Bethesda have been answering a few Skrim fan questions on their forums . Game director Todd Howard, lead designer Bruce Nesmith and lead artist Matt Carofano team up to reveal more about Skyrim's PC specific features. We'll be getting better textures, "larger render modes," mod tools and a better interface. Bethesda promise that we won't see a return of Oblivion's enormous fonts.
"We're packing a lot of info on the screen and the whole interface is much less 'look at giant fonts!' than, say, Oblivion," write the devs. "There's also a lot of “power user” stuff we do with the keyboard from how favourites work, to quick saves, and more that is similar to what we've done before in that area."
"The PC version also gets higher res textures, larger render modes, and a bunch of other effects you can scale up if your machine is a beast," they add.
We already know that Bethesda plan to release The Creation Kit soon after Skyrim comes out, but the mod tools are one of main reasons Skyrim will be better on PC. Oblivion and Fallout 3 have been completely transformed by the modding community. For modders, Skyrim's release will be more like the birth of a new platform than a game launch. We eagerly await the first mod that lets us ride a dragon.
"Modding the game and making it your own is very important to us and our fans," write Bethesda, "so we're going to keep doing whatever we can in that area."
The only thing we won't be getting is a 64-bit specific exe. The game's due out on November 11 this year. For a good look at Skyrim's dragons in action, check out the E3 footage , with our scene by scene analysis.
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
