The modding community is an important part of The Elder Scrolls, especially for Morrowind and Oblivion. I am in awe of modders who are able to build amazing things on their own. Some of the talent out there is just phenomenal, and the members of the team who we’ve hired from the fan community continually exceed our expectations.

One of our designers emailed around this incredible video of the Akatosh Mount mod that lets you summon a dragon that falls from the sky. And, as if that wasn’t cool enough, it lets you get on the dragon and fly around. Very impressive. The creator of this amazing mod - Saiden Storm (AKA Kevin Tolbert) - agreed to answer some questions for us so we could find out a bit more about the mod and the modder. The way he created this mod illustrates how strong and collaborative the Elder Scrolls modding community is. You can see videos of all his mods on YouTube.

UPDATE: Updated post with a picture of Saiden. Cheers!

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Community, Construction Set, Modding, Morrowind, Oblivion | 27 Comments »

Looking at Amazon sales for Europe, the US, and Japan for last week, it looks like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion continues to be a favorite among gamers world wide. In Japan during its first week, it was the top selling Xbox 36o game.

Over in the Europe, Oblivion comes in at #5 on the Amazon’s UK sales Charts for 360 games, over a year after release.

And stateside, Oblivion on PS3 ranked #5 as well.

For all of Amazon’s sales rankings last week, check here…

FTW, Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls | 8 Comments »

A couple more industry sites have added some coverage for Fallout 3…

• Adam Hartley of SPOnG selects Fallout 3 as his #1 game of E3 on the British news site, Mirror.co.uk.
• CNN’s Marc Saltzman briefly mentions Fallout 3 as one of the standouts at the show.
• The 1Up staff has voted Fallout 3 to their list of the “Best of E3.”
• PC Zone share their opinion on how the game is coming along.
• The guys over at SPOnG feature a four page interview with Pete .

Awards, E3, FTW, Fallout 3, First Look, Interview, Preview | No Comments »

Sliver Rose Studios, a community devoted to modding for Oblivion, put up an interview with Lead Level Designer Joel Burgess. For the interview, community members on the site compiled questions for Joel to field. In the interview, among other things, Joel discusses modding, downloadable content and Bethesda office culture. Here’s an excerpt: (more…)

Developers, Fallout 3, Interview, Modding, Oblivion | 5 Comments »

Those interested in getting into the modding scene with Oblivion, I just noticed that The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Files has launched a new tutorial team for helping out. If you’re interested in becoming a tutor, check out this link:

Sounds like a cool opportunity. And remember, if you have stuff that you liked to contribute to the modding community, you can always visit other sites like our very Construction Set Wiki.

Community, Construction Set, The Elder Scrolls | 1 Comment »

As you know, we’ve asked that you guys submit fan art for our blog. Over the weekend, I got some cool stuff from Elder Scrolls fan Raven Hall. These drawings are based on her interpretations of how the Daedra should look.

Above is her adaptation of Azura. Check out the Fan Art section on the right side to look at some of her other drawings.

Want your stuff in the Fan Art section? Just send an email with your JPEG files attached. We prefer to put up original designs, and keep in mind, we’re not going to be able to put up everyone’s art, but we’re always interested to see what you’ve come up with.

Community, Fan Art, The Elder Scrolls | 8 Comments »

Oblivion is the first Elder Scrolls game to ever be localized into Japanese. Japan is about to experience an open-ended RPG, the likes they’ve never seen before. The Elder Scrolls is a very different breed of RPG from Japanese RPGs, and we can’t wait to see how it does. Hopefully our initial Famitsu scores are a pretty good indicator that we’ll do well.

The Xbox 360 version ships today. It is the one we finished first originally so we decided to release its Japanese counterpart first. That said, we’re hard at work testing and wrapping up the PS3 version and that will be out in a couple months.

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Japan, Knights of the Nine, Oblivion | 11 Comments »

If you haven’t heard of Folding@Home, it’s a pretty cool and unique project. Set up by Stanford University, the project is a distributed computing project where people around the world can download software to create a supercomputer of sorts. The “folding” deals with research through folding proteins. Through this research, folks at Stanford hope to find solutions to diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, forms of cancer, and more.

So how does this relate to Bethesda or any of our games? Well, on Planet Elder Scrolls, and within our forums, The Elder Scrolls community has come together to create a team to help with folding projects (the more computers you have, the faster projects can get completed). If you’re interested in participating, you’ll want to join Team Elder Scrolls (ID #52286). Oh yeah, and if you’re using a PS3, you can help with this project too!

Community, Misc, Oblivion, Playstation 3, The Elder Scrolls | 3 Comments »

A while back before launching the blog, I asked Rob (our IT guy for the blog) about some issues I was having with posting YouTube videos. I was looking to post the Perlman intro from the original Fallout. When Rob finally got videos to embed on our blog, he replaced the Perlman video with this video. Even though the video has been out there a while, it’s still worth mentioning for those that haven’t seen it before.

Pretty funny use of the Construction Set if you have ask me. I especially like how the books speall out “LOL” near the beginning of the video. Secumfex, if you’re out there, I’d love to know how long this took. And if anyone has cool video similar to this, send them over!

Community, Construction Set, Modding, Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls, video | 7 Comments »

With the poll question relating to Elder Scrolls mods, I thought I’d mention some notable mods I’ve come across this week.

The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Files have uploaded a new mod, Martigen’s Monster Mod 3.0. The mod offers plenty of new stuff to fans, including:

“Over 800M in 150+ brand new creatures and NPCs, 1900+ variant creatures and NPCs, unique encounters, advanced behaviour AI, advanced combat AI, tailored loot drops and more!”

Sounds like a really impressive mod. For more details on all the features of MMM 3.0 (and there’s plenty), visit here.

Another cool mod comes from Planet Elder Scrolls member Coleen. This mod adds the ability to cook food and brew drinks, and it even adds a farmer’s market to the game. As noted, the mod combines food items from the Salmo the Baker from Tarnsman and Ravida’s hungry scripts.

Thanks to Coleen for making this (and making me hungry)…LUNCH TIME!

Community, Modding, Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls | 9 Comments »