Game Informer is report­ing that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim devel­oper Bethesda and Zen­i­max Online Stu­dios have announced that they will release a mas­sively mul­ti­player online ver­sion of The Elder Scrolls next year for PC and Mac.

Set a mil­len­nium before the events of Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls Online will take place across all of Tam­riel dur­ing a time when daedric prince Molag Bal is wreak­ing havoc on the realm. The game will fea­ture three player fac­tions and PvP com­bat. Pre­sum­ably you’ll be able to travel across the entire world of The Elder Scrolls, as Game Informer men­tions Elsweyr, Skyrim, and Cyrodiil as loca­tions in the MMORPG.

Ready for some DLC for Skyrim? Well, it’s on its way.

The first of pre­sum­ably sev­eral pieces of down­load­able con­tend is enti­tled Dawn­guard, and Bethesda has announced that it will be out this sum­mer for the Xbox 360.

If you’re a PC or PS3 player, don’t despair. If Bethesda’s pre­vi­ous ven­tures into DLC ter­ri­tory are any indi­ca­tion, Dawn­guard will make it’s way to your sys­tem of choice even­tu­ally. Prob­a­bly within a few weeks of the Xbox release.

From day one, Skyrim was quite pos­si­bly the biggest game ever released. From the mas­sive scope of the world to the num­ber of char­ac­ters and quests held within, it has always been extremely easy to lose track of time while explor­ing the icy landscape.

But when it was announced that the mod­ding com­mu­nity — which Bethesda has always embraced — would be able to release mods via Valve’s Steam Work­shop hit, the pos­si­bil­i­ties for Skyrim cus­tomiza­tion became vir­tu­ally lim­it­less. The abil­ity to both install and dis­trib­ute mods by way of Steam imme­di­ately pro­vided a boost to the PC ver­sion of the game and also put the spot­light on the bur­geon­ing mod­ding scene. Rarely does such a massively-popular game enable its play­ers to actively manip­u­late every aspect of it, but Bethesda’s Skyrim Cre­ation Kit allows play­ers to do just that. To demon­strate just how mal­leable their game was, Bethesda staff even began releas­ing their own mods.

From The Elder Scrolls Face­book page…

‎1.4 update should go up on Xbox LIVE early tomor­row morn­ing. PS3 update is look­ing good for tomor­row as well. If we get an update from Sony, we’ll let you know.

Over on their blog, the folks at Bethesda have released an update on both patch 1.4 and the eagerly-anticipated Cre­ation Kit. Here’s what they had to say about the latter…

The Cre­ation Kit and Steam Work­shop are nearly ready. We’re cur­rently work­ing with mem­bers of Valve and our mod­ding com­mu­nity to do some final test­ing, and we’re on track for a pub­lic release near the end of the month. We think Skyrim mod­ding is one of the game’s best fea­tures, and we have the best mod­ders of any game. It’s been a lot of excit­ing work for us, and we can’t wait to unleash it.

Word on the street is that, before the end of Jan­u­ary, Bethesda will release patch 1.4 for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, which aims to fix the prob­lems with lag that many PS3 users have experienced.

Here’s the Bethesda Twit­ter post that offi­cially broke this news.