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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

May is finally upon us, and that means three things: The weather is starting to suck less, Canada's oldest official holiday is approaching (happy birthday, Queen Victoria), and it's time to catch up on what's happening with Skywind, the mega-mod that seeks to recreate Morrowind, the greatest Elder Scrolls game ever, using the newer technology of Skyrim.

I'll cut right to the chase here: There's no release date, or even a target window for launch. This is very much a work-in-progress update, detailing advances made since the last check-in but also revealing (not that it comes as any great surprise) that there is much left to do. Some aspects of the game, like 2D art, writing, and voice acting, are nearly complete, while others—animation, voice mastering, SFX, and localization—are not.

As is the way with projects like this one, the team is also (still) on the hunt for volunteers. "A common misconception is that Skywind has been worked on by the same small group of people, chipping away at it for a decade," narrator Joy Hayward states. "In reality, the project has functioned more like a relay race, with the initial contributors having long since passed the baton.

"Over the years, more than a thousand contributors have given what they could, when they could, to an idea they believed in. Today, nearly every active volunteer was once a follower of the project, just like you, and the hurdles ahead can only be overcome as long as people—like you—continue to volunteer."

These roles are the team's current priorities:

Even though there's no big news here, the update video is a pleasure to watch because it looks so good. Morrowind is a uniquely beautiful, alien fantasy game, and seeing it renewed in this glorious new(ish) tech—yes, I'm aware of the irony that Skyrim is older now than Morrowind was when the Skywind project began—brings me real joy. I'm not generally one for remasters, but for Morrowind, I'll make an exception—not anytime soon, no, but someday.

If you're interested in helping bring Skywind across the line, you can sign up at the Skywind website.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

When did Bethesda become, you know, Bethesda? That is, when did it become one of those game companies whose every release becomes a ginormous public event? Morrowind? Oblivion? Fallout 3?

None of those, if you ask former Bethesda marketing VP Pete Hines. In an interview with Firezide Chat, Hines said the studio's first true "Holy shit" moment was Skyrim.

"Everybody played Skyrim—that was the thing that made us feel like we've arrived, we are legit," recalled Hines. It was the moment when a Bethesda release became something other studios dread: "You have to be concerned about us if you think you're going to win game of the year. You have to take us seriously now."

That's not to say Hines thinks every preceding Bethesda game was a drop in the pond. "Fallout 3 did a lot for us, but there's also people who love that game and people who never played it, but that wasn't a thing with Skyrim," he says.

My beloved Morrowind? A crucial game in the studio's legacy, but not a world-striding colossus: "Morrowind allowed us to stay in business… [it] wasn't some runaway success that, you know, everybody talked about".

Only Oblivion, for Hines, almost reaches the lofty heights that Skyrim set, and in some ways set it up to hit it big with TES 5. "We were the consensus game of the year off of Oblivion," says Hines.

"So Oblivion was like, we're meant to be here. We are good enough to do this. It doesn't matter how big we are, how big our competition is. We can do this. And we carried that belief into Skyrim."

I'll be honest, I kind of think of Oblivion as the game that took Bethesda from crunchy (and wonderful) RPG house to a studio that console makers wanted on their E3 stage, but I see where Hines is coming from. "We have broken out role playing games into a whole huge group of people who have never played an RPG before, but played Skyrim because it just looked like fun."

I loved The Witcher 3's wobbly bushes. In the original version of The Witcher 3 they used to sway like they were singing Auld Lang Syne on New Year's Eve, and it really helped bring Velen to life. Particle Wind, a mod by RavenKZP, does the same for Skyrim.

It's not just the shrubbery that'll wobble in the wind. Particle Wind also affects fire, including torches and candles, as well as smoke, steam, the spray of waterfalls, and more. Watching the embers on an alchemy table burner spiral in a breeze or lanterns go horizontal in a strong gust adds more to the immersion than I expected.

You'll need to have SKSE and the Address Library for SKSE Plugins installed, but after that it should be a simple matter of downloading Particle Wind from Nexus Mods. If you find the way things blow around to be a bit much, you can tweak the effect in the ParticleWind.ini file you'll find in Data\SKSE\Plugins. Just alter the fDefaultStrength, maybe dropping it from 2 to 1.5.

RavenKZP is responsible for a host of useful Skyrim mods that add things you might not realize are missing until someone points them out. Their other mods include Underwater Bubbles, Universal Arrow Spin, and Weapon Switch Animations Complete, which gives you bespoke animations for a variety of weapon-drawing and -sheathing options the vanilla game lacks.

Whenever I need a reminder of how long I've been impatiently waiting for the next mainline Elder Scrolls game, I think back to how excited I got when I first heard the premise for The Elder Scrolls: Blades. A dungeon crawling, town-building spinoff with roguelike and PvP modes? Count me in, right up until I saw some gameplay and it was a pretty meh-looking phone game with oodles of in-app purchases.

Still, it raked in some cash when it first dropped and presumably had its fans, so I might have given it a go had it ever come to PC. That day hasn't come, and now, it probably never will: as user Avian81 shared on Reddit, an in-game banner and notice on the Nintendo eShop declare that it will permanently shut down on June 30.

Until then, all its store items will be available for a single point of currency, and players will get a free bundle of both gems and sigils "so you can enjoy all the content Blades has to offer." The announcement ends by saying "Thank you for playing and we hope you have enjoyed your time in Blades."

It's the second Elder Scrolls game to call it quits in a little over a year: The digital card game Legends shut down in January 2025 after a half-decade without updates. While that game has attracted fan attempts at a revival, time will tell if Blades inspires the same fervor in its community. If nothing else, Legends had some really dope card art any Elder Scrolls fan can enjoy—Caius Cosades never looked so damn shredded.

The death of Legends might have been writing on the wall for Blades, but an 8-year run is arguably still impressive for a cross-platform online game. It's hard to guess at why it stayed up after the card game went down—maybe it was cheaper to maintain, Bethesda wanted a buffer between bouts of bad news, or the right person just remembered Blades existed—but it's still disappointing things are ending this way, with no attempt at long-term preservation for the game in the form of an offline-only version. You can't say a lot for An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, but at least you can still play it.

Look, I'll be honest: the very fact that I happened to install Curseadelica was downstream of my desire to see if I could make big mods work on Linux.

The good news: yes, I can! The bad news: yes, I can! Curseadelica is a Skyrim modpack that markets itself as "Biblically accurate Skyrim" and is, in action, a safe way of experiencing visions you could only otherwise witness by swallowing an entire bottle of cough syrup and drowning. I'd call it a feast for the senses but it would be more accurate to call it force-feeding. I love it. It is terrible. It destroyed my Skyrim install.

How hard can it be?

Regular readers of, uh, me will know that my Linux adventure is both ongoing and largely an excuse to constantly annoy my coworkers by talking about it. Having settled contentedly on openSUSE Tumbleweed after a period of distro-hopping, and with all my games pretty much just working, I needed a new height to summit. Why not modding? Why not a modpack? Why not 154 GB of modpack?

I wanted to test my system to breaking point. So, I downloaded Jackify—a Linux Wabbajack modlist installer—and pointed it at what seemed like the most computer-destroying mod compilation I could find. That was Curseadelica.

What is Curseadelica? Great question.

Installation was actually pretty easy, all I had to do was leave Jackify unattended for a bit. Curseadelica is… difficult to describe. On its main page, author JanuarySnow describes it as "A modlist that is based around my desire to prepare a feast for my eyes, to always give them something interesting to look at." This is—and I don't mean to criticise—underselling it slightly.

Curseadelica feels like a vision from the Book of Revelation. It is a mess: a hodgepodge of nearly 900 mods that turns all of Skyrim into an acid-trip sequence from a '90s cartoon, all with new races, new quests, new NPCs, new everything.

I first knew I had stumbled on something special when one of my selectable races at character creation was a human body whose head was a small spider, piloting it with levers.

From there? An all-out assault on your eyes and ears, barely recognisable as Skyrim. Every NPC is an inflated caricature spouting nonsense—their heads bulbous, their torsos balloons, their legs withered stumps. Or they're giant. Or they're tiny. And all their lines have been fed through machine translation and into full indecipherability. No one is normal, is really the headline here.

Which you will not notice, because you will be far too busy being distracted by the 8 billion baffling quest pop-ups, each one punctuated by that Jeremy Clarkson "How hard can it be?" soundclip. Or you'll be harangued by a courier who chases you in order to confess his love.

Or you'll interact with a guard—bedecked in Mandalorian armour—and choose the only possible conversation option, at which point he will begin rapping at you. Then you collapse, explode, and your clothes vanish. It's at this point you also realise that at least one of those nearly-900 mods is a nude mod. At one point, someone passed me by on a motorcycle.

I don't know. Look, here's a video of my first minute-or-so with the mod (content warning for, well, nudity of a sort).

Not long after this, my game crashed. I restarted. I picked some Nirnroot that was making wookiee sounds. The game crashed again. I began driving a Mazda. The game crashed again. I attempted to cast Wumbo on Master Chief. The game crashed again.

I began to suspect that Skyrim's foundation was not made for what Curseadelica had built atop it.

But I was chuffed to pieces: my actual mission to figure out if I could (relatively) painlessly get ridiculous modpacks working on Linux had succeeded. The crashes weren't a Linux issue—plenty of Windows users who have also tried the mod also encountered them. So fine, I was happy to crash the game because it was trying to render a chocobo and a Twi'lek simultaneously. The fact it ran at all, at any point, was enough.

That is, until I returned to it earlier today, having turned my PC off overnight. Now? It refuses to run at all—just a black screen for a couple of seconds and then nothing. Like the whole experience was some kind of beautiful dream.

What have we learnt?

The first thing? I might not be the world's biggest Skyrim fan, but god am I glad it's out there. As a sandbox for the world's most unhinged modders with far too much free time on their hands, it's still second-to-none.

The second thing? I have a new nemesis. You haven't heard the last of me, Curseadelica. I'm going to get you running again. And when I do, I'm going to have a proper adventure. Then I'm going to force you all to read about it.

When it comes to The Elder Scrolls 6, Todd Howard has one message for you: What even is that?

So says Todd in a recent chat with IGN, where he reflected that, yeah, since Bethesda announced it was working on a sixth Elder Scrolls all the way back in 2018, he's changed his attitude towards announcing things a little. But given he can't put that genie back in the bottle, he jokes that we should all "Just pretend we didn't announce it. Doesn't exist. No one's heard a word."

This is, just to reiterate, a gag, and Todd Howard has not suddenly forgotten he announced The Elder Scrolls 6, but it is emblematic of his Big Philosophy Of Game Announcements. "When you go and press play, you're about to play a game. What do you already know? What's in your head? What's your excitement level? What's your expectations? And I back up from there. I prefer not to talk about stuff until then."

That's a pretty different approach than the one which led Bethesda to show us that one goddamn image of TES 6—that I will probably have to use as an image in this article, for lack of alternatives—that we all know and love. "I like to compress that moment where you hear about a game to when you can play it," says Howard. "Those would be on top of each other if I had my way every time."

Howard's banged this gong before. After Oblivion Remastered's shadowdrop last year, he was out and about chatting about how much he loved the tactic of announcing and releasing a game at practically the same time, and even called that game's release a "test run" for things yet to come.

So I'd anticipate more of those, were I you, though probably not for TES6 itself. Announcing the next Elder Scrolls was, says Howard, "really about informing our audience, because when you're going to do something new, everyone's going to ask, 'What about Elder Scrolls 6? What about a singleplayer game?' And we did it that way, but it's not my preference."

When will the next Elder Scrolls come out? Wish I could tell you, but it sounds like Bethesda's spinning a lot of plates: "We're working on a lot of stuff. I think if you look at the scale of our studio, we could have 10 times the amount of people to do all this. We're doing so much and it's just finding the right times to tell everybody about it." Today, I suppose, is Starfield's turn. But tomorrow? Who knows?

So I'd anticipate more of those, were I you, though probably not for TES6 itself. Announcing the next Elder Scrolls was, says Howard, "really about informing our audience, because when you're going to do something new, everyone's going to ask, 'What about Elder Scrolls 6? What about a singleplayer game?' And we did it that way, but it's not my preference."

When will the next Elder Scrolls come out? Wish I could tell you, but it sounds like Bethesda's spinning a lot of plates: "We're working on a lot of stuff. I think if you look at the scale of our studio, we could have 10 times the amount of people to do all this. We're doing so much and it's just finding the right times to tell everybody about it." Today, I suppose, is Starfield's turn. But tomorrow? Who knows?

First, the Baldur's Gate 3 modding community gave Elminster Big Naturals, and then everyone's favorite dignified corpse Withers too. The Skyrim modding community, not one to be left behind, has finally followed suit.

It began with a request to give Ulfric Stormcloak "Big Naturals" on r/skyrimmods. "Does current technology allow this?" someone innocently asked, while we knew full well the answer would be "yes". It took a day to give the people what they wanted: a mod that gives the Jarl of Windhelm the gigantic gazongas he apparently deserves.

Response has been positive. "This is actually how he is first described in the original lore", one commenter helpfully explains. "Finally, a good reason to join the Stormcloaks!" says another.

If you're wondering why the fuck this is happening, apparently Gandalf Big Naturals was a Tumblr meme back in 2022? This one went right by me at the time, or maybe I just blocked it out of my mind. The idea of giving videogame wizards and other authority figures huge honking norks has also spread to Stardew Valley and Oblivion Remastered. Nowhere is safe. Soon wizards with tig ol' bitties will be everywhere. Tear out your eyes before it's too late.

I have one job here at PC Gamer and it's this: reminding you all that I really like Morrowind quite a lot. They tell me that's "not a personality," in response to which I begin levitating.

Anyway, today's Morrowind news is this: someone's making a version for the Game Boy. Not "someone made a Game Boy-styled recreation," someone is actually going through the trouble of making a cut-down Morrowind you can run on a literal Nintendo Game Boy Color.

From Jordanly on Itch.io, The Elder Scrolls Travels: Morrowind is a free, bitesize Morrowind experience made in GB Studio. A confession: it was actually made some time ago, but it got a fresh update yesterday that brought it to my attention, and now I'm bringing it to yours.

"I've seen and played a few Gameboy demakes before and I thought it would be fun if there was a demake of Morrowind," writes Jordanly in a blog post accompanying the game's earliest iterations. "I have no experience with game making, but for some reason I decided to try."

The result is… kind of fantastic? Make no mistake—this isn't the entire Morrowind experience condensed down onto a GB cartridge, but you can pick a race (and one of three heads for each one) and a class, meander through Seyda Neen, even take a silt strider (which you pilot! Yourself!) to Vivec to check out Miun-Gei's wares (I'm reasonably certain Miun-Gei does not, as of the current patch, have wares).

It's a charming, faithful little thing, and all the more impressive for the fact that Jordanly apparently only made it on a whim—it got its start when they fired up a pixel art app and began doodling some Morrowind characters.

It's a testament to Morrowind's sense of place, I think. Where I often feel like Skyrim and Oblivion—both of which I like to one extent or another—try to get the setting out of your way, letting you strike out as any flavour of adventurer you choose in a world that rarely tries to feel like more than 'vaguely fantasy-flavoured,' Morrowind grounded itself in geography, history, and cosmology that it took quite seriously and hoped you would, too. It's a big reason the places you can visit in this little GB demake feel so familiar: they feel like places you've genuinely been to and immersed yourself in.

It is, also, testament to how cool democratised game-making tools are. Time was, making a Game Boy Color game required a studio. Now it can be done by someone whiling away the hours doodling some pixel Dunmer. Not all modern tech is bad, I think.

I like to think I'm a relatively smart person; I can often remember most of my ABCs and it only takes me around five seconds to add seven to something. But one thing will remain forever beyond me: mahjong, the Chinese tile-based game that I mostly know as 'that one Yakuza minigame I simply don't interact with.' The fact is: it's impossible to learn. The other fact is: I've never seriously attempted to learn it. These facts are unrelated, to my mind.

Anyway, I may have to finally learn it, because some mad lad has gone and added mahjong—under the setting-appropriate name of mazte—to The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, probably my favourite game of all time.

Created by modder CarlZee, Mazte – Playable Mahjong Card Game will let you sling tiles in any of a number of inns across Vvardenfell (and beyond, if you have Tamriel Rebuilt installed, which you should). It is still, you know, in Morrowind, so don't expect a lot of fancy animations, but I'm still remarkably impressed by how well it's pulled off.

Playing is simple. Just walk up to a Mazte box—set atop this or that table in the affected inns—and hit go. You can choose to face up to three opponents and how much to bet on the game, at which point the box will splay forth its contents and arrange tiles and coins according to the options you chose.

Like I said, this is still Morrowind, so your opponents are all, ah, empty chairs. But hey, you can watch your ghost-enemies make their moves as the turn order progresses, and the tiles are all inked with appropriate artwork: rather than Chinese characters, you play using tiles like Hlaalu Councilman and what-have-you.

And if you've somehow gotten this far in life without learning mahjong, it also adds a rulebook. Thank god.

It's me, the player who starts Skyrim over and over with different mod loadouts and yet, nine times out of 10, ends up crouching with a bow shooting draugr in slow motion. Every now and then I push myself into another playstyle—like two-handed melee barbarian or summon-focused wizard—but drift back to my old favorite. I haven't installed the mod that just kills you if you play Stealth Archer again, but I am absolutely part of the reason that mod exists.

Not that I needed it, but now I have another reason to go back to my old favorite next time I fire up Skyrim. Hide in Bushes is a real "does what it says on the tin" mod that makes you 50% harder to detect when you crouch in a bush, with a lower percentage bonus for smaller shrubs, and makes you 10% harder to detect when you crouch near a tree or stump.

The reason this mod didn't exist until now is that it needed the Object Impact Framework mod first. Object Impact Framework flags a bunch of Skyrim's objects that previously had limited interaction so they can be activated in new ways. Want to be able to set fire to strong alcohol? Or extinguish torches? First you need Object Impact Framework.

Now those bushes and trees count as objects Skyrim cares about, they can have effects added to them. Like a boost to your stealthiness. Unfortunately grass doesn't count as an object—it's just a texture—which means you can't hide in it no matter how long it grows. Still, I expect my next khajiit to be squatting on his haunches behind a shrub for most of my next playthrough, and I will love every minute.

Bethesda veteran and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith has done a new interview with PressBoxPR going over his considerable time at the studio: among the topics addressed are why Bethesda shouldn't switch to Unreal Engine, Todd Howard's "seagulling" habits, and one bit of deep cut lore that had PCG's Joshua Wolens despairing.

Nesmith is asked at one point about the debate over $100 games, which has been going on for years now but feels especially acute in the year of our lord Grand Theft Auto 6, which some expect to set a new premium price point. The argument is that spiralling budgets and the relatively steady price of games over the years makes such an increase inevitable, and perhaps even essential to the industry's future well-being.

"I remember for 15 years, the price of a newly released game was $59.95," says Nesmith. "For 15 years, it didn't change. Not even a cost of living increase. Not even recognizing inflation. It stayed at that price point. The fact that the prices are going up, I can't fault them for that.

"But I don't think players look at the hours of experience per price of the title once it gets past a certain number. There's going to be savvy players who do but I think a lot of times it's just that immediate hit you in the jaw, the impact that I've got to drop this amount of money for a game."

Nesmith's argument is obviously a good one for something like GTA 6, or indeed Bethesda's own games: I've been playing GTA 5 and Online for about a decade on-and-off now and, while I'm more of a Fallout than Elder Scrolls type, I've racked up hundreds of hours in individual Bethesda titles.

"What I'm surprised you didn't ask about is if they weren't going to go to a subscription model," continues Nesmith. "A pay-as-you-go model. That seems to be where everything is going these days. I can't get Microsoft Word unless I pay a monthly fee. The model for online games [is] indeed that way, but are singleplayer games going to go that way too?

"I think that they would most likely sell The Elder Scrolls 6 for whatever the industry standard price is at the time. If consumers are accepting $79.95, that's what it'll sell for. If they're accepting $99.95, that's what it'll sell for. It'll sell for whatever premium games go for at that time, and Microsoft has a heavy say in that and how it's marketed."

Yes, good old Microsoft and its consumer-friendly ways. While The Elder Scrolls 6 may well sell at that price on PC, you'd have to imagine it will also be used for a big push on Game Pass, just as Starfield was. In that case it was even a bit of an awkward halfway house: subscribers got access to the game, but could play it even earlier with a $31.49 'premium' upgrade.

"Economies around the world are struggling a little bit," concludes Nesmith. "I personally think game developers would be wise to not push the prices higher but gamers are a special breed. You know, they will pay for what they want.

"I would be loath to tell you how much I have paid for gaming in my life. I'm sitting at a fancy gaming table I paid way too much for. We’re willing to pay for our hobby so maybe people will pay for that and smarter people on the marketing side than I will be able to answer that question better."

Nesmith gave the interview to promote his Loki Redeemed books, a trilogy of novels he's written since leaving Bethesda. He also discusses his past work on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and has some ideas about where both series' could go next.

In a new interview with PressBoxPR, Bethesda veteran and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith goes over his time at the studio, addressing topics like why it wouldn't make sense to switch to Unreal Engine, studio head Todd Howard's habit of "seagulling," and lore choices that had PCG's Joshua Wolens despairing.

One of Nesmith's themes is how Bethesda tweaks its games for mass appeal, even when this involves dialling back the complexity of certain systems. But when it comes to the studio's future titles (Nesmith no longer works at Bethesda), he thinks one recent example in particular has shown a way forward.

"I would probably look at two things [to shake up]," says Nesmith. "I would probably look at having the world be more dynamic.

"Bethesda games in the last decade have become less dynamic in order to meet the needs of what the games needed and audience expectations, but to be able to have the world be more fluid, I think that would be very cool."

The example Nesmith cites is Larian's Baldur's Gate 3, which received a whopping 97% from PC Gamer's Fraser Brown and scooped our 2023 game of the year award. We weren't alone in holding such a high opinion of the game either, with its metascore a stunning 96%.

"To look at Baldur's Gate 3 and draw lessons from that smash hit… that part of what made it so popular is that it felt like all choices were meaningful because you made a choice and it made a big difference in your play," says Nesmith.

Nesmith goes on to use a phrase that needs explaining: "put your toys away." This is a design principle whereby, for certain levels of storytelling within a game, you want things to reset back at the end of the quest, so you're not constraining what can be done afterwards. So with the huge story beats, that's where you'll see "sweeping changes" coming out of them but if, for example, you're designing a sidequest for the thieves guild, you don't necessarily want those world-altering consequences.

"Bethesda games have maybe pulled back from doing [those meaningful choices] a little bit," says Nesmith. "The focus is on putting your toys away but in these games you do something in the thieves guild quest line that completely changes what becomes of the mages guild, for example. The world and the game is changed because of your choices. Have it make a real impact."

Nesmith is no longer at Bethesda but said "if I were in a position of being able to make the decisions, that's something that I would look to be doing because I think the gaming community has spoken and said they want games like Baldur's Gate 3 where their actions feel like they have impact in a broader sense."

Nesmith gave the interview to promote the Loki Redeemed books, a trilogy of novels he's written since leaving Bethesda. Elsewhere, he discusses his past work on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and has some other ideas about where both series' could go next.

In a new interview with PressBoxPR, Bethesda veteran and Skyrim's lead designer Bruce Nesmith talks at length about his time at the studio. Among the topics Nesmith addresses is why it wouldn't make sense to switch to Unreal Engine, and how studio head Todd Howard is an inveterate fiddler, even if he "desperately" tries not to be.

Nesmith has some pretty firm beliefs about decisions that have been made about the hugely popular Elder Scrolls series over time, at least one of which had my esteemed colleague Joshua Wolens despairing (it's a lore thing). He's asked about the idea of lowering barriers to entry for new players within the series, and whether it's a trend he expects to see continue with The Elder Scrolls 6.

"Absolutely, and I led the charge on that, to be frank," says Nesmith. "Obviously I had to persuade Todd, as he is the ultimate arbiter on these things, but I managed to do so. I did a lot of the character systems and one of Todd's philosophies early on in Oblivion, which I took to heart and why I pushed so hard for these things, is that he wanted an interfaceless game so ideally you just play the game. You just play it."

Hmm. I mean, as a philosophy fair enough… but I would not describe a single one of Bethesda's games as even approaching "interfaceless." If anything they seem interface-full. But Nesmith says it's not just about the menus.

"It was about getting the character system out of the players' way," says Nesmith. "You don't have your head buried in menus, stats and rules. Just enjoy the moment. It is a way to do that. In every version of the Elder Scrolls where I had any say in character systems, that is what I would push for.

"We got rid of attributes in Skyrim and you know who complained? Almost nobody. They hardly even noticed it. I love the whole idea that you do something, you get better at it. That's now a hallmark of the Elder Scrolls series because you play the character you want to play and you just get better at playing that character."

To be fair, the single best thing about Oblivion or Skyrim is pickpocketing people until you reach a level where you can basically stand in front of folk and take the shirt off their back without them noticing. Nesmith reckons this is the true expression of the "interfaceless" idea.

"If you want to change, just start doing other stuff," says Nesmith. "You don't have to worry about where you are going to spend your points or how you are going to do this and do that. Just play the game. Lets get the game out of your way. To me, it has always been one of the great things about the progression of the Elder Scrolls titles."

Nesmith says that players after that more traditional RPG experience should, basically, look elsewhere: because Bethesda ain't going back on this stuff.

"If you look at Fallout, for example, and that's another Bethesda title of course, they are embracing old school RPG features with that, and that is intentional," says Nesmith. "That's by the same studio, by the way. We're not talking about a studio that has a bias. It's all about how each game should approach it."

Apparently this is a thematic choice: Bethesda's designers want everything about Fallout to feel a little old-school.

"In Fallout, they want you to have that retro feel because everything in Fallout has a retro feel. It's a world based on 1950s super science. The game rules do that as well. They're very old school RPG game rules where you get experience points and decide how to manage your character at that level.

"If you prefer those old school elements, there's a wealth of other games out there for you. For the players who want, they will find games for that. Bethesda as a studio can be the best at doing both with two different titles but a single game can't be trying to do both."

Nesmith gave the interview to promote his Loki Redeemed books, a trilogy of novels he's written. Elsewhere, he discusses his past work on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and speculates about where both series' could go next.

I don't mean to overreact, but someone needs to stop Skyrim design lead Bruce Nesmith before I actually start crying. The ex-Bethesda dev's been on a tear of late, chatting about everything from Todd Howard's tendency to "seagull" around the studio to his take on why Bethesda shouldn't ditch its venerable old in-house engine. That's all fine. Unforgivably, though, he's also told interviewers that he thinks anyone playing Morrowind today would "cringe" and that the game "would not stand the test of time."

Let me stop you right there, buster. I played Morrowind literally yesterday (via OpenMW) and that game is still the best thing Bethesda's ever done and one of the best games ever made. So jot that down.

Ahem. Anyway, the latest thing Nesmith has said in an attempt to hurt me specifically is that his biggest regret about the series' lore is something I regard as one of the coolest things it ever did. In a chat with PressBoxPR, Nesmith said "the big one" in terms of lore regrets "would be the time splitting thing that happened way back in the Daggerfall days."

That'd be the Dragon Break, a name you may dimly recall from the book Where Were You When The Dragon Broke? that you can find across multiple Elder Scrolls games. The "dragon" in this instance is Akatosh, TES' god of time (and also a large dragon; he's the fella you see at the end of Oblivion), and "Dragon Break" is really just a lore-appropriate way of saying "time got hell of screwy."

The Dragon Break at the end of Daggerfall—also called The Warp In The West—was Bethesda's way of accommodating that game's multiple endings in the stories of later games in the series. Daggerfall's ending depended on which faction gained control of Numidium, a giant brass god built by the Dwemer, but which the Dwemer never activated because they, uh, all disappeared (or they did activate it and thus caused their own disappearance, maybe? God, Elder Scrolls used to be cool).

How do you write The Elder Scrolls 3 when any of five factions could have seized the impossibly powerful brass god at the heart of The Elder Scrolls 2? Easy: you just say they all did, because time got incredibly weird and so every ending happened at once.

And if you want that explained, here's a passage from the in-game lore about it:

"Do you mean, where were the Khajiit when the Dragon Broke? R'leyt tells you where: recording it. 'One thousand eight years,' you've heard it. You think the Cyro-Nordics came up with that all on their own. You humans are better thieves than even Rajhin! While you were fighting wars with phantoms and giving birth to your own fathers, it was the Mane that watched the ja-Kha'jay, because the moons were the only constant, and you didn't have the sugar to see it."

So that clears that up. Anyway, as I'm sure you'll agree, this is cool as hell—an inventive bit of storycrafting that opens up all sorts of wild possibilities (including the tantalising one that TES' Empire was itself founded because the first emperor used a Dragon Break to invade every province at once, or in other words: he had saved games).

Yet Nesmith, somehow, doesn't share my feelings on this. "By allowing all the possibilities to exist and never resolving them, you cause yourself some lore issues and I think that probably could have been handled better," he says. No! I disagree! It was handled incredibly well, in a way that preserved and expanded on the beautiful strangeness that made Daggerfall and (especially) Morrowind so special.

At least Nesmith agrees with me that TES' deep lore is one of its best parts: "That’s one of the beauties of the Elder Scrolls series. The lore is so deep.

"When you have a game where time has been split into six parts and giant constructs that are 100 feet tall stride the earth, there's all kinds of crazy things you could do if you were to choose to." Though he does say "it's dangerous to mix science fiction and fantasy. People who like fantasy like fantasy," which I will spare you another 500 words of me complaining about. Suffice it to say, I disagree. And to be fair to Nesmith, that's not a hard rule on his part: "It’s not that you can't do it. It's been done before in the Might And Magic series. They took their series into space and even had ray guns by the end of it."

And if you gave Nesmith control of a future game's lore? "I would go deeper and deeper into the Daedric Lords and their realms. I think that's always been at the heart of what makes The Elder Scrolls feel like The Elder Scrolls and I think there's a lot of really interesting things you could do there." Hey, sounds good to me. Perhaps you could break a dragon or two while you do it.

In a new interview with PressBoxPR, Bethesda veteran and Skyrim's lead designer Bruce Nesmith has gone over his time at the studio, addressing topics like why it wouldn't make sense to switch to Unreal Engine. One of the questions he's asked is about studio head Todd Howard, and how the public perception of him differs from the man he worked with for decades.

"Well, you'll have to tell me what you think the public perception of him is," says Nesmith. "I've known the man for a long time. For me to see the forest for the trees is a little difficult.

"I can tell you candidly that when working at Bethesda up through the Skyrim days, Todd is probably one of the best bosses I've ever had. I can also tell you he's keenly aware of the fact that he is a bottleneck and he works his ass off to not do that. Unfortunately, he doesn't succeed very well."

Nesmith is keen to emphasise that this isn't about mismanagement or "something where he is being an ogre about it. It's part of the culture of the studio and that is extremely difficult to get away from because it's baked into how things are done. Even though he tries desperately not to, he does what he calls seagulling where he swoops in and changes things. It still happens."

Nesmith says this has to be seen in the context of Bethesda’s games, which are obviously large-scale projects with tonnes of moving parts. "When you build games as big as Bethesda games, Todd was very good about saying I care about this and this and this and this, and he spends a lot of time and attention on those things," says Nesmith. "We were left to go our own way on it, not that he wouldn't come in and have to approve the work, but he would give a lot of leeway."

The example he offers is revamping Skyrim's magic system. "I felt it was very old and clichéd and it needed to be redone," says Nesmith. "We had talks about it. [Howard] approved the general idea and he was very involved in that. Then he let me have my head. Not that we didn't have discussions about this particular thing or that but I had a lot of freedom to create that. A lot of freedom.

"It was the same with a lot of the character systems. He was very involved in the perks because he had a vision for what he wanted for that. On the underlying stuff, I had a tremendous amount of freedom to do what I wanted to do.

"I would say that the reputation you just said is both earned and unearned because it's a big studio. It's a big project. We do big projects. We did big projects. You can have both of those things be true at the same time."

Nesmith was giving the interview to promote his Loki Redeemed books, a trilogy of novels he's released after leaving Bethesda. Elsewhere, he discusses his past work on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and speculates about where both series' could go next.

The way NPCs open doors in Skyrim has always been a bit silly. When they're crossing load screens they can't open them all the way—because then the other side would have to be rendered—and so they pop doors open a crack revealing a sliver of darkness, then fade out of existence like the guy in that one meme.

I remember looking for a mod to replace that with fuller animations back in the day and learning it would be completely impossible. (Deleting the door-opening animation altogether was on the table though, thanks to the Get On With It mod.) Given the whole process is necessarily artificial, it never struck me how bizarre it looks in the instant before the fade—when the NPC about to vanish lights up like they've just been plugged into the mains.

As well as all shadows on them disappearing their hair looks super weird, vanishing from their eyebrows, sideburns, and the nape of the neck as the transparencies suddenly fail. Watching the video by modder wSkeever really makes it impossible to ignore. They light up like Uncle Fester with a lightbulb in his mouth, which is why the No Load Door NPC Fade mod is such a blessing.

It's a one-kilobyte download, and immediately joins my list of Skyrim modding essentials along with a bunch of other mods by wSkeever (don't ask what the "w" stands for) like Lock Add-Ons, Dynamic Things Alternative, the questmod Belethor's Sister, and the one that adds the weeping angels from Doctor Who.

Kurt Kuhlmann probably knows what location we'll be visiting when The Elder Scrolls 6 launches in approximately 100 years. Or at least, the former Elder Scrolls loremaster knows where Bethesda wanted to go before he left the company in 2023. But no, he's not telling us.

"From when we were talking about it way back in the Fallout 4 timeframe," he tells us, "there was a sort of consensus amongst a few people that were talking about it."

He clarifies that he doesn't know if that's still the case, and that it wasn't completely locked in—and obviously he's been out of the loop for a couple of years. But he remembers it being an easy choice at the time.

"We had an idea, but it was more of a consensus, like, 'OK, where should the next game be?' And the people that were talking all agreed. It was not an argument. It was like, well, obviously, it should be here. We were more in the feel of it, in the setting; there was no story involved yet."

Fallout 4 launched in late 2015, and The Elder Scrolls 6 was first teased in 2018. This short, cinematic view of a mountain is all we've had to go on for a whopping eight years.

Kuhlmann, whose brain is absolutely filled with The Elder Scrolls knowledge, seems to sincerely have no idea what the story of the sixth entry is. "Because I haven't been involved in that level of the story side of things since Skyrim," he says.

Todd Howard initially promised Kuhlmann the lead designer role on TES6, after being co-lead on Skyrim. But then came Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield, and somewhere along the way Howard changed his mind. Kuhlmann's hopes were dashed near the end of Starfield's development, years after TES6 was announced in the teaser.

The implication is that Bethesda had barely even started to think about TES6 by the time it first teased the game, and that it was still extremely early days when Kuhlmann left the company.

Of course, this isn't entirely surprising. Starfield sounds like it was a black hole for the developer's resources, with everyone focused on Bethesda's big interstellar gamble. But it does put into context just how ridiculous that brief trailer was: getting us all hyped for a game that, at the time, was just this vague idea being thrown around.

That said, Kuhlmann did have a story concept, where TES6 would have been like "The Empire Strikes Back". Players could save the day in a broad sense, but the game would have ended with the Thalmor taking over Tamriel, setting up a high-stakes, dramatic clash in TES7.

So! We still have no idea where the next game will be set, though the most popular theory points to Hammerfell. High Rock gets thrown into the mix a bunch too. Overly-long YouTube videos and Reddit threads will fling mountains of 'evidence' at you, but the truth is that it's all based on pure guesswork and a teaser that was created eight years ago.

We're just gonna have to keep guessing, then.

Starfield is a fascinating RPG. Not necessarily to play, but its development, its legacy—that's what's interesting. Massive in terms of ambition and scale, overflowing with checked open-world RPG boxes, crafted by a talented team who put years and years of work into it—so why is it a cautionary tale instead of an astronomical success?

According to Kurt Kuhlmann, Bethesda's former Elder Scrolls loremaster and the co-lead designer on Skyrim, "the main problem with Starfield is it didn't fully cohere as a game".

Kuhlmann left Bethesda in 2023, around the time of Starfield's launch, so he was there throughout development and thus was present for a lot of changes in regards to how Bethesda worked and how staff communicated.

When he was working on Skyrim, itself a massive endeavour, things were simpler. "I was working directly on the game, and I was a lead," he says. "That was how all the leads worked then, and so I was directly working with all the people, all the quest designers, myself." But from Skyrim on, that started to change, and it was "one of the main things" that Kuhlmann "didn't like".

By the time Starfield came around, "Todd [Howard] was still the creative director," Kuhlmann says, "and he had the leads, but the leads now included studio heads and producers and were from multiple studios".

Leads not "making content" didn't feel right to him. "I don't know that they were wrong and I was right, but I didn't like that, you know, it may be that when you have that many people, your job can't be also making content if you're actually also sort of managing that scope of the project."

With Zenimax having acquired various studios, the scope of Bethesda's projects increasing, and teams ballooning in size, communication problems where it wasn't clear who was making the decisions started to appear. "There would be people talking to the leads in one studio and getting an answer, and people talking to the leads in the other studio and getting maybe a different answer," Kuhlmann recalls.

Howard's growing responsibilities also created some speed bumps. "Decisions weren't being made maybe when they needed to be because maybe they needed Todd to make a decision as a tiebreaker and he was busy."

Kuhlmann says that Howard is a "very good project lead", but as the company got larger, his responsibilities took him away from game design, "and when he would get pulled away from the game that would really hurt the game". And with Starfield, that happened a lot more.

"When it came out, I thought it was a good game," says Kuhlmann. "It was a releasable game, but it wasn't the best." It had been in development for so long it had to come out, though he emphasises that he doesn't feel like it was pushed out the door too soon. Indeed, Starfield ended up being Bethesda's most polished, least janky open-world RPG.

Ultimately, Starfield was a victim of Bethesda's ambitions. Previously, with the possible exception of Fallout 76, a multiplayer novelty, each game was built on its predecessor. "The previous game is sort of the foundation we're building on," says Kuhlmann, "and then we're adding some new things."

Starfield, Kuhlmann guesses, was 50% "brand new", with the space setting, space combat, procedurally generated planets and craftable spaceships. Bethesda could no longer rely on one of its greatest weapons: "institutional knowledge".

To handle this, Bethesda needed to "add a bunch of people", raising the question of "how do you manage that size of a team and keep everybody on the same page … we don't have an institutional knowledge about how space works, how do spaceships work, how do we integrate that into quests?"

Combine this lack of institutional knowledge with the communication issues and you end up with some new problems.

From a quest designer perspective, Kuhlmann says problems arose because "if spaceships and planets don't really work for a long time, you are just guessing how you should integrate that into your mission, your quests and stories, and it might change fundamentally, because what we originally thought of how space or spaceships were going to work, well, it changed, or this idea we had didn't work, and we had to change it".

This led to quests being reworked, unsurprisingly, but Kuhlmann also notes that designers would try to anticipate reworks by avoiding adding anything that might be changed. "So you have both those things going on that make the game feel less cohesive, I think, because there were so many pieces that, when we started and for a long time, were up in the air or being reworked and in flux."

There was also the spectre of Fallout 76's initial reception looming over Starfield. While Fallout 76 has since been transformed into a genuinely good multiplayer Fallout game, it had little of what made Fallout work when it launched, along with a new level of jank. "We cannot do that again," says Kuhlmann. "We can't release a game that has the kind of problems 76 had when it was released, and that was one of the reasons why we got so much more time on Starfield."

But while Starfield bucked the trend of a buggy Bethesda launch, it didn't engender the kind of love that Skyrim received. "Some people thought it was a very good game and were surprised that everyone didn't love it," Kuhlmann recalls, but for him the reception was "about what I expected".

He believes it was a "solid" game, but it wasn't one of Bethesda's best. "We had tried to take this huge leap into this new genre with all these new systems and things … I don't know that you should expect that if you jump into the space combat genre that you're going to be better or as good as games that just do that, and have maybe been doing it for multiple iterations, right? Like, it was good enough. It wasn't, like, embarrassing."

Kuhlmann is still fond of many aspects of Starfield, though, from its aesthetic to things like its celestial mechanics. Those things, he says, were "knocked out of the park". But it just didn't come together. "There's this piece of the game over here, and there's this piece of the game over here, and do they fully have much to do with each other? That, to me, is where it isn't quite as good as some of our other games."

Bethesda RPGs are so big and take such a long time to develop that there's naturally a lot left on the cutting room floor, leaving them to be discovered by modders and given a second life. One such dropped idea was Skyrim's fully dynamic civil war, co-lead designer and former Elder Scrolls loremaster Kurt Kuhlmann tells us. And it was "pretty far along before it got cut," he says.

"The civil war was originally intended to be much more dynamic, in the sense that we were tracking if you went around and killed Imperial soldiers … and we would say, OK, you're harming the Empire in this hold … so we could see the balance of power in this hold is shifting towards the Stormcloaks, and at some point, if it shifts far enough through your open world actions, it could trigger the Stormcloaks to attack the capital city."

The hold you're helping one side take over would change in other ways, too, like encampments belonging to that faction appearing all over it.

We ended up seeing a tiny glimmer of this in the Battle for Whiterun quest, where you assist the Stormcloaks in seizing the city, and thus the hold. "But we had it sort of working with attacks on all the main cities in all the holds [in a] systematic way," says Kuhlmann. "So I still feel like we maybe could have pulled that one off."

It was complicated, though. In the Whiterun battle, the team "had so much trouble getting it to run; it had to have so much special handling". There were all the NPCs up on the walls and fighting inside the city, adding to the load.

Ultimately, the performance cost was too great. "The production decision was: we cannot make this good and make sure the frame rate is good in all the cities under all circumstances," Kuhlmann recalls. "That's just too much right now. I mean, it's still hard for me to believe that the game shipped on the 360. Oblivion and Skyrim, same platform originally, so we were really pushing it on the 360."

And you might recall the state Skyrim was in back then, before all the patches and mods and next-gen improvements. There were performance issues all over the shop. So imagine how it would have been with all these extra complications.

But Kuhlmann is still convinced that the team could have made it work.

Bethesda managed to solve the problems in Whiterun, hence why the Battle of Whiterun persevered. "I think that we could have taken what we learned there," Kuhlmann says, but it wasn't meant to be.

"We were pretty disappointed that didn't ship," he says. "Probably, if people pull up the creation kit, they can find a lot of bits and pieces of that system, because we couldn't delete everything that was supporting that, so maybe, I don't know, I don't know if anybody's ever modded that back in, or something like that."

The good news is that they have! There are a bunch of civil war mods that have come out over the years, like Skyrim at War. "As you travel Skyrim, every single road, town, city, or village has the potential to be a bloody civil war battle ground. Battles can start as swift small skirmishes and may escalate into intense large bloody battles that stretch on for over a mile," says modder OperatorYoRHa.

It's not quite the same as Bethesda's original concept, but there are a bunch of cool features, like being able to command troops, along with new units and battle formations.

This isn't the only feature Kuhlmann wishes Skyrim shipped with. There was another the team was tinkering with which would have pleased all the anti-fast-travel diehards: real-time horse and cart travel.

Every major settlement in Skyrim has a horse and cart sitting outside it. When you talk to the driver, you're able to select another city and then you'll appear there instantly (after some loading, naturally). But you'll also almost certainly remember another cart ride. One that sees you sitting in the back, making your way to a settlement in real-time. Before you get to the executioner's block and a dragon accidentally saves you.

This intro sequence became the foundation for Kuhlmann's real-time system.

"I had started, and I had it working to some extent … using the tech of the intro to the game. The horse is pathing through the world. It's pulling the cart. You're riding in it. I was like, well, if it works here, we should be able to make it work at other places."

The fact that it wasn't "fake" or running on rails meant it could be adapted, but that also created some issues in the intro. "If something changed or some little thing went wrong, the horse could decide to take a different path," says Kuhlmann. "So we had some restrictions we had to put on it, but fundamentally it worked."

You could even get out of the cart if you wanted. If you saw some bandits fighting people, you could just jump out and help. But it also went a bit haywire sometimes. "The cart could flip over," Kuhlmann remembers. This would happen when the horse went up a hill, and the physics would freak out. "We couldn't possibly ship that."

Honestly, I think players could have lived with a haywire horse and cart. There's a lot of forgiveness in our hearts for Bethesda jank.

Once again, though, the fantasy of riding a horse and cart through Skyrim was too tantalising to ignore, so modders made it happen. There are plenty of travel mods, some that give you complete control over your ride, and some even introduce things like ferries. So even though Kuhlmann ran out of time, the dream lived on.

Kurt Kuhlmann, the longtime Elder Scrolls "loremaster", hasn't revealed why he left Bethesda in 2023 after more than 20 years—until now.

His departure didn't make headlines but it rumbled those who know the series best. Michael Kirkbride, who worked alongside Kuhlmann on Morrowind and Oblivion, wrote at the time that "Kurt was the best writer that TES ever had… his leaving will be to the creative detriment of [The Elder Scrolls] 6."

"It was almost certainly time for a change," Kuhlmann, who now works at the Tencent-owned studio Lightspeed LA, tells me. "There were some things that had been going on for a long time that I'd not been super happy with."

Some were an inevitable result of Bethesda's boom years: with hundreds of developers across multiple studios making Starfield, communication sometimes broke down and developers felt disconnected from senior management, Kuhlmann says.

But there's another reason—and it's linked to a promise Todd Howard made to him about The Elder Scrolls 6.

A promise, he says, that was never fulfilled.

Kuhlmann's tenure at Bethesda was split in two. As a junior designer in 1996 and 1997 he worked on The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, and pre-production of Morrowind. He returned in 2003 and was involved in every major Bethesda game after that point, including as co-lead designer on Skyrim and as lead systems designer on Starfield.

He became the Elder Scrolls "loremaster" because of his longevity at the studio and his shaping of Tamriel's history: when ZeniMax Online Studios began making the Elder Scrolls Online, Kuhlmann was assigned to field lore questions.

Over this two-decade second run, Bethesda ballooned and its culture changed, he says, particularly after 2011's Skyrim.

In the early days, it was a close group of developers—including Todd Howard—in a basement office, making decisions and eating in the canteen together, he says. But new offices opened and other studios were folded in by owner ZeniMax Media, including BattleCry Studios and Escalation Studios (both in 2018). Zenimax was itself bought by Microsoft in 2021.

By the time Starfield shipped in 2023, "it's four remote studios all working together on a game," Kuhlmann says.

"When you get to that size, you can't have people just popping into Todd Howard's office to chat about a design point. He's not having lunch with everybody… It's very different when it's 400 people, four studios, big business, and Microsoft is now involved."

Size brought problems. Decisions that, on Oblivion, would've been made on the spot after a face-to-face conversation were instead filtered through layers of management. Sometimes developers couldn't even work out who had made those decisions, Kuhlmann says.

He also describes "communication breakdowns" during Starfield's development, where teams didn't understand what they were supposed to be doing. "Or, you know, there would be people talking to the leads in one studio and getting an answer, and people talking to the leads in the other studio and getting maybe a different answer."

The snowball

Bethesda's growth and the problems that came with it were a "slow, rolling" change, he says, and predated Microsoft's acquisition. And these changes sound as if they're exemplified by how Howard's role shifted.

"Todd's a very good project lead and fundamentally I think he's a designer at heart, and he's good at it, obviously, if you look back at the games," Kuhlmann says. But "over time as he got busier and every part of this larger and larger organisation wanted him to do stuff for their project… he would get pulled away".

Howard made good decisions, Kuhlmann says—so when he wasn't around, games suffered. Sometimes choices made in Howard's absence needed undoing later.

The way decisions were made wasn't the only problem for Kuhlmann: as Bethesda grew, senior developers became more managerial and less hand-on.

Skyrim's leads, Kuhlmann among them, were also making the game directly, for example writing and building quests. But by Starfield, the leads, overseen by Howard, included the heads of entire studios. It felt "more bureaucratic", he says. "The expectation was… your job can't be also making content if you're actually managing that scope of the project."

He doesn't believe this set-up is necessarily wrong, and says it's perhaps inevitable as a studio grows. He enjoyed leading other people but preferred designing. "I didn't want to work that way, because I like making games and being hands-on," he says. "It had gotten to a scale beyond where I was really enjoying working in that environment."

But what of Todd Howard's promise?

Kuhlmann says that after Skyrim, Howard verbally promised him the lead design role on The Elder Scrolls 6 (TES6), which was supposed to be the next project after Fallout 4.

"Of course, after Fallout 4 we didn't go to TES6, we made Fallout 76, and then even then we didn't make TES6, we made Starfield, which became this extremely long project compared to other ones. So from my point of view, I've been waiting like 11 years to be the lead on TES6," he says.

"I was obviously one of the old-timers there and had a lot of experience. Bruce [Nesmith] and I had been the co-leads on Skyrim. I think most people would call it a successful project, so I thought that it wasn't unreasonable for me to think that I could be a successful lead on TES6. It wasn't just my expectation—I had been told that that was going to happen," he says.

"And they made the decision, no, you're not going to be the lead."

He remembers that being a "tough conversation", and that Bethesda's leadership hoped he'd be happy with a different position. "Todd said, 'Well, we want you to have an important role in the project.' But what I wanted and what he wanted were different at that point."

Bethesda declined to comment on the topic, and Kuhlmann says he doubts Howard would acknowledge the promise—"and in any case, he could also say, well, that was a long time ago, things changed. And he's definitely right that things changed, and the role of lead on TES 6 is very different from the role of lead on Skyrim."

In retrospect, as much as he wanted it, he doesn't think he would've enjoyed it, "and so they may have made the right decision of saying [I] shouldn't be in this role."

Leaving Tamriel

It was a combination of this missing out and his overall dissatisfaction with the way the studio had changed that made him think the time was right to leave, he says.

He talks about these events without malice or bitterness. It's obvious that Bethesda, and the Elder Scrolls, still means a lot to him and that he enjoyed working with his colleagues on those games. If Bethesda was still the smaller studio it was 15 years ago, he would love to be making TES6.

He even knows what he would've done with the game's story—or at least, what he would've liked to do.

"I had in my mind that TES6 was going to be like The Empire Strikes Back," he says. The Thalmor, the elven supremacists who were peripheral in Skyrim's story and ultimately wanted to control all of Tamriel, would be the bad guys who come out on top, setting up TES7.

He saw evil triumphing as a welcome alternative to the "chosen one" idea Bethesda often relied on. The player might have "secretly saved the day" at the end of TES6, he says, for example by protecting an heir to the throne, "so you've preserved hope for the future, but overall it looks like the Thalmor are on the march".

He ultimately doesn't think Bethesda would allow an Elder Scrolls game with a "bad" ending and with the pace of its releases, a cliffhanger is "completely unfeasible," he says. "That's not a good way to end a game and say, yeah, we'll see you in 10, 15 years."

Fan theories point to Hammerfell and possibly High Rock as the locations for the next Elder Scrolls game—Kuhlmann says he doesn't know where it will be and jokes that his friends who remain at the studio "can't talk to me about what's going on".

The series' loremaster is now, like all of us, watching and waiting from the outside.

Former Bethesda lead artist Nate Purkeypile has given a new interview to Esports Insider, in which he makes the eyebrow-raising suggestion that The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced when it was because the studio was worried people would be "pissed" at it: The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced simultaneously alongside Starfield at E3 2018

It's been… eight years. Right now Elder Scrolls fans are huffing the copium thanks to a Microsoft tease that 2026 will be a "big year for games ending in 6", but the reality is there's no indication what date Bethesda is aiming for with the next Elder Scrolls. That's one hell of a stretch, even for a marquee title, and our man reckons it's because Bethesda didn't want Starfield's debut to be overshadowed by the absence of The Elder Scrolls.

"My assumption was always that we were announcing Starfield," says Purkeypile, "and it had been so long already since Skyrim that we needed to make sure people were not just pissed at us. It’s a very expensive way to do that, though. Those trailers are not cheap."

With that said, however, he also reckons Bethesda now has the luxury of time.

"I would imagine that they will take a while to deliver it because there’s so much pressure behind that title," says Purkeypile, "and I think it’s been proven with Starfield that they’re finally okay, actually delaying stuff." Starfield itself was subject to one big delay, something that Purkepile says was "not really the case early on… On Skyrim, it was like, 'It's coming out on 11/11/11' and we were like, 'what?! Oh boy, no pressure.'

"I think there is less economic pressure to just get Elder Scrolls 6 out on a date, but there is more economic pressure to actually make sure it’s good, and I think that’s a good thing. That’s healthy so long as they’re also honest with the team about that."

Asked whether these games are in a bit of a no-win situation thanks to the expectations, Purkeypile says: "Yes, and that definitely factored into me leaving because Skyrim being one of the top 10 games of all-time, how do you beat that?

"If they do, great! And I hope it’s a great game, but even if it’s just as good as Skyrim was, you’ll still get so many people throwing out hateful comments. I’m sure there will be more death threats again. All of that stuff. It’s really unfortunate that that’s the way things have gone."

Things then take a turn into the speculative, with Purkeypile asked about where they think The Elder Scrolls 6 should be set. Purkeypile left Bethesda in 2021 to establish Just Purkey Games, which has subsequently released the "heavy metal horror game" The Axis Unseen. So it's probably best to assume he's not doling out secret insider knowledge here, so much as having a bit of fun with it.

"I probably shouldn’t guess on that, other than not one of the regions that they’ve already done recently," says Purkeypile. "Outside of Daggerfall. That doesn’t count. My hope would be that they would just pick one region of Tamriel because that’s part of why I was not super into Starfield. It was the scope above all else.

"I think there is something to be said for going a bit more constrained. I always thought that was a weird goal anyway. No one before was saying 'I wish there were more of a Bethesda game!' It’s like, dude, people are playing that like a decade plus later. Do you really need it to be bigger? You can always dig deeper and deeper within that space because it’s already so big."

Other than that, Purkeypile "would hope that Elder Scrolls 6 has some new ideas, like systems you’ve never seen before. Who knows, maybe magic works in some completely different way, or there’s some new perk tree.

"I mean, I’ve always wondered what’s outside of the continent of Tamriel. It’s like one big landmass, basically. Isn’t there a whole planet to explore? What else is out there? That’s what I’ve always wondered."

Human beings are incredible at recognising patterns—which is an evolutionary reflex. See, we're hunter-gatherers, so being able to recognise the pattern of an edible plant against the pattern of an inedible one could mean the difference between life and death. Well, at least, it used to. Now we sit around and play videogames.

But those instincts are still kicking up there in our noggins, as proven by user guiltyassassin56 on the r/Skyrim subreddit who, almost a decade after it was released, matched a random background prop in a short scene of a Dr Who episode—season 10, episode 1 to be specific—to a random JPEG of a Skyrim skeleton.

Skyrim Dragon Skeleton in Doctor Who S10 Ep1 ‘The Pilot’ from r/skyrim

Well, I say "random", it's actually the image for the Skeletal Dragon on the Elder Scrolls Fandom wiki and, coincidentally, the first image result I got when searching "skeletal dragon" on Google. Whether that was true nine years ago is anybody's guess, since the episode was released in 2017. Just to be sure it was from here, I double-checked and the dates do, at least, line up: The page was made way back in 2011.

Now, you might be a skeptic. You might say "Harvey, they look similar, but where's the proof they're really the same?" Well, here's an overlay from user Lee993 of the tail that's pretty compelling:

Comment from r/skyrim

But as a journalist, it's my job to be super-duper certain. So I went ahead, rolled my sleeves up, opened Clip Studio Paint, and got to transforming, producing this .gif. When I posted it to our work Slack as further proof, my colleague Joshua Wolens stated: "a deep part of me needs the X-Files theme to play over this".

I didn't get as perfect of a line-up as Lee993, but the exact positioning of the head, ribs, blown-out chest cavity and wing pretty much cinches it.

This isn't super uncommon for VFX artists in TV series—it's not even uncommon for videogames. Back in 2024, War Thunder accidentally released official art with the debris of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster copy-pasted in the background. Which is a little worse than a beleaguered VFX artist on their nth cup of coffee trying to find a monster skeleton for a background shot.

Still, it's a good reminder that we were the apex predators of the animal kingdom, able to see patterns anywhere—it's just, y'know. Now we use it for nerd trivia instead of life-or-death herb selection. How far we've come.

YouTuber AnyAustin's playful, yet exacting style of videogame investigation has really taken off in the past year, garnering well over a million views per video. Whether he's investigating the hydrology of The Elder Scrolls or taking Grand Theft Auto to task for its lax standards of airport realism, you're in for a good time, and I've found the videos an inspiration to slow down and smell the roses more when I game.

AnyAustin closed the year with a bang: A characteristically whimsical investigation of how many trees there are in the entirety of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, but with a twist. He recruited 10 internet gaming personalities and one secret VIP guest to submit their own arboreal estimations, with the winner earning a $10,000 donation to the charity of their choice. For AnyAustin's own process, he attempted three different estimations in increasing order of rigor:

• Vibes-based, walking around, counting trees in a few spots and going "eh, seems right:" 41,500.
• Random sampling across the world map, with locations determined by a random number generator and the average multiplied by Skyrim's overall area: 29,506.
• Sampling limited to Skyrim's forested areas and averaged zone-by-zone, inspired by real world forestry practices: 40,340

My own guesses while watching were a moonshot of 200,000, adjusted down to 50K as I became better educated over the course of the video. As for the final answer, well, it feels a bit joyless and unsporting to spoil that here, doesn't it? Ditto for the "special guest," who wrung a gleeful chortle out of me when they appeared onscreen.

One thing I will say I found interesting about the total is that AnyAustin's first, most from-the-hip guess was the closest. Your fancy mathematics and forestry corpus just can't beat a good old fashioned gut check⁠—at least in the magical land of Tamriel.

If you have a gun to your head and your assailant is demanding to know the exact number of trees in Skyrim and who the special guest was, you can witness the latter at the 21:00 mark of the video, and the former two minutes after that. Here's the full list of charities that were up for that $10K, if the spirit of the season is moving you to philanthropy:

• Trust for Public Land
• Can-Do Canines
• The Global Foodbanking Network
• Palestine Children's Relief Fund
• AbleGamers
• World Central Kitchen
• American Heart Association
• Save The Children
• Gamers Outreach

Just a month after Bethesda creative honcho Todd Howard said The Elder Scrolls 6 "is the everyday thing" that developers at the studio are now working on, he's said it again in a chat with Game Informer. But this time, he added one very important note: It's goin' good.

"It’s progressing really well," Howard told GI. "The majority of the studio’s on [TES]6, but I’ll say this: We always overlap. So, we’re very used to overlapping development. And we have long pre-productions on things so that we feel good about them. And it’s a process. We all wish it went a little bit faster—or a lot faster—but it’s a process that we want to get right."

It's true: We all do wish that, not just for the next Elder Scrolls adventure but videogames in general. But Elder Scrolls 6 holds a special place in our hearts in that regard, because Bethesda announced it on June 10, 2018, which for the benefit of anyone without a calendar was seven goddamn years ago, and we've heard precisely zip about it since except occasional acknowledgement that yes, a new Elder Scrolls game will be released. Someday.

I mean, this is literally still all we know about it:

That's why people tend to leap at little tidbits like this. Tiny though they may be, it's something, and that's more than we've since the existence of The Elder Scrolls 6 was first confirmed. To put things in perspective, that happened at E3 (remember when that was a thing?) the year before Keanu Reeves made us all swoon with "You're breathtaking!"

But Howard wasn't the only Bethesda high-up to comment on the situation this time around. Studio designer director Emil Pagliarulo also chimed in to say "it's going," and to remind everyone that delayed is temporary, but suck is forever.

"What do fans really want? Do they want a game that comes out before it should and doesn’t meet their expectations? Or do they want the turkey that is in the oven for long enough to be delicious when it finally comes out of the oven?" Pagliarulo asked rhetorically. "That’s what I think people are going to want. So, we’re going to take our time and as long as it needs to be to be great."

Studio director Angela Browder also took a moment to crank up the hype machine: "The Elder Scrolls VI is this endless set of possibilities that is really, really exciting as a developer, but really, really exciting as someone who really likes to think about how far everything has come in our industry. It’s gonna be dope."

I certainly hope so and I'm absolutely looking forward to it, but TES6 has some hurdles to overcome. Personally, I was tired of the formula by the time of Skyrim (the first mainline Elder Scrolls game since Arena that I haven't finished), but the bigger issue is Bethesda's previous release, Starfield, a decent Elder-Scrolls-in-space style game that fell far short of expectations. That relative flop surely gave Bethesda an awful lot to think about, and may very well be playing a role in our long wait for what comes next.

I love stealth games, and I love playing a sneaky guy in bigger RPGs: Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Cyberpunk. You best believe that, when given the option, I'm crouch walking for 80 hours straight. I'm not alone in that preference either: The Stealth Archer in Skyrim, which plays exactly how it sounds, is a memetic, fan-favorite playstyle in Bethesda's smash hit RPG, with guides, analysis, and love letters galore on YouTube and Reddit.

Being obsessed with stealth in games, particularly Bethesda RPGs, I've always wondered about the Pagliarulo Connection: Bethesda's design director, who has contributed to all of the studio's games since Oblivion, got his development start at Looking Glass Studios, the legendary '90s developer of Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

Pagliarulo in particular designed two of Thief 2: The Metal Age's most fun levels: Life of the Party, a swanky gala infiltration that begins on the open rooftops of the surrounding district, and Precious Cargo, a pirate's cove hiding a steampunk submarine you have to stow away on. I got the chance to talk to Pagliarulo for an upcoming PC Gamer print retrospective about Bethesda's work on the Fallout series, and I just had to ask about how Looking Glass influenced his work.

"The two years I spent at Looking Glass were amazing, it was incredible," said Pagliarulo. "It was almost like grad school for me. I call it my Good Will Hunting phase. I didn't look like Matt Damon, but I was the kid from South Boston with all the MIT nerds thrown into the deep end, and it was just such an education.

"They were the best people, and they were so patient, and just so in love with what they were doing, so incredibly creative."

The Boston-based Looking Glass (initially Blue Sky Productions) was founded by Origin Systems (Ultima, Wing Commander) developer Paul Neurath, and drew on MIT graduates for its first staff members⁠—something that helps explain its games' cerebral sensibilities and exacting simulations. In another timeline, id cofounder John Romero might have helped start Looking Glass, while Pagliarulo, before becoming a developer, was editor of gaming website Adrenaline Vault.

"Thief was the first game that I played with headphones on in a dark room. I love that game so much, and so it was impossible for me not to bring that stuff over," Pagliarulo said. "In fact, one of the first things I did when I was hired here, Todd asked me, 'Hey, what do you think about the stealth in our games and stuff? Can you write something up?'

"So I did an analysis. I wrote up a big document of stealth in 20 different games, how they compared, and what we could do for stealth in Oblivion."

Speaking as a massive loser, I would love to read that stealth games analysis, which Pagliarulo said might still be tucked away in his office somewhere. One of the 20 games in question, according to Pagliarulo, was Hidden and Dangerous, a 1999 tactical shooter where you parachute behind German lines in 1941 to get up to assorted military hijinks and criminal mischief. It's actually still available for purchase on both Steam and GOG.

While Skyrim is where the Stealth Archer blew up, and Morrowind and Daggerfall had stealth systems, Oblivion is where the playstyle started being fun. The 2006 RPG had consistent sound and line of sight rules the player could account for, clear indication of whether you were hidden or not, as well as stealth-focused Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quests that took advantage of the new system.

"The thing is, Thief is a deep [game], a lot of depth, not a lot of width. It focuses on one thing: It's a stealth simulation." Pagliarulo said of the distinction between Thief and The Elder Scrolls. "Bethesda's games have been accused of being 'an inch deep and a mile wide'⁠—which I think is an insult, honestly, because I think there's a lot of depth there⁠—but we do provide a lot of different systems.

"Because we're a simulation, we do offer crime and stealth, and a lot of games don't offer that, so we were like, how do we get it as good as it can be, but still have time to do all these other systems and stuff. So it's that balancing act."

That does get at the heart of what makes sneaking in Bethesda games special, even compared to more intricate stealth sims: It's fun to have a choice, and to define the identity of your Orc or Dark Elf or whoever in opposition to the dozens of other characters they could have been. And it's a balm to my soul to see the DNA of the long-departed and never financially successful Looking Glass end up in some of the most popular videogames of all time.

"I'm really happy with where we've landed on [stealth gameplay] over the years," Pagliarulo concluded. "And I mean, look at the Stealth Archer⁠—the Stealth Archer in Skyrim is proof of that. I think it's just so rewarding to see those characters. So, yeah, the lessons I learned [at Looking Glass] have been with me my whole life, 100%."

When my 11-year-old son took a guard's arrow to the dome, it occurred to me I had failed as a parent. Rufus is—was, before the arm of the state converted him into a needlebook—my Fat Idiot Son, a mod for Skyrim that promises "a new level of realism, depth and challenge" via the introduction of "your useless, fat, stupid disappointment of a son."

Rufus is, logic dictates, the fruit of an illicit tryst my character had 11 years ago, and he is activated by means of a large wooden lever located behind the Honningbrew Meadery. "Enable Your Fat Idiot Son" reads the UI pop-up when you hover over it. "Be warned: Once Rufus is unleashed upon your game, there's no getting rid of him, ever," cautions the mod's description. "And he's just the worst!"

I considered this a challenge. After several hundred hours, my Dragonborn has long since summited every height Skyrim has to offer. She either vanquished the vampire coven or joined it, I forget. The bad, uh, evil dragon is dead. That guy from the Morrowind DLC is dead or trapped in the abyss or something? And damn near every icon on the world map is a satisfying, completed shade of white. There were no worlds left to conquer, save one: parenting.

Rufus would be my masterpiece. The ultimate challenge, overcome. I would take the clay of this pimple-faced, impudent boy and mould him into a man. He would be my crowning triumph, my greatest creation. He might even surpass me.

I hate my son

The first obstacle to my rearing an heir was that I did not, in fact, possess him. When you pull the lever at Honningbrew Meadery, Rufus does not appear. Rather, a robed woman dashes across a nearby bridge (in my game, pursued by a sabre-toothed tiger, which may have either been scripted or a beautiful coincidence; I genuinely do not know) and informs you that your son has been abducted by a cabal of witches.

This would be his first challenge, I decided. His first roadstone on the long path to adulthood. Once I had broken him free of his cage, he and I would—mother and son—clear the area of his kidnappers. He would be blooded.

This plan was almost immediately derailed when Rufus chose to participate in our reunion by remaining stock-still in his cage, nose pressed against the rocks behind it, occasionally yelping "Hey!"

When he did turn around—which I did not witness, engaged as I was in the process of dispatching like 30 witches—the words "Woah! A dead body!" echoed around the cave upwards of 20 times.

This was not a great start to my parenting career, but I was undaunted. Once we were out of the cave, I tried to figure out what young Rufus could actually do. He posed as if he was holding a torch but his hands were empty, which did not fill me with confidence.

"I need you to do something," I told him. In response, he told me that he didn't have to take this from me. "I need to trade some things with you," I tried. He took money from me. "It's time for us to part ways," I ventured. He laughed, as though I had made a joke, and kept following.

"Could you wait here for a minute?" was the last option on my menu, to which Rufus, my chubby 11-year-old boy, armed only with a small wooden sword, declared that he was going to go and join the Stormcloak Rebellion and promptly sprinted off over the horizon like a gazelle.

No matter what I tried, he would not listen, so intent was he on joining a racist paramilitary organisation. Only by shooting him in the back with a dragonbone arrow, sending him roly-polying into a nearby cairn, could I dampen his enthusiasm and get him to follow me again.

Party time

I thought I would try some combat again, given that this seemed to be the only one of Skyrim's verbs my son might actually have available to him. I scoured my map for a cave I'd not cleared and settled on Bloodchill Cavern, which sounded like precisely the kind of bracing, hair-raising adventure to introduce a young boy to adulthood.

This was a whole thing.

Turns out, Bloodchill Cavern is one of the 6,000 creations that download themselves whenever you launch Skyrim's anniversary edition. There's a party? In a mansion? And half the people there are obviously vampires.

Rather than help me be a good mother to my son, Skyrim instructed me to sit at a chair and read a letter, in which someone—who I gather was now dead—revealed that he had invited everyone to the party because he hates them. The obvious vampires revealed themselves as obvious vampires and a large gargoyle backed my 11-year-old son into a corner, whereupon he began repeatedly uppercutting him.

Everyone died, an orc arrived, gave me 1,500 gold and told me to keep the mansion. My son was still ragdolled on the floor. I found these events vexing.

High society

Cave-diving, adventuring and combat were clearly a little beyond my cherub, so I decided I'd try introducing him to civilisation instead. Specifically, I'd introduce him to stealing from it.

Hunched by a fountain, I directed my scion to start with something easy. Say, a bottle of wine from the counter of a local merchant. This went alarmingly well, not because Rufus was a stealth prodigy but because the shopkeeper in question seemed to have abandoned hope in life and didn't care that a small, rotund child had taken her stock right in front of her.

But pride goes before a fall, and here I must cop to an error in my parental judgment, which up to this point has been flawless. I knew that I could give Rufus directions like any other follower: by holding E and then directing him to the thing I wanted him to interact with. At some point, my memory had distorted such that I thought directing him at an NPC, while crouched, would make him attempt to pickpocket them.

It did not. Rufus drew his wooden sword and screamed "Die!" as he charged at a well-to-do man named Aquillius Aeresius. All the city leapt into alert. I was surrounded by guards, Aeresius' wife was hollering, the man himself was fleeing in terror, and my son was repeatedly smashing a sword into his back as he begged for mercy.

It's with a mixture of pride and horror that I tell you this turned out to be the only true kill my Rufus ever got in our time together. Aeresius refused to fight back, opting to beg for mercy instead, and the guards were preoccupied with me. My boy acquitted himself quite well in slowly beating the man to death for no apparent reason.

By this point I was surrounded by guard corpses and Aeresius' wife seemed to have slipped into a state of dumbfounded shock, paralysed and mute in the middle of the road. Only a few guards remained. It hadn't gone great, but perhaps Rufus and I would escape this one yet.

My boy, filled with bloodlust from his first kill, decided the final guard would be his. Sword aloft, he screeched "Surprise!" only to be immediately felled by a single arrow to the head.

But my kin's made of tougher stuff. Up Rufus got, and once again began charging the guard, and then inexplicably decided to attempt something I can only describe as a flying scissor kick. He was promptly batted out of the air and ended up face down in the dirt of Solitude.

I do not think I am a good parent.

Bethesda has all sorts of irons in the fire right now. There's the second season of the Fallout TV show on the horizon, a 10th-anniversary version of Fallout 4, whatever's happening with Starfield, and Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online MMO stuff bubbling away contentedly in the background.

But more likely than not, all you want to know is what's going on with The Elder Scrolls 6. Well, great news: in a recent chat with GQ, Bethesda big boss Todd Howard said that "The Elder Scrolls 6 is the everyday thing" that its devs are working on right now.

Howard says likes to have a "break" between Elder Scrolls games—to avoid them becoming rote and predictable—but admits that while "It’s also good for an audience to have a break—The Elder Scrolls has been too long." Boy, has it—it has been, for those not keeping track, a full 14 years since Skyrim first released, which was itself a mere five years after Oblivion.

Howard says he recently oversaw a "three-hour play test of The Elder Scrolls 6" for fans who raised money for the Make-A-Wish foundation to get a character made (that'd be the UESP editors who recently visited Bethesda to create a memorial character for community member Loranna Pyrel). "We spent an hour-and-a-half or so for them to tell us about their character, talk about the game, about why they love The Elder Scrolls, what they want to see from a new one," said Howard. "I think we’re aligned."

Does that mean, then, that TES 6 is right around the corner? Ah, well, no. Howard cautions us that the game is "still a long way off," but he does say something a little tantalising.

"I like to just announce stuff and release it. My perfect version—and I’m not saying this is going to happen—is that it's going to be a while and then, one day, the game will just appear." You know, a bit like Bethesda did with Oblivion Remastered earlier this year. "You might say that was a test run," says Howard. "It worked out well."

Now, I don't believe for one second that Microsoft would let a brand new TES game release without a massive marketing blitz beforehand, but maybe Howard's preferences will make that period a little shorter than it usually is. Maybe, when we find ourselves in the thick of the run-up to a sixth Elder Scrolls, we'll be shocked to find that era only lasts months, not years.

I've said it before and, unless PC Gamer fires me for all that embezzling I've been doing, I'm bound to say it again: OpenMW is one of the coolest mod projects out there. Much like DevilutionX does for Diablo or Daggerfall Unity does for Daggerfall, OpenMW is an open-source engine reimplementation for The Elder Scrolls 3 that lets you play it on damn near any device and with a lot of mod-cons.

If a phrase like "open-source engine reimplementation" fills you with dread, fear not: using OpenMW is as simple as downloading it and double clicking the launcher (though you'll need base Morrowind installed), and I strongly encourage you to do so—the devs just released OpenMW version 0.50, and it's a doozy.

"This round number release overhauls the gamepad experience, makes foundational steps in dehardcoding combat, further expands our Lua scripting API and, among the host of user interface fix-ups, introduces the highly requested quick item transfer," writes OpenMW team member Capo.

"Dehardcoding combat" is the process by which OpenMW is gradually opening up to Morrowind's core combat functionality to tweaks, expanding the Lua scripting API further enhances OpenMW's capacity for all-powerful Lua modding, and UI fix-ups are, well, self-explanatory. But I confess it's the gamepad stuff that has me going out of my gourd for this one.

My confession is that my first exposure to Morrowind was actually via its semi-miraculous Xbox version, which even had to quietly reboot the console during some load screens. My young jaunts about Balmora and Vivec came with my hands on a controller, not at a keyboard and mouse, and I still kind of like that way of exploring a Bethesda game. Not to mention that, frankly, I'm getting too old and tired to want to hunch over a desk to play my videogames. Anything I can play on my TV, I will.

TV or, indeed, my Steam Deck. OpenMW's new controller gubbins makes both prospects easier than ever. I've installed OpenMW 0.50 on my Deck and had a run about and it's shocking how natural it all feels.

Menus are navigable, inventories are parseable, and it might actually be easier to get a grasp on your myriad character sheets and maps when you bring them up now. It's fantastic and, like so much of the Morrowind mod scene, a testament to the talent and passion that still surrounds TES 3 over two decades later. If you've been hankering for a replay, I reckon this might be your time.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Tamriel Rebuilt is one of the most impressive mod projects of all time. Its quest is to build every part of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind's titular province that Bethesda didn't get to, and it's been doing that for literal decades. Earlier this year it released its ninth expansion, Grasping Fortune, and now it's gearing up for number 10: Poison Song.

This is a big one. Well, they're all big ones, but this is a big one for a new reason. Poison Song means players are finally getting "one of the holy grails that TR players [have] been waiting for more than twenty years—the ability to join House Indoril."

This is either the most hype-inducing sentence you've ever heard, or completely meaningless (if you are normal), so let me try to break it down.

Base Morrowind let you join any of three different Houses—Morrowind-native political factions that, conveniently, pretty much mapped to each corner of the Fighter-Mage-Thief triad. There was Hlaalu, the Empire-sympathetic merchant guild; Redoran, the traditionalist fighter sect; and Telvanni, dickhead wizards who live in mushrooms.

Missing from this lineup were House Indoril—the house of the legendary Indoril Nerevar himself—and House Dres, whose whole thing is somehow loving slavery even more than the Telvanni. So with Poison Song, it means we finally get a chance to sign up to Nerevar's own house, which is a pretty big deal considering a lot of Morrowind's main quest revolves around people proclaiming you the guy's literal reincarnation.

What makes this actually exciting, rather than merely a neat curiosity, is that Tamriel Rebuilt's writing quality is genuinely pretty stellar. The project's whole aim is to create the province of Morrowind in the same way that Bethesda of the early 2000s would have done it—full of esoteric lore and mythopoeia. I don't doubt for a second that when I do get to sign up to House Indoril in Poison Song it'll feel of a piece with the rest of the game. 23 years on, and we're still getting more Morrowind.

"Overall, the pace is good on all fronts," say Tamriel Rebuilt's leads "and finalization of the expansion is expected to be a matter of months away." I can't wait.

Few games enjoy such a long stay in the conversation as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of the biggest and most celebrated fantasy RPGs ever released. And release it did, again and again—but it's hard to blame Bethesda for all those re-releases. The game's community is so enthusiastic that modders are practically making entire games in the snowiest slice of Tamriel, and there's no sign they'll slow down any time soon.

It's something that leaves Skyrim's lead designer Bruce Nesmith "eternally shocked," as he told FRVR: "By all rights, a year later, some other game should have eclipsed it. And then two years later, three years later, five, ten. It’s like ‘what the hell is going on here?"

Speaking on the FRVR Podcast, Nesmith shared that Todd Howard would roll out the concurrent player numbers every now and again, to which Nesmith could only respond "'You've got to be kidding me? Seriously, ten years later.'"

You'll never find a consensus on which Elder Scrolls game is the best—I go back and forth on it all the time, myself—but it's no secret which is the most popular and broadly accessible. SteamDB notes the Special Edition has over 24,000 concurrent players on Steam alone as I write this article; that's a ludicrous number for any RPG of Skyrim's tenure, and over ten times what Oblivion Remastered is pulling in at the moment.

Nesmith told FRVR Skyrim owes its appeal to the fact that the team behind it "didn’t put anything off limits. We didn’t try to manage the experience … it was a player-driven experience. And very, very few games have mastered that because open world is now almost a cliché statement. ‘Oh yeah, we have open world.’"

It's an interesting thesis. In some ways, Skyrim is more restrictive than predecessors like Daggerfall and Morrowind—at least in terms of buildcraft and killing story-essential NPCs, for example. But there's no denying Skyrim's world is so chock full of surprises, every step feels like a discovery won by your own wanderlust. Sure, I can ride a horse across Daggerfall's much larger world map for hours on end, but the chances I find something on par with Skyrim's side quests are slim to none.

If you're feeling nostalgic for the Throat of the World, check out the PC Gamer team's favorite memories of Skyrim and add a few more of our favorite mods to your install while you're at it. I'm sure your CPU can take the heat.

Something you should know about me is: I would kill and die for the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP), a volunteer-maintained library of all things Elder Scrolls that's the absolute gold standard for fan wikis, so far as I'm concerned. Not for nothing were people excited when the Indie Fallout Wiki teamed up with UESP. Hell, we've even written our own paeans to it.

Its work hasn't gone unnoticed. According to a recent post on social media, the UESP editors' good deeds have been acknowledged by Bethesda itself, who called a gaggle of its editors into the office. To do what, you ask? Why, to design a character for The Elder Scrolls 6, of course! That's per the UESP itself, posting yesterday on social media.

"We just finished up a meeting with Bethesda where we got to design a character for The Elder Scrolls 6", said the UESP's official social media accounts. "Honestly, a lot of us went into the meeting pretty nervous and even reserved, but now we're all extremely excited for what's in store." One leading UESP-er posted that they'd even gotten a tete-a-tete with Todd Howard himself.

Which is great, to be honest. Lord knows I've got my criticisms about the direction Bethesda's taken over the last decade and change, but credit where it's due: the studio's been good to its community in the past few years, whether it's inviting the UESP guys in to make a TES6 character or doling out free Oblivion Remastered keys to the Skyblivion folks. Bethesda clearly knows its community kind of is its games, to a large extent, and it usually acts appropriately.

But here are the reasons this meeting of the minds excites me specifically. One: suddenly people are talking about The Elder Scrolls 6 like it's an actual videogame that might exist some day and not a phantasm on the horizon. It's good to slowly see the game gather substance, though don't get me wrong, I still don't anticipate playing it for years and years.

Two: by their very nature, UESP editors are lore nerds. They know their CHIM, their godhead, their dreamsleeve, their C0DA and what-have-you. To hear they went from "reserved" to "pretty excited for what's in store" is promising to me, a guy who's still upset Bethesda backgrounded all TES' cool lore stuff from Oblivion onwards.

Of course, it's also probably what I'd say, graciously, if a big company invited me over for sweetrolls, so I'm not gonna act like we're getting Morrowind 2, here. The signs are good, though! And with Starfield still a disappointing reflection in the rearview mirror, I'll take some good signs and be glad of it.