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.

Microsoft is giving select PC gamers free access to four classic games by Bethesda and id Software, which it acquired as part of its $7.5 billion ZeniMax purchase in 2020. And three of them wouldn't have been released if the tech giant isn't acquiring Activision Blizzard, as well. In a post on the Xbox blog, Microsoft has revealed that Xbox Insiders on Windows PC can now preview Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, HeXen: Beyond Heretic, HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, The Elder Scrolls: Arena and Quake Champions. It's not surprising that the offer is only available for PC users part of Microsoft's Insider program -- as Ars Technica notes, the first four games in the list were originally released in the mid-90s and run via DOSBox emulation. DOSBox runs software for MS-DOS compatible games, but it's a pretty inelegant solution for making old titles playable. The Elder Scrolls: Arena is an open-world action RPG published by Bethesda, with a first person perspective and features melee combat and magic.

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below.This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Welcome back to Talking Tech. You likely heard me a couple days ago talking about Microsoft's huge deal to acquire Activision Blizzard, which is the video game publisher that makes a ton of big titles, including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft through Blizzard, and a host of others. The big concern for some video game players, particularly owners of a PlayStation, is whether they should be worried that one of the industry's biggest games and Call of Duty may no longer be on the platform.

Ever since Cats of Zero Wing delivered the oddly worded threat "all your base are belong to us" some 30 years ago, the writing in video games has been received with varying levels of enthusiasm. Often, it's denounced as stilted, hackneyed, and just plain nonsensical. At the same time, it has become a much loved, instantly recognizable genre unto itself. While the earliest iconically bad dialog mostly derived from poor translations--like Magneto in the 1992 X-Men arcade game introducing himself as "Magneto, master of magnet!" and shouting "Welcome … to die!"--a lot of it has been terrible all on its own: Peter Dinklage, for example, tried to take a subtle approach to the lines he was fed in Destiny and sounded unmistakably like he'd been drugged. Infamously, Hollywood has spent billions of dollars trying to adapt game franchises into movies and TV shows, yet decades since a goggling Dennis Hopper horrified children across the world with his turn as Nintendo's Bowser, it still hasn't succeeded.

E3 has returned, brought to you live via stream, offering free entry for all to make up for another year without the show's wild cosplay. If there was an overriding theme of this show, it was pandemic-related delay: A lot of the games we've been champing at the bit for are further away than expected, or made no appearance at all. If you didn't manage to catch all the conferences from the comfort of your desk chair, don't worry--sit back in relative comfort and peruse this summary of the best E3 had to offer. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Undoubtedly the moment of the show, Nintendo finally (finally) aired some gameplay footage from the sequel to its 2017 masterpiece.

That's how Bethesda Game Studios Executive Producer Todd Howard described the upcoming game "Starfield" in an exclusive video interview with The Washington Post. "Starfield," in development since 2017, represents the first new IP in 25 years for Bethesda, the video game studio behind the critically acclaimed action role-playing series "The Elder Scrolls" and "Fallout." The new space-based role-playing game will be released Nov. 11 of 2022 for PC and Xbox Series X and S. Because of major technological leaps since "Skyrim," the last Elder Scrolls installment from 2011, Howard said "Starfield" will be much more robust than that title, which won numerous game of the year awards. The first video footage of "Starfield," which kicked off the Microsoft/Bethesda joint presentation during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) Sunday, shows a fraction of the breadth of this brand new universe. How big could it get?

When you've got a discography like Todd Howard's, full of critically acclaimed games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, it must be hard to pick a favourite. But there is one game he remembers more fondly than anyone else does: the first he ever worked on. "Terminator: Future Shock," he says. "When [Bethesda] came to Fallout, people were saying, oh, you're doing a post-apocalyptic open world! But we already did that in Terminator. It's an underrated game that not a lot of people played. I think Quake came out right afterwards, that might have had something to do with it, and understandably so … Future Shock was made with eight or 10 people and it did a lot of things that no game had done. I remember it got critiqued at the time, which annoyed me to be honest. But now the things it did are commonplace."

Microsoft announced Monday that it will acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of popular video game publisher Bethesda, for $7.5 billion. Here, a Microsoft store is shown in March in New York City. Microsoft announced Monday that it will acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of popular video game publisher Bethesda, for $7.5 billion. Here, a Microsoft store is shown in March in New York City. In what is set to be one of the largest ever acquisitions in the video game industry, Microsoft announced Monday that it has reached a deal to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of popular video game publisher Bethesda Softworks, for $7.5 billion.

The studio behind video game franchises Doom and Fallout has a new home. Microsoft announced Monday it will acquire ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion. The deal includes Bethesda Softworks, the Maryland-based publisher that works on video game properties including Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. "As a proven game developer and publisher, Bethesda has seen success across every category of games, and together, we will further our ambition to empower the more than three billion gamers worldwide," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda, was founded in 1999 and currently has more than 2,300 employees.

After a period of invite-only early access, Bethesda has announced that The Elder Scrolls: Blades can now be downloaded and played by everyone with a supported iOS or Android device. That's right, there's no need to register for early access or even use a Bethesda account, you can just download the game from Google Play or the App Store now. When it was first announced, it was confirmed that Elder Scrolls: Blades would be coming to PC and consoles as well as mobile but for the moment the release is limited to mobile devices. That's no bad thing, though; in our hands-on review of the game we found Blades to be "a thoroughly enjoyable experience" despite not being a completely fresh take on the universe. While it's now open to everyone, The Elder Scrolls: Blades is still a work-in-progress early access game and this is worth bearing in mind before you play.