Bethesda Softworks

If you’re still exploring the vast reaches of Starfield and are somehow hungry for more, you’re in luck. An “End of the Year Update” dropped by Bethesda outlined some of what’s to come in 2024. 

Starfield will receive updates "roughly every six weeks starting in February" if Bethesda hit their target, according to an end of year wrap-up. "These updates will include everything from quality-of-life improvements to content and feature updates," including previously mentioned city maps, mod support and new methods of travel.

Can you believe it, but it is nearly the end of 2023. We made it guys! While many of us will likely be setting our sights on a bottle of Baileys and novelty Christmas pudding shaped confectionery, Bethesda is still all business, and has laid out its Starfield plans for 2024.

Microsoft announced that Activision Blizzard CEO is finally stepping down, effective December 29. He is not the only high-profile departure, though Microsoft intends to leave most of the company’s management in place.  

It's looking increasingly unlikely Starfield will have the quite same kind of longevity as its Bethesda RPG stablemates, but that isn't discouraging the studio from continuing to tinker with the space adventure's core — and one intriguing addition Bethesda has now confirmed is that «new ways of traveling» are coming at some point in 2024.

If you were wondering where Fallout 4's «next-gen» update had got to, there's a bit of bad news; Bethesda has officially pushed its release out of 2023 and into next year.

Fallout 4’s “next-gen update”, announced just over a year ago as part of the series’ 25th anniversary celebrations, has seen its release date pushed back into next year - meaning it will arrive close to a decade after the last major entry in the franchise.

Open your map in Starfield and you won't see much more than a height map, even in cities. If you want to then travel around, you're limited to walking huge distances when on planet surfaces and using fast travel spaceship hops when in outerspace.

ZeniMax Workers United-CWA has won a tentative agreement which will allow union members to guide the company's use of AI in the workplace.

After the disastrous launch of Redfall, you'd have thought that immersive sim experts Arkane would have wanted to bust open the curtains and stay as far away from vampire games as physically possible. And yet here we are, with tonight's Game Awards reveal that they're making a Marvel Blade game. What are the chances? Will this second bite at making a (hopefully good this time) vampire game be the one? It's still early on in development, from the sounds of things, but here's the reveal trailer.

Bethesda has released a new and quite chunky update for Skyrim Special Edition, which in itself isn't all that remarkable. Sure the game is several years old now, but it is still very popular with players, so why not give the game a boost if it needs it.

A new update for Skyrim Special Edition has introduced "Creations", a method through which community modders can sign up to the "Bethesda Game Studios Verified Creator Program" and then sell their work through the platform to receive royalties.

is Bethesda Softworks’ biggest game yet in almost every respect, featuring an unprecedented amount of playable space, an inventive New Game Plus feature, and a record-breaking launch. The game took roughly seven years to complete—typical Bethesda games take around four—and is considered a true passion project on behalf of Bethesda director Todd Howard and the rest of the developers. In December 2023, was reported to see 1.2 million daily players, and had amassed somewhere around 12,000,000 players in total.

Amazon has dropped a new meaty teaser to get us in the mood for the upcoming Fallout TV show.

Perhaps the Last Of Us TV show on HBO getting it right was the dawn of a new era of good TV based on video games, but I still approach each adaptation with trepidation. That includes Amazon's Fallout series from Westworld and Person Of Interest writer/director Jonathan Nolan, which just got its first trailer.

Deathloop leads Amazon's crop of free Games with Prime for December.

Bethesda's heaping plateful of space-spaghetti Starfield presently rejoices in the status of a Mixed Steam user review rating, with over 80,000 such reviews posted to date. Bethesda High Command are clearly displeased with this, and several unnamed but platform-verified developers have begun replying to and rebutting individual Steam reviewers, giving apparent priority to complaints about the game's loading breaks during fast travel and when moving between maps.

Bethesda's customer support team has been responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam.

Bethesda has released a new patch for Starfield, which adds DLSS support for those on PC, as well as the ability to ingest food when it is found in the environment. This means players will be able to «enjoy those Chunks immediately or save them for later». Mmm.

Redfall's next game update is here, but if you were hoping that this new patch would roll out the option to play offline, you would be disappointed.

was a big hit when it launched in September, but two months later, its popularity is already slipping on Steam. The new game now has fewer active players on that platform than .

Starfield released a little over two months ago on PC and Xbox. However, despite a strong start which saw Starfield become the «biggest Bethesda game launch» of all time, things have tailed off a bit now. In fact, there are currently more people playing Bethesda's earlier RPG, Skyrim, over on Steam.

The number of people playing Starfield on Steam has slipped under the concurrent player count for the 12-year-old Skyrim, just two months after Bethesda proclaimed the sci-fi exploration epic as their biggest game launch to date.

You might have heard of the "horseshoe theory" in political science, which holds that far-left and far-right groups are actually closer to one another in terms of values and objectives than the political centre, coming together like the prongs of a horseshoe. I would like to propose an analogous theory for horror games and cute games whereby past a certain point of cuteness, the videogame in question teeters over dramatically into dread and nausea.

Starfield's cast of sidekicks includes cowboy dad Sam Coe voiced by Elias Toufexis, also known as the voice of Adam Jensen in Deus Exes Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. This wasn't the role Toufexis was originally hired for, however. The actor revealed that he and fellow voice actress Cissy Jones, who voices romanceable party member Andreja, were originally hired to voice Starfield's protagonist.

Bethesda's Starfield is awash with things to eat or drink, from half-eaten club sandwiches to bits of steaming alien gizzard, but chugging your fill has always been fussier than it needs to be, involving a trip through the game's irritating menus. No more! The next Starfield patch, which is currently available as an opt-in Steam beta, will let you guzzle things without opening your inventory, on top of various tweaks to the game's graphics and quests.

Starfield's protagonist is silent, but that wasn't always the case. Sam Coe's voice actor Elias Toufexis has revealed he recorded lines as the voice of the male lead, while Cissy Jones did so as the game's female protagonist.

Two months on from the release of Starfield, players are still waiting for Bethesda to address the numerous bugs which are present. But there's a whole other group of players out there taking matters into their own hands — the team behind the Starfield Community Patch, an ambitious and surprisingly professional taskforce trying to fix the game themselves. The project came under the spotlight about a month before Starfield released. It was wild to think that a group of modders could already be working on a mod for Starfield before it had even released, but there they were — anticipating the Bethesda jank fans have come to expect.

Microsoft is shaking up ’s upper management following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The company hopes that the reorganization will help prevent a repeat of Redfall’s disastrous launch.

Microsoft is shaking up ’s upper management following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The company hopes that the reorganization will help prevent a repeat of Redfall’s disastrous launch.

has been a big success for Bethesda and Microsoft. Not only was it thebest-selling game in the US for September, but it’s also been a significant boon for Game Pass. According to Microsoft, the day of Starfield’s launch set a record for the highest number of new Game Pass subscribers.

The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a mixture of new ideas and RPG systems that go all the way back to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, according to Bethesda's former design director Bruce Nesmith, who was lead designer on The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and senior designer on Starfield. In particular, Nesmith reckons it will "absolutely" continue with Skyrim's approach to levelling and progression, whereby you improved skills by performing the associated actions. He also thinks the game will "probably" retain elements of the magic system he designed for Skyrim, which broke away from Oblivion and Morrowind in being simpler to understand and more immediately powerful, at the price of flexibility and inventiveness.

Pete Hines isn’t the only major departure from Bethesda Softworks. Will Shen, lead quest designer and design director on Starfield, has also announced that he’s leaving the studio. He’ll join Something Weird Games, a studio of former talent from BioWare, Bethesda and Obsidian Entertainment, to work on Wyrdsong, their debut RPG.

Pete Hines, Bethesda Softworks’ senior VP and head of publishing, is retiring. In a recent statement, Hines said he will begin “an exciting new chapter of my life exploring interests and passions, donating my time where I can, and taking more time to enjoy life.” He noted that it wasn’t a decision that came “easily or quickly” but after “an amazing career” and following the successful launch of Starfield, he felt “like the time is right.”

Bethesda Softworks senior vice president and head of publishing has announced his decision to retire after 24 years at the company.

Five months after its launch on PC and Xbox, Arkane Studios’ Redfall has received the performance mode patch that enables 60 fps support on Xbox Series X and S consoles. Performance mode for Redfall arrives as part of game update 2 for Arkane’s vampire-infested first-person shooter — an update that also includes new stealth takedowns, accessibility improvements, and “an even more dangerous Redfall with an increased open world enemy population and new encounters.”

When Redfall launched earlier this year, one of the most highly requested features was adding an option to play the Xbox Series X/S version at 60 frames per second - and that request has finally been granted.

Released last month, Starfield is the biggest game Bethesda Softworks ever made, featuring 120 star systems and almost 1,700 planets. While it was only a matter of time before someone explored them all, one ambitious Starfield player had already scanned all 1,695 worlds.

id Software and Nightdive Studios released the first update for Quake 2 Enhanced Edition. It improves on a new feature added with this remaster, the Compass, with better objective navigating through several places in Quake 2, Quake 2 64, The Reckoning and Ground Zero.

Publisher Bethesda Softworks and developer Bethesda Game Studios have released simulation game The Elder Scrolls: Castles in Early Access for Android via Google Play. It is free-to-play.

A new game set in The Elder Scrolls franchise is now available for Android devices through the Google Play Store. It’s called The Elder Scrolls: Castles, and it looks a lot like another Bethesda Game Studios game, Fallout Shelter, but set in the medieval fantasy world of Nirn.

It's no secret that Starfield — out now on PC and Xbox Series S/X — is hands down one of the most monumental game launches of the year. For Bethesda, it's a gamble in uncharted territory as they undertake their first new universe in 25 years, set across the stars in a futuristic civilised corner of the Milky Way galaxy. For publisher Xbox, it's an opportunity to bounce back from a lacklustre 2022 slate and dominate the gaming conversation for a long time — probably years, given the staying power director Todd Howard's RPGs are notorious for. With over a thousand planets to explore, dashing factions to align with, and cosmic mysteries bubbling with political intrigue, Starfield aims to be the most complex spacefaring adventure of our generation. As such, it soars gracefully, but not without some turbulence.

PureArts and Bethesda are partnering together for a figure in the form of Vasco, the robotic companion in Bethesda’s latest game.

is a big hit for Bethesda, though the game isn’t without faults. A slow start and weak main plot are the most common criticisms across Starfield reviews. Meanwhile, some players also find its characters subtly off-putting. One veteran game developer recently explained why this is, pointing out subtle but noticeable problems with Starfield’s facial animations. 

It’s no secret that Starfield requires a powerful gaming PC. Even if you have the latest generation hardware and the best graphics settings, the game will still crush your framerate. PC optimizations are on the way at last though for Nvidia users, because the latest game drivers improve Starfield performance by a small margin on systems that support Resizable BAR.

The sci-fi RPG is proving to be a big hit for Bethesda Game Studios. However, not everyone is impressed by all aspects of the game. One Twitter user posted a video negatively comparing it to CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, prompting a Cyberpunk developer to defend Starfield.

Bethesda’s officially launched on Wednesday after about a week of early access. The game’s already proven to be a big hit, with over 6 million players, making it the biggest launch in Bethesda’s history. Interestingly, the game’s high profile also seems to be helping one of its competitors, with Hello Games’s seeing massive spikes in players leading up to Starfield’s release.

Bethesda Softworks publishing head Pete Hines has reassured players that Arkane isn't giving up on Redfall, despite its lukewarm reception on launch earlier this year. In fact, he's confident it will be a good game people want to play on Game Pass ten years from now.

Over the course of reviewing Starfield, I logged almost 100 hours. I spent them building outposts on exotic planets in distant star systems, and rising the ranks at my corporate “desk job” at Ryujin Industries in the cyberpunk-like city of Neon. I romanced Sarah, developing a relationship and—I think—getting married on a paradise planet, with beautiful and accurately orbiting moons looming above.

"[The Elder Scrolls 6] is in development," Bethesda Softworks vice president Pete Hines said when asked about whether the long-awaited sequel was still in the concept phase. "But it's in early development."

We now have some interesting information behind the making of Starfield, assuming our source is credible here.

Samsung is offering you another way to play Starfield, and all you need is a compatible gaming monitor and a Game Pass subscription. Thanks to a partnership from Samsung and Bethesda that will see the studio’s upcoming sci-fi RPG, Starfield, be available to stream through the Samsung Gaming Hub.

Players still have a few weeks to wait until they can get their hands on Bethesda Game Studios’, but that hasn’t stopped some disgruntled gamers from planning a review bombing campaign against the sci-fi RPG. The Starfield review bomb plans come as excitement about the long-awaited PC and Xbox open-world title has begun to reach a fever pitch ahead of its September 6 release.

I’ve never really gotten elbow-deep into the Quake series. Before the 2021 Quake remaster by Nightdive Studios, I was actually most familiar with Quake 4, and I really don’t remember that much about it. In 1996, I was into Duke Nukem 3D. And then after that, it was Goldeneye 007. I at least played Quake 2… The N64 version.

After a hiatus out in deep space, id Software’s legendary FPS triumphantly returns to PlayStation, looking sleeker than ever. Available now for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, the enhanced release of Quake II reintroduces the complete 1997 shooter with new content, visual improvements, local split-screen, online multiplayer, and more.

Publisher Bethesda Softworks and developer id Software have released a remastered version of Quake II for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 via PlayStation Store, Xbox Series and Xbox One via Microsoft Store, Switch via Nintendo eShop, and PC via Steam and Microsoft Store. It is priced at $9.99 and includes a new expansion pack, Quake II 64, and more.

One of the most hotly-anticipated game releases left of 2023 is Bethesda’s massive sci-fi RPG Starfield, but will it ever come to PS5?

Publisher Bethesda Softworks and developer Bethesda Game Studios have released a new series of “The Settled Systems” animated trailers for Starfield, which offer a glimpse into the game’s major cities.