New World Notes

Top Skyrim Mods Being Ripped and Sold in Second Life

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Not all of the ripped content in Second Life comes from 3D marketplaces, game files, and victimized Second Life designers. At this point it shouldn't be surprising that some "enterprising" residents with serious ethical shortcomings are using mods made by passionate members of other gaming communities to stock their SL stores with mesh goods, much like they may use the original resources from a game. One affected member of the Skyrim community is straight up quitting the scene after a frustrating ordeal trying to get his work removed from the SL Marketplace. Here's how it went down:

Love it or Leave it, Skyrim Edition: One Year Later, What's Still Great About Elder Scrolls 5 -- and What Isn't

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Skyrim celebrated the first anniversary of its release this month, and even one year later it's still a hot topic. It has it's own subreddit forum that gets new material posted as often as every couple hours from the community, and modding sites like Skyrim Nexus are still teeming with innovative new content.

Skyrim has proven that it has the same staying power that of previous games in the series (namely Morrowind and Oblivion) had... Maybe even more. But what exactly is it that keeps it going strong, and what parts of it have we outgrown in the past year? Here's my take:

The Elder Roles: How to Play Skyrim as a Skyrim Peasant

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

The Elder Roles is a new blog I'm publishing that solves a big problem I've been having with Skyrim lately: As much as I love the game, there was a period where I was feeling pretty lukewarm about playing it. I backtracked to other Bethesda titles like Fallout: New Vegas to feed my addiction with fresh content. At the same time, I never uninstalled Skyrim because I knew I wasn't done with it -- I just didn't know what I wanted to do next. The answer to that came when I read a woefully short series on PC Gamer called The Elder Strolls, following a character in Skyrim who wasn't a hero, a villain, an adventurer or a rogue. He was just some poor sap trying to stay alive. The author had even done the same thing before with The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion in a series of blog posts called Living in Oblivion. In game worlds that can support so much dynamic content and choice, even the most mundane lifestyle offers plenty of opportunities.

My own peasant playthrough has been a refreshing and even relaxing way to replay old content and stumble across things I'd never seen before. If you're curious about trying it yourself, here are a few tips for getting the most out of the experience:

Amazing Skyrim Photography by Jay Faircloth Will Leave You Breathless -- Here's How He Shoots It

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Recently while browsing Skyrim Nexus (a massive Skyrim modding community site) I stumbled across The Goddess ENB Configuration, a lighting and visual effects mod that gives your game a more polished and ethereal vibe. While the mod itself is good, it was the images taken by the modder that really caught my eye. No, these aren't stills from a big-budget Elder Scrolls CG movie, these gorgeous landscapes and intense portraits are screenshots from one man's ultra pimped-out game. I've written about taking gorgeous Skyrim snapshots before (and the importance of using an ENB mod to do it), but Jay's work still completely blew me away when I came across it. Of course I had to track this talented person down on Flickr and sift through hundreds more amazing pictures... And what kind of blogger would I be if I didn't share?

Keep reading for more of Jay's jaw-dropping work, and details on some of the game modifications that make it possible!

Is Skyrim's Dawnguard Expansion Worthwhile... If You Don't Care About the Vampire Lords?

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world fashion

I've been writing a lot lately about preparing to play Dawnguard (here and here, if you missed out), but it may be a bit conspicuous that I haven't actually talked about Dawnguard itself yet. To be honest, I wasn't sure I wanted to, because the topic that garners the most Dawnguard hype, the Vampire Lord form, didn't really interest me that much. Maybe I'm a goody-goody or just boring, but I never really enjoyed any of the monstrous forms available in Skyrim already, either.

So many writers and players alike have been focusing on Vampire Lord mechanics and play, but not many people were answering the nagging question I had: Is Dawnguard worth the $20 pricetag if I don't give a crap about being a super vampire? No one had a good answer for me, but I have one for you.

Four Tricks for Taking Gorgeous Skyrim Screenshots

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world fashion

Skyrim is one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, and it's even moreso with the addition of some mods and enhancements I've added to the Dawnguard expansion. I've also been perfecting my technique for sharing this new slice of an already stunning world via screenshots (or pics, or photos, or simulographs, or whatever you'd like to call them). I love taking pictures in almost every game I play, just as much as I love taking pictures in reality, so I take my screenshots pretty seriously. And at this point, the only game I've taken more pictures in that Skyrim has to be Second Life.

While my Skyrim snapshots are nowhere near as inspired as James Pollock's, I've still got a few tricks worth sharing whether you're an avid virtual photographer yourself or you simply want to share a few fun shots from the Dawnguard expansion with your friends. Keep reading to find out what!

How to Play Dawnguard So It Doesn't Seem Like More of the Same Old, Same Skyrim

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world fashion

A lot of gamers are complaining that Dawnguard, the first Skyrim expansion, doesn't add much to the game world, but that's probably because they're trying to play it with their original campaign character. In my opinion, the best way to play Dawnguard is with a totally new character who can explore Skyrim from a fresh perspective. And if you really want to get the most out of Dawnguard without retracing your original footsteps all over the map, the right mods will give you a unique experience through an alternate character-- and almost feel like a totally new game.

I'll admit that my triumphant return to Skyrim for this new expansion left me feeling a little... uninspired. After grabbing Dawnguard myself and finding that the campaign didn't really compel me to keep questing with the character I've spent nearly 160 hours playing, I went on a modding spree to develop a whole new playing experience, and to renew my passion for this game.

Here's exactly how I did it:

Skyrim: How Marketing Turned a Niche Product Into a Mass Market Hit

"Skyrim: How Marketing Turned a Niche Product Into a Mass Market Hit" is my latest article for The CMO Site edited by Mitch Wagner, and as you might have guessed, it's about how Bethesda and advertising agency AKQA launched a marketing campaign that marketed Skyrim so it could get out of the fantasy roleplay niche to compete with big gamer franchises like Battlefield and Call of Duty. I think they have some lessons certain other virtual world/game companies could learn from. Sample:

Lesson 2 - Find and promote an emotional core that aligns with current market leaders: The first challenge in Skyrim's campaign, as AKQA account lead Ed Davis put it, was overcoming "a stigma" of fantasy games, and the skepticism of console gamers who "think it's really nerdy." Some marketers try to mask the geeky genre elements by emphasizing gore, or layering the ads with a heavy metal soundtrack. Instead of doing either, Skyrim's marketing team sought to identify the emotional core of Skyrim. And while the game is very much in the orcs-and-elves roleplaying genre, it also has a high attention to detail and believability (within the fantasy context) -- or what the marketing team dubbed "epic reality."

Read the rest here, and please create a free CMO account to join the conversation with Mitch and me!

World of Skyrim Actually Much Smaller Than San Francisco

Physics grad Matthew Sutton wrote a very interesting analysis of Skyrim's size on Quora, and if you've explored Bethesda's grand, expansive game world, you'll probably be surprised. Extrapolating from the height of NPCs and the buildings they inhabit, Sutton estimates the world to be (on the high end)... 3.7 miles across from West to East, and 2.4 miles from North to South. So like this:

In real world terms, assuming Sutton is correct (and his calculations seem plausible), that means Skyrim is much smaller than San Francisco, which is roughly seven by seven miles across. Look:

Skyrim Dragonslaying: Such an Anti-Climax (So Far)

Skyrim is still my current favorite digital world vacation spot when I'm not writing about digital worlds, but after killing my sixth dragon with hardly any effort, this is pretty much my reaction:

Seriously, it took a few arrows and my foul breath to bring this one down. But that's par for the course. For a story which revolves around the return of dragons, and an ultimate goal "to defeat Alduin, a Dragon god who is prophesied to destroy the world", shouldn't these things be far harder to kill than a random snow tiger that hops out of the forest? Far as I can tell, the designers have level-scaled dragons -- meaning, adjust the strength of a given dragon so that it's proportionate to the player's ability level. And after 80 hours or so of playing time, they're level-scaled far too equally, making what should be a high point of the game into a resource-gathering task with a lot of gratuitous flash. Maybe this changes later in the story arc, but so far, I have to say it's a serious design mistake to an otherwise groundbreaking game.