Hunt: Showdown is one of our favourite multiplayer games. If you love dying in bushes, it might be one of yours, too. Developers Crytek have now outlined their roadmap of coming updates between now and the middle of 2024, and it includes an engine upgrade and new minimum specs.
Ark: Survival Evolved's official servers will switch off later today, at midnight UTC on September 30th (1am BST October 1st). The closure is part of paving the way for the piecemeal remake Ark: Survival Ascended, which will release in Steam Early Access in October.
Though there's many a huge RPG to play at the moment (recite the littany: Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077) many of us in the treehouse have retreated to smaller, or at least less garganutan, games for our days off this weekend. Though of course there's something called Counter-Strike 2 happening at the moment. I dunno, doesn't sound like it's important to PC or anything.
Cyberpunk 2077’s update 2.0 makes its RPG combat better than it’s ever been. The new perk system means that you can easily create a brutal killing machine, one capable of deflecting bullets with samurai swords and air-dashing like an anime hero to punch enemies apart.
Phantom Liberty, the expansion released right after update 2.0, makes its combat better in one extra way: by making most of it optional.
Worrying signs on the horizon for fans of sci-fi stories told a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. Sony have quietly yanked posts and videos for Embracer's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake, in what could be the first indication that the publisher have finally cancelled the game, after shuffling developers and delaying release indefinitely last year.
Delightful destructive heist sim Teardown is getting four paid DLCs, with the first to be released on November 15th. It's called Time Campers and will transport players back in time with a caravan to tackle new heists with "old-timey tools and architecture" in the Wild West.
It'll be followed by a second DLC, the destruction derby-focused Folkrace, and two more before the end of 2024.
This week we at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast look at two contrasting tales of games being always online: Payday 3's overloaded launch servers, and Sea Of Thieves' triumphant reveal of season 10 additions. Is always online good? Is it bad? Or, much like the radiator in your living room, is it basically invisible as long as nothing breaks? Plus we dive into the games we've been playing recently (Nate is still plugging away at Baldur's Gate 3), recommend a bunch of unrelated short videos, and answer a question that has plagued humanity for years: would you punch a gorilla for a cheeseburger?
Prime Day 2023 only came and went in July, but that hasn’t deterred Amazon – who presumably own a number of oversized clocks with the word "DEALS" replacing all twelve numbers – from announcing another, functionally identical sale. This time it’s Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, it’s happening this October, and god, I am so, so very tired of writing about these things.
Still, as much as Prime Big Deal Days is sillily named and oddly timed (is Black Friday not just a month later?), it may yet prove useful as a source of cheap PC gaming hardware. Amazon sales usually are, with SSDs, gaming mice, keyboards, and even graphics cards reliably among their discounted wares. Here’s everything we know so far, and some tips for the big day(s) on how to secure the best stuff and avoid shady rip-off tactics.
The Creative Assembly's Hyenas - a sci-fi extraction shooter about robbing Martian billionaires, which Ed deemed "a surprising amount of fun" when he saw it at Gamescom - is no more. Sega have cancelled the forthcoming looter FPS together with several unannounced titles - a stripping-down of the publisher's European business in response to financial losses Sega are blaming partly on Covid.
There's been a certain amount of confusion and alarm over the announcement of Nakwon: Last Paradise, a dingy third-person zombie survival adventure with a big emphasis on stealth, from the creators of Dave the Diver, a bright, breezy uramaki roll of a game that mixes restaurant management with side-on undersea exploration. Is this kind of like when Prince of Persia went all edgelord with Two Thrones? Do I need to call Mintrocket's parents and ask for an intervention?
Thing is, if you take a step back from each game they're actually very similar. Both are fundamentally about scouring dangerous places for resources and ferrying them back to a safe area where you can sell them off. Both pit you, a mediocre human, against strange and unearthly creatures. Both are sort of about redeeming scenario concepts we all hate - in Dave the Diver's case, the water level, and in Nakwon's case, the stealth mission. See, this is practically a remake! Let's have a look at the trailer.
Look alive, jarheads! Grab your Glocks and drop your - well, whatever you're holding that isn't a gun, unless it's a kitten or something, in which case tuck it gently under your arm and brace yourself for the news that Valve have finally released the public version of Counter-Strike 2, the long-awaited free-to-play technical upgrade (and replacement) for perennial Steam chart-topper Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, after six months in limited access. You can download it here.
Last time, you decided by 72% against 28% that setting unit waypoints is better than receiving waypoints yourself. Given how loudly people decry receiving waypoints, I'm a little surprised it was that close. And that's how we know we're doing science. This week, I ask you to choose between mastery of place and mastery of time. What's better: improvised environmental weapons, or skipping across a timeline flowchart?
I like small things - models, and what not - but I'm not patient enough to build them from scratch myself. Lego sets represent an ideal, if monstrously expensive, solution. I can build the thing without having to make all the constituent parts of it. I've recently gotten well into the modular city sets, to the extent that I look up discontinued sets on eBay and other such secondhand vendors. I don't actually get sets very often, but last week I built a police station, which can slot next to the bookshop I got for my last birthday. And while the bookshop has cute details - like a book called Moby Brick with a white block leaping from the sea on the cover, and an attic flat with a pet iguana in a glass tank - the copshop has some secret secrets that are the Lego equivalent of leaving a skeleton in a toilet stall. But better.
Chris Metzen, one of Warcraft’s longest and most influential lore-crafters for more than two decades before he retired back in 2016, has returned to work at Blizzard full-time.
Neowiz have released Lies of P update 1.2.0.0, a major patch for the puppet-ridden action-RPG which educated souls are describing as the closest we may ever get to a Bloodborne PC port. It introduces Dualshock 4 and DualSense controller support alongside a host of changes to enemies, the execution of the game’s Fable Arts or gear-specific special moves, item drop rates and the duration of stagger windows. The overarching aim seems to be to make the game easier, and as I’m sure you’re expecting, a few Lies of P fans - and, it turns out, RPS staffers - are ticked off about that.
It's one in, one out this November. Don't Nod's Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden has been delayed until February 13th, 2024 from its original November release date. That's because its developer and publisher want to avoid the busy release season.
The Talos Principle 2, not so much. The philosophical puzzler is launching November 2nd.
Like most people, I had assumed EA shut down Anthem soon after dashing BioWare's hopes to overhaul and revive the sci-fi looter-shooter. I was surprised to see Anthem on Game Pass while poking around checking out space games which are not Starfield. It did shut down, didn't it? Surely it did. So why's it on Game Pass? If an 80GB download is the price I pay for a ha-ha-hilarious joke post where I review a spinning loading ball or server error message, so be it. Let's go. Wait. Hang on. I'm playing this. This is a game. This is still a game!
CD Projekt have formally commented on the presence of references to the Russia-Ukraine war in Cyberpunk 2077's recently added Ukrainian localisation, apologising for dialogue lines "that can be considered offensive by Russian gamers", while reiterating their support for Ukraine.
In case you missed it, the Ukrainian script and menu localisation currently includes a number of antagonistic references to Russians and to the on-going Russian invasion of Ukraine. One dialogue line refers to a particular bandit group as "rusnia", and there's photo mode menu text for a squatting character that translates as "like a Russian". There's also lore text that apparently riffs on Ukrainian government rhetoric during the war, and a piece of in-game wallart that alludes to the dispute between Ukraine and Russia over Crimea.
Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis - a sort of mobile gaming RPG sandwich of the original Final Fantasy VII and its spin-offs Crisis Core and The First Soldier, plus gacha mechanics - is coming to PC and Steam, publisher Square Enix have announced. The Steam release will share data with the mobile version.
Ever Crisis on mobile is a free-to-play game with microtransactions and curvy, colourful chibi-style visuals. It's Final Fantasy: Polly Pocket Edition, sort of. Play breaks down into missions with turn-based battles and brief narrative sequences. The idea is that you can pack in a few minutes of Cloud gaming (no, not that kind) while waiting for your tube. But how will that formula square up on PC, and what to make of the game's reportedly very aggressive microtransaction pop-ups? Fingers crossed they'll rebadge it as a standard pay-upfront release and tear out all the gacha.
El Paso, Elsewhere feels like the cancelled shooter PS2 adaptation of an incredibly short-lived Image Comics horror series from the mid-90s, leaked by a disgruntled developer over Google Drive more than a decade after the fact. It’s something that would have had a six episode animated series, broadcast out of order at 1am. It’s a testament to that moment in pop culture where the coolest thing imaginable was a tortured guy in a trenchcoat, holding a gun in each hand and fighting monsters. Whether you regard this aesthetic with respect or disgust will help you determine whether there’s anything here for you.
You may have read that always-online crime caper Payday 3 has had a disastrous launch, with players forced into long queues for the privilege of playing by themselves. The chaos continues this week, as developer Starbreeze has now elected to take the game wholly offline for several hours at a time across Tuesday 26th and Friday 28th September, while exploring ways to minimise the game's reliance on internet access.
I've been greatly looking forward to Fortune's Run, despite absolutely sucking at the demo. Scandalously, we don't appear to have covered this indie sci-fi FPS on these golden pages, so here's a quick overview: you're the high-jumping, sword-wielding, bullet-pumping lovechild of Deus Ex and DOOM, galloping through a world that recalls the Imperial bases and sewers of Dark Forces, taking down grungy pixelart sprites by means of precision parries, grabs, combos, headshots, terrain traps and much more besides. Between dust-ups, you can play basketball and leave crayon graffiti for other players care of a Dark Souls-style messaging system. It's a feast!
The game was due to launch into Steam early access tomorrow, 27th September, but unfortunately, there's been a delay. Valve's testers have denied Fortune's Run approval to launch on the platform. Among the reasons, according to developer Team Fortune themselves, is that Valve don't feel the game's content warning for sexual assault is actually necessary.
I've read several comments here and elsewhere that Bethesda's Starfield is "a mile-wide but deep as a puddle", or variations on that theme. Said commenters might be tickled to know that there is, in fact, a puddle in the game's Akila City that contains infinite loot: by dint of peering into it, you'll magically gain access to a nearby store's inventory. Strip the shelves, then wait a day or two, and you'll be able to do so again, forever and ever. Or at least, that was the case till this week's Starfield patch, a small update consisting of exactly ten bulletpoints, including one that tackles "an issue that allowed for a vendor's full inventory to be accessible". Boo! Time to go looking for another convenient in-game metaphor, I guess. Perhaps there's something incredibly clever you can say about all the flying cities.
Before I discuss the flying cities, find the patch notes in full below. Again, this is a smaller update. Bethesda are working on larger patches that include the addition of official Starfield mod support - tentatively dated to arrive next year.
Prefer a larger monitor? Right now you can pick up a Viewsonic 32-incher with a 1440p resolution and 75Hz refresh rate for just £150.74 using a 20% off voucher at Ebay. That's a good deal for a monitor of this size and spec, especially from a brand like ViewSonic, and well worth considering for gaming and content creation. Let's take a closer look.
There are many unsightly euphemisms for the various stages of game development. My favourite used to be "sunsetting", aka cancelling a live service game, aka "we dragged the servers outside and smashed them with bats, gangland style". But now there's a new front-runner, "simmering". You know what's simmering? Quantic Dream's Star Wars: Eclipse, that's what. "Can I say it still exists? Because it exists," the developer's Lisa Pendse has revealed in a new interview from this year's Tokyo Game Show. "It's just not ready. It's simmering." Hmm.
Hypnospace Outlaw used to be a very different type of game than the one we know today. The authentic replica of the world wide web circa 1999 was originally designed to be little more than ornate level select screens in a stylish endless runner-style game, for example, providing extra context for your adventures pursuing "outlaws on the Hypnospace Highway".
Games change during development, of course, and it’s not unusual for once substantial ideas to be left on the cutting room floor. But seeing as Hypnospace Outlaw is our pick for the RPS Game Club this month, I wanted to reach out to the game’s creator Jay Tholen to ask some questions about these unlikely origins, its influences and its lasting legacy. What happened to the Hypnospace Highway? And what comes next for the world of Hypnospace?
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, enjoy being stalked through the streets by a murderous ice cream van, being killed by a walking shark, flushing yourself down a toilet as fast travel, and many more attractive and interesting sights. Come look at these indie games!
Reworked skill trees and new minigames aside, Cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 update includes a Ukrainian localisation of the game's million-plus-word script. It turns out the Ukrainian version is awash with references to Russia's on-going invasion of Ukraine, all of it seemingly in support of the latter. The news comes via Zone of Games, who have published a few side-by-side comparisons from the game's files, underlining differences between the English and Ukrainian translations in various bits of dialogue and menu text.
I asked the organisers of Indie Cup - a Kyiv, Ukraine-based digital festival of games like Pahris Entertainment's upcoming Space Wreck - to help me double-check the Ukrainian version's alterations. The Indie Cup team's Arsenii Tarasov was happy to oblige, and also volunteered a few further examples of more... adventurous localisation from his own research, supported with screenshots.
The conversation/free-for-all around the role of automated "AI"-based game development rolls on with a few thoughts from Tom Hall, co-founder of id Software and one of the creators of the original DOOM, who says he's (Commander) keen on the prospect of "ethical" uses for such tools in gamedev, but worries that reliance on them "will homogenize games, sort of like AAA games are now".
PlatinumGames co-founder Hideki Kamiya is leaving the company to work on new projects. His last day is 12th October 2023. Announcing the move on Xitter, Platinum thanked Kamiya for “his creative ideas, leadership, and contribution to the growth of PlatinumGames from our start-up to this very day”.
Sundays are for getting over some powerful Maltese flu. Before you cough, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
It's happening again. As sure as Square Enix overestimating their sales projections, as sure as John Riccitiello pissing off every available customer, EVE Online developers CCP will try to make a first-person shooter set in the same universe.
This time it's called EVE Vanguard, a shooter "module" which will sit within the EVE launcher and asychronously connect to EVE Online.
Payday 3 launched earlier this week. As reported back in July, it requires players to connect to a server even if they're playing solo or with a few friends in a private match.
You can already guess the third sentence: the servers have been a disaster at launch, with players forced to queue for long periods just to play alone, if they can manage to play at all. It currently sits "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam - that's 31% positive after almost 19,000 reviews.
Unity have announced that they're making changes to their "runtime fee" in response to overwhelming negative feedback. The key changes are that the fees no longer apply to developers using Unity Personal, and will only apply to developers using Unity Pro or Unity Enterprise who upgrade the next version of Unity which ships in 2024.
Want an RX 6800 XT graphics card? And a Solidigm P41 Plus 512GB SSD? And Starfield? For $486? Thanks to a Newegg bundle, that offer is open for you right now when you use code EEGCWA827 with these two items in the checkout.
Here are the links you'll need:
The Fractal Design North is one of the most popular recent PC case releases, combining a beautiful wood front panel, leather accents and excellent ventilation with a modern, easy-to-build mid-tower design. The North normally retails for £125 or more, but today you can pick it up for a more reasonable £110 when you buy from Box via Ebay, using code SAVINGS20 before September 28th. That's the cheapest this case has ever been in the UK!
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Dragon's Dogma was the action-RPG for people who wanted to play alone, but didn't want to feel alone. By far its most charming feature was the Pawn system, whereby you'd create an AI-controlled sidekick and hire two others, shared online by other players, to accompany you on your journey through a fantasy wilderness of tumbledown castles and goblin campfires. Pawns make dependable companions in many respects - pinning enemies for you to tag-team kill, healing or resurrecting you, opening chests you've missed, and enchanting your weapons at the outset of each skirmish. But what makes them fun to be around is that they're a bunch of massive buffoons.
Pawns talk without cease as you explore: a steady patter of idle observations about well-wrought staircases and the local fish trade, advice about the bestiary and, in the case of Pawns recruited from other players, quest tips based on time in their own worlds - all of it couched in the game's quirky faux-medieval dialect. Pawn dialogue is highly context-sensitive, and very often, nonsensical. They'll climb into fountains and complain that they're wet, and launch into pithy descriptions of monsters even as they're set on fire. It ought to be maddening, but somehow, it never is - probably because the Pawns never actually attempt to be witty like ally characters in, say, Xenoblade Chronicles. They're resolutely straight foils in a realm of lions with snakes for tails, chaotic boulder traps, unpleasantly lusty ogres, and players who push the wrong buttons and make random decisions on the fly. Well, pawns are back in Dragon's Dogma 2, which I recently played an hour of, and they're chattier than ever.
As if you were short on giant RPGs to play, here comes Cyberpunk 2077 with its excellent new expansion and a patch which basically sounds like a miniature relaunch. You're done with Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield, right? So what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Xbox's Elite Series 2 controllers are a great pick for PC and Xbox consoles alike, but they're also pretty darn expensive. Thankfully, you can pick up the cheaper Core version for significantly less money, especially if it's on sale - which is the situation right now! Amazon US are selling the Elite Series 2 Core in white for $99, a solid reduction from its usual price of $130.
The scourge of Cosy/Cozy Gaming has finally come for Middle-earth, and more specifically the Shire, which I guess was pretty cosy/cozy to begin with. Wētā Workshop and Private Division have announced Tales of the Shire, a "heart-warming" experience that will release on PC in 2024. I've got a live action trailer for you, in which a young person doodles pictures of Hobbits, while seated at a desk intriguingly strewn with modern appliances such as laptops and assorted Lord of the Rings paraphernalia. The book she's doodling in contains sketches of celebrated locations such as the Green Dragon pub in Bywater, and there are drawings of dolls, Hobbit-holes and onions. Take a peek!
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority have "provisionally" approved Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, removing the last major legal obstacle to the completion of the deal.
The CMA blocked the deal in April this year over concerns that it would "alter the future of the fast-growing cloud gaming market", and might lead "to reduced innovation and less choice for UK gamers over the years to come". Microsoft attempted to woo the regulator by agreeing to sell Activision Blizzard game cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft, and while the CMA have "limited residual concerns", they've largely accepted Microsoft's modifications.
Baldur's Gate 3's Patch 3, which was so massive Larian held it back a day to test it properly, will release today, and it'll add an RPG feature many of us have been requesting since we stepped clear of the Nautiloid - the ability to change a character's appearance. Alas, it comes too late for the Wood Elf Druid I rolled during my first try at the 1.0 version. I wanted her to look like a sort of Kung Fu Galadriel, with cool tattoos and aerodynamic scars, but she emerged from the character creator looking like she'd been mugged by a packet of demon crayons. I've left my active character, a High Elf Sorceress, safely tattoo-less.
AMD's RX 7800 XT is one of their best graphics cards in years, offering a genuine boost in performance over the competing RTX 4070 with FSR 3 Frame Generation tech on the way. These cards are meant to start at £499, but as with all GPUs to get a good review prices on most models are far higher - so it's nice to see an Ebay 10% off code that brings these models back to down to the price of a base unit. Today you can pick up the Sapphire RX 7800 XT Pure in white for £499 using code COLLECT10 when you buy from Ebuyer via Ebay.
Each year, Steam announce the dates for upcoming sales and fests. The information is designed so that developers can opt-in to have their games included, and plan for the year ahead. But if you're looking to buy a boatload of games, you might also want to plan when based on potential discounts.
Valve have now announced the relevant dates for the first four months of 2024.
After the closure of original developers Troika, a long-awaited sequel announcement, delays and layoffs at Hardsuit, a secret change of studio (which led to further layoffs at Hardsuit), preorder refunds and the belated reveal that a developer best known for (very good) non-combat narrative experiences would be taking the reins, the only thing I really want to hear about Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 is that it’s definitely, absolutely going to reach the finish line. There are actual vampires that come back from the dead less often. But I'm piqued nonetheless by Chinese Room studio design director Alex Skidmore’s thoughts on how this Seattle-set World of Darkness action-RPG adaptation will differentiate itself from other games in the genre, and especially, how it will put its vampiric premise to use.
The Baldur's Gate 3 "no possibility left unpossible" choice-and-consequence train continues with the revelation that, if you break up with a lover in the game, you can slowly repair the relationship and spark a bit of your old chemistry. This might not sound earthshattering to anybody from outside the videogame world - what are you doing here? Run along and watch your silly non-interactive movies and TV shows - but it's quite novel for a fantasy RPG in the BioWare tradition. In my experience, at least, most RPGs only give you the build-up to a character romance, then flash-freeze the relationship post-consummation, perhaps because you've unlocked a sexy "loyalty" companion ability and the developers don't want to take it away from you. Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the few that thinks about how chemistry might come and go.
The Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty expansion releases next week, but before that, we have Cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 update, a free rework that adds vehicle combat, smarter cops and new skill trees and perks, including the ability to play a sort of Wild Magic hacker and a skillset I can only describe as Big Hammer Go Brrrrrr. CD Projekt tech support have shared region-specific download availability for the update, together with some advice for new and returning Cyberpunk 2077 players taking the plunge. Let's have a look.
Good news for fans of heavy artillery, less good news for lovers of sleek rides. Criterion, British-based creator of the Burnout racing games and recent Need for Speed titles, will work primarily on EA and DICE's Battlefield shooters in future. The studio's first objective: improving the contemporary-set Battlefield 2042, which our Ed Thorn described as "an FPS package that has its fun moments, but one that's blighted by performance issues" back in 2021.
Spencer Yan's My Work Is Not Yet Done is a narrative-driven investigative horror game that combines elements of the survival and simulation genres with a plot exploring "the imbrication and dissolution of human identities/meanings within uncanny wilderness", to quote the project's Github page. It follows the final days of Avery, last surviving member of a doomed hunt for the source of a strange transmission, and sees you performing complex acts of maintenance upon environmental sensors, while picking through journals and other found documents so as to "to discern the most viable 'truth' behind both Avery's mission and the signal itself".
It's all wrapped up in a dense, warping two-tone aesthetic with shifting naturalistic sounds that makes my breath catch in my chest. I love everything I've seen and heard about Yan's game, but I don't think I've ever done it justice in writing, and I doubt today's efforts will address this. For you see, what I'd like to call your attention to right now is the game's complex recreation of shitting.
A new version of Stardock's cosmic empire wrangler Galactic Civilizations IV, titled Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Edition, will release on Steam and the Epic Games Store on 19th October - which also happens to be Stardock's 30th anniversary. It's "by far the biggest expansion Stardock has ever made", according to company founder Brad Wardell, who claims this latest dollop of interstellar tyranny will "transform the gameplay in ways not seen in a 4X game before". By which he chiefly means that the Supernova Edition uses large language learning models to generate civ backstories on demand. Let's dig in!
