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Donnerstag, 3. April 2025

Sea of Thieves crossing over with Destiny doesn't make a lick of sense, but here it is anyway

Everything is IP, all of the time, everywhere you look now, because big wigs in suits have got it in their heads that original, uniquely appealing content just can't win over a combination of pixels that resemble something someone already likes. Sea of Thieves is no stranger to crossovers, with big, thematically relevant ones like Monkey Island and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as some smaller ones like Halo and Banjo Kazooie. Today's crossover is one of the smaller ones, this time with, uh… Destiny. The sci-fi, first-person shooter. Huh.

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Mittwoch, 2. April 2025

Tomb Raider and Perfect Dark devs Crystal Dynamics cut staff, promising that current projects are unaffected

Tomb Raider, Soul Reaver and Perfect Dark developers Crystal Dynamics are laying off 17 "talented team members" in order "to better align our current business needs and the studio's future success". According to a social media statement, they "did not take this decision lightly". Oh, and "this change does not alter our current project plans."

It's not clear who exactly has lost their jobs, but going by this Xitter post, senior combat designer Mark Vernon is one of them. "Call me Mark S the way I just got severed, from employment," he writes. Best of luck finding your way to the black elevator hall, Mark V. (If you haven't watched Severance, I promise this reference is more hopeful than it sounds.)

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Minecraft's "vibrant" update has me thinking about video games as time capsules

In the latest Minecraft Live, developers Mojang revealed a "Vibrant Visual" overhaul for a game that is now older than many (most?) of the people playing it. Initially planned for the game's Bedrock edition, with a Java version update to follow, it garnishes Minecraft's blocky wilderness with directional lighting, volumetric fog and other gimcrackery you might recognise from more recently published open worlders.

Back when I was a mod-phobic Vanilla player, I would have sneered at all this. Minecraft is not supposed to have "subsurface scattering", whatever that means to regular mortals. It is not supposed to look high fidelity, or high tech. It is supposed to look like, well, Minecraft. These days, my reaction is less outrage and more curiosity, mingled with vertigo at the entangling of these trendy flourishes with the pixelgrain of what is still, on some level, Infiniminer touching grass. Whatever you think of these Vibrant Visuals, it's interesting to follow Mojang's efforts to tinker with and flesh out an aesthetic that was arguably 'perfected' in 2009. It’s also interesting to think about what “vibrant” might look like, 16 years from now.

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Monster Train 2 rolls up with a release date

The makers of cardy roguelike Monster Train 2 announced a release date yesterday, revealing that it'll be pulling into Steam libraries and honking its big "all aboard" horn in less than two months. Do you have the capacity to allow another deckbuilder into the overcrowded dining car of your brain? I probably don't. But I do have fond memories of the first game's crunchy runs and over-the-top card combos. Hmmm, maybe another rail trip or two hundred would be nice.

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Schedule I creator seems to have vastly undersold how much content is in his new Steam hit

There are few things more heartwarming than a solo developer seeing breakout success, especially if their game is a wholesome testament to community spirit, entrepreneurship, and innovative street cleaning solutions like Schedule I. Pretty close, though, is a solo developer pulling a 'Miyazaki lying about Elden Ring', and underselling just how big their game actually is in the run-up to release.

Developer Tyler has been updating the bud flinging simulator steadily throughout the demo release and into the current early access, and they've also got a roadmap over at Trello here (featuring: raids, parkour, jukeboxes, and controller support among other things). Some of the most relevant communication is actually in the Steam forums though. Tyler revealed yesterday that he's currently working on getting the game Steam Deck verified. It's also where he first revealed the full list of planned sellables that are now in the roadmap (Marijuana, Meth, Cocaine, Shrooms, MDMA, and delicious + cool Heroin), with plans to take community suggestions once they're all in.

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Dienstag, 1. April 2025

Stardew Valley Baldur's Gate 3 mod back online after D&D owners "mistakenly" send a copyright strike

Dungeons & Dragons company Wizards Of The Coast have apologised for "mistakenly" sending a legal takedown to the creator of a free Stardew Valley mod that adds a village inspired by and featuring characters from Baldur's Gate 3. The mod has attracted praise from Larian CEO Swen Vincke, who was naturally a bit piqued when it was taken offline.

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Eidos Montreal lay off 75 workers in further cuts to the Deus Ex studio

75 people have been let go by Eidos-Montreal, the studio announced yesterday. The Deus Ex and Tomb Raider developers laid off the workers because they didn't have the "capacity to entirely reallocate them", according to a statement. It's a further blow to the workforce at the Embracer-owned company, following hefty cuts last year.

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Dwarf Fortress creator toys with the idea of an Elf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress co-creator and programmer Tarn Adams has made fleeting, whimsical allusion to the possibility of an Elf Fortress game in a new interview - a fleeting, whimsical allusion I will now pounce on and make an enormous deal of, because my goodness, man, you can't just say "Elf Fortress" and walk off whistling into the sunset.

The topic arose during a discussion of why fantasy dwarves are a "fortuitous" archetype for a maddeningly system-driven game like Dwarf Fortress, in which half the fun is enjoying the tunnel vision of characters who will cheerfully neglect their duties and doom their brethren because, for example, they're obsessed with crafting a mug that menaces with spikes of bituminous coal and alpaca wool. According to Adams, this is relatably "human", though he muddies things intriguingly by dropping a reference to androids, and allows to weave stories around technical eccentricities and outright bugs, which can be read as instances of "dwarfy" fixation and excess. Elves? They don't work the same way.

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Montag, 31. März 2025

IGN Live will return from June 7th-8th and tickets are on sale now

IGN Live was already confirmed to return this June, but now RPS's corporate papa has put a date on it. The in-person fan event, with streams for those who can't attend, will return on June 7th-8th in LA, and tickets are on sale now.

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Tony Hawk personally made changes to Pro Skater 3+4 soundtracks because he wants you to discover new music

"Alien Ant Farm or we boycott," reads the top comment on Activision's recent reveal of the next wave of tracks for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 - a response to the revelation that the upcoming remasters have both been hit and struck by some soundtrack changes, which hasn't gone down completely smoothly with fans. You could almost say they feel making alterations to such classics is criminal. OK, I'll stop. For now.

It turns out these changes come straight from the large Hawk himself. “It was my choice to pick some different songs by the same artists featured in THPS3+4 OST,” he wrote on Instagram, as spotted by Very Gary Computing. “I’m hoping that discovery is half the fun, and a big reason that these soundtracks resonated in the first place. So listen and enjoy the ride. More to come… both old and new.”

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The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

OK you gutless punks, you've had this coming for a long time and now, you're gonna get it. Time to pay the piper, you miserable freaks. Oh, excuse me! I should explain. We've been doing some research into boosting site engagement, and it turns out the quickest way to engage people is to abuse and threaten them. We've also been reading up on seduction techniques - frankly, I wanted to try these out first, but the genAI poltergeist in my phone camera keeps misidentifying my nudes as Edvard Munch's The Scream, and Sotheby's now claim I owe them 120 million dollars. Anyway, here's what's new in PC games this week.

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Sonntag, 30. März 2025

What's on your bookshelf?: Now Play This founder, Dicey Dungeons writer, and The Husbands author Holly Gramazio

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I woke from a terrible nightmare last night. I'd just released a book and every three or so pages, the publisher had inserted a double page spread trying to sell the reader a wireless mouse with Minecraft movie Jack Black's gormless, gouty grin on it, turning my carefully curated atmosphere to shit! Phew. Thank goodness it was just a nightmare! Just an utter, utter nightmare.

Anyway, never mind all that. The sun is out, and books still exist and are and mostly advertisement free! Here to talk about them this week is game maker, Dicey Dungeons writer, Now Play This festival founder, and The Husbands author, Holly Gramazio! Cheers Holly! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for nursing a sore throat into nearly its third week of activity. I wish I wasn't such a tiny widdle baby, but I strongly feel that no person has ever suffered as I now suffer. Let's do some links.

Edge Magazine has launched an industry newsletter, called Knowledge. You can signup here. Edge has long been a stealth B2B product, so an explicitly B2B newsletter makes sense. This is also promising because it's being written by Marie Dealessandri, former deputy editor of GI.biz.

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Samstag, 29. März 2025

Sorry, other game devs, but Rockstar is still keeping quiet about a release date in the name of maintaining "anticipation"

There's a lot we still don't know about GTA 6, but probably the most annoying thing that has gone unanswered is just when it's coming out. Not annoying in the sense of, "oh golly gosh I'm so excited please I need to know", more "come on now, just get it over with!" It's just a whole thing, and I wish it wasn't, but Rockstar and their owner Take-Two also clearly know it's a whole thing, and are riding on that very fact. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently spoke with Bloomberg about a whole bunch of bits, and of course the question of when GTA 6 is coming out came up.

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Treeplanter is a woodland simulation game where every sale helps plant actual trees

We can probably all agree that planting trees is pretty much universally good, right? I can't really imagine a scenario where planting a tree is a bad thing, we need them to live after all. If you're not into planting trees you're probably an oil tycoon, or a squirrel with incredibly bad survival instincts. If you are, though, might I interest you in Treeplanter, a game whose name is exactly what it says on the tin? It was announced just yesterday, and looks quite, quite lovely.

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Myst and Riven developer Cyan Worlds lays off 12, essentially cutting its team in half

Bah, it's never fun writing one of these, but unfortunately Myst and Riven developer Cyan Worlds have laid off 12 of its staff members this week, supposedly cutting the studio by about half. Cyan shared the news on its social media accounts yesterday, noting that "industry conditions" have "forced" the studio to "weigh the future health of our studio against the month-to-month realities of game development in 2025."

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Former GTA producer's next game MindsEye has a release date, though I'm not sure if you'll find it Everywhere

Have you been Everywhere? Not like, literally, everywhere, but Everywhere, that sort of Roblox, sort of Fortnite, everything game from Build A Rocket Boy, a studio founded by ex-Rockstar dev and GTA 3 to 5 producer Leslie Benzies. That whole, uh, interactive experience or whatever you want to call it still seems to be in beta. But the first project spun off from it, MindsEye, a near-future action game that really just looks like slightly sci-fi GTA, now has a release date: June 10th, later this year. Except, I'm a little bit confused by it.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

This week RPS has been racked by staff absences due to illness, family affairs, press trips, and a dire force of negation called “holiday”. For a while, on Friday, I thought I might be the only one left. “Is there anyone alive out there?” I howled, guiding my lifeboat among the frozen gobbets of discount gaming keyboard. “Can anyone hear me?” Then, I heard a few, faint voices on the wind. Good news: RPS still has some writers and what’s more, they have plans for the weekend.

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Freitag, 28. März 2025

Killzone composer calls for a remaster, but worries Guerrilla's old FPS is too "bleak" for today's players

Horizon: Zero Dawn composer Joris de Man has expressed a tentative interest in the return of Guerrilla's Killzone shooter series, which was once touted as PlayStation's answer to Halo, Call Of Duty, and Gears Of War.

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Donnerstag, 27. März 2025

Sea of Thieves crossing over with Destiny doesn't make a lick of sense, but here it is anyway

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Yes, Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 3 is in the works, but that doesn't mean Space Marine 2 is already dead

These days, most sequels to even the most popular of games are announced a good while after whatever the latest title is. I mean, just look at The Witcher 4, we've known it's been in the works for a while now, but it only got a formal reveal last December, almost a full decade after The Witcher 3. Saber didn't wait around to announce a follow-up to last year's very popular Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, though, revealing that a third game is in the works just this month, about half a year on from its release. Even still, Saber would like you to know that this doesn't mean it's "abandoning" Space Marine 2.

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Real-time tactics game Strategos aims to outflank Total War with over 120 factions at launch

MicroProse or whatever currently prospers under the decades-old MicroProse banner have announced that they're publishing Strategos, a real-time tactics wargame set in classical antiquity. I hadn't heard of the game before, and my first reaction to the above screenshot was "oh hey, Total War: Rome". Then I veni, vidi, vickied on over to the Steam page, and it turns out that might be a flawed comparison, not least because Strategos is the creation of a single designer and programmer with artists working on contract. Here's a trailer.

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Tomb Raider and Perfect Dark devs Crystal Dynamics cut staff, promising that current projects are unaffected

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Mittwoch, 26. März 2025

I've tested these brilliant Steam Deck cases, and they're all discounted in the Amazon Big Spring Sale

Carrying your Steam Deck without a case is a bold move. Not the good kind of bold either—the “why is my joystick clicking funny now” kind. I’ve seen enough scratched screens and mystery stick drift to know that a decent case isn’t optional. It's armor. And right now, a bunch of great ones are discounted during the Amazon Big Spring Sale.

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"Relaxing" horror game LiDAR Exploration Program is PowerWash Simulator but with lasers

LiDAR or "light detection and ranging" is a way of working out and picturing the distance to an object by shooting laser beams at it, and timing how long it takes the laser to bounce back to the scanner. It's been used for a bunch of Hard Science-y purposes, from mapping cave systems to measuring changes in the Amazon forest canopy. It's also become popular among artists, who use it to create high-fidelity yet abstractly coloured and ethereal visualisations of, for example, rivers. Now here's LiDAR Exploration Program, a "relaxing atmospheric horror" game from KenForest, in which you roam maps with a handheld LiDAR gun scanning the geography into being.

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Dienstag, 25. März 2025

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide's Nightmares and Visions update adds in a sprinkle of Left 4 Dead, and you can try it out now

Fancy a bit of Left 4 Dead in your Warhammer 40,000: Darktide? Oh, well that's convenient, as the game's Nightmare and Visions update just dropped today, adding in Mortis Trials, a new wave-based game mode. The wave-based nature really is what it says on the tin: scores of enemies come after you round after round, but in this mode you'll get Indulgences, which is just lorespeak for upgrades you can unlock on different runs.

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The Samsung 990 Pro, a top-tier gaming SSD, is up to 40% off in the Amazon Spring Sale

Having spent a good chunk of this morning window-shopping SSDs, I’m prepared to point knowingly at the Samsung 990 and mouth "That one", thus crowning it as the best NVMe drive deal of the Amazon Spring Sale. Especially so, if you’re concerned about the swelling storage footprint of contemporary games, as the sale is focusing on the most cavernous 2TB and 4TB capacities.

The 990 Pro has popped up on RPS a few times, but if you’re unfamiliar, this basically forms a triumvirate with the WD Black SN850x and the Crucial T500 as the three finest examples of game load-time cutting in the mainstream PCIe 4.0 SSD space. Newer PCIe 5.0 drives can just about edge them, but not to the degree that their far higher price is justified, and with some help from the sales that gap gets even wider. All three of these deals, in fact, drop the 990 Pro to its lowest pricing since at least last year’s Black Friday.

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Today’s Amazon Spring Sale is rubbish, but this cheap, flexible Steam Deck dock is not

Amazon’s Spring Sale is back, and upon first inspection, it’s not looking like a vintage year. There are some discounts on quality PC gear, but a deals collapse has left them buried under forty thousand tonnes of overcomplicated toothbrushes and collagen peptide powders. So, so many collage peptide powders. I didn't know there was this much collagen on Earth.

It’s still my job – it is still my job, right? Okay just checking – to dig through the Paltrow-adjacent junk and yank out the good stuff, so let’s start small with a few quid/bucks off one of my favourite Steam Deck docks. The JSAUX 6-in-1 Multifunctional Docking Station may have a clumsy name but it’s a keen bit of accessory design, with the port-adorned central block (which acts as a stand in docked mode) able to detach and pull double duties as a portable USB-C hub. It’s perfect for Steam Deck/Asus ROG Ally/Lenovo Legion Go/Zotac Zone etc. owners who want to keep employing that extra connectivity when taking their handheld away from home, and the Spring Sale has chipped the already-aggressive price down to £38 / $31.

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Civilization 7 gives you an whole two seconds of your life back with a patch that lets you move units instantly

Come with me into the sexy world of UI. Chunky 4X strategy game Civilization VII is getting an update today that will let you move units from one hexagonal space to another much more snappily than before. The patch also adds the tallest mountain on earth to the game, but I know what Civ fans really want, and it's not Everest. It's a tickbox in the options that removes the animation of your little dudes sprinting across the map, saving you entire seconds of precious existence.

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Steam's latest sale is all about city builders with discounts on Oxygen Not Included, Frostpunk and Project Highrise

If there's one thing I know about you sickos it's that you love a good city builder. No, don't try to deny it. I have the site traffic data right here and the numbers do not lie (unless they make me look bad to people who outrank me). You people are never happier than when you're wallowing in a bathtub full of upgradeable cottages, taxation sliders and pop satisfaction metrics. It's a disgraceful habit, but I'm not here to judge - not when there's a Steam City Builder & Colony Sim Fest underway.

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Montag, 24. März 2025

Silent Hill f has been deemed too freaky for Australians... for now

Sorry Australians, you can't confront the horrifying psychological manifestations of your inner turmoil. It would be too much for you, according to the government. The country's classification board recently refused to grant upcoming horror game Silent Hill f an age rating, essentially preventing it from being sold in the country unless certain elements of the game are toned down or altered by Konami. But it's possible the developer will do just that, as the classification board has retracted their ruling. At least for the time being.

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RTX 5070 Ti is finally back in stock on Amazon UK, and for RRP

I want to believe the GPU gods are finally throwing us a bone. MSI RTX 5070 Ti 16G Shadow 3X OC is actually available on Amazon UK right now for £729. That’s not a typo. It’s in stock, sold and shipped by Amazon, and somehow not priced into orbit. When scalpers are still charging north of £1000 for this card, seeing a legit listing for retail price feels like someone left the vault door open and forgot to sound the alarm.

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Sonntag, 23. März 2025

What's on your bookshelf?: Finji co-founder Bekah Saltsman

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! As a reward for sticking with this column for so long, I'm delighted to announce that we'll soon be rolling out the chance for you to write in with a detailed list of all your most subversive ideas and which books inspired you to hold them, and in return I'll send you an email alerts if those books ever appear in this column. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is widely considered a classic so I'll just call it 'McCarthyism' for simplicity.

This week, it's the co-founder of Finji - publisher of such luxury games as Tunic, Wilmot's Warehouse, and Night In The Woods - Bekah Saltsman! Cheers Bekah! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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The Sunday Papers

In his irregular newsletter, Culture: An Owner's Manual, W. David Marx wrote about the age of the double sell-out. His argument is that, by the end of the 20th century, it was deemed acceptable for artists to sell-out because commercial activities were understood to pay for creative work, but now culture's most successful creators sell-out simply to sell-out further.

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Samstag, 22. März 2025

Carimara is a wonderfully grubby looking game about talking to Norman-folklore inspired creeps and exercising ghosts with cards

Everybody loves a good fairytale, but I'm sure you can agree that some kind of twist on a Brothers Grimm story is a bit overdone by now, so how about a game based on folklore from Normandy? Carimara: Beneath the forlorn limbs is exactly that, a self described "short and creepy fairytale" that has a look about it where I can easily imagine walking around its world and think "cripes, it smells a bit around here, 'ey?"

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Minecraft is getting a visual overhaul you probably don't need because of all of those mods you've got installed

Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time, but it's looked pretty much the same for the entirety of its almost 14 year run. There's an argument to be made that it's showing its age in places, an argument I won't make because I don't think so myself, but all the same, as revealed during today's Minecraft Live, Mojang announced that the sandbox game is getting a pretty big visual overhaul update called Vibrant Visuals. Now, don't worry, it'll still be all blocks and squares 'n' that, but it will be changing up how lighting looks.

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Katamari Damacy creator talks leaving Bandai Namco, and who he makes games for: "I’ll work on that in my next life"

Keita Takahashi is probably one of the most recognizable names in games, in no small part thanks to a game that needs no introduction, Katamari Damacy. That game was made at Namco, before it became the Bandai Namco we know today, and Takahashi actually left the studio back in 2006 around the time they merged, and in a recent interview with GameSpark (as translated by Automaton), the developer has shared the reason behind his departure.

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Maybe now that Silent Hill 4's PC release is getting some cut hauntings you'll admit it's quite good, actually

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: I love Silent Hill 4: The Room. It was actually the first game I played in the series, and when I did I wasn't aware that it wasn't universally loved or even liked at its release. Not that knowing other people's opinions would have changed my mind about it, I'm the kind of person that will ardently defend a 6/10, but still, I think there's a lot to love about it… unless you played the game on PC. For a long time, it was missing a few things that were featured in the PS2 version of the game, but GOG's Preservation Program is adding them back in.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Here, take a look at this very pleasing fossilised instant coffee. Doesn't that just make you want to start your weekend off right? It was presented to me on Tuesday like a ceremonial offering, and since then I've kept it on my window sill and just turn my head to look at it every once in a while. There's something powerful but also mournful about it, like it's holding itself together through sheer force of will, long after its time is due. Puts me in mind of crumbling castle battlements under siege. It's maintaining its shape well so far. I'm excited to see what the next week brings.

So that's my weekend largely sorted; but what are you all up to? Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

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Donnerstag, 20. März 2025

Frosthaven is getting a digital follow-up to Gloomhaven, and you can play it this month

Frosthaven - the sequel to Cephalofair's knock-a-horse-out massive board game - is getting a digital version from Julian Gollop's Snapshot Games. You can sign up here to its closed beta kicking off March 27th, and it's coming to Steam early access later this year.

Like predecessor Gloomhaven, Frosthaven is a tactical RPG where you'll resolve story events and encounters between dungeon delving, retiring old characters and unlocking new classes as you progress. New to Frosthaven is a fleshed-out management game that has you build up and protect an outpost, while dealing with harsh seasons and invaders.

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Six-armed octopuses and other abyssal horrors from Ark: Survival Evolved's new AI slop trailer

What's the going rate for a flight to attend GDC these days? I ask because I'd have loved to be buzzing my merry way about the convention walls when Snail Games USA unveiled this doozy of an AI-generated trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved's Aquatica expansion. I'd give it a solid nine on the "we're not even trying to disguise it any longer" scale. How bad is it? Bad enough that original developers Studio Wildcard hastily and firmly distanced themselves from the project, reiterating that their focus was on ARK: Survival Ascended and Ark 2.

If I had to sum up the trailer in a single word, I would attempt to write that word out with four-day old regurgitated Alphabetti spaghetti, invariably failing to give voice to my flailing disgust before retiring to the corner to fart at god. This would still take approximately fourteen times more effort than whoever got paid to write "like the ocean, but worse" into their phone to tease out the following results.

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I've found a good G-Sync QHD monitor for under $100 and I want it

I want a good gaming monitor for cheap, and this KTC 27-inch QHD gaming monitor is ticking all the right boxes. Amazon just dropped the price to $92.99 when you stack a $40 coupon with the promo code "05DMKTC38", making this one of the best budget gaming monitor deals I’ve seen in a long time.

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Mittwoch, 19. März 2025

Ok, Fallout 76's Ghoul Within update: I'll play as a ghoul if you stop using words like "Ghoultastic"

What's the pettiest reason you began to distance yourself from an old friend? I once casually suggested to a mate that I found toast more filling than bread, which prompted them to bang on for far too long about how I was actually wrong, since the act of toasting necessarily diminishes the structure of bread or somesuch. I'm not sure whether that's true and I don't care. I was speaking my truth about toast and you undermined it. Jog on, toast denier.

Fallout 76's new Ghoul Within update is 18.9 GB, which may well conclusively prove that searing ghoulification actually ends up with the victim weighing more than they did previously. I wish I'd known this at the time of my yeasty bust-up, because I'd have probably tried to make the same argument about toast. We might have stayed mates then. Maybe we could have played Fallout 76 together? Why, that's the subject of this very Steam blog! Incredible.

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New Palworld update adds crossplay, Photo Mode, new drafting table feature and cosmetic armour

You've crossbred Pokénots in Palworld, now get ready to crossbreed... players! Pocketpair have taken a break from their packed schedule of saloon brawls with Mario's lawyers to update their monster-catching survival game with a new Crossplay mode, together with new storage options, a Photo Mode, a cosmetic armour system, and a new Drafting Table feature. That and a multitude of smaller tweaks and fixes.

Witness the crossplaying in the below trailer, in which a base-vandalising Astegon gets its bell rung by a group of visitors presumably running foreign hardware. That'll learn 'em to step on my Lamballs.

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Dienstag, 18. März 2025

Stalker 2's latest patch once again comes with four figures worth of fixes and improvements

It's been four months since Stalker 2 was released, starting life as a really great shooter that had more tech issues than you can shake a stick at, but GSC Game World have kept themselves busy with some hefty patches. The first one alone had almost 2000 fixes, with the second one following that up with more than 1700. As of today, patch 1.3 is here, this time bringing in over 1200 changes, fixes, and improvements. Obviously quite a bit less than the previous two main patches, but a sizable figure nonetheless, and hopefully a sign that the game is getting to a healthy point.

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Chromatic Conundrum is a nifty looking puzzle game that will really test your understanding of colour theory

I like a good puzzle game, but to be honest I don't play them all that often. Not because I'm bad at them, thanks for assuming I'm a numpty, it's more just that I prefer games with a really good hook to them - think Portal as the prime example of such a game. Clean, knows exactly what it is, and uses its concept in increasingly interesting ways without overstaying its welcome. I have no idea if Chromatic Conundrum will manage that or not, but I've never seen a game use light as part of its puzzles in quite the same way before.

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PCIe 5.0 SSDs are growing up, but ye olde 4.0 drives are still better value for gaming PCs

Two years since the first gaming-focused PCIe 5.0 SSDs showed up, there are some encouraging signs that these drives might eventually develop something approaching a point. Consider the Crucial T700, one of the first 5.0 SSDs to escape the data centre and make a break for our PCs: more expensive than the best PCIe 4.0 models, and slower than them at loading games. Useless. Now, though, we have drives like the PNY CS2150 bringing down the entry fee, as well as the new Samsung 9100 Pro to finally – finally – deliver a performance improvement.

Still, there’s a way to go before PCIe 5.0 storage becomes the new standard, and honestly, that could take another two years or more. For all the CS2150’s cost-cutting and the all the 9100 Pro’s speed, neither make for compelling all-rounders like their 4.0 cousins do.

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Moroi is a top-down meatgrinder that stinks of Little Nightmares and American McGee's Alice

It was around the time the sigil-ridden corpse hooked up to a breathing tube pooped out a slithering, smiling garden gnome, and shortly after I had to sacrifice my arms, legs, colours and voice to a bunch of hideous trees that I realised that, hang on, this isn't my current lunchtime favourite Bracket City. This is the demo for Moroi, a top-down "dark fairytale" from Violet Saint and publishers Good Shepherd, in which you are a horrible little man in a world of talking meat grinders, plughole maggots, and clamp-faced crawling things.

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Ubisoft warn staff not to celebrate Assassin's Creed Shadows launch as part of “anti-harassment plan”

To avoid harassment, staff at Assassin's Creed Shadows studio Ubisoft Quebec have been "advised" not to celebrate or otherwise post on social media about the game's launch this week, as reported by French outlet BFM TV and spotted by Kotaku.

This follows months of online anger directed at the open world game, much of it from charming sods with handles like 'Da Phrenology Gamer' doing everything they can to avoid actually playing videogames, presumably before logging off for dinner and complaining that they don't want to eat any more woke broccoli, mum. Can't-hang-viceroy Elon Musk even got involved at one point, commenting "DEI kills art" on a tweet about the game (as opposed to, you know, cutting education funding).

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Montag, 17. März 2025

The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

Good day to ye, reader! I'm not sure what the weather's like in other regions, but here in London we're approaching the unhallowed time of year when grown men are overtaken by the urge to wear shorts. I saw a few unclothed kneecaps abroad last week, but thankfully the boreal winds returned and snuffed them out like premature daffodils. The forecast right now is clear skies till Friday. Pray for us. Alternatively, play some new PC games. Here's a list.

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