The Elder Scrolls 6 is hotly anticipated—and has been for a full eight years following its announcement at E3 2018 and complete silence on it ever since. Instead, Bethesda worked very hard at trying to push Starfield which, for a studio that was once the pinnacle of open world RPG makers, just wasn't quite up to snuff.

The setting was a little dull and boilerplate, the procedurally-generated planets didn't have much on offer, it looked a touch dated, and so on. It was left out to dry at The Game Awards, was thrashed by reviews on Steam, and it had the misfortune of coming out in the same year as Baldur's Gate 3, which is one of our highest-scoring games of all time.

According to Bethesda veteran Kurt Kuhlmann, most of the developers at the studio were surprised to be working on Starfield instead of The Elder Scrolls 6. And it's not as though Kuhlmann was some small fry who wasn't in the know: He joined the company in 1996, wrote the main questline of Oblivion, and was the co-lead designer on Skyrim before leaving the studio in 2023.

Speaking with Frvr, Kuhlmann says that "we all expected [The Elder Scrolls 6] to be directly after Fallout 4. Why wouldn't it be? That's what we did, and that was kind of the expectation. And then Fallout 76 came along."

Fallout 76 sidelined the studio for some time, as the project "wasn't originally supposed to involve our whole studio. But then, I mean, what we were supposed to be working on next—it wasn't ever that we were about to suddenly work on TES 6, even though that's what I think most people wanted."

He then describes Todd coming in with the Starfield-shaped steel chair: "Todd was like: 'No, we're doing Starfield. I got that approved. It's going to be a new IP. It's going to be this ambitious [game]. It's going to be the greatest space RPG ever made.'"

Kuhlmann, who it should be noted left due to a "tough conversation" wherein he was refused a lead role on TES6, theorises that Todd Howard "had maybe the opportunity and the ability to go to the people running ZeniMax and say, 'I want to not do TES 6'" after the successes of Fallout 4. "Which seems like a pretty hard sell, right? And it must have been."

Kuhlmann, understandably, "would've much rather have been making TES 6 instead of [Fallout] 76 and Starfield, personally. And I think that would probably be true for the majority of the studio. That's what most people wanted to do, you know?

"It wasn't like Starfield was this big internal like, 'Hey, we all want to make this space game, Todd.' It was very much, 'Guess what, team? We're making this space game.'"

This picture of Howard as an accidental force of nature in the studio does track with other accounts from former Bethesda employees, including character artist Dennis Mejillones, who said—while comparing him to George Lucas—that "a lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd, and I think that hurt him."

Last week, the Communications Workers of America and the Bethesda Game Studios OneBGS union took part in the Save Our Devs rally across the United States and Canada (and on Twitch) "to call out layoffs and corporate greed across the industry and to demand fair first contracts across Microsoft’s gaming studios." Speaking to Kotaku, Bethesda artist Alex Nguyen talked about how things changed after Bethesda was acquired by the tech giant.

"Since we’ve been under Microsoft… it feels like something has changed. We didn’t have layoffs before, and now all of a sudden we have yearly layoffs," he told Kotaku, saying teams were feeling the effects of cuts which eroded institutional knowledge. “If only five people knew how this thing worked and you let all five of them go, that’s a morale killer because it’s like we already knew this, and now we have to learn it again.”

According to that article, Nguyen pointed out that fixer-uppers like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online don't get a chance to bloom into successful fan favorites without sufficient labor and time. He also noted that there used to be a shared sense of long-term commitment among the staff at Zenimax and Bethesda—a commitment being smothered by Microsoft's current corporate tactics.

“That’s why a lot of people had such a long tenure here," Nguyen told Kotaku. "And they were like, ‘yeah, this is the place I’m gonna retire at,’ or ‘this is the place where I’m gonna finish out,’ or ‘I love being here because I want to stay in the industry for a long time.’ That was basically one of the benefits of being at Bethesda or a Zenimax studio in general.”

Last year, ex-Xbox head Phil Spencer said that "nurturing and protecting creative teams that want to go take risks" was of the utmost importance less than two years after Xbox's acquisition of Blizzard called for 1,900 layoffs. Current Xbox head Asha Sharma has sung a similar tune so far, suggesting that Xbox ought to be entertaining over a billion people each day while also announcing the "reset" necessitating 3,200 job cuts in the very same blog post. It's plain to see why workers might balk at conditions that continue to raise the bar for achievement while more and more developers lose their livelihoods.

Aw dang we cropped out my favorite sign from the Minnesota rally

— @mouseatreides.bsky.social (@mouseatreides.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T16:43:09.232Z

Bethesda Game Studios is warning owners of Fallout 4 to either log into a save or manually save their mod load order, because a new patch "focusing on general Creations improvements" is incoming.

Bethesda's got a bit of interesting history when it comes to Fallout 4 patches. 2024's "next gen" update didn't really improve anything but did manage to break quite a lot, and the best solution to come out of that whole thing was simply to roll it all back with a "Downgrader Tool." A year after that, Bethesda did it again, although on a somewhat smaller scale, except that ended up causing a surprise new round of headaches, resulting in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and of course another update.

All of which is to say that if you're a Fallout 4 fan, you should probably pay heed to Bethesda's latest heads-up.

"As a precaution, prior to these updates we encourage players to log into your game save if you haven't done so in a while or manually save your load order," the studio wrote (via Polygon). "Once your load order is saved, you'll be able to re-download your entire Creations list at once when the update is live."

The response to the post is an interesting mix of gratitude that an 11-year-old game is still being actively supported, concern about the damage that ongoing support might cause, and bemusement/outrage that Bethesda is dicking around with Fallout 4 instead of working on Elder Scrolls 6. My guess is that the studio is capable of doing both, but sometimes you just have to get this stuff off your chest.

In any event, this will hopefully not cause any major headaches, but it's still good advice. And speaking of The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda also said that it's working on a new Skyrim update, details of which will be revealed later. You might as well take that as a warning to back up your Skyrim saves too: Bethesda's recording on breaking mods in its fantasy RPG series is pretty much in line with its post-nuclear one.

While union members outside Bethesda's Maryland office celebrated a recent Microsoft visit by positioning a field of red flags representing laid-off workers and a giant inflatable rat on the lawn, inside the building CEO Asha Sharma was apparently having a delightful time watching a playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6. So that's nice.

"The scale and grandeur are incredible", Sharma said, referring to the game and not the huge blow-up rodent covered in scabs.

Sharma was careful to refer to the game's subtitle with a string of asterisks—eight asterisks to be precise, which sent us down a rabbit hole of trying to guess what eight-letter name it could have.

Coming in with 14% of the votes in our subsequent poll on the subject was Sentinel, which is the name of a prominent city on the Iliac Bay and also the kingdom it's the capital of. Sentinel is a strong contender because the rumored development codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for Sentinel, and naming the game for a city would make for a nice throwback to The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall—which was also named after a city and is still beloved by hardcore fans of the series.

It's now an ever stronger contender thanks to an easter egg in Starfield, as unearthed on Reddit. During character creation in Bethesda's sci-fi RPG, your employee number is displayed on the bottom of the screen: 190514-2009140512. Divide those numbers into pairs and you get 19, 05, 14, 20, 09, 14, 05, and 12. The 19th letter of the alphabet is S, the fifth letter is E, the 14th letter is N, and you get the idea. Yep, it spells Sentinel.

This might not be the only hint hidden in Starfield. Eagle-eyed watchers noticed a suspicious scratch on a spaceship console in the trailer, and suggested it was shaped like the Iliac Bay, sometimes called Starfall Bay all the way back in the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena. To find any more easter eggs we'd have to go back and replay Starfield, though. Er, you guys have fun with that.

I’m supposed to be stealing keys from several merchants in Leyawiin, but things haven’t exactly gone to plan. I accidentally wore my Grey Fox mask, a piece of armour that immediately marks me as a wanted criminal to every guard I pass. Even after finally sorting out my armour situation and making my way into Southern Books, the shopkeeper Bugak gro-Bol isn’t in bed when I enter and won’t stop following me around and trying to kick me out of his shop, because it’s midnight and I look like exactly the kind of shady character who might be breaking in to steal from him.

These are the same hapless adventures that I remember going on in Oblivion, but this time my Khajiit character isn’t out thieving at the behest of Cyrodiil’s Thieves Guild. I’ve already worked my way to the top of that organisation and become the Grey Fox myself. I’m back at the bottom of the totem pole now, working for a brand-new guild based in the modded territory of Elsweyr.

Meet the Khajiit

Wherever game developers leave loose lore on the ground, modders are always sure to pick it up and incorporate it. Khajiit lore in the Elder Scrolls games is varied and colourful, but has almost always been relegated to tomes and dialogue from cat-like merchants. Although the Khajiit homeland did appear in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, it didn’t show up again in a proper Elder Scrolls game until an expansion to The Elder Scrolls Online in 2019. In the meantime, modders have soaked up all the spare Khajiit facts available and designed the territory themselves.

One of the earliest fan-made forays into the Khajiit homeland is Elsweyr The Deserts of Anequina, originally published in June of 2009 by a Nexus Mods user called Iliana and including the work of dozens of other modders. I didn’t play Oblivion in 2006 when it released, but even 13 years later I can still intensely feel the awe that its opening fanfare and drawn-out 3D pan around the Imperial City must have inspired. In the same way I can appreciate how great a feat Elsweyr Anequina’s giant open expanse and huge cast of NPCs and quests are, despite playing through them 10 years later.

Anequina begins with a book, as plenty of mods do. It appears in my inventory to describe all the cities and quests available to me in the new territory. I also have to make sure I’ve turned off Oblivion’s default in-game borders that prevent me from exploring beyond the normal bounds of Cyrodiil. With that done, I’m able to wander across the southern border of the world and directly into Elsweyr over a bridge west of Bravil.

The first town I travel through is Riverhold, just over the southern border. It’s not immediately different from Cyrodiil—still lots of green, with bushes and waterfalls like other areas of Oblivion’s base game. Inside town though, I’m quickly face to face with all the various ‘furstocks’ of Khajiit. Most had never been seen in an Elder Scrolls game before, only described, and were left up to the imagination and resourcefulness of modders involved with Anequina.

Riverhold is full of Khajiit that lore-buffs will recognise, though they can’t possibly compare with the renditions from Bethesda’s own creations in The Elder Scrolls Online. Cathay, one of the playable races of most Elder Scrolls games, mingle with Ohmes, which have physical and facial features of Bosmer elves, just with fur on top. The house cat-like Alfiq and big cat Senche both seem to be based on the same cougar-esque large cat model, but scaled down and up respectively.

Whether by design choice or technical concern, neither Alfiq nor Senche can be spoken to. Other Khajiit speak plenty, though of course their voiced lines are only greetings like “Hello there!” and other small phrases that already existed in Oblivion’s base game for its Khajiit characters. Their more specific lines for quest giving are all text only. Elder Scrolls lore suggests that the scholarly Alfiq dislike speaking in front of outsiders, creating rumours that they are actually mute. I suppose my Khajiit thief is an outsider to them after all.

Local Color

Other mods that pair well with this dish

Beyond Riverhold, green shrubbery gives way to the arid desert that the northern region of Elsweyr—Anequina, as the mod is named after—is known for. Grassy hills quickly turn into steep sand dunes ringed with narrow walking paths that, to Anequina’s credit, feel as if they belong with the rest of Oblivion’s topology. Thanks to its notoriously floaty physics, it’s easy to break a leg stumbling down a dune while pursued by one of the many new monsters added in the mod.

The desert is dangerous, it turns out. In true Oblivion fashion, I learn the region’s fauna by running away from them at full tilt, turning back every so often to fire arrows into their knees. The desert is swamped with giant tarantulas, aggressive Alfiq, elephants that seem majestic and calm but absolutely are not when you get close enough, orc bandits, and many other things that want to kill me. It brings back fond memories of being chased by two very persistent wolves all the way from Bruma to Skingrad. Even a few remote villages of tribal Khajiit are hostile as soon as I got near their gates.

In between running from oversized arachnids, Anequina’s fully featured towns each have their own distinct design. In Dune there are camels for sale, and giant golden towers that look like a mosque on a postcard presiding over the open market in the lower half of the city. Riverhold is a treetop city of wooden homes all climbing the same waterfall topped with a modest lodge that calls itself a palace. Corinthe is a small town maze of back streets all branching from a central market, and its mostly single-story architecture crisscrossed with makeshift plank bridges between rooftops is the perfect hunting ground for the local Thieves Guild.

Compared with the Elsweyr I know from The Elder Scrolls Online, Anequina offers something a bit different. ESO’s wide-open world and detailed cities are beautiful, but all give me architectural fatigue. The steeply curved roofs that I’ve come to associate with the Khajiit thanks to that game are a constant presence in all of its cities in Northern Elsweyr.

Anequina features so much more contrast and more varied sources of inspiration thanks to all the different modders contributing to the buildings and city designs of the area.

Khajiit has quests

It isn’t all just exploration, of course. There are two dozen new quests and a few guilds to join. As in Oblivion, not all quests are of grand scale. In Riverhold my first encounter is with a man looking for his lost child. Solving this small mystery involves asking around town and using Oblivion’s odd speechcraft minigame to increase residents’ disposition towards me to eventually pry information out of them.

Outside town is a Khajiit highwayman not so committed to his task who simply gives up when I refuse to hand over the 400 gold coins he demands. Further into the desert I stumble over the dead body of a Khajiit lying next to a golden lamp. Having learned no lessons from pop culture whatsoever, I pick up the lamp and a dremora genie pops out to offer me a wish. Apparently I’m not averse to deals with demons because I wish, of all things, for love. I’m granted a random NPC friend for my trouble and the genie, now contractually freed from caring about my wants or needs, proceeds to attack.

With that problem behind me, I pull out my Anequina guide book again, the tome that started it all. I seem to remember seeing mention of the Thieves Guild. As the Grey Fox of Cyrodiil I find it only right that I should visit the local chapter and see what dark work needs doing. That’s where my great struggle lifting keys from the pockets of merchants in Leyawiin begins. In all my time traipsing about Elsweyr I’ve entirely forgotten how to be a proper thief. I do eventually manage to steal all three requested keys and return them to my new dispatcher Jinsiraga in Corinthe. After that I’m off to steal some horses, naturally.

These are only the beginning of my adventures in the Oblivion version of Elsweyr. Anequina understands Oblivion’s playfulness with its lazy highwaymen and desert genies. If not for having to install Anequina, I’d have never known it wasn’t part of Oblivion in the first place.

Oblivion Remastered has led a rather odd post-release life. The closest we've got to a new Elder Scrolls since 2011 released in April last year, received a fair amount of acclaim, then essentially went silent. It twitched into activity a couple of times in the months following its release for patches 1.1 and 1.2, but since then? Nada, and the game still has its fair share of performance woes and missing quality-of-life features.

But take heart, because a year after its last patch, Bethesda has remembered it released an Elder Scrolls game. In the wake of Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 release—which reportedly runs rather well—the studio took to X to promise players that it's working on getting the improvements it made for the game's Switch version ported over to other platforms.

"We've heard your feedback asking for an additional patch for Oblivion Remastered," wrote Bethesda. "The Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game has a number of optimizations that we are looking into bringing to other platforms and we will share more when we are able."

Which is good, of course, but it is a touch absurd that an Elder Scrolls release has spent a full year in stone-cold silence, with fans unsure as to whether anything was going to happen to the game ever again. Bethesda even maintained a 'suggestions for Oblivion Remastered' channel in its official Discord that whole time, which gradually went from earnest suggestions for new content and improvements to players imploring the studio not to abandon the game entirely.

I would hope, but not expect, that porting over the optimisations from Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 version would not be the last we hear of the game. Oblivion's a classic—and one of the funniest games ever made—it deserves more care and attention than it's getting right now.

Good news for the Bethesda RPG-starved: The Elder Scrolls 6 is significantly more corporeal now than it was eight years ago, when Todd Howard appeared at E3 (RIP) to announce it with nothing but a logo, a mountain range, and some rousing music. A couple months after Xbox CCO Matt Booty said the game "looks amazing," CEO Asha Sharma went to Bethesda to watch a "live playthrough" that she has now called "incredible."

This praise may come as a shock to the approximately zero people who expected the head of Xbox to publicly say the publisher's one guaranteed upcoming blockbuster looked like doggy doo doo. (Xbox's CEO also notably did not address the hundreds of flags placed outside the office by the Bethesda Game Studios union, each representing a worker from the studio laid off in Xbox's recent, brutal cuts).

Sharma praised the "scale and grandeur" but said "the story is even greater," which feels like a borderline preposterous statement to make after a brief live demo of an RPG destined to be dozens of hours long. Her tweet offers no actual new information about the game, but does reaffirm that the head of Xbox is going to rizz up Xbox games whenever the opportunity arises.

But wait... does her tweet actually contain a tiny scrap of new information about The Elder Scrolls 6? That depends on what you make of the eight asterisks that follow the name and colon. Do they merely symbolize a placeholder for the title, or do they represent a cryptic clue that whatever the game's subtitle is, it's exactly eight letters?

PC Gamer's Elder Scrolls loremaster Jody Macgregor took his best guess as to where TES6 will be located back in 2018, with High Rock and Hammerfell the two leading theories. With those in mind, we've got a few of our best guesses at the title in a poll for your approval.

If you're not up on your Elder Scrolls lore, allow Jody to explain the meaning behind a few of these candidates:

• Dominion: The Aldmeri Dominion was heavily foreshadowed as a future threat in Skyrim, and the name Dominion nicely mirrors Oblivion.
• Sentinel: The rumored codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for the name of this city (capital of a kingdom of the same name) on The Iliac Bay.
• High Rock: As teased in Starfield, a strong candidate for TES6's setting.
• Redguard: While already used as the subtitle of a spinoff, the name of the people who inhabit the area it's set in would fit here as well.
• Evermore: A city in High Rock close to the border of Hammerfell, it would make a convenient starting location and its name sounds cool.
• Balfiera: These islands in the Iliac Bay might be part of The Elder Scrolls 6, but as a videogame name it doesn't look great on the page.

That's all we've got until the next cryptic clue comes down the pike. If you've got your own idea, let us know below.

In a new episode of The Examined Game podcast (spotted by GamesRadar), longtime Bethesda environment artist and The Axis Unseen dev Nate Purkeypile spoke about his time at the legendary studio, including what he found to be Starfield's biggest design misstep.

Purkeypile had the title of "environment artist" at Bethesda, but his work seems to have extended into what would traditionally be considered level design. In addition to setting up the layout for Starfield's city of Neon⁠—which remained largely the same in the released game, according to Purkeypile⁠—the dev spoke about his contributions to Little Lamplight and Diamond City in Fallouts 3 and 4. He left Bethesda a year into Starfield's development, and released his first solo game, The Axis Unseen, in 2024.

Purkeypile spoke about the importance of deliberate design and points of interest in making areas late in the interview. "I think it's good to spend as little time as possible in menus, especially when it comes to exploration like that," said Purkeypile. Host Steven Lake asked if this was an issue Purkeypile saw coming in Starfield's development, a more disjointed, menu-driven system of travel.

"It's very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield, I would not have done it that way at all," the developer asserted. "I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts," something that sounds like Obsidian's approach to The Outer Worlds. "Even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out.

"I was like, I don't think this is a good idea. If you're going to do the thousands of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man's Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time, not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That's not procedural. You go to like the major city in Starfield and it's huge, but then like outside the city, there's nothing. And it's like this doesn't even make sense as a world."

This is certainly a big stumbling block I encountered playing Starfield, but I'm bummed to see Mass Effect 1 catching strays⁠—it feels like I'm the only person in the world who liked ME1's uncharted worlds. But even here, I see a distinction from Starfield. There were maybe two dozen procedurally generated planets in Mass Effect, and they contrasted sharply with the more structured gameplay in the main story.

Back to Starfield, this has been a frequent topic of conversation on the PC Gamer team: There's not really a Starfield equivalent to being on your way to Riften, only to get distracted by a dozen different sidequests en route. It's a problem that, hopefully as a matter of basic structure, we won't encounter in Fallout 5 or The Elder Scrolls 6. Elsewhere in the same interview, Purkeypile talked about how he's looking forward to how the Fallout 3 remaster will change the game.

Bethesda is currently running a 40th anniversary sale on Steam until August 13, just in time for this year's QuakeCon. The sale covers the studio's entire catalogue, including the offerings of subsidiaries id and Arkane.

That's where the real heat is, if you ask me: The recently-released Doom: The Dark Ages expansion, Revelations, is on sale for 50% off, 10 bucks to a typical 20. If you've missed out on the main game as well, Dark Ages itself is 67% off, or $23.

It's been a month since Revelation's July 7 release, and it's a beast of a shooter. Former PCG guides writer Rory Norris awarded it a 90% in his review, while staff writer Morgan Park, who was more cold on Dark Ages' base game, argued that Revelations redeems the whole endeavor.

Aside from Revelations, there's bound to be something in here to strike your fancy⁠—it's hard to argue against 10 buck Skyrim, if you somehow don't already have it. I'm a huge Arkane freak, personally, so the studio's whole catalogue for $54 gets a hearty recommendation from me.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is weirdly not discounted in this sale, possibly related to its publishing and copyright situation, but it's also only $10. So taking the plunge on the bundle probably comes out in the wash versus buying things piecemeal.

The sale is an undeniably great opportunity from a customer perspective, but comes at a fraught time for Bethesda. The studio and its subsidiaries were hit hard by Microsoft's "reset" at Xbox: Layoffs at Bethesda Game Studios, Zenimax Online, and id Software, while Arkane is getting spun off with an uncertain future. It also makes me nervous to see a game as good as Revelations get a 50% off discount after just one month⁠—you'd think Bethesda would have protected its value with a more token discount if it was selling really well.

Just a smidge over 30 years after its original release date, Quake just got a big update. MachineGames has added a new chapter to id Software's landmark 1996 successor to the Doom games, dubbed Dawn of the Machine.

The 19 new levels, which join two previous MachineGames expansions, see Quake's protagonist trapped in "a dimension of endless illusion." I'm most curious about some promised new weapon variants: "the Super Axe—unleashing lightning on successive strikes—and the Laser Cannon, firing ricocheting projectiles that tear through enemies from every angle."

The update also adds a gallery of archival material from Quake's development, including a handful of playable levels that were created early in development and never finished.

The creative process on display is decidedly relatable, with level names like "Tim" "Tim10A," and "Tim14," and notes like, "Lots of tight hallways make navigation tough, and similarly there are many dead ends that were not completed, so it is not entirely clear what the idea was."

The update was revealed at QuakeCon today in a panel which included id Software co-founder John Romero, who noted with laughter that the announcement was occurring not on the 30th anniversary of Quake, which released in June of 1996, but on the 30th anniversary of the day he left id Software.

Quake famously marked the end of an era for id: Romero, American McGee, Michael Abrash, Sandy Petersen and others left the company after its development. Petersen said recently that "Quake ruined id Software."

But ruined or not, the studio carried on and released two of my favorite games, Quake 2 and 3, and everything else that came after, including the much lauded run of modern Doom games.

Id now faces a new kind of adversity following substantial layoffs imposed by Microsoft as part of its plan to "reset" the Xbox business.

"This is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month," id Software co-founder John Carmack said in reaction to the news.

Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall are all scheduled to appear at a founders reunion panel on Saturday for "a rare conversation about the company's earliest days, and the friendships, challenges, and innovations that have forever changed gaming."

During his time at Bethesda Nate Purkeypile was an artist on Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield, as well as lead artist on Fallout 76. Now independent, he's responsible for stealth-archer bowhunting FPS The Axis Unseen, but when he spent some time talking to YouTube channel The Examined Game recently, his tenure at Bethesda was the main subject.

With Bethesda finally making the long-rumored news of a Fallout 3 remaster official, naturally that came up. Purkeypile is excited about the idea of seeing one of his children be taken over by someone else. "I'm personally looking forward to that," he said, "because we were like super tech-constrained making Fallout 3. And you could only place so many lights."

The Fallout 3 Bethesda released wasn't really what they'd hoped it would be at the time, he went on to say. "It's not like it's exactly how we intended," he said. "I get why people are more upset over like movie remakes and stuff, but in the case of games and particularly the art side of it, it's 100% not what we intended, and it was very, very constrained."

Fallout 3's concept art has always been a tantalizing glimpse at what we could have had, but even a simple change like extending the draw distance to give a better sense of the Commonwealth Wasteland's scale would be an improvement. Purkeypile is in favour of the kind of modern remaster that goes a bit further into remake territory, though.

"I think a lot of these remakes have been done frankly better lately too," he said. "Like the Resident Evil ones and stuff, those were fantastic. Whereas for a while I think a lot of those updates were just like, 'Oh, we made the textures a little bit bigger, and like threw a sharpen filter in Photoshop,' and it doesn't really look that much better, or actually as good as other games that are coming out."

Oblivion Remastered releases on Nintendo Switch 2 in August, which normally would be wholly irrelevant to PC Gamer. We've been merrily exploring revamped Cyrodiil for well over a year at this point. But you might want to hide your stealth archer in the corner of whatever dungeon you're exploring and check out Bethesda's latest promotional video for the Switch 2 launch. It's a little different from the usual fare of game footage and dramatic voiceovers.

To herald the Switch 2 version's imminent release, Bethesda brought back veteran Elder Scrolls voice actor Wes Johnson—who plays many characters across the series including Oblivion's default Imperial males—to reprise his most colourful role in the series, the mad, cheese-loving god Sheogorath.

In the video, Johnson—dressed as and in the role of Sheogorath—records lines in a sound booth and causes general mischief with the aid of an exasperated audio technician. As the video progresses, the Prince of Madness becomes increasingly baffled as to why he has to record lines he's already done before.

It's a shameless bit of marketing fluff, but it's nonetheless entertaining to see Johnson in full swing as Sheogorath. It's also a relief that he has apparently made a full recovery from the life-threatening medical emergency he suffered 18 months ago, during which he was hospitalised and put into an induced coma.

The responses to the video are similarly pleased to see Johnson in action. But there is an undercurrent of discontent to many of the comments. These mainly centre around the remaster's widely reported technical issues on PC. Not only do many Steam reviews report performance hitches while exploring Cyrodiil, but the game also suffers from a wide array of bugs. Some of these have been around since the original Oblivion released in 2006, while others are entirely new.

What doesn't help is that Bethesda and Virtuos appear to have abandoned the PC version. While Oblivion Remastered received a couple of patches after launch, the last one—update 1.2—arrived over a year ago. Consequently, recent Steam reviews have dropped down to Mixed, though the game still has a Mostly Positive rating overall. Let's hope the Switch 2 launch brings a bit of PC TLC too.

New ZeniMax Online Studios co-head Nick Giacomini says that despite deep cuts at the studio as part of the most recent round of Xbox layoffs, The Elder Scrolls Online "is here to stay." But those layoffs, which saw more than 200 people let go including Giacomini's predecessor Joseph Burba, mean that previously announced timelines are no longer workable, and things are being moved.

"Instead of rushing to hit a previously announced deadline, we are giving our teams the runway they need to do things right," Giacomini wrote in today's update, invoking the same term—"runway"—Xbox used when it dumped Compulsion and Double Fine. "Some of our upcoming additions, like the Class and Combat Refresh and our new Trial, are highly complex, and we want to ensure they hit the mark before we put them in your hands."

What this means in practical terms is that Update 52, which had been scheduled for Q4 of 2026, will instead arrive in January of 2027, and season 1's new Crimson Veldt trial is also being bumped to '27. Less certainly, from the sounds of it, ZeniMax is now "targeting 2027" for TESO's promised class and combat refresh, although it is "discussing some interim options for the classes still awaiting their full refresh to improve your player experience in the meantime."

As for 2026, Update 51 will launch on September 27, one week later than planned, with a new challenge, "Rumors" game system, and "player experience improvements," while TESO season 2 will debut on October 21.

The impact of the Xbox layoffs are obviously being felt at ZeniMax, but Giacomini said in his missive that "we are not looking to just 'maintain' the game. We are looking to grow it."

That's appropriately upbeat for a new studio boss, but the reality remains that ZeniMax has been gutted by layoffs over the past two years. Original TESO director Matt Firor, who helped launch the studio in 2007, also departed following the 2025 layoffs and was replaced by Burba, who lasted only a year before he was let go in this latest round of cuts.

A few weeks ago Bethesda Studios hit the big red button and announced that both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas remasters are in pre-production, but that wasn't all—there was also news of Fallout 76's next major expansion.

"Fallout 76 continues to be home to millions of players exploring Appalachia together," an official news post from Bethesda explains. "With nearly 70 free updates released to date, the journey is far from over. In fact, we have a major Fallout 76 expansion planned for next year; Raven Rock, a prequel story to Fallout 3."

The last major expansion for Fallout 76 saw players venture to Ohio for the first time in Fallout lore in the Burning Springs expansion. Released around the Fallout TV show's season 2, Burning Springs was meant to marry the game with the show and its Fallout 3/ New Vegas inspirations; aka, "desert, deathclaws, and raiders."

But if Raven Rock is going to be a Fallout 3 prequel then, first off, it's going to be a very early one: 76 takes place over 100 years before Fallout 3. Secondly it'll venture over to the other side of the map, as it'll probably head to the Capital Wasteland—which is east of Vault 76—specifically to Raven Rock or Site R, a former military base and shelter built into the mountains.

If I had to guess what we'll be doing here, I'd say it'll likely have something to do with the Abraham Lincoln AI superfan ZAX since it would've been active at this time around the years Fallout 76 takes place. But we'll have to wait quite a while longer to get any solid information on the expansion as it's not set to release until next year.

I'm all for exploring more regions in Fallout 76, and while I'm a little sad we won't be seeing any more of Ohio for the foreseeable future, a Fallout 3 prequel ahead of the remake is exactly the kind of expansion I'll head back to Appalachia for.

Bethesda is eager to reassure you that its house is not, in fact, on fire in the wake of 3,200 layoffs (1,600 that already happened, 1,600 that are still to come) at Xbox that claimed numerous devs at the studio, including the artist responsible for designing The Elder Scrolls' khajiit and argonians. Thus, its recent announcement that it currently has Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters in the oven as well as an incoming, Obsidian-made Fallout.

Now, in response to questions from YouTuber MrMattyPlays, Bethesda has said that the layoffs also won't affect its plans for The Elder Scrolls 6. "The roadmap [for TES6] is unaffected," said the studio. That's all you're getting. No, really.

Bethesda was ever-so-slightly more chatty about its plans for Oblivion Remastered. Yes, Bethesda has plans for Oblivion Remastered. I'm as surprised as you are.

Since a one-two punch of patches the game got shortly after it released last year, the UE5-ified re-do of one of the funniest games ever made seems to have been largely forgotten, despite still having its fair share of performance hitches and bugs. MrMattyPlays also asked if Bethesda planned to remember Oblivion Remastered on other platforms when it gets its Switch release in August. Apparently it does!

"The team working on remasters is focused on the Switch 2 launch," said Bethesda, but take heart: that version "has optimizations we hope to bring to console/PC." I also hope that. I had a good time with the Oblivion remaster despite its issues, but I'd quite like to be able to enjoy it, you know, not in spite of anything.

Anyway, Bethesda has said a few times now that it would like to be a bit chattier and more open with fans going forward, and it reiterated that here. It also said its new Glasnost policy isn't because Xbox boss Asha Sharma is making the studio do it: "Look, we read the internet too," said the studio.

"All of our fans and plenty of creators have been asking for us to lay out our road map for a long time. As bits of info or announcements come out individually, they get lost in the larger picture of all we're doing as a studio. So, we felt it was best to do it all at once and paint a clear picture for everyone. This is a shift in our approach to communication that Bethesda Game Studios has been contemplating for some time now."

I'll be honest, I can't say I completely buy that, given the timing of all this, but I suppose I welcome a more communicative Bethesda anyway.

The Bethesda Game Studios Union says it is filing a legal complaint against Bethesda for "continuing to violate labor laws in Canada" by prematurely terminating Canadian employees on July 17—the same day it dropped a huge announcement about the future of Fallout and other games.

The timing of the Bethesda infodump was suspect, to put it politely. Less than two weeks after Xbox announced that it is laying off 3,200 people and dumping four studios, Microsoft-owned Bethesda suddenly decided that it was time to confirm that Fallout 3 and New Vegas are both being remastered, that Obsidian is working on a Fallout game of its own, and on top of all that, that Fallout 5 is in early development too.

Good news as far as it goes, although as I noted at the time, the obvious intent was to reassure (or convince) followers that the loss of hundreds of employees wasn't all that big a deal, and so maybe just don't think about it so much.

The OneBGS union implied that the announcement was a more purposeful smokescreen, however, saying that Bethesda "flooded news sites announcing every expansion, remake, and sequel they could" while simultaneously blindsiding employees at its Montreal office by terminating them months ahead of a previously promised date, and with no negotiated severance.

"Previously, on Monday, July 6th, dozens of employees from Bethesda Game Studios across the US and Canada were told via video call that they were being laid off," the union said in a message on Bluesky. "They were told they would remain employed until September while the company negotiated severance with our union; this at least provided some solace and breathing room.

"However, at the end of the day on Friday July 17th the affected Canadian employees (part of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls teams) received termination letters via email. This was contrary to what they had been told in the Monday calls. These letters stated that the Canadians are to receive the bare legal minimum in terms of severance: eight weeks of pay in lieu of the minimum legal notice, any outstanding vacation pay, etc. They were to also immediately lose their group benefits health insurance."

CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth confirmed with PC Gamer that the termination letters took effect that day: "Those laid off were told in writing their employment ended effective July 17 (which was also the date of the letter that told them)."

Bethesda Games Studios’ Montreal workers are being treated especially poorly by XBOX and we won’t stand for it. Here are the details.If this upsets you let Microsoft know: feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/ide...

— @bethesdaunion.bsky.social (@bethesdaunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-23T13:29:26.941Z

The Communications Workers of America and CWA Canada unions, of which the Bethesda union is a part, had already filed a joint complaint against Microsoft prior to July 17: Smyth told Game Developer last week that Microsoft had "unlawfully fired people without giving notice to or discussing it with the union as the employer is legally obliged to do when we are in the middle of ongoing bargaining a collective agreement."

Smyth added that the union would continue to file legal challenges against Microsoft as necessary, and the OneBGS union said in today's message that it has done just that.

"Bethesda and Xbox leadership depend on our labor to make them millions, and yet when we do, we are disposed of," the union said in today's message. "The cycle of workers paying for the mistakes of management ends here."

One of Starfield's big problems is that its core fantasy runs contrary to the tech it's built on. Bethesda's space RPG is meant to evoke the majesty and scale of the cosmos. It's about exploration, curiosity, and wonder.

And yet, it exists in an engine that necessitates a whole lot of loading screens, and so the final frontier feels like a series of small rooms. In particular, the game's takeoff and landing sequences drew criticism for shoving in loading screens where games like No Man's Sky had seamless transitions.

Well, no more! Sort of! A modder named 0xBobby is hard at work to rid Starfield's takeoff sequences of the loading screen scourge. Seamless Planet Takeoffs is a mod for Starfield that makes departing its planets an at least somewhat immersive experience. Rather than cutting to a third-person view of your ship as it jets away, you remain in the cockpit, watching the planet's atmosphere give way to the void as you ascend.

It's not perfect, which is probably why it's in beta. It's not removing the loads so much as it is masking them, which means that you can still kind of identify the point at which the game shunts you from one cell to another.

0xBobby writes that "the seamlessness of the transition will depend on the atmosphere and weather of the planet," and that they're "working on making the transition even smoother." Still, even in its current state it's much better than the default experience.

Alas, your landings aren't going to be seamless. Not now, maybe not ever.

"It probably won't ever happen, at least not from me," says 0xBobby. "Yes, I know of all of the tricks I could use, hiding the loading through clouds or entry flames etc, but even that would be way more complex than what this mod or seamless grav jumps do." I guess landings are just too heavy a load to carry.

Sorry.

Well, it turns out that Bethesda's executive producer Todd Howard and I have at least two things in common—we're both roughly 5 feet 6 inches tall, and we're both chronic Reddit lurkers. Admittedly, I only have IMDB to go by when it comes to the height thing. Maybe it's wrong! But the Reddit thing is 100% true, because he went ahead and said it himself.

Howard gave the folks of r/Games a surprise jumpscare last week, making only his second public comment on the site in the last three years. It was, unsurprisingly, under a post sharing Bethesda essentially vomiting out every single thing it's currently working on, which came shortly after the announcement of parent owner Xbox's catastrophic layoffs.

"Hey Reddit. I'm a professional lurker and read your comments all the time. Many here do and we deeply appreciate the passion for our work," Howard wrote. "I know I don't really post, and we're usually very quiet. Today's info was an attempt at changing that and letting everyone know what we've been working on the past several years, and a look at what's coming. So know we're constantly listening and keep telling us how to be even better."

Howard then goes on to say: "You'd be surprised how many great ideas I get from Reddit. So upvote and we'll do it. Maybe." Well, huh. I do have to wonder if Howard is taking screenshots of comments and projecting them onto the wall during meetings, or simply jotting down little comments he reads here and there. I wonder what ideas Reddit is churning out that were so smart Howard felt the need to take note of them in the first place.

More importantly, what subreddits is our man lurking in? Does he just cycle through all the Bethesda-relevant ones? Is he sneaking looks at what people think of the competition? Is he also getting fed posts for subreddits he's never even heard of, like r/GirlDinnerDiaries? Seriously, why am I getting so many r/GirlDinnerDiaries posts in my feed?

Whatever he's getting up to over there—and whatever calculated business decision was behind him cropping up in the comments of a random Reddit post to begin with—is a secret that will remain between him and his Google Chrome history, I suppose.

Bethesda's gone and done it again. It's reconfirmed that Fallout 5 is in development even though it's still years away from Reclamation Day. As we once knew about the next Elder Scrolls' place in the development pipes relative to Starfield, Fallout 5 will launch after TES6, and this time we've not even got a logo on a mysterious unidentified bit of scenery to obsess over.

I can't gloss over how Bethesda firehosed out an announcement of pretty much every single thing it's working on right now as either a distraction from, or refutation of, the impact that the massive Microsoft layoffs will have on its projects. Fallout 5 certainly is in development, but we don't know what its plans were prior to the layoffs and how they'll inevitably change the scope or direction of Fallout 5 after.

When might the Fallout 5 release date be?

What we know for sure is that Fallout 5 will release after The Elder Scrolls 6, which we still don't know even a release year for. Maybe it won't be as long as the still-widening gap between Starfield and TES6, though.

In its July 2026 announcement, Bethesda said that TES6 and Fallout 5 are both being developed in Creation Engine 3, "a shared technology platform" it's been building since Starfield's launch. "It allows our teams to support multiple projects simultaneously," Bethesda also said. So there shouldn't be any reinventing the wheel between releases this time.

Fallout 5 setting speculation

What's been (mostly) confirmed about the Fallout 5 setting:

• "Fallout 5 will be existing in a world where the stories and events of the show happened or are happening," Todd Howard said of the Amazon TV show
• "Our plan is to predominantly keep it in the US," Howard told Kinda Funny when speculating about Fallout series locales

At this point, any specifics on when and where Fallout 5 will be set are total speculation. Todd Howard has said that the "Fallout schtick" is intertwined with "Americana naivete," so any official Fallout London probably isn't on the table, though jaunts up into Canada (in Fallout lore, it was annexed as the 51st state before the war) maybe could be.

Where in the post-nukes US might Fallout 5 be set though? Honestly I just don't want it to be Florida since I'm going to get enough of that from GTA 6 (and there's already a Fallout 4 mod in the works set in Miami). Say what you will about Fallout 76, it certainly has a vibe in chasing the Appalachian geography, folklore, and history. I'd bet on Fallout 5 attempting an equally strong pitch with a location that's really easy to sell the spectacle (or maybe just the accents) of.

Having already been to some iconic east coast and west coast locations, maybe Fallout 5 could take us into the midwest. Somewhere like Detroit would have a lot of potential for classic Fallout storylines about corporate industry tomfoolery. Somewhere up north like Montana would allow for some really striking scenery just like West Virginia did for Fallout 76.

How long has Fallout 5 been in development?

Fallout 5 hasn't been in development long, but what Bethesda has said so far makes it sound like it hopes to drastically cut down on the years between its major RPG releases.

Way back in 2021, Todd Howard said Bethesda has a "one-pager" on Fallout 5 and what it wants to do. Fallout 5 has likely been some excited scribbles on a whiteboard for most of the five years since then, honestly.

As of July 2026, Bethesda says "Fallout 5 is currently in preproduction" which means it's more than a twinkle in Todd's eye but still probably far out from any kind of playable version.

"Our teams are now developing The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 on Creation Engine 3, a shared technology platform we've been building since Starfield's launch," Bethesda also said in July.

If there's one thing we know about Todd Howard, it's that he doesn't hate Obsidian. We know this because he keeps telling us. He keeps telling us because Fallout fans won't stop speculating that secretly, deep down in his heart of hearts, Todd Howard hates Obsidian.

How often has he denied hating Obsidian? A quick and non-comprehensive list:

• 2024: Todd Howard says Fallout: New Vegas "is a very, very important game to us."
• 2025: Todd Howard expresses "huge respect to the folks at Obsidian."
• 2026: Todd Howard says that when it came time for someone else to make a Fallout game, Obsidian was "the only choice."
• And in case you think this is an entirely new phenomenon, 2018: Todd Howard says "the Obsidian guys did a fabulous job" on Fallout: New Vegas.

Now, with a new Obsidian-led Fallout officially underway, he's back to say it again.

"I appreciate some of the fan chatter, but behind the scenes, there's a huge amount of mutual respect [between Bethesda and Obsidian]," Howard told Windows Central. "We're always kind of wondering if we could find a way to work together in the right way. And when those things come up, I … look at the franchise all up, as you see in the note, everything that's happening with Fallout [and] say, is there a way or a window or a pocket where we could do something together that really, really made sense? And so we're super excited about the opportunity, working together."

"The note" Howard mentioned is the sprawling infodump Bethesda put out today that lays out its plans for the future, which despite the recent, sweeping layoffs at Xbox includes a lot of Fallout. The Obsidian partnership was made official, as were long-awaited remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 5 is in pre-production.

It is amusing how often Howard finds himself delivering some variation of this message—initially because some Fallout fans speculated that he's envious of the much-loved New Vegas, and later over even wilder speculation that he was using the Fallout TV show on Amazon to retcon New Vegas out of existence. Howard actually brought Obsidian developers onto the set of Fallout season 2 so they could see the show's take on New Vegas for themselves, but did that settle the matter once and for all? Apparently not.

I like to think, though, that Howard is in on the joke too, as he seemed to suggest with his remark about appreciating "fan chatter." It's a fine line to walk, because there is a tendency sometimes, among some people, to take things more seriously than they should. But it can be fun to play up an obvious exaggeration or misconception, and the more ridiculous, the better. I'm sure at some point in the past it was a genuine concern for Howard, but at this point I really do hope he's just rolling with it for kicks.

Windows Central. "We're always kind of wondering if we could find a way to work together in the right way. And when those things come up, I … look at the franchise all up, as you see in the note, everything that's happening with Fallout [and] say, is there a way or a window or a pocket where we could do something together that really, really made sense? And so we're super excited about the opportunity, working together."

"The note" Howard mentioned is the sprawling infodump Bethesda put out today that lays out its plans for the future, which despite the recent, sweeping layoffs at Xbox includes a lot of Fallout. The Obsidian partnership was made official, as were long-awaited remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 5 is in pre-production.

It is amusing how often Howard finds himself delivering some variation of this message—initially because some Fallout fans speculated that he's envious of the much-loved New Vegas, and later over even wilder speculation that he was using the Fallout TV show on Amazon to retcon New Vegas out of existence. Howard actually brought Obsidian developers onto the set of Fallout season 2 so they could see the show's take on New Vegas for themselves, but did that settle the matter once and for all? Apparently not.

I like to think, though, that Howard is in on the joke too, as he seemed to suggest with his remark about appreciating "fan chatter." It's a fine line to walk, because there is a tendency sometimes, among some people, to take things more seriously than they should. But it can be fun to play up an obvious exaggeration or misconception, and the more ridiculous, the better. I'm sure at some point in the past it was a genuine concern for Howard, but at this point I really do hope he's just rolling with it for kicks.

Less than two weeks out from massive Xbox layoffs that will put 3,200 people out of work, Bethesda Softworks has laid out its plans for the future, including confirmation of a new Fallout game from Obsidian and that remasters of both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are happening.

The full message covers pretty much everything Bethesda does, including a confirmation that Starfield, despite a middling reception and flagging player numbers, will continue to receive updates. There's also a nod to "more planned for the future" for The Elder Scrolls Online, even though the game and the studio making it both look pretty rocky right now.

But Fallout is the focus, and there is a lot going on. "Fallout is one of our biggest priorities today," Bethesda wrote. "Fallout 5 remains our long-range destination, and we have multiple Fallout projects in active development right now."

Included among those projects is a Fallout 76 expansion scheduled for 2027 called Raven Rock, which will serve as a prequel to Fallout 3, and as mentioned, the Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters—no dates were revealed, but simple confirmation that they're both in development is long overdue.

The previously reported Obsidian collaboration is also confirmed in the announcement, and to my reading at least, it sounds like it will be another non-numbered entry to the series, as New Vegas was. Following the mention of Fallout 5, Bethesda seemed to reference the Obsidian game as an entirely separate thing: "The wasteland continues to expand as we team up once again with our longtime friends at Obsidian Entertainment. We're happy to confirm they're working with us on a new Fallout project. We'll have more to share in the future."

It also sounds like Fallout 5 is much further out than the Obsidian joint: Bethesda said that game is currently in pre-production, while the majority of the studio is focused on The Elder Scrolls 6. There's still no date on that either, although Bethesda at least acknowledged that "we know it’s been a very long wait for the sequel."

While the layoffs aren't referenced directly, Bethesda said it will be "bringing our teams closer together so we can get our games into your hands sooner," although to me it sounds more like a straightforward consolidation of studios that were hit hard by layoffs: "ZeniMax Online Studios will partner closely with Bethesda Game Studios on The Elder Scrolls franchise, while continuing to deliver incredible new experiences for The Elder Scrolls Online."

All told, it's quite the infodump, despite being short on specifics, and clearly aimed at reassuring fans that the wounds suffered by Bethesda in the Xbox cuts are not mortal, or even seriously damaging—beyond the hundreds of people who find themselves out of work, that is. How it all actually works out, we'll just have to wait and see.

I'm somewhat prone to pessimism in this column, though that's not without cause. MMOs aren't exactly a dying breed, per se—we've got Guild Wars 3 to look forward to, and most of the old guard, while a little grey in the beard, have respectable playerbases and are thrumming with things to do.

But it's hard not to feel my blood pressure notch up a few numbers at this week's Xbox layoff news for… well, a number of reasons, really. I'm irate in particular, however, at the current state of Zenimax Online Studios (ZOS), developers of The Elder Scrolls Online, who seem to have become Microsoft's punching bag.

Left hook

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more depressing set of facts than Zenimax's past couple of years—back in July of 2025, Microsoft put thousands of people out of work, including those at ZOS and, more to the point, the cancelled Project Blackbird.

Blackbird was Zenimax's next major project, and while I can't say for certain it would've revitalised the MMO market or anything, we sure as hell need more new MMOs. It was in development for over half a decade, something the then-founder Matt Firor had described as, admittedly, a bit of a "large bet."

Still, the odds weren't bad. The then-CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer reportedly had to be torn away from it, and it was slated for a tentative 2028 release. And listen, even if you've got a cynical heart—five years of work from a development team of around 300 people getting flushed right down the toilet, along with 62 jobs (per a WARN notice), is a damn shame.

It was something that shook Zenimax to its core—but the studio did manage to pull through. I actually spoke to some of them back in January, speaking with executive producer Susan Kath who said that "the team has very much rallied … I see a lot of enthusiasm from the team as we're going forward. Folks are excited about their work. I'm excited for them to be doing this. We're looking forward."

Game director Nick Giacomini also echoed: "We are excited by what we're doing. We're excited by this transformation, this change, this evolution. It's like a second wind, and we've definitely got our eyes on the future, because this is our home. We are determined to make it continue to be so for us, for our players, for as long as we possibly can."

Indeed, things were looking up for ESO. It had found itself in a bit of a rut, as most MMOs do from time to time—but a new commitment to a seasonal model and a whole heap of reworks seemed dedicated to addressing long-held quality-of-life complaints and shaking things up.

The air, to me, felt like a smaller-scale version of the turnaround that World of Warcraft had after the disasters of Shadowlands, commitment to roadmaps and all.

Right hook

Fast-forward less than half a year later—an unconscionable amount of time in shareholder land, I have to imagine—and Zenimax Online Studios has been all but gutted. As PC Gamer's own Ted Litchfield figured out earlier in the week, an estimated 60% of the studio has been laid off between 2025 and 2026, with 213 of those layoffs happening this week.

That's a reduction of 275 developers at the studio in a year and a half, and, look—I don't want to cry that the sky is falling for ESO. Quite the opposite, I am hoping against hope that it'll manage to find a second wind somewhere down the line—but you simply cannot lose the contributions of 275 people without a massive dip in quality.

It's a response echoed by employees at the studio itself. Andrew Young, who left it in 2024, wrote: "There’s really no one left and no changing it now". Other employees were sent reeling, stunned at the absence of teams they'd been working with for years and forced to pick up the pieces.

I want to point out that Xbox saw fit to lay these people off literally as its first season launched—with layoffs occurring on Monday July 6, and the season launching on July 8.

Just imagine it—you work on ESO, the layoffs from last year hit you hard, but you're determined to turn things around. You're using words like "rallied" in interviews, you're finally getting to sort out complaints players have been having for years, you're trying new things. And after a year of work, your first season of the new era of your game is coming out. Two days before it arrives, Microsoft lays off 213 of your team. That, or you're shown the door yourself.

This is despite the fact that your game has brought in over $2 billion in revenue over its lifetime. That figure, posited in 2024, was touted 10 years after the game's launch. That means that ESO was raking in an average of $166 million a year.

Now obviously, that figure's going to have dips and peaks, that's just the nature of doing business—but the sheer boneheaded, next-quarter blinders you have to have on to believe that a game that historically brings you in $166 million annually somehow isn't profitable seems absolutely absurd to me.

And sure, maybe this reaction holds water if the fanbase wasn't liking your new changes—except they did! Here's just a few quotes from the Elder Scrolls Online subreddit:

• "What the fuck man. ESO was really getting a second wind," says u/PompeiiSketches.
• "The game seemed to be on the up and up, what happened?" says u/Crimsonmaddog44.
• "Absolute insane behavior to make cuts to the team that has gotten tons of players (myself included!) back into engaging with the game" says u/Ion_bound.

In a post on the game's forums, understandably stating that Zenimax'll have to be shifting its schedule around a bit, support is present, too:

"I just came back because of your roadmap for the future, and knowing now the people working on it are getting cut by a company that's billions in the green is really heartbreaking," writes one user, "know we haven’t always been happy with you all but those affected, whether they remain or not, did not deserve this. Especially in an era where things were finally looking up again. I am horrified," writes another.

This really does paint a picture of an MMO that was finally getting its sea legs back, just for Xbox to sweep in and knock it right off its feet again.

Holding shares

I will state it plainly: I think the way that Zenimax Online Studios has been treated is cruel, senseless, and short-sighted. There's no capitalist argument to be made about shareholders or prices or changing industries that's going to reach my ears on this one—it's downright unconscionable.

This is a studio that was making a profitable MMO with big dreams for the future, one that had somehow, miraculously, recovered from having a massive project that'd been in development for half a decade shuttered overnight. One that was just about to release the first proper season of its new imagined identity for the game that earned Microsoft over $160 million a year for the past decade.

It has been sacrificed almost wholesale on the altar of growth, by a company that spent over $68 billion on Blizzard, with Microsoft itself spending over $80 billion in 2025 on AI pipedreams. Its developers have been laid off to support a fantasy of getting 1 billion daily players, somehow, in a portfolio that's down 1,600 working roles and will be down 1,600 more by 2027.

More than that, this is an MMO we're talking about. If ESO takes a nosedive from here on out (and god, I am hoping it doesn't), that'll be one less game in an already-dwindling genre that's struggling to put up a fight amongst the unhealthy ambitions of the current industry's gluttony. ZOS deserved better.

Xbox's 'reset' layoffs have hit Bethesda hard, with long-term institutional talent shown the door—Zenimax Online Studios, which is part of the same studio family as Bethesda and works on the Elder Scrolls Online, was also particularly dismantled by Xbox, with over 60% of its staff laid off in the past year.

Understandably, Bethesda developers are irate. Partially because in some studios HR forced them to take down tributes to their laid off colleagues, but also because these layoffs seem to—as the Bethesda Game Studios Union (OneBGS) put it earlier this week—be part of a "stressful annual routine" for Microsoft.

And with 1,600 layoffs yet to come, a sword is left dangling over the rest of Xbox's studios, wondering who's to come next—prompting OneBGS to action. In a statement (shared here by Kotaku), the union said: "The company wants us to accept this as a done deal and quietly disappear. We won’t let that happen. Our next steps are to mobilize. We need every single member visible and unified.

"To that end, we are announcing our Save Our Devs March across all studios on Wednesday July 15th."

The objective, it seems, is to make sure that Microsoft understands it can't just keep doing this without adverse impacts on the developers left, who have the technical power to leave Xbox without one of their flagship studios:

"We need to show management right now that we mean business, so they will properly take care of our fellow co-workers today and think twice before ever attempting something like this again. Stay strong, look out for one another, and we look forward to seeing us all marching together on the 15th."

The scale and damage of these layoffs is yet to be properly tallied, but we know at this point that they include a near-hollowing out of id Software, the aforementioned ransacking of Zenimax Online Studios, and multiple hits to accessibility leadership.

It's a waste of talent and legacy, by all accounts, but not one that's unprecedented, mind. In addition to similar layoffs and project cancellations that occurred last year, Xbox has closed studios that've landed major hits before, including Hi-Fi Rush and Prey.

As reported by MMORPG, we now know the full scope of the layoffs at ZeniMax Online Studios (The Elder Scrolls Online) and ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Game Studios. A Maryland WARN Act notice shows 213 employees laid off from ZeniMax Online, and 166 from ZeniMax Media, for a total of 379.

ZeniMax Media and Online have two listings at separate offices on the WARN notice. There is no separate WARN notice for Bethesda Game Studios, indicating that the 166 layoffs at ZeniMax include those at BGS⁠—Bethesda and ZeniMax Media share an office address.

Further supporting this, the 136 layoffs at id Software were reported as "ZeniMax Media Inc. (Richardson Texas)" in a separate Texas WARN notice. It is unclear how many of the 166 people laid off from the ZeniMax Rockville office were Bethesda developers, and how many came from the ZeniMax publishing side of the business.

As for ZeniMax Online, we've already heard substantial anecdotal evidence that the studio was devastated by these layoffs, and the numbers add further perspective. Game Developer reported the ZeniMax Online Union as containing 461 members at the end of 2024⁠—mostly based in the Rockville offices, though some were spread across the country.

ZeniMax Online has lost 275 employees between July 2025 and '26⁠—a WARN notice last year for "Zenimax [sic] Media, Inc." using ZeniMax Online's office address put last July's layoff count at 62. Assuming no other significant sources of attrition and that the union accounted for a majority of employees, that means ZeniMax Online now consists of 186 people, or 40% of the manpower it had just a year and a half ago.

A September 2024 Twitter post by user Timur222 shared a since-amended LinkedIn experience entry by former ESO UX lead, Gary Boodhoo. In it, Boodhoo cited ESO as bringing in "$15M in monthly revenue for over 10 years." Now, I'm no businessman, but that sounds like a team you'd want to support, rather than laying off at least 60% of them in a year.

Back when Microsoft acquired Bethesda, our first thought was, 'I wonder if this will be bad,' but our second thought was, 'Ooh, maybe now Obsidian will make Fallout: New Vegas 2.' And when the Fallout TV show turned out to be a hit, we scratched our heads over the continued absence of a new Fallout game.

Now it looks like a new Obsidian-made Fallout RPG may actually happen. Word on the street is that Microsoft has put Obsidian's Josh Sawyer—who directed Fallout: New Vegas—at the helm of a new Fallout game as part of the "Xbox reset" shakeup, which will see 3,200 people lose their jobs.

The situation is "still in flux," according to the Bloomberg report that broke the news, and could change. But supposing that Obsidian and Sawyer do dive into this project, are you excited? There's a poll below, and the comments are open.

I'm feeling ambivalent. I like Obsidian and Sawyer, and a new Fallout game seems like a perfectly good pursuit for the developer and director, and a good thing for fans of the series who've been asking for just this for years.

But the news comes alongside thousands of layoffs across Xbox, including a substantial number at Obsidian itself, which has reportedly cancelled an Avowed sequel and other projects to make way for Fallout. It's not exactly an auspicious way to kick off a new project, and it's hard to sustain feelings I'd describe as positive after a bunch of people were just put out of work.

The Television Academy (which is not a place where TVs go to school, I've just learned) has announced the nominations for this year's Primetime Emmy Awards. And, yeah, yeah, The Pitt got 25 nominations, of course it did, Widow's Bay got 19 noms, and Pluribus got 18.

Eh, who cares? This is a PC gaming site. How did TV shows based on PC games do?

Great! Sort of. Fallout Season 2 hauled off an impressive nine Emmy nominations, but don't pop the Nuka Cola yet—none of the actors on the show were nominated. Not Ella Purnell as Lucy, not Aaron Moten as Max, not Kyle MacLachlan as Hank, who were all great this season. Not even Justin Theroux got a nomination, despite being deliciously creepy as the unhinged Robert House.

And somehow, Walton Goggins as Cooper Howard and The Ghoul didn't get a nom. I am surprised at this! Goggions would seem to be a shoe-in as a crowd favorite: he was nominated for Fallout Season 1 in 2024, though the award went to Hiroyuki Sanada for Shōgun, and I can't really beef about that because he was great. But Goggins was even better in Season 2, particularly his scenes as Cooper Howard in the pre-war sequences, which are easily my favorite parts of the show.

Who did get nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a drama? Noah Wyle, obviously, for The Pitt, Mark Ruffalo for Task (he was good), Gary Oldman for Slow Horses (no argument here), Sterling K. Brown for Paradise (only watched the first episode), and Rufus Sewell for The Diplomat (didn't see it).

How do you feel about those guys getting nominated and Goggins not getting gogginated? Here, do me a favor and answer this quick poll:

At least the people who turn Goggins into the Ghoul are up for a nomination: Fallout Season 2 is up for two Outstanding Makeup categories (non-prosthetic and prosthetic), and one for Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes.

The show is also nominated for Outstanding Stunt Performance for the episode "The Profligate," though I just scrubbed through that episode and I'm not sure which stunt was being submitted—possibly the performer leaping through the air while wearing power armor, at the end.

Other categories include sound editing, sound mixing, hairstyling, and production design. Just no acting!

You can see Fallout's complete list of Emmy nominations here. We'll just have to cross our fingers for Goggins to finally win an Emmy in Season 3.

If you've played a new Elder Scrolls game anytime since 2002, you've seen Christiane Meister's work: The senior character artist spent 27 years at Bethesda, contributing to games from Morrowind to Skyrim. As of this week's round of Xbox layoffs, however, her tenure is over.

The news came to my attention via a post by Lady Nerevar on Bluesky, though I double-checked Meister's LinkedIn and, sure enough, she is currently looking for work: "I was in charge of design, creation, and management of character art assets throughout all of the Elder Scrolls projects, starting with Morrowind to our latest title, Skyrim.

"This included drawing concepts and seeing the art piece through to the final stage of getting the object in the game as well as handing off concepts to other artists in the character group. I also oversaw outsourced assets from design to final in-game models."

As for her role in Skyrim, Bethesda still (bitterly) has a 'meet the artist' blog from 2022, wherein Meister talks a little bit about how she gave the khajiit and argonians a facelift between Oblivion and Skyrim:

"The beast races have always been a challenge, technically. In Oblivion, we went the route of everyone having the same face and using FaceGen to morph that face into the beast races. That was a… look. In Skyrim, I just [made] the faces how I wanted and then provided them with their own facial features to change. This looked much better! The only thing that it required was that we make separate helmets to fit their heads."

To me, it speaks to the depths of Xbox's cuts that such an incredibly crucial part of The Elder Scroll's visual identity has been let go. As some have pointed out, Asha Sharma, the current CEO of Xbox (who bravely claimed she'd steer the company towards an improbable 1 billion daily players), would have been either nine or 10 years old when Meister started working at Bethesda for the first time.

If you were to be a ruthless capitalist about it, you could argue that long tenures in game development lead to higher salaries—which'll often be the first in the crosshairs when layoffs inevitably come calling. The 'if' there is important, though, as I cannot think of a single situation in which booting someone with this much experience and expertise is the right move.

It's no wonder the industry writ large is spooked. There's no real world in which any of these layoffs and studio closures are a sign of good health—especially given the industry isn't exactly poor, right now. Global games revenue surpassed $200 billion in 2025; the money is there, it just seems to belong to the shareholders, and not the people who've been making games for nearly three decades.

The axe has finally fallen from Xbox's latest round of layoffs and studio sloughing—characterised as a "reset" by its current CEO, Asha Sharma, who paradoxically wants the company to have 1 billion daily players somehow. ZeniMax Online Studios, which currently develops Elder Scrolls Online, has reportedly been hit quite hard.

That's per senior content designer Katherine Souza, who posted to her Bluesky that half the team had been axed—she's since deleted the post due to the wording, but Souza has clarified that by "'half of its team' I'm referring to is active developers working on content, events, and dungeons. I can't speak to the studio at large because I don't have those numbers".

Souza's not the only one effected, though—the platform is awash of ZeniMax Online employees announcing their layoffs, including senior QA tester Page Branson, senior user researcher Elisabeth Whyte, associate design director Mike Finnigan, senior software engineer Dustin Thurston, senior community engagement manager Gina Bruno, the list goes on.

"For nearly 15 years ZOS has been my home. I have had a hand in every dungeon/arena/trial/event zone/challenge difficulty/etc," writes Finnigan. Other members in that list have similarly extensive, institutional experience at the studio that'll now be tossed out—Gina Bruno, for instance, was with ZeniMax for 19 years.

It's legitimately heartbreaking news, especially given the rough go that ZeniMax Online has endured—in 2025, Xbox cancelled Project Blackbird, a game that then-director Matt Frior had been working on for close to a decade. That was part of a corporate massacre to the tune of 9000 job losses, and it's horrifying to see the studio struck by them again.

Especially given the corner it seemed ESO was turning. In January, I spoke with executive producer Susan Kath and game director Nick Giacomini, who seemed resolute and hopeful despite a difficult 2025, describing a development team that had "rallied". A new seasonal structure and multiple refreshes have been in the works.

Now that's all up in the air, per an update from the team itself on the game's forums: "Looking beyond Season One, the roadmaps we previously shared will be shifting. We want to take the time to evaluate the work in front of us and then lock down an updated schedule. While we'd love to share a concrete details today, stepping back to get our plans straight will let us come back to you with a clear timeline."

While I'm hopeful that it still might achieve the goals it was clearly striving for, if ESO does find its groove again, it'll do so after being utterly hamstrung for reasons of corporate acquisition and AI overspending that none of these developers had any say in—in spite of Xbox, rather than because of it.

Today's Xbox layoffs may have hit Bethesda and ZeniMax particularly hard, as reports of "significant" cuts have begun to surface and the Bethesda Game Workers Union says that "many" employees at Bethesda Game Studios have been let go.

Today's announcement of major layoffs at Xbox and the spinoff of four studios—Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs—also included word from CEO Asha Sharma that company is "making reductions across other units, and in some cases, shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. These changes vary in size across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios."

Details on studio-specific cuts haven't been announced, but Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said on Bluesky that ZeniMax Media, the parent of id Software, Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax Online Studios, and others, "will be impacted significantly by the reorganization," although he added that Bethesda will not be pared down to just Fallout and The Elder Scrolls teams, as some reports have claimed: "The publisher will also still work on Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake."

But some of the studios responsible for those games are also reportedly being hit hard: "Studios in the Bethesda organization like id Software (Doom) and ZeniMax Online Studios (Elder Scrolls Online) are not shutting down but are cutting a significant number of staff this morning, per sources," Schreier added in a subsequent post.

A separate statement from the Bethesda Game Workers Union, the "wall to wall" union that formed in 2024, also indicated that the cuts run deep.

In what is becoming a stressful annual routine, Microsoft has decided to lay off thousands, including MANY of us at Bethesda Games Studios. With over 10k developers already cut from previous rounds, those at the top have deemed that insufficient in fixing their mistakes.

— @bethesdaunion.bsky.social (@bethesdaunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T16:29:42.450Z

"In what is becoming a stressful annual routine, Microsoft has decided to lay off thousands, including MANY of us at Bethesda Games Studios," the union wrote on Bluesky. "With over 10k developers already cut from previous rounds, those at the top have deemed that insufficient in fixing their mistakes.

"Today we say goodbye to many of our friends and colleagues and to hundreds more across Xbox, including folks that have worked at Bethesda Games Studios for decades. When will this cycle of cuts in pursuit of ever-greater profits end?"

I've reached out to Bethesda and the Bethesda Game Workers Union for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

A new Fallout 4 mod, Double Feature, is the fourth collaboration by modders Kinggath and co. with Elder Scrolls icon Wes Johnson—the man behind characters like Molag Bal, Sheogorath, and a whole lot more—as well as Fallout actors Jan Johns and Leer Leary. It's part of Kinggath's annual modding for charity project, which led to the creation of similar mods like Shady Motives and Trunk's Malfunction.

The mod's associated Alzheimer's fundraiser has raised just over $5,000 as I write this, with a current goal of $6,000; far past its original goal of $2,500. Combined with the other modders' supporting campaigns, it's up to $7,895. While Wes Johnson seems up for all sorts of RPG fan projects and shenanigans, it seems like the cause to end Alzheimer's is a particular passion: this is just part of Johnson's broader Fallout-themed "Voiceapalooza" effort, a partnership with the Fallout For Hope charity.

The mod itself features a unique dungeon and offers some custom rewards: a plyaer home, a new companion, some Vault Boy-themed power armor, and a new weapon. For details on how to start the quest and all the modders involved in Double Feature's creation, check out the Nexus page (you can also download it for free there). As with previous mods made for the charity event, it was all done in a weekend.

The Kinggath Creations website shows off the modders' other projects, which includes the previous charity mods as well as larger projects downloadable through Bethesda's creations library. One you might find familiar is the Sim Settlements mod for Fallout 4, which we named the best mod of 2017. Back then, PC Gamer's Christopher Livingston said it's "so good it should be an official part of the game."

Oblivion Remastered is coming to the Switch 2 on August 11, as Bethesda announced with a trailer featuring a live-action Adoring Fan that conveniently shows as little gameplay as they can get away with. I would love it if, after all the work that's presumably gone into getting it to run on the Switch 2, the PC version saw just a little more love.

Oblivion Remastered was patched on PC a couple of times after release, which is why the wonky khajiit tails and the Dark Brotherhood's lore-breaking door got fixed. But it still hitches when you're roaming around, and characters have weird dark lines across their eyelids whenever they blink, and there's a whole list of other bugs at the UESP.

Even some of the bugs from the original, like Brother Holger suddenly talking like a completely different character, still haven't been fixed—despite other NPCs being revoiced. Maybe like Tandilwe's voice actor saying 'Let me do that one again' it's been left in for the meme? These are the things that start to bug me, 60 hours into a Bethesda RPG.

The Switch 2 version will apparently integrate motion controls and the touch screen and have the full game on its cartridge, which is a surprise given how many games are going digital-only these days. It'd be nice if the PC version was worth playing on the Steam Deck, but right now you're better off with a modded version of the original.

It's been a long time since we last saw an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game from Bethesda. Fallout 4 is now 11 years old, while it's been nearly 15 years since Skyrim—the same timeframe between that game and the release of Daggerfall in 1996. It's wild that two of gaming's most popular series have been left on the shelf for so long, and one of Microsoft's few understandable decisions lately is a resolution to make these games quicker.

But one former Bethesda designer urges caution on this front. Bruce Nesmith, Skyrim's lead designer who also worked on Oblivion and Starfield, thinks that going too hard could end up disappointing fans, as he explained to FRVR (via GamesRadar).

"There's an adage in software development about the process having three corners: resources, time and quality," Nesmith told the site. "The studio decides two of them, which determines the third. If you lock down the resources and the schedule, that decides the quality you will achieve. If you lock down the quality and the schedule, that determines the resources you will need to complete the project."

Nesmith observed that "The three corners need to be roughly balanced. You can't ask the project to be done in a month by throwing a million people on it." Likewise, "allowing ten years for a project creates a cycle of endless reinvention and ultimate failure."

He argued that the problem faced by modern game developers—at least in the triple-A space—is that "resources in most big studios are already quite large". Modern game dev teams are typically in the hundreds, while budgets are in the hundreds of millions. Starfield, for example, had a core team of around 500 and an estimated budget between $200-400 million. At that scale, pumping more money or people into the project is only likely to make it more unwieldy.

Consequently, in Nesmith's view, if you want Bethesda to make its games faster, the only solution is to cut resources. "In my opinion, the biggest risk of shortened schedules is quality, reduced features, polish or bugs," he explained. "The things that are done last end up getting set aside to complete the game on time. And, of course, faster dev times would result in faster sequels. But that's the wrong question. Those sequels risk disappointing fans."

The obvious solution would be to hand the various licenses to different developers. Microsoft, for example, owns both Bethesda and Obsidian—the developer of what most fans consider to be the best 3D Fallout game. Nesmith concedes that "if the right studio is available, it's a great solution". But that "you can't just hand it to anyone."

He also believes that it's good to let a series "lie fallow" for a while. "A franchise that releases too many titles too quickly risks fan fatigue. Of course, too much time between releases can also be a problem."

At present, I would say that neither Elder Scrolls nor Fallout is at risk of receiving new games too regularly. But I appreciate Nesmith's points here. You can't make these games happen faster just by throwing more money and people at specific projects, which could well be viewed as the solution when you have the resources of a company like Microsoft. Managing a project like that is a huge challenge, and even if you had an entire team dedicated to each series, it would still probably take five years minimum between the start of the project and its end.

Morrowind, the gloomiest and mushroomiest of all the Elder Scrolls games, is getting on in years—and it was never the most polished game in town, even upon its release a whopping 24 years ago. If you're sick of those rough edges, you need look no further than OpenMW, a fanmade open-source engine which makes the game play nice with modern hardware and operating systems. If that sounds like your thing, you'll be pleased to know it just got a huge update.

The full patch notes are worth a read if you want to sift through the technical details, but the big highlights are up top: for instance, modders can now create custom magic effects using OpenMW's scripting API, which means that certain additions in popular mods like Tamriel Rebuilt—which previously would have only worked on the original engine using a script extender—can now be remade the open-source engine.

That and other changes, like the ability for all characters to cast enchantments, are laid out in a video breakdown of 0.51.0's additions (embedded above). Even if you care about none of this, it's an entertaining watch, and some of the new graphical bells and whistles are an impressive sight.

The update addresses a slew of technical issues, too. The notes state 0.51.0 fixes "many Lua-related crashes" as well as "annoyances with gamepad menu navigation." And if you're already mid-playthrough using OpenMW, there's no need to start over—it's safe to use your existing saves with the patched versions, though you can't take new saves into the old versions due to a file format change.

It's nice to see the elder Elder Scrolls RPGs and their surrounding communities thriving all these years later, with superlative fan projects like OpenMW and Daggerfall Unity keeping the games accessible to whippersnappers like myself who were two years old when Morrowind released. If that's too boring for you, maybe give a look to mods like Muffinwind Rebaked instead.

Raphaël Colantonio, co-creative director of Dishonored, has been streaming a playthrough where he's joined by different members of the team at Arkane who worked on whichever level he's currently replaying. It's been interesting, and has resulted in the unearthing of titbits like Arkane being tapped to make Thief 4 and Blade Runner before they ended up with Dishonored.

Most recently, Colantonio played the Lady Boyle's Last Party level with co-creative director Harvey Smith, lead gameplay programmer Stevan Hird, and level designer Anthony Huso. Noting how much loading there was between the streets outside the mansion, the mansion's outdoor area, and then the foyer, Smith came to the defense of the humble loading screen.

"People think it's an improvement that we got rid of loading screens," Smith said, "but honestly I think a break between one area and the next where you feel like, 'OK, that is behind me, I'm in a new pristine area,' and also being able to do the tips as part of the world-building, the art and the little in-fiction notes? I actually have a soft spot for all that."

Colantonio backed him up, saying, "There's something about it, yeah. It's true." Though he was also busy at the time trying not to play "super sloppy," something he apologizes for throughout this series of streams. Playing a game he hasn't played since before it released 14 years ago, while talking about it, and with a controller, has made for a playthrough with high chaos and a lot of hot exits.

But that's not what we're here for. We're here to hear Arkane drop goss like their passion for loading screens and the fact there was a plan at one point for Daud to cut off Corvo's hand—the one that gives him his neat Blink power—which he would then have to retrieve. Or vice versa.

"I love the idea that your creepy marked-by-the-Outsider hand, your undead hand, either you have to play through as it for a while to get it back to Corvo or you had to go find it," Smith says. He goes on to point out the idea ended up being re-used in a sense when a character in Dishonored 2 gains powers by using a mummified hand with the Outsider's mark on it. Nothing is wasted.

Now they've finished the party they only have four more levels to play. Unless they go through the excellent Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches expansions, which I hope they do—they're my favorite part of the entire Dishonored series. And maybe after that the crew can get back together for a playthrough of Prey? The fingers on this mummified hand are crossed.

The news that Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire, which seems like something the world definitely doesn't need, got me thinking: have I ever even played a videogame that let me be a trillionaire? I've definitely racked up millions of dollars or coins or other make-believe currency in a few games… but trillions?

I honestly couldn't think of any game I've played that let me accumulate that sort of unfathomable wealth. Heck, the only game I can think of off the top of my head that even dealt in billions is Balatro, where my high score is a mere 48 billion—but that's chips, not dollars.

While I was pondering this, I booted up Skyrim to see if it was even possible to give myself one trillion dollars. And wouldn't you know it? The fantasy world of Skyrim, which includes ancient dragons, evil necromancers, steam-powered robots, lizard-people, elves, and werewolves—doesn't allow trillionaires.

Inspired by many of the real world's richest men, I wasn't about to earn my trillions in Skyrim: I was just going to use a cheat and add it to my account as if it were an inheritance or a loan from daddy. I used a classic Skyrim console command many of us know by heart: player.additem.

I typed player.additem 0000000f (that's the item code for gold, also memorized), then added a 1, then carefully counted out the correct number of zeroes. It took a while!

1,000: thousand
1,000,000: million
1,000,000,000: billion
1,000,000,000,000: trillion!

That's a lot of zeroes, innit? Probably more than any one person should have, huh?

But I did it. I typed player.additem 0000000f 1000000000000.

I didn't become a trillionaire. Instead I lost 2,147,483,647 gold. Da hell?

That didn't sound right. Maybe a trillion gold simply couldn't be displayed in my wallet? Skyrim came out back in 2011, a blissful time when probably no one even considered that a trillionaire might someday exist. So I ran into the nearest shop (The Bee and Barb in Riften) and tried to buy a single bottle of Alto Wine for 19 gold from Keerava.

Nope. No mistake. Giving myself a trillion dollars had put me over 2 billion dollars in debt. I loaded up another character and tried it again. Same result.

I googled a bit, confused as to why some people are allowed to have a trillion dollars and some are not. Smarter people than me already know: in Skyrim, gold is a 32-bit signed integer, which means its max value is 2,147,483,647 (1 bit is used for positive/negative, the other 31 for the value). Apparently, if you go over that value by a few hundred billion, or maybe even just one, the number flops from positive to negative.

So there you have it! Even in a fantasy world where you can become a vampire and cat-people exist and you can change the weather by yelling at it, you can't be a trillionaire. I wish our own world made that much sense.

I had forgotten about Quake Champions, the free-to-play take on Quake 3 Arena that first arrived on Steam in 2017. But it's still around, it's still got, well, a handful of players, and today it got a surprisingly beefy update to mark the 30th anniversary of Quake, including a free battle pass for everyone.

The battle pass is the most obvious hook here: Befitting the big birthday of id Software's OG 3D shooter, the season 30 battle pass includes a number of cosmetic rewards from 1996 and QuakeCons gone by, plus previously exclusive skins and the new Disintegrator rocket launcher and Goroth's Earth Magic podium.

Functionally, though, I think the update is the bigger deal. Despite its age and relatively small player numbers—it typically peaks at a few hundred concurrent players on Steam these days—the patch makes some significant changes, including an overhaul to the network code aimed at reducing packet loss and lag compensation, and improving projectile predictions. The amount of lag compensation will now vary based on your ping, problems with hit validation for high-ping players have been fixed, and the 160 ms ping limit required to connect to games has been removed completely.

A range of other fixes, optimizations, and tweaks have been made across the board, and a new "Random Champion Select" option has been added that lets players play as locked champions—when randomly selected—in practice, quick play, and ranked modes.

Universal weapon shaders have been added, characters and maps have been tweaked up in a range of ways, Quake 30th anniversary banners have been added everywhere—this is a sizable update by any measure, and particularly so for a shooter we included in our list of "eight 'dead games' that are still very much alive" two years ago.

That hasn't gone unnoticed by players on Reddit. "I don't know how [Quake Champions developer] syncerror convinced them to let him keep updating this game for so long but I'm grateful for his efforts," redditor Fob0bqAd34 wrote. "When we got that battlepass some months back (or maybe it was last summer?) with a ton of the old weapon skins in one pass I thought that was going to be it. Hopefully he gets to keep quietly ticking away in the Sharma era as well."

The patch notes for the Quake Champions 30th anniversary update are below.

• Game Client Updates
  • Fixed the collision bug that pushed players out of the map, through the map geometry collision layer
  • Fixed being able to damage a respawning player by attacking their death location with a gauntlet
  • Raw Mouse Input fixes & optimizations • NVIDIA Reflex fixes & latency markers added
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the damage summation markers code
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the special movement input code
  • Fixed Heavy Machinegun shader not applying when attempting to customize its shader prior to selecting any other weapons in Customization
  • Fixed the wrong champion medals being awarded after meeting the qualifications for a medal and then changing champions
  • Fixed an issue where you could see a static player doll in the map when a spectator enters Freefly cam mode
  • Fixed spectators not being able to exit Freefly cam mode after entering it
  • Fixed a crash in the camera manager when switching to a player that is currently dead
  • Added caching optimizations to improve performance when referencing user setting values
  • Reduced RAM size requirements for Texture Quality levels
  • Quality Settings will no longer be lowered for hardware that is too new to appear in our internal CPU & GPU databases
  • Removed the fullscreen UI popup that would occur after a match when reaching Level 2, announcing that a new mode (Slipgate) has been unlocked
  • Fixed several cases of game crashes
• Threaded Input
• This option is enabled by default as it has tested to improve performance under most conditions – however, this option is not recommended for Linux users and may not be ideal for mice using polling rates of 4Khz or greater.
  • Added Threaded Input setting - Enables moving the input to a dedicated thread that runs at above normal priority. This has some benefit regardless of input mode but greatly reduces Raw Mouse Input latency
• Sound UpdatesBroken Persistent Sounds
  • Fixed sounds that would remain persistent in the world after they should have ended
• Pain Sounds
  • Fixed missing pain sounds
  • Fixed the incorrect pain sound playing when exactly 25 or 50 hp
  • Restored pain sounds between 75 and 100 hp
  • Added Acid & Fire panic sounds when a damage-over-time effect has been applied
• Death Sounds
  • Death Sound radius extended to 35m to match other character sounds
• Weapon Sounds
  • The volume of the RUTHLESS water railgun shot sound was reduced
• Item Updates
  • Power-ups dropped from dead players will now have a minimum duration of 3 seconds remaining • Dropped Power-ups no longer pop up vertically before dropping
  • Dropped items now fall at the normal rate of gravity
  • Fixed in-game Lore drops, in addition to being able to unlock a readable lore item, it grants an in-game bonus to those who discover them
  • Fixed dropped items (weapons, powerups, flags, etc.) from being able to land on a player’s head and remain floating in the air
• Bot AI Updates
  • Fixed Doom Slayer Bots so that they can now use their Berserk ability
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer run backwards during Bull Rush
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer accidentally cancel their abilities early
  • Fixed Strogg Bots so that they can now use their Drone Strike ability
• Armor Feedback
• To provide players better feedback regarding how their combat encounter is going, we have integrated the armor hit beep system from Quake 4 and expanded upon it further. This new feedback will provide unique hit beeps when dealing damage to an opponent with armor, as well as provide visual feedback when that armor has depleted.
• Armor Hit Beeps
  • You will now hear a unique hit beep when you hit an opponent who has armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BEEP STYLE - includes OFF, Q4 and QC options Armor Break FX
  • You will now see special fx when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • HUD Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK FX Armor Break Sound
  • You will now hear a special sound effect when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK SOUND - includes OFF, POWER DOWN, ENERGY RELEASE, SHIELD PUNCH, and METAL TINK options
• Additional Hit Beep Options
  • Added HITBEEP styles – includes:
    • Mid-Tone (popularized in Quake 3)
    • High-Tone (from Quake 4)
    • Damage-Based (from Quake Live)
    • Additive Damage (introduced in QC)
• Teamplay FeaturesTeammate Death POIs
• Teammate Death POIs have been added to assist in teamplay. These not just help you know when a teammate has fallen but can act as a sign of danger. Whether you choose to rush into that combat zone for revenge or heed its warning to find a new path is up to you.
  • Show a Point of Interest markers at the position a teammate dies
  • HUD Settings: Added TEAMMATE DEATH POI
• Drop Commands
  • Now available in team modes are the Drop Weapon and Drop Power-Up commands. Each command will drop the item if available and trigger a message in team chat
  • Drop Weapon will drop the weapon with the current ammo count if you own below the weapon’s starting ammo amount
• Say Commands
  • Added 6 Say Commands: Yes, No, Hi, Bye, Thanks, Sorry.
  • Available in all game modes, issuing these commands will print a chat message and generate a local in-world VO message that everyone can hear
• Show Vanity Customizations Toggle
  • Enabled by default, this new setting allows you to toggle off the in-game armor shaders, vanity items, vanity weapons (including their custom fx and sounds), and weapon shaders. This can be toggled on the fly in a match. You will still see all vanity in the Match Lobby and the Pre and Post Match Podium scenes to show off your style, but during gameplay all vanity will be removed
• Weapon Zoom Toggle
  • Activating the toggle will keep the weapon zoomed in until you either untoggle or change weapons
  • CONTROLS Settings: Added ZOOM TOGGLE
• Hidden Weapon Position
  • New Hidden option sets the weapon and hands to be invisible and centered
  • Added a Gauntlet icon to the ammo HUD, so that the gauntlet weapon selection is always visible
• Weapon, Ammo, & Knockback Updates
  • Starting Weapons now upgrade instantly without weapon switch downtime
  • Weapon Pickups will now always add the starting ammo count to your current ammo count
  • Knockback is now applied immediately instead of queuing and applied in delayed batches
  • Knockback cap adjusted from 120 to 132, resolving the rocket jump penalty accrued in the prior update
• Champion Specific Weapon Loadouts
  • Weapons are now equipped per Champion in Customization
  • Added an optional Equip on All Champions button
• Random Champion Select
• The Random Champion, selected in the Champion Roster, will make a random selection from all champions. This option allows players to play locked champions (albeit random) on Practice, Quick Play, and Ranked
  • In Duel, it selects one champion at random that will be used for the entirety of the match
  • In Sac Tourney, CTF Tourney, and TDM Tourney, selects a champion during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the team
  • In Duel Rounds, makes a random selection during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the squad
  • In all other modes, it picks a Mystery Champion that cycles at random with each respawn, with ability cooldown retained
• Universal Weapon Shaders
• All weapons that currently have shader support now support 23 universal shaders, which have been made available for free to all players, instead of needing to own different sets of basic weapon shaders for every individual vanity weapon
• Basic weapon shaders
  • Red, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Lime, Green, Teal, Blue, Purple, White, Grey, Charcoal, and Black Basic Shaders Camo weapon shaders
  • Grasslands, Forest, and Snow Camo Shaders Patterned weapon shaders
  • Blue and Brown Patterned Shaders Mastery weapon shaders
  • Ithagnal, Cthalha, Goroth, Volkerh, and Master Shaders
• UI Player HUD Updates
  • Buff & Debuff player info HUD (such as Quad, Protection) shows a remaining duration number when duration is 5 seconds & below (and shows decimal durations when duration is 3 seconds & below)
• Pre & Post Game
  • Fixed the Drag/Move Player hit detection of the bottom right pillar in the Custom Game 4v4 Lobby
  • Fixed a the Add-Bot [+] UI elements appearing on top of the Settings UI when passing Party-Leadership to a player actively in the Settings menu
  • Added new tips to the map loading screens
  • Fixed the persistent menu blur bug when leaving the Battle Report after a match
• Champion Updates All Champions
  • Changing champion mid-game no longer resets the ability cooldown
• Anarki
  • Disabled weapon switch during ability usage, while still allowing you to queue the switch, which will execute after the Injection completes
  • Fixed the Anarki hoverboard sounds' Teammate Volume support
• Athena
  • Grappling Hook: Fixes & updates to pull speed acceleration
• BJ Blazkowicz
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Increased Walk Speed from 160 to 280 ups (for silent walking)
  • Fixed BJ Blazkowicz’s SUMMERTIME outfit attachments when combined with the GOLDEN CROWN
• Clutch
  • Starting armor reduced from 100 to 75
• Barrier
  • Barrier: Breakable shield, increased duration that degrades as it receives damage, with a maximum of 200 dmg received before breaking
  • Barrier: Both duration and damage soak share the same energy pool. For example, while the shield can withstand a maximum of 200 dmg before breaking, if half of its duration expires before taking damage only 100 dmg is needed to burn through the shield’s remaining energy
  • Barrier: Shield sound now alters pitch as duration depletes
  • Barrier: Fixed incorrect movement settings during ability usage, including move speed 300 instead of 320 and max speed of 750 instead of 600
  • Mining Laser: Duration is now 3 seconds, instead of the remaining time from Shield duration
• Dodge
  • No Dodge Passive while the Shield is active • Spawns with 1 of 3 dashes available
  • Reduced stamina regen from 0.33 to 0.3
  • Improved the responsiveness & accuracy of the Dodge Stamina UI
  • Added a 10ms delay between executing dodges to address small issues when rapidly executing dodges
  • Updated the Air-Dodge passive title & description to Dodge Jump, to fully encompass both Air-Dodge and Ground-Dodge mechanics
• Death Knight
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Fixed the "bayonet" bug that would leave the sword extended outward while holding a weapon
  • Fixed Death Knight’s Humiliation vanity not staying equipped
• Flame Strike
  • Fixed the splash damage from the fireball projectiles, they will now always add the flame dot
• Charring Passive
  • Fire Dot - Increased from 6 dmg x 5 sec (30 dmg max) to 9 dmg x 5 sec (45 dmg max)
• Doom Slayer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
• Berserk
  • Improved enemy visibility in Berserk, making them appear solid white (with an enemy outline colored arrow)
  • Duration reduced from 5 to 3 sec (to reduce the distance he can run away when using berserk passively)
  • Duration restored in full when he lands a punch, resetting the remaining berserk time to 3 seconds (to encourage offensive usage)
  • Added a sound effect when a punch lands, to help it feel more visceral and for punches to feel like they are making contact
  • Added magnetism, trails, and new pickup sounds for blood punch bubbles
  • Fixed a bug with the weapon drop and hand raise that resulted in being stuck without fists or a weapon during or after ability usage
  • Blood Punch sound added when earning a kill with Berserk
• Eisen
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Max Extra AP reduced from 175 to 150 ap
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved Eisen armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 sec
• Sentry Turret
  • Added Damage Summation audio support for hitbeeps from turrets
  • Added Overhead Health Bars for both friendly and enemy turrets; health bars on enemy turrets are visible when the turret is either below full health or when it has obtained any armor upgrades
  • Decreased the turret’s max health from 120 to 100 hp
  • Increased the turret’s starting health from 120 to 125 hp
  • Starting Armor 0 ap, Max Armor 50 ap, Max Extra Armor 75 ap. Armor is granted via the updated Repair passive
  • Improved Turret armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 secs
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 100 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Reduced activation delay from 2.0 to 1.5 sec
  • Added an a health and armor info status indicator above the ability info to show when you have an active turret deployed and how healthy it is • Fixed turrets from eternally bouncing on jumppads
  • Throwing a turret into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the turret and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the turret was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
• Repair Passive
  • Removed the armor regen passive, in favor of a new Turret Repair passive
  • Eisen can now deny Light Armor pickups when at max armor by standing near the pickup for 2.5 sec. Any armor Eisen picks up will also be applied towards the deployed turret to "upgrade" the turret's stack
• Salvage Passive
  • Shards will now grant 5%, Light Armors 10%, and Heavy Armors 10% cooldown reduction
• Galena
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved the fitting of the QPL SEASON 3 BELT with Galena’s ACOLYTE Outfit
• Unholy Totem
  • Hitbeeps will now play when damaging enemy totems
  • Damage Numbers will now appear when damaging enemy totems
  • Added Overhead Health Bars, Enemy Arrows, and Owner Names for friendly totems
  • Added Overhead Enemy Arrows for enemy totems, when targeted Owner Names, and when damaged Hit Beeps and Health Bars
  • Totems now receive Quad Damage, Protection, and Spawn Protection FX to show when they will deal or can receive more damage
  • Added fire SFX to totems when 3 totems are deployed
  • Totems you own will now appear solid through walls, to differentiate them from totems belonging to a teammate Galena
  • Friendly totems will now appear yellow through walls when 3 overcharged totems are deployed
  • Enemy totems will now have a visible SFX ring around them that is visible in any lighting quality setting
  • Starting Health increased from 60 to 75, Max health increased from 60 to 75
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 75 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Throwing a totem into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the totem and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the totem was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
  • Fixed applying the Super Shotgun's close range bonus damage towards totems; damage was capped at 80 dmg with the Super Shotgun but you can now deal 120 dmg
  • Slightly increased the totem's weapon collision mesh, so that close range shotgun pellets don't miss when expected to hit
• Keel
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Grenade Swarm
  • Fixed grenades sometimes explode 3 times instead of once
• Reinforced Passive
  • Improved self-damage reduction from 60 to 67%
  • Improved splash damage reduction from 20 to 33%
• Stockpile Passive
  • Improved ammo box cooldown reduction from 10 to 20%
• Nyx
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 750 to 1000 ups
• Ranger
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Ranger Gladiator outfit renamed to BRAWLER to avoid having two armor sets with the same name (Strogg's GLADIATOR, which is based off of the Q2/Q4 Strogg Gladiator enemy). BP art for new reward added
• Dire Orb
  • Velocity reduced from 1000 ups to 900 ups
  • Shoot Delay after throwing increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • Shoot Delay after teleporting increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • The orb now has 75 pts of health and can be destroyed when shot, triggering the orb to explode. The explosion can be triggered by anyone: Ranger, teammates, or enemies
  • The orb’s damage output is now based on it’s time in flight, gaining damage over time & distance
• Scalebearer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
  • Fixed an IK animation crash in the Scalebearer’s animation set when trying to reach a target position during weapon-aiming that was unreachable
• Bull Rush
  • Fixed the Scalebearer sensitivity bug, where sometimes the default rotation limits are not restored
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bull Rush sometimes passing through the enemy target with a collision (especially at high ping)
• Slash
  • No changes.
• Sorlag
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Strogg
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Will no longer drop Stroyent when he commits suicide
  • Fixed Golden Crown power-up shaders • Fixed Golden Crown crash behaviors that would occur when cloaking & decloaking
• Drone Strike
  • Drone: Fixed Peeker’s camera view angles from updating if its Strogg owner's body enters a teleporter domain
  • Fixed Peeker’s drone flight sounds persisting after death
• Visor
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap Piercing Sight
  • Piercing Sight now exposes the enemy’s health and armor information
  • Increased the volume of Visor’s third-person ability VO and reduced how much the occlusion muffles its volume
• Game Mode UpdatesLobbies/Queues
  • In a ranked match, when a player disconnects from the lobby/match, the leaver still gets the existing forfeit loss, but now loses SR. The remaining opponent now also gets a forfeit win persisted to their profile
  • Added Unholy Trinity TDM to the Bot Practice queue
  • Added support for disabling the Score Limit, by setting Score Limit 0 in Custom Game
• Matches
  • Fixed the max warmup time bug, which would allow warmup to go on forever, instead of being capped to 120 sec
  • Fixed the Auto-Abort system, to properly end matches when no enemies remain in game
  • Anti-Griefing system will now exit the current match and send you back to the main menu, instead of closing the game application
• Duel
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized
• 2v2 TDM
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized. Instagib • IG Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Sacrifice
  • Active Abilities are now canceled on Soul Pickup, just like we do in CTF during flag pickups • Added an Announcer VO countdown from 10 to 1 as the point reaches 90-99% captured
• Clan Arena
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Slipgate
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Unholy Trinity
  • UHT Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Spectating
  • Fixed spectators having a delay changing the spectator player, when the followed player dies and has entered the death HUD UI
• Map UpdatesAll Maps
  • Quake 30th Anniversary Banners added
• Blood Covenant
  • Removed an unused out-of-bounds jumppad
• Blood Run
  • Added a teleporter from the Tri-bolt mid-level to the Super Nailgun / Power-Up room
  • Fixed a hole in the wall mesh near a statue
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bounds breakable urn, placing it back into the map
• Church of Azathoth
  • Fixed missing game mode flags for items in the disabled obelisk area
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bound breakable urn
  • Removed the out of bounds jumppad
• Citadel
  • Removed out of bounds fireplace reference inside the central jumppad Deep Embrace
  • Recreated ocean mesh from scratch for performance optimizations
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Insomnia
  • Fixed holes in the window frame mesh near HMG
• Ruins of Sarnath
  • Swapped the SG spawn and SG player-spawn locations (so that you don't have to turn around to pick up the Super Shotgun)
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Tower of Koth
  • The smaller version of Tower of Koth will now be used in DM, TDM, IG, i9, and UHT
  • The larger version of Tower of Koth has now added the support beam above the central mid-level teleporter that was introduced in the smaller version of Tower of Koth

Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls 6 in 2018, which was eight long years ago. The gap between Skyrim's release and that announcement was only seven years. It's been long enough for Elder Scrolls fans to go a bit feral about it.

So when Xbox CCO Matt Booty gave Variety a post-SGF debrief interview, discussing topics like the absence of Arkane's Blade from the Xbox Showcase (he hinted we might hear more on that front later in the year), you better believe the topic of The Elder Scrolls 6 came up. Why wasn't it part of this year's Xbox Showcase?

"I would say one of the more challenging balancing acts of someone in a job like mine is balancing that you want to go show the world all the cool stuff you're working on," Booty said, "and you want to get them excited early, but we also know that we want to wait till the right moment. And when you decide to show it, you want it to be the best you've got. And also that when you show the game, you're also giving them a promise of, hey, it's coming soon. So I can tell you, having visited Bethesda and sat with Todd [Howard] and seen Elder Scrolls playing, it looks amazing, and it's coming along well. And we'll make sure to announce it and really reveal it at the right time."

When The Elder Scrolls 6 was first revealed, Bethesda was trying to get out in front of Fallout 76 and Starfield to make sure players knew they weren't abandoning the much-loved series. In the years since then, that crumb they dropped for fans has become a millstone around their neck. Both Fallout 76 and Starfield were divisive games, and a vocal subset of the playerbase has lost confidence in Bethesda's ability to make another game like the classics.

It's worth remembering that Todd Howard took a moment earlier this year to say the studio was returning its focus to The Elder Scrolls, and considering Fallout 76 and Starfield "a creative detour" that Bethesda was ready to roll back.

"And, as we come back to Elder Scrolls 6 that we're doing now," Howard said, "we're coming back to that classic style that we've missed, that we know really, really well."

So maybe Booty really did get to see The Elder Scrolls 6 looking amazing. I'd like to believe he did, just like I'd like to believe what he saw was further along than pre-pre-alpha. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a khajiit offering a great deal on a bridge I'd be daft to pass up.

As reported by Gaming on Linux, The Elder Scrolls Online has achieved Steam Deck Verified status, meaning the long-running MMO should now run well out of the box on Valve's PC handheld, no tweaking required.

The Elder Scrolls Online has had that nebulous yellow "Playable" badge since 2024, with Zenimax Online having promised full verification eventually. The big hurdle for users until now was mandatory mouse input to use ESO's external launcher. It also defaulted to mouse and keyboard controls in-game until you set a preference for gamepad. Not the worst thing in the world, but also not quite a buttoned-up, console-equivalent experience.

The Elder Scrolls Online on Steam Deck strikes me as a real chocolate and peanut butter combo: Bethesda's single-player games already routinely number among the Steam Deck's most-played, after all. I find the daily grind of MMOs sat upright at my desktop to be a huge barrier to entry these days, so being able to enjoy that sort of low-intensity, second screen gameplay while lying on the couch is far more enticing.

PCG online editor Fraser Brown pointed out to me that this is another reminder of how spotty the Steam Deck verification process can be. Even with the launcher and mouse control default, ESO has long been a better Deck experience than many verified games.

Despite its Verified badge, we do not recommend Oblivion Remastered on Deck, for example, while Skyrim has been "Unsupported" on Deck for months even though it's still perfectly playable. Dread Delusion, one of my favorite indie RPGs, has been Verified for years, but it wasn't actually a good fit for Deck until a recent update.

It's not a half-bad time to start playing The Elder Scrolls Online, either: Zenimax Online has been previewing the upcoming additions for ESO's first season on a new release schedule, which includes the return of the Thieves Guild and a quest for the fan-favorite Daedric prince of madness, Sheogorath.

It is, however, a full-bad time to try to buy a Steam Deck if you don't already have one: AI hardware shortages have driven up the price of both OLED models by hundreds of dollars.

Despite what you may have heard, Marvel's Blade, the daywalker action game in development at Arkane, is not cancelled. The proof of life came from Arkane lead concept artist and assistant art director Jean-Luc Monnet, who delivered a short-but-pointed reassurance to fans on X after the game missed its second Xbox Showcase running.

"Let us cook."

Concern about the fate of Blade, and Arkane as a whole, is understandable. Despite making some of the best immersive sims (and thus, by definition, some of the best videogames) ever, Arkane has struggled to put a genuine hit on the board. Dishonored 2, despite its lineage, did not sell especially well, and Prey is a massively underappreciated gem; and the less said about the Bethesda-imposed live service catastrophe Redfall, the better.

Microsoft closed Arkane Austin in 2024, a year after Redfall's release, and that brutal handling made the future of the studio as a whole seem far less certain than it should be. PC Gamer's Fraser Brown, in fact, wrote that the absence of Marvel's Blade during the Xbox Games Showcase had him worried about Arkane—and this was in 2025. Rolling through 2026 without even a reminder of its existence naturally conjured up even deeper concerns, especially given Microsoft's desire to prove that it's still in the fight—and the fact that it had relatively little to actually prove it.

So it's reassuring news for Blade fans, but possibly still a bit of a stressful situation for the more specific crowd of PlayStation-owning Blade fans. As a licensed Marvel game, my assumption is that it will be released on all platforms—but platforms haven't been announced, and Microsoft's recently turned its eyes back to console exclusives as it gets ready to fight the next round of the console wars. Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game is a PlayStation 5 exclusive—it'd be a hell of a get for Xbox if it could turn the tables with Blade.

It is one of life's greatest privileges to witness the completion of a masterpiece. Imagine Michelangelo putting the final taut lines on David. Imagine shooting the final scene for Mulholland Drive. Now stop imagining. You're here. You're seeing it. Muffinwind Rebaked is done.

Muffinwind Rebaked is a remake of Muffinwind, a classic 2006 mod for Morrowind that integrates a new 20ish-hour narrative with a bunch of new quests. It is, you can probably tell from the name, a comedic work, but that doesn't mean it's not serious. "This is (I hope) a funny mod, but that does not mean it is a joke mod," writes creator CowGuru, "it's a mod with jokes in it. The tone I hope I've achieved is Discworld, not Monty Python."

The original Muffinwind is a well-loved and classic mod, and has a lot more care and love poured into it than you might immediately assume on hearing the name "Muffinwind." It's got branching quests, entirely new characters, and oodles of actual Elder Scrolls lore.

The cool lore, too: the Kirkbride stuff—all the ayahuasca comparative theology they hid round back of post-Morrowind games. "I want it to be a memorable adventure that you can take seriously," says CowGuru, "with nuanced characters who have understandable, human desires and motivations."

The Muffinwind-i-verse has not just lain dormant since the original hit in 2006. It was expanded last year with The Soggy Muffin, a "coffee shop [alternate universe]" take on Muffinwind that takes some of the characters and locations from Muffinwind and gives them a new spin. Before that, there was Muffinwind Enhanced, a kind of remaster of the original mod that is now pretty much superseded by Rebaked.

To make room for that long legacy, Muffinwind Rebaked comes in two versions. There's, well, Muffinwind Rebaked, which is a direct sequel to The Soggy Muffin and which is the definitive "final instalment in this long and winding series."

But there's also Muffinwind Vanilla, which is a more direct remake of the original Muffinwind—for the nostalgics out there—and therefore does not take place in the Soggy Muffin timeline. Got that? No? Long story short: if you're a Muffinwind old-head wanting to relive the mod you played in 2006, you might want to try Muffinwind Vanilla. Everyone else? You're probably best off going for The Soggy Muffin and Muffinwind Rebaked.

Me? I just think it's a testament to Morrowind and the hardiness of its community that mod events like this are still a pretty common occurrence. It's the best Elder Scrolls—and one of the best games of all time—for a reason.

Canvas the Castle is a classic whodunnit quest in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered where you'll track down an art thief in Chorrol. The investigation really doesn't hold your hand with hints or quest steps, so you'll have to do some extra snooping to uncover the truth.

There are multiple outcomes for Canvas the Castle, and your reward depends on the accuracy of your final accusation. You can also get a unique reward for covering for the guilty party instead of revealing them.

How to start Canvas the Castle

To start Canvas the Castle, travel to the town of Chorrol and enter the Castle Chorrol Great Hall. Talk to Countess Arriana Valga, who you'll find sitting on the throne. One of her paintings was stolen from the throne room, and she'll reward you handsomely if you can get it back.

Questioning the suspects

Finding clues in Canvas the Castle

After questioning all five suspects, you still won't have enough information to make a solid accusation. The testimonies seem to point the finger at either Orgnolf and Chanel, but the case isn't water tight just yet. There's a set of clues hidden around the castle that'll help you prepare a bulletproof prosecution.

Canvas the Castle rewards

Making the accusation

All the evidence points to Chanel, so confront her in the private quarters to force her to confess. If you've found all three clues, she'll come clean.

Chanel will only tell the truth if you have a disposition of at least 70 with her, so you may need to play the persuasion minigame to raise her opinion of you. If she doesn't like you enough, she won't confess even though the evidence against her is substantial.

Canvas the Castle rewards

With a concrete confession, it's time to return to Countess Arriana for your reward. There are three outcomes for this quest, each with a different set of rewards.

If you tell the truth about Chanel, the Countess will have her removed from the court. She'll give you a bunch of gold depending on your level, plus a set of valuable gemstones. Chanel will disappear from the game entirely afterward.

If you wrongly accused Orgnolf before pinning Chanel as the prime suspect, you'll receive a smaller amount of gold.

If you decide to cover for the thief and tell the Countess that neither Orgnolf or Chanel are guilty, then you'll get a very small amount of gold as a reward. Chanel will be thrilled that you protected her, however, rewarding you with a special painting after three in-game weeks. You can use it to decorate a purchased home, or you can sell it for 500 gold.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is a faithful recreation of the classic RPG, even down to its leveling and progression systems. Your main attributes govern your weapon damage and skill values, and your character's build matters much more than you'd think for a Bethesda RPG.

Oblivion Remastered attributes list

Deciding which attributes to dump your points into can be daunting—especially since Oblivion doesn't explain them in detail. Even Oblivion veterans can have a hard time during character creation since Oblivion Remastered makes some tweaks to each attribute. To save you the trouble, we've prepared a breakdown of every attribute in Oblivion Remastered and an at-a-glance view of which ones have changed and which ones are (mostly) the same as before.

Oblivion Remastered attribute changes

Oblivion Remastered keeps the same eight attributes from the original release, but some bonuses have been moved around to allow for smoother progression. One of the biggest attribute changes in Oblivion Remastered is the leveling process itself.

In the original game, your attribute upgrade points were dependent on the skills you improved while filling your XP bar. In Oblivion Remastered, you just get a flat 12 points to spend every level so there's no more tedious skill management required.

Oblivion Remastered also makes some slight changes to the stats and bonuses affected by each attribute. Everything's mostly the same, but there are a few key improvements.

Strength

Strength affects your maximum health, maximum encumbrance, and damage dealt by melee attacks (not counting shortswords and daggers).

In the original release of Oblivion, strength governed all melee damage. It felt a little weird dumping points into strength as a dagger-wielding rogue, so moving smaller blades into a separate category is an appreciated addition.

In Oblivion Remastered, strength now affects your maximum health instead of fatigue. It won't boost your HP as much as endurance, but those points will still make you a bit sturdier.

Intelligence

Intelligence remains largely unchanged from the original version of Oblivion. It governs your maximum magicka, making it the most important skill for spell-slinging sorcerers.

Willpower

Willpower is another attribute that didn't get any changes going into Oblivion Remastered. It affects your magicka regeneration rate and your maximum fatigue level.

It's important to level willpower alongside intelligence, otherwise you'll end up with a huge magicka bar that takes forever to fill up.

Agility

Agility received the biggest changes in Oblivion Remastered, and quite a few stats are now associated with it. This attribute affects your maximum fatigue, your ranged attack damage, and your chance to avoid getting staggered in combat.

Now in Oblivion Remastered, agility affects your fatigue regeneration rate. It also affects your damage with small blades like daggers and shortswords, making this the best attribute for stealth archers and dagger duelists alike.

Speed

Speed is one of the most self-explanatory Oblivion attributes, and it's largely unchanged from its original form. The speed attribute affects your movement speed and how far you can jump. It's great for exploration, but not much else.

Endurance

Endurance is one of the most important attributes in Oblivion Remastered, which affects your maximum fatigue and health, plus your HP regeneration rate outside of combat. You can also breathe underwater longer based on your endurance value.

In the original version of Oblivion, the wonky leveling system made endurance ridiculously important. It affected the health increase you'd get when leveling up, so you'd be forced to dump points into it early to get crucial health bar boosts. HP calculations are now retroactive in Oblivion Remastered, so there's no need to worry about all that.

Personality

Personality is one of the weakest attributes in Oblivion Remastered. It affects your disposition scores with NPCs, making persuasion and haggling easier.

Since you can use the persuasion minigame, bribes, or magic spells to make NPCs like you, I don't recommend dumping points into personality.

Luck

Luck is one of the most nebulous attributes in Oblivion Remastered. It provides slight increases to all of your skills, but not enough to make a huge difference in most builds.

Luck also has some very minor effects peppered throughout the game. A higher luck value will increase the health of gladiators you bet on at the arena, for example, and it also reduces the chances of lockpicks and repair hammers breaking.

This attribute can even affect special equipment like daedric artifacts. Mehrune's Razor has a small chance to instantly kill enemies, and the percentage grows with your luck. These are all very small buffs, but putting a few points into luck never hurt anyone.

Fallout 76's next update launches today, alongside the new season, Appalachia Under Siege. With it comes a new hostile encounter that sees different factions or forces claim up to "40 unique locations" only to be driven out by you, the player.

Instead of introducing a massive map expansion, new events, and NPCs like we saw in Burning Springs, Infestations seeks to "enrich the existing experience" by making the current map more rewarding and interesting to explore.

"I love seeing all the dots moving around, to me it sounds like the map is 'sizziling' there's stuff going on on the map constantly," Jon Rush, Fallout 76's creative director says in a group Q&A. "And to me that tells me players are in the game, having fun. So Infestations is another one of those forays into adding another layer of experiences on our map."

Infestations will appear randomly around the map with players having to sniff out the specific area for themselves. "The max number will be about five spawning every five minutes," senior systems designer Fahad Khan adds. The infection won't spread if no one manages to or bothers to clear it; it'll just disappear after five hours.

Those who do find the Infestation and decide to take it on, however, will have their work cut out for them, because while this isn't specifically end-game content, it's as near as dammit. "If [players] left at a mid level, maybe wait until you start to see the Infestation get a lot more dots around it before you hop in," Rush says. "These are hard, these bosses are hard, it is end game content to an extent, you do get four star legendaries from these bosses so they're going to be challenging if you go at it alone or aren't with the right people." Welp, it sounds like I'll need some help then.

But luckily, unlike Raids, Infestations won't need to be completed in a group, you can just wait for anyone on the map to show up and help. Carl McKevitt, lead designer on Fallout 76 explains how it's an example of Fallout 76's "emergent social gameplay" and that because of this it "floats somewhere between end-game and casual friendly."

So Infestations is a high risk event, but that's ok, because it's also high reward; "It is one of the easiest ways to get a four star," McKevitt says. "Which is helpful because that's a hurdle that has been hard for players that are in the late but not quite end-game to cross. So we're hoping to see an improvement in players' arsenals as a result of this." Some of the new four star legendary mods you can get from this include: Hauler's, Raging, Satiated, Tarnished, and Vector.

"We have something that we're calling a 'common pool' for our four stars which is about half of what went out with the raids," McKevitt adds. "We're moving towards a system where things that drop four stars will at least pull from the common pool and then pull from an additional 'exclusive pool' to that content. We want to make sure that any new sources of four stars we introduce don't necessarily invalidate the previous sources.

"In this case you'll get the commons plus the newly created ones that came out of this update. We want to try and preserve Raids as where you get some of the top tier most highly desired four stars but getting any four stars is still better than having none."

In terms of other rewards, while there won't be any new Xbox achievements or trophies Khan does confirm that there are "rewards which are specifically geared towards finding and completing infestations both in quantity and type as well. And obviously that's just the initial rollout of those as well, we'll be adding more team based challenges and additional gameplay challenges."

But you'll be able to experience all of this for yourself today, so good luck and godspeed in finding and defeating these Infestations and let us know in the comments if getting four star legendaries is as easy as the devs say it is.

Daedric Artifacts are some of the most powerful items in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, and you can get quite a few of them within the first hours of the game.

Most Daedric Artifacts are tied to special Daedric quests found at shrines across Cyrodiil, but others can be obtained from different sources like the Thieves Guild or DLC quests included with Oblivion Remastered. These are all the Daedric Artifacts in Oblivion Remastered, including their level requirements, quest locations, and unique abilities.

Oblivion Remastered Daedric Artifact quests and locations

There are 18 Daedric Artifacts in Oblivion Remastered. The table below lists each Artifact, the Daedric shrine associated with them, and how to unlock them for yourself. Note that Umbra and Masque of Clavicus Vile are alternate rewards for the same quest with the same starting location and are both marked "14".

Why Collect Daedric Artifacts?

Daedric Artifacts are among the strongest items in Oblivion, and you'll have a hard time finding better equipment anywhere else in Cyrodiil.

Umbra and Goldbrand have some of the highest damage outputs in the entire game, and the armor you can get from certain Daedric Princes will easily outclass whatever you can buy in the Imperial City. Plus, they're a whole lot cheaper. It's hard to beat free!

Some Daedric Artifacts also give you huge benefits that you can't get anywhere else in Oblivion. The Skeleton Key is the most famous of the bunch since quite a few people struggle with Oblivion's lockpicking minigame, and an unbreakable lockpick makes life way easier. There's also Azura's Star, which gives you a never ending supply of souls to power your enchanted gear.

You'll need to complete at least one Daedric quest at some point during your Oblivion playthrough because the main quest requires you to sacrifice a Daedric Artifact. It's a good idea to stock up on these so you don't have to give up your favorite when the time comes.

The Dishonored games were a treat for old-time stealth sickos in part because they cleaved so closely to Thief, the greatest example of the genre. in fact, when it came time to give voice to Corvo Attano in Dishonored 2, Arkane chose Stephen Russell for the job, the man behind the iconic voice of Thief protag Garrett. It turns out that we were actually not too far off from a full-on Thief-by-Arkane experience before all that happened, as Bethesda initially approached Arkane with the idea of having the studio make Thief 4.

The tale was told during a recent Dishonored playthrough by co-directors Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith (via Knoebel on Bluesky), during which Colantonio said that before Dishonored, Arkane was lined up to do a game based on either Thief or Blade Runner: "The proposition was, 'Hey, we have the Thief franchise and we know the people to make that game, and it's you'."

"Which is basically like coming to two cats and saying, 'We have a big bag of catnip here on the one side. We have another bag of catnip here. Which one do you want? You want both?'" Smith interjected. "We were both so excited. Blade Runner and Thief, like two of our favorite things of all time."

There's apparently a bit of a split on that front: Colantonio said Thief was "frankly the IP that I would have liked to work on the most," while Smith is "a big, big expert and fan of Blade Runner." Bethesda had reassured the studio that it'd get one of the two properties, which led into Smith cheerleading for Blade Runner and Colantonio leading the Thief campaign.

"There was a little bit of a competition in a way, because even though we wanted what was best for the company, I would have been devastated if it was Blade Runner," Colantonio said. Smith felt "vice versa," he added, and given Smith's laughter I suspect there were no hard feelings.

In any event, neither project worked out, and Colantonio said there was worry that Bethesda would cancel the development deal outright, which would have left Arkane in a tough spot. Instead, Bethesda eventually said, "It's okay, keep what you're doing and call it Dishonored," and Colantonio and Smith collaborated on the project as co-directors. Bethesda parent company ZeniMax ultimately acquired Arkane in 2010.

This isn't the first time the story has been told: Colantonio said during the stream that he's talked about it "a few times" previously, and Smith mentioned both in a 2025 interview on the closure of Arkane Austin. Still, as one of those old-time stealth sickos myself, I can't help but feel wistful for what might have been—especially when Smith says, "We had an amazing pitch for Thief." You're killing me here, Harvey.

We did eventually get Thief 4, from Eidos Montreal, which was fine but not great. The storied series has sat moribund ever since; a new attempt at a spiritual successor, Thick as Thieves, released earlier this month: It too is fine, but not great—although there's at least a chance for it to grow into something more fulfilling.

We've been going back through the PC Gamer vault looking for stories to revisit, reassess, or just have an honest "weren't we naive?" chuckle about, and few have ticked all three boxes as much as our February 2012 "Armchair Designer" column, "Ten things we want to see in Elder Scrolls 6."

It was a scant three months after the launch of Skyrim, and little did we know that we'd be waiting on TES 6 in the future year 2026, seven years after the setting of Blade Runner, and just one before Deus Ex: Human Revolution (also released in 2011).

By the way, I say "we," but I was still in high school when this article ran, and the unattributed author is likely no longer a member of our team⁠—though we do have plenty of decade-plus veterans on both sides of the Atlantic. I've shared images of the original article at the bottom of this story, but here's a summary of the wishlist:

• A 200+ year time skip, returning to the Iliac Bay region of Daggerfall. 2:1 odds
• Depart Tamriel entirely in favor of the oft-mentioned continent of Akavir. 50:1 odds
• Return to Morrowind's sensibility for NPC permadeath and reactivity. 100:1 odds
• Maintain, but do not expand map size while adding a greater variety of world-altering systems like Oblivion Gates or Dragon battles. 10:1 odds
• Expand companions and followers to something resembling the vaunted BioWare party. 18:1 odds
• Design larger-scale encounters with squad tactics systems. 14:1 odds
• Revamp stealth detection in favor of full-on immersive sim light and sound propagation. 14:1 odds
• Introduce Daedric pact magic a la D&D Warlocks, with permanent consequences. 70:1 odds
• Revamp movement in a Dishonored (they didn't have that yet, but still) or Mirror's Edge direction. 150:1 odds
• Introduce some kind of social-but-not-social media, blog/sharing mechanic. 4:1 odds

You crazy for that last one, anonymous PCG writer of yesteryear. Obviously some grace for them, though: It was a gentler time, years before platforms had fully consumed the internet. But the proposition does rhyme with the social sharing elements that have taken games by storm, like photomode. And the rest of the ideas? All pretty great, I think. A few have even come to fruition in Bethesda's other games.

BioWare-style companions? We got those in Fallout 4 and Starfield. The squad tactics not so much, but Bethesda has experimented with tacking on systems that feel like entirely new games, such as Fallout 4's settlement building and management. Also, shout out to reader jongreenall's submission of "SPACE." With Starfield, you kinda could argue we got Elder Scrolls in space.

As for my own favorites, Morrowind-style malleability would make me one happy camper, as would deeper stealth systems. Bethesda design director Emil Pagliarulo seems to have imported a lot of Bethesda's signature stealth gameplay from his formative time as a designer at the stealth GOAT, Looking Glass Studios.

I'd love to see the next step in that evolution. But we've also got 14 years of Bethesda not moving in either of those directions: Fallout 4 and Starfield both had essential NPCs and the crouch walky stealth we know and love.

The Akavir one was honestly the biggest curveball for me, but I really dig it as a potential shakeup. You could return to the very Dune-like approach to colonialism in genre fiction we saw in Morrowind. After a juicy timeskip post-Skyirim, pop us on the shores of a Thalmor or Imperial (or both) colonial project in Akavir, with contrasting architectures, populations, maybe even laws based on the zone of control⁠.

Make elf on non-elf crime essentially legal in Thalmor zones, or close off native Ka Po' Tun settlements to Tamrielic characters until they get enough faction reputation. Maybe the Imperial presence is a rump state, all that's left from Thalmor domination of the mainland. Have the Stormcloaks vs. Imperials equivalent for TES 6 be siding with the East East Empire Company, Thalmor, or native Akaviri like the Tsaesci and Tang Mo.

Basically, I want Pillars of Eternity 2 but in The Elder Scrolls. You'd still get that sweet hit of TES heartland nostalgia with the classic races and factions present, while the move would seriously shake up what risks becoming a stagnant fiction otherwise. A fella can dream, eh?

Today is the 10^th anniversary of Doom—not the 1993 classic that changed the world, but the 2016 reboot that proved to be far better than I'd dared to hope. We celebrated the big birthday by confirming with Doom co-creator John Romero that Doom Guy was not intentionally rocking a sexy tummy window, but had in fact had his shirt torn open by the legions of Hell. Why did we do this? Because we're PC Gamer and we do whatever the hell we want, that's why.

Others have apparently chosen to mark the memorable moment in more conventional ways—such as Doom overlord Bethesda Softworks, which has marked that great shooter down to just $2/£1.59/€2 on Steam, 90% off the regular price. Doom is, to be clear, well worth that regular price—as a stand-up, balls-out, rip-and-tear killfest, there are very few better—so for $2, it's an absolute steal.

"The most striking thing about the new Doom, to me, is how refreshing it is to play a game so rooted in the design sensibilities of 1994. These ideas don't feel old," PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon wrote in 2016, when we awarded Doom our Best Comeback GOTY award.

"From the moment your character throws an exposition-delivering monitor into the wall, Doom signals that this is a game of pure adrenaline, and that the new ways aren't necessarily the best ways. And it's absolutely right. Nobody makes games like the original Doom anymore, but after Doom 2016 it's hard to remember why."

It really is that good, and you're probably not going to find a better $2 shooter today than this one. But what if you already own it? I have good news for you there, too: It's all on sale.

• Doom + Doom 2 - $4/£3.19/€4 (60% off)
• Doom 3 - $4/£3.19/€4 (60% off)
• Doom 64 - $2/£1.59/€2 (60% off)
• Doom Eternal - $10/£8.74/€10 (75% off)
• Doom: The Dark Ages - $23.09/£23.09/€26.39 (67% off)

Those are pretty good deals across the board, but the simple fact is that there's one can't-miss deal among them, and that's the 2016 reboot—which is also, you may have noticed, the cheapest of the bunch. Trust me, if you don't have it, you want to get it. You also don't want to horse around about it too much, because the sale (on all of them) ends in just a couple days, on May 15.

If you think about actors who have starred in a bunch of videogame adaptations, Jack Black probably leaps to mind immediately, what with him starring in A Minecraft Movie, Borderlands, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, all in the past few years.

But Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul might be gunning for Jack Black's crown, if they give crowns for "starring in a bunch of videogame stuff." Paul was the lead in the Need for Speed movie in 2014 and played Nyx Ulric in the English version of animated film Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV in 2016. Now he's adding a third videogame adaptation to his resume: Deadline reports that Paul will appear in Prime Video's Fallout Season 3.

Makes sense: Paul worked with Fallout executive producer Jonathan Nolan on HBO's Westworld series, and interestingly enough, Paul also joined that show in its third season. (He joined the cast of Invincible in Season 3, too. Maybe that's just his thing now?)

It makes even more sense if you realize, as I just did, that he's been hanging around the fringes of Fallout for a while. Like: more than 15 years. While looking for a Getty image for this story, I noticed that Paul was spotted by shutterbugs at the Fallout Season 2 screening in London in December of last year and the world premiere of Fallout Season 1 in Hollywood the year before that.

But even further back, Paul attended a Fallout: New Vegas launch event way back in 2010 at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. Maybe that's how to get a role in a videogame adaptation: just keep hanging around until they invite you in?

There's even a bit more Aaron Paul videogame stuff on the books. Notably, he had his first ever role in an actual game last year when he starred in Dispatch, and for a deeper cut, he also voiced a character named "Gamer691" in the "USS Callister" episode of Black Mirror.

I guess the big question now is, who will Aaron Paul play in Fallout: Season 3? I'm gonna guess it'll be an original character, since only a handful of legacy characters have appeared on the show. Will he share screentime with Walton Goggins? I sure hope so—a quick search indicates they've never worked together, and I wouldn't mind seeing them go nose-to-no-nose in a scene or two.

To celebrate Paul joining the cast, how about a Fallout version of that Breaking Bad meme?

Remember Oblivion's wheel system for grinding NPC disposition? You probably do, since a very popular remastered version of that game came out a single year ago. But if not then, well, you Skyrim kids don't know what you're missing. Where the most recent Elder Scrolls (the one that's 15 years old), only let you affect your relationship with NPCs by completing quests and joining factions, Oblivion would let you affect everyone's opinion of you granularly, via a wheel-based minigame you could drop into mid-conversation.

Was it good? No. Was it intuitive? No. But was it representative of the actual experience of building up a rapport with other human beings? Again, no. No wonder then that it has become an object of cathexis for a certain generation of videogame players who found themselves developmentally T-boned by Oblivion's jelly-clockwork world at precisely the right age. We miss it, we yearn for it, and some of us have brought it back—for the second time.

Wheeljam 2 is the second iteration of a game jam that tasks participants with the speedy creation of playable things that feature "either the lockpicking minigame or persuasion wheel in some capacity." That's right, folks, the lockpicking minigame is in there too now.

Last year's entry ended up with 32 entries and some actually cool ideas, but 2026's edition has just wrapped up with a total of 40 submissions.

Voting is currently ongoing to pick the winner (who will get, uh, nothing tangible—"DO IT FOR THE LOVE OF THE WHEEL," beseech the jam's organisers), but the submissions are all playable now. Heck, you can fire up 27 of them in your browser, just as the flash games of olde.

I've mucked about with some of the submissions and, yep, many of these are utterly inscrutable, which is only proper. My personal favourite so far is probably A Contrario, which puts you in the clogs of a vapourwave artists' mannequin whose combat system is a wheel-ised selection of seasons, but I'm not willing to call it my winner just yet. I still need to check out Wheelfox 64 and The Wolf Of Wheel Street.

The jam's voting period ends in about five days, but the games will still be playable afterwards. See you next year for Wheeljam 3: Gettin' The Grease*.

*I just made this up. Please do not put Wheeljam 3 in your calendars just yet.

Modder RPGKing117 has had a busy month: He committed the blasphemy of putting Skyrim quest markers in Morrowind, achieved the triumph of cramming Morrowind into Fallout 4, and has no come back for one last job: Making Fallout 1 playable on Fallout 4's Pip-Boys and assorted vacuum tube, monochrome computer terminals.

This sequel mod does not yet have a public release, but will presumably be made available on RPGKing117's GitHub and Nexus pages like the Morrowind project before it. We do, however, already have a YouTube video of the mod in action for our viewing pleasure.

The Morrowind Mod used Fallout 4 Script Extender and the OpenMW source port to run both games at the same time, rendering Morrowind on the in-game screens of Fallout 4. Script Extender allows the player to launch Morrowind from within Fallout 4 and pass your control inputs through both games. A custom version of OpenMW streams its framebuffer⁠—the data sent from your GPU to your screen⁠—onto the in-game screens of Fallout 4.

As for how the Fallout 1 mod differs from the Morrowind one, we won't know the full story until RPGKing117 releases the full project on GitHub. There's a source port like OpenMW available for Fallout 1, Alex Batalov's Community Edition, and my assumption would be that this is what RPGKing117 used in his own project.

If you want to try this mod for yourself, keep an eye on RPGKing117's Nexus Mods or GitHub page for its release. I'm a huge sucker for game-within-a-game gags like this, and I'm always keen to see the farthest frontiers of absurdity people are willing to reach. Plus, much as I love the "Doom on anything" gag, it's nice to see people branch out into other classics.