• The Elder Scrolls Online Season Zero launches on April 2, 2026
• It will introduce a new event zone with loads of fresh content
• Everything being added to the game will be free for all existing players

The first season of The Elder Scrolls Online, Season Zero, launches next week and it's bursting with new content that will be "free for anyone who owns the game" with "no gates or barriers" according to game director Nick Giacomini.

As detailed in the new 2026 Seasons Direct presentation, Season Zero: Dawn and Dusk it set to begin on April 2, 2026. It will last roughly 90 days, the length of all upcoming seasons, and introduce loads of free content.

This includes the very first limited time event zone, known as The Night Market. Set in Fargrave (a location from the game's Deadlands expansion) it will offer a gauntlet of intense player versus environment (PvE) encounters with a focus on group play. That said, associate design director Mike Finnegan assured fans in the stream that "joining a group isn't required" and that's it's "easy to hop in and play" solo if desired.

In addition to exploring its various districts, completing puzzles and defeating bosses, players will be able to contribute to the progress of three factions: the Ruckus, the Glittering Goad, and the Thousand Eyes. Rewards will be given to the most successful factions, so choose carefully.

You'll even be able to unlock a free house, known as the Night's Den, simply by completing the event zone's initial quest.

Although The Night Market will only be available for seven weeks this time, there are already plans to bring it back in future or even add it to the game permanently if it proves popular.

Grind no more

Season Zero also marks the launch of the long-awaited Challenge Difficulty. This customizable system gives high-level players the ability to choose between four new difficulty tiers with unique modifiers to make parts of The Elder Scrolls Online experience much harder in exchange for big rewards.

All of this comes off the back of some recent player experience balance changes designed to make the game much more gratifying.

"We've heard your feedback and we agree," said player experience improvements team lead Kira Ross Schlitt. "Your time is valuable, so our first pass was to reduce unnecessary grind and friction that can bog down the experience."

Major tweaks include a massive increase in the furnishing limit for in-game houses, an overhauled UI for the player's bag, and a huge reduction in the cost to upgrade both your bag and bank so that you no longer have to grind for hours simply to store all your stuff.

Stablemaster training, used to improve your riding skill, is now three times faster, too.

Even more content is coming to The Elder Scrolls Online this year in Season One and beyond. The game is available now for PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, and Xbox One.

• The Elder Scrolls Online Collection: Gold Road is now available for free on PS Plus
• The game is also coming to PC Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere in June
• New content will be released in early 2027, taking players back to the Skyrim setting

Zenimax Online Studios has announced huge plans for The Elder Scrolls Online, including a PC Game Pass release.

During the 2026 Seasons Direct today, alongside new playable content coming to the game next month with Season Zero: Dawn and Dusk, the developer revealed that players will return to Tamriel's frozen north of Skyrim to explore an "iconic region" not previously seen in The Elder Scrolls Online.

This update will also introduce the game's first-ever Excursion Zone, as well as dynamic blizzards that "affect the gameplay of the zone itself."

What's more, The Elder Scrolls Online Collection: Gold Road, which includes the base game and all major Chapter zones (including Morrowind, Summerset, Elsweyr, Greymoor, Blackwood, High Isle, Necrom, and Gold Road) is available for free right now if you're subscribed to PlayStation Plus.

The offer is included in the PlayStation Plus Monthly Games for March and ends on April 6. It is playable on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, so be sure to grab it while you still can.

On top of this, The Elder Scrolls Online is coming to PC Game Pass on June 2. It will also be added to Xbox Play Anywhere, so owners will be able to dive in on a range of Xbox platforms at no additional cost.

Earlier this year, Zenimax announced the game's very first event zone, the Night Market, which arrives on April 29. A limited-time player-versus-environment (PvE) zone described as "new, experimental content".

Two new story content updates are also on the way, and are each focused on the Thieves Guild and Sheogarath.

• Todd Howard has discussed The Elder Scrolls 6 in a new interview
• He said that it will return to the studio's "classic style" of exploration
• He also reiterated that "it's going to be a while yet" until the game arrives

Bethesda director Todd Howard has indicated that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be something of a return to form for the studio compared to Starfield and Fallout 76.

Speaking in a video interview with KindaFunny (via IGN), Howard revealed that "the majority of people who made Skyrim" are still at the studio and hard at work on the next installment. He also claimed that he would have rather The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced later than all the way back in 2018 and explained that it would be more in line with older Bethesda games.

"We do have a certain style that we like and that our fans like that we want to get better and better at," he said.

"In some ways Fallout 76 and Starfield are a little bit of a creative detour from that classic Elder Scrolls, Fallout, a Skyrim or a Fallout 3 or a Fallout 4, Oblivion, where you're exploring a world in a certain way. And as we come back to The Elder Scrolls 6 that we're doing now, we're coming back to that classic style that we've missed."

Released in 2023, Starfield is still Bethesda Game Studios' most recent game. Although it received decent reviews upon release, many players felt that its massive but largely empty space setting was less exciting than the worlds of previous titles like Skyrim.

The idea that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be similar to those older games will definitely come as a relief to some, though it's worth noting that this next entry in the series is still a long way from release. In fact, in the same interview Howard reiterated that "it's going to be a while yet" before it lands in the hands of gamers.

• The latest Skyrim Switch 2 Edition patch addresses the port's performance issues
• A 60fps performance mode has been added
• Some intrusive visual bugs have been addressed, too

Bethesda Game Studios has released another big patch for The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Anniversary Edition - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition. And it's one that squarely addresses my biggest issue with the port.

Update 1.2 has been detailed in a post by the official Bethesda Game Studios account on X / Twitter. It has the usual smattering of fixes you'd expect, including addressing crashes, visual bugs, control issues, and the like.

However, the biggest change comes with the addition of an honest-to-goodness performance mode option. The port's Display settings now have a toggle that lets players swap between visual or performance priority.

The former is the Switch 2 version as you know it; a locked 30fps with crisper visual quality. The new 'prioritize performance' setting trades away some of that fidelity for a higher 60fps cap.

Some other visual oddities I made note of in my review of the Switch 2 port also appear to have been addressed. At launch, bodies of water would uncomfortably shift vertically when viewed from a distance. Additionally, distant trees and foliage would take on a strange blue tint. The update notes address these issues directly, too.

Overall, it's a robust patch that seems to address a lot of both the major and minor issues with Skyrim's Switch 2 port, thus making it much easier to recommend now.

The first patch was also swift to address its input latency issues shortly after launch, so you don't have to worry about that anymore, either.

• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the only Bethesda game coming to Nintendo Switch 2 that will have a Game Card in the physical edition
• Skyrim: Anniversary Edition and Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition will only offer codes in their boxes
• Oblivion Remastered will also receive a "physical code-in-box edition planned for a later date"

Bethesda has confirmed that only one of its games coming to Nintendo Switch 2 will offer a Game Card in its physical editions.

During the Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase yesterday, it was announced that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, and Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition are all coming to the Switch 2 this year.

Now, Bethesda has confirmed that only Indiana Jones will have a proper Game Card cartridge in its physical edition. Oblivion Remastered and Fallout 4 will only have digital download codes in their boxes.

The studio shared the finer details in a launch roadmap blog post. The official X / Twitter account also shared its own post, writing, "And yes, the game is on Game Card", instead of one of the controversial Game-Key Cards.

Starting with Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition, which comes with the base game and all six expansion packs, the digital edition launches on February 24, followed by the "physical code-in-box edition" on April 28.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will launch on May 12, and pre-orders are now available "for the physical game card at retail and digitally via the Nintendo eShop". The game's downloadable content (DLC), The Order of Giants, will also be available to download separately on that date.

Oblivion Remastered, which is slated to launch sometime this year, will also be released digitally, "with a physical code-in-box edition planned for a later date".

It also confirmed that The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Anniversary Edition, which was released digitally last December, will get a physical code-in-box release on April 28.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim isn’t exactly a game that needs an introduction. Its broad appeal and astonishing staying power have seen it come to practically every single console since its late 2011 release, and it remains as impressively accessible and playable now as it was all those years ago.

Enter the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Skyrim Anniversary Edition, which packs the full game and all of its official expansions and Creation Club content into one portable package. This includes a whole heap of quests, housing, armaments, and entire systems like fishing and a survival mode on top of the already massive base game.

It sounds like a pretty sweet deal, and in many ways it is. I was especially impressed by the port’s incredibly crisp image quality - offering clarity and broad draw distance not dissimilar to versions of Skyrim on other contemporary platforms like PS5 and Xbox Series X. It’s also a winner in handheld mode, with visuals and performance that are broadly comparable to docked play on TV.

You might be aware that this port has had some teething issues, though some of which have thankfully been addressed since launch. Its initial horrendous input latency has been cleaned up, allowing for a more responsive play experience overall.

Some issues do remain, however. Distant objects like trees and rocks can take on a weird blue hue, and reflections on bodies of water can jitter as you move the camera. I’m also not a fan of the complete lack of visual or accessibility settings. This has always been an issue outside of the PC version, but Skyrim is a game that desperately needs a field-of-view slider accessible in its settings menu and not hidden within console commands on PC.

Otherwise, Skyrim’s Switch 2 port is a perfectly playable version of the monstrously popular role-playing game. I think the 30fps lock for exterior environments is disappointing - especially when we see other Switch 2 ports like Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition offer VRR-supported 40fps modes for smoother play in handheld mode. That said, it is a stable 30fps, and you’ll rarely, if ever, run into bouts of chunky performance drops.

New dog, old tricks

Skyrim’s gotten its fair share of criticisms over the years - many of which are fair. The main story isn’t much to write home about, combat is pretty rock-em-sock-em-robots at the best of times, and role-playing elements have been sanded down to offer a more action-focused experience compared to Morrowind and Oblivion.

And yet for all its perceived issues, Skyrim remains one of the most impressively replayable games ever. Yes, even without mods (which aren’t supported on Switch 2 as they are on PS5 and Xbox, though I’m not going to criticize Bethesda for that one).

I still find much to enjoy in Skyrim to this day. Creating new characters to try a wide variety of builds is delightful - whether that be a warhammer-wielding Orc or a dainty Breton that specializes in conjuring everything from swords and skeletons, to zombies and atronachs. I’ve always liked the enchantment system, too; grabbing some nonchalant piece of jewelry and turning it into a fount of endless magicka regeneration is always such a satisfying feeling.

In this Switch 2 port, though, I’m checking out Skyrim’s curated Creation Club content for the first time. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Some additions are brilliant, like entirely new player houses that are wonderfully decorated. Others, like a smattering of just-okay sidequests, I can really take or leave.

I really would’ve liked an option for an ‘alternate start’ though. Skyrim’s lengthy, unskippable intro is still a slog when setting up new characters (you can load up an autosave that skips to character creation, but you still need to play through the tutorial in Helgen). Perhaps that would be veering too close to modding territory, and above and beyond what this simple port is trying to achieve, but it certainly would help the pacing on repeat playthroughs.

What I’m even less of a fan of is Bethesda’s insistence on not offering anything in the way of quality-of-life updates. Skyrim, by default, has a very narrow field of view, and there is no option to change this on any of its console ports, including on Switch 2. While not so bad on the console’s handheld display, it makes for pretty uncomfortable play sessions on larger TV screens.

A fiery port?

This latest port of Skyrim does have some Switch 2-centric features to speak of. Both gyro aiming and mouse controls are fully supported, which are nice additions on paper. However, I didn’t find the latter to be a particularly good fit for this port and its 30fps lock. This lower framerate makes aiming and tilting the camera with mouse controls feel quite sluggish, even after a patch that improved the input latency issues. I quickly found myself going back to the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller after testing out the feature for a little while.

On the topic of performance, I feel there’s room for improvement. While I’m happy that overall performance is largely stable, the 30fps lock for the overworld is underwhelming for a nearly 15-year-old game. At the very least, a performance mode option that raises the framerate would have been nice to see here.

Elsewhere, there are a handful of visual oddities to make note of. Distant objects - particularly foliage - often take on a strange blue hue. While quite subtle at first, it’s one of those things you’ll notice every time after seeing it happen just once. Meanwhile, bodies of water have a weird visual bug that causes reflections to jitter when moving the camera. It’s not as egregious as the blue trees, but worth mentioning all the same.

Performance while exploring interiors like dungeons, houses, and inns can vary wildly. Many indoor locations actually uncap the game’s framerate, meaning performance can appear to go as high as 60fps. It’s a bit jarring to have this gap in performance between indoor and outdoor areas, honestly, but a smoother framerate in the more mazelike interiors is certainly welcome.

Should I play Skyrim Anniversary Edition on Switch 2?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

Accessibility

Skyrim’s options on Switch 2 aren’t much different from what you’ll get on other platforms. You can choose to enable or disable various Switch 2-specific options like gyro aiming, mouse controls, and gesture-based attacks, but that’s really about it. Don’t expect things like a field of view slider or colorblind options here.

How I reviewed Skyrim Anniversary Edition on Switch 2

I played Skyrim on Nintendo Switch 2 for around 30 hours, completing the main story (again) and a handful of guild questlines. I also played through a good portion of the game’s expansion content and Creation Club additions.

I went back and forth between handheld and docked play, finding that both offer great image quality and largely stable performance. When playing on TV, I used the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller, as well as the Joy-Con 2, for trying out the port’s new mouse controls. My display of choice is the ever-reliable LG CX OLED TV.

First reviewed December 2025-January 2026.

Publisher Bethesda has revealed loads of new content that's coming to The Elder Scrolls Online throughout the year, with the vast majority of it being available free for all players.

The popular massively multiplayer online (MMO) game transitioned away from receiving big annual expansions at the start of 2025, adapting a premium content pass model that’s now transitioning to a more dynamic seasonal system intended to deliver an exciting mix of content at a less rigid pace.

This year is already shaping up to be one of the biggest in the game’s 12-year history, and it’s almost impossible to recap everything that’s been announced so far, and there’s even more to come.

Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a newcomer deciding if now might be a good time to take the plunge and explore the vast online world of Tamriel, these are the best and biggest additions coming to the game in the near future.

1. The game’s first event zone is on the way

The game’s very first event zone, the Night Market, is set to release on April 29. Game director Nick Giacomini described it as an example of some “new, experimental content,” and it might give us a good idea of what future updates could look like.

It’s a limited-time player-versus-environment (PvE) zone that’s filled with new mechanics and difficulty levels that the team wants to try out - effectively part in-game event and part testing ground for interesting ideas.

It’s set in Fargrave, a zone that previously appeared extensively in the game’s Gates of Oblivion storyline, and features loads of challenging encounters to put your combat skills to the test. Although accessible to anyone, it’s best for high-level players accompanied by a group of friends or playing with their Guild.

You’ll be able to align yourself with one of three unique factions in the area, all competing to make the most progress. Of course, there will be plenty of rewards for players willing to take on the challenge, including a large new house that you can upgrade by making progress in the zone. It’s the first house in the game that comes with its own in-built bank, too, which is going to be pretty useful for managing your inventory.

The team already plans to bring the event back in the future, with it returning at least once more and potentially even becoming permanent if it’s enjoyed by players.

2. Two new stories are coming to the game

Lore lovers rejoice - new story content is on the way, and some of it is centered around the Thieves Guild. The shadowy organization already has a strong presence in The Elder Scrolls Online, but players will be able to experience a new set of quests come the release of Season One in the summer.

If you’re not too interested in sneaking around, a second dose of story content introduces quests focused on Sheogarath - the iconic mad god who has previously (and very memorably) appeared in the worlds of The Elder Scrolls Online, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion via The Shivering Isles expansion.

Presumably, we’ll be learning more about what these new narrative additions entail in the weeks and months to come.

3. Prepare for big improvements for solo players

If, like me, you mainly play The Elder Scrolls Online solo, then you’ll be pleased to hear that a wealth of improvements are on the way as part of season two at the end of the year.

This includes the addition of two solo versions of the existing Moon Hunter Keen and March of Sacrifices so that you can learn their mechanics or experience their narrative content without the pressure of having other players running around completing objectives.

Solo mode is planned to have its own difficulty levels, so you can adjust the level of challenge, and potentially even a dedicated option just for immersing yourself in the story. There are plans to expand the ability to play alone to even more dungeons if it proves popular, too.

4. Expect plenty of other quality of life changes

There will be loads of quality of life changes throughout the year, too, including big visual updates to combat.

In March, the Dragonknight class and abilities will receive a big visual refresh alongside the two-handed weapon skill line - plus a little balancing to boot. Then, in June, the Werewolf skill line is set to receive some love in the form of new models for both male and female werewolves and some balancing work.

The Warden class is then being similarly updated in September, followed by the Sorcerer class in November. All of these changes are meant to modernize the combat and remove much of the floatiness of the old animations.

Other neat improvements include the ability to re-spec your skills and attributes for free via the UI, the addition of account-wide outfit slots, an increased furnishing limit to help you build the virtual home of your dreams (plus an even higher limit for ESO+ members), and much faster mount training to address the grind of levelling up your ride.

Premium game packs, including Orsinium, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, and Imperial City, and being made available to all players - with Greymoor to follow at the end of the year. Who doesn't love some freebies?

The Elder Scrolls Online is available now on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One.

• Bethesda's Matt Carofano discusses the Switch 2 port of Skyrim
• Talking to Nintendo Life, he stats the porting process was "really easy"
• The Switch 2 port of Skyrim is available now for $59.99 / £52.99

Yes, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is the gift that keeps on giving. Or rather, the game that keeps on releasing; this time on Nintendo Switch 2.

Shadowdropped onto the system by Bethesda, who traditionally love a shadowdrop (see The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered from earlier this year), Skyrim is a game with a reputation for inevitably coming to absolutely everything. Then again, it doesn't seem like the Switch 2 version required all that much work.

In an interview with Nintendo Life, Matt Carofano - creative director for the Switch 2 port and lead artist of Skyrim's original release - discussed the process of bringing the beloved RPG to Nintendo's handheld platform.

"It's really easy," said Carofano of the re-release process and working with Nintendo. "We're huge fans of Nintendo, love working with them and getting our games to their consoles. And because there's a new console, it's 'Hey, let's bring back one of our most beloved games to the Switch 2 and see how we can improve it and make it the best experience for that console'."

He continued: "We had previously done the version for the Switch, so this was going back to that and making improvements on it. So it was really an easy development process and actually pretty quick in terms of our timelines."

In terms of the port's qualities, Carofano said: "A lot of it was really just focusing on taking advantage of the new hardware. We can use DLSS now and get better resolution, better performance, and the game loads faster. Switch 2 has the Joy-Con 2 controllers that let you use mouse controls, so we added that.

"A lot of it is really just, 'How do we take advantage of the Switch 2? What can it do? And [how can we] give players the best version of Skyrim for that console?'"

Of course, the re-release memes we're lost on Carofano; even he sees the humor in constantly bringing this 14-year-old game back into modern conversation.

"It's a bit of a joke at this point how often we release Skyrim," he said, "but it's a great game. We want everyone to be able to play it in the best way possible."

For me personally, $59.99 / £52.99 is a bit steep for a modern release of Skyrim. When it's readily available on other platforms - with mod support - for much less, it's hard to justify picking it up again even with the benefits of portable play. That said, if its future discounts on Switch 2 are as good as they are on other systems, well, let's just say I'm not wholly immune to the charms of Tamriel's winterly north.

• Bethesda has shadowdropped the Nintendo Switch 2 version of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Anniversary Edition
• This version, which includes the base game its three expansions, also offers enhanced resolution, optimised performance, and better load times
• Switch Anniversary Edition owners can upgrade their game for free and play it on Switch 2, while Skyrim base game owners will need to pay an extra $23.97 / £17.99

Just as Bethesda Game Studios shadowdropped Oblivion Remastered, the studio has today announced that The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Anniversary Edition is now available on Nintendo Switch 2.

14 years after the game was first released for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, and many remasters and modern ports later, Bethesda's much-loved fantasy role-playing game (RPG) has now made its way to the Switch 2 with additional improvements.

This version takes full advantage of the Switch 2 hardware and offers enhanced resolution, optimised performance, and boosted load times, as well as Joy-Con 2 mouse support, motion controls, and Amiibo support.

What's more, the Switch 2 version will also include exclusive Nintendo content from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, allowing players to get their hands on the Master Sword, Hylian Shield, and Champion’s Tunic.

Owners of the Anniversary Edition will also have access to hundreds of Creations Club items, such as quests, weapons, armor, spells, dungeons, and more.

The Anniversary Edition, which was released in 2021, features the base game and three expansions to get lost in, including Dawnguard, Dragonborn, and Hearthfire, and will cost $70.59 / £52.99.

For players who already own Skyrim: Anniversary Edition on the original Switch, they can upgrade their copy and download the game for free on Switch 2.

Alternatively, for those who own the base edition of Skyrim on Switch, the Anniversary Upgrade will cost $23.97 / £17.99 to play on Switch and Switch 2.

• Xbox's official support account may have spilled the beans on the Oblivion remaster's release date
• Several X / Twitter users have been sharing direct message videos and screenshots
• The alleged release date is just a few days from now on April 21, 2025

Xbox's official support account may have just shared more than it was supposed to on the alleged remaster for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.

After a round of screenshots leaked online this week, the internet was once again abuzz with speculation as to if (or indeed when) we'll get to play the long-rumored Oblivion Remastered anytime soon.

It seems like we may have just gotten our answer. As reported by GamesRadar, several users on X / Twitter have been claiming that Xbox's official support account, via direct messaging, has been outright stating a release date of April 21, 2025 for Oblivion Remastered. At the time of writing, that's four days from now.

The above video shows a DM interaction between X / Twitter user Ser_Raven18 and what appears to be the official Xbox Support account.

"The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is set to release on April 21, 2025," writes the account.

Furthermore, in a reply to gaming account 'Synth Potato, another user shared a screenshot with details on how Oblivion Remastered will be handling the original's bevy of downloadable content, including the legendary Shivering Isles expansion.

"The remastered version of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion on Xbox Game Pass will include the base game only. The Shivering Isles DLC, along with other expansions like Knights of the Nine, will be part of the Deluxe Edition."

As a screenshot only, this message does carry less weight, and there's always the chance that correspondence here could be fabricated just to stew the pot. So naturally, take everything here with a healthy pinch of salt.

That said, a lot of things do seem to be lining up. Hopefully the speculation can be put to bed with an official announcement or trailer soon, especially as the alleged release date is mere days away.

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Having originally launched more than a decade ago, The Elder Scrolls Online has grown into one of the most content-rich and successful massively multiplayer online (MMO) games on the market.

Last year, developer Zenimax Online Studios revealed that it would be moving away from the annual release of major expansions and towards a seasonal model which would offer more consistent updates throughout the year. Now, thanks to the recent 2025 Elder Scrolls Online Direct broadcast, we know what that will entail this year and have had our first glimpse at some of the new content in store.

Speaking on the stream, Zenimax Online Studios studio head Matt Firor said that the studios wants to "put more of a focus on testing and new ideas" in order to "ensure the game remains fresh and modern for years into the future."

Looking to the future, he affirmed that "the game is strong, the studio is committed" and that the studio has listened to feedback "about more variety and to shake things up."

Jumping back in

Following existing updates to the game's tutorial, The Elder Scrolls Online will also be getting a revamped experience for returning players. These 'welcome back' features are designed to ease those who may have taken a break back into the game, providing a refresher on core mechanics and systems with a series of rewards.

The various Starting Zones will also be receiving graphical updates, with new lighting, assets, and effects to bring them more in line with the look and fidelity of more recently added areas. This likely is going to be great for new players, but also might provide a compelling reason for existing fans to create a new character and experience it all from scratch.

As someone who hasn't booted up The Elder Scrolls Online in a couple of months, this definitely all sounds tempting. I've poured hundreds of hours into the game over the years, but coming back to it after a break is always a bit of an uphill battle - often sending me straight to YouTube for a recap of existing features and explainers about new things I may have missed.

This is the case for many of the best MMOs, at least in my experience, so these features might prove a brilliant way to help set The Elder Scrolls Online further apart.

Melting pot

Content throughout the year will be released as part of Seasons of the Worm Cult, which will introduce a brand new island called Solstice and new story content that serves as a direct sequel to the original base game storyline.

Based on everything that I've seen so far, Solstice certainly looks like one of the most interesting environments in The Elder Scrolls Online to date. It has a unique tropical aesthetic, with bright sunny beached and palm trees.

This is contrasted by majestic, fantastical High Elf architecture and more tribal Argonian buildings in the main city of Sunport - which has a unique blend of the two cultures.

On your first visit to the island, you're introduced to the setting and tasked with liberating the city from the Worm Cult - a returning faction of necromancers that is attempting to control the island in order to harvest the souls of unlucky citizens.

Plenty of well-known characters from across the last decade of The Elder Scrolls Online will return including Razum-Dar, Skordo, Vanus Galerion, and Gabrielle.

As part of the next update, a new 12-person trial, Ossein Cage, is also being added which sees players tasked with destroying a massive, powerful Daedric relic that feeds on pain and suffering.

This is only the beginning, however, as more content (including a gigantic, server-wide live event) will be revealed and released as the year goes on.

Even more possibilities

One of the biggest new additions, coming to all players, is a brand new subclassing system. This will let you use Skill Lines from other classes, without needing to create a new character of that specific class.

It's unlocked as an account-wide ability at level 50, letting you add and remove Skill Lines freely. According to the developers, this takes the seven possible classes on offer and transforms them with more than 3,000 unique possible combinations.

As someone who has stuck with the exact same character since day one, this seems like an absolute blessing and will open up so many more exciting ways to customize my build and experiment with new powers and abilities.

This year's premium content will be released as part of a new content pass format. Those who purchase now will be able to play a new Fallen Banner dungeon pack, then dive into Seasons of the Worm Cult Part 1 in June 2025. This will be followed by the server-wide event (titled Writhing Wall) in Q3 2025, then the second and final Seasons of the Worm Cult Part 2 in Q4 2025. You will also get your hands on a bonus mount, pet, and memento when you purchase the pass.

The Seasons of the Worm Cult prologue quest is available right now, giving you an early taste of the start of the story. While release timings are still subject to change, this is all pretty exciting stuff for me. I mainly play The Elder Scrolls Online for its exploration and story content, so having that delivered over multiple months rather than all at once should help maintain my interest.

If you're keen to give The Elder Scrolls Online a go, it's available now on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One.

For a limited time, you can also claim a free in-game pet to celebrate the 2025 Elder Scrolls Online Direct with the code 2025ESODirect.

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• The next Civilization 7 update is finally bringing back something I think should've been in the game from the start

• The chance to create an NPC in The Elder Scrolls 6 is up for grabs at a charity auction
• Bids currently start at $10,450
• The money raised will go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation

Have you ever wanted to be part of a video game? Well developer Bethesda Game Studios is offering one lucky gamer the chance to create an non-player character (NPC) in the massively anticipated The Elder Scrolls 6.

It's being offered as part of a charity auction, benefitting the Make-A-Wish Mid-Atlantic organization. The charity works to provide wish-granting experiences for children with critical illnesses, with the aim of giving hope to children, families, and communities in a challenging time.

The auction is ongoing, with lot #301 letting the winner "have the opportunity to work with the Bethesda Game Studios development team to create a character to appear as a video game NPC in The Elder Scrolls 6." It's an incredibly tempting proposition, letting you have a direct impact one what is easily going to be one of the biggest fantasy video games of the generation.

Bidding starts at $10,450, though I imagine that this will seem like a small price to pay for some seriously die-hard fans. The money from the winning big will go directly to Make-A-Wish, which is going to be something to feel pretty good about.

The Elder Scrolls 6 was first unveiled back in 2018, where a short teaser trailer was shown. We've heard very little about the game since, though information from Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition suggests that it will launch in 2026 at the earliest.

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Ever played Skyrim? I remember my first time playing the game on PlayStation 3, trudging up the mountain known as the Throat of the World to meet the Greybeards, a caste of ancient priests who dwell at the top. The long journey up the mountain reminded me of Lord of the Rings; epic fantasy, regardless of medium, always involves an inordinate amount of walking. As I pushed the joystick forward and commanded my character to walk, the Northern Lights danced in the sky of the digital landscape, and I wished I could do this walk for real.

Ten years later, someone has answered my prayers and found a way to get their 10,000 steps in while playing Skyrim, all without using one of the best under-desk treadmills to do the trick.

I first saw this via a video published 10 days ago by YouTuber ShakeMistake, who is able to use the pedometer on his Android phone as he walks in place to propel his character forward in the game. All modern phones have pedometer functions that use the phone’s internal gyroscope, just like the best fitness trackers. ShakeMistake's footage shows him walking in place in his gaming studio, and the character onscreen moves forward as he does so.

A handheld trackball mouse is used to pivot, turn and take actions, but you could use another controller to do this. It’s very Ready Player One, in which the characters playing the virtual reality game use an omni-directional treadmill to move around the virtual environment.

He has done this in in two ways: a cheaper, easier, less immersive solution, and one that’s more complex to set up, but more sophisticated and rewarding to play. The first is a purpose-built app called StepL, which you download on your phone and on your PC. The apps match with a QR code made available during setup, and using the desktop app, it’ll map your W key to your phone’s pedometer.

The second uses another gamepad mapper called reWASD in combination with StepL. You can check out ShakeMistake’s full methodology in the video below.

Analysis: levelling up your cozy cardio

When on long nature walks, hikes or trail runs, I’m one of those huge nerds who’ll occasionally listen to fantasy soundtracks to really make me feel as though I’m travelling across Middle-Earth, Tamriel or The Continent. I’m certainly not the only one: videos with titles like “Ambient Walking Tour in the Hogwarts Castle” have garnered millions of views online.

If we advocate for people to use under-desk treadmills and walkpads to get your steps in during work, and watching Netflix, why not do it for gaming? I’m a firm believer in removing barriers to fitness, and not letting perfect become the enemy of good. You might not be going to the gym or signing up for an endurance race, but if you do 1,000 more steps than you did yesterday, that’s a win in my book.

If you’re a big gamer, consider looking at ways to map your phone’s pedometer to your 'walk' button to create an accessible entry point to fitness in general, and walking in particular. There’s no better place to start your fitness journey than walking across a fantasy land on your way to slay a dragon…

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Todd Howard has said that Bethesda Game Studios is currently focused on finding ways to increase its output. 

After releasing Starfield in September, Bethesda is now at work developing The Elder Scrolls 6. The role-playing game was announced back in 2018 and even though the development team has reportedly been "playing early builds", there's still no release date, reinforcing the idea that we won't be seeing the studio's next major title for a good few years at least.

During a recent interview with Kinda Funny Games, when asked about the timeline of Howard's work at Bethesda and what he still wants to achieve, the developer explained that he loves making games and that if he wasn't creating them, he'd be playing them. 

Howard also touched on the development to release period for Bethesda games, and currently looking for ways to shorten long wait times.

"You know, they do take a long time, and so I think one of the things we’re focused on here is obviously making sure they’re of the highest quality," Howard said, "but also finding ways to increase our output, because we don’t want to wait that long either, right. It’s never our plan, but we want to make sure we get it right."

"My hope is to do it as long as possible. I have no plans to retire or anything like that."

Howard has previously hinted that Bethesda is making plans for another Fallout game, which in theory would arrive after the release of The Elder Scrolls 6. The developer stated last year that he would've announced the next Elder Scrolls "more casually" when asked if he regrets announcing the game so early.

Elsewhere in the same discussion, Howard has revealed that Starfield's first post-launch expansion Shattered Space will launch later this year.

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As The Elder Scrolls series celebrates its 30th anniversary, Bethesda Game Studios has provided an update on the development of The Elder Scrolls 6.

In a celebration post shared to X (formerly Twitter) on March 25, Bethesda began by sharing a statement dedicated to The Elder Scrolls: Arena, which launched the series in 1994. The studio went on to discuss its significance, as well as how much the series has grown to include more titles over the years, including Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and perhaps its most popular, Skyrim.

The company also touched on The Elder Scrolls Online, which is also celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, before noting that it has "other exciting projects underway as well" including The Elder Scrolls: Castles on mobile, which is described as a "unique take on a castle builder where you control your own dynasty."

Perhaps the most notable detail in the post was Bethesda's small update on the development of The Elder Scrolls 6, the next mainline game in the series, as it has confirmed that it now has playable builds.

“Last but not least, yes, we are in development on the next chapter - The Elder Scrolls 6,” Bethesda wrote. “Even now, returning to Tamriel and playing early builds has us filled with the same joy, excitement, and promise of adventure.

“Thank you again for supporting us all these decades, and all you have brought to the games, making them your own. We couldn’t be more excited to continue it and celebrate the next 30 years.”

Aside from this small teaser, the studio didn't offer any more details on the progress it's made since announcing the game in 2018. After six years, we still don't have a release date, however, it was reported in September that the game is expected to launch in 2026 or later. 

Game director Todd Howard also explained last year that he wants The Elder Scrolls 6 to be the "ultimate fantasy-world simulator" and even implied that Bethesda may have revealed the next major title too soon. 

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Chris Avellone, one of the writers for Fallout New Vegas, has confirmed that the game's developer had a pitch for an Elder Scrolls game turned down by Bethesda.

A report from 80 Level dug up an old Twitter thread in which Avellone stated Fallout New Vegas's developer, Obsidian Entertainment, asked Bethesda "repeatedly" to work on more Elder Scrolls and Fallout spin-offs, all of which were rejected. Now, Avellone has taken to Twitter again to confirm: "This is true."

"One of the Elder Scrolls proposals (which I pitched)," says Avellone, "was intended to serve the same function as FNV did between F3 and F4, to provide more adventures in the setting during the years before the next Bethesda release."

Avellone states that the purpose of this strategy was to provide a similar content release schedule, at the time, to that of Call of Duty, with Infinity Ward and Treyarch swapping over each year. Though Avellone adds he had hoped the swapping between Obsidian and Bethesda would feel "less rushed."

Avellone ends the thread by saying the pitch for an Obsidian-developed Elder Scrolls title "didn't gain much traction," adding that he "never got the impression Bethesda was happy with FNV's reception (good and bad)."

Fallout New Vegas was released in 2010 for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. It was worked on by many of the original two Fallout games' staff and was received extremely positively by fans thanks to its earnest focus on storytelling and role-playing. It also had several quality-of-life features implemented over Fallout 3 including true iron sights, more meaningful perks, weapon modding, and a built-in optional survival mode.

While it's a shame we never got any more Fallout or Elder Scrolls titles from Obsidian, the developer's recent run of form has sat well with fans and critics alike, with The Outer Worlds and Pentiment enjoying positive reception. In 2024, Obsidian will release Avowed, its take on the Elder Scrolls formula set in the Pillars of Eternity universe.

For more excellent titles like Fallout New Vegas, consider checking out our guide to the best RPGs you can play this right now.

Skyrim Special Edition's latest update has rehashed one of the game's most controversial features from its past in the form of Creations.

Bethesda Game Studios announced the new platform via Twitter, stating that Creations "provides an updated way for players to discover, download and play community-made and official content." The adjacent blog post detailing Creations goes into more detail and offers some examples of featured Creations for players to try.

The post elaborates that modders can apply to be part of the Verified Creator Program, which will allow them to "set prices for their Creations." While players can still elect to upload Creations free of charge - and the Creation Club feature and its currency will continue to exist - Creations is offering a more up-to-date way for creators to earn revenue in Skyrim Special Edition.

What's important to note is that Creations seem rather more complex than those featured in 2017's controversial Creation Club. Back then, the additions Bethesda was charging for were extremely simple affairs; often very straightforward quests with none of the versatility or intrigue brought by modders for over a decade. Creations, by comparison, seem to be offering more substantial additions including graphical updates, voiced followers, and the like.

That being said, the update hasn't exactly gone down well on social media. In the replies to the official Twitter post, many are shaking their heads at the return to the concept of paid mods. Others are rightly worried about the possibility of popular (arguably essential) free mods being locked behind a paywall.

Hopefully, Creations won't prove to be overly intrusive for Skyrim Special Edition. Websites hosting free mods, like Nexus Mods, will continue to exist, as will support for mod hosting and downloads on console. Here's hoping, then, that Creations simply offers one avenue of accessing fan-made content rather than becoming the new norm.

If you enjoy Skyrim, you may be interested in the list we have over at our best RPGs page. Alternatively, our best Steam games guide details fantastic recommendations for PC titles both big and small.

Experience Points is a fortnightly chat with people in and around the games industry to talk about the most important games in their lives, whether that’s working on them, being inspired by them, or just playing them.

Everyone's journey into gaming and games is different; maybe you fell in love with the translucent Game Boy color, or you enjoyed spending Saturdays on the family PC playing Team Fortress 2. However, a great deal of people found their way into games thanks to Gary Gygax’s tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).

“Growing up, I was the Dungeon Master for five other boys for years. I was a big deal geek. It was awesome because it taught me a lot about games, and it sort of set me on this path”, founder of Something Wicked Games, Jeff Gardiner, says. “If I ever give an award speech, I'm going to have to thank Gary Gygax, because if it weren't for him, I probably wouldn't be doing this.”

Gardiner found that opportunities to cultivate exciting stories from a young age, like those offered in D&D, drew him into the boundless world of games. After going to college to study creative writing, Gardiner spent his time bartending and eventually working on the shoe company Vans’ first website, before deciding to change paths and get a Master's degree in computer science and website building. However, to do so, he realized he had to own a computer - something he didn’t yet have. So, without wasting any time, Gardiner bought a computer from a local shop called Fry’s Electronics. However, this wasn’t all he bought: “Of course, the first thing I did was buy a game, Baldur’s Gate 2,” Gardiner admits.  

Baldur’s Gate 2

After purchasing Baldur’s Gate 2 and his brand new computer, Gardiner decided to take a break from his studies and live what many gamers would consider a dream. “For a week, I would wake up in the morning, order two Domino's pizzas and just play Baldur’s Gate 2 all day,” Gardiner says. “I did this for nine days straight.” Sounds pretty good to me. 

Over the course of nine days, the deep narrative and personal connections made in BioWare’s RPG, in particular, fascinated Gardiner. A different level of detail and agency comes with playing Baldur's Gate 2; the decisions you make can be detailed and have various intriguing repercussions on the story progression and the NPCs you’ll encounter. Those of you who have played the newest entry, Baldur's Gate 3, will know this well.

Even after 20 years, Gardiner still thinks about the stories in Baldur's Gate 2 and the manpower and creativity behind it. “Creativity is such an amazing skill that human beings have; imagination and creativity can transport people like nothing else.”

There’s also so much more to enjoy with 11 playable classes, dozens of subclasses, player voice lines to customize your character with, and the standard Shadows of Amn adventure plus an expansion, Throne of Bhaal. You can have endless fun and adventures with Baldur's Gate 2. These adventures don’t stop when you turn off your computer either; many of them will live on in your memory and imagination well after you move on to the next game. “It's funny to this day, I wonder why I love pizza so much, and it finally dawned on me that it’s because every Friday night when I’d play D&D, I would have freaking pizza.”  

Populous 

At first inspection, Populous and Baldur’s Gate 2 have nothing in common; one’s a D&D-inspired RPG, and the other is a complex God game - an artificial life game in which the player influences things on a large scale. Interestingly enough, instead of directly controlling the AI civilization in the game, you influence their decisions by doing godly acts such as spawning volcanoes or introducing plagues. 

One memorable experience Gardiner had while playing Populous was desperately trying to look after his civilization without causing complete destruction. “To build land, you had to expand volcanoes - 'Oh, they're starving, they don't have enough crops, and I need more earth',” Gardiner explains. “The only way to make the earth is to spawn volcanoes, so you try to find a place on the map where you're not killing them.” It turns out that not smothering your people in volcanic ash and lava is more challenging than you’d expect. 

However, Populous isn’t just a volcano simulator; there are some intriguing RPG elements as well. “I like what Peter Molyneux did with the RPG genre at the time, and he put a lot of very unbelievably cool mechanics in that game, him and his team, I should say.” Instead of the story being a straightforward role-playing game, it’s more mature and complex than that. “You're experiencing a story that you can sort of influence, but you're not in. The goal of Populous isn't really to win; it's to sort of see what happens.” 

Red Dead Redemption 

If you’re as big of a fan of gripping storytelling as Gardiner is, then you’ll probably agree that when it comes to an engaging narrative, Red Dead Redemption has one of the best. 

You play as John Marston, a former outlaw whose wife and children are taken by the government and used as leverage to ensure Marston is used as a hired gun. With no other option, Marston is forced to bring three members of his former gang to justice. 

“In Red Dead, there are not a lot of choices; they all lead you to the same outcome, which allows the game creators to make a really well-crafted story because you only have to account for all these little decisions. It’s well worth it though when you get to the penultimate scene”, Gardiner says.  

That penultimate scene sees John Marston in a barn on his farmstead surrounded by U.S. Army Marshalls, having just helped your family escape. John stays behind to face each and every one of the Marshalls. As the scene draws on, you unload your barrel into the oncoming enemies, only to realize it’s all futile. “You start dry clicking, and your character starts getting hit with bullets, and you die. I was shocked,” Gardiner explains. “I get chills just thinking about it. I know it sounds strange because it's a video game, but I’m actually getting chills right now. I couldn't believe that after playing a character for 50 hours, you die and then come back as his son to go on the warpath.” This brilliant storytelling that Rockstar Games executed is something that Gardiner still thinks about to this day.

“Rockstar Games is fantastic. My biggest fear when I worked at Bethesda Game Studios was that Rockstar was going to decide to do a fantasy version of their game. We'd be trumped,” Gardiner admits. “I don't want to offend anybody, but man, put a sword in their hands and a horse, and that’s it. They can just do these details in games that are astounding.” 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 

Luckily, in the early-to-mid 2010s, Rockstar never made a trip into the fantasy world. Instead, Bethesda had a relatively free run at the genre. Spending more than 10 years working at Bethesda, Gardiner worked on some brilliant games, including The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76. However, only one of those has made his list of best games, and that, perhaps unexpectedly, is The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. 

“There's something so magical about Skyrim,” Gardiner points out. “I love Fallout. I worked on it for almost 10 years, but there's something about Skyrim. We were still small enough to really put in some amazing custom content, which was amazing.” 

Looking back, Gardiner has tons of fond stories about his time working on Skyrim. There’s the ant story, in which a colleague not only decided to add thousands of ants into the RPG so players could experience realistic forests but subsequently added realistic shadows to each of them. This caused a mass of game-breaking outcomes, with no one being able to figure out why Skyrim wasn’t running correctly. Luckily, the team eventually found these destructive ants and put them to bed. “When you're talking about 12-year-old tech, you [have] to be very careful with shadow casting 1000s of ants that you couldn't even see,” Gardiner says.

There’s also the time when developers decided they wanted to add butterflies into Skyrim. These would flutter around and follow players who had flowers in their inventory. While it may seem like a lot of work, it was worth it in Gardiner’s eyes. “That's why I chose Skyrim. It's not about the end result of it being this amazing 60 million-unit-selling game,” Gardiner admits. “It's more about the memories I have of the cool things that folks were allowed to do in that game. Sometimes we had horrible game-breaking outcomes, but oftentimes, you either learn from them or end up with some really cool outcomes.” 

The story continues 

This creative freedom that Gardiner experienced while working on Skyrim is something that he has prioritized at Something Wicked Games, his new studio, and in the creation of the upcoming RPG Wyrdsong, set in Portugal and revolving around the mythos of the Knights Templar. “I wanted to create a safe space for creatives; that was my number one goal,” Gardiner says. “You do that by establishing trust, by allowing people to fail and not feel like they did something wrong, by people feeling comfortable throwing a terrible idea in the room, without any bad repercussions.” 

One idea that was allowed to blossom thanks to the supportive environment over at Something Wicked Games was the one that involved heating swords. While this may sound strange, the team working at Wyrdsong realized that players would fight numerous fiery enemies with an iron sword. So instead of simply adding blood splatter, the team wanted something more realistic and added sparks and flames, as well as a feature that allowed the sword to get hotter, which then meant players could build up fire attacks to use on other opponents. 

It’s these small moments that Gardiner is most looking forward to seeing fully realized in the Wyrdsong. “I just want the devs to have as much fun as possible,” Gardiner concludes. “I want to go to my nursing home knowing that I helped other people's careers. I want to leave the people who come into my life a little better off; that's my goal.” 

While we still have a while to wait until we get any more solid information about Wyrdsong, it’s safe to say that when it comes to storytelling and creative freedom, it's safe in the hands of Jeff Gardiner and Something Wicked Games. 

Check out our list of best story games for even more fantastic titles, and if you've already played them, why not take a look at our best indie games list for some unknown gems? 

Redemption - Reawakened is an ambitious mod project destined to recreate the first Vampire: The Masquerade game 23 years after its release. Although updates on the project have felt relatively few and far between, its most recent update shows an entirely new look for Skyrim. 

Set in Medieval Prague, the newest video update for the project walks you through the city, including a look at the exterior and interior of St. Vitus Cathedral, and a walk around the grounds to see twisted, muddy streets that you’d expect from a medieval city. We cross paths with a few NPCs and experience some of the voice-acting the mod will offer. The full video exploring Prague during the day, alongside a walk through the Silver Mines, can be seen below:

In addition to this, we also get a first look at the mines, which players with a keen eye will recognize the familiar layout of. After all, this is a mod for Skyrim rather than a remake of the original game, but that doesn’t mean they won’t still be fun to trek around. 

Menus and loading screens have been completely overhauled too, alongside weapons and armor to help add to the immersion of the title. However, despite completely altering the game's appearance, there’s still a certain Skyrim edge that can’t be shaken - and this isn’t necessarily bad. Classic Skyrim hack-and-slash combat takes place over the traditional Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption combat, which helps make the experience more streamlined and engaging. 

Although we don’t have a release date for this mod yet, and the project is very much still a work in progress, the best way to keep up to date with any exciting updates is to keep an eye on Galejro's YouTube and Twitter pages. 

If you want to sink into a new adventure before this mod releases, you might want to turn your attention to the best RPGs. However, the best single-player games might also be of interest, alongside the best story games for a more narrative-driven adventure. 

Whenever the next big Bethesda Game Studios title comes around, we have double the reason to board the Hype locomotive all the way to Impossibly High Expectation Central. Because not only do we get a vast RPG that’s rich in environments, lore, NPC stories and incidental details, we also get a modding platform to bend and twist the aforementioned RPG into whatever demented vision we can imagine. (If you’ve forgotten what I mean, allow me to jog your memory.)

Todd Howard has confirmed that Starfield will have full mod support well ahead of launch, which means all of the above holds true for BGS’ upcoming game - it’ll probably be absolutely brilliant, and then it’ll probably spawn an absolutely brilliant modding scene that’ll give us years of strange, beautiful, and inevitably, weirdly sexualised experiences. 

But there’s also reason for caution. Because for all the incredible additions it spawned, goodness gracious, Skyrim has been an absolute nightmare for content creators and mod users alike. It was never supposed to live this long. It was never supposed to run on our smart toasters. And as a result of that unnatural lifespan brought about through constant re-releases, Skyrim has inadvertently made vast, vast swathes of UGC incompatible and redundant several times over. 

Here, then, are the lessons both we and Bethesda must absolutely learn from Skyrim in order to ensure a better platform for Starfield. 

1. No ‘special’ editions that create mod incompatibilities 

I think most of us know what I’m referring to here. Bethesda released a Special Edition of Skyrim in 2016, five years after its original launch. The intention was to upgrade the visual fidelity of the game for users on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Ooh look! Volumetric lighting! Slightly better snow! That looks cool. 

But there was a significant maggot in the sweetroll - Skyrim: Special Edition looked better than five-year-old original Skyrim, certainly. But modded original Skyrim made Skyrim: SE look like Ape Escape.

It got worse. Skyrim modding is a precarious house of cards. It’s propped up with SKSE, a script extender that allows for a multitude of features beyond the scope of the vanilla release. Most mods that modify NPC behaviour, spells or combat use SKSE in some form. So if SKSE stops being able to talk to the Skyrim .exe, it’s bad news. 

So when Skyrim: SE arrived in late 2016 and resolutely didn’t work with SKSE, it meant that a very significant swathe of the modding content that users had been building up for half a decade was now incompatible with the latest version of the game. Not an issue for console players who hadn’t been faffing about with these kind of mods in the first place and were instead bound by workshop/store content, but for PC players at the time it felt like a disaster. 

The community adapted, though. Modders found a way to convert their original mods to SE, and although it took a lot of work at first, by 2017 it was pretty straightforward to do. And by that time most modders had made the jump over to SE in order to make use of its new visual effects. 

And then Bethesda did the exact same thing all over again. 

Except this time, when Skyrim: Anniversary Edition released in 2021, 10 years after the original launched, it worked like an update to Skyrim SE on Steam instead of a separate SKU. In other words, unless you had auto updates turned off, this new version of the game installed itself over your fastidiously modded Skyrim SE install and rendered all your mods useless again. 

Again the fist-shaking. Again the mass update project. Those poor people who develop SKSE.

The lesson’s very simple: PC players and console players are not to be treated as one homogenous consumer blob. We have very different needs, particularly when it comes to how our games are updated and how new editions are delivered. 

Starfield is likely to be a stratospherically popular game. Popular enough to warrant Special Editions and remasters down the line, just like it’s dragon-thwacking ancestor. Bethesda can and will drop new content for it. But it needs to deliver it with the needs of PC players at the front of its mind. Don’t do this to us again Bethesda, please. I’ve only just got the enormous anime jiggling boob physics working again. 

2. Don’t release DLC that a mod already does better 

Nothing against Skyrim’s Hearthfire mod, but just like the above point, it only really met a need among console players. Over on PC, we’d been lording it about in preposterous 50-room mansions with armour display cabinets and jacuzzis since not long after launch. Heck, we’d been downloading player home mods as far back as 2006, for Oblivion. The last thing we needed in a paid expansion pack was the ability to build one single player home.

In Starfield, it’ll likely be spaceships and the customisable elements within them where modders place their focus. Right now at this proximity to launch that feels like a really important part of the game. You’re flying around a thousand different planets, a brain-melting amount of real estate, and your ship is likely to provide one of the only constants in the game, one of a few precious elements that make this all feel like one connected adventure. Your adventure.

So it’s going to be a natural point of emphasis for modders. Now if a paid expansion releases post-launch that adds in some ships, or ship customisation elements that pale in comparison to the volume and quality the modding community has already generated up to that point, it’ll be a bad look and another clear lesson from Skyrim ignored.  

3. Use the modding scene as a gauge for what players actually want in expansions and DLC 

An extension of the above point, and an opportunity for Bethesda to better attune to its community: look at what modders are actually making, and the content that’s proving most popular among players. Then use that data to guide the direction of post-launch content. 

And no, that’s not a direct contradiction of point 2, I promise. 

Here’s an example: in vanilla Skyrim, certain modding directions were nigh impossible. Deeper NPC interactions, smarter AI, better animations, more detailed physics. The community did devise solutions to most, if not all, these areas eventually, but they had to Heath Robinson their solutions, performing the code equivalent of slapping a bunch of electrical tape over the problem. Had Bethesda come forward and expanded the game’s creation tools in those areas themselves, we might have seen a very different Skyrim modding scene. 

Starfield shows signs that it’s taken direct influence from Skyrim’s modders. Player companions have a much deeper system to them, it appears, than was the case in vanilla Skyrim. So when Starfield releases, Howard and co can really take the temperature of the community and expand the game’s modding functionality - rather than simply the content - in the directions that creators really need. 

4. No paid mods, please 

Remember paid mods in Skyrim? It was based around implementing a pay-what-you-want model to creator content on Steam Workshop, whereby the money was split between creators, Valve, and Bethesda. It didn’t work. 

There are all kinds of reasons it didn’t work. Modding is incredibly collaborative and iterative. To get one single mod to work there’s a string of contingencies that you also need installed. Modders build on each others’ work. That’s just how it works. Often it happens simply by asking for permission or giving credit. But when money starts getting involved, that system doesn’t work as well, as Skyrim’s paid mods showed. Copyright disputes were raised, mods were pulled from the store, and players who’d paid for content were left without it. 

Modders deserve compensation for their work, but there are existing crowdfunding channels that allow for that. Paywalling the content just doesn’t work, and in the case of Skyrim’s paid mods in 2015, it created a huge fan backlash and plenty of infighting between modders. 

Starfield is on our radar of upcoming games worth keeping an eye on, but if you're looking for more titles to enjoy prior to its release, it's worth checking out our list of best RPGs, or our list of best free games if you're looking for something cheaper to pass the time. 

Players are seeing a severe increase in M-rated Skyrim mods that are using AI-generated voices based on real voice actors. 

Recently, the Skyrim modding community has been plagued by AI voice generators using voice actors without their consent. Now many of the actors have come out decrying the practice of cloning performances without consent, especially for pornographic purposes. 

AI-generated voice acting has become more prevalent thanks to the new AI tool ElevenLabs. It slowly gathered momentum through 2022 among Skyrim modders, with Nexus Mods officially stating that "AI-generated mod content is not against our rules", which added further controversy to the AI debate. 

The lengthy Twitter post argues that "voice actors are being abused by the modding communities", user Robbie92_ said. "I am a deeply concerned member of the mod community for The Elder Scrolls series of games". 

Robbie lists the names of voice actors who have lent their talents to The Elder Scrolls series of games and have subsequently been impersonated by AI voice cloning to create pornographic content. 

Luckily, players can do a few things right now to try and alleviate this problem. These problematic game mods are being hosted on the Nexus mods website, so Robbie points users towards contacting the host website to voice complaints and "demand the removal of works containing your voices used for deep fake pornographic content". 

The site does, in fact, have a DMCA form for players to use if they find a project using content inappropriately or illegally. However, it is unclear how effective using this approach is. 

Voice actor Zane Schacht weighed in on the controversy tweeting that AI voices are "fucking gross" just in principle. "The act of taking an actor's voice without their consent and making it say anything, ESPECIALLY NSFW content, is fucking heinous."

News like this is hard to digest, especially when there are so many terrific Skyrim mods available. While there may not be an easy fix, thanks to the almost infinite number of mods, hopefully, with help from the community, we can all make a change to this horrid practice.

For more coverage, check out our pages for Prime Day gaming deals 2023 and Prime Day gaming chair deals.

For many years now, RPG fans have been keeping patient vigil over a particularly special project in development. The road’s been long, and the setbacks have been many. But over the last few years, the dedicated fanbase has been treated to a few official announcements. And now, it appears, there’s at least an end in sight to it all. 

Whether that end arrives before The Elder Scrolls 6 is released is anyone’s guess. 

Skyblivion is not to be confused with Skywind (an amateur modding project aiming to port Morrowind into the Skyrim engine), Morroblivion (Morrowind into Oblivion), nor Unrake (a project porting Unreal Tournament’s guns into Quake 3 Arena that I just made up). It’s the gorgeous, loveably janky world of Cyrodiil, complete with the questlines, armor items, and NPCs that have all etched themselves into your interior life forever, ported over to Skyrim.

Yes, the Skyrim that came out 12 years ago. The proposition’s changed a bit since the project first got underway, in the wake of Bethesda’s juggernaut release. It’s no longer about playing an old classic in the latest bleeding-edge engine. It’s become something more akin to playing one old classic in the engine of another. But that’s absolutely fine. 

 Agony and SKSE 

The thrill of seeing an old, forgotten land, like Oblivion’s Cyrodiil, archived and renovated so artfully is still present, even after all these years. Take a look for yourself at the modders’ recent livestream and tell me you don’t have the urge to go running off into the horizon, to uncover some Skooma smuggling plot, or fall into a watercolor painting. 

That livestream demo cannily begins opposite the first Ayelid Ruin you catch sight of in Oblivion. The one just beyond the water from the famous tunnel you walk out of and into the freedom of Cyrodiil’s open-world map. There are few sights that better capture what made Oblivion so special. 

And while you might quite convincingly make the argument that if Oblivion was so good you should just go back and play that for the fully authentic and nostalgic experience, the benefits of Skyblivion are obvious. 

I played the original Oblivion recently, and it’s certainly untouchable for nostalgia, but there are also a few things our rose-tinted 2006 vision has glossed over. Things that we thought were there from the start, but which, in reality, we added in afterwards in mods, or weren’t actually implemented until Skyrim. It’s a surprisingly long list that covers features like player homes (mods), underwater combat (Skyrim), and a manageable inventory screen (mods for Skyrim). The team behind Skyblivion, TESRenewal Modding Group, wants to subtly add in all that stuff that we now consider central to the fundamental Elder Scrolls experience without losing the essence of Bethesda’s original. Based on everything it’s shown so far, the group seems to be pitching that balance expertly.  

The Fall Forest, for example, was a relatively small area along the orange road in the original map of Cyrodiil. Players remember it well because the autumnal leaves created a distinctive biome in what was otherwise a pretty ubiquitously green world. The modders acknowledge the Fall Forest’s popularity, so it’s rebuilding the area completely from scratch.

But the team is not just replicating it, stone for stone, leaf for leaf. It has decided to expand it and employ some artistic license, adhering to the spirit of the original rather than the letter of it. It’s the same for the Gold Coast, which was in fact, like everywhere else in Oblivion, green. Skyblivion’s version is once again completely redesigned and now lives up to its name thanks to a subtle shift in the shades of flora in that region. Nobody’s precious memories are going to be upturned and spat on by creative changes like this – it feels more like a heightened version of what we recall.

And that philosophy has often led to the best regarded of the games industry’s glut of remakes and remasters. Like-for-like texture upscale jobs have their place, but Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s complete reimagining of what was once more or less an isometric turn-based RPG on PS1 has captured the imaginations of a whole new generation of gamers. It still feels completely connected to the original, even though literally everything you’re seeing and doing is completely different.

Sky's the limit

For the virtual renovator, the real knack is in knowing where the essence of a game lies. Is it the soundtrack, or the character models? Is the control scheme sacrosanct, and would the experience be better if there was a change of camera perspective or a jump button added? I can’t articulate the essence of Oblivion any better than Skyblivion manages in every frame of pre-release footage; the team behind it just seems to telepathically know what each of us in the game’s enormous fanbase holds dear. It knows what to lean into, what to cut back, and what to completely overhaul. 

In some cases, that’s informed by Bethesda Game Studios’ original ideas. Skyblivion’s version of Leyawiin, on the south coast, differs from the original and instead uses original concept art and sketches from the dev team to flesh out a new vision of the city. It’s what the creators imagined the city might be like, before harsh realities like time and budget had their say. 

Skyblivion’s a modern rarity for its approach. This isn’t an Early Access release that’s been left to languish in functional but unfinished form, though its audience is sufficient for TESRenewal Modding Group to have done so. It’s not gated behind a Kickstarter with an ever-expanding goal. Its small team of amateur developers have been balancing the task of rebuilding a massive open world with their day jobs and many other responsibilities, and these modders are taking their time until it’s completed.

Which, by the way, will be no later than 2025.

That’s according to the latest major update, which explained that the ETA may move forwards depending on how quickly progress is made, but not back. So now there’s a race on, and one that Skyblivion will probably win – which will arrive first, this bedroom coding magnum opus or the next full-blooded Elder Scrolls game?

Bethesda hasn’t given any solid info on The Elder Scrolls 6 beyond an announcement trailer in 2018 which told us precisely nothing. There’ll be land and sea. It’s the sixth Elder Scrolls game. That’s it. Bethesda’s game director, Todd Howard, has gone into a little bit more detail on the studio’s internal timelines, only as far as to clarify that Starfield will be the studio’s focus until it ships. And Starfield, as we know, has been delayed into 2023. In 2018 it left pre-production, where it had been since Fallout 4 shipped in 2015, and entered full development, soon coming together into a playable state that same year. Given those timelines, The Elder Scrolls 6 is extremely unlikely to release a mere two years after Starfield. 

Which is just as well for Skyblivion. It’d be a shame for such an incredibly dedicated team to see its work overshadowed by a new mainline game. And besides, they’ll want at least a little break before they start on Skyscrolls 6.  

• The Elder Scrolls Oblivion fan remake release window revealed by shirtless demon

Great news for Elder Scrolls fans: Skyblivion, an ambitious fan-made recreation of Oblivion within Skyrim’s engine, has finally been given a release window after years of development updates. Skyblivion is an attempt to rebuild the entirety of Skyrim’s predecessor in a modern engine. 

Skyblivion’s latest trailer reveals that the project, that’s been in development since 2017, is now due for release in 2025. Though still some way away, it’s reassuring that the mod has a confirmed release window. At this rate, Skyblivion may well be out before Elder Scrolls 6. 

The sunny horizons of the RPG’s setting, Cyrodiil, make for a welcome change from Skyrim’s harsh, wintery vistas. The trailer also treats us to all sorts of goodies, such as footage of the neo-classical imperial capital, the dominating palace tower that sits in its center, and glimpses of the sinister assassin’s guild, the Dark Brotherhood. In the video's closing moments, we even get a look at the Daedric Prince Mehrunes Dagon, Oblivion’s final boss. As terrifying as he might be, this demonic colossus should really consider putting on a shirt.   

 Beyond the gate 

As you might expect, recreating the entirety of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion within Skyrim is no mean feat. As the mod’s official website puts it: “making games takes time, [and] this goes double for a volunteer project the size of a AAA game that took a team of fulltime devs years to make.” 

Skyblivion’s development diaries confirm the astronomical work these dedicated fans-turned-developers have put into the project. All of Oblivion’s original 3D assets had to be remade, along with every single environment in what is a huge map. Though released in 2006, Oblivion is a game of tremendous scope, bursting with content. 

Skyblivion is part of a group of volunteer projects entitled: The Elder Scrolls Renewal. A group that aims to recreate all of the major, recent Elder Scrolls games with Bethesda’s modern tools. As well as Skyblivion, TES Renewal hosts the Morroblivion and Skywind projects, mods that bring Morrowind into the Oblivion engine and Morrowind into the Skyrim engine, respectively. Clearly, The Elder Scrolls Renewal projects participants have a lot on their plates.  

Oblivion holds a special place in my heart. The game dropped around my 13th birthday, I’d just started at a new school and life was pretty scary. Enter: Bethesda’s brand new open-world RPG. The tutorial’s opening dungeon crawl hooked me deep. I played the game relentlessly, spending hundreds of hours in Cyrodiil. I joined the Fighter’s Guild, explored long-lost ruins, and, eventually, saved the world. 

Oblivion was far from perfect. The voice acting was notoriously hit and miss, and the overlapping systems that made up the RPG’s open world often led to goofy shenanigans. Still, I feel there’s a certain charm to Cyrodiil that’s worth immortalizing. 

Oblivion was a magical game that set the bar for modern open-world experiences and welcomed a whole new generation of players to RPGs. The prospect of seeing Oblivion’s world realized with modern graphics has me counting down the days on my Elder Scrolls-themed almanac until 2025. 

• If you can't wait until 2025, you can play some of the older Elder Scrolls game for free.

You don’t need to spend lashings of cash on a brand-new game when excellent community mods exist. 

Released in 2011, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim still holds up today as one of the best RPGs ever. It has all the core trappings of a fantasy epic: colossal dragons, slick swashbuckling, and a lot of yelling. But even though Skyrim is over a decade old now, there’s still new life to be breathed into it yet.

Warden Of The Coast is a huge DLC-sized creation from modder TheBawb, adding up to 15 hours of new missions, voice lines, companions, and five possible endings to one of Bethesda’s best-loved games.

Oh, and it’s free.

Shout at the devil

TheBawb has kitted out its Warden Of The Coast mod with everything you need to take the Dovah-Kiin on a brand-new adventure. At just 2.5GB, you’re getting a lot of content in a comparatively small space - especially considering how detailed this mod seems to get.

In the Warden of the Coast’s mod listing, TheBawb says it’s “heavily inspired by the game mechanics of Mass Effect and Dragon Age”, your mission is to halt the return of a malevolent Daedric lord with the help of your nine in-game companions. Each companion has their own unique questline to help build their loyalty to you, which should come in handy given the “three-companion exploration system”.

You’ll be able to check on your progress with each companion thanks to TheBawb’s companion regard system. It will be updated through dialogue, kills, and quest choices to give you an accurate bearing of where you stand with your partners. 

They seem to be fully-interactable members of your party, as you can revive them during combat and even level them up once your relationship is high enough.

As well as 9,000 brand new dialogue lines shared between 27 voice actors, you’ll be a lover as well as a fighter thanks to some new romance storylines - and you’ll even get to marry the beau of your choice in an upcoming patch. What’s more, the five possible outcomes will hinge on the choices that you make in the game, leaving plenty of room for replayability.

Storyline aside, Warden Of The Coast offers two brand new world spaces and 19 new interiors, giving it a fresh look that will shake up the world of Skyrim as you know it.

The only things you need to play Warden Of The Coast are your PC and a copy of Skyrim. It doesn’t use any unique assets from the special editions of the game, so you shouldn’t have any issues running it with the vanilla release.

As one of the most modded games ever, the Skyrim community has loads to look forward to if the talented modders keep the goods coming for incoming Bethesda games such as Starfield.

• Not into modding? Pick up one of the best PC games instead.

Beloved RPG Skyrim can now officially be considered old, as it hits PC gaming’s most popular storefront for classic games.

GOG (or Good Old Games) announced Skyrim would be coming to the platform celebrating the storefront’s 14th anniversary. Still one of the best RPGs around, Skyrim’s original release and its updated Anniversary Edition are available to buy all over again – both with hefty discounts.

“After many years and lots of requests from our users, Skyrim, the fifth installment of The Elder Scrolls franchise, is live on GOG,” the platform said in a press release.

Old folks scrolls

As is usual with games sold on GOG, its versions of Skyrim will be DRM-free. You can install the game on as many systems as you want, don’t need to be online to play, and don’t even need to be logged into your GOG account to boot it up once it’s installed. You won’t be required to log into the game’s Creation Club, either – an add-on platform that lets you buy Bethesda-curated mods.

Owing to Skyrim’s huge popularity among modders, GOG’s version of the RPG will be “compatible out of the box with most modifications” on Nexus Mods and support Skyrim Script Extender – a popular tool used by many mods for the game. GOG says it’s also preparing “something special to provide an even smoother modding experience”, for which we can “expect more details soon”.

Many modern triple-A and indie releases are listed on GOG, but the storefront specializes in older titles. Earlier this year, it said in a blog post that it wanted to refocus on retro games that hold a special place in players’ hearts. Skyrim’s addition to the platform shows its age, as it joins its predecessors in The Elder Scrolls series.

You can now find The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Anniversary Edition and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition on GOG. If you’re desperate to dip back into the world of Tamriel, you’re probably best taking Skyrim for another spin, since it’ll be years before The Elder Scrolls 6 launches. 

• Two of the best PS5 exclusives all but confirmed for PC thanks to leaks

They are ubiquitous. From Demon’s Souls to Crash Bandicoot, to pretty much every game in the Resident Evil franchise, we are surrounded by video game ‘remakes’. I use inverted commas because the term rarely means the same thing twice.

The Last of Us Part 1 is more of a remaster. And the new Final Fantasy VII Remake games manage to be both sequels and reboots. Google gives us a useful definition: to “make (something) again or differently”. In the end, it’s the differences, however great or small, that are the raison d’etre of the remake; after all, to make a game again exactly the same, frame by frame, pixel by pixel, would be a strange venture indeed.

There are plenty of cynics out there who will claim that the primary purpose of remakes is to make money. However, I reached out to creators in the remake business who definitely aren’t in it to demand $70 for a game you’ve already played. They're the ones who began as fans, rather than copyright holders.

“Even though I played it after Skyrim, the storytelling of Morrowind absolutely captivated me,” says Kylie, one of the writers for Skywind, a remake of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind in the Skyrim engine. “There was this dichotomy – the story of the outlander and the story of Nerevar. They’re happening simultaneously, woven into each other.” It’s clear from the start of our chat that the team behind Skywind love the source material. 

“We think of Skywind as Morrowind in a current design context,” says Matt, another writer. “For example, we are doing voice acting for everything. Morrowind was written in an era when you didn’t have to worry about that. The NPCs give exposition dumps that don’t make sense; they’re not how a person would speak to you. So we’ve broken up the dialogue to make that feel more natural.” Context, then, is one of the important ‘differences’ a remake can tackle – bringing a game in line with the expectations of a new era.

Memory drain

One of the issues that worries me about remakes is the possibility of older titles being permanently replaced. Neil Druckmann has said of The Last of Us Part 1 that it’s the vision Naughty Dog had back in 2013 – but one the developer is only able to bring to fruition with today’s technology. If this is the case, I suspect it will keep happening. Perhaps, in 2030, The Last of Us will be remade (or remastered) again, replacing this year’s version, and eventually, we’ll have no memory of that flawed but beautiful PS3 game of 2013. 

The Skywind team, by contrast, doesn’t necessarily intend its project to replace the original Elder Scrolls 3. “Morrowind is an incredible game, and if we weren’t massive fans of it then we wouldn’t be spending our free time remaking it,” says community manager Egrets. “Once Skywind is out, there will then be two games that tell the story of Morrowind. Skywind is a retelling of Morrowind, but it doesn’t replace it.”

Like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Skywind is simply a new reading of a classic story by someone who loves the source material. “It’s my hope that Skywind will lead more people to go back and play the original game,” says Kylie. “That it’s an old game makes it challenging, but look at Elden Ring, the Souls games – more and more people are looking for a challenge.”

One of the biggest fan remakes on the market is Black Mesa, an unofficial rebuild of the original Half-Life using Source, the engine designed for Half-Life 2. It’s been a success story, with the folk at Valve among its fans. “Black Mesa is a love letter,” says Ben Truman, a designer at Crowbar Collective who has worked on the game for 17 years. “I’m fairly certain that everyone who worked on it considers Half-Life one of the greatest games of all time.” 

Ben found out about the project while enrolled in the Video Game Art & Design program at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh – a course he was studying primarily due to his love of Half-Life. “I quickly learned there were a handful of students with similar origin stories,” he says. “We all became collaborators on the project at some point, along with a very talented and passionate international team of developers.”

Like Skywind’s developers, Truman is keen that Black Mesa become a gateway game to the Half-Life series as a whole. “I would encourage any video game fan to try the original,” he says. “Black Mesa was never intended to replace it. We wanted to reimagine Half-Life with all of the new, groundbreaking features that the Source engine had to offer at the time. I love to hear that Black Mesa has been someone’s on-ramp into the world of Half-Life.”

Tomorrow wind

Perhaps this is the model we could follow for non-cynical remakes in the future: love letters, written with the intention of drawing more eyes back to a work of art. Morrowind and Half-Life are old games that might not appeal to everyone, but these new homages, that play like modern games, will hopefully ignite a flame in younger gamers – a desire to go back to find out where we’ve come from. 

One of my favorite fan-made remakes is DRL – Doom, the Roguelike. It's nothing like what the mainstream would perceive as a Doom remake; the graphics aren't triple-A, or even current gen. But this is precisely why it's so creative. Built by an indie team on a budget, it’s no improvement or replacement, but a tribute. A new perspective on a game that cannot be replaced.

The team at Skywind are looking for volunteers. So if you’re a developer or writer, or even a voice actor who loves The Elder Scrolls, give them a shout! 

• The most impressive PC mods ever made

Starfield has finally been revealed, and it looks like Bethesda’s much-anticipated sci-fi RPG will be reintroducing a mechanic of the Elder Scrolls series that hasn’t appeared since 1996’s Daggerfall.

As shown during the Starfield gameplay reveal at the Xbox and Bethesda Showcase, and spotted by one observant fan on Reddit, the spacefaring RPG looks to include a mortgage system of some kind. The feature was briefly alluded to when director Todd Howard walked through the game’s character customization features, and discussed several Personal Traits that can be selected for “unique advantages and disadvantages”.

One of these is titled Starter Home. “You own a small house on a peaceful little moon, but it comes with a 50,000 credit mortgage with GalBank,” the trait’s description reads.

The mention of mortgages doesn't usually stir much excitement, but the financial system has a storied history across the Elder Scrolls series. Daggerfall included a surprisingly robust banking system that allowed you to deposit gold in an account, buy items by carrying around a letter of credit, buy and sell houses, and even take out loans at a 10% interest rate. If you were to default, your regional reputation would reduce until you had improved your financial standing.

The mortgage system was dropped for future Elder Scrolls games, although The Elder Scrolls Online does feature banks that can be used to store gold and items. Several mods have also been created for Skyrim that add entire banking systems, spanning loans, debt repayment, and saving accounts. Check out Bordeciel Bank Mod (BBM) or Google's Imperial Bank if that’s your thing.

That Starfield will involve a credit and debt system of some kind shouldn’t be too surprising. Bethesda is pitching the game as a realistic, grounded take on an interstellar human future, even describing the game’s aesthetic as NASA-punk. And how better to create “ a future that’s believable and, while maybe not always the most welcoming, at least familiar” if not by adding a splash of rentier capitalism to its world. 

Tantalizing traits

Starter Home isn’t the only Personal Trait that caught our eye. A list of 16 traits was shown during the first Starfield gameplay trailer, with the player able to choose three in total. Among them were more typical standard personality traits – introvert and extrovert – as well as more universe-specific options. 

You have the option to imbibe yourself with alien DNA and acclimatize yourself with the zero-gravity of space for a stat boost. You can also alter how and where your character grew up, which can grant extra dialogue options and rewards when interacting with specific factions.

Elsewhere on the character creation side, you can customize the look of your character, altering their body and face shape using a range of sliders and presets. Character Backgrounds, meanwhile, will send you off into the universe with three starting skills. They let you tailor your character's abilities, such as by improving the damage of specific weapon types, forcing weaker enemies into ceasefires, or upping your chance of persuading NPCs during dialogue.

Although excitement around the game is swirling, TRG’s editor-in-chief reckons Starfield is already losing the space race and needs to do more to really shine among existing space-based RPGs. It might not be too much longer before we get our hands on the game, though, as Xbox Game Pass suggests Starfield will release early next year.

• Get excited about all these stellar upcoming games

Yet another version of Skyrim is here, as one fan has remade a portion of the acclaimed RPG in Unreal Engine 5.

Skyrim’s Riverwood has been rebuilt in Epic Games’s recently released top-of-the-line engine, which is the prefect fodder while we wait for The Elder Scrolls 6. The Redditor  responsible shared their creation in a 5-minute video (spotted by GamesRadar). 

The clip walks through the classic Skyrim settlement, showing off a few of its buildings and streets in dazzling graphical fidelity. It then cuts to what looks like the Western Watchtower in Whiterun, although this ruined outpost is a lot more detailed than the one you might be used to seeing.

The graphical upgrade is remarkably impressive. All the textures are rendered at a higher resolution, the lighting is crisper, and the shadows punchier. It certainly doesn’t look like a game that was released on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Watch the clip below to see for yourself.

imagining_skyrim_remake_with_unreal_engine_5 from r/skyrim

A glimpse into the future 

The video doesn’t only serve as an impressive tech demo; it’s an exciting glimpse into what games could one day look like. As developers become practiced with Unreal Engine 5, its technical potential will only be pushed to the limit.

However, it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing any Elder Scrolls game that looks like this anytime soon. Bethesda tends to use its in-house Creation Engine to construct its games. And while Starfield will use a new version of the software, we don’t expect it will match the graphical potential of Unreal Engine 5. 

As fan-made projects like this one show, Epic's recently released engine is top of the pack. In fact, it can produce such lifelike renders that a recent demo created with the software tricked viewers into believing it was real footage taken with a mobile phone.

But while Bethesda might not be leaping on Unreal Engine 5, plenty of other developers are. CD Projekt Red previously announced it’ll be ditching its own REDengine in favor of Epic’s software for The Witcher 4. The news came as a surprise to many, given just how successfully the REDengine had been employed to create the vibrant world of The Witcher 3, but goes to show how much faith the studio's putting in the tech. 

Similarly, BioWare is using the engine to develop Mass Effect 4 – placing another feather in Epic’s game-building cap.

Don’t expect those games to look quite as brilliant as this fan-made Skyrim project, though. As sprawling RPGs, they’ll have to sacrifice graphical fidelity in favor of fast asset loading, high framerates, and other player-facing considerations. But the redditor’s demo certainly goes some way to suggest what our favorite video games might one day look like.

• Skyrim Grandma has a stern message for Todd Howard

Bethesda has added a handful of classic games to Steam, ahead of its PC launcher shutdown. 

The publisher added five classic titles to Steam on April 26 (via Kotaku), four from the Elder Scrolls franchise and one from Wolfenstein. The best part? Three of these five games are free to play, allowing you to soak up some retro Bethesda goodness.

The five games added are The Elder Scrolls Arena, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. 

All of these games are free to play on Steam apart from Redguard and Battlespire, but both cost just over $5, so if you do fancy picking them up you can do so for relatively cheap.

The addition of these games comes ahead of the planned closure of Bethesda's own PC launcher. The publisher is gradually migrating its PC titles to Steam, with the official shutdown scheduled for May 11. 

From April 27, those who have previously purchased games or have currency for the Bethesda launcher will be able to move their wallet and games to Steam. But you only have until May 11 to do this. At the time of writing, Bethesda hasn't said what steps you need to take to do this.

A long wait

Sure, these aren't necessarily the most popular games within the Wolfenstein and Elder Scrolls franchises, and they'll likely feel pretty clunky and outdated to play now, but adding them to your Steam library costs you nothing so you might as well give them a shot.

After all, it's nice to remind ourselves of Bethesda's roots, especially as we wait for upcoming blockbusters like The Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield. While we don't have too much longer to wait for Starfield, with the action RPG set to release on November 11, it remains unclear when we'll get our hands on the next Elder Scrolls. We're hoping Bethesda sheds more light on the highly-anticipated next entry in the Elder Scrolls series during Summer Game Fest 2022 or at Gamescom 2022, but we're not holding our breath.

So while you wait, you might as well play an Elder Scrolls game you may not have played before. After all, it's free, and it'll likely make you much more appreciative of the more modern games (for better or worse).

• Check out our release schedule for upcoming games

The best laptop games are there for you whenever you're on break for work and you just need to kill some time before you get back to the grind. Because they're so easy to run, even cheap laptops will be able to play these games just fine. 

Don't think you're getting some third-rate games here, either. Games like Disco Elysium are not only easy on your laptop, but engaging and hilarious to boot. The laptop games on this list are among the best PC games on the market right now, and really goes to show the flexibility that PC gaming offers. 

Even if you're using one of the best gaming laptops, the games on this list have a lot to offer, even if they're not quite up to snuff to the mighty graphics in more powerful notebooks. This list is by no means extensive either: but we narrowed down the 10 games that everyone should consider installing on their laptops for some nice gaming on the side. 

1. Disco Elysium

• CPU: Intel Core i7 or AMD 1800 equivalent
• RAM: 8 GB RAM
• GPU: NVIDIA Geforce 1060 or equivalent

Ever had grand dreams of becoming the greatest detective in history? We know we did, and we have just the game for you. Disco Elysium is digital heaven for those who’ve always had a knack for problem-solving skills and fancy themselves the coolest (or most crooked) PI in their daydreams. 

In this open-world RPG, among the best laptop games that you can play right now, you have unprecedented freedom to do whatever you want as a detective – whether that’s solving murder mysteries and helping people or taking bribes, manipulating others and becoming a millionaire. And, that’s with a plethora of wild skills and cool detective tools at your disposal. 

The city you’re running around in, of course, has that certain mystery je ne sais quoi atmosphere to it, like Gotham-meets-Neo-noir. And, it only adds to this extremely charismatic title. If you’ve got hours to kill, or really even if you don’t, this game needs to be on your laptop right now.

2. Among Us

• CPU: Intel Pentium 4
• RAM: 1 GB
• GPU: Intel HD

Among Us seems a bit more casual than other titles on this list, with each game lasting 10 to 15 minutes but that doesn’t mean you won’t lose hours playing it. The concept is relatively simple. 4 to 10 players are placed in a map, either a spaceship or space station, and are tasked with some menial errands. Up to 3 of the players are secretly imposters who pretend to do the same things but actually go around sabotaging things and killing other players. Emergency meetings can be called where players argue over who the imposter is and then vote to kick someone out. Considering how short each game is, just about everyone will have a chance to play as an imposter after a few games.

What makes Among Us such an enduring game is how it can bring friends together the way a good board game can, combining socializing and strategy in a way that most online games don’t.

3. Cuphead

• CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E8400, 3.0GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 3.0GHz or higher
• RAM: 2 GB
• GPU: Geforce 9600 GT or AMD HD 3870 512MB

You might be turned off by the tremendous amount of challenge it poses, but we promise you that Cuphead is worth a shot. If you don’t already find its vibrant, whimsical art style delightful, then you might be convinced by some backstory of how it was made.

Cuphead is from indie developer Studio MDHR (short for Studio Moldenhauer), named for the two brothers who started the project, Chad and Jared Moldenhauer. In fact, the whole company is made up of family members and friends who sought out to finish their dream project.

Marija Moldenhauer, Chad’s wife, was responsible for the inking and clean up in this hand-drawn ode to 2D platforming classics like Mega Man and 1930s Fleischer cartoons like Betty Boop. And, if the 19 bosses aren’t enough for you, Cuphead is getting a major DLC next year featuring new bosses, areas and a new playable character.

4. Humankind

• CPU: Intel Core i5 4th Gen
• RAM: 8GB
• GPU: NVIDIA GTX 770 or AMD R9 290

If you’re a fan of history-based strategy games like Civilization or Age of Empires but are looking for something a little different, then Humankind is for you. This game takes that format and gives it a little twist, allowing you to customize your gameplay as you go. You can upgrade to different cultures as you progress and shape your empire with all sorts of decisions regarding religion, war, alliances, and more that can have long lasting impacts. In fact, every play through will be different. 

You can wage nuclear war or destroy the world with pollution in Humankind, but your goal is to be the most famous empire by the end of the game to win. While it does seem to share a lot of similarities with the aforementioned giants of turn-based historical strategy games, that added level of customization, different mechanics for city-building and waging war, not to mention the ability to essentially rewrite history makes Humankind a worthy and unique addition to the genre.

5. Stardew Valley

• CPU: 2 GHz
• RAM: 2 GB
• GPU: 256 MB video memory, shader model 3.0+

If you’re obsessed with farming sims (and, considering how well the likes of Farming Simulator and Harvest Moon sell, there’s a few of you out there), then few games will get you jumping for agricultural joy more than the enchanting busywork of Stardew Valley.

Taking cues from the Harvest Moon games, Stardew Valley's top-down point of view and cutesy characters feel blended together seamlessly, making it one of the best laptop games available.

It doesn’t seem all that exhilarating, tending to fields, growing produce and raising livestock – but that’s the beauty of it. There’s a special kind of peace to the mundanity of Stardew Valley’s minutia as you expand your farm, catch some fish down at the river and even head into the village to strike up friendships (and maybe something a little more) with a cast of NPCs. Farming has never been so much fun or addicting.

6. Age of Empires IV

• CPU: Intel Core i5-6300U or AMD Ryzen 5 2400G
• RAM: 8GB
• GPU: Intel HD 520 or AMD Radeon RX Vega 11

Fans of RTS games rejoice! Age of Empires IV is here and it takes everything that made previous entries so much fun and updates it. Not only does the game receive a fresh coat of paint but the AI and mechanics have been updated as well.

You can select one of eight civilizations to play your way through four distinct campaigns covering 500 years of history, ending at the Renaissance. You don’t have to stick to the single-player campaign however. You can also play with friends in PvP or multiplayer co-op as well. And, more importantly, you don’t need a hefty GPU to play, making this a great game to play on your laptop. You just need integrated graphics as good or better than Intel HD 520, which has been around since 2015.

7. Night in the Woods

• CPU: Intel i5 Quad-Core
• RAM: 4 GB
• GPU: Intel HD 4000

In more than a few ways, we’re inclined to describe Night in the Woods as Life is Strange meets Bojack Horseman. The interactive dialogue bits are reminiscent of the former while the overarching themes of dealing with mental health issues ring true in the latter.

Night in The Woods itself was developed in Unity by Infinite Fall, the virtual studio comprised of coder and composer Alec Holowka and Twitter jokester slash illustrator and animator Scott Benson. Together, these two have designed not just a game, but a stunning world full of relatable characters that should hopefully resonate with you.

You take on the role of Mae, a cat who dropped out of college and recently returned to her hometown of Possum Springs. It’s a completely narrative-driven game, as modern point-and-click adventure games tend to be, with very few gameplay hooks that will hold your attention. So, if you’re into Telltale Games or Life is Strange, Night in the Woods might be the best laptop game for you.

Best of all, it will run fairly smoothly on integrated graphics, given that it has an attractive, but not highly demanding, art style. Surely, this is a title we’ll be talking about for years and years to come, even if it was snubbed at The Game Awards.

8. Command and Conquer: Remastered Collection

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 @ 2.4ghz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400 @ 2.4ghz
• RAM: 4GB
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 420 or ATI Radeon HD 5570

The 90’s are still alive in the form of the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection. This doesn’t just have a remastered version of the original game from 1995. It also has Red Alert as well as the games’ three expansion packs for over 100 missions and over 250 multiplayer maps. That’s quite a lot of content in this release.

Among the best laptop games to dig into this 2020, this remastering includes upscaling the cinematics, remastering the music (including 20 re-recorded tracks), and most importantly, setting the game in 4K resolution. The controls have been updated for a modern experience including the ability to use hotkeys. And, the game comes with mod support for those who want to add their own spin to the game.

The core of the game is still mostly the same as it was in the 90’s so if you’re looking for a great looking, great sounding blast from the past, then this is the perfect escape for you.

9. Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire

• CPU: Intel Core i3-2100T @ 2.50 GHz / AMD Phenom II X3 B73
• RAM: 4 GB
• GPU: ATI Radeon HD 4850 or NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT

While it’s a 2018 title and has a reasonably massive following, your laptop’s integrated graphics can still run Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. It has mostly the same forgiving system requirements as its predecessor, so if you are a fan of that game, you should be able to engross yourself in this best laptop game as well.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire drops players on the Deadfire archipelago and tasks them with hunting down a rogue god. And, just like its predecessor, it features rich storytelling and deep RPG gameplay that harkens to the days of Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

While all the backgrounds are in 2D and viewed from a top-down point-of-view, they’re still lovely to behold. Plus, the numerous spell effects will keep you bewitched as you work your way through the intense and tactical combat.

And, because it's coming from Obsidian, a studio known for making the best RPGs of all time, you can be confident that you’re getting an adventure, and one of the best laptop games, that’s worth every penny.

10. Papers Please

• CPU: 1.5 GHz Core2Duo
• RAM: 2 GB
• GPU: OpenGL 1.4 or better

If somebody told you a game about working in a border control office would be one of the most addictive games ever, would you scoff and walk off shaking your head?

Well, you might give a little indie gem by the name of Papers, Please a chance. Set in a fictional take on the Eastern Bloc, you’re an immigration clerk tasked with processing refugees from a hostile neighbouring nation.

The core concept is simple: check each person’s documents against a clear set of rules, process those who meet the requirements and detain those with false papers. 

The game is created to test your attention to detail, as well as the strength of your moral compass. Sometimes you’ll have to decide if specific sympathetic characters should be granted asylum, even if it goes against the rules. 

The twist is good performance effectively feeds you family, while mistakes put their lives in danger. It’s dark, but engrossingly so.

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The Elder Scrolls 6's release date is still a mystery in 2025, given that we've not received a substantial update on the highly-anticipated fantasy RPG in over seven years. Given the pedigree of its predecessor, however, it's easy to see why The Elder Scrolls 6 is at the absolute top of many gamer's wishlists, even after all these years of relative silence.

What we can tell you for certain is that The Elder Scrolls 6 is indeed in development, and that it will be the next release for Bethesda Game Studios, now that Starfield is well and truly in the rearview mirror. Even so, it's clear that the game is quite a ways out, especially following comments from Xbox head Phil Spencer last year. A shame, given it's easily one of the most highly anticipated upcoming games out there.

Here's what we know about The Elder Scrolls 6 so far, including a look at platforms we can expect it to launch on. Hopefully, we will hear more about the game by the end of 2025. When details do emerge, this page will be updated.

The Elder Scrolls 6: cut to the chase

• What is it? The long-awaited successor to Skyrim
• When does it come out? TBC
• What can I play it on? TBC - but evidence points to it being only on PC and Xbox Series X|S

The Elder Scrolls 6 platforms prediction

Platforms for The Elder Scrolls 6 haven't been confirmed yet but, given Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax Media in 2021, releases on PC, and Xbox Series X|S are almost a certainty. A PS5 release was previously ruled out, according to documents revealed as part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case. Similarly, releases on Xbox One seems extremely unlikely, as Starfield shows Bethesda's moving on from last-gen hardware.

One thing to consider here is that since we last heard about The Elder Scrolls 6's Xbox exclusivity, Microsoft has started taking a very different approach to its releases. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, for example, launched on PS5 a few months after its launch on Xbox. Similarly, we've now seen Sea of Thieves arrive on PS5, so it's possible that The Elder Scrolls 6 will follow a similar pattern. We'll have to wait and see.

Will The Elder Scrolls 6 release on Xbox Game Pass?

The Elder Scrolls 6 will be available on Xbox Game Pass on day one. This means that subscribers will be able to pick up the game at no extra cost the same day it releases for everyone else.

The Elder Scrolls 6 trailer

The only footage we have of The Elder Scrolls 6 is a very short clip of the game's logo. Other than that, you might be waiting a while to see more. Here's the announcement trailer:

Elder Scrolls 6 setting prediction

We’re willing to bet that like all the other games in the series, The Elder Scrolls 6 will take place on the continent of Tamriel. Previous games have taken us to High Rock, Hammerfell, Morrowind, Cyrodil, and Skyrim. Valenwood, Elsweyr, and Black Marsh are the biggest places left to explore. However, even though these areas are prime spots for exploration, that's not to say that Bethesda won't return to areas from previous games.

There were rumors that The Elder Scrolls 6 could be set in Valenwood, the home of the Bosmer. It’s an area of Tamriel that Bethesda hasn’t explored much and that's based on a reported internal Bethesda memo from all the way back in 2014. In this memo, Bethesda employees were reportedly warned against using the terms Fallout: Nuka World, Elder Scrolls VI or Project Greenheart.

It's hard to tell from the short E3 clip we have of the game. However, since it was shown, general opinion has moved towards the idea that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be set in either Hammerfell or High Rock.

Adding credence to the Hammerfell rumor is a post from the official Elder Scrolls Twitter account at the end of 2020. That says "transcribe the past and map the future" and shows an image with an unmapped Hammerfell region. There is, however, a chance that this teaser doesn't relate to Elder Scrolls 6 at all.

Obviously, those of us who know the world of Tamriel thanks to Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and yes, even Elder Scrolls Online, the entire world is a veritable expanse of different lands and settings where the game could be set. We do know one thing for certain; wherever it does end up being set, we can expect to be fulfilling a great many side quests.

The Elder Scrolls 6 news

Fallout 5 is fully greenlit
According to an episode of the Xbox Two Podcast, Fallout 5 has reportedly been fully greenlit (via Gamespot). Interestingly, it's reported that the lead studio may not be Bethesda Game Studios, which is busy working on The Elder Scrolls 6.

Oblivion Remastered is now available on Xbox, PC and PS5
Well, it wasn't exactly the best kept secret, but The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has now dropped for players to dig into. It was a secret release that happened April 22, 2025, and you can play the game on Game Pass. Read our Oblivion Remastered review for our full thoughts.

New release window rumors
According to a court document revealed from the FTC v. Microsoft case, The Elder Scrolls 6 is expected to be released sometime during or after 2026, and is seemingly planned to be released solely on PC and Xbox (via The Verge).

The Elder Scrolls 6 is still in early development
In an interview with Spanish publication Vandal (as translated by Gamespot), Pete Hines revealed that The Elder Scrolls 6 is still likely a long way off.

"It's in development, but it's in early development."

Fallout 5 is coming after The Elder Scrolls 6
In an interview with IGN, Todd Howard confirmed that Fallout 5 will be Bethesda's next project after The Elder Scrolls 6.

"Yes, Elder Scrolls 6 is in pre-production and, you know, we’re going to be doing Fallout 5 after that, so our slate’s pretty full going forward for a while" Howard told the publication. "We have some other projects that we look at from time to time as well."

Bethesda wants to take its time to get it right
The Elder Scrolls 6 is probably still a few years away yet but that’s not because Bethesda is deliberately dragging its heels. In an interview with IGN, when discussing the gap between Skyrim and its follow up, Howard said “Would you plan to have the kind of gap we're having between Skyrim and the follow-up? I can't say that's a good thing. Do I wish I could wave a wand and the game we wanted to make [...] just came out? Absolutely.”

According to Howard, however, the time felt right for Bethesda to try something new with Starfield and The Elder Scrolls Online meant that the Elder Scrolls franchise was in a relatively good place.

“That being said,” he added, “everything takes longer than we would like as well, but we want to make sure that we get it right. Hopefully Elder Scrolls 6, you don’t want to say hey, that it’s worth that kind of wait, but that it does stand up to the series as it has been in a really big, impactful way for when it comes out.”

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ZeniMax Online has teased the latest expansion coming to The Elder Scrolls Online, which promises to go to a never-before-seen area of Tamriel. A Twitch reveal stream has been scheduled for the end of the month where further details will be revealed.

Thus far, there's no information as to where this new area might be based yet. However, ZeniMax has released a teaser trailer giving players potential hints. 

The teaser shows three boats, representing the Daggerfall Covenant, Ebonheart Pact, and Aldmeri Dominion factions, sailing to a new coast (or island, potentially.) Not too much is given away past that, but there are some contextual clues. The area gives off a medieval Mediterranean vibe, all the while surrounded by mountainous landscapes. 

You can watch the trailer here:

It seems whatever the case, this will be a fairly nautical affair, which is a departure to the general fantasy setting of the broader Tamriel world. 

Be sure to watch the reveal stream later this month!

Elder Scrolls Online is still going strong in 2022, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. This announcement of new content is sure to fill fans with excitement, especially with word of a brand new area of Tamriel being filled out. 

Thankfully, players don't have too long to wait to get more details about the MMOs plans for 2022. ZeniMax Online will be hosting a Twitch stream on January 27 at 3PM EST where it will reveal all. During the show, a more fleshed-out look at the new expansion will be shown, as well as other upcoming DLC coming through the rest of the year. 

That's not all though. If you watch the reveal on Twitch, if you have your TESO and Twitch accounts linked, you will receive a Barnacle-Back Coral Crab pet and an Ouroboros Crown Create through Twitch Drops.

The crab certainly looks very sea-themed, further hinting that the game might be about to get a nautical flavor. 

New areas being shown off in Tamriel is an exciting hook for a new expansion though. Even if you aren't an Elder Scrolls Online player, there's potential this new location could feature in future media that you are interested in from the franchise.

Hell, it's even possible this is the new setting for The Elder Scrolls 6. Don't bet on it, but it's certainly possible this is Bethesda setting the foundation for what is to come. Unlikely. Very unlikely. Exceedingly unlikely. But possible. 

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Ah, 2006. An iconic year for the best PC games in more ways than one. Games like Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Neverwinter Nights came out – and there were so many more. One of them was a very special game to me personally, and to many others: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

It had been delayed from an original release date of November 2005, and after much anticipation and hype, ultimately ended up being released as the first RPG title for the Xbox 360 the following March. This was a mere four years after the release of Bethesda Game Studios’ last entry in the series, Morrowind, which received awards and critical acclaim on PC and Xbox in 2002. Sure as can be, Oblivion also went on to receive praise and adoration alike, winning “Ultimate Game of the Year” at the Golden Joysticks in 2006, as well as Best Role-Playing Game of the Year from publications such as IGN, GameSpy, PC Gamer US, and much more. 

To this day, Oblivion is a staple classic that is still enjoyed by both serious players looking for a grand high-fantasy adventure, and silly ones who want to revel in the broken chaos engine that Oblivion is infamous for. You could even say that Oblivion almost single-handedly kicked off the popular trend of ‘sandbox games with wacky physics and AI glitches’ in popular media, finding its way into many early YouTube videos and memes. 

In 2021 we’re 10 years removed from a new Elder Scrolls game, and Skyrim is on its umpteenth re-release. While Bethesda has released Skyrim in VR, Skyrim on Switch, Skyrim Special Edition, and Skyrim Anniversary Edition over the past decade, none of them quite scratch the itch of a new Elder Scrolls experience, as you may expect.

It may not be a surprise that Elder Scrolls games (and Bethesda games in general) have some of the largest, most active, and well-known mod communities in PC gaming. Since Skyrim's release, modding has become gradually easier and more accessible due to the popularity of Skyrim mods in media and YouTube videos, as well as mod developers simply having more time to fine-tune a game that wasn't re-released ad nauseam. We've gone through the same song and dance with Skyrim for a whole decade, so what does modding Oblivion in 2021 look like?

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The process

When I was a kid in 2008, I was naturally drawn to computers, since it was my father’s hobby and career. He introduced me to the ins and outs of the Windows file system, as well as installing PC games from The Orange Box to Dragon Age. Oblivion was one of those games, and when I wasn’t watching YouTube Poop videos, YouTube had all sorts of suggestions for entertaining modifications I could make to the game. Spells that would make NPCs do silly dances, flyable dragon mounts, underwater player homes, and even Final Fantasy weapons, complete with an in-game re-creation of the Sephiroth fight from Final Fantasy 7 – the possibilities were endless. 

Despite the potential of an awesome and hilarious outcome, the process of modding was quite frustrating and time-consuming. Granted, it was much more difficult to do in 2008, with slower Internet connections and the modding scene still in its early days. Even Oblivion Script Extender (OBSE), a popular mod which expands the scripting capabilities of the game, was practically nonexistent at the time. It was very often with prayer and muttered pleas under our breath that we started Oblivion with new mods installed, as crashes were frequent, and determining which mods were causing them was like finding a needle in a haystack. 

Mod load orders were sorted manually, and don’t even get me started on editing .ini configuration files. These issues aren’t completely absent in modern Oblivion modding, but thanks to community-created and maintained tools such as the Load Order Optimization Tool (LOOT), TES4Edit for mods with ‘dirty’ data, and BethINI for easy .ini editing, it’s much easier to avoid and even correct many of them. Not only that, but thanks to Wrye Bash, a mod manager for Oblivion which has been around since the beginning, you don’t need to spend anywhere near as long copying and pasting mods and mucking around in the file system. 

These days, simply search “easy mod guides for Oblivion” with Google and you’ll find a few resources that will walk you through the process of making the game far more bearable to play in 2021 without affecting the base experience too much. For my game, I used the Quick and Easy Overhaul Guide for 2020 by Nitefox98 on Nexus Mods, which is where the majority of your mods will come from (with the exception of some bigger tools and texture packs). This guide will get you a patched, optimized, and better-looking Oblivion install in the course of an afternoon or so, and it starts out with all of the bare essentials in case you don’t want to get too deep into texture replacement and mod configuration. In all honesty, you could run Oblivion with just the Unofficial Patches and BethINI to configure display settings and have a perfectly fine time.

The entire land of Cyrodiil is your burrito, and you can make it however you want; or turn it into something completely new. Go wild. Just keep in mind that the more modifications you make, the higher chances become of things going terribly (and sometimes irreversibly) wrong with your installation. Such are the risks of modifying game files. 

By Azura, be thorough and patient

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve drifted away from Oblivion. I’ve been spoiled by the far more stable engines of Morrowind and Skyrim, and had come to think my modding skills were so good that I didn’t need to worry about breaking things anymore. Oblivion brought me crashing back down to reality very quickly. In my own hubris, I picked a mod list that was almost 200 entries long, and installed them all sequentially without loading into the game even once to ensure things were working, which proved fatal after hours of copying and pasting. 

Things appeared normal when I loaded up the game. I escaped the Imperial prison, had a few bouts in the Arena, got supplies, and set off toward Weynon Priory to start the main story quest in earnest. However, as soon as I crossed the bridge to the mainland… crash. After confirming where it was crashing in the game, I realized it was caused by a misconfigured mod. At this moment I realized I may have messed up pretty badly.

Unfortunately, since I didn’t install my mods in batches and failed to ensure things installed properly, I couldn’t tell which mod out of the 200 was causing the issue. While I could have dug in and possibly found it, the amount of time, frustration, and potential of messing the game files up further wasn’t worth it when I could simply start over from scratch. 

After reinstalling, choosing a simpler mod guide, and taking my time to methodically install each mod and confirm they work, I was finally ready to give the game another test run. I even created a new character, got to the end of the prison/sewer sequence, and saved at the point where you are first able to go into the open world so that I could test for crashes without going through the intro over and over again. 

Although, as is par for the course in Oblivion, there are still the occasional “how did this even happen” anomalies that make me burst out with laughter. I keep them in my game just for the novelty. Like Rowley Eardwulf’s brows being so low that they completely cover his eye sockets, and when you ask him about “rumors” he suddenly opens them wide to reveal large, beautiful brown eyes for no reason at all. 

Wow, this game is old

As I  tested to see if there were any issues with crashes in certain areas, I noticed a strangely familiar issue: the longer I played, the more tiny crackles in the game’s audio would appear. It almost sounded as if the game was lagging, or on a delay, but the game played fine. Eventually, it would get to the point where the audio sounds like it’s coming out of a broken speaker, and the only way to fix it (temporarily) would be to completely close and restart the game. Last year, while playing Morrowind, I also experienced this problem, but it took a lot longer for it to ramp up to full glitchiness, and it wasn’t too annoying to restart the game every hour or so. In Oblivion, I couldn’t explore a single cave without starting to notice the audio degradation. For both games, it doesn’t seem to be an issue that many people know how to fix online, and it isn’t typically mentioned in any mod guides that I have read either. 

Luckily, I found a solution, by accident, in the comments section of a 2018 video titled “Oblivion music stutter” by Lordzio on YouTube. There, one or two users said that the fix was simple: put two files called dsound.dll and dsound.ini into the root directory of your Oblivion install. They then linked to a website, IndirectSound, which explains why this file fixes the sound issues. 

Apparently, a lot of older PC games with 3D positional audio rely on audio hardware acceleration to play stereo sound properly, and modern Windows operating systems simply don’t support that feature anymore. Support for DirectSound, which provided such hardware acceleration, was dropped in Windows 7 and Vista. So to get the audio for older games working, you need to emulate the hardware acceleration, which is where IndirectSound comes in. You can read more about the specifics on its page, but after downloading and pasting the two files into my root Oblivion folder, audio has stopped stuttering, and while the placebo effect might be speaking for me, I’d say it sounds better too.

Wh…why are the mages invisible

Finally, while this issue wasn’t caused by any specific mistake I made, it’s just a reminder that sometimes problems with mods manifest in the most humorously random of ways. After I had finalized my setup, I sat down to gaze upon my work in satisfaction of a job well done and began a new playthrough. Graphics appeared surprisingly detailed compared to what Oblivion originally looked like (ahem, potato), and it seemed to be performing excellently. As far as I knew, I finally nailed it after failing miserably the first time. But then I got to Chorrol. 

It started with a man walking toward me from down the street. He smiled wide and greeted me, apparently oblivious to the fact that his whole body, except for his hands, feet, and head, were entirely missing. Invisible, perhaps, but there wasn’t any magical effect to indicate it. Interesting, I thought to myself, Well, if it’s only one person, I guess I could live with that. Oh, sweet summer child. 

As I strode into the Mages Guild, it became comically apparent that the entire Guild had sold off their physical bodies to a Daedric Prince, and are now cursed to wander the land as floating appendages. Every so often, you’d find one of them wielding a giant yellow sign that reads “WTF!? I’m A Missing Mesh!” Turns out one of the mods I installed in the last batch, Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, had a mod file that was accidentally enabled and required textures/meshes from a different mod that I never installed. Conveniently, it was a simple fix since I had taken measures (batch installs, you know the drill) that make things easy to roll back and readjust. The cherry on top was that when I reversed the mod, all of the Guild mages were in their undies when I loaded back in. All in a day's work for the humble Oblivion modder. 

That sounds super chaotic, why would I want that?

Oblivion modding can be as involved as you’d like it to be. While it is possible to experience vanilla Oblivion on newer consoles as well as PC, the base experience is terribly dated, and many of the game’s systems and glitches are notorious for being annoying or completely game breaking at times. Mods such as the Unofficial Oblivion Patches, tools like BethINI, and much more have been created by the community specifically to fix glaring flaws with the original game that Bethesda either neglected to fix, or didn’t anticipate needing to prepare for, such as modern operating systems and hardware. At the very least, I highly recommend installing the essentials, which should only take you about an hour tops; they will greatly improve your playing experience, while still allowing you to see Oblivion in much of its original glory. 

However, if you get addicted to the chaos and satisfaction of successfully molding this classic RPG to your liking like I did, it has never been easier to do despite the potential hangups and learning curve. I find that the unpredictable nature of each playthrough and mod configuration adds a lot of fun to the game, as someone who has played the original many times.  If you’re feeling particularly daring, you might want to look into mods that turn Oblivion into entirely different games, like with Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge. 

Oblivion can almost always be found nearly anywhere for a low price, on PC at least. The Steam version has a base price of $15, but it isn’t rare to find it there or elsewhere for less then $5. If you don’t have other methods of acquiring it (I just so happen to have installation discs from the Elder Scrolls Anthology), then digital copies are the way to go, and the most convenient if you happen to mess up your installation while modding. Regardless of what you decide to do, Oblivion is a classic Bethesda RPG worth re-experiencing in whatever way you prefer, and it can very easily be played over a laid-back winter break. Don’t let the lack of Elder Scrolls VI get you down too much. Simply mod your own Elder Scrolls VI into existence.

Bethesda's space RPG Starfield is still a full year away, but a new teaser trailer has offered a key insight into the way the game might be structured.

Game Director Todd Howard, Studio Director Angela Browder and Art Director Matt Carofano all sat down for seven-minute YouTube video to talk about the upcoming game, which is set to release in November 2022 on Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and PC – provided there are no delays to the schedule.

While most of the video is pretty innocuous, with the devs talking in broad strokes about the importance of virtual storytelling, and the "pride" that players can feel at what they achieve in-game, there's also a brief tease from Howard that's worth paying attention to.

Near the end of the video, Howard is describing the awe of "step-out moments" in the Fallout games, where a character emerges into a world that's been irrevocably changed by nuclear war. Few who've played Fallout 3 or Fallout 4 can forget the feeling of leaving their vault for the first time, moving from subterranean bunker to open wasteland, and facing a vast frontier that's yet to be explored.

It's that feeling that Bethesda seeks to recreate in Starfield – but in a blink-and-miss-it moment, Howard says that "Starfield has two step-out moments," adding that he's being intentionally "cryptic."

Two big reveals

While it's not too hard to imagine that initial step-out moment in a Bethesda game – in the case of Starfield, leaving cryostasis or ending a centuries-long journey through space seems likely – that second moment is fascinating, suggesting that the world will open up in a whole new way at some point in the game.

Whereas Fallout 3 let you explode the city of Megaton, cutting off quest lines in the process, Starfield could go one better with a massive divergence event that changes the entire galactic map – or unlocks a whole new one. In a truly sci-fi game like this, who's to stop Bethesda from sticking a black hole in the game that eats up commonly-visited planets, stranding you in another dimension, or transporting you into the future for an unprecedented endgame?

Art Director Matt Carofano says that "A lot of our games are about exploration," adding that space travel is "sort of the ultimate exploration" – and it's thrilling to think about how Bethesda might push the boudries of what's expected.

Carofano is keen to say that Starfield will have a "realistic science-based backing" to it, and calls it a "more grounded game and grounded setting" than the likes of Skyrim. But the developer will have to have some good tricks up its sleeve after the botched launch of Fallout 76 – indeed, many of comments on the YouTube video speak to ongoing resentment over the multiplayer title. 

One sarcastically asks: "Please make it online only like fallout 76 with no mods. Because that's what people really want" – while another says "I think Fallout 76 cost Todd the credibility to get me excited." There are also asides referencing Cyberpunk 2077, a game with such a successful hype cycle that the reality of its poor last-gen console performance hit incredibly hard – and many may now be warier of big-budget games that promise the world.

Given that Starfield won't launch on last-gen consoles, though, we imagine the same issues won't arise.

Yet another commenter says "I doubt i will ever play another Bethesda game, but i want to see what they can do with this setting" – which is at the heart of Starfield's launch. Players are looking to this game to restore Bethesda's reputation, as we're sure the developers are too.

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Ever since Starfield, Bethesda's 2022 sci-fi adventure, was confirmed to be an Xbox and PC exclusive at E3 2021, questions have arisen as to whether The Elder Scrolls 6 will also be absent from the PS5.

In an interview with GQ, Xbox boss Phil Spencer shed some light on the subject of The Elder Scrolls 6's exclusivity, and it doesn't sound too positive for fans of Sony's current-gen machine.

"It’s not about punishing any other platform, like I fundamentally believe all of the platforms can continue to grow," Spencer said. "But in order to be on Xbox, I want us to be able to bring the full complete package of what we have. And that would be true when I think about Elder Scrolls 6. That would be true when I think about any of our franchises.”

In the same interview, Bethesda game director Todd Howard didn't add any hints as to whether or not The Elder Scrolls 6 will actually be a console exclusive for Xbox, nor if it will even release soon enough to launch on the current-gen Xbox Series X/S.

However, given that November 2021 is the tenth anniversary of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Howard seemed to be feeling the pressure of being able to top a game that's legendary in the eyes of its vast playerbase.

"I think that would drive me crazy to try to say, 'Okay, this is the thing you have to top,'" Howard said of Skyrim's seemingly infinite shelf life. "But then you realize, like, The Elder Scrolls 6 has got to be a 'decade game'. How do you make a game where you go into it, like, 'people have to play it for a decade?'"

Analysis: Will The Elder Scrolls 6 actually be Xbox exclusive?

While it's still not been outright confirmed, it does seem like The Elder Scrolls 6 being an Xbox console exclusive is a foregone conclusion. Judging by Spencer's comments, though, that exclusivity would be less about taking something away from PS5 players (even though that's kind of what exclusivity would achieve) and more about creating a bespoke Elder Scrolls experience on Xbox.

Xbox's ace in the hole is undoubtedly the Xbox Game Pass subscription service, which will no doubt play an integral part in making The Elder Scrolls 6 widely available on both Xbox and PC from day one. In this case, there's no need to buy the game. It'll be ready to download for subscribers from the jump at no extra cost.

That's an incredible deal, considering the Elder Scrolls series is one of the most highly regarded in gaming. And much like Starfield, a brand new main series Elder Scrolls game certainly has the potential to shift consoles if consumers know they can access the game for as little as a monthly subscription fee.

Of course, that's all speculation that should be taken with a pinch of salt. We still don't know if The Elder Scrolls 6 truly is an Xbox console exclusive. However, we'd be more surprised if it wasn't at this point.

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The Skyrim Anniversary Edition, when it launches next month, could cause problems for mod creators and render your existing Skyrim mods useless.

Mods alter the basic code or structure of a game to make substantial changes, and these can be adding better textures, changes to how the game actually plays, or even completely wacky changes. For example, there’s a mod for Skyrim which makes Thomas the Tank Engine a hostile NPC. Many of these mods have become an essential element in improving Skyrim for PC gamers. Now, these mods could be unplayable due to the Anniversary Edition of Skyrim.

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Skyrim Anniversary Edition is the 64-bit version of the existing Skyrim Special Edition including the Creation Club (a place to buy mods recommended by Bethesda) and 26 other yet-to-be-released creations. Crucially, the Anniversary Edition won’t be a separate entry to download on Steam, instead, it’ll be an update to your existing Skyrim Special Edition installation, and it could cause existing Skyrim mods not to work.

Mods developers have explained that because Bethesda has updated existing versions of Skyrim, changing some of the code. This has meant mods operating with the existing version of Skyrim will not be compatible with the new Anniversary Edition. As the developer explains, everyone who has written code to develop mod software for the existing version of Skyrim will have to do a considerable amount of work to support the Anniversary Edition. This means for Skyrim players who use mods, your favorites may be unplayable for an extended period of time.

But, if your mods end up not working after the Anniversary Edition update next month, a team member who works on the mod auto-installer program Wabbajack, has said they plan to develop downgrading software allowing users to revert to older builds of games to get their Skyrim mods to work. Of course, this means that you’ll miss out on any advancements that the Anniversary Edition brings.

Analysis: Mod support has already been a problem

Skyrim Special Edition has already been a cause of problems for modders. Every time the Bethesda Creation Club gets new updates, it somehow breaks the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE), which is a plug-in needed for many of the best Skyrim mods to work. To circumvent this problem, many Skyrim Special Edition owners set Steam to “only update this game when I launch it.”

A recent update to Fallout 3, also developed by Bethesda, is doing away with the game’s Games for Windows Live requirement, which is software that enabled PC users to connect to Microsoft’s online gaming service, which has since been abandoned.Fallout 3 also used Visual Studio 2019, and it appears that mods that have been developed for Games for Windows Live and Visual Studios 2019 are having compatibility issues, making some of them unplayable.

• Starfield: release date, trailers, exclusivity and everything you need to know

Via PC Gamer

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will soon hit its 10-year anniversary, and to celebrate Bethesda plans on releasing an extra special edition of the game that includes… fishing. Yep. Fishing.

The 10th Anniversary Edition will drop on November 11, 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S, though you’ll be able to get free next-gen updates on the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S if you own the Special Edition of the game.

Included in the fourth re-release of the game – yes, unbelievably Skyrim is on its fourth re-release – will be a new fishing mini-game and 500+ Creation Club elements that offer “pre-existing and new quests, dungeons, bosses, weapons, spells and more".

The obvious advantage to buying the game for the FIFTH time is that it will take advantage of the Xbox Series X and PS5’s upgraded hardware, but Bethesda has yet to say which exact features the game will take advantage of. Frame rate? Faster loading times? Spatial audio? Who knows – all we know is that there’s going to be fishing. 

Opinion: There’s not much new here… but I’m too big of a fan to pass on it 

So how did we come up with the number of remasters? Well, you’ve got the Legendary Edition of the game that came out two years after launch that combined all the expansions plus the main game into one box, then came the Special Edition that ported the game to Xbox One and PS4 in 2016. We got a VR version of the game in 2017/2018 and finally we come to the Anniversary Edition that’s dropping on November 11. 

Each of the remasters brought something new to the table and two of them – the VR version and Special Edition – helped adapt the game for current hardware at the time. 

The latest version of the game will do the same thing but it feels a bit like a cash-in of a cash-in – a port of a port that we’ve already played through. That said, because it’s a free upgrade for Special Edition owners it doesn’t feel all that egregious, even though it’d be great had Bethesda added something a little more than a fishing mini-game. 

Regardless, Skyrim remains one of the better-known, widely regarded entries in the open-world RPG genre, and is a personal favorite of mine. So, yeah, I’ll probably buy it. But I swear I won’t buy it a sixth time.

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All these years after launch and with The Elder Scrolls 6 somewhere on the horizon, Bethesda’s open-world RPG epic Skyrim still has secrets to be solved. One of the most long-standing and contentious mysteries in the game has finally been put to rest – and it centers on a humble fox.

As any Skyrim player will know, the icy tundras of the game world are littered with the sprightly pups, who will run away at the first sight of the Dragonborn hero. 

But, over the years, a theory developed that the foxes weren’t running away aimlessly. Instead, some players believed that the foxes were actually guiding them to treasure troves.

As it turns out, that’s actually sort of true – but it's more down to a programming quirk rather than any intentional design decision.

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Solving the mystery

Developer Joel Burgess, formerly of Skyrim developers Bethesda but now lead at Grindstone-makers Capybara Games, revealed just how the foxes work.

“Skyrim uses something called 'navmesh' for AI navigation,”   Burgess revealed in a lengthy Twitter thread.

“For non-dev folks, this is an invisible 3D sheet of polygons that is laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go. In most situations, you're seeing AI decide what do to (run at player, hide in cover, etc), use navmesh to make a path, and navigate along that path.

“Foxes are no different.  But their AI is very simplified: they basically can *only* run away. So foxes flee.  Why would they flee towards treasure?

“This is where it gets interesting.  

“If you're close to an AI, it's in "High Process", or the most fancy, CPU-intensive pathfinding.  It uses the full navmesh and will do things like line of sight and distance checks.

“To contrast, there's also "Low Process" - used for stuff like NPCs walking a trade route across the world. These are only updated every several minutes, and position is tracked very loosely. The bandit stabbing your face, however, is running nav stuff many times per second.

“There is a sort of "Medium Process" for characters nearby, but who didn't need the complex pathing of combat.  Because of the way the fox's AI worked (always be fleeing!) it's basically ONLY using this process.

“This is where understanding of how Skyrim uses navmesh comes in.

“Swaths of the outdoor world have simple navmesh. You don't need to add lots of detail in a space with basic topography, little clutter, or a low chance of combat. So wilderness = small number of big triangles.

“When you stumble across something like a camp, however, navmesh gets way more detailed.  Added visual detail means added navmesh detail, and if we're placing NPCs of any kind, we also tend to add even more detail.  

“So Points of Interest = big number of small triangles. You see where this is going?

“The Fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away - it's trying to get 100 *triangles* away.

“You know where it's easy to find 100 triangles?  The camps/ruins/etc that we littered the world with, and filled with treasure to reward your exploration. So foxes aren't leading you to treasure - but the way they behave is leading them to areas that tend to HAVE treasure, because POIs w/loot have other attributes (lots of small navmesh triangles) that the foxes ARE pursuing. To players, however, it's the same thing.”

Analysis: Happy little accidents

Reading through Burgess’s explanation, I’m reminded of the painter Bob Ross – not just his painting’s similarities to Skyrim’s wondrous forestry, but Ross’s love of “happy little accidents”, the misplaced brush-strokes that would become his favorite landscape elements over the course of a piece.

Skyrim’s foxes are similar – the result of countless decisions, lines of code and player behaviours interacting, and the chaos between the structure. It’s not unusual for game developers to purposefully hide easter eggs and secrets in game worlds, but it’s these unexpected moments where massive games like Skyrim really start to feel alive. It’s why we’re still talking about Skyrim ten years after its release, and why players are still discovering Breath of the Wild techniques and secrets with the release of Tears of the Kingdom approaching.

“It's a nerdy little story, but I love it,” wraps up Burgess.

“Emergent Gameplay is often used to describe designed randomness, but this is a case of actual gameplay that NOBODY designed emerging from the bubbling cauldron of overlapping systems.

“And I think that's beautiful.”

• 5 things The Elder Scrolls 6 can improve on from Skyrim

It’s fair to say that The Elder Scrolls 6 is one of the most anticipated games on the horizon – if not ever. Since its reveal at E3 2018, with a teaser trailer showing little more than a logo and some rolling hills, speculation has been rampant about just what Bethesda has up its sleeve for the next entry in the beloved Elder Scrolls series. After all, ten years on from its release, The Elder Scrolls 6’s predecessor, Skyrim, remains one of the most-loved, and continually played role playing games of all time.

But it looks like it will be some time before we find out what awaits us in The Elder Scrolls 6, given the recent revelation that the latest entry in the open world RPG series is only in “the design phase” - meaning we likely won’t get our hands on it for a few years yet.

Regardless, that hasn’t stopped us from speculating about The Elder Scrolls 6 and how it could differ from its predecessors - in particular, Skyrim, the lauded last entry in the series. Despite its decade-old age, there are still a few lessons that can be learned from Bethesda’s critically acclaimed fantasy adventure that we hope will be improved upon for The Elder Scrolls 6. 

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Retain the sense of adventure

From the moment you emerge from the cave into the hills of Skyrim, the sense of freedom is staggering. While the game gently directs you towards the local logging village of Riverwood, you’re more than free to do a ‘Bilbo Baggins’ and go your own way. Opening the map in Skyrim reveals a vast, mysterious plain, shrouded in fog. It’s almost impossible to resist picking a random direction and seeing what you find. What Skyrim player doesn’t have a story of a detour they took and the battle, quest or hilarious death they faced as a result? While it’s unlikely that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be a significantly more linear game, we hope that the developers don’t sacrifice the mystery of exploration in order to make sure more players experience all of the content. 

Though not quite as impenetrable as the Souls series in terms of lore, there’s a mountain of characters, quest lines and stories that most players have probably missed across the Elder Scrolls series. But for those willing to read every book and scour every house, there’s a rich amount of backstory and history to be found. Let’s hope The Elder Scrolls 6 holds on to that sense of adventure, exploration and discovery for those who love to seek it out. 

Brighten the place up a bit

While the look of Skyrim may be iconic, from the snowy peaks to the green fields of Whiterun, after ten years it looks a bit… drab. Unlike The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which even now shines with its colorful flowers and vibrant towns, Skyrim’s nordic-inspired art style can feel a little one-note. This isn’t helped by the fact that a lot of the game's dungeons are dark caves. While we don’t know anything concrete about the location for The Elder Scrolls 6, outside of a potential teaser in the Starfield trailer, we hope that it takes us to a brighter and more colorful corner of Tamriel. 

Since The Elder Scrolls 6 will be harnessing the power of the next gen consoles, this is the perfect opportunity for Bethesda to show off what they can do with a significant upgrade in hardware. 2019’s Ghost of Tsushima is an open world game with a world that absolutely sparkles in every screenshot because it juxtaposes the bright colours of the Japanese countryside with the brutality of war and burned down villages. We’d love The Elder Scrolls 6 to take the same direction and leave the grey hills of Skyrim behind. 

Jack of all guilds, master of none

One thing Skyrim really lacked was a sense of repercussions for how you role-played your characters. By the time you finish the game you can easily be the boss of the Dark Brotherhood, the Thieves Guild and the Archmage of Winterhold. You’re already the Dragonborn that was tasked to save the world, and allowing you to basically do everything kills any sense of experiencing your unique story.

Plenty of RPGs have an issue with making the player character an all powerful God that is the main character of every story, but for The Elder Scrolls VI, we hope more attention is paid to facilitating unique stories. Sure, giving decisions more weight means that some players will miss some content, but we think it’ll make for a more memorable experience.

Monster maker

The character creator in Skyrim leaves a lot to be desired. While not the most limited creator ever, it pales in comparison to even Oblivion. While most players played Skyrim in first person, we think that if we were able to create a warrior, mage or archer more in our own image, or whatever horrific image we’d like, more players would prefer experiencing the world in third person. 

The last Bethesda Game Studios title, Fallout 4, shifted the perspective of conversations, meaning that both the player character and the NPC were shown in third person, ditching the intense eye contact of the past. We think this also encouraged players to take the way their character looked more seriously, or, more keen to make the kind of monster that’ll give you nightmares. But where Fallout 4 funnelled players towards a relatively defined role and purpose in its world, we’d hope The Elder Scrolls 6 would let a wider array of customisation options inform an equally wide array of digital lives to be led in its game world. 

Who are you again, anyway?

The NPC dialogue in Skyrim was one of the things that was memed quickest when the game originally released in 2011. You couldn’t move for horribly-compressed images adorned with jokes about taking arrows to the knee. While the internet grasped hold of this due to the frequency with which it was said, the bigger problem was that that guard who was so keen to tell you of his adventures was just one of hundreds of NPCs that didn’t remotely care or react to what you did. 

You could kill a dragon and save an entire farm, only for the farmer to barely acknowledge your existence. It made the towns feel sterile, like amusement park attractions, filled with animatronics that spit out their line and nothing else. While we know The Elder Scrolls 6 can’t possibly make every single NPC have something relevant to say after every choice you make, it’d be nice to feel like we’re having some impact on the world we’re exploring, other than merely reducing the average life expectancy of dragons. 

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Wanting to fill the time until God of War: Ragnarok releases? Then you’ve landed on the right page. The critical and commercial success of 2018’s God of War reboot on the PS4 meant that a sequel was surely in the cards for old man Kratos. This surprisingly heartfelt tale transformed the Greek demigod from a vengeful killer into a doting dad, and it seems like his story is far from over.

But the PS5 sequel, God of War: Ragnarok isn’t releasing until 2022, which is still a ways off. And if you can’t wait to check back in with Kratos’s Norse mythology escapades, then we’ve got a few game suggestions that will keep you occupied until that elusive release date rolls around next year.

The following five games have been chosen based on their similarities to the God of War series, such as setting and/or gameplay. While they won’t necessarily be entirely similar, we’re sure there will be at least one game in here that will be to your liking, and could even become a new favorite among your gaming library.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim (2011 - PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Nintendo Switch, PC) 

Okay, to be fair, if you’re reading this you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with Skyrim. But if you know it in name only, there’s a wonderfully fantastical and dangerous world waiting for you to conquer with boatloads of quests, factions and character customization to dabble in.

It’s a little scary to think that Skyrim has been out for nearly a decade at this point, but Bethesda’s open world fantasy adventure remains brilliantly playable to this day. The wintry environs of Skyrim can be as beautiful as they are harsh, and the dynamic world design means you could encounter unpredictable events at any turn.

While Skyrim does look pretty dated at this point in terms of graphical quality, the Special Edition released on PS4, Xbox One and PC added some lovely visual flair like higher resolution textures and improved lighting effects.

One of Skyrim’s best features comes from the players rather than the developers, and that would be the game’s robust collection of mods. If you can get over the learning curve, installing mods into Skyrim can transform the game in so many amazing ways, including adding quests, weapons and extra graphical details. Mod support is also somewhat miraculously supported on Xbox and PS4, though it’s unfortunately more limited on Sony’s machine.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020 - PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC) 

If you’re looking for something that’s fairly God of War adjacent, it’s hard to do much better than Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. This brilliantly realized open world takes place across the medieval landscapes of ye olde Norway and England, exploring the Nordic influences present in Britain at the time.

Valhalla trades the drop-dead gorgeous vistas of its predecessor, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, for something a lot more grounded. Medieval England is a gritty, often dingy place to explore. It has its moments of beauty, of course, but you’ll often be fighting in the rainiest, muddiest climes merry old England has to offer.

Much like Odyssey and Origins before it, Valhalla has a pretty decent story that will guide you through all the highlights of the open world. The abundance of weapon and armor swapping has been greatly toned down from Odyssey, too, allowing for a more streamlined gameplay experience.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015 - PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC) 

The Witcher 3 is getting on in years at this point, but that doesn’t make the game any less impressive. Truly, the scope of The Witcher 3 is nearly unparalleled to this day, showcasing a giant open world set across multiple and varied regions.

The Witcher 3 is very much about its characters, not least of all Geralt of Rivia, the series’ moody protagonist. Geralt’s grit-filled voice, no-nonsense mannerisms and dry sense of humor never get old, and seeing his relationships with other characters unfold is worth a playthrough alone.

That’s not to say the game is all form over function. Far from it, as The Witcher 3 boasts one of the most involving and detailed action combat systems in recent years. You have your standard sword attacks, of course, but those are supplemented by crossbows, potions, poisons and Signs - a set of basic magical abilities Geralt can employ to swiftly change the course of battle.

The Witcher 3 is a genuinely massive game, and much like Skyrim, will take you upwards of 100 hours if you want to see and do absolutely everything. That playtime expands exponentially with two substantial expansions - Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. Not to mention Gwent, the bizarrely addictive collectible card game that got its own online multiplayer spin-off.

Ghost of Tsushima (2020 - PS4)

If you loved the God of War reboot, then you absolutely won’t want to miss out on another stunningly good Sony first-party title. Ghost of Tsushima pushes the PS4’s graphical power to its limits, delivering one of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous games on the system. But that’s not all Ghost of Tsushima has going for it.

Developed by Sucker Punch, Ghost of Tsushima puts players in the role of samurai Jin Sakai. As Jin, it’s your job to protect the island of Tsushima from an invading Mongol horde, and you can do this via careful stealth or fiercely visceral sword combat.

Jin can also make use of a handful of useful tools to help him gain the upper hand in combat. Smoke bombs can be used to make a hasty escape, while kunai can strike multiple enemies for a quick burst of area damage.

Ghost of Tsushima’s open world is a delight to explore, and a real visual treat much like God of War and fellow PS4 landmark Horizon Zero Dawn. And just like those games, it’s easy to spend hours just drinking in the sights, and making use of the game’s superb photo mode.

Hades (2020 - Nintendo Switch, PC)

With 2018’s God of War and the upcoming God of War: Ragnarok largely featuring Norse mythology, it’s easy to overlook Kratos’s Greek origins. That’s why we’re recommending Hades - an action roguelite heavily inspired by Greek mythology - and arguably one of the best games ever made.

In Hades you play as Prince Zagreus, and the basic premise is to get one over on your dad (the titular God of the Dead himself) by escaping the underworld to reach Mount Olympus, spurred on by the gods that reside there who also aren’t particularly fond of Hades. Said gods will grant you boons (essentially combat perks) as you progress through the levels of the underworld, and are indispensable to your survival.

Hades is a very challenging game, but one of its best features is the House of Hades, where you return upon death. While here, Zagreus can interact with the house’s denizens to increase his bond with them (yep, Hades doubles as a dating sim), as well as upgrade himself and the layout of future runs to help give you every advantage you’ll most certainly need.

Like any good roguelite, the first time you clear a full run will feel oh-so satisfying. However, in Hades, that’s far from the end of the game, as the narrative cleverly sets itself up to give Zagreus a reason to continuously escape from the underworld. If you like fast-paced and challenging combat with a sizable helping of Greek mythology, Hades is a near infinitely playable game and simply one of the best indies around.

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Modiphius Games, creators of licensed tabletop adventures such as Dishonored: The Roleplaying Game and The Elder Scrolls: Call to Arms are once again teaming up with Bethesda to create a cooperative board game based on its landmark hit, Skyrim.

As reported by Polygon, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim The Board Game will be a cooperative adventure game for one to four players. We don’t currently know anything beyond that, however.

Publisher Modiphius Games says Skyrim: The Board Game’s crowdfunding page is set to go live in June, but it’s not being hosted on Kickstarter. Instead, Modiphius is launching its campaign on Gamefound, a Kickstarter alternative primarily used to fund tabletop games, and the draft page for the project is now live. 

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Can't wait to count out your coin

Gamefound was founded in 2020 and already has one huge crowdfunding success to its name, that being Awaken Realms’ ISS Vanguard, a cooperative sci-fi tabletop game that to date has raised almost $5 million. When you consider its initial goal of $50,000, it’s hard to see that as anything other than hugely successful.

We’re hoping that Skyrim: The Board Game can follow in ISS Vanguard’s footsteps. It definitely has all the makings to do so, as it’s a well-loved game from a pretty important video game series.

While no big details about how Skyrim: The Board Game will play have been revealed yet, we’re happy that just like the game, the tabletop version will support solo play. We do wonder how Skyrim will translate to a cooperative environment, however, but we imagine it won’t be too different from other cooperative games in the space, such as the Doom and Dark Souls board games.

• How to play Skyrim in local split-screen co-op with a friend

Of all the ways to while away lockdown with live-in friends, loved ones and housemates harbouring resentments over the unclaimed crusty spoons in the kitchen side-sink, there are few more appealing than escaping into one of the best RPGs of all time together. 

The Skyrim mod Skyrim Together lets you do that, enabling online play with up to 32 players (though the recommended maximum is eight). Recently, the mod was integrated into Nucleus Coop, an ingenious tool that turns typically online-only multiplayer games into local split-screen games, meaning you can explore those familiar frozen lands side by side.

There are some caveats to this. You won’t be able to do quests independently, with one player having to push forward quests and other key dialogue while the other essentially ‘tags along’, and it’s still prone to some bugs and desyncs. But you know what? It’s still a largely functioning couch co-op Skyrim, and it’s free. That in itself makes it worth exploring, so we’ve put together a guide on how you can play Skyrim split-screen with your chosen co-adventurer.

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1. Get started

First, download and install the latest version of Harbor Launcher (you may have to right-click the downloaded .exe file and choose ‘Run as administrator’ if you run into problems opening the installer).

Open Harbor Launcher, then under ‘Game Version’ choose Skyrim SE. If the big bar says ‘Game Not Found’ then click the search icon and navigate to your Skyrim .exe file (C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition by default).

Once you’ve done that, the big bar should say ‘Install’. Click it to start downloading Skyrim Together.

2. Get Nucleus Co-op

While you’re waiting for Skyrim Together to download, download the latest version of Nucleus Co-op, then extract it to a root folder on your PC (for example C:\ or another hard drive). 

A recent update to Nucleus Co-op means that it’s being flagged by Chrome and Edge’s malware scanners as a virus. This is a false positive, and you can safely download Nucleus Co-op. You could use Firefox to download it instead, which doesn’t flag the file, or temporarily disable Chrome’s anti-malware protection by clicking the three-dotted menu icon at the top right of Chrome, then Settings > Privacy and security > No protection.

Windows Defender may also flag the file as a virus. If that happens, click the popup box saying a threat has been detected, click the threat, then click Allow on device > Start actions. After you’ve done this, try downloading the file again, and remember to reenable the protections on Chrome and Windows Defender afterwards.

3. Add Skyrim

Open Nucleus Co-op, click ‘Download Game Scripts’, then type Skyrim into the ‘Game’ box and click Search. Click Skyrim: Special Edition then Download.

Click 'Yes' when asked if you’d like to add Skyrim Together to Nucleus Co-op, then navigate to your SkyrimSE.exe again.

Close the Download Game Scripts window so you’re back on the main Nucleus Coop screen then click Skyrim at the top-left corner. Click the small icon at the top left corner of the box below Gamepads to select how you want your screen split.

Make sure your controllers are switched on, then drag their icons to fill up the sections of the box, like below:

Click the arrow at the top right corner of Nucleus Coop, then choose how many instances of Skyrim (i.e. how many players) you want. When you’re ready, click Play.

Two instances of Skyrim should now open on your computer. If you get an error message saying you are missing libcrypto-1_1-x64.dll, download it from dll-files.com and put it in the ‘server’ folder in the game’s installation directory ( C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\server by default).

4. Load up Skyrim

With both instances of Skyrim Special Edition running, both players need to either start their own new Skyrim games or open existing separate Skyrim save files (if you start a new game, you’ll need to create your character and get past the tutorial area to join another player’s game).

To join the same local server, both players need to press the right Ctrl key on the keyboard when their instance is selected, then click Connect, enter 127.0.0.1 into the address box and click Connect again. 

Once you’re both connected to the same server, press right Ctrl again to hide the chat box in each window.

Once that’s done, both players will spawn in the same place they were standing in in their separate games, but you’ll now both be in the same world. You’ll need to manually find your fellow player in the game, as there are no map indicators showing each other’s location. Luckily with split-screen, you can just look at each other’s screens to track each other down.

Of course, you’ll need a pretty powerful PC for this to run smoothly, and you may need to do some tweaking with graphics settings and resolutions to get a nice steady frame rate. 

If the game is running smoothly for one player but not for the other, press Alt+Tab until you’ve selected the Nucleus Co-op launcher. This should smooth out the frame rate for both players, after which you can just move the Nucleus Co-op window out of the way into the corner.

As you play, you’ll probably see that this mod still needs work in some areas, but it’s already an incredible experience. Now that you have Nucleus Co-op too, it’s worth using the tool to see what other games it converts into split-screen (there are over 300 in total!). Happy gaming.

• These are the best PC games

It’s high time Tamriel got the TV treatment. According to a report from industry insider Daniel Ritchtman, Netflix is developing a TV show based on the The Elder Scrolls franchise.

Ritchtman claims the streaming giant is hoping to capitalize on the success of its existing fantasy series, The Witcher – which is based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels and the acclaimed video game series – by bringing Bethesda’s beloved world of magic and dragons to life. 

If the rumours are true, it’s a move that makes sense in a lot of ways. The history of The Elder Scrolls series is a rich one – the franchise lays claim to some of the most successful RPG games of all time in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim – and Netflix producers will have no trouble developing a story based in such an established fantasy universe. 

Beyond the main entries in the franchise, the series has maintained popularity through the successful MMO spin-off game The Elder Scrolls Online – which continues to grow almost seven years after its initial release – and Blades, a free-to-play RPG for Nintendo Switch and mobile devices. 

The point being, The Elder Scrolls is a series with esteemed lineage and a vast fanbase, and few would argue against its suitability for the screen.

• Everything we know about The Witcher season 2 
• Everything we know about The Elder Scrolls 6 
• Game of Thrones prequel series: House of the Dragon details 

News of its rumoured adaptation also comes amid a growing appetite for fantasy TV content. Despite going out with a whimper rather than a bang, HBO’s mega-hit Game of Thrones proved the narrative and commercial potential of fantasy storytelling, reviving interest in the genre in measures not seen since the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy two decades ago. 

It’s an appetite that other streaming services are hoping to capitalise on, too. HBO has already released details of its Game of Thrones spin-off series, House of the Dragon, and Amazon famously acquired the TV rights for a Lord of the Rings series – to the tune of $250 million – back in 2017. 

Although The Elder Scrolls doesn’t have the same literary pedigree as those acclaimed fantasy series before it, it nonetheless remains a franchise packed to the rafters in lore – from its elves, orcs and anthropomorphic animals to its themes of legendary heroism and magic. 

Audiences have already proven their willingness to embrace video game adaptations in the success of The Witcher, and Bethesda has likewise proven its willingness to embrace the small screen with another of its popular video game properties; a Fallout TV series is coming to Amazon Prime Video, and it's being made by the production company behind Westworld, no less.

But while its apocalyptic fictional universe is certainly one rich in detail and potential for good storytelling, even Fallout can’t touch The Elder Scrolls for size and depth of lore. If indeed the rumours are true and Tamriel is finally coming to TV, Netflix looks certain to be onto another winner.  

The Elder Scrolls 6

The appetite for a TV adaptation of The Elder Scrolls also comes amid the customary longing for a new video game entry in the series. Despite the release of various online-only spin-off games, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – released in 2011 – was the last main, story-driven addition to The Elder Scrolls universe. 

Rumours of The Elder Scrolls 6 have swirled in their numbers throughout the last decade, and fans were delighted when Bethesda's Todd Howard used the spotlight of E3 2018 to confirm that the studio is indeed working on a new instalment in the series.

But since then, details of the new game have been few and far between. We’ve rounded up everything we know about The Elder Scrolls 6 here. 

In related news, the new game – whenever it finally arrives – may not be coming to PS5 consoles, following Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax.

In an interview with Russian publication TASS, Playstation boss Jim Ryan said that it's still uncertain as to whether Bethesda’s upcoming titles will come to PlayStation – or whether they will be Microsoft exclusives. "That’s a decision that is out of our hands," Ryan said. "We’ll wait and see what happens. I look forward to learning about that."

More recently, Microsoft boss Phil Spencer was asked about the acquisition of ZeniMax and its impact on the exclusivity of a new The Elder Scrolls game: “Is it possible to recoup a $7.5 billion investment if you don’t sell Elder Scrolls 6 on the PlayStation?” Spencer was asked, who quickly replied with, "yes." 

In any case, while the future of Bethesda’s beloved franchise remains uncertain from a video game perspective, a Netflix adaptation of The Elder Scrolls looks set to satisfy the cravings of fans so long deprived of new stories from Tamriel. 

• Will Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield come to PS5? 

Skyrim, Among Us, and The Yakuza Remastered Collection are all coming to Xbox Game Pass.

Revealed at last night's The Game Awards, Microsoft confirmed The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - Special Edition will debut on the subscription service on December 15, while the fantastic Yakuza Remastered Collection - which features Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 – joins the roster on January 28, 2021. 

Yakuza 6: The Song of Life is also on the way, but that won't arrive until March 25, 2021. Skyrim is headed for console and Android, while the Yakuza games will release on Android, console and PC.

Finally, cult smash Among Us was also confirmed for PC players, but for now, there's no solid release date, just a promise that it's coming "soon".

You've probably heard all about the hilarious antics of Among Us by now. As we reported a couple of months back, it released way back in June 2018 but has seen a huge surge in popularity recently. 

The game is available on PC as well as smartphones and tablets, although while it's free on mobile - chiefly because you view ads between games - on PC, it's a premium product you have to purchase.

• Xbox Game Pass review
• Xbox Series X: what you need to know
• PS5 vs Xbox Series X: what are the differences?

The Game Awards: Game of the Year winner

The Game Awards - which is less like the Oscars for video games and more like a marathon of world premier trailers – took time last night to honor the biggest game experiences of the year.

Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II took home the grand prize of Game of the Year, beating off competition from Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Hades, Ghost of Tsushima, Doom Eternal, and Final Fantasy 7 Remake. 

For the full details, head to our recap of last night's The Game Awards show, including all the winners and announcements from the show. 

• The best PS5 games so far

It looks as though the new Elder Scrolls tabletop spin-off, entitled Elsweyr, has been pulled for good – having been released only yesterday, it was quickly noted that it had a lot of similarities to a Dungeons & Dragons module published in 2016.

And we do mean a lot of similarities... introduction text that matches up very closely, scenarios and gameplay details that appear to have been lifted wholesale, and so on.

"We have pulled a previously shared ESO tabletop RPG adventure while we investigate the source," says Bethesda in a Facebook post. "Thank you to those who reached out with concerns."

• The latest rumors on Rage 2
• Explore Summerset Isles in ESO
• Get hold of The Elder Scrolls: Blades

The printable materials have since been taken off the web, but Ars Technica has a good rundown of how Elsweyr compared with The Black Road, the 2016 D&D adventure. At the moment it's not clear exactly who supplied the materials to Bethesda.

The same but different

One of the ways Elsweyr and The Black Road match up is in an encounter with a four-wagon caravan – even down to the contents of each wagon, and how frequently the caravan travels.

While some D&D rules have been released under the OGL (Open Game License) for other players to adapt, this would appear to go way beyond what's permissible.

The creators of The Black Road D&D module, Paige Leitman and Ben Heisler, helped spread the word of the plagiarism claims but seem to be waiting for Bethesda to find out exactly what happened before pointing fingers.

As for the other Elsweyr – the expansion pack due on June 4 for The Elder Scrolls Online – that's still going ahead as normal. But the tabletop promo game... probably not.

• The Elder Scrolls 6: release date, news and rumors

After a period of invite-only early access, Bethesda has announced that The Elder Scrolls: Blades can now be downloaded and played by everyone with a supported iOS or Android device. 

That's right, there's no need to register for early access or even use a Bethesda account, you can just download the game from Google Play or the App Store now. 

When it was first announced, it was confirmed that Elder Scrolls: Blades would be coming to PC and consoles as well as mobile but for the moment the release is limited to mobile devices. That’s no bad thing, though; in our hands-on review of the game we found Blades to be “a thoroughly enjoyable experience” despite not being a completely fresh take on the universe.

While it’s now open to everyone, The Elder Scrolls: Blades is still a work-in-progress early access game and this is worth bearing in mind before you play. According to Bethesda's FAQ, however, any early access progress or purchases you make will be carried over to the main game. 

If you just can’t wait until The Elder Scrolls 6 for a new Tamriel fix, then you can download The Elder Scrolls: Blades now on iOS and Android. 

• Prefer to think about The Elder Scrolls 6? Here are a few items we'd like to see in that game

What makes The Elders Scrolls such a brilliant RPG series is the expansive worlds that Bethesda builds - and the items and objects that fill it. Unique axes, maces, shields and chest pieces hide in dungeons, waiting to be discovered, and finding your new favorite, enchanted sword is every bit as rewarding as slaying a powerful boss.

In anticipation of The Elder Scrolls 6, and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the series, we’ve scoured Tamriel to find the items that we love the most. 

Here are the best weapons, armor, scrolls and shields in The Elder Scrolls- along with some suggestions for what we’d like to see in Bethesda’s next game.

Wabbajack – Daggerfall/Oblivion/Skyrim

The Wabbajack is The Elder Scrolls’ most unpredictable weapon. Point it at an enemy and you might transform them into a sweetroll, but they may also morph into a powerful Daedra that can maul you in seconds.

In Daggerfall and Oblivion, the Wabbajack turns NPCs into a random creature. Skyrim’s version is even better: as well as transforming an enemy into a chicken or a book it might decapitate them, teleport them a short distance, or make them explode in a shower of Septims. That randomness can make fights harder - but the resultant chaos is always worth it.

Boots of Blinding Speed – Morrowind

For the small price of your eyesight, the Boots of Blinding Speed let you sprint around Morrowind as if you have rocket-powered shoes. You have no idea where you’re going thanks to the pure white light filling your screen- but you know you’ll get there very fast. 

Certain enchantments, such as resist magic, will keep the blindness at bay so you can see where you’re going, but we prefer to leave it to chance.

Skull of Corruption – Daggerfall/Oblivion/Skyrim

A wonderfully evil item that, in both Daggerfall and Oblivion, spawns a duplicate of any enemy, forcing your foe to fight a corrupted copy of itself.

In Skyrim it’s different, but no less dastardly: it’s a regular staff that you power up by harvesting the dreams of NPCs. The more dreams you collect, the more damage the staff deals, and it can hit multiple enemies at once. Sleep with one eye open.

Severed Nord Leg – Morrowind’s Bloodmoon expansion

Dying by a sword or axe isn’t humiliating. Dying because you’ve been bashed over the head by a severed leg, however, is The Elder Scrolls’ ultimate embarrassment. 

Part of the joy of getting this weapon is the beast you must kill to find it: it’s part troll, part gorilla, with glowing green eyes. It’s a tough fight, so stay limber. 

Ebony Blade – Arena/Daggerfall/Oblivion/Skyrim

A beautiful, terrible sword that has become more twisted as the series has progressed. What started out as a weapon that leeched life from enemies when you slashed them has become, in Skyrim, a blade that hits harder the more friendly NPCs you slay with it. 

You’ll have to kill 10 friendly characters to max out its stats, you awful, awful person.

Dawnbreaker - Skyrim

A sword that smacks the undead so hard they explode. That ability, deriving from an enchantment called Meridia's Retribution, is specific to Dawnbreaker, making it the best sword for cutting down Dragon Priests and Draugr. 

These explosions of fire and flesh will damage any other undead enemies nearby, and some survivors will flee in fear. One to keep in mind for the zombie apocalypse, then.

Auriel's Shield – Arena/Daggerfall/Skyrim’s Dawnguard expansion

The Elder Scrolls has plenty of powerful shields that will deflect blades and arrows, but Auriel’s Shield is the only one that’s also a viable weapon. 

In Arena, it healed you as you held it, in Daggerfall it reflected spells - but in Skyrim, it absorbs the energy from attacks that it blocks and, when you power bash, turns that energy back on your enemy, blasting them through the air. Who needs a fancy sword?

Scroll of Icarian Flight – Morrowind

You can’t fly in Bethesda’s RPGs - but this scroll is the next best thing. It boosts your acrobatics skill by 1,000 points, which basically makes you springier than Flubber on a trampoline, and you can jump halfway across the map in a single leap. 

The way you discover it is one of Morrowind’s best moments: a wizard plummets from the sky, screaming. If you’re quick enough, you can save him with a Slow Fall spell, which is also the best way to safely land after you’ve gone airborne.

Bow of Shadows – Morrowind

This bow takes your stealthy archer build to another level. When wielded, you become invisible, raining down arrows on your opponents while they scan the horizon, clueless. You’ll also get a speed boost, which lets you dart from vantage point to vantage point, constantly flanking your enemies. 

It hasn’t made an appearance since Morrowind, sadly - we’d love to see the damage it could do in Skyrim’s dungeons

Mehrunes' Razor – Daggerfall/Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim

Don’t judge it by its size: this dagger can take down any enemy in one hit. It has decent base damage, but on every strike there’s a small chance - around 2% in Skyrim- that you’ll one-shot an enemy. 

That goes for dragons, daedra and Dwarven Centurions. Nobody is safe.

Armor of the Crusader – Oblivion’s Knight of the Nine expansion

Technically a group of items rather than just one, but the Armor of the Crusader deserves to be worn as a set, or displayed in its full glory on the Priory of the Nine’s armor stand. Each piece has its own benefits and abilities: the boots will cause usually-hostile animals to pay you no attention, for example. 

Really, it’s on this list for how it looks. The red and gold diamond on a white background is iconic, and makes you look every inch a Knight of the Nine.

Bloodskal Blade – Skyrim’s Dragonborn expansion/Morrowind’s Bloodmoon expansion

Without mods, this is the closest you’ll get to a lightsaber in The Elder Scrolls. Power attacks send out a beam of energy that travels through both enemies and walls, letting you deal damage to large groups at once. 

It has a devilish red tinge and mean-looking notches on either side of its giant blade. It also made an appearance in Morrowind’s Bloodmoon expansion, where it was simply called Bloodskal. That version looked more vanilla, though, and its effect was just plain old frost damage.

Eltonbrand – Morrowind

A shiny gold katana that smites your enemies with extra fire damage. To obtain it, you first need to obtain the Goldbrand sword and then follow a set of ridiculously precise steps, including having exactly 11,171 gold to your name.

It’s also, to our knowledge, the only Elder Scrolls weapon named after an NBA Basketball player. That player is Elton Brand, who went to Duke University - the developer that made it was a huge Duke fan, and when you pick up the weapon you’ll see the message “Go to hell, Carolina!"

Dawnfang and Duskfang – Oblivion’s Shivering Isles expansion

Two swords for the price of one, this blade is fiery Dawnfang by day, and frosty Duskfang by night, changing colour as the sun sets. As if a transforming sword wasn’t cool enough, it’ll also track how many enemies you’ve killed with it. 

Slice up 12 foes before it changes form and you’ll get a superior version the next day that absorbs health or magicka from enemies.

Glass Bow of the Stag Prince - Skyrim’s Dragonborn expansion

Unless we’re roleplaying a ranger, we never really find a reason to hunt in Skyrim beyond the first few hours. But the Glass Bow of the Stag Prince changes that: for every 20 animals you kill, you gain a blessing that boosts your health and stamina. 

That’s reason enough to stay on the tail of every stray deer - just try not to think about Bambi.

Skooma – Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim

Drink responsibly.

A few items we’d like to see in The Elder Scrolls 6

We’re sure Bethesda has plenty of unique weapons and armor pieces planned for The Elder Scrolls 6, but here are some specific items we’d like to see in the game when it finally arrives...

Gloves of Fire (or ice, or lightning)
We enjoy enchanting our weapons with special effects, but we wish we could swap out those enchantments to match the enemy we’re facing. To keep that lore-friendly, Bethesda could add magic gloves that imbue whatever weapon you’re holding with a particular effect. The gloves of fire, for instance, would set your sword ablaze - gloves of lightning would add a spark to each of your arrows. It’d make character builds more flexible, and give us a way of adapting to different threats.

Spears
Spears haven’t been in The Elder Scrolls since Morrowind. They were fun, but we’d love to see how they’d work in Bethesda’s updated engine, and it’d create a new fighting style to master. 

Free Horse Armor
We’ll never forget Bethesda’s ridiculous $2.50 Horse Armor DLC - but we did miss the ability to customise our mounts in Skyrim. We’d like to be able to deck them out in the colors of our choosing, and the extra protection would also make horseback combat more viable.

Customizable shields
Speaking of customization: shields need some livening up. Bethesda should let players pick a design or coat of arms to display on the front of their shield - a pack of lions, or a group of Mudcrabs, perhaps. Maybe you could take them to a tailor for a new paint job, and buy new designs as you roamed the world.

Wearable lanterns
Holding a torch all the time is annoying, which is the reason there are tons of wearable lantern mods. It’s a lore-friendly method for lightning your way through dungeons, and you can keep both hands free to do battle. 

Pouches and backpacks
In every Elder Scrolls game we end up carrying five swords, three shields, and stacks of potion, with no sign of where our character actually keeps them. Pouches and backpacks would add some visual flair to our hero, as well as explaining where all those items are stashed.

The Wabbajack
Never take it away from us.

• Read more: The Elder Scrolls 6: release date, news and rumors

One of YouTube's most endearing content creators is making a cameo in the next Elder Scrolls game.

Shirley Curry – called 'Skyrim Grandma' by her fans – is an 82-year-old gaming enthusiast and dedicated Skyrim fan, with a popular YouTube channel that's racked up over half a million subscribers for her Elder Scrolls play-throughs.

Curry took to Twitter this week to announce she would appear "as a character in the next TES game", posting a video in an Elder Scrolls shirt next to a smiling Todd Howard – the Bethesda director who oversees development of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series.

How are they doing it?

Putting real people in games is different than using the standard character creation tool, however.

We learnt more about Bethesda's use of 'photogrammatry' tech at PAX East (when Gearbox also officially announced the upcoming Borderlands 3 game), during the Elder Scrolls 25th Anniversary Panel. The tech allows Bethesda to take measurements of real-life faces, objects or surroundings in order to recreate them within the Elder Scrolls VI game engine.

As the mo-cap tech used in video games progresses, it could be we see more and more real-life people and well-known faces appear in our games. In March this year we also caught wind of Lady Gaga apparently playing a character in CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077.

• The Elder Scrolls 6: release date, news and rumors

Via Kotaku

A strange thing happened about six months ago, when I started to notice more and more people wearing Apple AirPods on the train each day. 

The AirPods were mocked when they were first launched in 2016, for being over-engineered, and over-priced – and by people like me who couldn’t actually get the darn things to stay in their ears for more than five seconds at a time.

Yet, a couple of years later, the AirPods are very much in vogue, and the internet is abuzz with rumors of  the AirPods 2 on the way. 

With loads of other manufacturers taking a cue from the true wireless design of the AirPods, Apple actually seems to have popularized a whole new category of headphones.

Of course, the AirPods aren’t the only tech product to have undergone such a dramatic reversal of fortunes. There are plenty of gadgets and games that seemed to crash and burn when they were first launched, only to rise phoenix-like into the tech hall of fame. 

So let’s take a stroll down memory lane and look at some of the zeroes that somehow managed to become tech heroes.

Apple AirPods (2016)

The wire-free AirPods did get some good reviews when they were first launched, but they cost £159 and the audio quality wasn’t much better than you could get from a cheaper set of Bluetooth headphones.

Yet, in the last six months or so, the AirPods have been all over the place, being worn on trains and out on the streets – and featuring prominently in Velvet Buzzsaw, the new Jake Gyllenhaal film on Netflix.

• Check out our roundup of the best true wireless earbuds

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (2016)

The Galaxy Note 7 had record pre-orders ahead of its launch launch in mid-2016, but there were soon reports of batteries overheating and catching fire. 

The phone was banned on many airlines, and discontinued before the end of the year – with Samsung taking a huge hit to its profits in the process. Yet Samsung took less than a year to recover, launching the successful Galaxy Note 8 in 2017, and Galaxy Note 9 in 2018. 

Microsoft Tablet PC (2000)

You’ve got to give Bill Gates credit, as he was promoting the idea of a ‘tablet PC’ years before Apple got round to launching the iPad. 

Gates demonstrated a prototype tablet in 2000, and a number of PC manufacturers produced their own tablet devices as well – but the processor technology of the time just wasn’t ready for these new mobile devices, and it wasn’t until 2010 that Apple managed to pull it off with the category-defining iPad.

• Best tablet 2019: the top slates tested and ranked

Apple Macintosh Portable (1989) 

Apple had its own stumbles with mobile technology along the way. The Macintosh Portable was its first foray into the laptop market, but with a weight of more than 7kg this colossal clunker was quickly dubbed the “luggable” instead.

But Apple learned from this mistake, and a few years down the line it came up with the groundbreaking, super-slim design of the MacBook Air.

Microsoft Surface (2012)

The Surface range has been a huge success in recent years, yet the first version sank without trace, as it ran a modified version of Windows – called Windows RT – that never got very much support from apps and software developers.

It was the Surface Pro running the standard version of Windows 8 that turned things around in 2013. Microsoft never looked back, and the versatile design of the Surface has been widely copied – even by Apple, which released the iPad Pro in response.

• Read our review of the Microsoft Surface Go

The Chromebook (2011)

The first Chromebooks got mixed reviews back in 2011, and were criticized for their poor performance and reliance on an ‘always on’ internet connection. So, in 2013, Google took matters into its own hands, and launched its own Chromebook, called the Chromebook Pixel.

The Pixel was expensive, starting at around $1000 (£750 / AU$1400), but its high-res screen and powerful Intel processor made it a match for traditional Windows laptops. 

Google’s current Pixelbook has a convertible design that directly competes with the Microsoft Surface, and there’s an increasing range of Chromebooks on offer from traditional PC manufacturers as well.

World of Warcraft (2004)

It’s been one of the most successful games of all time, but World Of Warcraft got off to a rocky start. 

The online servers were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people trying to log into the game, and hardcore players quickly reached the game’s level cap and found there wasn’t much else to do. 

But an endless stream of expansion packs kept the fans coming back for more, and WoW still has millions of paying subscribers while most of its rivals have ditched subscriptions and gone free-to-play. 

• World of Warcraft: Classic – is the nostalgia trip worth visiting Azeroth?

Elder Scrolls Online (2014)

The single-player games in Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series are some of the most revered games of all time, so expectations were high when the company announced the massively-multiplayer Elder Scrolls Online (ESO).

But those hopes came crashing to the ground when the PC version arrived in 2014. Log-in problems were just the start, and a series of bugs and a dated design saw subscribers fleeing in droves.

But ditching subscriptions in 2015 saved the game, and a series of impressive expansion packs has ensured that ESO is now permanently perched near the top of the MMO chart on Steam.

• Elder Scrolls 6 release date, news, and rumors

Final Fantasy XIV Online (2010)

Like the Elder Scrolls games, the Final Fantasy series has a long and successful history, but the online FFXIV fell flat on its face when it first launched, with an endless series of bugs and technical glitches. 

The revamped 2012 edition had problems too (don’t even ask about the Mac version…) but with each successive patch and update, FFXIV was knocked into shape, and with continuing healthy subscriber numbers it has actually become one of the company’s most successful releases.

Diablo 3 (2012)

Many multi-player games have log-in problems following their initial launch, but Diablo 3 went one further, with the infamous Error 37 that even prevented solo players from logging into the game’s single-player mode as well. 

The online ‘auction house’ that allowed you to buy weapons and armor with real money also went down like lead balloon. 

But, with Error 37 eliminated, and the auction house quickly shut down, Diablo 3 turned out to be hideously addictive and entertaining, and is still going strong today (just don’t mention Diablo Immortal…).

• Diablo 4: everything there is to know so far

Pebble Watch (2013)

The Pebble was the first modern smartwatch, and it broke records for the funding that it raised on Kickstarter in 2012 – but sales didn’t live up to expectation, and the company shut down in 2016. 

However, Pebble sold most of its patents and technology to Fitbit – who, of course, went on to create a whole new category of ‘fitbands’, and a couple of years later, Apple did its usual mopping-up trick with the Apple Watch.

• Best smartwatch 2019: the best wearable you can buy today

Sega Dreamcast (1998) 

Sega’s Dreamcast was the harbinger of modern, online gaming. It was the first console to include a built-in modem for Internet access and online gaming, but a lack of A-list games titles saw the Dreamcast discontinued in 2001. 

It was a glorious failure, though, and pointed towards the future of gaming, with online games such as Fortnite now dominating the industry.

The mobile phone (1946)

Admittedly, we’re getting a bit generic here, but the very first MTS – mobile telephone service – from Bell in the US was launched back in 1946, and weighed in at a whopping 36kg. 

Motorola launched the first modern mobile phone – the fondly remembered Dynatac ‘brick’ – in 1973, with a more manageable weight of about 1kg. And the rest, as they say, is history.

• The best smartphone of 2019

Foldable smartphones

Talking about making history, our future tip for the top is the folding smartphone, which arrived in a flurry of headlines at the Mobile World Congress last month. 

The $2000 (around £1,515 / AU$2,760) price tag of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold doesn’t exactly have ‘mass market success’ written all over it, and Huawei’s Mate X is even more expensive at around $2600 (£2,000 / AU$4,770). 

But there’s so much money and effort going into foldable screen technology that it’s just a matter of time before one of these bendy things finds its way into your pocket.

• Foldable phones: all the rumored and confirmed foldable handsets

Google Glass (2013)

Actually, the Google Glass is still a big fat zero. The original idea was suitably futuristic, allowing you to view information such as maps or emails on the lens of the glasses, but the ability to take pictures of people without their knowledge by using the built-in camera raised privacy concerns, and actually led to physical attacks on a number of Glass wearers.

 On the upside, the Glass debacle did coin the term “glasshole” – so it wasn’t a complete loss.

• Seven wearables to look out for in 2019

More than seven years after it first launched, and we still can't get enough of The Elder Scrolls v: Skyrim. And that's thanks in large part to the continued efforts of its dedicated modding community, which is now serving up another treat – working multiplayer support.

Though the Elder Scrolls games excel in large part thanks to their focus on solo play (the Elder Scrolls Online notwithstanding, of course), several years in and Skyrim's large open world still begs to be explored with pals. Many modders have tried to bring this dream to fruition, but it's the team working on Skyrim Together that has come closest to making it a reality.

It allows up to eight players to team up and take on the majority of what Skyrim has to offer, once again breathing new life into the game.

Dragon wagon

Skyrim Together is currently in a closed beta, accessible only to the team's Patreon contributors, though that's only set to be a short season before a wider release is enabled.

So what can and can't you do in Skyrim Together? It seems the majority of the game is accessible in multiplayer mode, with NPCs and quest systems supported – though no effort is being made to adapt missions to make them more co-op compatible. You'll be able to interact with objects and NPCs as you'd expect, although dragon encounters, a key elements of the main storyline, don't quite work.

As for interactions with other players, these work just how you'd hope they would – team health bars are displayed as part of the interface, and you can heal target charms with restoration spells and the like.

Could this be a sign of things to come for the Elder Scrolls series? Alhough its efforts proved problematic in Fallout 76, Bethesda certainly has ambitions to make its open world games more multiplayer-friendly. While a modding effort is a far stretch from official support, don't be surprised if we see this one, and many other Skyrim mods, act as inspiration for elements of the The Elder Scrolls 6.

• The Elder Scrolls 6: everything there is to know so far