The $400,000 funding goal was met in one day. By the next night, the total had risen to over 1 million dollars. At this moment, there are 31,205 backers pledging a total of  $1,175,056, almost three times the initial goal. The pledges range from at least $15 all the way up to $10,000 and possibly beyond, as their are additional incentives that are "too rich" for Kickstarter. The extra money means the game can "appear on more platforms, be translated into more languages, have more music and voice, and an original soundtrack for the documentary, and more!"

Double Fine couldn't find a publisher for a game in a "dead" genre, so they skipped the middleman and went directly to their customers and fans, and it worked. The game is still up in the air, of course. Maybe it will be awesome, maybe it will be mediocre, maybe it will crash and burn and fail spectacularly. But the community of backers on Kickstarter will have input and insight into the development process along the way, and everyone will get an interesting documentary regardless of what happens to the game. I can't wait to see the finished products.

Although the funding goal has already been shattered, you can still pledge money for the next 32 days, until March 13th (which happens to be my birthday). $15 or more will get you the full game on Steam, an early beta on Steam, the video series, and access to the private discussion community. Higher tiers offer additional rewards including autographed posters, a portrait of you, or a character in the game based on you (for $50,000).

Disclosure: I pledged $15.00.

The Creation Kit can only be launched through Steam, which is mildly annoying, but not too bad considering Skyrim itself already has the same requirement. The new kit has some major new features mixed with scattered minor changes and improvements. Most obviously, the new Papyrus script has substantially more flexibility, with support for custom functions, loops, waits, multithreading and more. Quests have a new "Dialogue Views" tab with a branching visualization of the dialog. There are other changes related to AI, dialogue, quests, world editing, magic, characters (NPCs and creatures have been combined into "Actors" for example), scripting, and more.

Importantly, Bethesda has finally decided to fix the lip sync generation that they broke all the way back in Oblivion. The process was broken after an Oblivion Construction Set update and was never fixed. The process remained broken in Fallout 3's G.E.C.K. and the Fallout: New Vegas G.E.C.K. too. In fact the only way to generate the required files was to use the old Oblivion CS from before Bethesda broke it. The fix is long overdue, but appreciated.

The Steam Workshop looks mostly as I expected. The interface is good enough, but there seems to be very limited functionality (there isn't even a search function!) and some decisions destined to cause problems down the road. There is currently no method of manually downloading mods; you must "subscribe" to them. Your subscriptions will then automatically be downloaded, or automatically be updated if necessary. Sounds good on paper, but mods for Bethesda games are not always that simple. Automatic mandatory updates are fine for many mods; for many others, it may have serious negative consequences. Containers can be reset, updates can cause problems (or in rare cases irreversibly corrupt saves), not at all updates are always wanted (and there seems to be no way to add optional sub-files or anything like that), some updates require clean saves, etc.

Obviously, in most cases, mod authors will be aware of this and take appropriate precautions. But with the current set of features available on the Workshop, those precautions may be limited to uploading mods somewhere else. There is no support for optional files (except as entirely separate mods), no support for mod dependencies, no support for custom installation scripts, no support for conflict detection and/or resolution, and no support for asking users if they want to update or not. Those missing features wouldn't be an issue normally, but if you're trying to create a platform that automatically installs and updates mods for users, you're going to run into problems without those features. For example, even a "simple" mod like Lightweight Potions and Poisons has to direct users to SkyrimNexus if they want other weight options.

Despite all that, I will still probably be uploading any mods I create to both SkyrimNexus and the Steam Workshop when possible. Regardless of the problems, some of which will hopefully be addressed over time, the Workshop will be doing great work in expanding the mod user audience to people who have never even installed a mod before. The process may be messy but in the end a larger and broader mod community is a good result.

Of course, Valve being Valve, the very first mod available on the Steam Workshop was Fall of the Space Core, Vol. 1 created by "Aperture Laboratories."

There are already some other great mods available: Midas Magic, Weapon Retexture Project, and even an early version of Open Cities. Right now, Midas Magic is the most popular mod (deservedly so) with over 3000 subscribers and 10000 views. There are already over 300 other mods available.

Finally, the "surprise" that Bethesda teased was of course the high-res texture pack of which evidence was discovered 1 hour after the "surprise" was mentioned. I haven't had the time to explore enough to see how good the pack is, but it is certainly an improvement. You can check out some comparison shots, and read a more detailed analysis (including some mistakes you can fix) of the texture pack in another thread created by Brumbek.

If you're interested in trying out the Creation Kit yourself, it is available in the "Tools" section in Steam. You may have to restart Steam for it to appear there. For information and help with the Creation Kit, you can use the Creation Kit Wiki or the official forum. Bethesda has also released three video tutorials explaining various concepts.

Bethesda has also uploaded a "first look" video of the new Creation Kit showing off some improvements: new dialog display, render window controls that may not be awful, the new scripting language (Papyrus, no relation to the font, hopefully), and of course the Steam Workshop. Since the kit is coming tomorrow, the "second look" will be the Creation Kit itself.

On the other hand, Bethesda and Valve have still given almost no information about the Steam Workshop for Skyrim. We know it will allow one-click mod downloads/subscriptions and have some sort of upload method available through the Creation Kit, and we got a quick look at the interface in the first look video. Mods with nudity, sexual content, excessive violence, child killing, drug use, etc. will all probably be banned from the Workshop if Bethesda's past behavior is any indication.

Beyond that, everything is up in the air. Will there be any conflict detection or management? Will Bethesda's provided launcher still be entirely useless for any serious mod use? How will mod subscriptions work? Can mods only be uploaded through the Creation Kit? How will mod requirements be handled with the "one-click installs?" How will the Workshop work with 3rd-party tools (Nexus Mod Manager, Wrye Smash, BOSS, etc.)? How will the Workshop be moderated? What level of user/community participation is there? What are the terms of use/service? How much control do modders have over their mods and mod pages once uploaded? 

All these questions (and more) will be answered once the Workshop is open, of course, but it would have been nice if at least some answers had been provided ahead of time. But neither Valve nor Bethesda typically work that way, so it isn't too surprising. The official Creation Kit "information" thread on the official forums doesn't even have the latest information about the Tuesday release.

One good bit of information did come out, though: Bethesda asked a group of veteran modders to test out the new Creation Kit (and the Steam Workshop too, I imagine) ahead of the release. Whether their feedback will be addressed is another matter, but at least this time we may get a kit where lip-sync actually works, the script editor isn't missing functionality, and entering an .ESP description without risking a crash is possible.

Along with Pete Hines' random reveal of that Tuesday release on Twitter, he also teased a "special surprise" would be coming alongside the Creation Kit. 59 minutes passed before someone discovered that the special surprise is probably an official "HighRes" Texture Pack. So much for a surprise?