You know what I love? Acting. I love games that encourage me to treat the world like a stage and my playable character like a role to perform. I love not using my character as a mere tool to do what I want to do, but doing what I think my character would do.

When a game makes me feel like I should act out the role of the character, it gets me out of the mindset that I should play in the ‘perfect’ or ‘most efficient’ way, and instead makes me feel like I should play in the way that best strengthens my own version of the story.

If you delayed picking up Skyrim because you suspected a special edition would pop up at some stage or other, your patience has been rewarded. Bethesda has a long history of repackaging its hits, meaning that today’s announcement of The Elder Scrolls V: Legendary Edition probably won’t come as much of a surprise.

The new release will include version 1.9 of the core game, which recently added a withering new difficulty level, removed the level cap for some skills, addressed some stability issues and fixed a range of persistent bugs. The collection will also include DLC instalments Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn.

The Elder Scrolls V: Legendary Edition will be available in Australia from Thursday 6 June. The PC version will retail for $49.95.

Ther are two kinds of people in the world: people who want to play Skyrim as a Ninja Turtle, and people I’ve just deleted from my Facebook for not having any joy in their souls.

Higeyosi’s TMNT mod gives you a craftable set of armour and a mask made with one Dragon Bone, one Dragon Scales, two Leather Strips and one Linen Wrap, which when equipped on your faithful Argonian character, makes you look quite a lot like one of the world’s most famous chelonian crime-fighters.

You can put together the armour at any forge, and although it’s classified as a Daedric set, you don’t need the perk.

There’s not much else to say about this except that the world is a vast and wonderful place full of clever people with a lot of free time, and that the machinima this produces may well be better than the upcoming movie.

Source: PCGamesN

The team behind Skyrim have finally hung up their daedric armour, washing their hands of a development cycle that started way back in 2006. In a farewell post on the Bethesda blog, they thank all the players for their support and mention the need to move on.

“For the last year and a half we’ve been working on new content for Skyrim; from the game updates, Creation Kit, Steam Workshop, Kinect support, to DLCs. Parts of our team have also been in pre-production on our next major project, and that game is at the point where it requires the studio’s full attention to make it our biggest and best work yet.”

“Even though we’re moving on, we’ll still have minor updates to Skyrim as needed. We’ve invested so much of ourselves into Skyrim and will never truly say goodbye to it.”

Could that new project be The Elder Scrolls: Arena? Well, probably not, but we’ll see.

Source: Bethblog

If we ever needed any other reason to love PC gaming, here’s one now: a new mod for Skyrim lets you turn the entire game into a tropical, jungle adventure. Snowy hills are gone and sweeping green grass is the order of the day, with palm trees and moss and clear blue skies. The mod also affects animals, turning trolls into apes, bears into pandas, and much more. Check out this delightful video below, or head over to the listing on the SkyrimNexus and grab it for yourself.

Bethesda continue to patch and patch Skyrim, and they’ve announced overnight that the 1.9 beta is now available for Steam users.

The beta brings with it a new ‘Legendary’ mode where you can not only select Legendary as a difficulty level to make things a whole lot harder for yourself, but also allows you to make skills of 100 into ‘Legendary’ skills. “This will reset the skill to 15, return its Perks and allow the skill to affect leveling again,” writes Bethesda.

“This effectively removes the overall level cap.”

Click through for the full patch notes below.

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Wondering why your copy of Skyrim on Steam updated overnight with another 1.5GB? Well, it was a surprise bonus from Bethesda: updating the high-res texture pack to include the textures for Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn.

The official note on the Bethblog warns users to make sure they exceed the game’s minimum requirements before attempting to install the high-res pack, so if you haven’t already got this free DLC (which you can find in the Steam store) make sure you check what your machine is capable of before downloading the now 4.7GB worth of additional textures.

According to Bethesda, you’ll want be running Windows Vista/7, with a minimum of 4GB of system RAM, and a DirectX 9.0c compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with at least 1 GB of RAM and the latest drivers.

As a glorious PC gamer, you owe it to yourself and your friends to enjoy this exclusive advantage over our console brethren. Download today!

Source: Bethblog

After a month-long period of exclusivity, Skyrim‘s Dragonborn DLC has now arrived on the PC. As we found when we reviewed it back in December, Dragonborn is a surprisingly large add-on that delivers an impressive new quest area and a story with more than a hint of tentacular Cthulhu-esque action.

Dragonborn takes you to the island of Solstheim off the coast of Morrowind, and as such you can expect to see a new twist on some familiar faces.

The new DLC is available on Green Man Gaming for $15.99 but appears to be currently out of stock, so if you need it immediately you can head over to Steam and pay $9 more to get it right now. Enjoy!

If you’re like me and you have to obsessively own every game soundtrack for every game ever, then I’ve got bad news.

Bethesda have just released the soundtracks for some of their biggest names onto iTunes so you can grab them officially and digitally at the same time.

Releases include The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Also up for grabs are Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Dishonored and RAGE.

Bethesda have revealed that the Dragonborn DLC for Skyrim finally has a release date on PC: February 5, 2013. The DLC launched on XBox 360 back in December but, due to an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft, PC and PS3 players have had to wait until now to even find out when they’ll be getting it.

This also marks the first time PS3 players have had access to any sort of Skyrim DLC, with hold-ups meaning that unfortunate PS3 owners haven’t even had a chance to experience Dawnguard or Hearthfire yet. To celebrate, all three DLCs including Dragonborn will be 50% off for PS3 owners during launch week.

We reviewed Dragonborn last year, and found a surprisingly large add-on with a delightful smattering of Lovecraft to the whole thing — but some very nasty bugs as well.

Source: Bethblog

What? I don’t even… why? Gaming has gone mad.

Skyrim modder Clintmich has finished and officially released his latest mod: Super Skyrim Bros. The mod features a new instance that is accessed via a house near Winterhold, that completely mods the Skyrim world into Super Mario Bros. Almost completely. There are Goombas, Koopa Troopas, Invincibility Stars, even Bowser shows up as the final boss. You can’t jump on enemies though, my one complaint.

I enjoy how they’ve meshed ideas between the two games though, such as health, stamina and magicka mushrooms and the Staff of Fire Flower. All joking aside, this does look like a lot of light good-natured fun. But don’t take my word for it, slap on your fake moustache and your best faux-Italian accent and watch the trailer below. “It’sa me! Fus-Ro-Dah-rio!” Awful.

Source: RPS

I loved Mass Effect 3. I thought it was a great way to end a wonderful story and I spent as much time as possible savouring the final journey of Shepard and the crew of the Normandy, completing every side quest, every conversational strand and following every interpersonal relationship to its ultimate limit.

Likewise I loved Skyrim, albeit for other reasons. The story wasn’t particularly great but the sense of place was superb, with the rewards for exploration being constantly surprising and tangible. Over 180 or so hours I explored every inch of the world, investigating every cave, climbing every mountain and opening every door, portcullis and chest I came across.

The thing is, however, that I have had absolutely no impetus to play any of the DLC for either title, though admittedly for quite different reasons.