Ahead of GTA 6, Rockstar warn modders against against making unofficial main story expansions, unauthorised ports and mods that combine GTA maps

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.

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Silent Hill: Townfall review - an often inspired, if slightly lumbering trek into the fog

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.

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The Sunday Papers

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.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

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.

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"If the player trusts you enough, they are not going to savescum": Why the makers of some of the best RPGs on PC want you to get used to failing

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?

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Helldivers 2 and Horizon Forbidden West delisted from Steam in the UK, Sony say they're "working with Valve to address the issue"

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.

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"They often don’t make it in the door": Wardogs studio Bulkhead check for "anti-crunch messaging" on prospective hires' social media, CEO says

Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer has revealed that the studio behind recent FPS hit Wardogs check the social media accounts of prospective hires for public criticism of crunch practices, and deliberately prefer to avoid bringing such folks on board. In the exec's view, devs working extra or long hours to get a game or update out of the door - otherwise known as crunch - "is going to happen at some point", even if the studio "always try and avoid it".

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