Since May 1st, whenever I try to open Bethblog.com I get redirected to the German version de.bethblog.com.

The language selection top left does nothing. Manually typing www.bethblog.com, fr.bethblog.com or it.bethblog.com in the browser doesn't help either, I always get redirected to de.bethblog.com.

This is neither a an issue of my browser, my PC nor my ISP since I tried this on 3 different computers with two different operating systems, 5 different browsers and two ISPs.

I am located in Germany but I want to read the English version of the blog, NOT the German version.

Does anyone else have this problem?

@Bethesda: Is this intentional? If so, PLEASE STOP IT!

You might be region locked if you get the same result from several browsers, computers, and ISPs. Try a proxy site.

Alternatively, try and navigate there from other US based sites. Unfortunaly there is no IP address you can use to bypass the DNS ser

Thanks. I even tried a VPN with US and UK servers. Same result, which is weird. Through a VPN the site should only see the US or UK IP of the server!?

But I also just noticed that the language selection is now gone from the German blog site.

Seems Bethesda wants to limit users to their regional blog-site.

Edit:

After deleting cookies and browser cache I can access the english site though a VPN connection.

Very annoying. Apparently Bethesda intentionally redirects users in Germany to the German site since the beginning of this month.

I'd really like to know why. Either way, this svcks!

I dug a little deeper and found that accessing www.bethblog.com from a German IP returns a

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

in the header with de.bethblog.com as the new location. This is a common method to implement a redirection through PHP.

This is also cached so even when switching to a proxy or VPN to access the English blog, you have to delete your browser-cache first.

Cookies from either version of the bethblog.com site are irrelevant.

Edit: Apparently this censorship only happens to users in Germany. Through my VPN service I tried accessing Bethblog.com from dutch, french, UK, US and German IPs.

From German IPs the redirection to the German site occurs, with all other IPs there is no forced redirection.

Shame on you Bethesda/ZeniMax!

Bethesda, Gstaff, whoever reads this, this censorship really svcks!

And I'd really like to hear some explanation, why are you doing this?

I can explain this today. Because of constitutional laws, we're not allowed to let folks in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, or Hungary have access to sites where we're promoting specific assets for our newly-announced game, Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Given the subject matter of Wolfenstein, there are laws that dictate how we promote the game's official website (not yet live) and other destinations where we're sharing details on the game -- including these forums, Bethesda Blog, Facebook, YouTube, and even what can be seen in our Bethesda Blog RSS feed.

As a result, we're actually putting the final touches on getting the Wolfenstein forum up (wolfwww.gamesas.com). We didn't want to have to block these forums entirely, especially since we don't have a forum language option.

Thanks for the update Gstaff