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.

Prolific Bethesda game speedrunner pekkanen has been on a quiet hot streak: Over the past two months, he has set nine world records in two categories of Fallout 4 speedrunning, first beating the competition before repeatedly lowering his own records.

The categories are Any% and Any% (No Intro), so anything goes, glitch-wise, while the latter category explicitly does not count time for Fallout 4's iconic, but slow-paced and largely on-rails pre-war playable intro. On March 4, he bested longtime runner tomatoanus' 33:51 Any% with a 33:44. Pekkanen then took the No Intro crown from tomatoanus 15 days later on March 19.

Since then, pekkanen has lowered his own Any% record five more times, and improved on the No Intro record twice. As a note, the Speedrun.com Fallout 4 leaderboards do not yet display pekkanen's most recent improvements on the record, only the first month or so worth of optimization.

• March 4: 33:44 Any%
• March 19: 25:36 No Intro
• March 26: 33:28 Any%
• March 31: 24:19 No Intro
• March 31: (god damn same day): 32:54 Any%
• April 11: 32:15 Any%
• April 25: 23:17 No Intro
• April 27: 31:32 Any%
• May 6: 31:18 Any%

As you might expect from a Bethesda game, pekkanen's speedruns are eminently watchable and entertaining⁠—except, of course, for the beginning of the normal, not No Intro Any%. I can see why they made a separate category for it: You just gotta stand there and wait for the scripted parts of the intro to play out. Though it is funny and relatable to hear pekkanen impatiently mash the "use" button waiting for something to happen.

After all that, though? Baby, we're off to the races: Sprinting across the Commonwealth, cooking mutant meat for uncertain ends, engaging in some kind of arcane save-load routine at crafting benches to unlock teleportation and turbo speed, all the stars are here.

As a frequent viewer but relative dilettante when it comes to speedruns, I live for some kind of bizarre sequence of inputs resulting in a burst of godly power or world-altering consequence⁠—that Super Mario 64 trick where you backwards jump into the stairs a few times before getting launched into the stratosphere is the platonic ideal of the form, to me. Pekkanen's Fallout 4 hot streak does not disappoint on this front.

Years ago, at the end of 2021, I reported on him beating his own Skyrim glitchless world record twice in the same week. Since that time, he's been active in a variety of categories for Bethesda's 2011 classic. Going by YouTube uploads, Fallout 4 is a more recent addition to his repertoire, but boy has he taken to it.

I believe that Doomguy, the protagonist of seminal FPS series Doom, may have a more whimsical reputation than he deserves. The culprit? His belly, which is readily visible in Don Punchatz's cover art for the 1993 classic. Doomguy did not go into battle wearing a jaunty little cutoff tee, nor did he have a uniform purpose-stitched to display his impeccable abs, but I believe he may have left this impression on untold thousands (millions?) of gamers.

Whatever the in-universe explanation for the tummy window on Doomguy's outfit, it has become a persistent feature of his design in both fan and official works. When his OG outfit is replicated in the HD era, you always see the abs: Doomguy's classic skin in Quake Live has it, as does the equivalent skin in Doom Eternal

This arresting fan art by user Dalia and Sam on Artstation takes it as inspiration for a full-on, early 2000s, low-rise midriff take on the reboot Doom Slayer armor. Even the brown paneling over the belly on the Doom Eternal Slayer armor is clearly evoking the tummy window

Dozens of us

Take a gander at this 2021 Doomworld forum thread on the subject. "His undershirt is ripped (presumably) exposing his six pack, right? Yeah, we all definitely realized that," user Terraformer9x wrote in the introductory post.

"Wearing a belly shirt leaves Doomguy open for tickles," quipped out_of_service further down the thread. Many commenters wondered how the exposed skin plays with the Martian atmosphere and sub-zero temperatures.

LastSpaceMarine took a moral stand against the tummy window being anything but a deliberate aspect of Doomguy's outfit, in-universe. "I refuse to accept that the shirt is ripped," they wrote in 2021. "As far as I'm concerned, it's an intentional ab window. Doomguy just wanted to look hot while he kills demons."

I got on this beat via the 2007 mod, Classic Doom 3, a recreation of Doom 1 Episode 1, Knee Deep in the Dead, in Doom 3. YouTuber DarthVR recently uploaded a longplay of the project, to give you an idea of what it looks like. The mod begins with a heinously, deliciously amateur voice-acted cutscene setting the stage⁠—let me tell you, never in my life have I been more amenable to Doom programmer John Carmack's famous assertion that story in a game is equivalent to story in a porno.

Anyway, you can see Doomguy suit up in an id Tech 4 recreation of his classic outfit, and his tummy is out, matching Don Punchatz's iconic artwork. I immediately assumed the author shared the same misapprehension I did for many years: That the Doomguy's shirt was always like that, like a saucy little cutoff tee is the official uniform of the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC)'s paramilitary wing.

"Casualties have been up since they instituted the hunky cheesecake uniform," these far future jarheads might grumble to each other. Clearly, I am not a smart man.

The thought has since occurred to me that this was just a tongue-in-cheek visual allusion rather than a painstaking 3D recreation of Doomguy, but we press on. Before any action, before any demon might have had the chance to expose Doomguy's belly to the world, this fanmade Doomguy was both sun's out, guns out and hellspawn free, tummy for thee.

When I told my colleagues the horrible truth—that I'd long known there was solid evidence that Doomguy's shirt had actually been torn in battle— I found out I was most definitely not alone in thinking he was just feelin' himself for all those years.

"This is news to me, also," wrote PCG senior editor Robin Valentine. "Could it be… Doomguy was never as slutty as I hoped?" News writer Lincoln Carpenter chimed in with: "Dude didn't just want to show off his ab work?" It's an astute observation: Doomguy has an incredible, some might say anabolic physique.

Whether Doomguy is natty or not is a question for another day (I think he's juicing): I'm here to talk about his shirt (or lack thereof). To prove I'm not insane, I've embedded a close-up of my McFarlane Toys Doom Slayer (Classic Doomguy Skin) action figure above. You can clearly see frayed edges where the shirt was ripped, yet viewed from far away, it almost looks like a window to the abs—so perfectly does it frame them, it must have been tailored.

Window to the soul

To confirm this unsexy revelation, I got in touch with the man who would know best: John Romero, id Software co-founder, programmer, and designer. In his memoir, Doom Guy, Romero described the day a model was brought in to pose as reference for Punchatz⁠—there was no mention of the shirt situation, though. I had to ask: Was the torn shirt a visual design priority for id, or an artistic flourish from Punchatz?

"As you can see from the Doom box cover," Romero wrote, "Doomguy's shirt was torn by demons. His armor is still there, but the shirt below is shredded. This was all Don's idea. In the game you are fully clothed."

That last part was a bit of a bombshell for me, and something that was brought up as a point of discussion in that old Doomworld thread. I'm sure I'd seen, but never really noticed, that the in-game Doomguy sprite had a fully intact shirt.

Another bit of evidence on Romero's side is the 1996 Doom comic, in which Doomguy's midriff remains chastely covered while he yells. "I'VE GOT A HANDFUL OF VERTEBRAE AND A HANDFUL OF MAD!"

Subsequent generations of game and fan artists turned not to Doomguy's in-game model, but Don Punchatz' art as a primary inspiration to bring Doomguy to life in different art styles or with modern graphics.

I can't blame them⁠—Punchatz' art is iconic for a reason⁠—but Doom's cover shows a single moment in the Doomguy's crusade, one where his shirt happened to get torn in a particularly playful and sexy way. Now that moment is part of his identity in perpetuity.

But let it be known: Doomguy did not show up to the Martian hellbreach dressed like he was going to utterly dominate a beach volleyball tournament, he showed up ready for business. I'm sorry if this news is a disappointment.

Days before committing the world historic sin of putting quest markers into The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, modder RPGKing117 already earned himself a pardon: He created a mod that lets you play The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind on the in-game Pip-Boy and computer terminals of Fallout 4.

RPGKing117 has a nice demonstration of the mod up on YouTube, showing it running on a stationary computer terminal rather than Fallout 4's iconic wrist-mounted menu system. It is, perhaps, not the optimal way to play Morrowind.

Forget the low resolution: That dark, monochrome screen is gonna be the real dealbreaker for a 100-hour playthrough. You'll also need a computer powerful enough to run both games at once⁠—not an absurd luxury these days, but this might not work on Steam Deck.

But who cares about that, nerd? A game within a game is one of the funniest bits you can pull in the medium, by my reckoning, and there is an undeniable anarchic joy to seeing the 2002 RPG rendered in this way. My favorite little touch: The in-game cassettes with Morrowind's box art that you can pick up and drag around, maybe decorate your house in Sanctuary with.

Under the hood, the mod is fairly simple to understand. "OpenMW runs in a hidden window locked to 876x700 which gets upscaled to 1024x1024 and streams its framebuffer directly into Fallout 4's Pip-Boy display in real time," RPGKing117 wrote on the project's GitHub page. "A custom F4SE plugin handles the holotape trigger, the shared-memory bridge, and input passthrough so keyboard controls reach Morrowind while you're in-game."

That relative simplicity doesn't mean it was easy to get running, though. "It took quite a lot of work, countless hours of beating my head against a wall but I am quite proud of the outcome, RPGKing117 wrote in the video description of the mod's demonstration on YouTube. "I hope anyone who tries this out, enjoys it."

I'm enjoying just looking at it. You'll need the Steam versions of Fallout 4 and Morrowind, plus the Fallout 4 Script Extender to run the mod. You don't have to grab the essential OpenMW source port yourself, though: The mod runs a custom fork of OpenMW included with RPGKing117's installer on GitHub.

The ongoing project to port The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind into Elden Ring—recognised by UNESCO as the eighth wonder of the world*—is one of the more Herculean projects currently bubbling away in the mod scene, and it just got a new update. Long story short: this thing is nuts (complimentary).

In a new video, cheekily dedicated to one particular commenter who declared the project would never get done, author InfernoPlus walks us through the progress he's made on Elden Wind (my title, not his, probably because it sounds like a medieval doctor diagnosing a gastric issue) and, my friends, I'm impressed.

InfernoPlus takes us on a whistlestop tour of Seyda Neen—Morrowind's starting area—and Balmora. Buddy, let me tell you: as a guy who has seen a lot of the original Seyda Neen and Balmora in his life, that sure is Seyda Neen and Balmora. Our boy's done a sterling job. You can buy some starting gear from Arrille and pop into Addamasartus to free the slaves held there.

In keeping with the true Morrowind experience, InfernoPlus quickly gets impaled by one of the slavers, though it sounds like that's because he hasn't really futzed around with their stats yet. Still, it's authentic.

We've also got Tarhiel falling out of the sky and, over in Balmora, the ability to join the Fighter's Guild and kill some rats. And then kill some people, which is just as much an escalation here as it was back in 2002.

The part that really brings a tear to your eye, though, is the fact that NPCs can call you fantasy slurs ("Fetcher," in this case) and stab you simultaneously. It really is Morrowind, folks.

So it's done now, right? All good to go? We can play?

Ah, well, not quite. There's still plenty of stuff left to put in before the mod can see the light of full release, not least of which is proper volunteer voice acting rather than the charming Microsoft Sam-style voice NPCs use now.

Still, what is in there is amazing. InfernoPlus has managed to get a full-on crime and punishment system going, a process he likens to "Teaching a dog calculus," and there's weapon enchantment and skill training too.

I guess that guy who said the mod would never be finished might be proved right yet, but what's already here is really impressive.

*This is not true, but envision a better world with me.

What makes The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind one of the greatest games of all time? Is it the complex imperial politics of its setting? The piquant mythopoeia? Fargoth?

It's none of these. It's the fact it's a right ballache to actually play.

I… kid? Sort of? I'll admit it: Morrowboomers can lean a little too hard into valourising Morrowind's rough edges, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. What I love about Morrowind more than anything is that its world just doesn't care about you. It will subject you to its weird and arcane rules and expect you to figure them out.

If you break against the rocks? Fine. If you totally grasp it and turn yourself into a gamebreakingly powerful death-wizard? Also fine. The game just doesn't mind either way, which makes all your struggles, tragedies, and triumphs feel like they actually belong to you.

Anyway, all this long preamble is to say: someone has made some very well-done Skyrim-style quest markers for the game, and I for one am outraged.

Coming from a modder named RPGKing117, Quest Markers Plus for Morrowind (specifically, for Morrowind's open-source engine reimplementation OpenMW) aims to dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend staring at your journal trying to figure out which goddamn tree out of Vvardenfell's 8 billion trees your quest objectives are orienting themselves by. Gotta find Caius Cosades? Easy-peasy. There's now a marker smack-bang on his front door and, once you're inside, over his Skooma-addled head.

It's also highly configurable and, as an added bonus, you can use it to mark city locations on your HUD. It's like Vvardenfell got Google Maps.

To drop kayfabe for a sec, it looks tightly constructed, taking advantage of other OpenMW map mods to create an overhauled mapsperience that brings TES 3's crusty old systems into the 21st century. Is it the kind of thing I'd use myself? Probably not, mostly because I've memorised enough quest locations for Morrowind at this point that I'll be damned if I let some robot take my job.

But a Morrowind first-timer? Yeah, I might recommend it. If you grew up on Skyrim, it'd at least mean you didn't have to acclimatise to Morrowind's old-school quest design at the same time as figuring out why none of your attacks are connecting.

But I still think its author should go to prison. Fair's fair.

In a recent interview with MinnMax, ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor discussed the death of its new MMO, Project Blackbird, as well as his thoughts on the games industry's current economic crisis. The takeaway? While things are bad, he thinks we're still in a boom and bust cycle that will come back around, and he's heard some of this routine before.

MinnMax host Ben Hanson asked if Firor had come into any recent epiphanies about working in games, leading the developer to express his disagreement with analyst Matthew Ball's bombshell report on the state of the industry.

Essentially, Ball argues that gaming has hit a saturation point, with fewer new people entering the hobby, and companies competing over the remaining audience share with not just each other, but also social media. Gaming is "losing the War for Attention," according to Ball, with short form video in particular representing a major threat to the industry's continued growth and health.

"That was very, eerily similar to E3 2001, when we went to E3 with Dark Age of Camelot, with no publisher," said Firor. "We met with⁠⁠—I'm gonna say 18, but it was probably five⁠—publishers. And four of them were like, 'There's already enough MMOs out there, no one is ever gonna play a new one. There's Everquest, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call. I mean, really, what are you doing that they can't?"

"Forunately, the fifth one was Vivendi, and they ended up publishing Camelot. It's just cyclical. It's always cyclical. There's always a boom and a bust, and we're riding a pretty weird bubble right now, tech-wise, but I've seen it before."

This prompted Hanson to ask if a new MMO could potentially succeed no matter the market conditions, so long as it was good enough. Firor had a more reserved, perhaps less optimistic answer on that front. "I would like to think that's true," he said, "But there are a lot of really good games out there that nobody knows about.

"Discoverability is a big issue. But in general, if you have the right game with the right features and the right crew that's helping you get the word out to the world, that's the recipe for success. No guarantee, but every game that has been successful has pretty much followed that model."

I'd like to share Firor's optimism about the cyclical nature of such layoffs, particularly since he lived through them himself, and he draws a compelling parallel between the "saturation point" idea expressed by both Ball and those publishers at E3 2001, but the sustained nature of gaming's current layoff crisis gives me pause. It's been three years of this, with no signs of slowing down.

I don't think gaming is too big to fail, but it's too diffuse for there to stop being cool new games to play: Too many developers working at varied levels of complexity on every continent. What seems to be an open question is whether you can reliably live a good, dignified life making games, something one gaming CEO recently described as a "romantic idea."

In a recent interview with MinnMax, ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor described his reaction to his MMO, Project Blackbird, getting canceled, as well as his more general thoughts on the current moment in the industry. To hear Firor tell it, the closure of Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks on the same day was recognized as a sign of things to come inside Xbox.

Firor said that the one-two punch caused developers to, in Firor's words, see themselves in an "EA 2008" situation, a reference to the publisher cutting 1,100 jobs in response to the '08 Financial Crisis at the beginning of 2009, with an even larger 1,500-person layoff to come later in the year. Firor said that the presence of industry veterans at ZeniMax Online primed them to recognize this likely meant more hardship to come.

"[The Elder Scrolls Online team] was hundreds and hundreds of people by that point," said Firor. "The Blackbird team alone was 300. We had people that worked everywhere. That day, people just came into my office like, 'I've seen this before. I know where this is going.' We had people leave in the weeks after that, just because it didn't feel good."

Firor also reiterated that this is an industry-wide problem, not just an Xbox one: "I know we're talking about Xbox here, and specific situations, but these situations happen way too often all over the place." Even with that being said, though, Firor seemed optimistic about the industry as a whole, saying elsewhere in the MinnMax interview that he sees the current industry layoff crisis as being of a piece with previous boom and bust cycles.

There doesn't seem to be much consensus about the state of things, though, other than "it's bad." In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, legendary designer Brenda Romero said that, "We were there in the '80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier."

You probably could have guessed that The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is one of the most-played games on Steam Deck, but according to Valve, it shouldn't be. Skyrim has remained on the most-played Steam Deck games list put out by the company in December, January, February, March, and now April despite having an "Unsupported" designation on the platform.

The now-default Skyrim Special Edition from 2016 appears to have first received the "Unsupported" designation last December. The white "No" symbol is usually the death knell for taking a game on the go: "Some or all of this game currently doesn't function on Steam Deck," is how Valve puts it.

Maybe jumping through some serious hoops or messing with .ini files will get an Unsupported game running, as is the case with the OG Max Payne, but such games often don't support gamepad anyway, and I usually find it's not worth the effort.

But thousands of people have kept playing Skyrim on Steam Deck, and I don't blame them, because it runs flawlessly. No explanation has been offered for the shift from "Verified" to "Unsupported," while Steam Deck HQ, as well as users on Reddit and Steam, all report that it's still all systems go⁠.

I can also personally vouch that it starts up fine. I don't understand why this was done, but it lends Skyrim the dubious distinction of being the most-played supposedly unplayable game on the platform.

Usually I've had to deal with a real vs. reported playability disconnect from the other direction: Despite having a Verified badge for years, it was only with a recent update that one of my favorite indie RPGs, Dread Delusion, really earned the status.

Fallout 76 is about the closest we're likely get to a fully-fledged Fallout MMO—given the genre's pretty hard to get into nowadays and, well, it's doing rather well. But there was a time that would've seen a massively multiplayer variant of the wasteland competing with Blizzard's biggest: The ill-fated, legally-tangled Fallout Online.

That's per Matt Firor, in an interview with YouTube channel MinnMax. Firor was the director and founder of ZeniMax, which runs The Elder Scrolls Online, before leaving the studio in 2025 shortly after Microsoft's bloodbath, which saw his brainchild Project Blackbird cancelled. He also worked on another MMO, Dark Age of Camelot, back in the day.

"I had gotten some promised investment, I was pitching a publisher 'Brash Entertainment', which existed [for] about six weeks in that timeframe, and I was talking directly with the head of Interplay"—Interplay published Fallout 1 and 2 via its subsidiary studio Black Isle Studios—"and I had a design, I was getting a team together, I was getting a budget together."

But then, says Firor, silence: "He just went totally dark on me, wouldn't return calls or emails, and then like, four weeks later, the headlines: Bethesda acquires rights to Fallout, and I was like 'oh, god'."

Given Firor's work with Bethesda later down the line on ESO, though, he still did technically get to work on a Fallout MMO, in a way: "I'm in the special thanks in Fallout 76, I got other credits," which he notes was likely due to a "realisation that I was calling them way too often with advice.

"But it was more about the fact I grew up in West Virginia," rather than his MMO expertise, he admits. The missed opportunity doesn't bother Firor, though: "It's in totally good hands. I played the sh*t out of 76, I love that game, I played 'em all and they're great."

Fallout Online was an MMO that went through a lot of legal turmoil, with Firor's involvement being a footnote—in the interview linked above, Firor doesn't actually make note of when he was revving up to take control over it (Bethesda actually bought rights from Interplay twice, once in 2004 to make Fallout 3, and again in 2007 to get the IP wholesale) but I have found this IGN interview from 2021 wherein he tells the same anecdote.

In it, Firor notes that he was trying to assemble Brash Entertainment in the year after his previous studio, Mythic, was bought out by EA in 2006. That places this potential Fallout Online pitch circa 2007, when Bethesda bought the Fallout IP outright.

In that same year, Firor would found Zenimax Studio (under the same parent company of Bethesda) and begin work on The Elder Scrolls Online, instead. As for why they didn't put him on a Fallout Online MMO stat? Well, Bethesda actually allowed Interplay to keep the rights to make Fallout Online.

This would come to a head in 2009 when Bethesda sued Interplay over the rights to make it, claiming that Interplay hadn't held up its end of the bargain to secure funding and begin development—Bethesda lost that first round, and Interplay was allowed to keep working on it for a time, but the legal slapfight between the two companies continued right up until 2012, when an out-of-court settlement saw Interplay lose the rights to develop a Fallout MMO entirely.

Basically, Matt Firor probably dodged a bullet—winding up on the right side of that particular spat. The Elder Scrolls Online would be released in 2014 after seven years of development.

In a recent interview with YouTuber TKs-Mantis, former Obsidian creative director Chris Avellone revealed that the studio got in a spot of minor trouble over its depiction of the Rorschach Test in Fallout: New Vegas.

When you wake up in Doc Mitchell's house in Goodsprings, the second step in character creation is a Rorschach Test administered by the doctor, with your answers determining your recommended tag skills. It's a riff on the GOAT exam in Fallout 3, itself a tongue-in-cheek reference to the character creation quiz at the beginning of The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

I guess I just always assumed that the Rorschach Test, the psychological assessment where a person gives their free associations from viewing ink blots, was public domain at this point⁠—after all, its namesake and creator died 104 years ago in 1922. Bethesda and Obsidian apparently shared this misapprehension when they included it in New Vegas without giving Big Rorschach a slice of the pie.

Avellone mentioned the kerfuffle as part of a longer discussion of New Vegas' Wild Wasteland trait, which included fourth wall-breaking references. "We got in trouble for some of those things," said Avellone, "Because it wasn't passed along what some of the jokes were.

"We already got in trouble for the Rorschach Test, because we didn't get the trademark for that. Those folks came to Bethesda and said we're gonna have a fun lawsuit on our hands, so pony up! You could hear all the groans over at Bethesda. I don't think they realized they should have checked for trademarks⁠—we certainly didn't realize it."

This anecdote is how I learned that trademarks can be renewed indefinitely, rather than having a set lifetime like copyright, and a Swiss publisher has maintained its claim to the Rorschach Test for decades now.

It all has a similar twang to how the "Happy Birthday" song is still copyrighted⁠—though I much prefer the Metal Gear Solid 5 version anyway. However much Bethesda had to pony up, it was worth it: Doing a Rorschach Test to determine your character's skills is an all-time RPG bit.

It also led to "Two Bears High-Fiving," a gag that keeps on giving. An early New Vegas mod added this as a possible answer to, well, the ink blot that looks like two bears high-fiving. The original project has since been removed, but another version was created by author Nehred in 2023.

This mod was shouted out with a Wild Wasteland NPC in New Vegas' Honest Hearts DLC, and even turned up 15 years after New Vegas' launch in Avowed. "Two Bears High-Fiving" is an achievement you can get for summoning a bear to fight another bear.

Look, the Elder Scrolls series has never had great combat, but 2002's Morrowind and the games before it are the worst offenders. A new mod for the OpenMW source port could be just the thing to make the open world clunker sing, though: It adds a Sekiro-style perfect block parry, as well as one of the most cleverly balanced overhauls of Morrowind's controversial percent-chance-to-hit system I've seen.

Author MrArrean describes his mod, N'Garde (nice), as "What if Bethesda had another year or two to let Morrowind cook?" with a goal of "more difficult, but more rewarding melee combat." N'Garde is primarily built around the best kind of parry: A perfect block where, when you hit the timing window, you take no damage and stagger your opponent.

Miss the window? You still get an imperfect block that doesn't ruin your whole day like the sluggish shield swings of Dark Souls.

N'Garde is shockingly modular and lightweight, working with completely unmodded OpenMW and a list of 15 tested mods, including animation replacers. I love how thoughtfully it's been weaved into Morrowind's base systems, too: Your perfect block window and imperfect block efficiency can be improved by leveling the game's block skill, but if you're blocking with a weapon and no shield, your skill with that weapon type (long blades, blunt, etc.) will impact your effectiveness as well.

MrArrean even tweaked parry windows and effectiveness by weapon type: Bigger and heavier weapons are understandably superior to lighter ones, but shields reign supreme over all. N'Garde even plays nice with Morrowind's default (awful) hit chance system, while also offering one of the most inspired alternatives I've seen.

One of the great filters to prospective Morrowind players is, understandably, running into the first dungeon, smacking a guy standing right in front of you, and having your weapon just do nothing like it's passing through thin air. Morrowind is the worst of both worlds by default.

It's a first-person action game, much less abstracted than its forebears, but it still has a very D&D-adjacent system where your skill in a weapon determines whether you hit an enemy or not, resulting in what I can only describe as a mechanical Uncanny Valley effect: Morrowind's feedback is too good and responsive otherwise for such an archaic system to feel right.

But as bad as missing melee attacks in Morrowind feels, the game was balanced around this system, and when I've modded it out completely, the game just feels too flat and boring. N'Garde has a completely optional overhaul of this system to introduce "Glancing Blows," a halfway point between misses and full hits:

• "Preserves vanilla hit chance mechanic, but - a missed attack becomes a "glancing blow" deals a maximum of 20% damage and doesn't grant skill XP to the attacker. Time-to-kill is roughly the same, just better combat feedback.
• If 'strength affects h2h damage' is enabled in launcher⁠—missed h2h attacks lose strength bonus, but instead only get reduced to 40% damage.
• Takes 'normal weapon resistance' and armour into account.
• While disabled attacks that are missed can still be parried, or perfect parried to stagger the opponent."

Taken together, this combination of feedback and functionality could even result in more fun melee combat than in Morrowind's successors, Oblivion and Skyrim. Much as I love all of these games, even more recent entries' melee systems are still booboo, seeing you just trading hits back and forth like a pair of pugilists from before they invented ducking and weaving⁠—why do you think everybody just plays Skyrim as a sneaky archer?

Magic is the way to go in Morrowind, but I never like being a pure mage in any RPG. So the next time I feel the urge to rock some kind of Orc or Dark Elf Nightblade on the scenic island of Vvardenfell, you best believe I'm taking N'Garde for a spin⁠—even with my increasing aversion to modding Bethesda and Bethesda-adjacent games in such a manner.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena is the first game in the series, and has an OST composed by Eric Heberling (who would also be on audio duties for The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall.) TES: Arena shipped in 1994 on MS-DOS, meaning that Heberling's orchestral-style compositions had to be compressed to fit the technology of the time, something he bemoaned in a 2011 interview:

"The Elder Scrolls games used an 'orchestral' palette," said Heberling. "I mainly used the instruments offered by General MIDI. That said, I composed with a Roland Sound Canvas, when few players owned anything remotely similar. Inevitably, I had to convert them for FM Sound Blasters, etc. All the tracks suffered as a result. Especially the arrangements that relied on the timbre of the GM samples. Those I reinforced with counter-melodies fared better."

More than 30 years later, an enterprising young composer called Ryan Zachariah Martin (YouTube, Bandcamp) has taken it upon himself to compose a remake of the entire OST, and has released it across various platforms including Spotify. I'm a total sucker for cover versions of classic videogame music, purely because it's always great to hear the original compositions break free of their technological limitations:, and this is a wonderful example.

In another interview Heberling had highlighted the song Oversnow as one of his favorite tracks, and I can see why: it quickly builds layers into a beautiful crescendo before looping back on itself. In Martin's version, the counter-melodies of Oversnow have been gorgeously re-done.

"Arena has always been a game that I hold close to my heart," Martin tells PCG. "Not only is it the first entry of my favourite series, The Elder Scrolls, but a time capsule in both old-school RPG game design & music. It was actually released the year I was born, and I discovered it by working my way slowly backwards from Morrowind. When I read that the game featured all of Tamriel, I had to try it. I felt an odd nostalgia for it and it was a wonderful experience."

As for the qualities of the Arena soundtrack itself, Martin says it "has many similar motifs and elements that feature in the Daggerfall soundtrack and I think it's important that fans of The Elder Scrolls have the opportunity to hear a modernised version of the music, using software that wasn't available at the time."

I ask Martin what he likes most about the Arena OST, and the remake track he's proudest of.

"My favourite thing about the Arena OST is that it perfectly fits the retro-RPG vibe," says Martin. "It's grandiose and varied, with eerie, atmospheric dungeon tracks & powerful, orchestral pieces for the intro & outro. It really gives you a sense of wonder and adventure, helping the player fully immerse themselves in the experience."

I have to concur: it must be decades now since I last turned on Arena, but I've had this remade OST playing in the background for the last hour or so and the '90s stylings are undeniable. That "retro-RPG vibe" Martin references is a perfect description, and at times it almost felt like I was back on my dad's PC playing Arena with a slideshow framerate in a nook of the dining room.

"I am most proud of the character creation track," says Martin. "I loved the tribal & orchestral mix and it was a challenge trying to recapture that in a more modern setting, whilst staying true to the original. The intro theme is another piece I was quite proud of. I think I captured the feel of what the intro was originally aiming for, with an emphasis on the beauty & simplicity of the melodies, rather than a bombastic orchestral piece."

Skyrim's got a lot of NPCs. Thing is, most of 'em are dolts. They don't have any kind of distinct personality or routine, and sometimes do the dumbest stuff imaginable. I'll never forget the time a dragon flew down to attack me near a settlement, destroying some fencing in the process, and the entire town swivelled before charging towards me, daggers drawn, completely ignoring the massive dragon in their midst that had actually caused the damage.

In recent years Skyrim's peerless modding scene has seen various experiments incorporating AI elements into the game, with varying results: PCG's Chris Livingston took a ChatGPT-powered Skyrim companion for a test drive and it nearly got him killed by repeatedly failing to solve the game's easiest puzzle. Another that's been around since 2023 is Mantella, which uses various AI LLMs alongside speech-to-text tech to enable NPC conversations, and last week received a major update.

Mantella boasts NPCs that "have memories of your previous conversations, are aware of in-game events, have vision, and can even perform actions." You can see an example of a conversation below (which is from a version before this patch) and, yeah, it's stilted in places and the voicework is clearly rudimentary computer babble: but it works.

Here's another, showing an NPC follower being scornful about the player's dance moves.

Installing Mantella is fairly straightforward (here's an installation guide, and a collection of community resources), and the new version (0.14) improves nearly every element of it, focusing particularly on NPC awareness and how they interact with the world. Among the improvements made in this version are:

• Advanced actions—Mantella can now trigger complex in-game actions. Actions can now be triggered in multi-NPC and radiant conversations. Advanced actions can be enabled in the `Actions` tab of the Mantella UI
• Nearby NPC tracking—Nearby NPCs are now added to the context and can be targeted by actions
• Combat targets are now tracked, and their deaths are added to the context
• Vanilla dialogue awareness—Vanilla dialogue interactions are now added to the LLM's context
• NPCs can approach the player and start a one-on-one conversation (disabled by default)

This version also supports group conversations involving up to five NPCs, with the winning detail that they'll no longer bellow across the room at each other, but group up like people would when talking.

A user with the un-improveable name BongChompsky says: "How do the voices work...? How on earth is the AI able to use the NPC voices so well? Is it because Skyrim is so thoroughly data-mined? I was shocked to hear some voices from Mod NPCs as well. Strangely, Hjoromir from Interesting NPCs has Aval Atheron's voice... the dark elf who sells meat in Whiterun, lol. Like some others have posted, I am floored by this mod."

If I can offer a more sceptical take, Mantella definitely points towards one future path for mods in particular, and it is an undeniably impressive production that can surprise you unexpectedly. But this isn't a revolution so much as an extremely cool gimmick, one that puts me in mind of that AI cliche about it being as wide as the ocean but as deep as a puddle. Mandela brings something new and different to a world we're all so familiar with, but this is still very much a work-in-progress.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain has a new video going over some of his principles for game design, and as you might expect has some strong opinions on the intersection between design intention, and what players actually end up doing.

"Rule one, our game is non-linear—don't assume that players will go somewhere first or talk to someone first," says Cain in a new YouTube video called Eight Level Design Guidelines. "I wanted to remind level designers that just because you put a guard outside the town, don't assume that everybody will stop and talk to that guard."

Cain clearly has a bee in his bonnet about guards specifically, and is soon freewheeling through examples of why the above is bad practice: "If you want to force that, you can put a gate in the town that doesn't open until you talk to the guard or, worse, force the guard to go into conversation with the player."

So in Cain's world, it's time for that guard to meet their maker. "I point out that if you're capable of shooting that guard from long distance and killing them, I'm gonna go into that town without talking to the guard. And you may think well, at that point, it's OK because everyone in the town will attack you."

But Cain's principle is basic: don't expect players to ever act in the way you expect. "In general, I just like to remind level designers, don't assume anything the player is going to do in a particular order. Your job is to provide a nice map for them to play on and not make such assumptions."

Cain has previously spoken about the ineffable sadness when he sees a design document that relies on something like locking players in a room until they've done a particular thing, and says this shows a misunderstanding of why someone's playing a game in the first place.

"If at this point you don't know what all of this is in service of, you're going to run into problems," says Cain. "You should know why. Why am I doing all this? Why did I make this setting and tell this story with these mechanics? Once you've listed your goals, everything should fall from that."

Cain also recently posted a video outlining his love of Dungeons & Dragons, and how that game has informed his own design principles. So whaddya know: we owe Fallout's existence to an admiral and his officers teaching him to play D&D in 1979.

Fallout: New Vegas writer and former Obsidian creative officer, Chris Avellone, has given a new interview to Fallout content creator TKs-Mantis, and it's a hefty one. Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising assertion is that Bethesda doesn't have the source code for New Vegas (I've asked Bethesda about this, and haven't had a response yet), but there's plenty more: including one particular road not travelled for the series, alongside a healthy crank on the specul-a-tron about where Fallout might go next.

When being asked about the early stages of Fallout: New Vegas' production, the host mentions the potential of a setting like New Orleans. "Holy shit," says Avellone, "Yeah so one of the designers / producers on one of our other projects suggested New Orleans's location, and I was so stoked for that.

"It's going to be a weird reference, but there is an old comic franchise that was started by this author-artist Matt Wagner called Grendel. And a lot of the Grendel stories are very post-apocalyptic. There was one that was written in New Orleans, it was called Four Devils, One Hell."

I haven't read this, so I looked up a plot summary, and it involves a PI investigating the murder of a chef while four Grendels manifest their own visions of hell in New Orleans. One "is insane and believes himself to be a knight in the service of Charlemagne" and likes to fight vampires, one's trying to mess with the PI, one's an English curator on the hunt for some mysterious treasure, and the last is a gentlemanly gambler. I can kinda see where some of that might map onto Fallout's own brand of post-apocalypse.

"It's a fantastic story but as soon as I read it, which is while I was doing Fallout research ironically enough, I'm like, man, this makes me want to do a Fallout New Orleans so bad," says Avellone. "'Cos the vibe was so cool. The flavor was cool. And like it's still Fallout, but in a different area that felt different. There's a lot of potential there. [It would've been] so sweet."

Elsewhere in the interview, another location pops up: though not in relation to New Vegas. Avellone offers up some thoughts about what the Fallout TV show has done well and not-so-well, before ending with "the show's laying all the groundwork for whatever I guess Fallout 5 is going to be as far as I understand it."

He's asked about the fact that Bethesda supposedly said 'don't do San Francisco' when pitching, and confirms with a simple "yeah." Bethesda also later asked for the removal of a line of dialogue in New Vegas that said San Francisco was nuked. Asked whether he thinks this means Fallout 5 is heading to San Francisco, Avellone says "it's quite possible."

Avellone left Obsidian in 2015, citing creative and business disputes with management. He has since written for several notable RPGs, including Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and is currently collaborating with Red Info, the studio founded by Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz, on a future title. As for New Vegas, the hopium continues to waft around a mooted remaster, the most recent rumours landing last month.

Fallout: New Vegas is one of those games that only seemed to rise in peoples' esteem as time's gone on—especially since it seems like a milestone marker for the last remnants of the series' more oldschool CRPG spirit before Fallout 4 saddled gamers with a voiced protagonist.

But it's a matter of public record that Obsidian wasn't brought on for further projects—which, according to writer on the game and prolific videogame narrative guy Chris Avellone, was something Bethesda really hammered home.

During a recent interview with YouTube channel TKs-Mantis, Avellone made what I can only describe as a series of faces as his interviewer praised the New Vegas DLC Dead Money, which is infamous for stripping you of every belonging you own to build a more survival horror-esque atmosphere.

"The reason I'm making these expressions and hesitations about it is because—despite what I thought would be cool as an examination of Fallout, it was so different from the core experience that it was obviously a huge turn-off for a lot of people."

And while TKs-Mantis tries to brush these concerns aside, Avellone insists that "when it comes to sales and reviews it matters—and also Bethesda used review scores against us for the DLCs for, like, why they didn't want to keep doing things with us anyway. Even though they didn't wanna keep doing things with us anyway. So whatever."

His subsequent comments ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as he left Obsidian on bad terms with upper management in 2015, then encountered further controversy when allegations of sexual misconduct saw him removed from Dying Light 2 in 2020 (those charges were later dropped in 2023)—basically, he's not got a lot of reason to mince or be careful with his words. Still, they're nonetheless wild. According to Avellone, Bethesda raked Obsidian over the coals with slides.

"It was fun, it was fun—they had a whole powerpoint. Not even about the DLC, they had a whole powerpoint about all the things Obsidian did wrong, and we were like 'wow!' and they showed it to us. And we were like… 'okay'. This is hugely morale-boosting."

He continues: "I thought we [made] a good product for you guys that kept Fallout in the public consciousness, but you guys don't seem very happy about it despite the fact you reaped a lot of the rewards for it."

As far as Dead Money goes, Avellone says that he thinks "the vision for [a] survival horror experience … Was a little too different from the core experience of Fallout that was kind of a turn-off to people." Which, hey, fair enough. I think it's probably true that weird, novel experiences tend to age better, removed from the expectations that come as a package deal with most DLC.

Fallout: New Vegas writer and former Obsidian creative officer, Chris Avellone, says don't get your hopes up for an Oblivion-style remaster of the game, and his reasoning is a bit of a doozy.

"I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow to make a remaster of New Vegas at all," says Avellone in an interview with TKs-Mantis (spotted by GR+). That's a pretty eyebrow-raising assertion, given that what the studio and Virtuos managed with Oblivion, but Avellone argues there's a unique roadblock with New Vegas: "the very last milestone" Bethesda gave Obsidian Entertainment was to "deliver all the source code and the ability to make the build" for $10,000.

"For reasons unknown to me, but I have suspicions, [Obsidian studio head] Feargus [Urquhart] decided not to cash out that milestone, and did not deliver it," says Avellone. "It's not a strange decision if you feel, which would not be out of the realms of possibility, that the New Vegas experience cheated him out of X amount of money.

"In which case cutting off the revenue stream for that product for a time would be a possibility. I could certainly see that. And I'm not saying Bethesda doesn't have the source code for New Vegas, they may have aspects of the code… but everyone that I talked to after that period of time said they had no idea how to reassemble it."

The idea that Bethesda doesn't have the source code for New Vegas seems absurd: I've reached out to Bethesda reps to ask whether there's anything to it.

"What that milestone really meant was if all those assets are given to Bethesda, that means they can recreate the game at any time," says Avellone. Things get a little thornier when you get to how Bethesda would actually approach such a project: the Oblivion remaster uses a fork of Unreal Engine 5 that somehow incorporates the original Gamebryo engine.

"One of the only ways they could do [a New Vegas remaster]" would involve a similar approach, with Avellone adding that the mooted Fallout 3 remake will be a good opportunity to "try out that process… just to see what all the all the problems and issues are as a result."

These days, both Bethesda and Obsidian are owned by Microsoft, though Avellone argues that just because the two companies have the same owner doesn't mean they're necessarily going to play nice.

Avellone himself left Obsidian in 2015, citing creative and business disputes with company management. He has since done contract writing on a number of notable RPGs, including Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Most recently, he has collaborated with Red Info, the studio founded by Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz, on an unannounced game.

The rumours around a Fallout 3 remaster have been swirling for years, and things like the success of Oblivion Remastered and the wildly popular Fallout TV series make it seem almost like an inevitability. Similar levels of hopium waft around a mooted New Vegas remaster, with the most recent only last month.

"This may be one of the longest running secrets in the history of The Elder Scrolls we are about to reveal," says the holy repository of knowledge that is the Ultimate Elder Scrolls Portal, "this has seemingly stayed hidden for 28 years from general knowledge."

In 1998, Bethesda released a third-person action-adventure set in the realm of Hammerfell called The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard. It's a bit Tomb Raider, a bit Sid Meier's Pirates, and a whole lot janky. With its pre-set fully voiced protagonist, Redguard's quite different to the Elder Scrolls RPGs, and still quite divisive.

Its got followers though, enough that there's a Redguard Unity project working to port it to the Unity engine, just like Daggerfall before it. And it's thanks to the Redguard Unity project that the UESP was able to learn what happens if you try to upskirt an NPC in Redguard using the free camera.

You see a smiley face. Someone at Bethesda knew we'd try this, and almost 28 years later we got laughed at for trying to see up the dress of a Hammerfell lady trying to go about her Hammerfell business. Frankly, it's what we deserve.

Redguard Unity aims to make the crash-happy Redguard more stable on modern systems, as well as update it with a more modern control scheme, improved visuals, and mod support. I was never that put off by the control scheme, which was at least a step up from the frankly unforgivable controls the Tomb Raider series suffered with for years, but a version of Redguard that doesn't crash just because I tried to screenshot a cutscene would be ace.

Here at PCG towers we've recently been unearthing a bunch of classic interview material from our publishing company Future's decades-long history in print media. Earlier today I wrote about a 2014 interview in which the design lead on the first Elder Scrolls fondly recalled the days when Bethesda would finish a game, then the team would "assemble boxes, inserts and use the heat gun" to get it shipped.

This led me down a rabbit hole towards an even older interview with designer and Daggerfall lead Ted Peterson, conducted with GameSpy in 2001, in which he answers a question I'd never thought to ask—why's it called The Elder Scrolls: Arena anyway?

"I was one of two designers on it, the other being Vijay Lakshman, who along with Julian LeFay really spearheaded the initial development of the series," says Peterson. "Up to that time, Bethesda had never done a roleplaying game, only action games like the Terminator series and sports titles like Wayne Gretzky Hockey. I remember talking to the guys at SirTech who were doing Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant at the time, and them literally laughing at us for thinking we could do it."

We'll get to the name, but the context behind it is how Arena changed over the course of its development from a combat-oriented game to more of an RPG.

"Julian, Vijay, and I were all longtime pen-and-paper roleplayers, and fans of the Looking Glass Ultima Underworld series, which was certainly our main inspiration," says Peterson, who also cites a "completely forgotten" contemporary title called Legends of Valour: "It got pretty pitiful reviews and not many people bought it, but I really had fun with it."

Arena was always meant to have a "little bit" of an RPG element to it, but over the course of development this changed from a side-bonus to the game's main focus.

"The initial idea was that there was a series of tournaments in an arena, and your character fought in a team to win the coveted title against other teams," says Peterson. "A story developed that there was an evil wizard named Jagar Tharn who you could only fight once you made it to the final tournament in the Imperial City. Along the way you could do sidequests which were more roleplaying in nature.

"Eventually during the development, the tournaments became less important and the sidequests became more important. We eventually dropped the whole tournament idea altogether, and just focused on the quests and the dungeon-delving."

Which led to a realisation: Arena wasn't really a game about an arena any more.

"In the end, we had a game that almost didn't resemble our original idea at all," says Peterson. "It was really a hardcore roleplaying game, but we had already done the advertising and printed up boxes with the name 'Arena.' Someone came up with the idea that the Empire of Tamriel, because it was so violent, had been nicknamed the Arena. That explained, kinda awkwardly I guess, why there was no arena combat in a game named Arena.

"I think Vijay [Lakshman] was the guy who tacked on the subtitle 'The Elder Scrolls.' I don't think he knew what the hell it meant any more than we did, but the opening voiceover was changed to "It has been foretold in the Elder Scrolls..."

To be clear, this is not new news: it's coming from an archived interview that's 25 years old, and yes I'm sure some of you already knew this piece of trivia. But I'm always fascinated by moments of serendipity like this, where a pre-printed box and a change in the project's nature led Bethesda's developers to come up with the name of the series that the company would be built upon.

The Elder Scrolls Arena launched in 1994 and, with the benefit of hindsight, you can see the beginnings of much that would come to define the series: here's PC Gamer's own 1994 review. It was the first game in a series that would go on to become Bethesda's golden goose, and make the studio one of the most prominent in the industry. But at the time, Bethesda was a much smaller operation, and everyone involved in the game had to get hands-on with every aspect of it.

"We had a great team of hardworking developers who truly put in their best effort," Vijay Lakshman, lead designer of Elder Scrolls Arena, told the magazine GamesTM in 2014 (an interview recently exhumed by PCG sister site GR+). "No-one wore only one hat, and we were all familiar with what everyone did."

This was of course long before the days of widespread digital distribution, when PC games were shipped in those lovely big cardboard boxes and had to sell themselves to players on store shelves. And because Bethesda self-published Arena, it had to take care of that whole physical side itself.

"We even spent time shrink-wrapping the games ourselves, as Bethesda was the publisher and developer," says Lakshman. "We were in the loading dock and we learned how to assemble boxes, inserts and use the heat gun. Talk about seeing a product through from concept to box wrap! We did it all."

Arena was also late, thanks to the initial idea of an action game based around a tournament morphing over development into more of an RPG. "Eventually during the development, the tournaments became less important," recalled writer and designer Ted Peterson in 2001. "We eventually dropped the whole tournament idea altogether, and just focused on the quests and the dungeon-delving.

"At the end of development, we missed our Christmas deadline, which is really serious for a small developer/publisher like Bethesda Softworks. We released in the doldrums of March, which is disastrous. That, coupled with the fact that the distributors discovered we had essentially not made the arena combat game we said we were making, meant we initially shipped something like 3,000 units of the game."

Which was not the number of copies that Bethesda needed to sell to keep afloat. "We were sure we had screwed the company and we'd go out of business," Peterson said. "Month by month, though, people kept buying it, hearing about it word of mouth, and after a while, it turned out we had a minor 'cult' hit."

That's a modest way of putting it: a 1996 industry estimate put the total copies sold at the time at 120,000 copies in the runup to the release of Daggerfall (and the very fact of it having a sequel speaks volumes).

"The folks at Bethesda kept the franchise alive, poured their resources into it and turned it into a winner," says Lakshman. "They deserve it. I’m proud that my team could’ve done so much with so little, but I’m really awed at how much more complex the storylines, technology and adventures have grown, and how artfully woven the franchise has become. I take my hat off to the entire team at Bethesda today."

Every time I think Skyrim modders can't show me any more, they deliver something new. Take a bow daubuoi, whose Unique Jarl Throne Sitting Animation mod fixes a problem I'd honestly never even noticed: in vanilla Skyrim, you see, there is one throne-sitting animation that is used for all jarls.

Quick jargon reminder: the jarls are the ones in charge of the nine holds in Skyrim, governing their cities and answerable only to the High King. They're the mini-kings and queens of Skyrim, in other words, and each have their own fiefdom.

And "every jarl now has a unique throne sitting animation reflecting their personality, authority, and the type of throne they occupy, replacing the single generic pose from vanilla."

The one exception to this is the character Kraldar, a Nord who can become jarl of Winterhold, who keeps the vanilla version as a unique animation "since I feel it suits him quite well."

I have to be honest here and say I can't quite recall the differences in personality between various jarls, except that Korir is a whiny douchebag. But a quick flick through the mod's new poses shows that daubuoi clearly has very firm ideas on how they would comport themselves, and the new poses definitely add a new layer of personality.

"Every ruler now carries themselves differently, as true jarls should," says our modding hero in their sign-off, and this is another in the long list of reasons that the Skyrim mod scene cannot be beaten. It's not so much the spectacular full conversions like the "biblically accurate Skyrim" mod that blow me away, but the ones that fixate on tiny details like how jarls sit: modders have meticulously tackled things like door textures, book spines, how clouds look, and even given some of the incidental flora a tune-up. All of these and more can be found in our guide to the best Skyrim mods.