STALKER 2's Cost of Hope expansion, and its free but still hopeful 2.0 update, get an August release date

Grab your Geiger counter and your copy of The Arbinger Institute’s seminal conflict resolution handbook The Anatomy of Peace, because STALKER 2’s faction war-y story expansion Cost of Hope has a release date. It’s out on August 20th, developers GSC Game World have announced, and will launch in tandem with the long-awaited Update 2.0 – which, among other tweaks, will move the base game over to a newer, less technically perilous version of Unreal Engine 5.

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This week in PC games: a battle royale detective game, a broken Y2K metaverse, a laptop tycoon sim, and a new Company of Heroes RTS

Hello all! Welcome to another week of sordid digital diversions, aka new PC games, dumped upon the innocent wanderer like a chamberpot upended over your head by a Victorian maid, as you saunter down an alleyway in your finest crinoline and lobster tail bustle. How are you supposed to attend the Crown Prince's soirée in this bedraggled state? In vain do you shake your reeking fists at the chambermaid, for she is a minion of the Maw, and only squawks with glee. You totter out of the alleyway, mopping your face with your nosegay, and are promptly arrested for being a public obscenity.

Enough of this pissy period palaver! Our list of the week's most promising new PC releases awaits. It's a longer edition, possibly because my laptop audio stopped working halfway through the curation process, so I may have included a few extra games that sound absolutely abysmal.

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Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls open beta beaten and bashed by PC performance issues, Arc System Works "apologise for the impact this has had on your experience"

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls' pre-launch open beta has just wrapped up, having been open over the weekend. Sadly, those who've given the fighter a go on PC over the past few days have run into a litany of issues, leaving developers Arc System Works apologising for the inconvenience and scrambling to provide fixes.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for sobbingly lifting exactly one boulder from the groaning dreampile that is my backlog. Good news, Vacuity, cpt_freakout and the rest – I'm trying out your precious, precious Troubleshooter game. I hear it's a hundred hours long, so please do not take this as a promise that a write-up is forthcoming. So far my major takeaways are 1) I enjoy collecting masteries, aka packages of abilities and modifiers, and 2) this "Short Break" track is cooool. Please hum along while browsing our latest collection of Rollicking Reads.

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Commit cinematic sacrilege in Baldur's Gate 3 with this true third-person camera mod

Video game cameras are often a point of contention primarily because a bad one can completely disorient you, or even outright make you feel sick. These are worthwhile things to consider, but I do wish there was more of a discussion around the specific choices that are made in particular camera angles and positions, and how it might actually be important that certain games should be played in the way they are designed. I'm going to throw all of that out of the window right now though and tell you about a Baldur's Gate 3 true third-person camera mod.

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Thick as Thieves studio does what triple-A won't: keep its game playable

Poor Thick as Thieves. When it was revealed over two years ago it had some promise, or at the very least an interesting mechanical premise in that it was a multiplayer immersive sim where everyone would be competing for the same loot. This got downgraded earlier this year ahead of its launch to just solo or co-op play, a real shame but hey ho, how many co-op imsims are there anyway? Sadly, the game has clearly not done well, as a number of layoffs have taken place at developer OtherSide Entertainment following its launch. But at the very least, what's left of the studio has some positive news: it won't become unplayable.

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Final Fantasy 14's Evercold expansion brings aboard a Final Fantasy 7 collab and a job that's all about fighting with massive shields

Finally, a Final Fantasy 14 job made specifically for the type of person who likes to dual wield shields in Dark Souls! The latest FF14 fan festival is taking place, and with that has come a suite of announcements, including a reveal at one of the two new jobs coming as part of the next expansion, Evercold.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

I spent most of last Saturday laid out in a Baku hotel room, muscles in both legs ground to flecks of useless meat by the decision to walk down a mountain when there was a perfectly good funicular right there. May this weekend be more fruitful, and less marred by the stupidity of trying to please a step counter that only truly cares about where its next battery charge is coming from. Ruinous silicone bastard.

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"Let's make a better world": Denshattack's developers on counterculture, biker gangs, and the optimism of fighting a mecha with a train

In hindsight, I was a fool for meeting Denshattack’s satirical, irreverent, downright countercultural sensibilities with surprise. Upbeat, even goofy as it is for a train driving game, it shares more common ground with skateboarding games, and while the commodification of skater culture is certainly A Thing, few skaters have ever reapplied their asphalt-eating skills to bootlicking.

What remains striking, though, is how specifically '2026' Denshattack's targets are. The main baddies are a rogue big tech company, deploying all your current favourite social ills: enforced inequality, mass surveillance, misinformation-spewing talking heads, police violence, and soulless AI replacing true craft and skill. If only it did a bit on mass layoffs, it would have had a full set. You meet them with force, too, assembling a crew that resembles a Greatest Hits of Japanese normbreaker groups while repeatedly ramming your engine through those oppressive mechanisms at top-gear Skinkansen speeds.

The result is that Denshattack manages to have it both ways, being fully capable of stretching a daft grin across your face, yet possessing a radical heart that wards off the sense – and, indeed, accusations – that this is just an ironic bit of comedy train capering. Yet according to David Jaumandreu, game director at developers Undercoders, Denshattack was never consciously given a political voice – it simply emerged, logically and naturally, from its Japan being shaped as a more locomotive-mad version of the real one.

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Thwack, the Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls open beta is underway, and, pow, Phoenix Cyclops is coming as a post-launch DLC fighter

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls' pre-launch open beta has opened its doors today, July 24th. It's set to run until July 27th, so offers a chance to end your week with some superhero graps prior to the game's full launch early next month. Meanwhile, Arc System Works have revealed the first fighter set to arrive as part of Fighting Souls year one batch of post-launch DLC in autumn. It's Phoenix Cyclops.

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Indie open worlder Future? No Thanks! gets last minute delay after Steam content mods allegedly demand a "watch the sex scene" button

Entertaining open world satire Future? No Thanks! has been abruptly delayed by Steam content reviewers, due to the presence of multiple seconds of "untextured polygons depicting ass and boobs". In a statement, developer Paulo "Molleindustria" Pedercini reveals that Valve's moderation teams have had the game under review for "more than three weeks", but have yet to make a call. Steamworks documentation suggests that content review should take no more than seven business days.

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Blasphemous and Sekiro enjoyers may savour the boss rushing of Rubinite, a dark fantasy action RPG about a red-eyed murder princess

If I've learned anything from years of dark fantasy, it's that there's no force in this universe more terrible than a puny-looking girl with a kitchen knife. Just ask Katana Man, or the Queen of Hearts. Or the lolloping wolfbeast I've recently disembowelled in Rubinite, a pretty slick and engrossingly evil boss rush action game from Gameworks Ventures and Cup Dog Games, which is on sale today.

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Playing the riff from Smoke on the Water on a cat piano may be possible in composer sim Offbeat, if you've got more musical talent than me

Duh, duh, duh. Duh, duh, de-duh. Duh, duh, duh. Duh, duh. That's how the riff to Deep Purple's tune about a fire burning down a Swiss casino goes. As with any riff, it's just a sequence of inputs you make on your instrument of choice. Usually, this would be a guitar. I've been trying to use the cat piano and singing gnome of jobbing composer sim Offbeat, which is out in early access today, July 22nd. Sadly, I don't think I've cracked it, but I have been having plenty of fun making funky jingles and wedding tunes.

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Baldur's Gate series overlords Hasbro take $56 million hit after cancelling several games due out in "2028 and beyond", with Exodus and Warlock unaffected

Hasbro, parent company of Baldur's Gate IP holders Wizards of the Coast and backer of Exodus developers Archetype Entertainment, have announced a $56 million impairment as part of their latest financial results. This recording of assets decreasing in value compared to their theoretical worth is tied to the company having cancelled "several games scheduled for release in 2028 and beyond". That leaves Hasbro's games lineup thinner going forwards, but with releases targeting 2027, like Exodus and Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, still on the way.

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Scarlet Deer Inn, out today, is a Slavic folk tale platformer with a dark underbelly where every sprite is physically embroidered

Occasionally I will see a game that opts for an artstyle so complex and involved that will clearly take years to make, leaving me with an unbridled fear of the gamey part being not very good. I'm talking about games like Harold Halibut, where the entire thing is stop-motion. Do you know how long stop-motion takes! A while, I've heard. I feel similarly about Scarlet Deer Inn, a Slavic-folklore inspired platformer where every single sprite is made from embroidery that's out today.

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"The concept of [Xbox] Game Pass was good" despite its eventual faceplant now contributing to mass job losses, reckons Forza Horizon 5 director

Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, who's currently working on open-world racer Clutch after departing Microsoft-owned Playground Games in 2023, has offered his perspective on Xbox's current layoff-heavy pivot in direction. Despite the Xbox Game Pass push of former Xbox boss Phil Spencer and co being blamed by new boss Asha Sharma as she's ditched studios and given devs their walking papers, Brown still believes Game Pass was a "good" concept, if clearly not one successful enough to avoid this outcome.

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"Built for that world doesn't mean built to require it": Unity reveal their next game engine while walking a careful line around generative AI

Unity have announced Unity 7, the latest incarnation of their game creation platform. In a pleasant shock for people who've been keeping up with Unity's doings these past couple of years, it doesn't appear to ruin anything. Aside from more routine promises of "speedier workflows" and tastier graffix, the company are promising a more "open" approach whereby collaborators using third-party tools can contribute more easily to Unity projects, without using the full Unity editor. This being the year 2026, there are of course some new features for genAI fans, though Unity appear interestingly guarded on this front, stressing that these can be ignored.

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Valve see the great RAM shortage "getting worse," just in case you were clinging to hopes of a cheaper Steam Machine

As Oisin reported over the weekend, Steam Machine engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais gave a big Valve thumbs-down to the practice of platform exclusives – a hot topic in the context of Xbox owners Microsoft retreating back into whatever kind of shrivelled, joyless husk Xbox is nowadays. The same interview, with Bloomberg scoopsmith Jason Schreier, also touched on the acutely PC-spoiling subject of RAMnarök and its subsequent, en-masse embiggening of hardware prices. Good news? No! Obviously it’s all terrible!

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This week in PC games: a Mass Effect-style RTS, a gamebook RPG for back-stabbing nobles, and a civilisation builder that offers to teach you kanji

Hello all! This week, there are a lot of new cat-themed games for some reason. One suspects that some dire cat anniversary is underway. Maybe week of 20th July 2026 marks 30 million years since the invention of cats? Or since cats invented us? In any case, there is already far too much cat discourse round these parts, so I've only allowed one of those sinister feline diversions into the Maw. Without further ado, the list.

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Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros delayed to 2027, as PlaySide take more time before playing their turn to ensure the RTS hits a "high level of quality"

Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros, the Age of Empiresy RTS teeming with Targaryens and laced with Lannisters, has been delayed to 2027. Developers PlaySide have decided that while development's "progressing well", they need a bit more time to nail their strategical rendition of the Seven Kingdoms.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for realising that there's a car in Japan's Super GT racing series this year which is sponsored by horse girl game Umamusume Pretty Derby. Here it is. It's been racing in the GT300 category against, among other cars, a Mercedes sponsored by Hatsune Miku. I'm not sure I like them as much as my all-time favourite GT300 car, the Mooncraft Shiden (I mostly just dig its name), but hey, they exist. I often wonder if their small crews of drivers - Super GT has pilots swap over after a set time behind the wheel - gather at the back of the garages and think about some bloke in the UK writing for a games website. They probably don't.

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You're probably not going to see everything your friend does in The Blood of Dawnwalker, and its director is just fine with that

The Blood of Dawnwalker is, if done well, a game that might not land with everybody. For one, there's the lack of a traditional main story quest, and then there's the fact that you only have 30 in-game days and nights to beat it. Neither are necessarily massively novel, the brilliant Unsighted, for example, also forces a timer upon you, but this is still a notable AAA game taking a risk. This thing likely won't have been cheap to make, and crafting a scenario where not everyone is going to experience the entirety of what it offers, on purpose, is certainly a touch bold at the very least. So it's a good thing its director is happy with people missing things.

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A month after mass layoffs at Bungie, Marathon game director Joe Ziegler is leaving the studio

Another regular day in Marathon Land. Following on from mass layoffs at Bungie after the final major update for Destiny 2, and ahead of next week's mid-season 2 Marathon patch, the extraction shooter's game director Joe Ziegler has announced that he's left the studio, with Del Chafe III taking over his role. Chafe, up until this point, has served as Marathon's assistant game director.

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ZA/UM are set for more layoffs only two months after launching Zero Parades: For Dead Spies

It's been almost two months since ZA/UM released their second game Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (and obviously first after years of controversy. Unfortunately for workers at the studio, the game does not appear to have sold well enough, as more than 30 devs are being laid off or are at-risk of being laid off.

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Esoteric Ebb is the D&Disco Elysium I never knew I needed, but more importantly it's proof I'll never be cut out for political canvassing

Which way are you voting in the election?

There’s an election coming, could I trouble you to ask which way you’re voting?

ELECTION. YOU. VOTING? WHICH WAY?

The time to place the great slip of paper into the holy box of ballots is almost nigh, my honoured friend, wherefore will thou be placing thine vote and whom will it be in favour of?

There are a lot of ways you can ask someone which way they plan to vote. All of them are awkward. The awkwardness isn’t helped by the fact that, in these situations, you might be standing on a doorstep having just interrupted their dinner or be butting into a chat they were having in the street with someone they actually like. Esoteric Ebb revels in that awkwardness.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

What are we all playing this weekend?

This weekend is the eye of the wedding storm, a brief reprieve before heading up to Sheffield next week for further nuptials. Though, that doesn't mean I can relax. My body is in a finely tuned state that I can't let slacken with the finish line is in sight.

I will, of course, be following my wedding guest training regime.

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Unions accuse Microsoft of having "unlawfully fired people" in unfair labor practice complaints filed over Xbox layoffs

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) union and their Canadian offshoot CWA Canada have filed unfair labour practice complaints against Microsoft, accusing the company of having mishandled the recent mass layoffs at Xbox.

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"Id Tech is there, the Doom team is here": Doom: The Dark Ages director pushes back against idea studio have been "nerfed into the ground" by Xbox layoffs

While reports about Microsoft's mass layoffs have painted a devastating picture, the company and affected studios like Doom developers Id Software have been publicly trying to reassure players that the cuts aren't the end of the world. Doom: The Dark Ages director Hugo Martin has stuck to that line while acknowledging the layoffs during on official livestream of the game's Revelations DLC, which came out the same week 136 Id workers were shown the door.

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Control a human proxy on an abandoned spaceship by typing in every command or risk losing your job in Remote Control

The idea of another person controlling every action my body takes is one that keeps me awake at night more often than I like to acknowledge to myself. So how about a game all about that! It's called Remote Control, and in it you most titularly remote control human proxies to explore a derelict spaceship and figure out what went wrong on it.

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I don't like football, but I do like platformers, so Kick is a pretty little bridge that closes that gap

I've never been a football person, so this whole Global Mug thing that's going on at the moment is as important to me as eyelids for a fish. What I have always been is someone who likes platformers, however, even when they're all about that thing they call the beautiful game. And in the case of Kick, it seems that sidescrolling ball dribbling is actually quite delightful.

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Roblox announce plans to let people AI generate basic games using text prompts stuck into a mobile app, but claim that won't fill their homepage with AI slop

"Play is humanity's oldest technology for connection and learning," Roblox's CEO yells at me through my monitor. "Before agriculture, before commerce, before civilization, we played together." Right, so, where's this going? Oh. They're rolling out a tool on their mobile app which allows people to generate basic games by sticking a text prompt into an AI model, then do some light rearranging of said game so they can pretend it's in any way unique or artful before they publish it for others to give a go. The tool's called Build.

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Xbox's gut-wrenching layoffs include the Elder Scrolls Online dev who became studio head around the time of last year's gut-wrenching Xbox layoffs

Last week's Microsoft layoffs, a seemingly never-ending source of terrible and sobering news, included several members of the Elder Scrolls Online's leadership team. According to a WARN notice, studio head Jo Burba is among those departing, despite having only stepped into that role around the time of last year's mass layoffs at Microsoft. With him and several other key figures on the outs, a "transition" to a new leadership team for the MMO is reportedly underway.

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Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced's latest update stops unexpected mutinies triggered by ship shopping trips and forces skies to be sunnier

We've all been there. You're a pirate captain whose pockets are overflowing with freshly nicked doubloons and you fancy blowing it all on some shiny new cannons or a figurehead carved to resemble a bag of money. So, you sail on down to a port with a harbourmaster and start perusing ship upgrades. Then, when you get back to the docks, your ship's disappeared into thin air. Ah. Yarr've got to be kidding me. Completing the rest of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced might be rather difficult now. Thankfully, these impromptu mutinies are a bug Ubisoft have fixed in the title update set to arrive in the game today.

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Dead Space creator Glen Schofield announces he's retiring from "the day-to-day work" of making games from the vicinity of some chirpy nature

Dead Space creator Glen Schofield has decided it's time to walk away from game development, or at least "the day-to-day work of making them. Thus concludes a career which kicked off all the way back in the early 90s, and saw Schofield work on games ranging from Disney World racing to Call of Duty and The Callisto Protocol. The latter will now go down as the developer's last game, provided he hasn't got any surprise un-retirements up his sleeves.

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As unionised Microsoft workers rally against Bethesda layoffs, Fallout 4's been filled with protest signs and OneBGS logoed vault suits by modders

Today, July 15th, unionised Microsoft workers are set to hold a series of co-ordinated rallies outside the offices of Xbox-owned studios, in protest of the mass layoffs the company set in motion last week. According to the Communications Workers of America union (CWA), over 400 union-represented jobs across Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax, and id Software are being cut. In solidarity with the union marches, modders continue to fill Bethesda games with union logos. Skyrim was the first and Fallout 4's the latest.

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RuneScape revamps its housing customisation with a snazzy looking build mode and the option to make your own neighbourhood with your pals

RuneScape is having a bit of a home improvement moment, quite literally. An update went live yesterday that focused completely on player-owned housing, revamping how you both use and construct it, bringing it honestly quite close to The Sims in how it handles house building, amongst other tweaks and additions.

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"Ubisoft thinks that's what we deserve": Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced's release followed by union strike over planned Ubisoft Barcelona layoffs

Following the release of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, an undertaking by a bunch of Ubisoft studios based all over the world, union protests at one of said studios have kicked off over plans to lay off staff now the remake's out of the door. Ubisoft Barcelona, the studio in question, were reported last month to be set for a restructure that'd see them focus solely on Rainbow Six games going forwards.

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Fallout: New Vegas gets a Mojave interpretation of Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood, thanks to this assassin-focused faction quest mod

While there's never been any shortage of characters who'll pay you to splatter some brains across the desert with your trusty anti-mat rifle in Fallout: New Vegas, a new mod adds a whole extra faction based around being a post-apocalyptic assassin. They're dubbed the Dark Family, and you get no prizes for guessing which robed gang of Elder Scrolls dagger-enthusiasts they're based on.

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Following Xbox split, South of Midnight devs Compulsion are looking for work as a co-development or support studio

Having recently parted ways with former owners Xbox as part of the console maker's mass cuts, South of Midnight and We Happy Few developers Compulsion Games have announced they're seeking opportunities to collaborate with other studios. Likely to help them keep the lights on until they've got a new game of their own well on its way, Compulsion look to have turned their focus towards landing a co-development or support gig on someone else's project.

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Baldur's Gate 3's Astarion gets an extra ending cutscene, made by a modder keen not to finish up on a rather awkward note

Warning: Spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3 lie ahead.

Shagging Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3 might say various things about your taste in blokes, but it's understandably the way a lot of folks go. Not everyone's got the nerve to admit that they want to cast some spells with Gale's other wand. Anyway, a veteran BG3 modder's now come to the aid of those who reckon one of the white-haired fang lad's endings concludes a bit too abruptly for their liking, and without enough final hugs.

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"An oversight we deeply regret": Games Done Quick cancel SNK-sponsored stream following backlash over studio's Saudi Arabian ownership

Games Done Quick, the speedrunning organisation behind events like Games Done Queer and the yearly Summer Games Done Quick, have cancelled a stream sponsored by Metal Slug developers SNK following backlash to the fighting game studio being majority owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. Games Done Quick apologised for the "oversight", and wrote that they "failed to conduct the level of review" they should have when deciding whether to accept the sponsorship deal.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for waking up before the sun and getting a bike ride in before the tarmac gets hot enough to cook an egg. Any sensible person would skip the bike ride altogether, but I, a nonsensical person, have agreed to a ride across the country at the end of the month and I'm currently not able to manage 40 miles a day, let alone a hundred. So, I have to get them gains.

Still, should I get back home unsizzled by this heatwave sun, I can celebrate with a tarmac-fried egg and lazy perusal of some of this week's best gaming (and non-gaming) reads.

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Digital Extremes finally reveal Warframe: Tau, the sci-fi shooter's long-awaited second solar system, and it's a gruesome place indeed

Digital Extremes's venerable looty-shooty mechabody extravaganza Warframe is finally getting a full second solar system, after a warm-up flashback tour in last year's The Old Peace expansion. The developers have just screened a first look at Tau, home of the game's Sentients faction, during a presentation at Tennocon, the annual Warframe and Soulframe expo.

What does Tau harbour? In brief: lots of noir theming. The first of the system's two initial areas is a ringed city, Fornax, whose occupants are plagued by corrupting rain and addicted to a substance called the Bloom. Fornax is home to Brysko, a chain-smoking, trenchcoated "Chimera Warframe" with an inner monologue reminiscent of a Raymond Chandler detective (he's actually voiced by Critical Role's Matt Mercer). Before you read on, seasoned Warframblers, please understand: I am trying to phrase all this in the language of everyday mortals. I'm sure I'm getting all sorts of lore wrong.

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Fantasy action-RPG Soulframe is open to all players for a limited time, with a new dark progression path, wolf mounts, and a Warsongs origin quest on the way

Soulframe, the fantasy action-RPG from Warframe creators Digital Extremes, is getting wolf mounts, a Warsongs quest, and a new Vadagar progression path or "Pact" that transforms your "Envoy" character into the lovechild of Soulcalibur's Ivy and Tim Curry's Hexxus from Fern Gully. Unfamiliar with both of those? Think ichor-slathered bone warrior with whipsword. The Vadagar class addition is intriguing because it sees you channelling the powers of the Ode, Soulframe's space-faring, spellsong-controlled enemy faction, who are trying to harvest or corrupt all the world's resources and wildlife.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Another horrendously hot Saturday, another wedding to go to. I am all in favour of love, but could we please reschedule it to a cooler day in the year? Mercifully this one's a London wedding and it can be reached and returned from on the tube. Though travelling on a hot carriage and not arriving looking like a boiled saveloy pressed into a too-small suit will be a challenge.

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"We are the best allies to game devs": Skyrim modder shows solidarity with laid off Bethesda workers by draping union logos across Tamriel

You've heard about Microsoft's mass layoffs by now. The last few days have been filled with stories of how these cuts are affecting different studios both still and formerly owned by Xbox, with even Elder Scrolls 6 developers Bethesda not being spared, regardless of that series being one their corporate overlords are determined to squeeze more out of going forwards. Thankfully, those overlords are reciving some pushback, with unionised Bethesda staff planning protest rallies and a modder using their talents to offer players a way of showing solidarity.

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After years of Nintendo lawsuits and many millions of sales, Pokémon baiter Palworld is out in 1.0 today

Creature-catching game Palworld - the cheerfully macabre survival game that came out of nowhere in 2024 and has sold 40 million copies despite being roundly berated and, indeed, taken to court by Uncle Nintendo for riffing rather flagrantly on Pokémon - launches out of early access today. It's been a journey! Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the industrial exploitation of Kingpacas.

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Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis shutting down means its Japan only, prequel phone game will remain unplayable

It was not particularly surprising to hear that Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis, the other remake of Final Fantasy 7 that opts for a more faithful approach to the original game (if being filled with gacha rolls counts as faithful), is ending service. Square Enix have been ceasing development on pretty much every mobile game they have out at the moment, so why would this one be any different? It's a shame, though, not just because of the fact that it'll be completely inaccessible when it goes down, but because of its inclusion of Before Crisis.

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Stardew Valley enters the third dimension thanks to this in-development mod that even comes with VR functionality

I don't need to tell you that Stardew Valley is not a 3D game, and if I do, your understanding of dimensions is unsettling to me. However, where there's a will, there's a way, as a modder has done the unthinkable by adding an extra dimension to the beloved farming sim, turning it into something else entirely.

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Hooded Horse’s new strategy game Rogue Carrier has you captaining a research ship on a planet where the seas boil with violent squid

There are two cultural artifacts that buzz about my brain without ever truly settling: 2001's action game RTS hybrid Hostile Waters and Wes Anderson's film The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. It may be an unfair lens to apply to newly announced roguelite colony builder Rogue Carrier, but it has enough of both of them to have me ready to dive into its ocean.

In Rogue Carrier, you are the captain of a science ship that is stranded on a strange world. More than a schooner, this vessel is a mega carrier – the largest vessel humanity's ever built. The Bohemoth is able to support whole buildings and production lines on its back. It falls to you to pilot the ship across an ocean that is bubbling with alien sea life – some of it friendly, much of it not – surviving attacks, learning more about the world, and finding your way off the planet.

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from Rock, Paper, Shotgun https://ift.tt/aH6Fser
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