The Ghost Clan, a cult of murderous fanatics, has infiltrated the waterworks beneath the town of Wellspring with plans to poison the water supply. You are the only one with the weapons, talent and courage to stop them. While in Wellspring, you can also meet the townsfolk, try your hand in games of skill and chance, peruse the wares of the local vendors or hit the Speedway for some racing.

This will come in handy this Friday, when the game is available for a special price at select retailers — $29.99. Hooray, Black Friday!

Bethesda Softworks announced a new “Ultimate Edition” of Fallout: New Vegas today.

The new version of the game will be available in stores on February 7 in North America, and in Europe, on February 10.

The Ultimate Edition comes with all of the game’s add-on content — Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, Lonesome Road, Courier’s Stash and Gun Runners’ Arsenal. Each of these increases the max level cap by 5, so that brings you up to a total of 50 levels.

Skyrim releases November 11.

Like we said in our E3 Skyrim preview the graphics are stunning. There are moments where I would just stand on top of the mountain and look around. It never re-rendered as I was looking around, it was a smooth look at the vast territory of Skyrim. I even found some perched areas that almost seemed meant for the player to pause and take it all in.

We spoke about the weather system a little bit at E3, but it was quite breathtaking while playing it. The land changed from daytime to night without awkward transition. One area I was in, a snowstorm started and you could really tell that the snowflakes seemed to have a life of their own. This is also where I have to talk about the audio. During the snow storm it also sounded like a snowstorm. Visually when it picked up, so did the audio. Maybe that was partially the Turtle Beach headsets we used (I don’t ever use headsets when I play), but they did a great job of making sure the audio completely surrounded you. I think there was one moment where I jumped because all of a sudden I heard a wolf barking at me, but I couldn’t see him (he was behind me). Of course I tried to play that off.

The character customization is very detailed. I decided to not spend too long in this area because I wanted to dive into the game. I created a character that wielded an one handed ax and in the other hand was a fire spell. Our characters were placed about 45 minutes into the game, which means I have no idea how it actually starts. I basically went out into the world and started exploring.

I tend to be anti-open world game because of my a)lack of direction and b) it makes it difficult to stick to the story line. In this demo, I spent at least an hour wandering and discovering, completely going the opposite direction of some quests. Nice PR person from event came over and suggested I go to a certain town (after I got my butt kicked by a bear in a cave). I was informed that getting your butt kicked typically means that you are in an area you aren’t ready for. But in open world games, there is no other indication you should not be there. Thankfully the Giants I ran into just looked at me as I ran by.

My lack of direction issues were slightly solved by the fact that you can mark a territory and have it guide you there. I did not get verification if this actually was a guide or maybe just a spooky time of night, but a headless horseman lead me to the town I was looking for. I guess we’ll find out when the game comes out if that is a guide or a ghost.

Elder Scrolls Skyrim makes it super easy to go between first person and third person view. Once I found the way to go to third person view, I never left it. The third person views help me with my targeting as well as sense of direction. In first person view, I feel out of control and lost. But this may not be true for you. The best part is that Bethesda has made it really fluid and easy to pick which view is more suited to your needs.

Bethesda surprised me sometimes with their attention to detail. In one of the quests, I found a book lying there. I picked it up and before I took it with me, was given the opportunity to read it. I started to read it and then flipped a page. The story continued and I became very curious about how long the book would be. Usually in RPGs the book is a page or two if you get more than a paragraph. Unfortunately I did not count the number of pages, but I flipped for quite a while until I got to a proper end of the book. It definitely contained a full story that probably adds to the overall storyline.

Working skills are easy to level up. In the one town I got my quests, blacksmithing was simple to try out. I didn’t get too involved with the skills though due to lack of time, but for any gamer that enjoys the leveling up system for skills will find it easy and entertaining to do so. Selecting weapons, items, skills, and the map is made incredibly easy by pressing the “B” button on the controller. Elder Scrolls has the whole weight system which I had to keep dropping items to make sure I could move easily. Although in a short demo, there probably was no need for me to hold onto things to sell. The Skills menu is quite beautiful in a celestial look. Each skill has it’s own “star” design and when selected you work your way up the skill tree that way. When you level up, you get a point to place in a skill. I did activate a skill, but could not figure out how to subsequently grow that skill to the other nodes once I earned more points.

I enjoyed the new lockpicking system. It’s very similar to Fallout’s lockpicking with the combination of the lockpick and screwdriver (I think that’s what it is). I opened every chest I came across because it was fun. I also loved stealing a horse. The horse’s owners had died and so I didn’t feel conflicted about stealing it. The interesting thing about stealing a horse, is when you get off of it to fight or talk to someone, the horse goes off on it’s own. I did run back into the horse twice, but it definitely does not stay in the same area to wait for you. A little frustrating if you are trying to keep the horse because you cannot tie it up, but it does seem like you’ll be able to find it again.

The time I spent with Elder Scrolls Skyrim ended too soon. I loved just about every aspect of this game. There are things like the skill tree that I have to figure out, and this is obviously not enough of an impression for a full review. For me personally, I cannot wait until Skyrim comes out. I rarely get time to play games, and my three hour demo went so quickly that I wanted to beg for more (or steal the dev box). Very few games get that time commitment from me in one sitting (I’m always multi-tasking or doing other things). Personally, I am excited about my pre-order for Skyrim. 11-11-11 cannot come soon enough. Funny thing is….when I came home, I started to play Oblivion. ^_^

Christopher Plummer (who you’ll see next in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) plays Arngeir, who is a Greybeard elder living atop Skyrim’s tallest mountain. Max von Sydow plays Esbern, an agent of the Blades. Joan Allen will play Delphine, also part of the Blades, who is attempting to figure out why the dragons are back.

Lynda Carter (you know her best as Wonder Woman) voices Gormlaith Golden-Hilt, who has already had her turn with the dragons. Battlestar Galactica’s Michael Hogan plays Imperial General Tullius, and Vladimir Kulich portrays his enemy, Ulfric Stormcloak. Claudia Christian, from Babylon 5, plays Legate Rikke, and Diane Louise Salinger, George Coe (Woodhouse, if you watch Archer) and Renee Victor all play as-yet unnamed characters.

“It’s been incredible to have all these actors together,” said Todd Howard, Game Director. “When you start a project, you always make your wish-list of actors, and to actually hear them in the game, it’s amazing. We can’t wait for everyone to experience it.”

Guess how much space is required for the install? Eight gigabytes. That’s huge, people. And it looks like Tim Willits over at id is pretty happy about it.

“Sony was great,” he told Eurogamer. “Kudos to Sony for letting us do that. They don’t allow every game to do that. So definitely, hats off. What we were able to do is install all the textures to the highest level. What is nice about the PS3 platform is that it’s just one platform. Everyone has one Blu-ray drive, one hard drive, it’s all the same. Some of the other systems you have… should I install it on my 360? Should I not install it? So yes, it’s very nice.”

Don’t worry, you Xbox 360 people. You get a little bit of an annoyance, too — the game’s three discs long.

Willits said, “We recommend installing the game to the hard drive, but you don’t need to install all three discs. If you don’t have the space available on your hard drive, don’t stress. Install the first disc, the first chapter, the first half of the game, then when you’re done, uninstall and install disc two.”

So that’s the disc-install shuffle, I suppose. Everyone gets his or her own fun!

The original target date for this content was “early July,” but better late than never, right?

Here’s a quick description from Splash Damage/Bethesda:
Secrets, lies, and double agents. No one and nothing is at it seems as the arrival of a mysterious ship from the outside world shatters the tentative peace reached between the Resistance and Security factions. The revived battle spreads to two all-new districts of the Ark – the futuristic, underwater Labs facility and Founders’ Tower, the iconic spire housing the island’s wealthy elite. Unleash fury on your enemies with new lethal abilities as your work your way towards the newly raised level cap of 24 and customize your character with brand-new outfits and additional weapon attachments.

There are lots of dragons, and some of them seem to have an affinity for eating people. Very unfortunate for the people in question.

We also see a little bit of combat and conversations with people. Not too shabby, I think.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim releases 11/11/11.

BUY

If swords and sorcery is what you crave, then Hunted: The Demon’s Forge has all the qualities you might be looking for. It is a third person action RPG published by Bethesda and running on an Unreal Engine. It has a fine pedigree. It doesn’t happen too often but there weren’t many disappointments with it either. It is a pretty seamless third person action adventure with easily accessed RPG elements. You can play as your choice of two mercenaries, a guy Caddoc and E’lara, a hot female elf.

In the summer we need more games like this. It has two person co-op on the one console. You can sit down with your cousin, at that rustic family cottage on Cape Cod which has no internet service, and actually have some fun. We need two person co-op for date nights, and just for the congeniality of playing games with actual people on your side. I enjoyed Hunted’s single-player experience over online co-op.

Is E’lara short for or ‘elf Lara’? I wouldn’t complain about that comparison too much. Since the svelt E’lara can do some acrobatic moves like her human name sake, and she is a tremendous new female character, but she can’t jump. No jump button in a game is short hand programming. Even if developers had some misguided notion of justification for that, at least by the time the game got to QC someone should have dissuaded them from putting out a game with an elf who can’t jump.

E’lara makes up for the slight by being very talented in other ways. She has the ability to cast spells by hand or enchant them onto her weapons. She is excellent with the bow, and they can be set up to light on fire which comes in handy on many of the missions. Sometimes when you have enough points she will give your camera a ride along on an arrow as it plummets into an enemy in slow motion.

E’lara isn’t limited to ranged weapons, she can hack and slash with swords, although her slight figure does put her at a disadvantage. Health potions and magic potions as well as gold provide the drops. The potions fit on E’lara’s Belt so she can’t keep too many of them. You also collect crystals that are desired by a sorceress character played by Lucy Lawless. She gives out magic upgrades and mixes metaphors to go with them.

Up to now probably the best ever western style RPG on PS3 was Oblivion. Very few games since have compared in overall completeness to that game. Though it is now dated, in many ways it became the standard that carved in stone what gamers would expect in a console RPG. The amount of depth and attention to detail that was pioneered in that game has yet to be matched in the genre.

This year I played several new RPG’s, all of them had some of the qualities that might make a great game, but none of them had all of them. In each game, there was at least one element that was glaringly omitted. Especially lacking would be the department of including playable female avatars. It seemed as though every one of them failed by using some sort of odd compromise, instead of having character customization and playable female avatars. These misguided games would come up with just about any pretense, include a female, but then exclude her either from game play entirely, or to give her an odd job instead.

The RPG I reviewed most recently was Two Worlds, where you couldn’t play as a female character. You could see female NPC’s, talk to them and listen to them, they were more interesting than the main character. Plenty of space must have been left over on that disk because the map was practically a blank too. Then there was Enslaved where the female character had a male character on a “leash”. That game portrayed that she couldn’t make it without a male. Many new RPG’s have been giving a confusing message about gender and power. Dragon Age 2 had a mixture of males and females in playable roles as well as in leading roles in the story. But you were pretty much stuck in terms of the navigating through the game, it was claustrophobic. You were kept inside a castle keep for most of the game. And the outdoor missions were entirely linear without any chance of straying off a very pointedly defined path.

The better ones have been Mass Effect 2 and Fallout New Vegas. Then coming up, presumably will be Skyrim on the game of the year expectancy track. ME2 and New Vegas were excellent, but were not in the tradition of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons and Dragons. Now a new game that has potential has finally appeared with Hunted: Demon’s Forge which lands at the top of the heap so far this year.

It doesn’t have character creation which is a lost opportunity. It is forgivable because the two mercs it does have are fun and are more than one dimensional. It does do its homage to those in the board rooms who are were nervous about putting out a game where you are “stuck” playing as a female character the whole way through, while at the same time giving her enough power and agility to solo it through the game herself in the single player experience. Yet, it does a good job of giving you that warrior princess who makes it against all the odds kind of experience that many of us enjoy.

The story is a long rescue mission of Townsfolk and their mayors across the land, who have been disappearing as kidnapping victims of some deranged despots. You will cut them down and release them by various means depending upon their dire circumstances when you find them.

The two mercenaries E’lara and Caddoc will pick up gold during their travels also. The tone is dark, there is plenty of blood and death. The bodies or survivors that you can see have been through slavery, torture and there and human sacrifice. The dungeons really are what they should be, it is very gritty and gruesome. The game is sombre without any preaching, it is mature without being slutty, and the warfare is tastefully violent.

The maps are severely lacking. But that is one of the few flaws. They have cut away so much of the clutter that you find in RPG’s and made it sleek like a slim archer. Most of the time when games do attempt to bang genres together it doesn’t work and it just seems so obvious they have skipped some things. However this game seems to get quite a few things right for a change. The game mechanics for the spells, and the targeting with the bows is excellent.

The pale visaged enemies this time are mainly undead such as skeletons, or the Wargar who are zombie-like but have become that way from drinking a mercury-type substance which has caused them to turn. There are also minotaurs, and even a few dark lords. The bosses can be interesting looking, and some have spells of their own. Those are good times to use E’lara’s blasting powers from a distance. If you are quick enough in between a boss battle and a cut scene you can grab their rare dropped weapons. I enjoyed the inclusion of the old weapon racks which you can hack down to yield randomly occurring weapons. The game gives up enough loot and items to balance the avarice of collecting bounty with the speed at which this game moves. You aren’t going to be bogged down by flicking through menus forever. Everything has a place, and usually it’s mapped right to the controller buttons. At first some of the placement of the functions doesn’t seem right. Once you are used to it, you can quickly switch from arrows, to swords, to fireballs, or engage a health potion or toggle other commands easily.

Hunted has as one of it’s many strengths the cinematic atmosphere. The environments are very well rendered. The twigs and branches look very realistic. The houses, barns and other structures have well detailed looking wood. Instead of having graphics that look like smeared peanut butter everyplace the way scenery has looked in other games this year. You do get the feeling of walking through dilapidated towns just after monsters have been through them. There is fire and smoke, the floor boards creak under foot. Even though it is linear, it still packs in many surprises, the paths twist and wind around intricately. It isn’t all entirely predictable.

Unfortunately not being able to jump is usually a sign that you are in for a very linear experience, as is true here. There is only one specific way to get through the areas. You may wander, map-less through underground mazes, finding treasure rooms and sparkling crystals, but ultimately there is only one way out, and to solve the mystery that you came there to resolve. Still, no map is unforgivable, who let that get by? The glitter ball that is deployed by a downward click of the L3 button leaves a trail for you to follow. But it isn’t always right. It can only tell you certain things such as how to go back to the beginning of the check point. It’s clever enough to the point where it almost works. Almost. Basic gaming 101, map.

The two characters can be switched in game if you feel the need to call upon Caddoc’s melee abilities, or E’lara’s marksmanship prowess. Midnight purple crystals send up a beam of dark light, as a beacon to those who would swap genders.The two banter back and forth giving a few entertaining lines. If you listen closely they crack insults on each other and the townspeople.

E’lara’s bow and arrow mechanics and the spell system were very competent. Making it a pleasure to get in there and shoot the bow. Well made bow sets can rival the satisfaction from virtual guns in a game. It is a welcome change from shooters. Looking at E’lara’s cute figure in that, shall we say, ‘interesting’ battle costume and tattoos is certainly an improvement from looking at the back of some burly guy avatar wearing a baggy jumpsuit and dirty armor.

Sure there are plenty of flaws to go over. The fun factor in the game stands up to it anyways. The lightening spells look bright blue white and they ark and crackle. Making a boss with annoying habits explode is very satisfying. Special effects, shinny lighting, glowing weapons, big kills and explosions, helps you to get over it when the cover system sticks your character to a wall when you want to run and shoot.

The co-operative AI between the characters is supportive and intuitive. You would never expect a computer controlled character to be as sympathetic to the gamer. When playing as E’lara Caddoc took up the slack, he’d shoot his crossbow, take on a few guys with his big sword, or toss her a healing potion when she would have had an otherwise untimely death. Your character can die, and you would be returned to the last check point. The game frequently auto saves, and there are walls and gates in between compartmented levels.

Hunted looks stunning, it has more than one palatte and it isn’t drab. There are many vibrantly coloured areas and the locations change up. There are jungles, country acres and not just one run down town and dungeon after another. There is lots of browns used in the palette which has caused me to shoot Caddoc more than once. The black, gray and brown can make it hard to distinguish who is who in a battle. If you can get up to a higher vantage point with E’lara that changes. The lighting changes along with where you are.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is an enjoyable enough game. It will be interesting to see if InXile will take this idea and run with it an enhance what is all ready a solid game, which is a contender to stand up against some other more well known franchises. It is worth it to pick up since it has multiplayer to try as well as several hours of story mode gameplay. It also has level customization, so you can check out some of your own dungeon-ing skills, giving it more long term value.

Of course, considering that statement, of course you’ll have to go there. And hey, at least it looks like the people were pretty wrong on this one. There’s totally things surviving there.

“Old World Blues” releases July 19. Take a look now by browsing the screenshots below.