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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim News

Are Skyrim and Baldur's Gate 3 immersive sims? If you're asking one of the guys that created Dishonored, yes


The infinite debate about what is and isn't an immersive sim continues to rage on, as one of the co-creators of Dishonored says he thinks Skyrim is one.


Immersive sim, as a genre, is a really hard one to define. I'm not even going to try to define it in any meaningful way for you, I just know that games like Thief, Dishonored, and Deus Ex fit within that genre. It's a type of game that has major qualities of lots of other genres, which is why it can be hard to define. But in a recent interview with PC Gamer, Dishonored co-creator and Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio has shared the bold opinion that he thinks Skyrim is an immersive sim (and that Baldur's Gate 3 is "immersive-sim adjacent").


Explaining himself, Colantonio said "If you really think about it, Bethesda games - or Obsidian games - are very, very immersive sim. The overlap between first-person RPG and immersive sim, it's very blurry. I would say they are less physical than Arkane games, and they're more on the stats, but at the end of the day they totally rely on simulation. Doing things such as fooling a merchant by putting a bucket on its head is definitely an immersive same thing, right?"

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"Who lets you into the cool kids club?" Fallout: London's project lead on Bethesda's Creations and the ever-controversial issue of paying for mods

Paying for mods. If you’ve ever said those three words to anyone who plays games or makes mods for them, odds are you got a pretty strongly held opinion in response, or at least an acknowledgment that - as many Facebook relationship statuses say - it’s complicated.

With Bethesda’s latest attempt at creating a system designed to facilitate such a thing having proven pretty much as polarising as its predecessors, we recently asked Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter, project manager of the massive and free Fallout 4 mod Fallout: London, how he views the current state of play when it comes to whether mods are paid, or remain free to play.

“I wish they would just choose something,” Carter said when I brought up Bethesda’s Creations in the interview, which also featured chat about the cut quest line that’ll be arriving in a future update and how both John Bercow and Neil Newbon ended up starring in it.

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After half a year of layoffs and closures, more than 240 Bethesda workers come together to unionise


It's a big day for the labour movement in the games industry, as 241 Bethesda staffers have formed a union.


Yesterday evening, Bethesda Game Studios workers announced it had formed a union under the Communication Workers of America (CWA), making it the first studio to fully do so since being acquired by Microsoft. Bethesda Montreal filed for unionisation last month, and QA workers at Zenimax, Bethesda's parent company, did the same in 2023, but with the Dallas, Rockville, and Austin sites forming this union, the entirety of US-based Bethesda studios have now unionised. It's also the first "wall-to-wall" union at a Microsoft video game studio, as of the 241 workers that have unionised, there are members "including artists, engineers, programmers and designers have either signed a union authorization card or indicated that they wanted union representation."


In a statement, senior system designer and member of the CWA Mandi Parker said, "We are so excited to announce our union at Bethesda Game Studio and join the movement sweeping across the video game industry. It is clear that every worker can benefit from bringing democracy into the workplace and securing a protected voice on the job. We’re thrilled to get down to brass tacks and win a fair contract, proving that our unity is a source of real power to positively shape our working conditions, our lives, and the company as a whole."

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"I do think we're gonna take a look at that" - Todd Howard addresses Starfield's creation club controversy


The recent release of a creation club for Starfield - delivering content from Bethesda and modders for purchasable credits as the studio's previously done with Skyrim and Fallout 4 - drew a lot of backlash from players. Bethesda's Todd Howard has now addressed the controversy and indicated that the studio could be looking at making some changes to the initiative going forwards.


If you're out of the loop, the big sticking point with this iteration of Bethesda's ever-polarising attempts to intergrate some form of add-on system that allows for 'paid mods' was the pricing, especially when it came to one Trackers Alliance quest. With that second quest based around the faction being behind the paywall, while the first Trackers Alliance mission was given out for free, some players were annoyed that it looked like they'd be paying a lot more for this and upcoming Trackers Alliance content than they might otherwise do if it was all released as one DLC pack.


In an interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays, game director Todd Howard was asked about this controversy, and responded by suggesting the studio will be looking into potentially revising how it proces and packages creation club content in light of the backlash.

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Starfield alien-hunters claim to log 200+ unique creatures, about five times more than Fallout 4

A group of dedicated Starfield alien hunters claims to have located and photographed over 200 unique creatures while exploring the cosmos, a number that’s pretty breathtaking in comparison to other Bethesda games if accurate.

Given how vast the game’s world is (1000 planets, anyone) it’s not surprising that it would have a lot more wildlife packed into it than a post-apocalyptic wasteland or a single fantasy province, but the number being quoted here would put it into truly uncharted territory. Leave it to Facebook to house some potentially cutting-edge research, I guess.

The group that claims to have turned over every rock in the cosmos to see what crawls underneath goes by the name ‘Creatures of Starfield’ and serves a hub dedicated to “capturing the beauty and diversity of the creatures that inhabit the cosmos”. Recently, the group’s head honcho, Alex Kushner, who goes by the Reddit username blazer380, has taken to the Starfield subreddit to share an image collage they claim shows “all 209 Starfield creatures photographed and located”.

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