Larian's king wizard (CEO) Swen Vincke is very eager to tell you about the studio's next game after Baldur's Gate 3. And also, a bit terrified, because after all, the response to Larian's D&D adaptation has been rather rhapsodic. How on Earth do you replicate that level of success? The answer may lie in scripture.
Tactical extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov is adding vaulting, a recoil rework and new armour, as revealed in a developer livestream. Of the bunch, it's vaulting - the act of clambering over a low wall - which has been greeted most feverishly by Tarkov's community, a fact which is honestly not surprising.
A huge part of Cities: Skylines appeal lay in its modding community, which expanded on the citybuilder's robust foundations with new maps, assets and more for years post-release. Cities: Skylines 2 is still waiting on its own official mod support, but Paradox have offered a new update on progress, saying that the editor is "a couple of months" from being in a releasable state, with no concrete timeline as yet.
A Highland Song, Inkle's Scottish rhythm mountain climbing game, now has a release date of December 5th. I'm Scottish, I spent my childhood walking up mountains, and I'm a long-time fan of Inkle, so it's kind of them to make this game specifically for me. Hop below for a new trailer, too.
Now that the Steam Deck OLED is almost certainly about to swell the number handheld PC owners – to say nothing of recent price cuts on the original version – we should really consider the best early Black Friday deals on Steam Deck accessories. A quality microSD card is a must-have, after all, while docking stations make it far easier to extract the most flexibility out of your Deck’s desktop mode.
2023's games industry jobapocalypse continues with news that Amazon Games are laying off 180 people. This includes the entirety of the Twitch service Crown Channel, plus its Game Growth division. According to Amazon themselves, it's all with a view to refocussing on Prime Gaming, which serves up games to Amazon Prime subscribers.
Shadows of Doubt is the voxel-based 1980s detective sim in which the glass is always rain-slicked, the coffee as bitter as the human soul, and the whodunnits, procedurally generated. Hard-nosed private eye Rachel (RPS in peace) pronounced herself fascinated but a little stumped by it, back in April, while Graham described it as his "ideal game" in a post about the recent addition of infidelity cases and lost-and-found jobs, adding to my suspicions that Graham is some kind of jigsaw killer and that his news posts are actually ciphered confessions of his terrible crimes.
Well, these already viscous plots are about to thicken into a borderline-immobile soup of intrigue, for ColePowered Games are adding modding tools to the game. These will allow you to pen your own detective mysteries, and even alter the surrounding city to fit.
