New ‘Skyrim’ Expansion Rides Out on a New Trailer

We all knew that it would only be a matter of time before Bethesda announced yet another piece of new Skyrim content for the Dragonborn of the world to sink their fangs into.

Speaking of “Dragonborn,” that’s the new title of the newly announced second expansion for the fifth Elder Scrolls game. Said expansion will be released on Xbox Live on Dec. 4, 2012 with a PC version presumably coming a little while after that. As for the PS3 version... well, that depends on how quickly the developer can fix their own broken game.

“Dragonborn” looks to be about the very first “Dovahkiin” (aka, “Dragonborn”) trying to return to the mortal realm and presumably wreak havoc on the almost-Vikings of the Skyrim nation.

More importantly, the trailer for the new piece of downloadable content shows off some of the new locations and features that players can expect. Even more importantly, one of those features presented in said trailer is the ability to ride at least some of those infinite dragons found in “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.” That’s right, the game is going to have dragon-riding.

Also shown in the trailer were a few new enemy types, such as what looked like goblins riding warthogs (not as awesome as riding dragons, but a close second) and new environments that look suspiciously like the swampy nation of Morrowind featured in “The Elder Scrolls III.” It’s worth mentioning at this point that some clever modders out there did manage to find some Morrowind-like environments built into the Skyrim map on the game’s PC version.

Returning to the topic of the Playstation 3, it’s worth noting that Bethesda has yet to release the last bit expansion, “Dawnguard,” for Sony’s console citing difficulties in development. Furthermore, they still haven’t even managed to get the standard version of the game running properly on that console.

Bethesda has a storied history of making sub-par versions of their games for the ostensibly more powerful Playstation 3 in the past. Actually, the company has a history of releasing broken games in general, but they’ve usually been particularly broken on the PS3. However, they’ve always been able to remedy their broken games on all systems in the past. This time seems to be different, though, and the developer publicly announced that they were seeking help from other Playstation 3 developers to find a solution.

What this means for the future of “Dragonborn” on that console, much less the rest of their expansions, remains a mystery for now.