In this feature, we’ll be talking about a few such things, which we’ve seen popping up in genres in staples as time-honoured traditions over the years. With all that said, let’s get started.

CUSTOMIZE YOUR APPEARANCE

Let’s begin with something basic, and something that’s not necessarily exclusive to RPGs- customizing the look of your character. This doesn’t happen in every RPG, of course, but chances are, as you’re beginning a game, you’ll be altering the look of your character, from their hair to their facial features to their skin colour and more. Some games tend to have more in-depth character creators than other- and those are the ones that really let us have fun.

Bethesda Game Studios, the chaps who brought us the excellent Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4, have opened up a brand new game studio in Montreal.

“We’ve worked with some very talented developers in Montreal for a long time, and decided it was time to open a studio there,” said Todd Howard, Game Director and Executive Producer at Bethesda Game Studios. “It’s exciting to think about the new games we’ll be building together.”

Bethesda Game Studios Montreal already has an established core team of more than 40 developers, spanning both console and mobile development. The studio will be managed by industry veteran Yves Lachance as Studio Director.

“Our collaboration with Bethesda Game Studios has been an exhilarating and memorable journey already,” said Lachance. “We are thrilled to be launching the studio in Montreal and contributing our city’s great game-making talent to the kind of games that Bethesda Game Studios is known for.”

Hopefully, this means we won’t have to weight 8 years between subsequent installments of Elder Scrolls and Fallout.

Today it was revealed that a trademark for the title “Soulburst” has been filed by ZeniMax media as of September 2nd, 2013. ZeniMax Media is a company that publishes and develops videogames, and owns a large number of subsidiary companies. Some of their more notable subsidiaries are Bethesda, the names behind the hugely successful Elder Scrolls and Fallout series’, MachineGames, who are handling the new Wolfenstein game, Arkane Studios, who are responsible for Dishonored, and ZeniMax Online, who are handling the much anticipated upcoming Elder Scrolls Online game.

Under the ‘Identification’ section of the trademark application, the description for Soulburst reads: “Computer game software for use with computers and video game consoles; downloadable computer game software offered via the internet and wireless devices; computer game software for use with on-line interactive games.”

The implications of this description are: A cross-platform game, which will include DLC of some sort and will have online/multiplayer functionality. Given the titles we’ve seen so far from ZeniMax Media, a game with this many features is one we’ll certainly want to keep an eye on.

Via: All Games Beta

There are plenty of great games on there way already and we can’t even get our hands on the new consoles yet. I for one have been chomping at the bit just waiting for my PS4 to show up so I can play some of these titles that have not failed in getting noticed by the public. With this leap in hardware it looks like we’re going to be seeing as a lot more cross-platform titles too. So no matter what you choose, there is going to be some great new worlds to explore come November. Even if open worlds aren’t your thing E3 had so many titles to offer this year there was a bit of something for everyone.

Thankfully, then, the third major Skyrim DLC release. the newly released Dragonborn, is flat out incredible, and one of the best examples of how DLC should be handled. With an entirely new set of locales to explore outside of Skyrim, and near fan favorite Morrowind, an entirely new questline that adds substantially to both general Elder Scrolls lore, and specifically, to Skyrim’s backstory, and finally, a lot of fan service to players who played and enjoyed previous Elder Scrolls games, and most notably Morrowind, Dragonborn nails it completely.

It’s a substantial download, at over 800 MB, and when you actually start the questline, you realize why: Dragonborn takes place on Solstheim, an island off the coast of Morrowind; across the expanse of the island, you will find the geography changing dramatically, from the now familiar snow clad rocky locales of Skyrim, to the more exotic scenery of Morrowind proper, replete with giant mushrooms and the like.

Dragonborn sees you follow the questline of the original Dragonborn, the Dovahkiin Miraak. After Miraak turned evil, he was banished to Oblivion, and he is now trying to return to Tamriel. Frankly, the story and the setup stop mattering after a while. Wheras the setup is great, because it adds substantially to the series’ extensive lore, after it sets the new questlines up, it gradually recedes into the background in terms of importance, eventually degenerating into giving you just an excuse to go perform the next task that you have been given. Sadder still, Miraak never really comes off as menacing, and after a while, his one gimmick begins to come off as genuinely comical, almost as if the game has become self aware at the sheer absurdity of the story it is trying to tell, and is now making fun of itself.

Where the storyline itself fails, pretty much everything else picks up on the slack. The locales in Solstheim are fresh and incredibly varied, and it feels like a miniature Morrowind/Skyrim hybrid all at once. The main questline itself lasts at least a good half dozen hours, following which there is at least twice that many hours worth of extra content, quite a lot of which is, in true Elder Scrolls tradition, banal, but most of which is impressively addictive. And then there is also the dragon riding.

Dragon riding is probably the most publicized feature of the new DLC, and it’s easy to see why, to the legions of new players introduced to the franchise via Skyrim, the prospect of riding a dragon after you tame it becomes so alluring. And while Bethesda went the really safe route and opted to make dragon riding an all on rails affair, with pre determined flight paths, that does not take away from the sheer freshness and absolute excitement of it, although it does become fairly boring once the sheen has worn off. Whereas right now, it is understandable that Bethesda opted to not have free roaming dragon riding in order to keep the player firmly within the designated playground, I hope one day, we get a game where we can use dragons to get to any part of the scenery we damn well please to.

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In spite of its fairly obvious limitations, Dragonborn is brilliant. To any Elder Scrolls fan with Skyrim, it is recommended. To any Morrowind fan, it is recommended. To any Skyrim fan, it is recommended. To anyone who possibly feels that Skyrim somehow needs to provide them with more value for money than it already did, Dragonborn is recommended. It is a rare example of DLC done right, and is flat out the best Skyrim DLC available at the moment.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

Dawnguard first came to be over a month ago, releasing solely on Xbox 360 on 26th June, facing what looked like indefinite postponements for both PlayStation 3 and PC. Computer gamers need wait no longer, giving gamers the choice of joining the Dawnguard stopping Vampire Lord Harkon in his tracks, or sodding that and opting to drink blood like it was cheap supermarket wine.

Harkon’s got this mad idea that getting the Elder Scrolls will grant him the power to end the sun for all time, although I’m not too sure how that would play out for all life, ever and the Vampire ecosystem as a whole.

English, German, French, Spanish and Italian versions of Dawnguard are now on Steam for £13.99/€18.99/$19.99

Bethesda’s legendary Elder Scrolls series of role playing games got another installment last November. Skyrim took the world by storm, achieving mainstream success that few games ever manage, breaking into the limelight on account of its iconic protagonist, the Dragonborn, and the fodder for memes that he provided, and for its expert treading of the fine line that divides dumbing down a game too much for mainstream accessibility, and streamlining it while still retaining all its depth. Skyrim was a game with hundreds of hours of content- it is incomprehensible that anyone has actually managed to go through all the content that the game has to offer within the last nine months; at the same time, however, it is entirely possible that people who completed the main quests and were bored of the banality of the daily sidequests had long since turned to other games. For these gamers, and for others, who want more to their Skyrim experience than it already offers, comes Skyrim’s first proper full fledged expansion, Dawnguard.

Offering another couple of dozen hours on top of the hundreds of hours of mileage that you’ve probably extracted from Skyrim, Dawnguard shamelessly sells out to the popular vampire craze that permeates all things these days by being first and foremost about the blood sucking variety of Skyrim’s citizens. Named after the eponymous bunch of vampire hunters, Dawnguard offers the players two sets of campaigns, both of which can be accessed as soon as your player character in the core quest reaches Level 10. The first quest involves you joining Dawnguard and hunting down vampires, whereas the second quest offers you the opportunity to join the vampires, and square off against Dawnguard.

The second quest is actually infinitely more interesting than the first, which is a bit of a shame, particularly since, as long time Elder Scrolls players probably already know, playing as a vampire, though coming with its own fair share of benefits, also comes with a few downsides. There’s quite a few people who do not like playing as a vampire (like yours truly), who would rather go werewolf, or maybe just continue uninfected, , and they might feel slightly cheated out of their money with this expansion.

It’s not like the former Dawnguard quest is lacking. On the contrary, it is exceptionally well made, and adds quite a bit of lore and mythology to Skyrim’s already extensive tome of backstory. However, the vampire quest is just infinitely more interesting, more unique, and considering how similar quests begin to get in the main, vanilla game, and how much Dawnguard’s anti vampire quest begins to mirror them, it’s a bit of a shame, and a feeling of banal repetitiousness might begin to permeate your entire experience.

It’s the other quest where the expansion truly shines. When you have access to vampire powers, the entire Skyrim experience gets a new lease of life; in particular, abilities such as the one that lets you turn into a swarm of bats adds not only mindless fun to the experience, but some depth too. This expansion actually justifies the existence of vampirism within the game, which, as I said above, felt compromised, especially compared to the set of abilities that werewolves get. Here, vampiric powers come into their own, and you can truly feel empowered playing as one.

The Elder Scrolls games have always been about exploring immaculately crafted worlds, with their own geographies, histories, mythologies, and lore, all of which is immense. Skyrim in particular won accolades for how well crafted its Nordic inspired mountain world was, each village having its own personality, its own history, each village being a living, breathing place inhabited by real people. People who were expecting more exciting new places to travel to with Dawnguard will find themselves immensely disappointed.  Dawnguard largely takes you through the same areas as the core game, though there are a few new caves and dungeons to explore. Being that caves and dungeons were perhaps the most unforgivably monotonous portions of the Skyrim experience anyway, and that the newer ones feel baffling and poorly thought out compared to the ones in the vanilla game, it’s not much of a respite. Especially to players who have sunk hundreds of hours into the game already, Dawnguard may come off as feeling quite stale.

Dawnguard does its best to preserve the core Skyrim essence, and so, a very important, albeit undesirable, part of the Elder Scrolls experience has found its way into the expansion: glitches and bugs. Skyrim, when it released, made waves for the sheer number and variety of bugs in it, and the various kinds of ways they could be activated or triggered, and the imaginative fixes that people would sometimes come up with. Unfortunately, after some time, bugs and glitches become tiring, and detrimental to the game experience, no matter how hilarious they are (hello, dragons flying in reverse), and in Dawnguard, which brings its own set of bugs and glitches the the experience, many of which simply have no fix, and most of which should not have made it into the final game, especially after its beta testing period, they are outright frustrating and hinder the enjoyment of the game actively.

Honestly, Dawnguard feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. The quintessential Skyrim experience has always been about literally making your own story that you would then share with others. Although in theory, Dawnguard offers more of that, the problem is, with its rehashing of the same locations as in the core game, and somewhat unimaginative quests, at least on the vampire hunters’ side, you will find it lacking. It offers a nice dozen hours of play per quest, which means you should be able to add about twenty five hours from it if you want to see everything it offers. Unfortunately, what it offers isn’t all that much, and not that compelling to begin with. Fans of vampirism might like the ability to turn into a vampire lord, but that’s the most you’ll get from this.

At $20, Dawnguard cannot be recommended. If you do want to give it a go, wait for the inevitable Skyrim Game of the Year Edition, which will include all the game’s DLC and will probably retail for the same price as Dawnguard does right now.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

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 sent a legal notice to the Nordic developer Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, creator of Minecraft. Bethesda says the word “Scrolls” in his new game infringed trademarks, and that people might confuse it with Elder Scrolls.

“Just got a letter from Bethesta’s [sic] lawyers. They claim “Scrolls” infringes on their trademark and everyone will confuse it with Skyrim,” Persson tweeted.

Stay tuned, we will keep you updated.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/bethesda-sends-legal-note-to-minecraft-creator/feed 1 39013 https://gamingbolt.com/elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion-movie https://gamingbolt.com/elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion-movie#respond Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:51:04 +0000 http://gamingbolt.com/?p=11080

Bathesda’s parent company, the guys who own the creators of titles such as Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3, ZeniMax, have trademarked the title ‘Oblivion’ under the category ‘motion picture film production.’

Is it possible that ZeniMax are looking to keep possibilities of an Elder Scrolls movie open? This is what the recently filed trademark says: “Motion picture film production; entertainment services, namely, providing motion picture theatrical films in the field of fantasy games.”

So, season of game movies? Halo movie… Red Dead Redemption movie… what next? A Mass Effect movie? Now that’d be cool.