The second season of Fallout - Prime Video's mega-hit based on the popular video game series - has landed. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where Earth has been ravaged by nuclear war, the first series was a commercial and critical hit, impressing long-time fans and viewers who'd never played before. Its surprising success had a huge impact on Bethesda Softworks, the developer of its source material, bringing back lapsed players and creating new ones along the way. Key creatives from the company have told BBC Newsbeat about working with the show's producers, and what the success of the programme means for the future of the games. The first season of Fallout arrived at a turning point for Hollywood video game adaptations.

For months rumors have circulated that developer Bethesda was about to release a remastered version of its timeless classic action RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion–now one has finally arrived and it looks so good I can barely believe my eyes. The remaster boasts the complete Oblivion world–Cyrodiil and all–beautifully remade with high-resolution textures and new lighting. The graphical conversion comes courtesy of the game development engine Unreal Engine 5, with a little input from Bethesda's in-house gaming engine to keep it looking as true to the original version as possible. Thanks to Unreal Engine 5, players will now be able to play Oblivion in 4K at up to 60 FPS, enjoying a level of detail they could otherwise only dream of in the original. They can forget about wandering past trees and shrubs that seemingly appear in 2D, for example, because they'll now be rendered in mind-blowing 3D, like everything else in the game. In addition to a graphics overhaul, the remaster boasts an updated UI as well as updated sound and visual effects.

One of the worst-kept secrets in games is now completely out in the open. It's true, Bethesda has been shepherding along a remaster of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion with the help of external developer Virtuos. The publisher formally revealed the remaster on Tuesday. Never mind that screenshots leaked on Virtuous' website last week. You can play it right now as the game has landed on PC (via Steam and the Xbox App for Windows PC), Xbox Series X/S and PS5.

I am a few episodes from the end of the series Fallout on Prime Video. In other words, it's just like the games, which veer between quiet, tragic moments exploring the vestiges of America, and being chased down a hill by irradiated scorpions because you've run out of ammo. Fallout's ensemble cast – with Walton Goggins' almost-immortal ghoul and Ella Purnell's wide-eyed vault-dweller the standouts – lets it cleverly compartmentalise the different aspects of the games' personality. As its director Jonathan Nolan pointed out, when I interviewed him last week alongside Bethesda's Todd Howard (the director of the games), this is a common device in TV storytelling but rare in games. Grand Theft Auto V does it successfully: each of the three protagonists represented a different part of GTA's DNA (Trevor the violent chaos, Michael the prestige crime drama, Franklin the Compton realism). But in most games we play one character, and we know them intimately by the end – or we get to shape them, and they become unique to us.

Starfield just received some key updates promised by Bethesda a couple of months ago, the developer announced. Version 1.8.86 comes with DLSS support that finally gives users with supported NVIDIA cards features including DLSS Super Resolution, Deep Learning Anti-aliasing (DLAA), Reflex Low Latency and DLSS frame generation. That should assuage numerous grumbling users, many of whom used a controversial DLSS mod to tide themselves over. Along with DLSS, the update includes GPU performance optimizations that will help users with higher-end cards. Bethesda has also addressed memory leaks and other related issues, improved renderer threading and made a number of other stability and performance improvements.

Bethesda appears to have shadow-dropped (intentionally or not) a new mobile game set in a familiar universe. The Elder Scrolls: Castles is a building management game reminiscent of Fallout Shelter. The title, first spotted by Reddit user u/tracteurman (via GamesRadar), is available for Android but not iOS. "Oversee your subjects as the years come and go, families grow, and new rulers take the throne," the game's Play Store description reads. It describes a real-life day in the game covering a year within the virtual world.

Like several million other video game players, I spent many hours last week travelling the galaxy in Starfield, the latest adventure from Bethesda, the creator of Fallout and the Elder Scrolls. But as with a number of my colleagues in the games press, I have spent much of this time wondering what it is about the game that's not quite right, that's lacking somehow. The consensus – summed up neatly in Eurogamer's review and this PCGamesN op-ed – is that the game adheres too closely to the well-worn structure of modern open-world games, where an inescapable main narrative is bulked up with optional side challenges that give the illusion of freedom, without any of the substance or unpredictability, or indeed actual freedom. Starfield represents a highly commodified form of exploration in which player adventures are channeled into endless fetch quests and box-ticking busywork. You're free, but you're unable to create any meaning or narrative of your own.

For the past five years, the YouTuber Bacon_ has been uploading funny video game clips, nearly all of which come from titles made by Bethesda Game Studios. With the release of Starfield this week, Bacon_ has new fodder. "Just trying to get through my shift," which was posted four days ago, shows a Starfield NPC pounding a mining laser into his colleague's crotch. "So Starfield is out, and it's definitely a Bethesda game," Bacon_commented. For video games, technical difficulties come with the territory.

The Guardian's review of space exploration epic Starfield, Xbox's big game of the year, went live this morning – almost a week after other outlets published theirs. This is because Bethesda did not give our reviewer an advance copy, as publishers usually do. Along with several others, including the greatly respected games publications Eurogamer and Edge, we were left waiting until the game's early access release last Friday to play it. Bethesda's reasons for cherry-picking reviewers are known only to itself, but it's far from the only publisher to do this. Sometimes, controlling early reviews is a way to manipulate a game's Metacritic average in the crucial first week of release.

One of the only announcements at this year's Gamescom, an event replete with games to play but usually light on news (as Keith wrote in last week's newsletter), was that the demon-killing, time-deleting action RPG Diablo IV's second "season" would start on 17 October. That means new stuff for its 12 million players to do – vampiric powers feature heavily. But given that this game only came out in June and its first season of new content started in late July, it also means that its developers will have been working nonstop since its launch to get yet more game content ready to go. I have often wondered how the makers of live service games – "forever games" that essentially wish to monopolise a player's attention over an extended period of time, a still relatively new genre and business model that's emerged in the last 10 years – manage these brutal schedules. Twenty years ago, studios would release a game and that would be it; 10 years ago, they'd be on the hook for a patch or maybe a downloadable expansion, but not such an endless stream of content. So I asked Diablo's GM, Rod Fergusson – who has been running games teams for more than two decades, most famously with Epic Games on Gears of War – how they manage it.