"Getting sidetracked doesn’t feel too unnatural": Baldur's Gate 3 Act Two Expansion modder on how they seamlessly fit a "detour" to fight an army into the RPG's plot

Midway through September, modder SquallyDaBeanz released a solo-developed custom campaign for Baldur's Gate 3 in beta, adding an extra chapter to the RPG's main story. Neatly nestled between the RPG's second and third acts, the mod sends you and your party on a trip through The Chionthar Wilds while the Absolute's Army marches on towards the city the series is named after. SquallyDaBeanz has now offered a bit more explanation as to why they reckon the second section of BG3's established story benefits from having a few more forks in the road before the serious business of the final act begins.

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GTA 6 will simulate hurricanes, rainbows and persistent, dynamic clouds, among other efforts to make you stop doing crime and become a weather nerd

Grand Theft Auto 6 features a re-engineered, "more localized and persistent" weather system that ranges in intensity from physically credible rainbows to full-bore hurricanes, according to Rockstar vice president of art for lighting and rendering Owen Shepherd. As ever with GTA, the question is to what extent this will materially affect your doings in the new open world game, but at the very least, it seems like there's scope to pack in the core Bonnie & Clyde routine and become an amateur weather watcher for hours at a time.

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With Deadlock's latest updating promising six new heroes, over 10,000 new voice lines and too much more to mention, it's clear Valve are still pretty committed to it

It feels weird that Deadlock is technically a game that isn't out yet, doesn't it? You can't even just play it as someone that's never done so, you have to have someone that's already got access to send you an invite. Valve didn't even really acknowledge its existence publicly, and they still sort of treat it as this little secret that everyone's in on. Two years on, though, it's still getting updates, and the latest one arrived today changing… well, a lot.

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Sometimes the thing you need is a wonderfully ethereal physics platformer jam game where you are a little round guy with very stretchy arms called Big Stretch

I have a working theory that above all other aspects, the Vibe (with a capital V) of a game is the most important thing to enrapture a hypothetical audience. A strong Vibe is not a guarantee of such a thing, this algorithmic world we live in denies us such luxuries, it's just the most important starting point. The Vibe does not look like any one thing, the only rule is that it must elicit a response along the lines of, "now what's this, then?" Big Stretch, a game jam physics-based platformer that features hardly a semblance of assets, feels like it proves that theory to me.

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I perished in the flesh pipes of Darktide's Depths of the Damned update, and you will too

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide continues to cling tightly, perhaps even aggressively, to my Steam installations, my occasionally waning interest repeatedly re-sparked by the addition of akimbo-autopistolling chem fiends or haughty toasterpeople. A live service sucker, it makes me. Today's Depths of the Damned update, the grimdark co-op shooter's biggest since the Skitarii rocked up, continues the trend: it's centered around a massive new mission that's as revolting as it is compelling.

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"A quite beautiful compromise": The LEGO Skylines devs did consider brick by brick building, but decided it was too much fuss for players

LEGO Skylines is the new plastic city-builder from Cities: Skylines 2 and Surviving the Aftermath developers Iceflake Studios, published by Paradox Interactive. I've played an hour or so of a preview build, just long enough to devise a circular highway of coffee shops, glass-fronted houses, unaccountably cheerful farms, and playgrounds poking up haphazardly like fungus. Kind of like the M25, but more rustickal. There's a park in the middle that can't work out which century it's in, with an ornamental fountain every ten paces to baffle the casual stroller.

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The Witcher 3 Remastered has scuppered an ambitious cut plague quest restoration mod, but there'll be "something extra" in the update that gets it working again

Today, September 29th, The Witcher 3 is back on the path in Remastered form. With that remaster bringing a host of tweaks to the decade-old RPG, there was always going to be an adjustment period for the RPG's established mods. One that won't work right out of the gate is the WAR Project - an ongoing effort to restore a plague-themed questline CD Projekt Red abandoned prior to release.

However, the modders behind it have made clear this is just a temporary bump in the trail and promised "something extra" for the update that brings their demo up to remastered spec.

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