Years ago, a never-officially-released Warcraft point-and-click adventure game developed by Blizzard in the late ‘90s was leaked online. While the game was completely playable back then, its cutscenes were low-quality, highly compressed, not perfectly synced to the audio, and a few were even just straight up missing from the leak. Now, after years of working on it, someone has remastered all the cutscenes, fixed them up, and made it easier to experience this bit of video game history.
As spotted by Indie Retro News and PC Gamer, modder DerSilver83 recently released the finished 1.0 release of WACRP (Warcraft Adventures Cutscenes Remastered Project). The mod contains 20 completely remastered cutscenes, including two which didn’t actually exist in the initial leak but appeared later on via a different DVD leak.
You can see an example of what this mod and its improved cutscenes look like in the video below:
DerSilver83 / Blizzard
A lot of work went into this release, according to the modder and the project’s website. Apparently, DerSilver83 hand-removed all the compression artifacts from all of the cutscenes. The modder also used Photoshop to painstakingly redraw entire frames and assets, frame-by-frame. Continuity issues have also been fixed and some new transitional scenes have been created entirely from scratch. All audio was also synced and everything now runs at the correct 12fps.
All told, DerSilver83 says they have been working on this mod for about six years, and this latest 1.0 release represents the end of the project. They explained in a post on July 31 that they have done all they can in what they call a “reasonable timeframe” and are happy with the end results.
“I want to remember this project as something fun before it transforms into some kind of a burden,” said DerSilver83 on the project’s site. “So this is it. The final release of my Cutscenes Remaster Project and I hope everybody who uses it can enjoy it as much as I do. I always wanted to create a substantial mod for a game I love and I can finally say that I have achieved (or at least tried) that.”
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Logitech G502 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming Mouse
Gaming! Uses exclusive ultra-fast wireless tech to make sure your mouse is faster than you are, can be sued alongside special software for highly-customizable performance, and has 11 buttons to mess around with, a hyper-fast scroll wheel, and RGB lighting too.
To actually play this, you’ll need to do some searching around the internet to find the appropriate files needed to play the full game, as this mod only contains the remastered cutscenes and nothing else.
In the meantime, you can read more about Warcraft: Lord of The Clans via this great story from our own Luke Plunkett.
Last month, EA announced new rules and restrictions on paid mods, early access, and how creators can advertise their creations. And this led to many unhappy responses and ongoing controversy within the Sims community.
The Sims 4 might have been released in 2014, but the life simulator continues to get massive official updates and boasts a large, active community of modders who regularly produce user-made content for the game on PC. Some of these creators make a living selling mods or taking donations from players who enjoy their work. So it’s not surprising that the July 26 update to EA’s policy—which outlined that selling mods or locking them behind a Patreon sub would no longer be allowed—set off a firestorm online.
In the update posted to the official EA Sims 4 help site, the company explained that mods can’t be “sold, licensed, or rented for a fee” and that mods can’t add or support “monetary transactions of any type.” What this means is you can’t stick your own digital store inside of The Sims 4 and sell NFT shirts or sell your mods via a website.
EA did acknowledge that developing a mod takes time and resources and allows for creators to sell advertisements on their modding sites and to take donations, but creators can’t include that stuff in the game itself.
Read More: Sims 4 Update Accidentally Adds Incest
But when this support page first went live, the part mentioning paid Early Access being allowed, wasn’t included. This led to a large backlash as many content creators and modders use the Early Access model to release mods to dedicated fans willing to pay before everything is working properly or finished. The idea is that once the mod is done, the devs release it for free and that paid period helps support them while working on finishing the mod.
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Vertagear Summer Sales 2022
Ergonomic premium quality Vertagear has a number of gaming chairs on sale right now. One in particular that caught our eye is the PL4500 which is embroidered with Swarovski crystals down to $500. You can also get one of their RGB kits to add a set of lights to either the top cutout sections around the headrest or a bottom LED kit for $200 to light up underneath like your chair is in Need for Speed: Underground 2.
EA seemingly coming after this fairly old system that was mostly accepted by the community went over about as well as you’d expect. It’s also quite a turn as the publisher is typically supportive of its Sims modding community. Gamespot talked to some content creators about the situation, with some explaining selling access to mods was how they were able to survive.
“Patreon early access is one of the only reasons I can afford my own medications, food, pet care, and apartment so I can live above my disabled dad to take care of him,” Sims 4 modder JellyPaws told Gamespot.
After a lot of backlash from players and some bad press, EA has now changed course and earlier today updated the help article to include a specific carve-out for paid Early Access. While straight-up selling mods or locking them behind a paywall is still a no-no, this new update does allow for the community-approved Patreon system.
Here’s the text EA has added to confirm it is okay with this type of paid mod system.
Offer an early access incentive for a reasonable amount of time. After a reasonable early access period, all users must be able to access the Mods in full for free regardless of whether they donate.
However, while this helped put out some of the fire, others are still nervous about how vague this new rule seems to be. How long can a mod remain in Early Access before EA declares it must be removed and published for free? EA only says a “reasonable amount of time” but doesn’t specify, likely to allow the publisher some wiggle room as they evaluate mods on a case-by-case basis.
Kotaku has contacted EA about the Early Access rule and asked for clarification.
For now, Sims fans and creators like KawaiiFoxita seem cautiously optimistic about the situation. Of course, if EA reveals that a “reasonable amount of time” is like five days or a week, it’s likely to find itself in another mess.
It all started with a question: “How do you get into the church?” The answer, it turns out, is simple: You don’t—at least not yet. Yes, Nier: Automata’s baffling secret door was all just an intricate mod.
If you haven’t been following along, Nier: Automata’s secret door had all the makings of a pantheonic gaming secret. Two months ago, one Nier player, known only as their Reddit handle, Sadfutago, started asking around on niche subreddits about a hidden church. But Nier: Automata, an action-RPG developed by PlatinumGames and released in 2017, didn’t have a location that matched such a description, which led the few people who paid attention to call bullshit.
Eventually, Sadfutago posted video evidence of the discovery, located in the Copied City, a level of Nier: Automata that’s devoid of color and texture, giving it the look of a game in early development. That clip—and subsequent, more extensive clips—sent the community into a tizzy. Some fans thought it was a legit instance of cut or hidden content for Nier: Automata. Others figured it was totally fake, either a hoax or a mod or a viral marketing campaign orchestrated by Nier director Yoko Taro, who’s no stranger to hijinks. (Here’s a thorough rundown of the whole saga.) More still did the one thing the internet does best: Meme it into oblivion.
Well, it turns out the whole area was the work of three modders: DevolasRevenge, who designed the geography and architecture; Woeful_Wolf, who created the tools in Blender; and RaiderB, who wrote the scripting tools. They’re planning on making everything public, but not for a few days, DevolasRevenge tells Kotaku. It’s been quite the week. They’re tired.
“Originally, it was supposed to be a little joke to show people, and we fully expected data miners like Lance [McDonald] and Grojdg to shoot us down in two seconds,” DevolasRevenge says. “But they were questioning it as well.”
The team’s statement.Image: DevolasRevenge / Woeful_Wolf_ / RaiderB
At first, the footage seemed legit. But over the past few days, Sadfutago’s posts have started to include dead giveaways. One of their latest Reddit posts mentioned “Zinnia”—a niche aspect of Nier lore—which indicated Sadfutago, whoever they were, was more knowledgeable than they let on. Plus, the whole church area contained assets from Nier: Replicant‘s more recent remaster, which came out in 2021. It’s a stretch of the imagination that the base version of a 2017 game could include character models from a 2021 game. (This discovery was widely believed to have been made on the game’s 1.00 version—meaning it hadn’t been affected by any post-release patches or updates.)
“Towards the end, I figured most people thought it was a mod,” DevolasRevenge said. “I didn’t mean to mislead anyone.”
DevolasRevenge said that some people “seem to be taking this negatively.” But over on the Nier modding Discord, at least, folks are in largely good spirits. They’re cracking jokes, validated in their assumptions that something was fishy with the church. Some prolific Nier modders are pumped to start working with a new suite of tools. While Nier: Automata modding tools are fairly sophisticated, modders haven’t been able to alter the game’s environment to the degree seen in the church videos.
“This will have quite a large impact on the community,” Meowsandstuff, a member of the Nier modding community and a leading figure in the hunt to prove the secret door wasn’t all it seemed, told me. “While we already had the tools to make similar stuff, from my understanding a lot of the newer things are much more better-developed and user-friendly.”
As part of his sleuthing, Meowsandstuff was designing his own version of the secret church. The architecture of the area was spot-on, but it kept crashing whenever you’d try to walk down the main hallway to the church. He’s now planning on polishing up the progress he’s made so far. He’ll scrap the rest, then use the new tools for a slew of other ideas, including one that renders the Nier: Automata map with the low-key look of the Copied City (which, by the way, sounds dope AF).
“I’m honestly feeling quite refreshed,” Meowsandstuff said. “I wanted to believe it could’ve been something that wasn’t a mod, but now knowing that this is a mod and knowing that we are getting access to the tools necessary to make stuff like this has really energized me.”
Earlier this week, The Sims 4 received a big, free update that added curved walls, body hair, and new wants and fears. It also seems to have accidentally added incestual relationships. Oh, and people are aging much faster, too. It’s a weird time to be a Sim, that’s for sure.
As spotted by PC Gamer, Reddit, and elsewhere, Sims 4 players are reporting that after the game’s July 26 update, some in-game characters are looking to date family members. One player shared a screenshot of an older woman who suddenly wanted to start a romantic relationship with her own son. Another player shared a bug report with EA stating that one of their male sims wanted to ask his twin sister to be his girlfriend. In that same support thread, a player on Xbox shared an offputting example of a daughter wanting to date her father. Yikes!
What’s going on here? Well, according to some Sims 4 players and modders, the likely issue is the newly added “Wants” system, which was seen in older Sims games. The system gives Sims things they want to do and accomplish, giving players more goals to chase. However, it seems that a bug with the system is creating “Wants” that involve romantic relationships with anybody, including other family members. Once again, yikes!
Thankfully, EA is aware of the bug. Yesterday, a dev on Twitter confirmed that the team knows about the incest issue and is “looking to get it fixed ASAP.” EA also re-confirmed that it’s working on a fix in a support thread about the bug on the publisher’s official site.
On top of this less-than-ideal bug, another problem some players are encountering in the Sims 4 after the last update is less gross and more existentially devastating.
Players are reporting that characters are rapidly aging. Some folks have experienced Sims aging from young babies to elderly adults in a matter of minutes. As with the “family members wanting to date each other” situation, EA is also aware of the issue and working on a fix. In the meantime, the company suggests players stick to the “Normal” lifespan option to avoid this aging bug.
Yayoi Sunset Bath and other beautiful VRChat worlds are now less accessible for some players.Screenshot: VRChat / Kotaku
VRChat’s had a hell of a week. On Monday, the wildly popular virtual reality social game announced that its next update would implement Epic Games’ Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) technology, prompting immediate outrage from a large portion of its playerbase. That update landed Tuesday, and since then, VRChat’s struggled to respond to growing fallout among its most dedicated players, some of whom are canceling their premium subscriptions and threatening to leave for other games.
VRChat, for those who haven’t had the privilege of jumping into what might be the best argument for virtual reality as a medium, is a game where anything can happen. The purpose is to meet other people, but because the game allows you to upload custom content, being social within VRChat can feel like a fever dream. You might pop into a rave where Mickey Mouse and Spongebob Squarepants are grinding, or perhaps dropping into a painstakingly-recreated Taco Bell that’s serviced by Superman and a furry is more your bag. Lauded as the already-existing Metaverse that everyone is racing to build, VRChat is one of the few cutting-edge products out there that still embody the messy freeness of the old internet, back when it wasn’t dominated by the same handful of companies.
And now, one of the core aspects of what made VRChat so great in the first place is in trouble.
On Monday, VRChat announced that update 2022.2.2, officially dubbed “The Security Update,” would institute something called Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) to crack down on “modified clients,” an expansive term which comprises both malicious hackers running modified VRChat software and everyday players using any of a wide variety of generally benign, community-made modifications meant to improve the user experience. VRChat claimed anti-cheat would make the game “a better and safer place to hang out,” while squeezing out hackers. Unfortunately, banning all client modifications would also largely destroy the game’s thriving underground mod scene, as well as prevent some people from being able to play.
VRChat has always had a contentious relationship with mods, which are officially against its terms of service. Last year, it went as far as banning the accounts of a number of high-profile mod developers for a while. But many players continued to use mods for a wide array of reasons. This led to an unspoken culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell”; mod users could generally avoid bans unless they flaunted their upgrades or otherwise caught moderators’ attention.
What’s more, oftentimes unofficial mods have been the only means by which to access certain features, ranging from support for exotic hardware like advanced trackers and networked sex toys to addressing accessibility concerns like closed captioning and text-to-speech. Also popular were mods that tried to protect against malicious “crasher” avatars, mods that helped to increase framerates in the notoriously sluggish, Unity-based game, and mods that allowed avatar searching, a basic-seeming feature that VRChat still lacks.
Despite VRChat’s official disapproval, it’s maintained a dysfunctional yet symbiotic relationship with modders, with user-made mods sometimes pointing the way toward future features in the official client. Such was the case with May’s “IK 2.0” update, which implemented much-improved body-tracking familiar to longtime users of the popular, previously essential IKTweaks mod. VRChat Inc. even has a history of hiring talented mod developers who emerge from the community.
That all in mind, it’s unsurprising that news of what’s effectively a total ban on modding went over poorly with much of the playerbase.
“Don’t think I’ve seen a bigger fuck up in gaming history,” one Twitter user replied to VRChat’s announcement. “This is a social platform with most of your player base using some sort of mod for enhancement, I use camera animations and emm flight to create videos on TikTok/YouTube, in what way is that harming your game?”
“I’ve been working on a video project, writing the script for weeks, commissioned some custom avatars, and this would include the use of the Freeze Frame mod so I can act out lots of characters in VRC by myself,” replied another. “Now that’s gone. Are you JOKING? Please don’t go through with this.”
A smaller number of players tweeted gratitude for the new anti-cheat, including world creators who said they were tired of having to troubleshoot user problems that traced back to mod usage, and players concerned about having their custom avatars “ripped” (stolen) by malicious players lurking in public instances.
Two users share unhappy sentiments on VRChat’s feedback site.Screenshot: Kotaku
In the wake of the announcement, angry players attempted to organize boycotts and commenced a review-bombing on Steam (by Wednesday, “recent reviews” had fallen to “Overwhelmingly Negative”). Players also made their displeasure known on Canny, VRChat’s official feedback platform. Before this week, the most popular Canny ticket ever was “Add Underaged Reporting,” with 2.4k votes (2.9k, now). As of this writing, the main EAC protest ticket, “EAC in a social VR game creates more problems than it solves,” is at 23.2k, followed by “EAC disproportionately punishes deaf and hard-of-hearing users” with 5.4k user votes.
On Tuesday the update went live despite this outcry, and a number of players are pissed to the point of threatening to leave the game. (Others are “just” canceling their VRChat Plus subscriptions.) Their two most obvious destinations are small-time social VR games ChilloutVR and Neos VR, both of which reached four-digit concurrent player counts for the first time ever on Tuesday. (Both would-be competitors remain dwarfed by VRChat, which reached nearly 90,000 concurrent users this past New Year’s Eve.)
History’s at play here, too. Players have long felt unheard by VRChat’s developers, and share a widespread perception that VRChat rolls out new features at a glacial pace. That often left unofficial mods as the only way to enjoy certain much-coveted features. Perhaps what stings most this week is the perception that VRChat’s anti-cheat launch hasn’t just blithely disregarded the general playerbase’s desires, but even the needs of players who literally relied on mods just to access the game.
“It’s unacceptable that the VRChat dev team is moving forward with an anti-modding solution that will disproportionately affect deaf and hard-of-hearing people, with massive accessibility gaps in the unmodified game,” user Foxipso wrote in the deaf and hard-of-hearing Canny ticket.
“It’s not really the fact that mods are banned,” wrote another user on the VRChat Modding Group’s Discord. “It’s the complete and utter disregard for community feedback, and unwillingness to adapt the game to fit people’s needs before making sweeping changes like this.”
So in a sense, this week’s events are akin to the straw that broke a long-straining camel’s back.
VRChat’s garnered over 20,000 negative Steam reviews this week.Screenshot: Kotaku
On Tuesday, VRChat attempted damage control by adding an update to Monday’s Security Update announcement blog. After affirming that the unpopular Security Update was here to stay, it started extending olive branches to the playerbase.
“Since the announcement yesterday, we’ve gotten a LOT of feedback from all of you regarding the incoming 2022.2.2 VRChat update that integrates Easy Anti-Cheat,” it wrote. “We are reprioritizing, reorganizing, and changing our internal development roadmap to focus on the feedback you’ve given us.”
It also acknowledged that many players have been left high and dry without their accessibility mods.
“We’ve been talking to VRChat communities and community leaders about the changes and additions that they want most, including speaking to communities focused on accessibility to VRChat,” it wrote. “Our first priority for these changes is addressing several accessibility concerns in VRChat.”
Tuesday’s blog post update concluded by promising an additional update, coming Wednesday, that would share more specifics regarding its updated development plans. It went live on Wednesday evening, about which more below.
“We’ve known that our users frequently use mods to gain added features that are not part of the base VRChat client,” a VRChat spokesperson told Kotaku. “We’ve done our best over the years to add these things into VRChat as we’ve been able. Two good examples are Avatar Dynamics and IK 2.0, both of which were released earlier this year. In many cases, these features had been in the works for a long time, and we really wanted to make sure they were next to perfect before releasing them.”
The spokesperson disagreed with the fairly widespread notion among players that EAC won’t actually help to suppress cheating, suggesting that “an increasing amount of hostile traffic” has been coming from hijacked accounts, whose owners have no idea anything is amiss until they suddenly get banned. They also cited seemingly benign mods that “report back” to a Discord, sharing sensitive information that can then be used to harass the user or their associates.
“EAC would put an immediate stop to both of the above examples,” said the spokesperson. “Likewise, we believe it will help prevent users from [experiencing] harassment (as previously mentioned, some modified clients are used to stalk and attack users), crashing, and more. Improving safety has been one of the biggest requests the community has had for a long time, and with this update, we’re addressing it in a very big way.”
VRChat’s spokesperson also pushed back against the notion that Easy Anti-Cheat could be easily circumvented by hackers.
“While we anticipate that malicious modders will attempt to circumvent EAC,” they said, “we haven’t seen any evidence so far that they’ve been able to do so. In the [event] that EAC was able to be circumvented, however, we’re confident that the EAC team would rectify that immediately.”
They said that EAC has been ready to ship for some time, but VRChat held off in favor of shipping other requested features first. VRChat’s spokesperson said that it couldn’t be put off forever, but even so, it’s unfortunate that some of the game’s most vulnerable users have been so badly impacted.
“Accessibility mods were also unfortunately caught in the crossfire. That’s something we want to rectify immediately,” said the spokesperson. “Many of the accessibility mods that people were relying on were fairly niche—it wasn’t until after EAC released that requests for them spiked. While there are some features that we know users wanted (but we hadn’t gotten to yet), that wasn’t the case with all of them.”
A user on VRChat’s official Discord server reacts to VRChat’s latest blog post on Wednesday evening.Screenshot: Kotaku
In VRChat’s late-Wednesday blog update, titled “Addressing Your Feedback,” the company laid out its initial plans to officially support several mod-exclusive features that the Security Update wiped out on Tuesday. Among these were a few accessibility features, including accommodations for color blindness and for users who play while lying down. The blog promised that all hands will be on deck for this effort, which will see new features prototyped and released more rapidly than in the past—mere weeks in some cases, it claimed. Commenting to Kotaku, the spokesperson pointed to VRChat Inc.’s increased hiring over the last year as one factor that will help it push out features more quickly than before.
(Ironically, a little additional relief may come from special user-made accessibility tools that can attach to avatars or be built into worlds, but these require much more per-user technical effort to implement, and are generally far less convenient than were the now-unusable mods.)
On the official VRChat Discord, initial player reaction to Wednesday’s “Addressing Your Feedback” blog seemed mixed at best. It’s clear that this first wave of promised updates will only just begin to start addressing the larger number of players with special needs who’ve been locked out of the game by the forced removal of mods.
Whether this week’s Security Update will go down as a decisive turning point in the history of the VRChat community or just a larger-than-usual blip remains to be seen. But two things are certain: A lot of players are angry, and the Security Update is here to stay.
“Whenever you are taking something from users, it’s always going to cause pain—even when there’s a good reason to do so. In this case, releasing EAC was something we had to do for the safety and security of our users,” said the VRChat spokesperson. “Our goal with this update wasn’t to make our users’ lives more difficult—we’re just trying to make VRChat a safer, more secure place to be. […] Security is never a ‘fun’ update, but it had to be done.”
Because Stray is out on PC, there are already mods for the game, and because Stray is a game about cats, a lot of those mods are focusing on that.
We’ve featured some here already, like one that lets you change the colour of the playable cat, but this one by Sirgalahad172 is a little less subtle. It takes the cat and replaces it with, as is now custom, CJ from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
The creator says “this mod is intended as a joke as cj needs to be modded in any game that exists XD”, which is fair enough, but I actually really like the story-telling possibilities here. I’ve seen people describe CJ’s stilted appearance here as “horrific” online, but I prefer to think of this—and his other modded appearances—as some wild GTA side mission where CJ is cursed by an evil wizard, and is doomed to spend eternity drifting through other video game genres, experiencing everything they offer that San Andrea’s sprawling landscape does not.
If you want to install the mod yourself you can get it here, but just know that the first few minutes of the game might be a little unsettling, as all the cats from the intro share the same model as the player, so they’ve got CJ’s new body, but not his textures.
While we’re on the subject of swapping the cat out with other animals, here’s another example, even if it’s not strictly a mod. Instead of modifying Stray, this video was actually made in Dreams on the PlayStation 5, and replaces the nimble little ginger cat with…a clomping big horse. Which would make it harder to do all the platforming stuff, I guess, but might also make dealing with the Zurks easier since you could just kick them in the face.
I know there have been a lot of attempts at releasing multiplayer mods for Skyrim over the years, but none of those have been as ambitious as the co-op mod Skyrim Together Reborn, which aims to get between 2-8 players running around in the same game, completing the same quests and fighting the same monsters.
The mod, which has been years in the making, was released last week. And while it’s not without its teething problems—you can read some of those here—for the most part it works, allowing players to jump into the same world and have all their actions and progress sync up.
To see what this is like in action, here’s a video the development team released earlier in the year, showing five players completing a few story missions:
Skyrim Together Reborn quest sync (5 players)
If you want to try it out yourself, the team have also uploaded this handy video which shows you how to install the mod, followed by how to actually get it running (it’s a lot easier than I would have thought, especially the latter, since all you need to do is wait til the intro is over then hit a “connect” button to join a server):
Skyrim Together Reborn: getting started and how to play
At time of posting, the developers say that ideally you want to be trying this out with 2-8 players. But there’s scope for much more than that. Here’s another video from earlier in the year, showing a stress test where over 25 players were on the same map at the same time (the devs have since said you can get 30+ if you’re really pushing it):
Skyrim Together Reborn stress test (25+ players)
If you’d like to install the mod, you’ll need the latest versions of either the Special Edition or Legendary Edition, then head here for the download.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is important for any number of reasons, for its pioneering place in a series that would go on to include Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim to the fact it was a Game of the Year winner in its own right. The thing is, the game is a 3D adventure from 1996, and trying to play it in 2022 sucks.
Not through any fault of its own! For the 90s it was doing its thing. It’s just that early 3D games didn’t have the same universal smoothness and ease of movement that we associate more modern titles with, and so anyone who has been more familiar with the series’ later games trying to play Daggerfall now would be in for a struggle, especially when it comes to combat.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall – Gameplay
Or, they would be if they were trying to play the original 1996 release (above). What they could be doing instead is playing the wonderful Daggerfall Unity – GOG Cut, which has just hit Good Old Games. It’s not an official Bethesda release; rather, it’s the work of a team of modders whose work has been packaged together for release on the shopfront:
Play a reimagined version of the all-time RPG classic from The Elder Scrolls series. Daggerfall Unity – GOG Cut brings this amazing experience to modern gamers. It has been made possible thanks to a whole team of passionate creators working under the banner of Daggerfall Unity.
This ambitious project, launched over a decade ago by Gavin “Interkarma” Clayton, is aiming to bring the unique experience of the classic open-world RPG game to a new generation of gamers. Thanks to the efforts of the GamerZakh, a gaming content creator with a love for classics, you can now enjoy a special GOG Cut of the Daggerfall Unity title.
All you have to do is download the game and simply launch it. The GOG Cut of Daggerfall Unity doesn’t require any special actions or updates on your behalf. Thanks to settings and mods that were selected by GamerZakh you can explore the rich world of Daggerfall with enhanced visuals and gameplay.
Some of the specific features of this bundled remaster of the game are some high-resolution visuals (remade entirely in Unity, hence the name) with new lighting, much longer draw distances, support for mods and most importantly a number of quality of life tweaks, including smoother first-person controls.
You can download the pack for free, and check out the full list of modders involved, at GOG’s site.
If you’re still playing Elden Ring and never want to stop, you’re in luck. A new randomizer mod for PC changes up everything from item placement to boss locations. You can even transform every enemy into Malenia. Consider it the unofficial “new game plus” FromSoftware was too merciful to ship itself.
Announced back in April, Matt “thefifthmatt” Gruen’s Elden Ring “Item and Enemy Randomizer” mod is now “feature complete.” It scrambles world, shop, and enemy items, as well as characters’ starting loadouts. Bosses can also be swapped. You can set key item locations to change as well. Everything is calibrated using sliders, so you can customize how the chaos all shakes out. The mod even has a completionist mode where you can’t complete the final boss fight until you’ve collected all seven great runes.
“In the best case, I hope the randomizer gives players an experience of discovery and adaptation not always found in normal re-playthroughs,” Gruen told Kotaku in an email. “Shuffle-based randomizers have fun design elements too, like knowing that thing X ended up in place Y lets you infer things about thing Y.”
Randomizers have become popular for games with high replayability where those who have already mastered the underlying game need new ways to challenge themselves. While the current 0.4.1 version of Elden Ring is still a work in progress, there’s a roadmap for future improvements and ongoing bug fixes. It also already supports co-op.
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Gruen said he was influenced by modder HotPocketRemix’s Dark Souls “Item Randomizer,” which inspired him to create similar versions for Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro. His experience on those projects helped prepare him to take on Elden Ring, whose randomizer clocks in at over 45,000 lines of code and more than 90,000 configuration files.
“Elden Ring is an intricate and generous game where 99 percent of players won’t see all 100 percent of it, so modding it requires a different approach to both mod design and implementation,” Gruen said. But the thousands of hours the modding community poured into FromSoftware’s earlier games have paid dividends. Aided by the Elden Ring’s technical improvements over its predecessors, they’ve been able to mod the game at breakneck speed.
“Many limitations which hindered modding in previous titles are gone,” he said. “I hope Elden Ring has a thriving future in the myriad ways people wish to experience it.”
While Elden Ring is technically playable in co-op, the convoluted way developers FromSoftware have implemented the mode means hardly anybody ever bothers. That’s about to change, thanks to this incredible mod by LukeYui.
It does…basically what you would have hoped the official co-op would do, by letting you and some friends jump into the game together and just play, with no weird rules or restrictions getting in the way. Here’s the official description:
Simply put, the mod allows you to play with friends throughout the entirety of the game with no restrictions. With this, it’s theoretically possible to play the game from the tutorial up to the final boss completely in one co-op session.
– If a player dies, they will respawn in the same world at the last bonfire they rested at. The session will not be terminated.
– Defeating enemy bosses and clearing areas no longer sends co-operators home.
– All fog walls/barriers that usually restrict the multiplayer zone (along with their respective teleports) are gone.
– All players can use torrent (assuming they have the whistle) in a session together.
– All map waypoints will synchronise, allowing you to navigate the world in a group easier.
– When one player rests at a Site of Grace, the world state will reset for all players. This is necessary to prevent enemy desync.
– Game progression events completed in online play will also progress the game in your own world.
Players are free to explore the entire game map (overworld, underground, legacy dungeons, etc.) together, and may split up if they wish.
Everyone can use Torrent? Waypoints are synced? Your progression carries over? Amazing! Of course, to get all that working, a few changes had to be made to the base experience. Most importantly, being able to wander around indefinitely with friends makes the game a lot easier, so a number of balance tweaks have been made, including adding a third tier of enemy scaling, locking anyone who dies in a boss fight into a spectator mode and inflicting anyone who dies in a co-op session with rot.
Invasions are gone, because they don’t work with the way the co-op mode had been built, and the Stakes of Marika have also been removed because they cause “connection problems”. And the whole thing basically comes with a warning that, while it works, it’s also still a work-in-progress and that players will be encountering bugs throughout.
If you want to install the mod and try it yourself, you can find it here.