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Uncategorized Tuesday, August 28th 2012 at 1:45 pm

Hearthfire, the Next Skyrim Expansion, Releases on September 4th

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Good news, fans of role-playing games everywhere! Bethesda Game Studios has announced the second expansion coming to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — and it is called Hearthfire. The newest expansion centers on building a home, upgrading said home, and all the trappings of domesticity. If this sounds suspiciously like they’re bolting The Sims onto Skyrim, that’s because it looks like they actually are bolting The Sims onto Skyrim. Those lucky Xbox 360 players will get to start building their own gardens on September 4th.

Some folks are displeased with what they’re calling a “glorified Sims” expansion. After all, Bethesda went on record saying that they were looking at making fewer but more meaty expansions with the game. Having an expansion slot taken up by an interesting, but mostly cosmetic, piece of content seems to be at cross-purposes with that in mind. Perhaps, however, there’s another reason in mind.

Bethesda has an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft; their first two expansions are required to be an Xbox exclusive for a set period of time. This had been originally stated as 30 days, but the longer the PlayStation 3 goes without receiving the previous Dawnguard DLC, the more it looks like some kind of other deal was ultimately reached. Strutting out a smaller expansion, like Hearthfire, might very well be a ploy to use up that second exclusivity agreement in order to avoid it later.

Then again, perhaps Bethesda just really thinks players direly wanted to adopt children.

(Bethesda Game Studios via The Verge)

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  • josh w

    As a hardened male individual, I’m trying not to be excited by this…and failing. I am finally going to have 30 display cases to display all of my daedric weapons! Oh, and something to spend my 2 million gold on!

  • Connor Mc

    lol i can’t wait either, i modded my xbox so i can spend 999,999,999 gold on a huge house, only a few more hours till the 4th of sept, ugh, time goes so slowley when you want something so bad.

  • Josh w

    Ugh, it’s not as great as it could’ve been.

    You can’t choose where to place the items in the house. You can make individual items, but it’s like a checklist rather than a “make what you want” type of deal and the game auto-places the items into the room you’re in.

    In other words, you can only fit 3 display cases in a room that you can also place two corner tables. You can’t put 5 display cases and no corner tables.

    That said, it’s still the nicest house of any of the other ones in the game, and I’m going to max out every room, including the cellar before I bring my wife home and start talking kids with her.

  • Leela

    I saw on a google search thingy that (for the XBox 360 players) this expansion is free, is this true? Also, do you have to get the DawnGuard expansion first? Thank ya :)