#skyrim-elder-scrolls

#skyrim-elder-scrolls

Blizzard completely reimagined the Blood Elf capital city of Silvermoon and its surrounding lands, first introduced in 2007 as part of the game's first expansion, for Midnight. The results have players feeling some serious nostalgia, and wanting more where that came from.

The last five years have seen a tremendous resurgence of role-playing games, from the turn-based masterpieces of Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, to the action-packed Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. And staggeringly, it looks like that trend is set to continue well into 2026. While there's undoubtedly a handful of games we don't know about, even what we do have looks like it's going to make this another banner year for RPGs.

You know the drill by now: large scale immersive exhibitions have gone from nowhere to ubiquity in London, with the last year alone bringing us big, tech-augmented, family-facing shows devoted to the likes of Tutankhamun, the Titanic, and the destruction of Pompeii.

We've already seen a full season of Amazon Prime Video's hit series, and while so much of the post-apocalyptic video game is accurately depicted without directly adapting, there's one element that hasn't popped up yet: deathclaws, the ultra-powerful monsters that appear over and over in Fallout games, much to players' chagrin. Not much is known about these mutated lizard monsters, but Fallout Season 2 finally revealed a key part of their backstories - and it goes back even further than fans first thought.

But if a reluctance to add yet another subscription to your streaming rotation means you haven't watched Amazon's surprisingly excellent adaptation yet, you might be interested to know that the company is currently releasing season one for free on the Prime Video YouTube channel.

Yesterday brought us the inaugural New Game+ Showcase, in which multiple content creators decided to cut out the Kojima-glazing middleman and just show off a crapload of games. While the event ended up getting ridiculed a lot for feeling more like a podcast than a showcase, it did include interesting new glimpses of a number of upcoming games, including what claims to to be one of the largest open-world RPGs of 2026.

"They were the only choice," Howard told Game Informer (via GamesRadar). "They had done something similar with [Star Wars] Knights of the Old Republic 2, and we knew them really well. We knew we were going onto Skyrim, the franchise was back, but we knew there was going to be a long break until Fallout 4--how can we keep this going?"

Recently, the topic of 2010's Fallout: New Vegas and Bethesda creative director Todd Howard came up during a New Year's Eve party I attended. During the conversation, a few people, myself included, joked about how Howard doesn't like New Vegas, a Fallout game developed not by Bethesda but by Obsidian. Look around online, and you'll see plenty of others joking and suggesting the same thing. Howard hates New Vegas. Or is at least annoyed by its success.

In 2017, in the lead-up to the launch of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, developer Warhorse Studios was criticized by some online for not including people of color in the game. The studio defended this by claiming it was historically accurate that in early 15th-century Bohemia, especially in the countryside where the game was set, it was rare to see non-white people. Some scholars agreed, others weren't sure, and people online yelled about it, with some right-leaning gamers very invested in protecting the studio from the "woke agenda."

As impressive as the teams of developers that create games are, sometimes I am more blown away by the passion of the communities that build up around them, and what comes out of them. As more and more games are being made with software that is more available for general public use, like Unreal Engine, Blender, and Unity, this means that fans are able to try their hand at making custom creations to add into their favorite games, or even full-blown tools that help others do so. From clever randomizers to giant adjustments to the base game, these are some of the best fan mods and creations released in 2025.

Baldur's Gate 3 was the kind of game that could take hours to get started, thanks in part to a rich character customization suite that allowed players to fine-tune everything from their race to several minute details.