Skyrim. It's a great game. A huge game. With almost limitless replayability and customization and experience, people will be playing it and talking about it for a while yet. Bethesda has promised that they will continue to work and support the game to ensure that it's everything that the players expect it to be, meaning (in large part) bug free. In January, Bethesda will also be releasing creation tools to allow players to create mods which will be integrated into Steam Workshop.
A few days ago, Bethesda released the 1.2 update for Skyrim, which fixed a few things, but inadvertently caused a slew of new errors. Most notably, rendering magic resistances and immunity useless and having the occasional backwards flying dragon, among other things. Rest assured, Bethesda is aware of the problem and has announced that an incremental update would be released by next week for PC, with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 updates following the week after (probably due to authentication). The update will be fixing the issues caused from 1.2, so Breton mages will no longer be hanging in the wind.
In January, Bethesda will be releasing the same development tools to users to let them create their own mods and share them online via Steam Workshop. Users will be able to rate, flag for download, and browse various mods through Steam using mobile devices, so when they get home and fire up Skyrim, mods will automatically download. Bethesda will also be releasing a wiki and various videos to help users get started on bringing their ideas to life.
The company also released a statement on their blog regarding future updates and continued support for Skyrim. It's worth reading:
After the holidays, we’ll continue to release regular updates for the game – through full title updates, as well as incremental “gameplay updates” to fix whatever issues come up along with rebalancing portions of the game for difficulty or exploits. We plan on having a lot of these, not just a few. Overall, you should expect updates to be hitting the PC and Steam earlier and more often, as that’s a process we control. Console updates will follow, as they must be certified and processed by those manufacturers.
We all know this is a huge game, and everyone has a different experience. We’ll continue to do everything we can to make the game better and better for as many people as possible every day. We’ve also realized that with the millions upon millions of people playing Skyrim, we need to treat our updates with greater care. If we get too aggressive trying to fix a minor issue, we run a risk of breaking something larger in a game like this. To be safe, we are prioritizing code side fixes right now over data fixes. Quest and balance issues are usually data, and those will start rolling in a large way with the January updates.
Yes, that is also an apology for the 1.2 update, with an affirmation that Bethesda is updating to make sure the game is as stable as possible for people to enjoy. It certainly seems like people are enjoying Skyrim immensely, as it is now the number 3 game played on Xbox 360 - no small feat.
While the 1.2 update may have angered a number of fans, it hasn't stopped them from doing some pretty ludicrous, creepy and genuinely entertaining things with the game, and sharing them with the world.
Skyrim might be the benchmark for the open-world RPG right now, and as more and more people begin playing and experiencing the epic world that Bethesda has unleashed, one can't help but wonder what the company will be working on next. It's easy to fantasize about a new Fallout game in the vein of Skyrim, in terms of scale and the world, and be paralyzed with the possibilities. Until any new game announcements are made, Skyrim will be entertaining people for quite some time.
[UPDATE]
Bethesda has acknowledged that the 1.2 patch, which was also designed to repair some errors PlayStation 3 users were experiencing has not worked for everyone. The company is reaching out and requesting save data from users to see if they can pinpoint where the errors are originating from, of which there are several. Some errors are attributed to the autosaving feature (which can be turned off), A.I. updates, or dynamic system memory allocation. The upcoming 1.3 patch, which is in the final testing phases, will not include fixes for these errors, unfortunately, but they are on Bethesda's radar to be repaired.
Skyrim is available now for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.
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Source: BethBlog