The Elder Scrolls

inside-the-quixotic-team-trying-to-build-an-entire-world-in-a-20-year-old-game

Inside the quixotic team trying to build an entire world in a 20-year-old game


Stories and lesson learned from an impossibly large community modding project.

The city of Anvil, rendered in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Credit: Daniel Larlham Jr.

Despite being regarded as one of the greatest role-playing games of all time, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind disappointed some fans upon its release in 2002 because it didn’t match the colossal scope of its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Almost immediately, fans began modding the remaining parts of the series’ fictional continent, Tamriel, into the game.

Over 20 years later, thousands of volunteers have collaborated on the mod projects Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel, building a space comparable in size to a small country. Such projects often sputter out, but these have endured, thanks in part to a steady stream of small, manageable updates instead of larger, less frequent ones.

A tale of (at least two) mods

It’s true that Daggerfall included an entire continent’s worth of content, but it was mostly composed of procedurally generated liminal space. By contrast, Morrowind contained just a single island—not even the entire province after which the game was named. The difference was that it was handcrafted.

Still, a player called “Ender,” stewing in disappointment over Morrowind’s perceived scope, took to an Elder Scrolls forum to propose a collaborative effort to mod the rest of Tamriel into the game. Tamriel Rebuilt was born.

After realizing that re-creating the entire continent was too lofty a goal, the group decided to instead focus on the rest of the Morrowind province alone—but that didn’t last long.

There had been others working toward similar goals. The makers of the fan project “Skyrim: Home of The Nords” were working on putting the province of Skyrim into Morrowind well before that location was officially made the setting of the 2011 sequel The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

A Khajiit attacks inside a fort in Skyrim

A screenshot from Skyrim: Home of the Nords.

Credit: Daniel Larlham Jr.

A screenshot from Skyrim: Home of the Nords. Credit: Daniel Larlham Jr.

Other modders were working on “Project Cyrodilll,” an attempt to put The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s province into Morrowind. In 2015, those two projects combined to form Project Tamriel, reigniting the goal of adding the remaining provinces of Tamriel.

Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel first became connected when the modders decided to combine their asset repositories into Tamriel_Data, but they have since grown closer through their shared developers, training protocols, and tools.

“The entirety of Tamriel is, in our scale, roughly the size of the real-life country of Malta, which is small in real life, but quite big from a human perspective,” said Tiny Plesiosaur, a senior developer who has done mapping and planning for both projects but who spends most of her time on Project Tamriel these days.

Both projects aim to create a cohesive, lore-accurate representation of these realms as they would have looked during the fictional historical period in which Morrowind takes place. So far, they’ve made substantial progress.

One thing in their favor, said Mort, a 13-year veteran quest-designer of Tamriel Rebuilt, is that Morrowind design makes it especially amenable to large-scale modding.

“I’d say the thing that makes Morrowind most conducive to these kinds of projects is no voiced dialogue,” Mort said. “The reason that you see so many quest mods for Morrowind as opposed to Oblivion and Skyrim and even Fallout is that the barrier to make a quest is essentially nothing.”

Frequent, contained public releases also work to their advantage. “I know for a lot of projects, they want to [do a] ‘we’ll release it when it’s done’ kind of thing,” said Mort. “We’ve found that releasing content builds hype, it gives players what they want, and perhaps most importantly, it serves as a proof of life and a fantastic recruitment tool.”

Every time Tamriel Rebuilt pushes a release, he said, the team picks up at least a dozen devs almost immediately. So far, Tamriel Rebuilt has seen nine releases; the most recent is titled “Grasping Fortune.” The next release, “Poison Song,” is expected sometime in 2026 and will include a never-before-seen faction. The most optimistic estimate for when the project will be fully finished is 2035.

A map of the province of Morrowind for the Tamriel Rebuilt project. Note that the original game includes only the large island in the bay in the top half of the image.

Credit: Tamriel Rebuilt

A map of the province of Morrowind for the Tamriel Rebuilt project. Note that the original game includes only the large island in the bay in the top half of the image. Credit: Tamriel Rebuilt

Project Tamriel has made most of its progress in Skyrim and Cyrodiil. The release of “Abecean Shores,” the coastal section of Cyrodiil, came in late 2024. Together, the projects have added hundreds of hours of hand-crafted quests, dungeons, and landscapes to a game that was already robust.

Lus said the current timeline for Project Tamriel is a new release for Skyrim and then Cyrodill, followed by either High Rock—a comparatively smaller, peninsula province west of Skyrim—or the desert province of Hammerfell.

For many developers, the point isn’t to see these massive projects in a finished state but to complete the next task and hopefully bring the team closer to the next release.

A brief history of Tamriel Rebuilt

Sultan of Rum, a kind of historian for Tamriel Rebuilt, joked that the project was aptly named because of how many times it has been rebuilt—partly because the tools the modders use to build the project have gotten better over time, rendering work done before those advances obsolete.

But even then, Tamriel Rebuilt was more of a Wild West in its infancy: a ragtag bunch of video game enthusiasts working mostly independently and without very much oversight. As the project has become more unified, it has meant a lot of turnover and a fair share of setbacks.

“If you took a satellite picture of the game world in 2005, you’d have essentially a complete province already,” Sultan of Rum said. “But the trouble was that the quality wasn’t good; there was no coherence. The 5 percent of the work to just create a landmass was done, but the management wasn’t there.”

Much of the project’s history has been lost to time as Internet forums disappeared, but Sultan of Rum has been able to piece together some of the growing pains Tamriel Rebuilt has endured. A struggle between the need to centralize and the desire of some modders to remain independent is a recurring theme.

One period is considered a dark age for Tamriel Rebuilt. In the first couple of years, a significant group of modders had been working on a piece of content for the project called “Silgrad Tower,” while the project simultaneously began consolidating to build continuity.

Concept art for the project. ThomasRuz

There was debate among the modders about where Silgrid Tower should be located and which faction would have controlled it. This eventually led to an acrimonious split between the two groups. “The Silgrid Tower team was eventually put to the choice of either having to delete their work and restart it or, you know, leave the project. So they left the project,” said Sultan of Rum.

He said that much of the conflict has since been scrubbed from the forum archives, and the ordeal led to the deletion of the Tamriel Rebuilt forums, which were hosted by the Silgrid Tower team. This was probably the most drama the project has seen, he said.

There was also a period when the project moved to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s construction set. “Maybe even a majority of the project jumped onto the [Oblivion] engine to start building out Hammerfell,” said Sultan of Rum. “So for a long time—four years—the sort of focus point of Tamriel Rebuilt was on Oblivion and on the province of Hammerfell, not on the Morrowind part, which of course was the successful one.”

Another event is solemnly referred to as “The Great Self-Decapitation.” Sultan of Rum explained that around 2015, some of the older guard—developers and administrators alike—left the project all at once. The exodus was due to the second scrapping of a large city in development.

“People were hoping that by 2013 it would come out. Literally thousands of hours of human labor were spent creating it in the construction set,” recalled Sultan of Rum. “It just turned out that it was non-viable as a playable space. It wasn’t thought out well enough, it didn’t coalesce into a compelling, playable world. The modders were faced with the prospect of having to throw out just a huge chunk of work.”

That decision sapped a lot of energy from the project, and others on the team began to move away from it as their personal lives became busier. Sultan of Rum said all this has made the project better in the long run. Project leaders soon instituted better planning and management systems that centralized information and preserved institutional knowledge in case longtime developers decide to leave.

Over the years, they’ve also refined their training practices, which has ultimately led to more developers joining both projects.

“If your goal is to get development done, providing as much detail and tutorializing and onboarding processes, making that as simple as possible is going to get you your best results,” said Mort. “Because, again, if you aren’t gaining devs, you’re losing devs.”

The parameters for onboarding new developers are now clearly defined, with a low barrier to entry focused on competence with the tools. These tests are called showcases.

Once the showcase is accepted, developers can begin working on both Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel, where much of the overlap between the two lies.

Mort added that the gap between a potential developer expressing interest and actively contributing can be as little as a week. This also allows movement between roles—for example, an interior designer training in exterior designing or someone starting in quest design moving elsewhere if it’s not a good fit.

Even more importantly, newer tech has improved the development process. The open source 3D modeling and animation tool Blender has become much friendlier to Morrowind modders, enabling teams to create custom assets more easily.

While this has required retouching some areas of Tamriel Rebuilt, it has also meant quicker turnaround times for custom assets. For Project Tamriel developers, the impact has been greater, as they can now reliably and routinely create assets to better represent Tamriel’s diverse cultures.

The old informs the new

The developers are well aware that both projects may still be unfinished 10 years from now, but most are just working toward the next release.

Discussing the project with just a few of the developers, it’s immediately clear how current work will inform future efforts.

For example, LogansGun is an exterior developer who did much of the work on the promotional videos for Tamriel Rebuilt’s last few releases. He joined the project because he wanted to leave his mark on this historical effort and ended up staying much longer than he thought he would.

Between work and raising a family, LogansGun often found himself working on Tamriel Rebuilt instead of playing video games, partly because of a childhood love for Morrowind and a desire to make the game more than it was.

“I remember playing it a lot, and it really stuck with me,” LogansGun said. “And it might have been like 5th or 6th grade that I had a friend and we all sat in like a four-student pod, and he would bring the map inside the plastic Xbox disc case. When we had some free time in class, he’d lay it out, and we’d all be looking all over the map of Vvardenfell and all the things that we had explored or wanted to explore.”

A city spire against the sky

Another environment from the game, Old Ebonheart.

Credit: Daniel Larlham Jr.

Another environment from the game, Old Ebonheart. Credit: Daniel Larlham Jr.

Meadhainnigh, a college-aged chemical engineering student, first learned about Tamriel Rebuilt through the promotional video for Grasping Fortune, the project’s most recent update. The roughly three-minute video showcases some of the landscapes, cityscapes, and interiors, the culmination of thousands of hours of work. LogansGun is credited as the creator of that video, which has been used to inspire the next wave of contributors.

“I was thinking, well, this seems like a really cool project, and I just wanted to contribute and feel part of something bigger, and the rest is history, really,” said Meadhainnigh, who is now an asset dev for Project Tamriel. “But I joined the Discord server. I kind of learned the process of the project, and once I felt like I knew what I was going on, I tossed my hat in the ring.”

Meadhainnigh knew very little about development before he joined the project, and he said it’s the first online community he has been a part of. What keeps him going is that community—and to see his and others’ work become a part of a whole.

“We have some really wonderful people who are the old guard that feel like they are the comfortable welders, and they’re all very wise,” he said. “But even in the newest editions, we’re not here because we think that it’s all going to be done within our lifetimes. We like to joke about 2090 and about raising our children to work on the project. We just like to look at the next release, and that tends to be exciting enough to get us going.”

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A question for the ages: Is The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall a good game?


Revisiting the 1996 RPG exposes both genius and madness.

A render of a book in a library in Daggerfall

Daggerfall certainly has ’90s DOS RPG charm in spades. Credit: Bethesda

Ostensibly, C:ArsGames is to some extent about actually driving a few game purchases, but in reality it’s mostly an excuse for me and my colleagues to wax nostalgic about the games that were formative for us. Case in point: This entry in our ongoing series with GOG is about a game that’s completely free. I think Ars can withstand this tiny revenue shortfall for the sake of peak nostalgia!

There are a couple of reasons I chose The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall this time around: its co-creator, Julian LeFay, recently passed away, so it seemed timely. Also, it was one of the defining games of my youth—one I have continued to revisit now and then.

But it’s also interesting because of where its developer, Bethesda—a studio people both love and hate—is at today. Going back to Daggerfall, we find a game that shows off so much of what we’ve lost from the bygone era of ’90s PC gaming, but also one that makes it abundantly clear why the industry left those sensibilities behind.

I’ll spoil the conclusion though: I still love this game. It’s profoundly not for everybody, but it’s definitely for me.

The kids don’t get it

OK, so we’ve established that I love Daggerfall. Knowing Ars Technica’s readership, some of you probably do too. So who, exactly, doesn’t like it?

Just search YouTube and you’ll find a bunch of videos with titles like:

Ouch. That’s rough. Granted, one of those isn’t actually negative if you sit through the video, but it still acknowledges that it’s not easily accessible for everyone.

Look, I get it. Daggerfall hails from an era when “game design” primarily meant “experiment with programming techniques to come up with cool, unproven stuff no one’s seen before” rather than “meticulously craft a conveyor belt of nonstop fun via proven formulae.”

Those experiments are all exciting and interesting, and it’s refreshing to go back to an RPG from this era that was willing to try some wild ideas and deep systems, as opposed to most (not all!) RPGs today, which seem to have the same basic format with talent trees and so on.

I love that Daggerfall includes odd mechanics that you don’t often see in RPGs, like climbing. I like its vast world and accurate representation of most wilderness as meaningless liminal space. I think its opaque and sometimes maddening faction reputation systems are fascinating. Its character progression system is detailed and interesting.

I know this is already what the game is best known for, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the scope of the game’s map is staggering. Credit: Samuel Axon

For me, the most frustrating aspect to Daggerfall is not its jazzy mechanics. It’s the mechanics that aren’t explained at all.

For example, in the playthrough I started to refresh my memory for this article, I spent a couple of hours doing quests in Wayrest, one of the most prominent cities in the game. Everything seemed to be fine as I rode my horse around town helping people out, training my skills, and buying new gear. But then a guard ran up to me and arrested me for assault. Who did I assault? I had no idea, but I pled guilty in order to get a softer sentence, even though I was pretty sure I wasn’t actually guilty.

I wrote that off as a fluke, but then it happened again: assault. And a third time, again assault. I couldn’t fathom why I kept getting arrested.

To DuckDuckGo I went for a quick Internet search to see if anyone else was having this problem. It was pretty common, and the cause was something I never would have imagined: I had been riding my horse around the town, galloping for speed to complete quests faster. It turns out that galloping too close to wandering NPCs in the street registers as assault, with penalties of up to a month in prison and hefty fines.

There was no feedback about this when it was happening. I didn’t even know I was doing it. I don’t specifically remember having this problem back in the ’90s, but it seems likely I did, and I must have just shrugged it off, because back then I would have had no way of figuring out what was going on.

I get why this sort of thing is a big barrier to new players, but I also think some of the YouTubers I watched applied a double standard. One complained that the game doesn’t explain itself, but then in the same video extolled the virtues of Minecraft—a game that explains itself even less.

Save early and save often. That was ingrained in me by ’90s gaming. Watching some of the YouTubers take this game on, it stressed me out how little they saved. Credit: Samuel Axon

It may be that we’re more patient with learning games when we’re kids. I played Daggerfall as a kid (well, a young teenager) so I’m relatively chill about its opaqueness and idiosyncrasies. That YouTuber played Minecraft as a kid, so that’s the one he’s willing to gloss over.

If you’re willing to spend a lot of time on wikis (just like with Minecraft) then Daggerfall as a lot to offer to those who are patient. I often feel the most engaging games in the long run are ones that have a steeper learning curve up front.

The unspoken spiritual successor

Of course, it’s not just the learning curve or opaque mechanics that are an issue for many players. A lot of people don’t like Daggerfall‘s procedurally generated world and quests—especially players who are used to Skyrim‘s more hand-crafted environments and quest lines.

Yes, Skyrim has “Radiant Quests,” which resemble Daggerfall‘s. But with the exception of a relatively small number of main story missions, Daggerfall only has what Skyrim calls Radiant quests.

A loose modern analogue to that is Elite Dangerous, which has no meaningful story content at all. Some people might be more comfortable calling that a simulation than a game.

But there’s another modern space title that has some strong resemblances to Daggerfall: Bethesda’s own Starfield. As with Daggerfall, Starfield has a small cohort of obsessive fans amidst a much larger crowd that thinks it’s just terrible.

When people bought Starfield, they were expecting Skyrim in space. I believe that one of the reasons a lot of people were disappointed was that they actually got Daggerfall in space, and that’s a very different experience.

Like Daggerfall and Elite Dangerous, Starfield not only accepts but even centers the notion that most of the environments are filled with, well, not a whole lot. It accurately reflects what space or wilderness actually are and makes much of the game a slow-paced mood piece rather than a constant dopamine dispenser.

Starfield has some structural and design similarities to Daggerfall. Credit: Bethesda

Most of Starfield‘s dungeons are randomized. It’s more about taking in the vibes and playing with the systems than it is about following an authored narrative—though Starfield does have an authored narrative. (It’s just not the game’s strongest suit, so it explains why people who are looking for that aren’t big fans.)

Granted, there’s little crossover between the original Daggerfall team and the folks who made Starfield. Daggerfall was pre-Todd Howard-as-creative-director and pre-Emil Pagliarulo, the two main creative leaders at Bethesda Game Studios since the Morrowind days.

But that’s why it’s all the more surprising that Starfield is, at best, a hybrid of the sensibilities of Daggerfall and Skyrim. Given those YouTubers trying and failing to play Daggerfall in 2025, it’s no wonder that Starfield didn’t land for a lot of people.

(I quite like it, personally, but I also like Daggerfall, so I’m either a masochist, old and archaic, or just plain wrong, depending on who you ask.)

A pure expression of one of gaming’s oldest dreams

There has long been a recurring dream in PC gaming of one super game that would allow you to fully live out a particular fantasy life of your choosing. Whether it was intended by developers, promised in marketing, or just in hopeful players’ heads, there’s an appeal to the idea of living an alternate existence in a sophisticated simulated world that’s so immersive in its escapism that you reliably forget your real life for hours on end. The idea is “I want to be a space trader,” or “I want to be a wandering fantasy adventurer,” and the game gives you a toolkit that’s both wide and deep to experience that entirely on your own terms.

A lot of times, the titles that went for this on some level seemed more like simulations than games or stories. They were less consistently fun than other games, but they were often profoundly ambitious.

Since they were all about helping a player live out something in their imaginations, they were also prone to viscerally negative reactions at launch from people who had personal expectations that didn’t map to the reality of what a game can actually do or chooses to focus on. (This continues today: look at the reactions to No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, and yes, Starfield.)

Daggerfall is one of those games. It is not for everybody. But for that niche group of players who are up for something jazzy and simulation-y that takes risks to let them live an alternate fantasy life that’s as much in their head canon as on the screen, it’s one of the best games of all time.

I strongly believe it’s important to judge a game (or any other art or media) more on whether it achieves what it’s going for than whether it meets whatever external expectations you might bring to it. If you agree, then that puts Daggerfall in a better position than if you have a more prescriptive attitude about game design.

The fidelity expectations of modern AAA titles and accompanying scope and cost make the kind of experimental, life-sim focus of a game like Daggerfall all but impossible to pursue now, but I miss it. Personally, I’ll usually take a deeply flawed work of sheer ambition over a retread of proven ideas I’ve already experienced before, no matter how skillfully crafted and consistently fun the latter is.

Yeah, I enjoy a good formula game now and then; my point was exactly that when I wrote about Assassin’s Creed Shadows a few months ago. But as much as I have enjoyed Shadows, it won’t stick with me for 30 years. Daggerfall has, and revisiting it this week, I can see that’s not purely because of nostalgia. It represents a maximalist philosophy of game design I feel is sorely underrepresented in today’s market.

A screenshot of a town from Daggerfall Unity

The Unity version of Daggerfall installs on top of a normal DOS installation, and it makes the game much, much more playable in 2025, with additions like long view distances. Credit: Samuel Axon

If that’s your inclination, too, it’s worth giving Daggerfall a shot. Just make sure to use the far more accessible Daggerfall Unity remaster on top of the GOG classic version you download, and be ready to look at the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wiki a lot. Make sure you have a couple hundred hours to kill, too.

Oh, that’s all, eh? Hey, you could always make it a project in your retirement.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Photo of Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

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Julian LeFay, “the father of The Elder Scrolls,” has died at 59

Julian LeFay, the man often credited as “the father of The Elder Scrolls,” has died at the age of 59, his creative partners announced this week.

“It is with profound sadness and heavy hearts that we inform our community of the passing of Julian LeFay, our beloved Technical Director and co-founder of Once Lost Games,” his colleagues wrote in a Bluesky post.

LeFay spent most of the 1990s at Bethesda Softworks, culminating in his work on The Elder Scrolls series into the late ’90s.

His career didn’t start with The Elder Scrolls, though. Beginning in 1988, LeFay made music for the Amiga hack-and-slash game Sword of Sodan as well as the NES game Where’s Waldo, and he did design and programming work on titles like Wayne Gretzky Hockey, the DOS version of Dragon’s Lair, and two DOS games based on the Terminator movie franchise.

In the early ’90s, he joined fellow Bethesda developers Ted Peterson and Vijay Lakshman on an Ultima Underworld-inspired RPG that would come to be called The Elder Scrolls: Arena. Though famed creative director Todd Howard has helmed the franchise since its third entry, The Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall were chiefly spearheaded by LeFay. One of the gods of The Elder Scrolls universe was named after LeFay, and the setting was inspired by the literature and tabletop role-playing games LeFay and Peterson enjoyed.

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“Older than Google,” this Elder Scrolls wiki has been helping gamers for 30 years


Interviewing the people behind the 30-year-old Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.

A statue in Oblivion Remastered

The team is still keeping up with new updates, including for Oblivion Remastered. Credit: Kyle Orland

The team is still keeping up with new updates, including for Oblivion Remastered. Credit: Kyle Orland

If at some point over the last 20 years you’ve found yourself in an Internet argument or had a question in your head you just couldn’t seem to get rid of, chances are good that you’ve relied on an online wiki.

And you probably used the online wiki: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. But for video games, Wikipedia provides a more general, top-down view, painting in broad strokes what a game is about, how it was made, when it was released, and how it was received by players.

In addition, many games and franchises have their own dedicated wikis that go a step further; these wikis are often part game guide, part lore book, and part historical record.

But what does it take to build a game wiki? Why do people do it? I looked to one of my all-time favorite games for answers.

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages

It had been at least 10 years since I last played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion before this past fall, when I decided somewhat arbitrarily to put another 80-or-so hours into a new save. Rushing through the first few parts of the main questline, it felt like I was visiting home, right up until I was named “Hero of Kvatch.”

Then, though, it quickly began to feel like I was playing the game for the first time, and, to put it mildly, I was getting beaten to a pulp across Cyrodiil.

While it was great to re-explore the game that consumed so many hours of my life and discover again what made the 2006 release an instant classic, I was frustrated that I had forgotten how the game worked.

Without the official manual that came with my now surely sold-to-GameStop Xbox 360 edition of the game or the Official Prima Strategy Guide, I quickly found myself (as countless others do) on The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.

Broadly, UESPWiki is an impressive information repository of The Elder Scrolls franchise. It also documents the dense, often convoluted lore of the franchise, as well as books and merchandise sold alongside the games, and the multiple tabletop games.

The homepage for UESP, with a classic wiki design

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages as they appear today. Credit: Samuel Axon

For all its uniqueness—the sort of early “Web 2.0” design style, limited advertisement space, and its namespace-centered way of organization—the UESP is an independent wiki at its core. It has all the bone structure that makes a wiki accessible and easy to use and is driven by a dedicated community of editors.

The wiki currently maintains over 110,000 articles. The phrase “We have been building a collaborative source for all knowledge on the Elder Scrolls series since 1995” is written at the top of the home page. This year, UESP is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

“The phrase I always say is ‘we’re older than Google,’” said 51-year-old Dave Humphrey, founder of the UESP. “Obviously, we’re not as big or as popular as Google, but we’re older than Google, and we’re older than a lot of websites. In fact, I don’t think there’s any other Elder Scrolls-related website that’s older than us.”

The earliest version of the UESP wasn’t a wiki at all and is just a little older than 30 years. It was a message distributed through USENET called Daggerfall FAQ, originally published in the fall of 1994, and it featured prerelease content about The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.

A year later, the Daggerfall FAQ would become a webpage, and a few months after that, it would become the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, which was just a webpage at the time, to include information about The Elder Scrolls games.

When The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind released, it was the franchise’s biggest game at that point, and Humphrey quickly became remarkably busy. He wrote hundreds of entries for the game and its two DLCs while maintaining his regular job. But the more he did, the more reader emails suggesting new entries and edits to the site came in. In 2005, UESP officially became a wiki.

“It was too much for me to do as a full-time or second full-time job sort of thing,” Humphrey said. “That’s when I decided instead of having a regular webpage, we’d move to a wiki-based format where instead of people, you know, emailing me, they can edit their own tips.”

In 2012, Humphrey officially made the UESP his full-time job, but he is largely no longer involved in the content side of the wiki. He instead maintains more of an overseer role, doing most of the back-end server maintenance, programming, and cluster design for the site.

What sets UESP apart, at least from Humphrey’s perspective, is the creativity and decision-making capacity derived from its independence. This allows the team to run the ads they choose and implement new utilities like the ESO Build Editor.

“We’ve been asked to join larger wiki farms before, and while it might make sense from a technical standpoint, we would lose a lot of what makes UESP unique and long-lasting,” said Humphrey.

In fact, UESP has been slowly expanding over the years and is starting to host wiki sites beyond The Elder Scrolls. In August 2023, the site launched the Starfield Wiki, which already maintains over 10,000 articles and has unofficially taken over all the construction set wikis for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises. Currently, Humphrey said, UESP is looking at hosting a few more existing game wikis later this year.

As for the Elder Scrolls series itself, The Elder Scrolls VI is still well into the future. But at the time of my interview, the Oblivion remaster was just social media speculation. Still, Humphrey predicted how the game might change the wiki.

“It comes down to the organization of the site. We sort of have to deal with that a bit with DLCs. There’s the base game, and then there’s the DLCs; for the most part, DLCs are their own contained area, but they do modify the base game as well,” said Humphrey.

“We’d probably take a similar approach with it, creating their own namespace underneath Oblivion and putting all the remake information there,” he added.

It’s always a challenge to determine how to organize things like DLCs and remakes into the wiki, Humphrey said. He noted that he would ultimately leave it up to the editors themselves.

Since the release of Oblivion Remastered, the game has, in fact, received its own namespace, and editors are already documenting some of the changes.

A changelog on the wiki

There’s a detailed page listing every known change in the Oblivion remaster. Credit: Samuel Axon

When it was still the Daggerfall FAQ, Humphrey wasn’t thinking about what it would look like in 2025 or how a community could be built around a website; he was simply someone with a passion for the game who liked building things.

But as time went on and Humphrey began attending conventions and Elder Scrolls-related meetups, he started to realize the kind of community that had naturally formed around the site.

“It’s not something I planned on doing, but it’s really neat, and it’s something I’m more aware of now in terms of doing community-related stuff,” Humphrey said.

That community, which has over 23,000 users with at least one edit in its history, measures the success of the wiki not by the quantity of content but the quality of the pages themselves. Humphrey leaves most of the content decisions up to those editors.

Scraping and editing

Robert “RobinHood70” Morley—a 54-year-old native of Ottawa, Canada—has been editing the pages since May 2006, just a short time after UESP turned into a wiki, while playing through Oblivion.

He explained that he found the wiki at a critical time, shortly after he fell ill with a sickness that doctors struggled to diagnose.

“Getting involved in the wiki provided a bit of a refuge from that,” Morely wrote through Discord. “I could forget how I felt (to some degree) and focus instead on what was going on the wiki. Because I couldn’t really leave the house much anymore, I made friends on the wiki instead and let that replace the real-life social life that I couldn’t have anymore… That continues to be the case even now.”

He didn’t necessarily set out to find that kind of community, which was much smaller at the time, but he recognized that it was helping him cope with things. Not only did editing give him a sense of accomplishment, but he enjoyed seeing what others were able to do.

Over the years, Morely’s involvement in the wiki has grown. He’s gone from a regular user to an admin to a bureaucrat. He’s the only editor with access to the servers other than Humphrey. He now does the critical job of running bots through the game pages that add bulk information to the wiki.

“In some sense, a bot is like any other editor. It adds/changes/removes information on the wiki. The difference is that it does so several thousand times faster,” Morley said. “Bots are often used to bulk-upload information from the game files to the wiki. For example, they might provide the initial documentation of every NPC in a game… They would provide the hard stats, but afterward, people would expand the page to provide a narrative for each character.”

When an Elder Scrolls Online update goes live, for example, Morley quickly deploys the bot, which detects any changes in the new versions of the game, such as skill and stat adjustments. All that added information is dumped into the wiki to provide human editors with a base to start from.

That’s similar to the process of creating pages for a brand-new Elder Scrolls game. The game would be scraped shortly after it was released, and editors would get busy trying to figure out how those pieces fit together.

Once created, the pages would be edited and continuously retouched over time by other editors.

Those editors include people like 26-year-old Dillon “Dillonn241” D., who has been a part of the wiki for over half of his life. He first discovered and began editing pages of the UESP at 11 or 12 years old.

While his activity on the wiki has ebbed and flowed over the years based on interest and the demands of daily life, he says the community is a big part of what keeps him coming back—the near-endless nature of collaboratively working on a project. He enjoys the casual conversations on the wiki’s Discord server, as well as the more focused and pragmatic discussions about editing through internal channels.

He has since become a prolific editor and was awarded a “gold star” on his talk page last year for editing more pages than anyone in 2024, with a total of 18,864 edits.

“I don’t want to call it an addiction because that makes it sound bad, but it’s kind of like—you know, I guess I have an hour here. I’ll just hop on UESP and edit a few pages or see how things I’ve edited have been doing.”

Most of those edits, he explained, were likely minor, things like fixing grammar, sentence structure, and formatting to better conform to the wiki’s internal style guide. In this way, he considers himself a “WikiGnome”—someone who makes small, incremental edits to pages and makes changes behind the scenes.

When he’s in the mood to do some editing, he’ll jump around the wiki using the random button for a couple of hours and make changes.

All those hours have given him not only refined copy editing skills but also a serious familiarity with the pages. Dillion says he can jump on just about any page and find at least one of his edits on it.

He has done a lot of work on the namespaces for the Tamriel Rebuilt mod and essentially rewrote the entire namespace for The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, a game he doesn’t particularly enjoy playing but started on a whim.

“At some point, I stumbled across the wiki section for it and was like, well this is nothing, this is awful,” he explained.

He recalled getting stuck on a section of the game, and the wiki wasn’t able to help him. He was able to stumble through the game but decided he would completely fix its entries so they would be more helpful to future players.

Now, the Redguard namespace includes detailed descriptions of the quests, characters, and items, along with photos, most of which Dillion took himself. He says that if the game and all its files were somehow wiped from the earth, developers would be able to remaster the entire game in Unity based just on what’s in the wiki.

A screenshot of the Redguard wiki page

Yep, he took those screenshots. Credit: Samuel Axon

“I guess that’s kind of the end goal,” he said, “and some of the namespaces are kind of close, like Oblivion I would say is kind of close to where the things that you can still add to the page are getting minimal.”

Efforts all over

While Dillion is a more prolific editor than most and Morley plays a more specific role in the wiki than others—and Humphrey represents the original jumping off point for the former two—it’s the combined effort of thousands of editors like them that make the UESP what it is.

And across the Internet, there are equally involved editors working on an endless number of wikis toward similar goals. In a way, they are remaking the games they love in a text-based format.

At their core, these community efforts help players get through games in a time when physical guides often no longer exist. But in the aggregate, deeper, centralized insights into these games can ultimately contribute to something new. A record over time of how a game changes and how it works can lead to discovery and debate. In turn, that could spark inspiration for a mod—or a new game entirely.

“Older than Google,” this Elder Scrolls wiki has been helping gamers for 30 years Read More »

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You can play the Unreal-powered The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remaster today

The worst-kept secret in the gaming industry in 2025 is no longer a secret: Bethesda Game Studios’ 2006 RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has been remastered, and that remaster has already been released on all supported platforms today.

A livestream featuring developer sound bites and gameplay footage ran on Twitch and YouTube today, making it official after years of leaks.

Oblivion was the immediate precursor to The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim, which became one of the most popular games of all time—but Oblivion was pretty popular in its time, too, and it was the first game in the franchise that would end up feeling at all modern by today’s standards. (I personally will always love The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, though.)

Like Skyrim, it straddles the line between story-based fantasy RPG and systems-based, emergent gameplay playground. It’s less structured and accessible than Skyrim, but it offers far more robust character customization. It’s infamously janky, but largely in an endearing way for fans of the franchise. (Players who prefer a polished, curated experience should surely look elsewhere.)

The Oblivion livestream reveal.

The port was not handled directly by the original developer, Bethesda Game Studios. Rather, people within BGS worked closely with an outside developer, Virtuos.

Virtuos is a sprawling, multi-studio organization with a deep history as a support studio. It contributed to a whole range of games, like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, The Outer Worlds, and more. It also was involved in some previous well-received remaster efforts and ports, including Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection and Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster. Based on the footage in Bethesda’s reveal video today, it appears that Oblivion Remastered was largely developed by Virtuos Paris.

It’s important to note that this is a remaster, not a remake. This project uses Unreal Engine, but only for the presentation aspects like graphics and audio. Bethesda’s proprietary Creation Engine is still there handling the gameplay logic and systems.

You can play the Unreal-powered The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remaster today Read More »

ars’-favorite-games-of-2024-that-were-not-released-in-2024

Ars’ favorite games of 2024 that were not released in 2024


Look what we found laying around

The games that found us in 2024, from 2003 space sims to 2022 backyard survival.

More than 18,500 games will have been released onto the PC gaming platform Steam in the year 2024, according to SteamDB. Dividing that by the number of people covering games at Ars, or the gaming press at large, or even everybody who games and writes about it online, yields a brutal ratio.

Games often float down the river of time to us, filtered by friends, algorithms, or pure happenstance. They don’t qualify for our best games of the year list, but they might be worth mentioning on their own. Many times, they’re better games then they were at release, either by patching or just perspective. And they are almost always lower priced.

Inspired by the cruel logic of calendars and year-end lists, I asked my coworkers to tell me about their favorite games of 2024 that were not from 2024. What resulted were some quirky gems, some reconsiderations, and some titles that just happened to catch us at the right time.

Stardew Valley

Screenshot from Stardew Valley, in front of the blacksmith's shop, where a player character is holding up a bone (for some reason).

Credit: ConcernedApe



ConcernedApe; Basically every platform

After avoiding it forever and even bouncing off of it once or twice, I finally managed to fall face-first into Stardew Valley (2016) in 2024. And I’ve fallen hard—I only picked it up in October, but Steam says I’ve spent about 110 hours playing farmer.

In addition to being a fun distraction and a great way to kill both short and long stretches of time, what struck me is how remarkably soothing the game has been. I’m a nervous flyer, and it’s only gotten worse since the pandemic, but I’ve started playing Stardew on flights, and having my little farm to focus on has proven to be a powerful weapon against airborne anxiety—even when turbulence starts up. Ars sent me on three trips in the last quarter of the year, and Stardew got me through all the flights.

Hell, I’m even enjoying the multiplayer—and I don’t generally do multiplayer. My cousin Shaun and I have been meeting up most weekends to till the fields together, and the primary activity tends to be seeing who can apply the most over-the-top creatively scatological names to the farm animals. I’ve even managed to lure Ur-Quan Masters designer Paul Reiche III to Pelican Town for a few weekends of hoedowns and harvests. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Paul was already a huge fan of the game. And also of over-the-top creatively scatological farm animal names. Between him and Shaun, I’m amassing quite a list!)

So here’s to you, Stardew Valley. You were one of the brightest parts of my 2024, and a game that I already know I’ll return to for years.

Lee Hutchinson

Grounded

First-person perspective of a suburban house in the background, fall leaves on a tree nearby, and a relatively giant spider approaching the player, who is holding a makeshift bow and arrow, ready to fire.

Credit: Xbox Game Studios

Obsidian; Windows, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation

My favorite discovery this year has probably been Grounded, a Microsoft-published, Obsidian Entertainment-developed survival crafting game that was initially released back in 2022 (2020 if you count early access) but received its final planned content update back in April.

You play as one of four plucky tweens, zapped down to a fraction-of-an-inch high as part of a nefarious science experiment. The game is heavily inspired by 1989’s classic Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, both in its ’80s setting and its graphical design. Explore the backyard, fight bugs, find new crafting materials, build out a base of operations, and power yourself up with special items and steadily better equipment so you can figure out what happened to you and get back to your regular size.

Grounded came up because I was looking for another game for the four-player group I’ve also played Deep Rock Galactic and Raft with. Like RaftGrounded has a main story with achievable objectives and an endpoint, plus a varied enough mix of activities that everyone will be able to find something they like doing. Some netcode hiccups notwithstanding, if you like survival crafting-style games but don’t like Minecraft-esque, objective-less, make-your-own-fun gameplay, Grounded might scratch an itch for you.

Andrew Cunningham

Fights in Tight Spaces

A black-colored figure does a backwards flip kick on a red goon holding a gun, while three other red and maroon goons point guns at him from a perpendicular angle, inside a grayscale room.

Credit: Raw Fury

Ground Shatter; Windows, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation

I spent a whole lot of time browsing, playing, and thinking about roguelike deckbuilders in 2024. Steam’s recommendation algorithm noticed, and tossed 2021’s Fights in Tight Spaces at me. I was on a languid week’s vacation, with a Steam Deck packed, with just enough distance from the genre by then to maybe dip a toe back in. More than 15 hours later, Steam’s “Is this relevant to you?” question is easy to answer.

Back in college, I spent many weekends rounding out my Asian action film knowledge, absorbing every instance of John Woo, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Flying Guillotine, Drunken Master, and whatever I could scavenge from friends and rental stores. I thrilled to frenetic fights staged in cramped, cluttered, or quirky spaces. When the hero ducks so that one baddie punches the other one, then backflips over a banister to two-leg kick the guy coming up from beneath? That’s the stuff.

Fights gives you card-based, turn-by-turn versions of those fights. You can see everything your opponents are going to do, in what order, and how much it would hurt if they hit you. Your job is to pick cards that move, hit, block, counter, slip, push, pull, and otherwise mess with these single-minded dummies, such that you dodge the pain and they either miss or take each other out. Woe be unto the guy with a pistol who thinks he’s got one up on you, because he’s standing right by a window, and you’ve got enough momentum to kick a guy right into him.

This very low-spec game has a single-color visual style, beautifully smooth animations, and lots of difficulty tweaking to prevent frustration. The developer plans to release a game “in the same universe,” Knights in Tight Spaces, in 2025, and that’s an auto-buy for me now.

Kevin Purdy

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Axe-wielding polygonal character, wearing furs and armor, complete with bear face above his head, in front of a wooden lodge in a snowy landscape.

Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

Bethesda; Windows, Xbox

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind always had a sort of mythic quality for me. It came out when I was 18 years old—the perfect age for it, really. And more than any other game I had ever played, it inspired hope and imagination for where the medium might go.

In the ensuing years, Morrowind (2002) ended up seeming like the end of the line instead of the spark that would start something new. With some occasional exceptions, modern games have emphasized predictable formulae and proven structures over the kind of experimentation, depth, and weirdness that Morrowind embraced. Even Bethesda’s own games gradually became stodgier.

So Morrowind lived in my memory for years, a sort of holy relic of what gaming could have been before AAA game design became quite so oppressively formalist.

After playing hundreds of hours of Starfield this year, I returned to Morrowind for the first time in 20 years.

To be clear: I quite liked Starfield, counter to the popular narrative about it—though I definitely understood why it wasn’t for everyone. But people criticized Starfield for lacking the magic of a game like Morrowind, and I was skeptical of that criticism. As such, my return to the island of Vvardenfell was a test: did Morrowind really have a magic that Starfield lacks, even when taken out of the context of its time and my youthful imagination and open-mindnedness?

I was surprised to find that the result was a strong affirmative. I still like Starfield, but its cardinal sin is that it is unimaginative because it is derivative—of No Man’s Sky, of Privateer and Elite, of Mass Effect, of various 70s and 80s sci-fi films and TV series, and most of all, of Bethesda Game Studios’ earlier work.

In contrast, Morrowind is a fever dream of bold experimentation that seems to come more from the creativity of ambitious designers who were too young to know any better, than from the proven designs of past hits.

I played well over a hundred hours of Morrowind this year, and while I did find it tedious at times, it’s engrossing for anyone who’s willing to put up with its archaic pacing and quirks.

To be clear, many of the design experiments in the game simply don’t work, with systems that are easily exploited. Its designers’ naivety shines through clearly, and its rough edges serve as clear reminders of why today’s strict formalism has taken root, especially in AAA games where too-big budgets and payrolls leave no room at all for risk.

Regardless, it’s been wild to go back and play this game from 2002 and realize that in the 22 years since there have been very few other RPGs that were nearly as brazenly creative. I love it for that, just as much as I did when I was 18.

Samuel Axon

Tetrisweeper

Tetris-style colored blocks fallen inside a column on top of settled blocks, most of which are gray and have Minesweeper-like numbers indicating an explosive tile nearby.

Credit: Kertis Jones Interactive

Kertis Jones; Itch.io, coming to Steam

If you ask someone to list the most addictive puzzle games of all time, Tetris and Minesweeper will probably be at or near the top of the list. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that Tetrisweeper makes an even more addictive experience by combining the two grid-based games together in a frenetic, brain-melting mess.

Tetrisweeper starts just like Tetris, asking you to arrange four-block pieces dropping down a well to make lines without gaps. But in Tetrisweeper, those completed lines won’t clear until you play a game of Minesweeper on top of those dropped pieces, using adjacency information and logical rules to mark which ones are safe and which ones house game-ending mines (if you want to learn more about Minesweeper, there’s a book I can recommend).

At first, playing Tetris with your keyboard fingers while managing Minesweeper with your mouse hand can feel a little unwieldy—a bit like trying to drive a car and cook an omelet at the same time. After a few games, though, you’ll learn how to split your attention effectively to drop pieces and solve complex mine patterns nearly simultaneously. That’s when you start to master the game’s intricate combo multiplier system and bonus scoring, striving for point-maximizing Tetrisweeps and T-spins (my high score is just north of 3 million, but pales in comparison to that of the best players).

While Tetrisweeper grew out of a 2020 Game Jam, I didn’t discover the game until this year, when it helped me clear my head during many a work break (and passed the time during a few dull Zoom calls as well). I’m hoping the game’s planned Steam release—still officially listed as “Coming Soon”—will help attract even more addicts than its current itch.io availability.

Kyle Orland

Freelancer

Ship with three thruster engines approaching a much larger freighter, long and slightly cylindrical, in murky green space, with a HUD around the borders.

Digital Anvil; Windows

What if I told you that Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts previously tried to make Star Citizen more than two decades ago but left the project and saw it taken over by real, non-crazy professionals who had the discipline to actually finish something?

That’s basically the story behind 2003’s forgotten PC game Freelancer. What started as a ludicrously ambitious space life sim concept ended up as a sincere attempt to make games like Elite and Wing Commander: Privateer far more accessible.

That meant a controversial, mouse-based control scheme instead of flight sticks, as well as cutting-edge graphics, celebrity voice actors, carefully designed economy and progression systems, and flashy cutscenes.

I followed the drama of Freelancer‘s development in forums, magazines, and gaming news websites when I was younger. I bought the hype as aggressively as Star Citizen fans did years later. The game that came out wasn’t what I was dreaming of, and that disappointment prevented me from finishing it.

Fast-forward to 2024: on a whim, I played Freelancer from beginning to end for the first time.

And honestly? It’s great. In a space trading sim genre that’s filled with giant piles of jank (the X series) or inaccessible titles that fly a little too far into the simulation zone for some (Elite Dangerous), Freelancer might be the most fun you can have with the genre even today.

It’s understandable that it didn’t have much lasting cultural impact since the developers who took it over lacked the wild ambition of the man who started it, but I enjoyed a perfectly pleasant 20–30 hours smuggling space goods and shooting pirates—and I didn’t have to spend $48,000 of real money on a ship to get that.

Samuel Axon

Cyberpunk 2077

A woman with a red mohawk, wearing a belly shirt, amidst a dense, steel, multi-colored cityscape, suffused with neon.

Credit: CD Projekt Red

CD Projekt Red; Windows, Xbox, PlayStation (macOS in 2025)

Can one simply play, as a game, one of the biggest and most argued-over gaming narratives of all time? Four years after its calamitous launch sparked debates about AAA gaming sprawl, developer crunch, game review practicalities, and, eventually, post-release redemption arcs, what do you get when you launch Cyberpunk 2077?

I got a first-person shooter, one with some interesting ideas, human-shaped characters you’d expect from the makers of The Witcher 3, and some confused and unrefined systems and ideas. I enjoyed my time with it, appreciate the work put into it, and can recommend it to anyone who is okay with something that’s not quite an in-depth FPS RPG (or “immersive sim”) but likes a bit of narrative thrust to their shooting and hacking.

You can’t fit everything about Cyberpunk 2077 into one year-end blurb (or a 1.0 release, apparently), so I’ll stick to the highs and lows. I greatly enjoyed the voice performances, especially from Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba (the latter in the Phantom Liberty DLC), and those behind Jackie, Viktor Vektor, and the female version of protagonist V. I was surprised at how good the shooting felt, given the developer’s first time out; the discovery of how a “Smart” shotgun worked will stick with me a while. The driving: less so. There were moments of quiet, ambient world appreciation, now that the game’s engine is running okay. And the side quests have that Witcher-ish quality to them, where they’re never as straightforward as described and also tell little stories about life in this place.

What seems missing to me, most crucially, are the bigger pieces, the real choices and unexpected consequences, and the sense of really living in this world. You can choose one of three backgrounds, but it only comes up as an occasional dialogue option. You can build your character in myriad ways, and there are lots of dialogue options. But the main quest keeps you on a fairly strict path, with the options to talk, hack, or stealth your way past inevitable shootouts not as great as you might think. Once you’ve brought your character up to power-fantasy levels, the larger city becomes a playground, but not one I much enjoyed playing in. (Plus, the idea of idle wandering and amassing wealth, given the main plot contrivance, is kind of ridiculous, but this is a game, after all).

Phantom Liberty, in my experience, patches up every one of these weaknesses inside its smaller play space, providing more real choices and a tighter story, with more set pieces arriving at a faster pace. If you can buy this game bundled with its DLC, by all means, do so. I didn’t encounter any game-breaking bugs in my mid-2024 playthrough, nor even many crashes. Your mileage may vary, especially on consoles, as other late-coming players have seen.

Waiting on this game a good bit certainly helps me grade it on a curve; nobody today is losing $60 on something that looks like it’s playing over a VNC connection. When CD Projekt Red carries on in this universe, I think they’ll have learned a lot from what they delivered here, much like we’ve all learned about pre-release expectations. It’s okay to take your time getting to a gargantuan game; there are lots of games from prior years to look into.

Kevin Purdy

Photo of Kevin Purdy

Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.

Ars’ favorite games of 2024 that were not released in 2024 Read More »