A developer's work is never done! On the very same day it launched, Control Resonant received a hotfix that tackled various complaints that were levied against the game's combat, making it slightly more manageable for those having a tougher time. While a fuller update won't be coming until next month, developer Remedy have outlined their plans for the next couple of updates, namely a New Game++ mode, and a photo mode.
I'm sure I had at least three more sets of Saturdays and Sundays in my September box. That thief time has snuck in again and picked up all the unattended days. If you see him, give him a whack on the back and see if he'll cough them back up again, I'm not quite ready to crack the wax seal on October 2026.
Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios is bowing to the pacifists and trialing a PvE mode in their extraction shooter. If you play between October 13th and 20th, you'll be able to flick a toggle that means you load either into the traditional world of Arc Raiders, where human players vie for the valuable scraps left behind in a ruined world watched over by killer robots, or a slightly safer version where the machines are still deadly but the humans can't hurt you.
"We’re seeing a large and growing group of Raiders who come to the Rust Belt for the co-op and the ARC, not fighting with other Raiders," Embark say in the post announcing the trial. "That group has become a core part of our community, so it’s important we learn how to support them properly rather than leave them working around the game."
I would hope that for most of you it would not be a controversial thing to hear me say I hate generative AI. It stinks! It is rotting everyone's brains, and the people shilling it don't even care (see Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saying he doesn't think it matters that kids aren't actually learning things like basic math when they use AI). But - please don't leave yet - it sure does make for some primo storytelling. Like, for example, in the upcoming LOVE alt delete, a psychological horror visual novel where you are beta testing a chatbot that you're trying to date.
If it ain't broke, why fix it? That seems to be the thought process behind Iron Bramble, the next game from the devs behind Rusted Moss. Like its predecessor, Iron Bramble is a pixel art metroidvania, one where you have a grappling hook that lets you swing about the place at rapid pace, only this time the setting is a "cyber-gothic megastructure" and you play a story-eating demon (?) woman in a world where humanity's flesh bodies have all died out and their souls now reside in metal, robotic husks.
Rockstar’s modding guidelines, recently updated in advance of GTA 6, say much about how you can’t dream up unofficial story missions, or give the upcoming instalment a cheeky unofficial PC port. But they don’t say a goddamn thing about crowbarring DLSS, DLAA, and FSR into 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV, which is exactly what ChunkLeChuck’s DLSS IV mod has gone and done.
After nearly a decade as a free-to-play game, Quake Champions is dropping all that nonsense in favour of being a nice and simple premium release on Steam. That means no more battle passes, no more loot boxes, no more premium currencies. They've even got rid of the store.
If you've played the game through any free events on Steam in the past, then you will be upgraded to a full version of the game automatically. And if you've bought any premium currencies in the past two months will be refunded.
However, while this is a welcome change, it should be seen in the context of Xbox's mission to fire 3200 developers.
Less than 24 hours after confirming they've managed to secure a future outside of Xbox by going independent, State of Decay 3 studio Undead Labs have announced that they've had to lay off "a significant number" of staff as part of that transition. The news follows a second round of mass layoffs this year at the studios still under Microsoft's thumb. Undead Labs were one of the five studios Microsoft announced plans to split with during an initial round of layoffs in July.
Further details have emerged of the impact that Microsoft’s Xbox consolidation and job cuts programme is having on affected workers. World’s Edge, the studio that effectively manages strategy megaseries Age of Empires, has allegedly been hit hard, with an unnamed but verified creative director posting on industry forum ResetEra that "just under half" of all staff had been let go in the process of moving from Xbox’s direct control to Activision’s.
I was not a child that was built for skateboarding. Child me was a tad too wimpy to ever do anything so wicked cool as that. What if I scuffed my knee a little bit, or worse, embarrassed myself? So I did what any skateboarding curious child would do and bought a Tech Deck. And then I never learned how to get good at it. I am only slightly bitter about this adolescent failure of mine, yet all is not lost, for there is an entire video game out today that can let me experience such a feat digitally: Stuntboost.
One of the bright spots of a miserably grey Summer Game Fest 2026 was Mr. Records, a mashup of rhythm-action autorunner and casual vinyl shop management by music game specialists Glee-Cheese Studio. I’ve since played a demo – which you can now try yourself on Steam – and was pleased by the apparent confirmation that it can induce that head-nodding, foot-tapping thing that rhythm games should. Big fan, usually, of games that force me into involuntary body movements.
Not long after announcing changes to how they'll handle majorly updating Marathon going forwards, Bungie have reversed course on their decision to stop developing Destiny 2 - a move they followed with layoffs. Promising to bring back vaulted bits of Destiny 2 and declaring that the series is "foundational" to their future. A future which they've kicked off with a lot of grovelling for forgiveness.
Nighthawks, the 1942 painting by Edward Hopper, is generally described as portraying loneliness. The four people at the diner counter are dwarfed by the empty, cold openness of the street. But the inside of the diner looks warm. One man sits apart, but the other two patrons might be a couple, their hands close. The worker seems to be watching them, perhaps thinking of somebody he’ll return to after his shift. Nighthawks, the 2026 vampire RPG, takes this same sensation, connection in the middle of isolation, and plays it much less subtly. When it works, it manages to tell sub-stories that will stick with me like the glow of a friendly building late at night.
But it doesn’t always work.
Having launched though the same system of reservations and waitlists as the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame is still navigating that inscrutable void betixt "on sale" and "actually out." Nevertheless, it’s had its first software update, SteamOS 0.3.0, which brings – among other technical tidbits – a microphone bug fix, smoother controller tracking, and "substantially faster" charging to the VR headset. Yeah, nice one Valve. Would have been useful to have that last one when reviewing the thing on a deadline but whatever.
There still might not yet be a release date for GTA 6's PC port, but Rockstar appear to be preparing for the massive uptick in mods for their games that'll inevitably accompany it. In new modding guidelines posted this month, the studio have expressly warned against a bunch of things modders could do, including building on established storylines from the base game, pulling over bits of older GTAs, and porting the game to platforms it's not hit yet.
Once a fictional town in Maine, Silent Hill has broken containment and become a transferable oral history mechanism, offered to videogame developers worldwide as a way of investigating, even celebrating local culture. I'm still in two minds about whether this licensing outreach project, begun with Silent Hill f, is more inspired than it is vampiric. I picture Konami's invitation being pushed under the door of potential collaborators like Mary's letter to James in Silent Hill 2: "in our restless dreams, we see that town... let's touch base there sometime, expand our concepts further."
There's opportunity and peril for any studio who answers the letter: opportunity, because Silent Hill is an uncommonly rich way of thinking about the past, with its parallel realities, monster metaphors, and woozy grounding in both mysticism and psychoanalysis. And peril, because licenses have a way of engulfing licensees, forcing them into a straitjacket of tropes: fog, sirens, antagonists with geometric heads. Thankfully, Silent Hill: Townfall's creators Screen Burn (previously No Code) haven't gotten lost in the murk, though I don't think Townfall is their finest creation, not least because it's overreliant on stealth. Like the makers of Silent Hill f, they've taken what they need from Silent Hill to tell a story of their own.
Sundays - well, very early Sunday mornings - are for watching a whole queue of hungry wild animals pass your kitchen window, because a neighbour has decided to leave a bollard-sized catfood dispenser outside the block entrance while they're away on holiday. I'm pretty sure the neighbour's cat wouldn't eat from the dispenser even if there wasn't a badger wedged eagerly inside it. She's an aloof and disdainful creature, who hates going near the front door because that's where those stinky humans come from.
Will I try to feed the poor moggy, denied her dinner by a bunch of Farthing Wood rejects? No I will not, because I'm too busy reading articles about videogames, and things that are vaguely in the orbit of videogames. Here are a few of those articles. Look, please stop fretting about the cat. She's perfectly plump and glossy, whereas that badger looks like he hasn't had a square meal since August.
It's well and truly not summer now. I'm writing this with the lights on because the screen's backlight is suddenly too bright for these eyes grown weak and lazy by the abundance of natural illumination.
When it comes to RPGs, I am an irredeemable savescummer. I admit it. I'll slam F9 at the drop of a hat (perhaps the hat was dropped as a result of a failed dexterity roll. Unacceptable. Reload).
So when I recently found myself reloading a Divinity 2 save for the umpteenth time in a single session, I started to wonder - in a genre that's supposedly about storytelling first and foremost, why am I viewing botched persuasion checks as something to be studiously avoided? And why is it that I feel totally different about making a horrible mess of things in tabletop roleplaying games?
After all, some of my fondest memories of real-life roleplaying are moments of extravagant failure: sometimes of the bathetic stepping-on-a-rake-instead-of-slaying-the-necromancer variety, and sometimes of the much more grounded, human, and affecting type.
It all got me thinking: how do RPG developers think about player failure? Would they recognise the distinction between digital and tabletop that I'm describing? And can they convince a savescummer like me to renounce my ways?
Helldivers 2 and Horizon Forbidden West have disappeared from the Steam store in the UK, something that's happened rather out of nowhere and looks like it might've even taken publishers PlayStation by surprise. Said publishers have issued a statement noting that they've already reached out to Valve to get the games back up.
