Make sure the dildos are flying at half mast. Saints Row 1 design director Chris Stockman has said he believes the series is "dead", following conversations with Embracer Group about his pitch for a prequel. According to the developer, who currently heads VR studio Bit Planet Games, that chatter about a potential Saints Rowssurection post Embracer's closing of Volition has ended in the publishers ghosting Stockman.
Tencent have reportedly shut down their TiMi Montreal studio, set up back in 2021 with the goal of creating multi-platform open world games. In those five years, the studio haven't shipped any games, but had brought on former Assassin’s Creed creative director Ashraf Ismail. Ismail was reportedly fired by Ubisoft following an investigation into misconduct, with the developer having been accused of taking advantage of his status to engage in extramarital relationships.
Hello reader who is also a reader! It's time for another instalment of our winningly impromptu article series in which game developers discuss and marvel over books. Let us make the customary ritual sacrifice to Saint Nic Reuben, baron of words and founder of this column. Excelsior! And now, I turn the lectern over to Mariia Grygorovych, executive producer at GSC Game World, developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Cheers, Mariia! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Sundays are for finally biting the bullet and spending some of your Christmas money on a boxset of 2000s British Touring Car Championship season reviews. You stick the first DVD in, a three hour trip back through the 2000 season of car touring around the finest tarmac-filled fields Britain has to offer. You think of the American readers, and make a mental note to explain to them that the action you're watching is a bit like NASCAR, except with no oval tracks, smaller engines, and a lot more exchanges between drivers you can accurately describe as 'politely grumpy tantrum throwing'.
Nyooommmm. A Ford Mondeo flies by, Swiss ace Alain Menu at the wheel. Smash. James Thompson and Jason Plato have attempted to meld a Honda Accord and a Vauxhall Vectra together to form the world's first Honhall Veccord. Screech. Another Mondeo slides around a bend. You can't make out the number on the door. Is it Rickard Rydell or Anthony Reid at the controls? Oh smeg. It's neither. Adrian Edmondson somehow flashes a cheeky grin through a full face helmet as he dips the machine down through Paddock Hill bend.
Saturday mornings are hopefully for not feeling hungover or beaten-up or assassinated. You see, it's Friday as I write these words, and I've just been invited out for drinks in the park with one Graham Smith, former RPS EIC and nowadays, co-founder of disgraceful champagne socialist operation Jank.cool, an indie joint the rabble-rousers among you are already calling "RPS when it was good". What's the matter, aren't we feeding you enough Deals posts?
Embark are continuing their meteorological experiments in extraction shooter Arc Raiders with a rousing injection of wind. There’s a hurricane coming to the game on February 24th, a new map condition that limits visibility, degrades shields, impedes movement, and makes you suck even more at shooting things. Still, this stormcloud has a few silver linings. With the gale at your back, you’ll naturally move a lot faster. Also, you may find it easier to avoid detection in the open if you disable your shield.
It’s always a pleasure to write about Frostpunk, but I’m glum that Frostpunk has boarded the Great Videogame Remaking Train. I don’t think the original Frostpunk is beyond improvement, but I do find it very complete. Chilly finitude, obsessive symmetry are its narrative ethos and aesthetic. It’s a three-act story in a genre that tends to be exhaustingly open-ended. Its dramatic stakes are stark and inescapable – who and what will you sacrifice so that everybody else can survive? In place of the hopelessly indulgent, always-extendable gridiron of SimCity it gives you an Omelasian foxhole, with construction rigorously defined by distance from the coal burner at the heart. The Last City's inner configuration may vary, but it must describe a perfect circle, because it has to dissipate heat evenly against the apocalyptic winter. It can’t afford to sprawl.
But sprawl Frostpunk has - firstly in the form of DLC expansions, and then in the shape of Frostpunk 2: a looser, fragmented game of expansionism, bickering council members, tangled ideologies, and petrol politics. And now here’s Frostpunk: 1886, an Unreal Engine “remake plus plus”, as game director Maciej Sułecki puts it, in a sector saturated with boutique revivals, some of them landing a handful of years after the original game - a forcing of embryonic nostalgia, huffing on embers, that suggests an industry running out of fuel, giving itself over to cycles of regeneration.
Still, perhaps I’m being too gloomy. I’m definitely being melodramatic. As you’d expect, Sułecki has a more hopeful analysis.
Another intriguing Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod has emerged to confront your party of quirky RPG adventurers. This one's a short story which lets you take a break from BG3's main story to attend a dinner party at the house of a not-at-all creepy rich bloke, who happens to be very good at jamming out on the organ via illusions.
In the aftermath of reports claiming that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) deepened their reliance on Microsoft’s cloud technology last year, No Azure for Apartheid have issued a statement demanding the company cut ties with the agency.
No Azure for Apartheid are the same worker-led group who've carried out protests against Microsoft's dealings with the Israeli military, amid what Amnesty International and a UN enquiry have called a genocide in Gaza.
"I mean, look, I think everybody knows why we announced it that way then." Stay calm, I've got to get my dinner first. "We know some things we're doing." Please stop trying to jump on the bench. "It's going to be a while yet." Some of these are things I often have to say to my cat when the clock ticks to within an hour of feeding time. Some of them are things Todd Howard has said about The Elder Scrolls 6 in his latest bout of interview chatter about the RPG. He's confirmed it's running on a new version of the Creation Engine, but will also be a return to Bethesda's "classic style".
Rubbing shoulders with factions is a big part of the Fallout: New Vegas charm, even if it often devolves into you doing a bunch of favours if you don't want to risk ending up on the vilified naughty list for one too many accidental grenade pickpocktings. You do get some nice perks for keeping the likes of the NCR or Legion on side, but a new mod aims to take that to a new level, letting you send faction cronies out on handy odd jobs while you kick your feet up.
Highguard is in a bit of a Schrödinger's cat situation. That's because at the time of writing, the official site only shows the shooter's logo, and text that reads "This site is currently unavailable. Please contact support@codethirtytwo.com for assistance," alongside links to its official Discord server and Dwitter page. This, of course, could just be a blip, but even as I'm writing this it's been the case for several hours, and there's not a single word from developer Wildlight about why it's down. So, it is both dead and not dead until someone opens the box.
I wake up at 3AM. Do 50 pull-ups on a halberd wedged in the door frame. Do 50 push-ups on the cold stone floor. A servant hands me my protein mead and a wine frappamachiato. I violently double fist the two beverages. I don't eat breakfast, because food that isn't flavourless cup gruel is the enemy of productivity. Then, I'm dressed in my robes for the commute to the throne room. The magic starts. It's 5AM in Crusader Kings 3 and I'm on my medieval monarch grindset.
I pull out Paradox's latest dev diary. Oh, look at that, they're working with a mystery modder on bringing exactly the sort of big number tables to the strategy game that I need to tell at a glance whether I'm out-grinding my inbred wealth-creating cousins who rule other nations across the world.
Well, this is cool. You can now download Unreal Tournament 2004 for free and with a patch that ensures it'll run smoothly on modern hardware. This is all thanks to a fan community called OldUnreal, who've made it their mission to keep Epic's classic shooters alive, even going as far as getting the Fortnite publishers' permission to do so.
While a lot of the Witchery chatter so far this year has been about an extra Witcher 3 DLC rumoured to be in the works, one of the projects we know for sure CD Projekt have on the go is a remake of the first Witcher game. Ahead of the remake's arrival, a key dev on the 2007 RPG has just finished a developer commentary run through it, which makes for a great way to pass some time between Witchery things.
As feared, the recent uptick in Steam Decks being noted as out of stock is down to the ongoing memory crisis. RAM prices have been driven through the roof by AI companies gobbling up memory sticks en-masse, with the other downside of that being the tech's very scarce at the moment. Cue companies like Valve stuggling to keep on securing as much as they need to make and sell hardware without interruption.
Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight has become the latest game to have its initially listed recommended RAM requirement yanked down by a substantial amount, following in the footsteps of fellow 2026 release 007: First Light.
There's nothing more spooky than having to neatly get your message across in a limited number of words which may or may not have to rhyme or stick to iambic pentameter. That's something Polish horror devs Bloober Team clearly understand, since they whipped out some William Blake poetry over the weekend, in order to reveal that Layers of Fear 3 will be a thing.
Sundays are for lying in bed and listening to the persistent rain beating at the skylight. It's a comforting sound but one that's become all too familiar in this seemingly endless winter. This week has at least brought murmurs of sunlight in the mornings, but for now they're often drowned out by the tap tap tap of rain.
While the sound of the rain is exhausting its welcome, the urge to stay in a cosy bed and pooh-pooh the outside remains very welcome. For now, I will put the thought that I need to go to the shops and pick up food for the week into a shoebox and hide it away under the bed, next to the lost socks and sleeping spiders.
The second series of Amazon’s Fallout adaptation has now fully emerged from the vault, its eight episodes having been plinked out gradually, rather than whipped out in one fell swoop. Naturally, one of us has taken in the show how its distributors intended, injecting a stimpak a week in calm and measured fashion. The other waited until all the episodes were out, and then injected them all at once like an unhinged adventurer blowing through half their chem stash in a mid-fight panic. I’ll let you try to work out which is which, here’s our verdict.
Major spoilers for season 2 of the Fallout TV Show lie ahead.
I thought I would make it all the way through winter without getting ill. We're practically touching March. Yet, despite being within spitting distance of the clocks changing and bright evenings returning, I have the lurgy. This weekend, I will practice the art of the double duvet sausage roll.
Sharpen your fangs and chuck out all of the garlic bread in your house, Castlevania's back with a new game co-developed by the folks who made roguelike-Metroidvania Dead Cells. Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is the name of this fresh bout of vampire whippage set in medieval Paris, which publishers Konami have teased is just the first of many Castlevania things they have coming as the series turns 40.
You knew it was coming, I knew it was coming, and now one Mr. Hideo Kojima himself (disclaimer: technically it was Sony during tonight's State of Play, though I'm sure he's Fweeted about it on Fwitter) has confirmed that yes, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is making its way to PC. It's also doing so pretty soon, and with a small suite of additional features not present in its original PS5 release.
If there is anything that is concretely true about the upcoming Disco Elysium follow-up Zero Parades, it is that it is certainly a new RPG from ZA/UM. Everything else, well, that depends on who you ask, and where they lie in the messiness that has been in and around the studio these past few years, but a ZA/UM game in name it is. And now there are two opportunities for you to form a more direct opinion about Zero Parades, and its quality therewithin.
I hope you like warlocks. Well, if you're someone who regularly delves into Diablo, I hope you at the very least don't detest warlocks with all of your hellish heart. Because yesterday evening's Diablo 30th anniversary shindig was rather heavy on warlocks, with the class coming to not just Diablo 4's next expansion, but also Diablo 2 and Diablo Immortal. Meanwhile, Diablo 2: Resurrected has moseyed on over to Steam.
Wildlight, the studio behind recently released shooter Highguard, have confirmed that they've "parted ways" with an unspecified number of staff. This confirmation follows a former Wildlight level designer affected by the cuts claiming in a LinkedIn post that "most of the team" at the studio have been laid off.
I still haven’t left the starting area in Skull and Bones, but it’s a relief to know that as and when I do, I’ll have some big molluscs to bombard alongside those boring galleons. Ubisoft’s open world Jolly Rogerer forges bravely on with another season of updates, Eye of the Beast, despite Ubisoft recently jettisoning a bunch of games and studios in their efforts to buoy up the share price. Yes, this is the same Skull and Bones that has 320 in-game players on Steam as of writing, and a worryingly Biblical user review average of 66.60%.
Monster Hunter Wilds is fast approaching its first anniversary, meaning if it were a real human baby it would be legally unable to do anything really because have you met a one year old? Still, ahead of that anniversary, Capcom has outlined the game's next big update which, shock horror, includes a new monster to hunt, a new weapon to hunt with, a collab with basically itself, and more coming on February 18th. Oh, and there's DLC coming! But once again, the horror, the shock.
If you like your board games a little less physical, and a little more not technically a board game any more if we're being honest but that's fine because it's a neat looking, strategy RPG now, then boooooy howdy do I have the game for you! Those familiar with the dungeon crawling tabletop game Descent will be interested to learn that it's getting a video game adaptation in the form of Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent.
Planet of Lana II, Wishfully’s followup to their tremendous puzzle-platformer original, punched our news mouths with a double hit of announcements last week. First, it’s got a release date of March 5th 2026, a mere three weeks from now, and second, there’s a Steam demo coming even sooner, on February 11th. An embargo lift means I’m now at liberty to share my thoughts on said demo, and can report that it’s exactly the same as the demo given to press last year, and as such, you can already read what I said about it here and here. Still, eh? Release date, eh?
Cthulhu games are a dime a dozen these days, with everything from JRPG parodies to well-meaning but flawed efforts that bear the official Call of Cthulhu license. But there aren't many point and click adventures showcasing H.P. Lovecraft's sanity-twisting mythos. Two very dated Infogrames efforts in the early 90s come to mind, but if you haven't played 1993's Shadow of the Comet and 1995's Prisoner of Ice, you're not missing much.
The Dark Rites of Arkham, by indie developer Postmodern Adventures, rectifies this with a well-rounded effort filled with odes to all of Lovecraft's best stories. It has the quality of a Call of Cthulhu tabletop campaign assembled by a well-read fan.
2XKO, Riot's League of Legends fighting spin-off, is having its development team significantly cut back not long after release. Game Developer report a Riot spokesperson as stating the publishers have put plans in motion to lay off around 80 developers on the game, about half of the global team who've been working on it, with the potential for some of the affected workers to land in new posts at Riot.
Last year I covered the demo for Void War, robotically describing it as FTL meets Warhammer 40,000, because that is what it is, and sometimes, you have to call a Spade Marine a Spade Marine (I did enjoy the demo, as flagrantly combinatory as the game may be).
Happy this week all! Peeling back the curtains, I discern traces of blue advancing through sallow clouds, a hint of stray sunshine gracing the soggy leaves in the drive. All signs point to the onset of spring, but I will not be fooled. This is a classic Maw stratagem to waylay vitamin D deficient news editors. The creature is trying to tempt me into the open so that it can shower me in digestive juices (what you in the normal world are pleased to call “rain”).
Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties' director Ryosuke Horii has addressed the controversial casting of actor Teruyuki Kagawa in the remake, which has resulted in fan backlash due to a 2022 report from Shukan Shincho detailing sexual assault allegations against the actor. Kagawa apologised at the time, but didn't specify what he was apologising for or confirm the events reported in Shukan Shincho's article.
Hello reader who is also a reader! It's finally time for another edition of our thrillingly erratic column on game developers and their bestest books. This week, we're having our ears bent by Marcia Shange, chief operating officer of South Africa, Johannesburg-based developers Nyamakop, creators of puzzle platformer Semblance and the forthcoming postcolonial heist 'em up Relooted. Cheers, Marcia! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Sundays are for waking up and remembering you said you’d help your sister-in-law move house. A burning fear flares in your gut, not of the manual labour, but of how she said it was fine because she’d bought a flatbed trolley off a Chinese website for £40. The fear fades into sad resignation that you’ll end the day picking up splinters of shattered plywood out of a carpet.
This week’s readings are a little light on actual videogame stuff. Though let’s be honest, sometimes videogames don’t deserve it.
For all of their faults (the list may be endless), the interesting thing about live service games, when done well anyway, is the way they can change from day to day. There's an actual living quality to them that, even if I'll always prefer them, a singleplayer game can't capture as well. One such game that can change quite drastically is Arc Raiders, with its varying map conditions and events, swapping in and out at the whims of its developers. This rotation isn't something universally loved, but CEO Patrick Söderlund has said that they're here to stay.
Last month, Ubisoft pretty unceremoniously cancelled a bunch of games, the most notable of the bunch being that long gestating Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake. This came as part of a major restructuring at the company, putting up to 200 jobs at their Paris HQ at risk, ultimately leading to a call for an international strike, and the firing of one Assassin's Creed designer. It's all a concerning mess, and now the creator of Prince of Persia and lead designer on the original Sands of Time Jordan Mechner has shared his sympathy to devs affected by the remake's cancellation.
I'll be truthful with you for a moment: I do, from time to time, enjoy a game where I do not have to be supremely strategic, and get to watch different lights and colours light up on my screen. Something that's got the juice, but doesn't ask too much of me. Everyone needs to turn their brain half off once in a while! And I believe I could quite easily find myself switching off that half to STICKER/BALL once in a while, a "pool game roguelike from the future."
You know, you'd think that with decades worth of RPGs in existence, side quests would have been more or less figured out by now. And yet, there are still enough games releasing that seem more interested in going for quantity over quality. But for the devs over at Archetype Entertainment, the goal is to make the side quests in their upcoming sci-fi jaunt Exodus not feel just "tacked on."
My Menace campaign hasn't been a rousing success. In my first mission, I failed a string of optional objectives and saw one of my squads gunned down by a group of heavily-armed, jetpack-wearing space pirates. I got revenge by running them over with an APC. So, we'll call it a draw. But I need to up my game if I'm to kick these freeloading bandits off the planet Backbone.
I'm likely going to be spending much of this morning preparing conversation topics for the two-year-old's birthday party I'm going to this afternoon. It's not the toddlers that are the issue - all the old standards go down a treat with them – "Do you like the taste of boogers?", "What's that behind your ear?", "What's your position on jelly?" (To which the answer is always "On a plate!"). No, it's the parents that are the issue.
They get really weird when you as them if they like the taste of boogers.
Everything's a show! Everything's a show! Everything's a show! Everything's a show! Did you know Baldur's Gate is a show? Well, it will be soon. One that'll carry on from the events of Baldur's Gate 3 and star characters both old and new. Baldur's Gate 3 developers Larian, though, don't seem to be directly involved outside of the show's boss asking if he can pop into their studio for a chat.
"I think a lot of survival games are really boring," Geoff 'Zag' Keene, founder of Deep Field Games, developers of Half-Life adjacent co-op survival game Abiotic Factor, said in a recent interview. However, despite these strong words, please hold onto your spit take for just a moment.
It's not the first time Keene's said something like it and, in fact, in the episode of The AIAS Game Maker's Notebook, he's responding to a question about when he said it to cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer back in 2024. So, please, calmly swallow your spit take liquid of choice, so I can explain why I'm reporting on something Keene originally said two years ago.
I am very much of the opinion that for the most part, video games do not have a very good relationship with food. There are plenty of games where you can eat food and get some delicious HP back for it, but rarely is food the focal point narratively. So, ever since its announcement I've been quite excited about Dosa Divas, a turn-based RPG where you play as two sisters piloting a cute robot whose goal is to take down an "evil fast food empire." And I'm more excited now, as it has a release date!
Approximately 15 years, two months, and 14 days ago, Quintin Smith (RPS in peace) lobbed the headline 'Poker Night At The Inventory Released Today' onto this fine site. On this day, February 5th - approximately 479,821,535 seconds further on in time - I'm here to tell you Poker Night At The Inventory is coming back, baby.
Following The Witcher 4's big reveal at 2024's Geoff Awards, it predictably took modders about five minutes to revamp The Witcher 3's Ciri into her older monster slaying variant. Now, one of them's had a crack at going a step further by designing a short questline offering a taste of Geralt's non-quite-daughter slaying monsters in Kovir and Poviss, with help from CD Projekt's RedKIT tools.
If you keep an eye on the big, ambitious Fallout mods that're always in the works, you might have heard of Fallout: Revelation Blues. Its developers have been plugging away at remaking Van Buren - the version of Fallout 3 which was in development at Black Isle Studios before being cancelled in 2003 - as a New Vegas mod for the past few years. While they released a first demo last year under the Revelation Blues moniker, the group have decided to re-christen their project Fallout: The New West ahead of releasing a second demo at some point soon.
Despite AMD’s assurances to the contrary, Valve have announced that they’ve pushed back release plans for the new Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame VR headset. Alas, my curse of publishing news posts roughly 0.0045 seconds before a major situation change continues to ruin my life – sometimes I wish I’d never beaten the warlocks in that Titanfall 2 pub match.
