Todd Howard, game director of Bethesda’s upcoming massive RPG, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has confirmed that vampires will be returning as enemies. They were discovered in a seemingly deserted mountain cave, as a preview at Ripten says.

It is not yet know if these will be playable as a class, but at least they’ll be there. And thankfully, they’ll not glow and sparkle in the sunlight, rather be harmed and lose chunks of energy.

The vampires in the game, as expected, are agile, quick, deadly and you should run from them as fast as you can as soon as you lay their eyes on them. If you don’t want to, you should be ready with the best of equipment, armour and weapons.

Other tiny little details, like a new and improved menu system which tells you what is the best weapon/item/armour out of the ones you are carrying and is a lot more streamlined and detailed than before, or the fact that you can push enemies off a cliff with a shove of your shield, or that the game looks “fu*king beautiful” were also delved upon in the preview.

Jim Cummings, a famous voice artist who has lent his voice in games like Mass Effect 2, Fallout, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, is also included in the game. Todd Howard did not give any confirmation about that, but revealed that Skyrim has over 70 voice actors.

Hit the link to read it. It’s quite interesting.

Skyrim releases in November on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Fallout: New Vegas, last year’s entry in the Fallout franchise, was developed by Obsidian under the guidance of Bethesda. When Pete Hines of Bethesda was asked by GI.biz if they would ever outsource The Elder Scrolls to third party devs, he said he “doubts it”, but he would “never say never.”

“In the case of Obsidian it was a really unique opportunity,” he said while talking about Fallout: New Vegas. “We had a studio that had availability and a group of guys within that who had worked on previous versions of [the Fallout series]. You don’t have that same situation with Elder Scrolls at all.”

About Elder Scrolls, he said: “I doubt it. I guess technically never say never, but I don’t see that being something we actively look at or explore.”

Skyrim will be out in November. Stay tuned for more info.

Thanks, Beefjack.

Bethesda has confirmed that their upcoming The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will not feature weapon or armour degradation, which means that you wont have to spend money on repairing your equipment and stuff.

“We replaced that w/ creating/improve weap/armor, instead of spending lots of time getting them back to where they were,” said Pete Hines via Twitter.

Players in the game will craft weapons and armour of their own and upgrade them and improve them throughout the playthrough, rendering thr repairing part practically obsolete.

Game comes out in November for the PC and HD twins. Check out the new dev diary here.

Wow, this is a biggie.Microsoft has announced that the first two DLC packs for their upcoming RPG, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will be exclusive to the Xbox 360 for 30 days.

“The first two add-on content drops for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will be released exclusively on Xbox 360, 30 days before” the other platforms, said Microsoft.

We don’t know yet if they’re mere added weapons and equipment, or actual, full-blown DLCs. But we’ll keep you updated.

Skyrim releases on the X360, PS3 and PC on November 11.

[CVG]

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim director Todd Howard believes the Xbox 720/3 and the PS3 won’t be here next year, neither will they be here in 2013.  In an interview with gaming mag PS3M, when he was asked when the successors to the HD twins will be here, Todd Howard said he thought “consumers are happy” with what they have right now.

“I think it’s going to be a while still, I really do. I think consumers are happy with the current ones, there’s a lot you can do with them,” he said. “So I don’t think it’s coming next year or the year after.”

When he was asked about his earlier comments of thinking of releasing Skyrim on next gen consoles, he said: “We want [Skyrim] to be fresh. We don’t want it to feel, visually or technically, ‘Oh this is Fallout 3’ or ‘this is Oblivion’ And if we couldn’t do that we would have waited.”

Stay tuned to GB for more info.

New gameplay footage for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released recently at the San Diego Comic-Con, and it looks nothing short of amazing. The gameplay looks fluid, the world beautiful and detailed… it looks like it’ll turn out to be the best game of the year, probably.

Elder Scrolls V will release this November on the 360, the PS3 and the PC.

[GameFront]

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s director, Todd Howard says he isn’t a big fan of 3D, and he doesn’t like wearing those bulky 3D glasses. “Honestly, I couldn’t care less – having to wear those glasses! I’m not a 3D fan. It ruins the image for me,” he said while talking to PSM3.

“I want the clarity,’ he said. When asked if he would ever try the feature like so many other devs, he said:

“I think everyone’s going to keep trying. But I’m not sure.”

Stay tuned to GB for more info.

Bethesda has announced they will not be releasing a demo for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim- ever.  “No, we won’t be doing a demo,” Lead producer Craig Lafferty said when asked by Gameplanet in a video interview (via YouTube).

“For a game of this size and complexity it’s really hard to do a demo that represents the game truly, and it would be a gigantic demo, so we won’t be doing a demo.”

Damn, that’s a bummer. We do hope the game’s worth the wait.

Recently, game designer Todd Howard said they wouldn’t be dumbing down the game for wider audiences. He also said they’re looking to improve NPC interactions in Skyrim.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim releases on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on November 11 this year.

Unlike a lot of developers this generation, Bethesda doesn’t think they’ll have to dumb down their new game (The Elder Scrolls V) to appeal to a wider audience. “Honestly, [making the game more accessible is] not something that we think about a lot, in that we’ve found that we’re getting a pretty big audience making a game that we want to make,” Todd Howard, design director, said while speaking to Gamasutra.

“We want to make it for whoever it is – even if you’ve played Elder Scrolls before, you haven’t played this one, so you don’t understand what a skill does yet.

“We want to remove confusion, that’s what I’d say. As opposed to making it more accessible, we’d like to remove confusion for anyone who’s playing,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do now is lead you into it more… In our games or others’ games, they give you a character menu and say, ‘Who do you want to be, what powers do you want?’ [Players think,] ‘I don’t know, I haven’t played yet!’

“What happens in Oblivion is you start the game, play for three hours, and then think ‘I want to start over, I chose wrong.’ So we’d like to sort of alleviate some of that. I also think the controls work better [too] … it’s more elegant.

“You look at Call of Duty, the most popular game in the world, and that’s actually pretty hardcore. At the end of the day, it’s a hardcore game, has RPG elements in multiplayer, making classes, picking perks. I think the audiences are there, and we tend to make our game more for ourselves and other people who play a lot of games.”

Stay tuned to GB for more info.

Keep everything aside- the things Bethesda is focusing the most on in Skyrim are the NPCs,  the interaction, and how they act. They want to keep the NPCs’ reactions to your actions realistic, and not scripted. Not being scripted, according to Bethesda, could lead to some weirdness and quirkiness.

“The big things for us are still – and we still struggle with – the NPCs, the interaction, and how they act,” Design director Todd Howard told Gamasutra.

“That’s because the game is so dynamic, we don’t want to script them, so weirdness can ensue sometimes. So we came out of Oblivion thinking, hey, how do we get more believable characters on the screen who are reacting to you?

“I always thought we did environments well, and we want to keep doing it well. But I’d say the characters and how they perform on the screen was probably our number one [focus].”

“There’s going to be some [weirdness], like the player did X, Y and Z that we didn’t expect, and now he’s attacking the town, sleeping in this guy’s bed, he killed his wife,’ he continued.

“We sort of learn each time how people play these games and experience them. So we get better each time, but we do at the end of the day sacrifice, say, a well-paced story. It’s almost impossible for us to do. We’d rather let you go do whatever you want. So that’s a sacrifice that we’re willing to make.”

About the bugs that Elder Scrolls IV was so notoriously known for, Howard says: “You know what though? Those things are there, and it’s fair that people call us out for them, we’ve got no problem with that.”

Stay tuned to GB for more info.