Tag: Bethesda Game Studios

Fallout promises world building and dark humor on April 11

Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here.  Prime Video is gearing up for its first video game adaptation based on Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout series. The final trailer for the post-apocalyptic series promises to faithfully adapt the franchise’s dark humor […]

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Skyrim finally truly beaten as fanatical player does ‘everything that can be done’ in the game, nabbing every item and perk in quest to hit level 1,337

I don’t know whether to describe this as an act of herculean heroism or sisyphean torment, but someone has beaten Skyrim. No, really beaten it. Wrung every last drop of adventure out of it in a trial that left them with every spell, item, and perk in the game at level—wait for it—1,337, entirely without […]

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Baldur’s Gate 3’s most beloved voice is joining Fallout 4’s most ambitious mod as Astarion actor Neil Newbon bares his fangs on the streets of London

Fallout 4’s mega-ambitious, DLC-sized, and indiscriminately British expansion mod Fallout: London is rapidly approaching its official release date of April 23, and to mark the occasion its creators have released its final (of many) progress videos, showcasing the mod’s state ahead of its release and revealing a few appetite-whetting tidbits to pique your interest. First […]

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Starfield’s ‘biggest’ update now has patch notes, which boil down to bug fixes and visual updates—also, your pet rock’s going to a nice farm upstate

Last week, PC Gamer’s own Andy Chalk talked about an upcoming patch for Starfield—flagged as the “biggest Starfield update yet”, though he rightfully pointed out that it didn’t seem all that big. Well, patch notes for beta testing are here. We’re getting visual and lighting upgrades to certain areas, as well as bug fixes to […]

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Starfield data miner uncovers fossilized remains of a much cooler, more hardcore game tucked away in its files: ‘We had a washed version of the game’

Space travel in Starfield is pretty easy. Remarkably easy, actually. You just bring up the map, click a dot and go. Sure, some things might be out of immediate jump range, but if all the yawning void of the cosmos has to threaten me with is “mild inconvenience,” then I’m gonna complain that documentaries like […]

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After 2023, I’ve had my fill of 100+ hour sprawling mega-games for a while

Games are big nowadays. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—it’s good to get value for your money. But the industry at-large has gone from having an identity Crysis over visual fidelity into wanting everything to be bigger, better, and forever. I’m left with a single question: is anybody else tired, dude? Some time in the […]

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Fallout 4’s intro is both the most ambitious and the most flawed of any Bethesda game—and it feels like Starfield learned all the wrong lessons from it

Reinstall This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 389 in October 2023, as part of our Reinstall series. Every month we load up a beloved classic—and find out whether it holds up to our modern gaming sensibilities.  A staggering eight years ago, Fallout 4 was released. Its developer, Bethesda, made the swap back […]

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Bethesda needs a change after Starfield’s middling release, just not the one you’re thinking of

I’ve been a Bethesda fan for decades, by which I mean I consider Morrowind my favourite game of all time and I’ve gotten progressively crankier about everything released thereafter, so perhaps it’s inevitable that the dull thud Starfield made when it released has made me start thinking about the studio, its past, and its future. […]

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Starfield’s biggest issues can’t be solved with patches, mods, or expansions

This week Bethesda teased upcoming patches for Starfield that will add everything from “city maps, to mod support, to all new ways of travelling.” That’s great news, especially since a lot of the features they’re planning to add come straight from community requests.  But even when these patches arrive next year, is that really going […]

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Skyrim player amasses 267,000 gold lifetime bounty after killing ‘everything that was killable,’ and all you can really do is tearfully salute it

“When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants,” said the greatest philosopher who ever lived: Mass Effect 2’s Thane Krios, “then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.” And friends, I’m excited to announce that war has officially provideth-ed for every man, goat, chicken and guard […]

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Starfield’s down to mixed reviews on Steam, while the community laments ‘the magic is just missing from [the game]’

Bethesda has a reputation for these big, deep, open-world RPG you can get lost in for years. They have a legacy of large, technically impressive worlds filled with detail and places to explore. To this day, Skyrim endures as a world people want to return to—which 12 years after launch is genuinely impressive. Starfield, which […]

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We almost had an Adam Jensen-voiced protagonist in Starfield before Bethesda changed its mind

There is quite a lot of Starfield. A gajillion planets. A crafting system I still haven’t unlocked all of. An embarrassment of cowboys. But there’s one thing it’s relatively sparse on: voice acting, specifically for the game’s main character. Starfield opted for an unvoiced player character for its space-based antics, possibly because everyone made fun […]

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I used a mod to turn The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion into a massive worldwide gang war, and now I don’t want to play any other way

I’ve lost track of who’s winning. All the residents of Skingrad have descended into barbarism, going at each other with knives and clubs and fists and arcs of fire and lightning. They’re yelling battle cries, but over the swords and the screams I can’t make out what they’re saying.  I know they’re fighting for Skingrad, […]

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Morrowind’s most impossibly ambitious mod just added a whole new region for its 7th expansion in 22 years

One of the most ambitious mods in history got even bigger today with the release of Tamriel Rebuilt’s Andaram expansion, the seventh major add-on for the 22-year-old Morrowind mod project that is, somehow, older than Morrowind itself. Tamriel Rebuilt’s aim is to construct the entire mainland of Morrowind, the dark elf province of Tamriel on […]

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You can build your own Starfield space stations thanks to this modder who found the code ‘already in the game’

If you’re anything like me, you were a little underwhelmed by Starfield’s outpost systems. We’re eight years out from Fallout 4, but the process of plonking down habitats and mining rigs on the games’ fifty bajillion planets didn’t feel much different to building tin sheds for the Wasteland’s countless hapless farmers back in 2015. If […]

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Skyrim’s former design lead tips his hat to Baldur’s Gate 3: ‘Very few of the decisions in a Bethesda game feel highly meaningful, you get maybe three or four’

In Starfield, there’s a quest where you get to betray a major player. I’m going to keep the details vague to avoid spoilers, but in a lot of other RPGs this would be a massive story moment. If you walk down this path, you’ll never be able to interact with that faction again. You’re signing […]

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Skyrim’s retired lead designer says anything other than the ‘Bethesda usual’ has to be approved by Todd Howard: ‘He doesn’t believe it’s true, but unfortunately it’s true’

Liked Starfield? Hated Starfield? You probably have Todd Howard to thank. A recent chat between MinnMax and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith shed some light on Bethesda’s structure and organisation, and it sure sounds like pretty much every choice the company makes needs Howard’s stamp of approval before it can go ahead, even as it’s […]

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Ex-Bethesda dev says Starfield could’ve focused on ‘two dozen solar systems’, but ‘people love our big games … so let’s go ahead and let ’em have it’

Starfield‘s big. Real big. Over 1,000 planets big. However that illusion of bigness really vanishes when the game reuses particular prefabs. You can only go through the exact same space base so many times before you start feeling like you’re on the Truman Show. As PC Gamer’s Fraser Brown pointed out a while back: “there’s […]

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Starfield player turns shotgun into a carpet-bombing artillery nightmare that should probably violate interstellar law

Starfield has a ton of weapon mods to muck about with—not the kind you need a script extender for, mind you. I’m talking about the vanilla crafting system: If you drop a few points into the Science skill tree, you’ll be able to craft all kinds of mods that blow the doors wide open on […]

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Pete Hines is leaving Bethesda after 24 years

GamesBeat Next unites gaming industry leaders for exceptional content, networking, and deal-making opportunities. Join us on Oct 23-24 in San Francisco.  Register Now Pete Hines, Bethesda’s head of publishing, announced today he’s retiring and leaving the game company. The executive, who’s been with Bethesda since 1999, said that he feels the launch of Starfield marks […]

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Starfield players uncover some of the best XP farms in the game through obliterating cosmic wildlife: ‘even in a video game this feels wrong’

Good news, my friends: Starfield players have entirely abandoned human morality in their quest to invent the most effective methods of XP grinding possible, turning the game’s rambling planetary plains into a kind of Victorian safari hunt. I’m discomfited, disturbed, and would quite like to unlock the manipulation ability, so might give this a try […]

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Starfield pioneer murders the same elite enemy 100 times to reach a damning scientific verdict: The loot is bad

You ever feel like Starfield’s best drops are a bit thin on the ground? Specifically, that its toughest elite enemies seem only ever to drop fairly naff rare and epic weapons instead of the legendary drops that come with three gameplay-altering modifiers? You’re not alone, but now, as spotted by GamesRadar, one enterprising player has […]

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Starfield becomes literally more expansive than ever with the introduction of its promised FOV slider

Good news for all the prey animals out there: Starfield’s latest dinky update will finally allow you to achieve a field of view roughly equivalent to your own. The 1.7.36 patch for Bethesda’s spacefaring RPG doesn’t make many changes—in fact, it makes barely any—but it does fulfil Bethesda’s promise of introducing a proper FOV slider […]

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Todd Howard says Starfield was ‘made to be played for a long time,’ but a month after launch I’m already drifting away

“It’s intentionally made to be played for a long time,” said Todd Howard in an interview about Starfield with the AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook Podcast back in September.  “It’s one of things we’ve learned from our previous games,” Howard said. “From Skyrim, from Fallout, that people want to play them for a very long time. […]

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Starfield truly beaten as player constructs faithful and ludicrously huge Star Destroyer after taking build limiters off: ‘It’s not practical at all but it was worth it’

Wrap it up, people; Starfield has been solved. You can put away your dinky ships, your Ebon Hawks, and your Serenities, because someone has finally fulfilled what must, I think, be the game’s true purpose: creating a flyable Star Destroyer the size of Connecticut. As spotted by GamesRadar, DotElectronic7174’s Starfield Star Destroyer must be the […]

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