Making Baldur’s Gate 4 would be "a great challenge" for Rogue Trader devs Owlcat, co-founder says, as the studio reiterate their commitment to CRPGs

I'm not saying you've got to be making a vaguely Mass Effecty RPG starting with Ex to be considered as a successor to Larian on the Baldur's Gate series, but it certainly doesn't seem to hurt. Exodus devs Archetype Entertainment were offered such a chance according to former studio head James Ohlen, and while The Expanse: Osiris Reborn devs Owlcat might not have been yet, their co-founder has said it would be a "great honour" if they were.

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American Truck Simulator trundles off to a land of enchanted highways and giant bovines with a freshly announced North Dakota expansion

Fresh off a trip to Illinois back in May, American Truck Simulator devs SCS Software have revealed another expansion they've got in the works. North Dakota's on the way as the big rig roadtrip continues to gradually make its way eastwards.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for looking back at the week and honestly just thinking, yeesh, what are you doing, working in an industry that’s succumbed so deeply and so wilfully to moral decay. The publishers sold to executioners. The naked attempts at thought manipulation. The constant, miserable hum of distrust and paranoia produced by a technology that even bedroom modders, once the poster children of earnest DIY enthusiasm, are now using to cut corners and mislead players. God, it's awful.

Thus, in honour of my dire need to spend this weekend thinking about something else – hopefully that being enough time to reset and rediscover some of the medium’s lingering pleasures – here are some quality reads from the past week, absolutely none of which concern games.

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Manage a cafe by day, go to bed and fight in your dreams in a world without sleep by night in Hips N Noses

"Don't even talk to me before I've had my coffee that restores my lost memories!" This is a line I imagine that the general public would oft repeat in the world of Hips N Noses, a cafe management sim/Vampire Survivors-esque roguelike that's set in a world where no one but you can sleep, and everyone's suffering from a touch of amnesia.

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Got a spare $10? Net yourself almost 150 games and help support laid off game devs with the game industry hardship fund bundle

I don't need to tell you how badly the games industry is doing, right? Badly in the sense of a handful of people desperate to continue making millions are laying off workers by the tens of thousands, with a new layoff story seemingly every week, of course. There's money to be found, just not for those putting in the work. With so many out of work, Necrosoft, the studio behind Demonschool, have decided to do their bit to help out by putting together a bundle of almost 150 games where the proceeds will go towards the game industry hardship fund.

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"I sense immense expectations": Final Fantasy 7 Revelation's director on ending the remake trilogy and DLC

Final Fantasy 7 is the game that never seems to end. That's not just because the original PS1 release is filled with things to do, it's because of the subsequent follow-ups that came as part of the Final Fantasy 7 Compilation. It's also because of the whole remake thing that Square Enix has been doing over the past few years, with the third part, Revelation, due out next year. And as hard as it might be to believe, according to director Naoki Hamaguchi, this really will be the end. For the remake trilogy, at least. More or less.

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What if Stop Killing Games win? Anthem, SpaceCraft and Warframe devs on the "massive undertaking" of reverse engineering an always-online game

Sci-fantasy shooter Warframe is the sexy cyborg fruit of 13 years of updates and expansions, encompassing scores upon scores of quests, areas, plotlines, systems and characters, together with a huge quantity of player-made art. Much of Warframe's original design still exists within the game, however tweaked and refreshed: the developers have removed a few larger chunks, including the underloved PvP raids, but they've mostly sought to polish up aspects that have lost their lustre, while playing out stories that range from spacey self-referentiality to commentary on indentured work. Currently, the studio are reworking Banshee, a sonic avenger who formed part of the Warframe launch roster way back in 2013.

"I know the Warframe team has been talking about bringing back raids, and doing stuff with that," the game's original design director Scott McGregor told me, at this year's Tennocon expo. "But overall, there's a lot of stuff from Warframe that's been in there for a long, long time. For better or for worse. I think, as a team, instead of mostly turning it off, we either improve it, or we replace it with something better."

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