“We are gratified that Skyrim continues to garner high review scores and accolades around the world,” said Robert Altman, Chairman and CEO of ZeniMax Media. “We are most grateful to our fans for their support and enthusiasm for the game, and their love of the hundreds of hours of gameplay it offers.

“We continue to strive to deliver the highest quality entertainment experience for everyone. 2012 will be another huge year for our fans, with the release of the Creation Kit, as well as exciting DLC which will add to the richness of this epic adventure.”

“Skyrim is the fastest selling title in Steam’s history,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve Corporation.

“Bethesda’s commitment to and understanding of the PC as a gaming platform shows in the great review scores, spectacular launch, and continued high player numbers that Skyrim has received. We are delighted that Bethesda chose to use Steamworks to support Skyrim both at retail and digitally.”

The game also garnered over 200 perfect scores worldwide.

Although Bethesda have been known to distribute buggy games on launch with regards to pretty much most of their titles. I have personally put almost 50 hours into it… found silly bugs but absolutely nothing game breaking to get me frustrated, it has received my personal GoTY due to the fact that I am hooked onto it like crack and doing any side quests I can so the game does not end. Console adopters especially PS3 owners might differ from my opinion but all in all I think this game is brilliant an something I have been waiting for all this year.

If paying for stuff isn’t your sort of vigilante superheroism, there’s also a Batman, Inc. Batsuit now available, totally free, as a thank you from Rocksteady for supporting the game.

This is how awesome they are as a small little dev house. Don’t know for howmuch longer they will still be referred to as small after they brought out my fav game of that year followed up by my 3rd favourite of this year (1st Skyrim and 2nd is Dark Souls).

Check out the Skyrim Perk Calculator here.

Thanks to everyone for the messages. One year goes by quick. The next update is in the latter part of Dec., near Christmas.

A late December launch falls neatly in line with the rough “every two months” DLC release schedule outlined at SEMA, so the date will definitely be raising eyebrows (and expectations) – especially considering Kazunori has a history of playing Santa Claus… Hopefully you’ve been good this year.

Thanks to Joe_Ald for the early tip!

This being my favourite (Well only driving game I still play) I can’t wait to see what will be dropping. Yet everyone is still asking for the “Top Gear reasonably priced car” to be added in so we can check laptimes and compare, we can only hope. Till then we will have to keep revving…

Source : GTPlanet

We recently spoke with 5TH Cell’s CEO and creative director Jeremiah Slaczka about what it’s like being an independent studio today, if review scores really matter, and if the traditional $60 retail model for games is broken.

Is the current business model for traditional video games – the $60 boxed game – a broken model?

Yes, the $60 boxed game is a broken model. It was always broken, it’s just more broken now because games cost so much to develop, produce and market. Before the model was tolerable, because the cost was reasonable enough to allow mediocre selling games to make money. Now it’s just insane. If you aren’t going to be a mega hit at $60, you might as well give up before you even try, because it’s tens of millions down the hole.

Think of it this way: Homefront was an okay FPS – not great, not terrible, just okay. But as a consumer, why would I want to play an okay FPS when I can play a bunch of great FPS titles for the same price? And that’s what the consumers did. While over 13 million people bought Black Ops last year in the US alone, smashing records, less than just 1 million people bought Homefront in the US. The consumer voted with their wallet, right?

But what if you could rent Homefront for $4.99 for 24 hours from your console? What if Homefront was only $30 dollars upfront for the single player and if you liked it you could buy the multiplayer for an additional $30?

All of the sudden it’s not a binary purchase option anymore. Where before you had two options as a consumer, pay $60 or pay $0 for the AAA experience or the okay experience. The market proved that gamers were not willing to pay $60 for Homefront the same way they were willing to for Black Ops, so that is out of the equation.

That doesn’t mean all games have to go this route, there’s still room for the AAA only, but a lot of titles should try a different method. It’s a win-win scenario for everyone involved.

Looks like there is hope for the future. We just need more devs to adopt this way of thought.

Source : Game Informer

The massive world of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim can get a little intimidating at times with its seemingly never-ending supply of new adventures and areas to explore. Thankfully, when it comes to tracking your Skyrim exploits, there’s an app for that — or rather, there soon will be.

Dragon Shout is an upcoming, interactive Skyrim map for iOS that will allow users to place annotated markers and make notes about their activities in different parts of the game’s world.

“For example, yesterday I played Skyrim and left a bunch of dragon scales and bones on the side of a mountain because they were too heavy,” the developer told Touch Arcade.

While the game will launch as a solo experience, the developer plans to update the app with a social element that will allow users to share markers and notes, chat, and other activities.

Dragon Shout will be a free app and is expected to be available “within the next couple of days” for iPhone and iPad, with an Android version still in development. You can get more info on the app and check out some early screenshots at the app’s official website.

Source: Digital Trends

The thief snatched them from a display stand before running past the check-outs and into a waiting Ford Fiesta. The haul included eight PlayStation games and two for the X-Box.

The culprit was white, aged 19-22, about 5ft 7in tall and of thin build. He had black cropped hair and was wearing a black hooded top with black jogging bottoms.

So in MW4 maybe there will be a mission with a Fiesta as a getaway car?

Source: Herts and Essex Observer

But this got my mind running on how the Xbox changed the current state of gaming. Who knew that one thing namely Xbox LIVE could have such an adverse effect on gaming state. The Dreamcast died which made space for the Xbox to slip in to the running. But if it was not for Xbox we would not have Xbox live and also Sony and Nintendo would neither have launched PSN or wiiconnect24 respectively. Sure it would have happened eventually but I think that LIVE caused them to speed up the process.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think the online services are fantastic. Network services were done in previous consoles but the Dreamcast was the first console to be shipped specifically with multiplayer in mind. But LIVE brought in DLC, which at the time seemed like a good idea to me. It’s something small that could extend a good game. But I never saw how badly this could be exploited until the last year or so. It all started with Oblivion and the Horse Armour DLC which launched and people moaned about the price, yet they bought it. This was a green light for many publishers and developers alike and now the market is flooded. Good examples of DLC are the Fallout: New Vegas DLC’s… Bad examples are Mass Effect, Call of Duty, Gears of War and basically 90% of DLC out there that they can milk. Be it a new character skin, outfit, weapon pack even. It has become tacked on additions that normally would have been included in the original package. It gets so bad that mid-game in Dragon Age: Origins you cannot accept a certain quest because you have insufficient Bioware Points. Now if you’re going to have it as DLC, remove it from the game and do not show the quest if you do not have it. All this DLC, Micro-Transactions and stuff are getting out of hand.

It’s also killed the imagination of games with the multiplayer aspect as games used to have a good single player campaign and an additional multiplayer aspect. Now they make games mainly for multiplayer and give players like me who enjoy story and character with a bitter taste in my mouth. Games are being allowed to have a 6-7 hour campaign as a standard. And as an RPG lover this is ridiculously short. The new annual Call of Duty: MW3 (Or as I refer to it as Cash on Delivery 2011) has a 5 hour campaign. Which I think is ridiculous. With the premium price of console games now it should be frowned upon the fact that you can finish a game in one day. And they back their sad excuse of a campaign with it being aimed at the multiplayer experience. Sorry, not everyone in the world that owns a console has a good internet connection or even support for the relative online service in their country. But why would they be worried if the manage to push 9.5 million copies on launch day. And you can’t try to sell many of them when completed as they have an online pass that needs to be activated and if it has been used don’t fret, because you can always buy another pass… Ka-Ching!

Also online facilities on consoles have made developers lazy because many don’t do proper QA on their games before launch knowing that they can just release a patch later on and thus using its audience as testers. But that is another topic on its own.

But not all things are bad. People that know me are aware that I love indie games and support indie developers. And these online facilities are a platform for these games. Absolute gems like Braid, Machinarium, Shadow Complex, Bastion and Trine would have never seen the light of day and that would have been sad.

As a PC gamer it saddens me a bit because this whole exploitation has moved over onto the PC platform I love. But it makes money so you can see why they would do it. It has pushed gaming into the mainstream. And has filled online services with “Duders”, “Brah’s” and 16 year old kids screaming over the mics in an 18 and up game. But luckily there are some great houses like “CDProjekt RED” that bring out games like The Witcher 2 that keeps my faith in gaming industry. I’m not sure if I’m one of the few that feel this way but I can be sure that many of the others that echo my sentiment would mainly be PC gamers around before the exploitation… when games were great, they were there to immerse you as opposed to exploiting glitches to have the best K/D ratio, who stop midgame and admire the effort put in to the artwork instead of moaning that it’sDX9 when it should have been 11 and who became the character as opposed to doing things they never would have done just to get “Cheevo’s”.

After Skyrim gamesave files surpass 5MB in the PS3 version, many claim to experience lag and stability issues. “Such as framerate issues, poor rendering, shoddy loading and non interactions fro finishing quests/cutting wood etc,” wrote gamer PurpleHaze on the game’s official forums.

“I can’t finish ANY quest and i can’t buy from ANY trader/npc and i can only talk to them after some laggy button pressing,” continued PurpleHaze. So my gamesave is now 6mb (how i don’t know since i couldn’t buy/sell/talk or complete quests) and the LAG and framerate issue is so bad at this point, the game isn’t worh restarting.”

PurpleHaze, whose issues started after hitting 5.3MB, isn’t alone, with other players experiencing similar slowdown once their save files pass the neighborhood of 5MB~6MB (some are reporting problems after reaching 10MB).

“My file size is growing constantly, and fast,” wrote player AMG on the game’s forums. “It’s already well over 3mb in size and I’ve only played for 3hrs.”

The current fix is to restart the system, which makes Skyrim playable. However, after an hour or two of play, the game once again apparently becomes laggy.

This issue does not seem to affect the Xbox 360 version nor the PC version. Even gamers with plenty of available PS3 hard drive space are having problems.

“It does not take long for the save file to exceed 6MB, roughly 16 hours for me, so playing the game in any sort of depth will become very troublesome,” wrote Kotaku reader Toby.

In the above gallery, there is game footage of what looks like people experiencing these issues (note that they might be experiencing unrelated glitches, too). Players are calling the PS3 version “broken”.

Source: Kotaku

EA have gone around shown that they are watching accounts and users closely with their exploiting and cheap tricks. They have recently released this comment :

“This week we’ve banned hundreds of offending accounts and have stats-wiped accounts for exploiting (such as boosting),” reads a Tweet over on the Battlefield Twitter stream.”

“We are working on banning as many people as we can as quickly as we can. We have a zero tolerance policy for cheating,” reads an update.
Some of the more “popular” cheats included an invincibility glitch, a ranking glitch that let players go up tens of thousands of points in a single game using the Engineer class, and sniping on Kharg Island because srsly, it just ruins the game for everybody else, kthanxbai.”

Will this stop the rest from attempting or will they just buy another game and create a new origin account to give EA more money… with the silly people in this world, notihng would suprise me.

Source: https://twitter.com/#!/Battlefield/status/135079725499559938