Bethesda Newsletter, anyone else get one? Options

[RobRendell]

Did anyone else get a newsletter from Bethesda? I'm not sure what I did to subscribe... maybe it's everyone with an account on the official Bethsoft forums?

It had some stuff about Oblivion that I hadn't seen before. A screenshot of a statue (along with two other screens I've seen before: the khajitt on the wharf and the dwemer armour outside Cheydinhal), and a link to a new dev diary.

The dev diary has some nice info about magic:

My personal favorite is Detect Life. In Morrowind, this effect placed icons on the minimap indicating where creatures or characters could be found. It was a nice effect but not workable for Oblivion, so now when Detect Life is cast, a magical cloud, which is visible even when the creature is not, will envelop each nearby creature. You can watch these clouds to track potential targets, and usually you can even identify which creature you are looking at by the specific shape and movement of its cloud.

The Chameleon spell, for instance, uses our awesome refraction special effect to render targets nearly invisible, like a block of clear walking ice or a cloaked Predator.

And good news for modders:

But we know that just tweaking our spells isn’t enough for you guys, so there is one brand new, very special magic effect that we hope will give modders a great deal of creative freedom. It’s called Script Effect, and using it in conjunction with the scripting system, modders will be able to expand the magic system and create spells that do things we at Bethesda haven’t even thought of yet.

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Dec 16 2005, 12:59 AM