Homeworld 3 will launch on March 8th 2024, completing a development journey that began with crowdfunding back in 2019. To give some insight into that journey, developers Blackbird are going to release a documentary this December, a clip from which you'll find below.
Dwarf Fortress is best known as a colony sim, but the wonderfully detailed fantasy world's it generates can be played in different ways. Adventure mode is a procedurally generated RPG campaign in which you control just a single character, and it's now on its way to Kitfox's DF-with-graphics Steam release in April 2024.
I am late to walk the Path of Exile. Very late: the evergreen free-to-play dark fantasy action-RPG launched literal generations ago in 2013, the heyday of Bioshock Infinite and GTA 5. (It's still arguably the heyday of GTA 5. Bioshock Infinite, not so much.) It's my understanding that New Zealand-based developer Grinding Gears have released approximately one bazillion Path of Exile updates and expansions in the decade since, the latest of which, Affliction, is briefly detailed in a boxout down the page.
I am not your guy for blow-by-blow descriptions of what Affliction adds to Path of Exile. My cautious summary would be: lots of terrifying trees, and lots of modifiers. I am, however, your guy for a newcomer's snapshot verdict on the sequel ahead of the closed Path of Exile 2 beta on 7th June 2024. In a twist so far-fetched they might just pull it off, the new game is designed both for returning players and newcomers, and I think a lot of that is epitomised by the just-announced Mercenary class, which reflects game director Jonathan Rogers's desire to create combat mechanics that are at once more involved and more inviting.
Fallout 76 continues to add more new content to the experience. On December 5, 2023, the game will receive Season 15: The Big Score.
In Season 15 players will be able to earn S.C.O.R.E. by completing in-game challenges, with new cosmetics on the table for those who can climb up through the rank - such as the Diamond Dress Outfit or the Conqueror Power Armor Paint. Plus get new items for your C.A.M.P.
This week on The Electronic Wireless Show podcast, we get a little bit removed from the rails, as it were. Things aren't looking great for Starfield - or at least, they're looking mixed, as in the Steam reviews, and verified but nameless devs are responding to negative reviews with comments that are basically like "no, our space game is fun and you're playing it wrong". We laugh about this (but also discuss the role of Steam reviews and devs replying to them). As well as that, the lads have been playing, well, the same sort of stuff this week, James brings us talk of mini PCs, and Nate makes us play Dracula or Russell Crowe. Extremely normal.
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Capcom's fantasy action-RPG Dragon's Dogma 2 will sell for $69.99 - $70, if you disregard the usual "deduct one cent to fool silly left-to-right readers into thinking it's significantly cheaper" gambit - when it releases in March 2024. If you're in the UK, the figure is currently £53.98 on Steam. It's the first time Capcom have sold the base edition of a game for $70 in the US of A, and follows comments this September from a Capcom executive that videogames are priced "too low" these days, based on how much games cost to make.
Rome wasn't built in a day, but in sci-fi strategy game Stellaris Nexus, you can found, expand and fritter away a whole intergalactic empire in around an hour. In the case of my multiplayer hands-on, that empire was the Ix'Idar, a race of burrowing insect critters with a unique resource - pheromones. Boldly disregarding the PR's gentle advice that I start with an easier-to-master race, I set out to swarm the galaxy and immediately found myself at the bottom of the victory or "Succession" point scoreboard, with one player picking off my planets by means of espionage, while others stomped my fleets of stargrubs flat in no-nonsense space combat.
I did manage to briefly take possession of the titular Nexus, a throneworld which awards beaucoup Succession points to its owner, but it turns out fixating on the Nexus is a great way to set yourself up for a midgame dogpile - you pour resources into capturing it, sacrifice half your fleet to the first invader, then lose it all to the second. With my initially bountiful dominions rudely shrunk to a smattering of isolated planets, I took the coward's way out of the press event and said I had to be going because I had other work to attend to. I didn't at all! I just wanted to go and cry in the toilet. Alas for the Ix'Idar - not so much "lions led by donkeys" as an antfarm in the hands of a wilful toddler.
Last week I wrote up an irreverent cyberpunk ninja game called Ninja Issen. The just announced Quantic River, which Graham tossed into the Maw last night, is that game played straight. In Fluidfury Interactive's new dystopian slasher, you are a resurrected cyborg who, for reasons not currently given, must katana the limbs off a bunch of other dudes in a lean and nasty 2.5D metropolis.
I hope you've had your fill of cyberpunk, because we're heading back to Rivia, baby. Almost half of CD Projekt's development staff - around 330 people - are now working on the next Witcher game, the mysterious project Polaris.
The Anacrusis is a co-op swarm shooter from Stray Bombay, the studio co-founded by former Left 4 Dead developer Chet Faliszek. It's currently making its way through Steam Early Access, but Faliszek says he "will never do Early Access again" due to "how player counts are seen by steam and then downwind by the community."
The Embracer mass layoffs train has come for Fishlabs, the studio behind space shooter Chorus. Embracer have laid off more than half the Fishlabs team - "around 50 people" - as part of a restructuring operation that has already seen the conglomerate cut over 900 jobs across its operations over the summer.
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only... compromise, calculation and license to misbehave. In Owlcat's forthcoming RPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, you play the free-wheeling head of an interstellar merchant's dynasty. Operating on the fringes of uncharted space, you're the owner of a Warrant of Trade that essentially lets you run your own miniature empire within the Imperium, deciding the fates of planets, amassing vast wealth and recruiting a motley crew of xenos, heretics and assorted weirdos. It's the kind of behaviour that'd get you vaporised if you were some run-of-the-mill Space Marine Chaplain, but out here on the frontier, you're allowed to act with impunity, providing you fulfil your overall mandate of adding to the God Emperor's glory and kicking the odd Eldar's head in.
Rogue Traders are arguably the only characters in Games Workshop's brutal and decrepit table-top setting that lend themselves to the role of CRPG protagonist, because they are the only characters in Warhammer 40K's Imperium who enjoy anything like the plot agency of a Commander Shepard. And with that, I think, comes an interesting transformation of the character alignment systems the game shares with other CRPGs such as Baldur's Gate 3.
Bethesda's heaping plateful of space-spaghetti Starfield presently rejoices in the status of a Mixed Steam user review rating, with over 80,000 such reviews posted to date. Bethesda High Command are clearly displeased with this, and several unnamed but platform-verified developers have begun replying to and rebutting individual Steam reviewers, giving apparent priority to complaints about the game's loading breaks during fast travel and when moving between maps.
Baldur's Gate 3's next update, Patch 5, will address various performance issues caused by the bountiful fantasy RPG's previous patch. The source of the lag? No, it's got nothing to do with teeth. According to Larian, the slowdowns are actually connected to the game's understanding of crime and morality: Patch 4 left it unable to "forget" player thefts and acts of vandalism that haven't been detected by NPCs, meaning that BG3 players who break the rules often and get away with it have been saddling their simulations with unfinished tasks. That's right, the game's latest technical crisis is in fact a crisis of conscience. Oh the humanity!
Black Friday may have been and gone, dear readers, but the deals still continue with the dawn of Cyber Monday. This will be the last day of the Black Friday extravaganza, so make sure you get those purchases in before midnight if you still want to take advantage of any offers. And to help you navigate the trauma of endlessly navigating several different price-checking sites to bring you the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, I'm back for one last day of liveblog duties. Hardware editor James will also be updating our dedicated Cyber Monday deals pages with lots more of the best deals if you're looking for something more specific.
(And if you're looking for more console-related Cyber Monday deals, then our friends at Eurogamer have their own Cyber Monday liveblog you may want to keep an eye on as well.)
Black Friday 2023 is donezo, but the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals live on. Here, we’ll continue to round up big savings on all kinds of quality hardware – from the best SSDs and graphics cards to fully prebuilt gaming PCs and laptops.
The Logitech G432 has been our pick for the best gaming headset for ages, and with good reason. It packs a huge amount of quality into a very reasonably priced package. And this Black Friday weekend, that package is even more reasonably priced than usual, as this fantastic headset is down to half-price in both the UK and the US.
Four-legged beat 'em up Them's Fightin' Herds has had quite the journey, having begun life as an unofficial My Little Pony fangame before becoming a legally distinct and well-liked fighter via crowdfunding and Early Access.
Now that journey seems to be an end. News of a patch and some DLC characters earlier this week came alongside the news that these updates would the game's last - meaning that an in-progress story mode will never be completed and certain crowdfunded rewards will never be delivered.
There's a quote about early computer animation, which I can't track down now, that before Pixar came along everyone was using it to swoop cameras through outerspace and up a gnat's ass. Or perhaps it was a fly's butt?
I'm glad Pixar used computer animation to tell great stories, but in watching the 24-minute trailer for the technology underpinning Star Citizen, I have come to realise: swooping the camera through outerspace and up to a man's sweaty brow, at least, is actually pretty cool, too.
Amazon doesn't specifically list this as a Black Friday deal. But it's certainly a bargain that you can take advantage of this Black Friday weekend. AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X processor is available for just either side of half-price, depending on which side of the pond you live on. Regardless, that's a big chunk off one of the best gaming CPUs around.
When Katharine reviewed the 5600X back in 2020, she called it "a stonkingly fast gaming CPU". It's a six-core, twelve thread processor, with each of its Vermeer processors providing speedy single-core performance, making it an ideal CPU for playing both modern multithreaded games, and older single-thread titles. There are of course plenty of faster CPUs around these days, but you'll pay significantly more for those, and it's only prudent to do so if you're looking to get the highest framerates at 1080p. If you're gaming at 4k, then it's your GPU that'll be doing most of the heavy lifting, and your funds are better spent there.
It's also worth noting that the 5600X is highly power efficient, with a TDP of just 65 watts. This makes it both more economical and more environmentally friendly that a lot of CPUs, an important consideration if your energy bills are making you wince.
These days the best gaming mice often have nearly as many buttons as your keyboard. But at the end of the day, a gaming mouse needs three things, a left-button, a right-button and a scroll-wheel. And this Black Friday weekend, you can get twice that many buttons three, plus some fetching RGB lighting, for less than twenty quid.
The Steelseries Rival 3 has long been one of the most dependable budget gaming mice. Its 8500DPI TrueMotive Core optical sensor is a substantial improvement over its predecessor the 110, while the six programmable buttons are double what you need for the vast majority of games. It's a pretty little thing too, the illuminated logo and RGB lighting strip around the base are both well-judged, attractive without being ostentatious.
RAM is rarely the first consideration when upgrading a PC, as it has a much smaller impact on performance compared to a better processor or a spanking new GPU. But you also won't get without far it, and we are slowly heading toward the point where more RAM is preferable. This year brought a scare when Star Wars: Jedi Survivor seemingly needed a minimum 32GB of RAM. Luckily that turned out to be an error in the system requirements, but as the size and detail of video game worlds exerts greater demand on load times, RAM will become more important. And if you want to get ahead of the game(s), you can get 32GB of rock solid ram for less than £50 this Black Friday weekend.
Deck the halls with strings of neon, reader dear, for Cyber Monday is almost upon is. It truly is the most wonderful time of the year, bringing friends and family together to exchange warez, sing Front Line Assembly carols, and quaff mulled Jolt Cola in celebration of all things cyber. Ah, brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it. Please, do tell me what you're planning for Cyber Monday. And tell me what you're playing this weekend. Here's what we're clicking on!
Every so often a new game surfaces that aims to be a successor to classic, stylish, mid-'90s antigrav racer Wipeout. Released back in 2018, BallisticNG was among the better attempts, managing to capture the speed and a little of the style while hewing close to the chunky polgyonal style of the PlayStation 1-era original.
Fast Forward five years and BallisticNG has been regularly updated since that initial launch, and a new trailer to mark its release on GOG is keen to brag about
Deliver Us Mars is a third-person puzzle adventure which manages to marry planet-sized problems with personal family drama. Katharine was a fan when it released not so long ago, back in February.
Which makes it nice that it's free to keep this week from the Epic Games Store.
American Truck Simulator will head to Kansas next week, with the release of its latest DLC on November 30th. Before that the truck driving and management sim has received a new update which adds improved weather effects, revised mountains, used truck deals, and the Moon.
As Alec wrote in his Styx: Shards of Darkness review, what the goblin stealth 'em up has going for it is purity. It's a third-person adventure where stealth is the only option and being spotted is swiftly punished.
It's currently free from GOG.com.
Time for something a bit different from the usual Black Friday PC deals: Sony’s DualSense gamepad, my personal favourite controller, is down to £40 here in the UK. That matches its previous all-time low, and to sweeten the deal – in the traditional sense, not the Nate Trying To Make Me Do Horrible Things sense – you can get a £5 ShopTo gift card in the process. To gift to yourself? I believe so. This deal applies to six different DualSense colour options too, from PS5-standard white to a cool blue and a dubiously useful camo pattern.
Black Friday week has already yielded some tempting deals on Nvidia’s latest mid-range graphics cards, the RTX 4060 and the RTX 4060 Ti. Up at the top of the GPU pyramid, meanwhile, AMD cards are getting in the act as well. Like, say, this £200-off deal on the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX Gaming Trio Classic, bringing it down to £900. Still a lot of money, sure, but the RX 7900 XTX is the absolute crème de la crème of the current Radeon lineup, with native 4K performance on par with that of Nvidia’s RTX 4080.
This sure is a blast from the past. The LG 27GL83A and the slightly more expensive GL850 were the first two Fast IPS monitors to hit the scene, offering significantly better motion handling than IPS monitors up to that point - which excelled in terms of colour and viewing angles, but struggled with fast-paced action. Now the 27GL83A is back once again, and at a new low price - $200, a nice $100 reduction from its usual asking price.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 had no confirmed release date beyond the vague "2023" still listed on its Steam page. In a business update released today by publishers Focus Entertainment, however, it seems the third-person boltgunner has been delayed into the "second half of 2024".
GameMaker, the 2D game creation toolkit, has been used to make everything from Chicory: A Colorful Tale to Gunpoint to the original freeware Spelunky. It's also one of the more accessible ways to make games for beginners, kids and students, thanks to a drag-and-drop interface and forgiving scripting language.
Good news, then: GameMaker is now "free for non-commercial purposes on all non-console platforms" - such as PC.
Star Wars: Empire At War wasn't a great game, but it did fulfill a simple fantasy: it was a real-time strategy game with original trilogy Star Wars units. If what you wanted was to fling swarms of AT-ATs against swarms of X-Wings then, yeah, you could do that. Darth Vader versus entire platoons of rebel soldiers? That too.
Why am I talking about a 2006 RTS? Because it just got a new official patch to make it run in 64-bit and fix a number of bugs.
I watched a few hours of Worldless being played last night and didn't really register that it was turn-based. That's because it's a Metroidvania platformer and, when it is time for back-and-forth combat, you're not choosing attacks from a menu. Instead you're stringing together combos in real-time, then when your alotted attack time is over, you're parrying enemy assaults with rhythmic flair.
So, turn-based, yes, but with a twist. It's also out today.
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 developers Sledgehammer Games (umpteenth reminder: that's Modern Warfare 3 as in the 2023 game, not the 2011 FPS of the same name) have hosted a Reddit AMA in which they answered a bunch of questions about the evolution of the game's competitive meta. That's meta as in the overall balance of power between Modern Warfare 3 loadouts, playstyles and so forth based on a variety of factors such as map design, rather than the Alan Wake 2 kind of "meta", where characters talk about how they're just characters in a game and so on. I would dearly like to see some crossover between these types of "meta". I guess the Call of Duty that comes closest to fulfilling that idea is Black Ops 3, with its fourth-wall-breaking cyborg theatrics.
Anyway, the discussion is interesting because it touches on the fact that the evolution of an FPS competitive meta is an artful balance of prediction and reaction, imposing new directions on players at times, taking direction from them at others. The developers want the Modern Warfare 3 meta to change "from season to season" - the question, of course, is how to do this without alienating fans of certain weapons and strategies.
Want a 4TB SSD for £160? Of course you do, you glorious data hoarder! The Crucial MX500 is my go-to SATA SSD recommendation, and it's now available at this price in an Amazon Black Friday deal.
AMD's Ryzen 5000 series was the zenith of the long-running AM4 platform, a family of CPUs that offered an extreme uptick in performance compared to Ryzen 1000 processsors on the same socket. While the exceptional 5800X3D takes the title of the fastest gaming CPU from this generation, the standard 5800X is another capable performer - and this eight-core, 16-thread CPU is significantly cheaper during Black Friday, costing just £181/$207.
That's pretty good going for a CPU that cost double that at the start of 2022 - especially when it also costs 60% as much as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D while delivering 75% to 95% of the performance, depending on the game.
Capcom have announced a showcase for November 28th to delve into Dragon’s Dogma 2, a sequel to their oddball fantasy RPG from 2012. That’s exciting news to me, since the original’s small-person-climbs-big-monster combat was pure fun to simply watch. Doing the actual monster-stabbing was even better, though, and thankfully the sequel’s release date doesn’t seem that far off if a videogame ratings board is to be believed (accidental ratings boards leaks being the way many release dates are revealed these days).
The Logitech G Pro Wireless was one of the first mice to kick off the ultralight trend, offering incredible agility, bulletproof Lightspeed wireless and high-end components at under 80 grams. Its successor, the G Pro X Superlight, is even lighter at 63g with a refined shape and even better specs, resulting in its adoption by a huge percentage of active esports pros and competitively-minded amateurs alike.
Today the Superlight model is down to £90 on Amazon UK versus its normal £140, a £50 discount that means it's a great time to see why this mouse is so popular - and one of my all-time favourites.
Sundays are for cleaning the tea stains out of your mugs. Before you scrub, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
Half-Life turns 25 years old tomorrow, with new maps and updates to celebrate. Valve also reunited the game's original developers for an hour-long making-of documentary in which its original programmers and artists reminisce about creating the first-person classic at a time when many of them had never shipped a game before.
Chief among the revelations within is that all of Half-Life's textures were created by a single person, Karen Laur.
Immortals Of Aveum never looked like it was going to be successful, and it wasn't. I root for it, however. In an industry where big budget blockbusters are most often sequels, or boringly safe, Aveum feels comparatively bold just by being a self-evidentaly daft first-person mashup of Call Of Duty and Doctor Strange magic powers.
Now it has a demo, so you can try it for free.
Half-Life came out 25 years ago tomorrow and to celebrate Valve ahve released an anniversary update. It includes four new multiplayer maps, updated graphics settings, and fully verified Steam Deck support. It also includes some new multiplayer models and skins, including proto-Barney and the original design for Gordon Freeman, pictured above.
I'm still trying to enjoy as much autumn as I can, returning for the third weekend in a row to favourite woodlands. It's more and more bleak each time, though I do enjoy seeing this progress. I've also now needed to break out thermal layers. I dislike this period when trees are barren and fallen leaves are sludge underfoot but it's not winter. Unpleasant, sure, but not yet thrillingly hostile. Ah well, it'll come. What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Former Dragon Age: Dreadwolf production director and veteran Mass Effect scribe Mac Walters has founded a new studio, Worlds Untold, with funding from NetEase. According to the official site, the studio will develop "triple-A action adventure games with an emphasis on narrative and worldbuilding": its first project is a single-player-focussed, "near future action adventure game in a breathtaking world filled with mystery and exploration".
Amongst other things, this reflects Walter's desire to move away from the "space opera" RPGs he's made in the past and develop a more linear, story-driven sci-fi game, whose universe might also host TV or novel adaptations. Which might not sound very appealing to BioWare diehards, but you can rest easy on one count: the game will have plenty of lore, though how it's served up to the player is another question.
Reports suggested Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was a crunch-driven 16 month project, and our campaign review thought it displayed characteristics of a rushed schedule-filler. Besides quality gunplay and a fantastic array of classic maps, MW3's multiplayer doesn't do much to differentiate itself from MW2, aside from being more of a frustrating grind. And its awkwardly positioned zombies mode, though it might appeal to some, has been robbed of its sickle-sharpening soul. All of it does smack of being rushed, and I'd only recommend the game if you're an ardent fan of COD who's happy to accept little in the way of changes. Otherwise, this FPS simply isn't worth spending your hard-earned bucks on.
At the time of Star Fleet II: Krellan Commander's release, I was still learning to spell and wrestling with the whole "going to the toilet independently" business, but if I'd had access to an MS-DOS PC between potty-training sessions, I dare say I'd have tried my hand at being an intergalactic warlord. Originally published in 1989 by Interstel Corporation and distributed by a little-known company called Electronic Arts, it's an absurdly in-depth and fiddly-looking space sim in which you fly around a randomly generated cosmos in your horrible Klingon-adjacent battlecruiser, blowing up or commandeering other ships, bombarding or invading planets, and generally speaking being a nuisance.
According to its creators, Trevor Sorensen and Mark Baldwin, the game had a rushed launch that led to a lot of technical issues. The developers released another, relatively bug-free version in 1991, which is the version you'll find on most retro game preservation sites. Then, in 2018, Sorensen decided to make a new 2.0 version of Krellan Commander using his original 486 PC, which finally launched this week on Steam and GOG.
The ocean planet of GUP-14 is not a happy place. Its seabed has been gunked up with piles of trash, globs of purple gunge and nasty clouds of micro-plastics, all because an industrial megacorp couldn't be bothered to clean up after themselves after bleeding it for resources. That megacorp's since upped sticks to, sadly, continue their terrible ways somewhere else in the solar system, but calling out these bad practices (beyond them being obviously bad and not good for the planet) is not really Loddlenaut's concern here.
Rather, your job is to simply clean up this mess with your array of high-tech gadgetry, healing its polluted environments so: a) it's not a grim, purple hellscape anymore; b) native, axolotl-like loddle creatures can move back in and prosper. It's simple, satisfying work that's designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside without having to think too hard. But its straightforward, frictionless tale may leave some wishing it had just a little more bite, and less of a sense that you're laying the ground for some other faceless corpo power to go and splurge all over it again.
Everybody's favourite bulk-buyer of studios and licenses Embracer Group have announced that they've laid off 900 people over the last three months, as per restructuring plans revealed this summer - around five percent of their total workforce.
Warner Bros and Rocksteady have released the first of a series of development diaries for troubled comicbook schloot-me-do Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. And it looks... OK?
