week since practicing expressions of surprise and delight so that when Bethesda come through the door with - Oh, Bethesda! What’s that you’ve got there? For me?
Now that Bethesda have officially drawn a developmental line under their 2011 opus, their publishing wing is ready to swoop in and play the ‘Legendary’ card, knowing that they won’t have to trump it later for a more comprehensive box-set (Super-Mythic?). The Skyrim: Legendary Edition will reportedly tie together all released DLC to date alongside its parent game.
Step a) Be an Argonian.
Step b) Fashion TMNT armour and TMNT mask at forge.
Step c) Become Michelangelo*
Skyrim has been in ongoing development for seven years. For comparison's sake, that's seven FIFAs, or precisely the time it takes to forget about the horse armour thing. Today, Bethesda have finally chosen to draw a line under their opus and create anew.
Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
The soundtrack for the Elder Scrolls series has been voted the fifth most popular classical work ever in a poll conducted by Classic FM. Back in February, just a day after my birthday, I was bleating excitedly about the news that it had climbed to the 238th spot. This was with the help of a campaign started by the games industry PR Mark Robins. Well, 238th is now a distant memory, and that same campaign has also helped the Final Fantasy series soundtrack climb up to third place.
If you’ve a copy of Skyrim installed on Steam, 1.9 is likely already worming its way into your hard drive, subtly changing the face of a game you thought you knew. The biggest change comes with Legendary difficulty, and the accompanying Legendary skills. They’re a new hole in the glass ceiling of character progression, say Bethesda, and that’s true. But you’ll need the patience of a mountain-monk to really take advantage of it.
Even if you have never heard about Jeremy Soule, you have probably heard his captivating talent. Skyrim, Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria are just some of his most recent works, but he’s left his mark on our most beloved games since 1994. Now Jeremy has taken to Kickstarter to raise funds to create his Soule Symphony No. 1, “The Northerner".
Spoiler: He’s already 50% over his target at the time of writing.
Is that a 16-inch Dovahkiin in your pocket, or are you still $299.99 in the black?
A total conversion mod for Skyrim has ripped out the bitter wastes wholesale and replaced them with the best of Far Cry 3 - palm trees, baked earth and chattering birds.
In an unprecedented and MMO-like move for Bethesda, the Elder Scrolls developers have removed the 100-point limit for skill development in Skyrim and introduced a new Legendary difficulty setting to match.
Lock your doors. Do not go outside. Do not search for loved ones. The infection has spread. As of 4am last night the Dota 2 beta reached critical mass and overtook Skyrim as the game with the most concurrent players on Steam, making it the most played game on Steam ever. If you've thus far managed to avoid contracting the Dota 2 beta then you are one of the last few. Make peace with your god(s)/relatives/Winnie the Pooh shrine while there is still time.
I’ve spent the last week umming and harumphing in the direction of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and more pertinently its roots in CD Projekt’s proprietary REDengine 3 - the tech which allows for its seamlessly open world. Yes, it’s an upgrade of sorts, and yes, the open world RPG is a genuinely wonderful form - but I’m left, metaphorically speaking, staring at the new pelican crossing and coming to the slow realisation that I sort of fancied the lollipop lady.It’s official: Skyrim’s mighty soundtrack is now the 238th most popular classical work ever, or that’s at least according to a Classic FM listeners’ poll. It’s an impressive achievement for a video game soundtrack, but it almost pales in comparison to the success achieved by Aerith's Theme, from Final Fantasy 7, which climbed all the way into the top 20 and settled into 16th place.
The British radio station asked its listeners to submit their three favourite pieces of classical music, new or old, and a campaign by games industry PR Mark Robins (who runs this Facebook page) helped put video game music in the Hall of Fame alongside the likes of Mozart and Mealor.
Remember that first Skyrim teaser trailer? And late ‘80s CITV fantasy challenge show Knightmare?
If you answered yes to at least one of the the above questions, please come in and close the door behind you.
Bethesda have released a free update to their free HD texture pack for PC players who like free things. There was much rejoicing in local free houses. The pack now includes high resolution versions of the new textures that were brought to Tamriel in the Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn expansions.
Cor, Bethesda pick a good music man, don’t they? Morrowind’s title theme has long since passed into the Halls of Irrefutable Brilliance, of course, but the same applies to the sonics of every one of their recentmost first-person bad-botherers.
Dragonborn is the third official add-on for Skyrim, after Hearthfire and Dawnguard, and it sends you in a north-easterly direction to the island of Solstheim where adventure awaits in the form of seven main quests, 30 side quests and 70 new locations. If the rumours are true, you may even find another dragon-blood waiting for you.
Tamriel is uniformly about the second or third fictional realm to drift into the ambitious heads of prospective mod makers, just behind permanent mind’s-eye fixture Middle-earth. As such, just as there’s a Westeros in Minecraft, you can bet there’s an Elder Scrolls mod for Civilization V. As it happens, there are at least three good ones knocking about Steam's Workshop.
It was precisely a month ago today that Bethesda released a new trailer, a chance to rub our eyes wetly across the white/brown wastes of Solstheim - the island destination of Skybox’s first major add-on. That one, longing look might have to last us for a while yet though - Bethesda tell us we won’t be seeing Dragonborn on PC until the new year.
At the time of writing, it looks like Dragonborn is the closest thing Skyrim’s going to get to a full, 15 lb expansion pack. No $5 crackling this; the next chunk of DLC will include new Shouts and spells, new weapon and armour types, new enemy types, and of course the new realm itself - Solstheim.
