Skyrim: Dawnguard On PC and Patch Updates

Skyrim fans got a jolt of excitement a few days ago as the Dawnguard expansion popped onto the Steam store without so much as a whisper of an announcement, except for Bethesda‘s sneaky QuakeCon announcement that it was already available on PC that day. PC gamers all over rejoiced in this fantastic news, after having to wait more than a month after Dawnguard’s release onto the Xbox 360.

Sadly, those trekking the lands of Skyrim on their PS3 will not feel the power of the vampire lord for quite some time. A post popped up on Bethesda’s blog regarding the matter.

“We are not satisfied yet with Dawnguard’s performance on the PS3. We would like for everyone to have a chance to play Dawnguard, but we aren’t going to release it for PS3 knowing that some people’s experience in Skyrim will be worse. We do everything we can to have our content available to all; from our free updates, to user mods, to paid DLC. We’re as disappointed as our fans when that isn’t the case, but we’ll continue to push for that reality.”

During the Companion quest line in Skyrim players become a werewolf, which makes them immune to the Sanguinare Vampiris disease, more commonly known as ‘oh damn, now I can’t do anything.’ Sadly though, this immunity doesn’t spread into the Dawnguard expansion and if you wish to become a vampire lord you will have to surrender your animorphing abilities.

Dawnguard is available to purchase on Steam for $24.95, and if you are having trouble figuring out how to kick off the quest line, the guards around towns will be sure to give you some hints as they usually do.

It wasn’t long ago that Bethesda announced on their blog that Skyrim’s 1.7 patch had moved out of BETA and was now live for all steam users. With this came the announcement that the patch was being submitted to console manufacturers and would hopefully roll out for the consoles soon as well.

The 1.7 patch fixed a few bugs that included a general memory fix and overall stability optimization. Also, fixes related to a crash isolated to new water shaders was resolved and a rare crash was fixed involving dragon landings. Another issue patched in the v1.7 edition of Skyrim included resolving a bug when using vampiric grip and swimming at the same time, which would prevent swimming animation from playing afterwards.

For the Xbox 360 edition, the patch also included a fix for a logic error when loading screens from add-ons. There was also improved recognition with Kinect voice commands put in and there was Kinect-enabled dragon language shouts for Italian, Spanish, French and German fixed to now work as intended. More patches are fully expected to be released by Bethesda for all three of Skyrim’s platforms as the year progresses, although there is no word on further DLC packages comparable to Dawnguard as the team is undoubtedly hard at work on the PS3 edition of the first DLC now.

Finally, those unlucky adventurers on the PS3 will finally receive the 1.6 patch included with the 1.7 patch when that is released.

Stay tuned to Gaming Illustrated for the latest Skyrim news.