Okay…what’s the last one of these I did? Ah…last Wednesday’s article. Well then.

Bethesda Softworks

Um…okay, well then. Let’s start with Bethesda, what say? Did you all notice that they overhauled their website recently? And The Elder Scrolls Online is hosting some sort of limerick contest.

Tom Francis has posted the next part of his ongoing Illusionist playthrough of Skyrim, which always makes for an amusing read. The bigger Skyrim-related news from last week, though, was this potential leak of information related to the upcoming Hearthfire DLC.

Also: this is totally my kind of Skyrim mod.

Eurogamer has a big Dishonored premiere this week, and (of course!) the game continues to look utterly fantastic. And Arkane Studios’ Raf Colantonio sat down with VG24/7 to discuss the gaming medium and gaming as artistry, and also with Rock, Paper, Shotgun! The Guardian also got a hands-on preview, and of course came away with a glowing report.

A pretty cool demo of Dishonored, featuring a macabre masquerade ball, was also released last week, again to rave reviews. And deservedly so; it looks nothing short of awesome. A second trailer, looking at the game’s stealth system, was also released…which, again, looks just amazing.

The more we see of Dishonored, the more it becomes apparent that Arkane are doing something truly marvelous, as well as something innovative and new. Is it any wonder that the game came away the winner at Gamescom, or that it’s being hailed as something that’ll save gaming?

And to close out the Bethesda section, Edge Online published a retrospective of Morrowind. Also, OpenMW 0.17.0 was released today.

Obsidian Entertainment

In a somewhat bizarre move, Chris Avellone and others did a “post-mortem” on Planescape: Torment with Eurogamer; Avellone also spoke with Kotaku about what a spiritual successor to said game might look like. Understandably, this kicked off a lot of speculation…though as yet, nothing has come of it. But Avellone has been talking about PST a lot of late; something has to be up.

Brian Fargo delivered a keynote at the Unite conference (the conference put on by the developers of Unity, the engine Wasteland 2 is using), in which he explained that his team were “kicking ass” without “corporate interruption” as they worked on Wasteland 2. A piece of enemy concept art was also posted on the inXile forums; check out the creepy dog-thing!

Oh, and one piece of very good news: Knights of the Old Republic 2 was released on Steam last week. RPS has a bit of a guide to getting the Restored Content mod working with it.

Larian Studios

Despite the theft of two PCs, Larian Studios still considers GamesCom a success, which is good. Sven Vincke also penned an interesting blog post about “the next Skyrim“, which focuses on the logistics and pitfalls of making a massive, open-world RPG. Worth a read!

Also worth a read is this Verge article about Divinity: Dragon Commander and the board game that inspired it.

CD Projekt

CD Projekt RED gave an interview recently about how they decide to keep or kill features in a game. They also posted some footage of REDkit, the soon-to-be-in-beta toolkit for The Witcher 2. In yet another post on their suddenly very active company blog, they discussed changing Geralt’s appearance between games.

CD Projekt RED are also hiring a lead animator, and a senior multiplayer programmer. One wonders if that’s another “research position”?

BioWare

Okay…here we go..the actual topic of today.

The chief operating officer of EA, Peter Moore, expressed confidence in BioWare despite recent controversies and mis-steps with their recent titles. Shamus Young, meanwhile, took the occasion of Guild Wars 2’s release to lambaste Star Wars: The Old Republic a little bit more. And Eric Schwarz at Gamasutra went after the game as well for its “ludonarrative dissonance“…whatever that is.

Oh, and speaking of SWTOR…sat down with Eurogamer to discuss, among other things, his plan for the ending of Mass Effect 3. Not surprisingly, his idea focused more on dark energy, the build-up to which can be seen in some of the missions in Mass Effect 2. Karpyshyn doesn’t take a position on the actual ending of the game, though he does mention that “synthetics vs. organics” was one theme that the team wanted to grapple with and wrap up.

The Leviathan DLC for Mass Effect 3 releases tomorrow, I believe, so do check out this trailer for it before then. As expected, it features a rogue Reaper…and an undersea sequence.

Oh, and don’t miss this Mass Effect fan art. Just…don’t.