Skyrim Special Edition brought us back into the world we all enjoyed playing when the game first released, but as with everything it did come with a downside. Skyrim had grown quite the sizeable modding community, and with Special Edition being 64-bit a lot of mods that previously worked with the original Skyrim became incompatible.

While a lot of mods just changed cosmetics (everyone’s see the Thomas the Tank Engine dragon reskins right?), there were also a lot of mods that expanded and built upon what Bethesda had already made and just made the game even better than it already was, to the extent that a lot of people now find it very weird to play without those mods enabled. One of the biggest casualties was Skyrim Script Extender, which helped a great many more Skyrim mods run as it helped increase the amount of commands Skyrim could run and handle at once. One of those that used it was SkyUI, which tidied up menus and allowed players to easily customise and toggle other mods on and off simply. Mods don’t need SkyUI to run, but it makes them a lot easier to handle with it.

Because of this, the team who made Skyrim Script Extender are planning to release an update for their mod sometime in mid-March, making sure that it will work with Skyrim Special Edition now. The last update in late December suggests that they’re making good progress, but still have a long way to go before they finish which is why they estimate March is when it’ll be available – and then only a beta version. The completed one will take even longer.

Once it and SkyUI are back, maybe the Skyrim modding scene will go through a second upsurge in mods being created. And maybe we’ll get an even funnier widespread mod than the flying tank engine dragons.

Nostalrius have been in the news quite a bit in the last few months, if you follow what goes on in the World of Warcraft and its gaming community. Unfortunately while the story has taken another turn, it’s not one that makes Nostalrius look that good in the eyes of the community. They have just asked a server hosting their source code, Elysium, to shut down – effectively handing them a cease-and-desist.

First of all, a little history so you can put that into context. World of Warcraft has been around for a very long time, and in that time an awful lot has changed as expansions brought new story and updates patched in and out certain things. Like anything else, nostalgia grew and Nostalrius was one result of that. The server launched on a private French server back in 2015, running a version of the MMO that was just like it used to be, back in the ‘good old days’. This was of course before Legion launched and players were feeling Blizzard had lost their way a little bit with WoW, so it got very popular. The only issue with this is that such projects? Technically illegal in the Blizzard’s Terms of Use for the game. However, because the Nostalrius team ran it so professionally, no one was really against them doing it. The team’s aim wasn’t to make money or steal the IP, they said their aim was purely to make Blizzard realise how big of a demand there could be for ‘legacy’ servers – servers that ran an older version of the game for those who missed it.

Fast forward to April of last year though, and Blizzard finally sat up and took notice of Nostalrius’ numbers. They handed down orders to the Nostalrius team to shut up shop as they were running an illegal server. The news was announced and in the days leading to Nostalrius’ closure; people paid tributes to the team, held vigils in server for the game and generally just poured out a huge amount of support and love for Nostalrius and its team. The team then managed to gain around 278,000 signatures onto a Change.org petition asking CEO Mike Morhaime to consider official legacy servers, and after all the support and outcry Blizzard then sat up and took notice in an entirely different way. Before Blizzcon they invited down members of the French team behind Nostalrius to talk about what they had been doing and about legacy servers, and people through they’d hear more about Blizzard’s official plans at Blizzcon or at least it would get a passing mention.

However, Blizzcon came and went with no mentions of legacy servers and the Nostalrius team seeing it as a sign that Blizzard were going to either drag their heels on the idea, or possible weren’t ever going to consider it announced they would be releasing their source code to allow other servers to take up their banner and continue to prove to Blizzard that legacy servers would be a good idea. They eventually ended up handing it over along with access to their character database to a Ukrainian team, which led to the creation of Elysium – which in many respects is Nostalrius respawned although Nostalrius characters had to be manually requested to be carry over to the new server.

So yes, one team behind an illegal server is asking another illegal server to stop using their source code – source code they handed to them in the first place. This hasn’t gone over well with the community, mainly because it’s just as ridiculous as it sounds.

Their excuse is that Elysium has missed the point of their mission, saying “we have the feeling that the main objective was missed”. They feel like Elysium has now built up a reputation as a ‘pirate’ server instead of a ‘fan’ one, and thus promoting people ripping off the game and setting up their own servers instead of trying to encourage Blizzard to eventually implement official legacy servers. “Until this stigma is removed, it’s unlikely any true progress towards official legacy content can be achieved.”

Elysium on their part have come back with a reply that said they’re going to maintain “All characters that have existed in the game world since Elysium’s launch” and that “all Nostalrius specific data will be wiped.” They believe that the process will take several weeks and will involve a transfer of the game’s files to their own core which they believe is now “equal to or superior to” the one they inherited from Nostalrius.

“Nostalrius handed us the torch, we have no intention of putting it out,” the statement says. “The environment within the game is wonderful, and is one of the key points to why we are so passionate about it. Fun, polite, social, and yet we find a completely different environment on social media.”

Everyone had a feeling the Elysium wasn’t going to be allowed to run without any problems, but I doubt anyone saw where the problem would come from. I don’t think this is over by a long shot.

Yesterday was actually Friday the 13th. I actually totally didn’t notice.

Anyway, Gun Media have been developing an asymmetrical multiplayer game based around the movie series of the same name (Friday the 13th that is), and saw yesterday as a good chance to release another trailer depicting some gameplay and revealing how one of the other Jasons will work.

This Jason is the one from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, and the film sees him being revived by a bolt of electricity from the dead. Which technically makes this Jason a supernatural undead killer. He has the ability to phase shift after fleeing camp counselors which makes him very, very hard to outrun if he sees you. He’s also armed with a spear, just in case they are keeping just out of reach.

In the more general area, Jasons have now been revealed to having throwing knives and darts that stun counselors for a second if it hits, letting the killer catch up easier. Oh, and it seems that friendly fire and team killing is completely possible if you’re with the counselor team, as during the video a counselor being chased is hit by a car being driven by some other counselor players. Ouch.

Check out the new video below:

At the moment, the big name in digital card games is Hearthstone, Blizzard’s free-to-play and very successful game based on their World of Warcraft lore. Outside of the digital market though, the physical card game market has quite a few more competitors and now one of the biggest names there is preparing to put more effort into the video game market.

Wizards of the Coast is known for their Magic the Gathering card game and according to president Christ Cocks they are planning to redouble their efforts in the digital market, having formed a new Digital Game Studio and hired industry talent from all over to help them with this. Among the team are people from Valve, Activision, Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment, BioWare and many many more, so they’re not short of experience.

According to Cocks, the team is currently experimenting with how to translate the Magic card game digitally and let players tap mana and prepare spells. The system could be a revamped mana one similar but not exactly the same as the one used in the physical game already. Of course, Wizards have already made a few attempts to translate Magic to a digital game, but neither Magic Online or Duels of the Planeswalkers really managed to catch the audience’s attention in the world of digital card game players. Let’s hope this attempt brings them more success.

As well, Wizards own the property of Dungeons & Dragons, and if the amount of online shows with a group of personalities playing through campaigns is any indication, a properly done digital D&D game would sell extremely well probably. I’d certainly consider trying it, if it looks worth the price tag put upon it.

Of course, this is all just talk at the moment. We’ll probably have a wait before anything concrete gets shown off to us or even rumoured.

Today saw the first of a new experiment Blizzard are trying with their game Hearthstone, a livestreamed Q and A to keep players up to date on what the developers are thinking about and how certain processes work as far as changes being made.

The stream lasted only an hour at most, but during it we got to hear a number of different thought processes that show how Blizzard watch their game and seek to keep the balance both in the meta as well as making the game interesting for both new and experienced players.

As far as keeping it accessible to new players they talked about how they’ve tweaked the Casual mode in the past to make it more welcoming for those just beginning to learn how to play. They said that in the past Casual had a few bugs, but now that it takes many things into consideration including card collection size, previous win rates and tries to match newer players against other new players so players play people of their own skill level more often.

With experienced players, they talked about how they’ve noticed that ranked ladder is beginning to feel very grindy to most players and measures they were thinking about with how to address that better. These included upping the total of bonus stars awarded upon the start of a new season, the addition of more brake points besides just the one around Level 20, and also possibly extending the win streak beyond Level 5. All these were just thoughts and ideas though, it was never said that all or even any of these would be coming to Hearthstone in the future.

As far as the meta balance, there was talk about how they think that Standard and Wild will become much more distinct once the next rotation of card sets happens. Right now, only two sets are outside of Standard, Naxx and Goblins vs Gnomes; but the next rotation will take many more sets out and limit them to just Wild decks. This means that a certain deck type could be very different in Wild to how it appears in Standard and it was hoped that such a thing would encourage the growth of more Wild-focused tournaments from fans and other groups.

There was also discussion about the rumours of possibly retiring some Classic cards to Wild too, versus what has generally happened before which is a nerf or effect change. Right now, neither option has been decided upon and Blizzard are still weighing up their pros and cons to both before decisions get made either way. Retiring to Wild might be more extreme, but there is also the question of people who come back to the game after months away and get confused with cards changed by nerfing – so it wasn’t stated either way that one or the other would be happening.

With the recent addition of the Streets of Gadgetzan set, the meta has changed already quite recently although it’s now had a few months to settle down into a regular routine. Speaking of what they saw, we were told that a lot of experimentation happened during the first few weeks as you would expect, before patterns began to emerge.

One of the biggest surprises to the team was that Pirate decks have been on the rise in Ranked ladder with the new Gadgetzan cards, with Warrior, Rogue and Shaman all making use of that Minion type heavily for weapon buffs. In fact, so much so that they expressed a little concern saying that the percentage of those decks in use right now was just a little bit higher than they generally like to see, and that if it didn’t change enough they might need to step in to tweak something to redress that balance. We were told it was not so much how many decks of that type exist, as much as which cards were seeing overuse in many decks – for example before its nerf Undertaker was seeing use in as many as 40% of decks at the time. Arena-wise, they have seen more Priest and Mage players beginning to claw back higher win rates.

So right now, that is the state of how Blizzard see the meta of the card game playing out. While nothing said in this Q and A can be seen as confirmation of things coming, we were told that 2017 is planned to be another big year for Hearthstone. Whether or not they’ll continue to do these Q and As is also to be seen as of yet.

If nothing else, we learned that those people with pirate decks should prepare themselves for choppy waters if Blizzard do decide to interfere there.