Sundays are for trying to fill several pairs of enormous shoes and shuffling around awkwardly in them while I get my bearings. Before I start wobbling at the lip of the top stair and have a near death experience prior to grabbing the railing, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things).
The Oculus Quest launched back in 2019, just five years ago, but come May new apps released in the Quest Store won't be playable on the Quest 1. This isn't because the Quest 1 isn't powerful enough to play them anymore, but because developers will no longer be able to upload them and players won't be able to see them.
It's part of the planned obsolescence of the Quest 1 which Meta announced last year.
I still think of Rain World as the beautiful, brutally hard game about accidentally going down tunnels butt-first and being crushed to death by weather, but it's grown and expanded a lot since its release almost seven years ago. It's about to grow again with a new DLC: The Watcher.
I think its reasonable to say that the term ‘fetch quest’ is well passed the point of being a neutral descriptor and has moved firmly into the realm of full pejorative. You won't see many games tout ‘epic fetch quests’ on their Steam Page, and you’re much more likely to hear the term lodged between the words ‘not a bloody’ and ‘again’, like two slices of exasperation-enriched bread stuffed with a shit-tier filling. Cucumber, perhaps. Not so, at least not for me, when it comes to Dragon's Dogma 2. The action RPG game has more or less solved the fetch quest problem. All it took, it turns out, was some interesting world design.
Have you said hello to our new staff writer, Nic Reuben yet? You should say hi to Nic. You've already been reading him on RPS for years as a freelancer, but he's ours now. Is us now. In other news, hey, it's a long weekend! Most of us (sorry, Alice Bee) have Friday off and Monday too, so expect us to return properly on Tuesday. Until then, what are you playing this Easter weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Head over to the Epic Games Store on April 4th and you'll be able to grab The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition and Thief (2014) for free and to keep forever. Like a thief!
Sonic Dream Team developer Hardlight and Total War studio Creative Assembly have been hit with a round of layoffs by publisher SEGA Europe, affecting around 240 roles across Creative Assembly, SEGA Europe, and Hardlight, via IGN.
Staff were notified by an email sent around this morning from SEGA Europe’s managing director Jurgen Post, alongside the news that Relic Entertainment, makers of Company of Heroes and Dawn of War, would be sold. As IGN point out, SEGA Europe studios Sports Interactive and Two Point Studios, makers of Football Manager and Two Point Hospital respectively, were not mentioned in the email.
The time is nigh for this month’s RPS Game Club liveblog, where we’ll of course be discussing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. We’ve already had some good pre-chat, and now at 4pm GMT today (March 28th), we’ll reconvene right here for a proper 41st Millennium natter.
Diablo 4 is headed to Game Pass in just a couple more days, on March 28th, giving the stingy-but-curious like me a chance to click demons to death at lower cost. As preperation, Microsoft have outlined the steps necessary to link your Game Pass account to a Battle.net account - because what is a launcher for, if not launching other launchers.
On March 31st, Ubisoft's open world racing game The Crew will be turned off for good. As of right now, no one can buy the ten-year-old racer, but come the end of the month, even those that did buy it will no longer be able to play it.
On April 18th, The Crew Motorfest will arrive on Steam after several months available via the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft's own launcher, providing a new venue to buy the third entry in the series. Or perhaps that should be "rent".
Journey developer thatgamecompany have announced the PC early access release date for their social MMO Sky: Children Of The Light. Having already built up a substantial community on both mobile and consoles, PC players will now be able to join in on April 10th on Steam. There will be some special PC-themed goodies available to celebrate the occasion, too, including a Companion Cube prop from Portal, a Journey cosmetic pack, and double rewards for sending Heart gifts to other players.
Look up to the skyline, and tell me what you see. It is me, standing on a hill, uttering firmly with my dying breath: Mass Effect: Andromeda was pretty good. For anyone currently gathered around the hill, searching the pockets of their N7 hoodies for more heavy objects to fling at me, however, here’s some good news: the as-yet unnamed Mass Effect 5 is in the capable hands of “trilogy vets”, according to project director Michael Gamble, via Le Epic Musk Zone (OP didn’t steal), formerly Twitter. The team heading up the space game franchise’s next entry comprises of veterans of the first three games in various leading roles, namely: Art Director, Game Director, Creative Director, and Executive Producer.
It's Monday and I'm tired, so do I really have to write out hundreds of words telling you who Nic Reuben is? You already know Nic! He's been writing here as a freelancer loads. He threw a rock through the treehouse window and were preparing to sacrifice him to appease Horace's great coils, but the endless bear spake and instead commanded us to hire him, after a rigorous interview process. Say hello to Nic in his new and official capacity here on the site! My enthusiasm has woken me up again!
Days Gone is that zombie x motorbike open world game (except they were at pains to point out that Freakers weren't zombies) that Sony did for PS4 in 2019, and ported to PC in 2021 - both years after people were done with Sons Of Anarchy as a thing. As alluded to in The Maw this week, there hasn't been much news out of Bend Studios since then, but they're now hiring for a lead project manager for "crafting our next high-profile AAA title." Another clue? The successful applicant must have experience "with an emphasis on live operations" and "in leadership roles shipping AAA live service games". Hmmm.
It's a brand new week in Computer Game Land, and right now, I am playing a nasty little survival sim called "Beating Jetlag". I landed back in the UK from GDC on Saturday afternoon, and my brain and eyeballs still feel as though they're being gently sautéed in a medicinal blend of oil and vinegar. The sun and sky bear down with a terrible, holy light and I can't seem to conjure any warmth into my elbows. In the street outside, a small dog is barking. Soon, very soon, I will catch that dog, place it in a box and FedEx it to China.
Sundays are for buying easter eggs for the week after. Let's prepare to crack as we read the week's best writing about games and game-related things.
Final Fantasy 14's next expansion, Dawntrail, will launch in early access on June 28th and then release in full on July 2nd. Producer Yoshi P announced the date onstage at PAX East, while acknowledging the release date's proximity to another RPG: Elden Ring's Shadow Of The Erdtree expansion, which releases on June 21st.
Spring has sprung, reader dear, and may our spirits soar with it. I'll not pretend it's warm yet in Scotland (evidence: not seen a single lad going taps aff) but we've had a few nice days and you can feel hope, you can feel hope in the air, it's coming. Winter has been too long. So, uh, enjoy hunkering down inside playing Dragon's Dogma 2? Tell me, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Larian Studios, the makers of the enormously successful and multi-"so-many-awards-they-probably-need-ten-new-trophy-cases-to-house-them-all"-winning Baldur's Gate 3, will not be making Baldur's Gate 4, founder and CEO Swen Vincke has announced. Nor will they be making any DLC or expansions for Baldur's Gate 3, for that matter - a stance I 100% respect as the studio starts to think about what's next for them.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is, as a game per se, very good! It’s creative and intelligent and lets you fill other players’ worlds with recruitable humanoid versions of your pet cats. Still, a technical masterclass it is not. In my performance analysis, I touched on DD2 being particularly unplayable on the Steam Deck, suffering from sub-10fps framerates and a bunch of broken settings. Since that was based on pre-release code, I had quietly hoped that Capcom could pull something – anything – out of the bag to salvage handheld PC play in time for launch day, but now the time has come, I’ve checked again, and nope. This RPG adventure simply doesn’t work on the Steam Deck, and probably never will.
I’m not saying it’s some kind of electronic commerce conspiracy orchestrated by Big Graphics Card, but I’ve noticed that most of the best Amazon Spring sale deals on gaming monitors are for 4K screens. On the one hand, aww, because everyone likes a bargain 1440p-er. On the other, woo, because gaming-spec 4K monitors are usually some of the most financially devastating PC hardware pieces you can get. Anything that makes these super-sharp displays more affordable is, therefore, quite welcome. 160Hz, UHD visuals for £399? Sure, why not.
If you're an MMORPG fan who's been waiting patiently for news of Riot Game's swing at the genre, then I'm afraid you'll probably have to wait quite a while longer. Riot co-founder Marc Merrill announced that the project has been "reset" and won't appear for "likely several years", with one of the main reasons being a "need to do something that truly feels like a significant evolution of the genre".
In a powerful move, one of the two devs behind Cryptmaster announced the delightful typing-based dungeon crawler's release date last night during his acceptance speech after it won the Independent Games Festival award for Excellence In Design. Powerful. May 9th is the day, so you have time to practise your touchtyping with Mavis Beacon. I really enjoyed playing Cryptmaster's Steam Next Fest demo, so I'm excited for the full game.
The winners of the 2024 Independant Games Festival were announced at GDC last night, and it was Visai Games' Venba that came home with the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. The cooking adventure was up for four IGF awards in total, including nominations for Excellence in Audio, Narrative and Visual Art. But there was no runaway winner at this year's IGF Awards, with all prizes going to completely different indie games. Come and celebrate the full list of winners below.
Amazon’s big sale events, as overfrequent as they are, do at least reliably provide the discerning Steam Deck owner with good opportunities to grab a new microSD card. Case in point, Amazon Spring Deal Days – which launched today – has some alluringly low prices on the me-approved Samsung Evo Select. That’s on both the 256GB and the (also me-approved) 512GB models.
It's GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they've had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It's the usual pitch. "Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?", asks Ubi's official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is "Erm, probably no, actually?"
Still, the internet made good hay from the prototype image Ubisoft shared on Xitter, as many people took the opportunity to make fun of the dialogue from Bloom, a prototype man in a prototype beanie who wants to be your friend.
Bungie have announced a change in director on their upcoming revival of their classic shooter Marathon, amid reports the studio is once again shaking up its creative leadership. Former Valorant director Joe Ziegler confirmed his appointment on Xwitter last night, replacing long-time Bungie designer Christopher Barrett in the role.
Eight years after launching, Stardew Valley just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Update 1.6 arrived yesterday, with enough changes that the patch notes are 7308 words long. It bumps the farm-o-life sim's co-op player limit to eight, adds hundreds of new items, opens up a new progression system for "powerful perks and items", adds new events, lets you drink mayonnaise, and so much more that. Best of all, it lets you have more pets. New pets. Pets wearing hats.
Detective Edward Carnby looks very different these days, and not only because he’s made of a lot more polygons. Gone are the professorial waistcoat and bow tie of his angular 1992 incarnation, replaced instead by the grubby suit of a life-bruised 1930s noir PI, complete with hipflask of brandy for when the stress of being unaccompanied with the lights out gets too much.
Carnby isn’t the only one who’s transformed in this reboot of Alone in the Dark, the classic survival horror avant la lettre, either. Veterans will find plenty of callbacks and familiar names as they poke around its Louisiana manor house – talk of the Pregzt Shipping Company might raise an eyebrow, for instance, as may the gnarled tree filling much of the conservatory. But like these, everything here is remixed, rewritten, relocated. Indeed, Decerto house is no longer empty but a ‘home for the mentally fatigued’, while player characters Carnby and Emily Hartwood now arrive together, since she’s hired him to help check on her uncle, a long-term resident who may be in danger.
If you're keen to try out Sand Land, an upcoming action RPG from the developers of One Piece Odyssey and the creator of Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama, then I have some great news. There's a demo out right now that lets you explore a portion of the sandy map, try out a handful of the characters, and ride some rusty vehicles ahead of its release next month on April 25th.
In the run-up to Total War: Pharaoh at the end of last year, a slightly strange question popped into my head: "What if someone made a Total War game that also had the handsome anime looks of Fire Emblem: Three Houses?" Clearly, it was also a question on the minds on Japanese indie developers ThinkGames Inc, who have just announced their debut game Valiant Tactics EX. The 38-second long reveal trailer paints quite an enticing picture ahead of its Steam launch on March 29th, and that's not even the half of it either. For Valiant Tactics EX isn't just an anime Total War-like. It's also a whopping great deckbuilding game.
Valve have launched Steam Families on the Steam Beta Client, a suite of new and refreshed family sharing options that replace Steam's existing Family Sharing and Family View features. The idea is that you'll now have a single location where you can manage your family's games from, as well as have more control over what and when other family members can play.
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, my eye has been caught by a meaty walking truck, opportunities for hubris, slime cleanup troubles, submarine dilemmas, and more. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!
Solo developer Billy Basso's enigmatic Metroidvania Animal Well has been dated for May 9th, publishers Bigmode announced yesterday. In it, you'll explore a vast labyrinth of tunnels, solve puzzles and escape its many mammalian-based horrors, all of whom are out to gobble you up in one fell swoop - though as a strange, tiny little blob creature the size of a chicken nugget, it's unclear both what you are, and why exactly you're so appetising to them. Well, it probably has something to do with looking like a sentient chicken nugget, I suppose. Come and watch the release date trailer below.
The Amazon Spring Sale is back, refreshed and renamed as Amazon Spring Deal Days. Maybe because there’s so many of them: this flowery festival of buying stuff begins on Wednesday March 20th and runs all the way through Monday March 25th. And I thought Prime Day was getting too long, sheesh.
On the upside, this should mean more chances topick up some quality PC gaming hardware on the cheap. Been putting off that new SSD or graphics card upgrade? Spring Deal Days is likely your best opportunity to exploit mass discounts until Summer.
It's GDC week over in San Francisco at the moment, and such a high concentration of video game developers in one place can only mean one thing: The Maw has turned its ever-dribbling gaze to America's west coast, and is preparing to bask in all the fresh learnings being shared about how last year's best video games were made and created. Edwin is one the ground there for us, so we wish him well in his news gathering and interview appointments. Back home, the news cycle still continues apace, with lots of great releases big and small coming up over the next seven days. Here's what we've got our eyes on.
Next week sees the Game Developers Conference arrive in San Francisco along with our Edwin, who'll be sniffing for scoops and—I hope, for his sake—big burritos. My years of GDC left me devestated by the full realisation of how bad Mexican food is in the UK and I'm still not over it. Even the 'fancy' tacos and burritos you find nowadays cannot stand up to whichever burrito joint was closest to the BART station, especially as those were $7 and you'll pay £15 for a bad burrito here. Just. God. I miss them. I miss them so much. And the grackles. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
If you're fond of the fairly specific blend of doomy theology, rich art direction and Soulslike-tinted metroidvaning encapsulated by Blasphemous, you might also enjoy Saviorless from Cuban team Empty Head Games and publisher Dear Villagers, which now has a PC release date of 2nd April.
Pocketpair have popped up a trailer for Palworld's first new raid battle boss, Bellanoir, who is "coming soon" to the monster-catching survival game in a big old Palworld update that will also include some fixes and additional anti-cheating measures. First impressions: it's an evil Goth girl with a jellyfish where her legs should be.
As if colony sim RimWorld doesn't already have enough ways for your sci-fi frontier adventurers to die, a new expansion titled Anomaly is goiong to add "all manner of monstrous, mysterious, and maddening threats". It's out in around a month, and will be paired with a free 1.5 update for the base game.
Cast your eye over the original Outcast from 1999 today, and you'll find a world that's more abstract than alien. Hazy, almost block colour textures are stretched to breaking point over terrain that looks like it's been pulled and poked by a child sculpting in putty slime, while its cast of beige, three-fingered Talans are so rigid that they'd all be reigning champions at the local robot dance-off. Understandable, given the era in which is was made, but even so - what a difference 25 years make. Even after 2017's remake glow-up with Outcast: Second Contact, A New Beginning's version of Adelpha is a lush and verdant paradise, with treetops soaring over your head, and mountains requiring several triple or quadruple jetpack jumps to traverse. It's no Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, admittedly, but it leans in very much the same direction, punching your eyeballs with such bright, primary colours that you'll feel enticed to explore every inch of it.
A shame, then, that all its visual splendour amounts to is little more than an empty husk filled with open world busy work that already felt tired and done ten years ago. Its non-linear approach to storytelling remains intact, letting you tackle the quests and problems of its numerous village settlements in any order you wish, but even this has been boiled down to tedious checklists of fetch quests, escort missions and shooting up the same identikit facility one after another. Topping off this fatal combo is returning protagonist Cutter Slade, whose macho army dude dial is still set firmly to cringey wise-cracking and patronising stereotypes. A new beginning this ain't.
While we felt it wasn't an amazing game, we quite liked The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria's dwarven survival antics. It was a bit of cosy fun for a group of pals, and thankfully, open-ended co-op play looks to be the focus of the next big update, which adds a new sandbox mode that lets you pick rocks and sink pints free of storyline constraints. Not to mention new armour, weapons, and quality of life improvements like the ability to pause your single player sessions.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink has received a sizeable game update, which adds a new, difficult quest, The Final Vision, some additional camera and aim sensitivity settings, and new Steam trophies. That's in addition to a brace of bug fixes, character-specific balancing tweaks for multiplayer, and assorted quality-of-life improvements, including visual and audio indicators to indicate when you've lost your buffs.
Our Alice B described Cygames' latest as a "slick JRPG wedded to the rule of cool" in our Granblue Fantasy: Relink review, noting that "the combat is kind of weightless, but it's layered and fun - if you can be bothered to get to the bottom of it". There are certainly layers to the version 1.1.1 patch notes. The bits about changes to characters are a fusillade of nitty-gritty observations like "Io should no longer lose the Mystic Vortex status effect even after taking a hit from an attack that removes positive status effects". Fans of Ghandagoza, meanwhile, will rejoice in the knowledge that they've nixed a problem that stopped you dodging right after performing an aerial barrage, while Cagliostro players will be happy to learn that "objects transmuted as part of a link attack should now hit foes with greater accuracy".
I still haven't played Granblue Fantasy: Relink (with suspiciously good timing, Alice B is on holiday today, or I'd have asked her write this piece) and reading the full patch notes feels a bit like trying to glean map directions from waterfalls of Matrix code. I feel like all patch note writers should learn from Larian, whose patch notes are often very funny for all their absurd intricacy.
TopSpin 2k25 was announced in January, the first entry in the tennis series since 2011. It turns out there's not long to wait before it's served up either, as it now has a release date of April 26th.
Tribes 3: Rivals is out in Steam Early Access now. The fast-paced, capture-the-flag shooter has been through several betas over the past year, and now has a post-launch roadmap of updates that includes new weapons, maps and class abilities.
The latest Helldivers 2 PC patch makes life a bit easier for players fighting the Terminids, aka monstrous hellbugs, on difficulty level 7 or higher, with tweaks to spawn rates for Chargers and Bile Titans, while increasing the spawn rates of certain other, less heavily armoured Terminids to fill the gap. The developers have also lowered the health of the Charger’s head, allowing for instant takedowns with a Recoilless Rifle or EAT-17, without (in theory) entirely doing away with the community’s treasured "leg meta", which sees players blasting the juggernaut’s limbs to sabotage it.
Capcom announced last night that Monster Hunter Stories, a 2016 Nintendo 3DS spin-off from their megahuge monstermashing series, is coming to PC in June. They've remastered it with a wee visual refresh, fully voice acting, a concept art gallery, and more. We've actually already had the sequel on PC, 2021's Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin, so it's nice to catch up.
I remember revealing at some point that my most-played game is actually a free-to-play picross game (picross, also called nonograms sometimes, being the logic puzzle game where you colour in squares on a grid to reveal a larger picture). You can imagine my intrigue when I saw that Tents And Trees, a picross-ish puzzle game previously on Switch and phones, is coming to PC on April 24th. That's a couple of months away, but you can play the short demo on Steam now to get a taste. It's slick and clean, and I like it!
I've written a bit about playing Helldivers 2 as a solo diver, noting that Arrowhead's frenetic shooter holds up surprisingly well when you rudely insist on treating it like an open world stealth sim, a la Metal Gear Solid V. The developers have weighed in on this front, commenting that strictly speaking, Helldivers 2 doesn't support stealth at all. It's just designed in an "agnostic", systems-first way and this in itself makes stealth a possibility. It's also a quiet attempt to capture something of the intricacy of a full-blown military simulator, while still being a very "arcadey" game at heart, which owes a little to Arrowhead's own collective time in the military.
In a real "no thanks, I hate it" move that seems to be aimed at making me, specifically, have some kind of coronary event, Walker Labs and Readyverse studios have announced a new battle royale game, designed with Ernest "I Tip My Hat To You, Sir!" Cline. Cline, who you will remember is the writer of Ready Player One, is apparently one of the co-founders of Readyverse, and I'm sad to see he's still in search of a second idea. Open (that's the name of the game, but it's in all caps in their press assets) is an "immersive multiverse filled with nostalgia-infused biomes featuring characters and cultural legends across iconic franchises", coming to early access this year. Also it somehow involves web3.
