The situation at the highest levels of AI and also some graphics cards if you insist company Nvidia continues to look, well, less than ideal. CEO Jensen Huang, he of the reported extramarital affair with a suspected Chinese spy, now appears to potentially be on the verge of being chucked out of the window of a black and green corporate tower, following a report claiming that he had a second alleged affair with an executive who reports to him.

Read more

Hello, good local-time-zone-adjusted afternoon, and let's just say it's been a while. But I come back to you now at the turn of the technological tide. Well, sort of. Sadly I'm not here to predict an end to the ridiculous AI-fuelled chip crisis. That whole mess has a couple of years to run, surely.

Instead I speak of screens, where there is actually some very good news. In short, have you seen how cheap PC gaming monitors are? I mean remarkably, almost stupendously, cheap. I'm talking £60 / $60 for an entry-level 1080p panel with triple-digit refresh rate, sub-£200 / $250 for high-refresh 4K gaming. Heck, even OLED monitors now start with a "2" in both currencies.

Read more

CD Projekt Red have reportedly enlisted Ukrainian AI firm Respeecher to modify voice lines recorded for the Polish version of Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3's upcoming Songs of the Past expansion. The move's been made with the permission of Geralt's Polish voice actor, Jacek Rozenek, and is rooted in the studio wanting his new lines to sound similar to the ones he recorded for the original game prior to having a stroke which has altered how he sounds.

Read more

Back in July, Doom developers id Software laid off around a hundred people as part of wider Microsoft blood-letting. Now, a few of those devs have founded a new employee-owned studio, Hidden Horses. Their first project is Danger Pay, a single-player FPS influenced by ancient arcade blaster Smash TV (pictured) and dystopian movies such as deadly gameshow fable The Running Man – itself an influence on Smash TV.

Hidden Horses have 20 id Software alumni on the books, including former lead VFX artist Todd Boyce, principal engine programmer Dustin Land, senior AI and gameplay engineer Daniel Young, producer Andrew Willis, senior technical designer Jordan Turner, principal technical designer Tim Locke, and senior skybox artist Allison Dombek. They're looking to make "the kind of old school shooters that we think people want more of," in Land's words.

Read more

Minerva Rising is a post-apocalyptic city builder in which your city extends deep underground, divided into levels with their own resources, industries, and communities. You are an artificial intelligence with overall control, but watch out: if you alienate the population of any particular level by, say, forgetting to supply them with oxygen, subversives may rise up and cut your feed, blinding you to their activities.

I'm keen to know whether it's possible for every level to lose faith in you and hack your cameras, reducing the game to a pile of "SIGNAL NOT FOUND" messages. I'm also imagining turning the feeds back on and discovering that everybody is having a massive orgy. Stupid sexy vault dwellers! You'll go forth and multiply when Deep Thought tells you to, and not a second before.

Read more

Some may find this hard to believe, given the absolute state of the market today, but if you were building a gaming PC in 1998, the hard part wasn’t finding somewhere that had 3D cards in stock for a reasonable price. It was choosing the right one among a glut of potential, reasonably affordable options.

In 1998, 47 companies were designing or selling PC graphics, driving a market that hit 130 million units and outsold PCs themselves. Just two years later, at the turn of the new millennium, only 15 remained, and not long after that, there were merely two: Nvidia and ATI, nowadays part of AMD.

Read more

Black Forest Games, developers of the Destroy All Humans! remakes, have spun out of Embracer Group-owned publishers THQ Nordic via a management buyout and announced plans to form a new "developer-driven group" of independent studios. The new group, dubbed Third Signal, will aim to "give teams the independence, resources and creative freedom" to "bring their own ideas to life".

Read more

Loot boxes, dark patterns, virtual currencies, subscription services, pay-to-win systems, and many other trappings of diabolical digital serfdom all face extensive regulation under the European Commission's proposed Digital Fairness Act, which has been formally presented to EU member states today. The full draft text of the regulation leaked earlier in the week. If it passes into law - and there's plenty of debate and revision ahead - it'll have big consequences for the developers and publishers of games like Overwatch, Dota 2, and GTA Online.

Read more

Since they released The Outer Worlds 2 around this time last year, the world has rather turned upside down for Obsidian. The studio lost a chunk of staff to Microsoft's mass layoffs and have pivoted to making a new Fallout game as a smaller group shoved underneath Bethesda in Xbox's corporate structure.

Given all that, The Outer Worlds 2's two-part story expansion is likely arriving in vastly different circumstances than those the studio might've imagined when they began sketching out DLC plans. Part one of the expansion, dubbed Side Effects Guaranteed, is set to release early next month.

Read more

Warning: I'm probably about to make you feel old. Today, November 11th 2026, is the 15th anniversary of Skyrim's release. The first one, before it was re-released on every other platform under the sun. Fittingly, one of its best expansion mods, Beyond Skyrim: Bruma, has gotten a beefy 2.0 update to commemorate the occasion. Though, its creators insist the main driving force behind the update was more a matter of "technical necessity". There are new quests, dungeons, and corners of Skyrim-era Cyrodiil to explore either way.

Read more

Content warning for discussion of extreme violence and self-harm.

Read more

In the nearly 30 years since they opened their doors, Relic have been an enormously influential studio. Responsible for lauded RTS series Homeworld, Dawn of War, and Company of Heroes, they also dabbled in other genres with third-person shooter The Outfit and the original Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Yet, despite this history, in 2024, when Relic were negotiating their sale from Sega to UK investment firm Emona Capita, CEO Justin Dowdeswell knew the rights to Company of Heroes had to be part of the deal. "Without it we would have been a dead studio," he tells me.

Without naming names Dowdeswell points out that there are "numerous examples" of studios that weren't able to survive on their name alone. Not only did Relic need the ability to make more games in the series that they were known for, but they also needed the income from back catalogue sales a series like Company of Heroes provides.

Read more

Right, today's been miserable thanks to the now hourly discourse we have to all take part in lest we be seen as approving of the current bad thing, how about something that looks simply pleasant? Today's the launch day for Tanuki: Pon's Summer, a delightfully vibrant mail delivery sim/Tony Hawk's Pro Skater but for bikes about restoring a shrine before the end of summer.

Read more

You know, I'm sure that Sony had every intention of following through on their intention to release 10 live service games by 2026, as they mentioned way back in 2022. Well, as far as an intention that's designed to please shareholders can go, anyway. And now here we are, almost five years on from that comment that continues to haunt them with the news Fairgame$ has been cancelled.

Read more

It's a bit of a time for AI and games at the moment, 'ey? A bad time, obviously, as it's infecting everything from game development, to the modding community, to native PC ports of a remake of a very popular game that I won't link to for fear of a certain company finding out where I live and ending me there and then. And of course, the latter may be a concern for one Rockstar Games and the impending release of GTA 6. But according to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, game's publisher, they are currently technically and legally preparing themselves.

Read more

Marathon is getting a lot bigger next month. In September, Bungie outlined their plans for the shooter making some big promises, namely the arrival of a PvE mode, and now they've shown off what you can expect from its next season, Symbiosis.

Read more

If I wasn't so sick of hearing about AI every day of my life at the moment I might have found it funny to hear that one of the biggest peddlers of the poison around Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was caught having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Oh who am I kidding, it is funny! And despite knowing that this won't likely push Nvidia away from AI, I am a bit tickled to hear that the tech company and Huang are on the receiving end of a lawsuit.

Read more

The Company of Heroes 3's 3.0 update is huge. Touching virtually every part of the three-year-old RTS, the patch notes are longer than, well, my arm isn't a great measure of patch note length. Let's just say the headline features of overhauled VFX and audio don't really cover it. It also comes with new autumn and winter biomes, an updated grand strategy campaign, improvements to unit AI, and a whole host of other changes.

Talking to Relic ahead of the 3.0 update's launch I learned a little more about the scale of work that went on behind the scenes to make it happen, but also a little more about why Relic are still supporting the game three years after it was released and two years after separating from Sega.

Read more

As another addition to the slew of smaller studios being dissolved by their parent companies, Bandai Namco announced in a press release that they are shutting down their subsidiary studio Reflector Entertainment, a Montreal studio responsible for 2024's action-adventure game Unknown 9: Awakening. In its notice, Bandai Namco explains that the reason for the liquidation is due to Reflector not meeting its expectations for "future business plans, necessary additional investment, and the possibility of profitability and business continuation."

Read more

In a press release coinciding with Grand Theft Auto VI becoming available for pre-load ahead of its November 19th release date, Rockstar has confirmed that the game "has been fully developed from the ground up to provide the best possible experience for the current generation of consoles, targeting 30 frames per second while pushing both platforms to their absolute limits." Read between the lines, and you can kind of make out the words "...so hope your PCs are up to spec, computer nerds."

Read more

In what has come to feel like the dawn of the final day before Grand Theft Auto VI's release, one thing that Rockstar really don't want people to be aware of is the ongoing legal dispute between the Rockstar Games Workers Union and the studio itself following Rockstar's alleged union busting in firing 31 union members last year. Starting on the 12th through to the 26th, recognition of the union will be voted upon by staff to ensure that workers would be given a say over "topics including pay and bonuses, overtime, redundancies, flexible working arrangements, and generative AI policies."

If it passes, the vote would also make the union the largest recognised union in the UK games industry, partly thanks to its partnership with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain. Now, the global labor union SAG-AFTRA have chimed in to endorse the Workers Union, offering solidarity to the members involved and granting important leverage from a global force.

Read more

In a statement posted yesterday, Killing Floor developers Tripwire Interactive have announced that the studio is laying off 36 "talented" internal staff as part of a "workforce reduction". The job cuts come 16 months after the release of Killing Floor 3 (which James didn't care for), and within hours of unrelated yet equally dispiriting redunancies at Skydance Games.

Read more

Valve have finally made clear what they've been doing with all that hoovered-up performance data and all those "Framerate Estimator" text strings: a framerate estimator for the Steam Deck. Or, rather, a framerate average-r, as games on the Steam Store are now getting attached graphs – under their existing Steam Deck Compatibility details – that show how many frames-per-secondseses that game has been recording on real players' handhelds, the OLED and original LCD models both.

Read more

A little over a month following the huge, vile, culture-defining (negative) merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. into Skydance, the corporation has confirmed that games division Skydance Games will be facing a round of layoffs, according to a report from Variety.

Read more

The folks behind Nexus Mods have rolled out a new "daily limit" system which ensures modders who upload multiple works in bulk during a single 24 hour period can't take up more than one spot in the tabs dedicated to showing off new mods for different games. Instead, those who chuck up their mods in bulk will see one of their works given a spot, while the rest are neatly filed away behind it, ready to spring out if you click a bit of text indicating that modder's got other fresh works to show off.

Read more

Friendslop du jour Big Walk is the latest in an unfortunately long series of games that have been confirmed to use generative AI in their production, with developers House House clarifying their use of it in a statement to Aftermath (thanks!). House House state that "LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs", and that "well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage", but are quick to note that "generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game."

Read more

Poema is my pride and joy. She was my first horse and she's a competition winner, but she's reached her potential. She'll never be a show jumper, and that's where the money and prestige are to be found. If I'm ever to grow my horse farm into a nationally renowned equestrian centre, I need the cash to expand and upgrade my facilities. Poema is a hoofstep on the path to that future, but she's not going to be able to take me all the way herself.

For all its hand-drawn aesthetics, Horses of Hoofprint Bay has hard realities like the limits of Poema's future bubbling under its surface. While the game's scripted narrative may be lacking, it's shockingly easy to fill in the gaps with drama worthy of a Jilly Cooper novel.

Read more

Oh shit, that's not too far away. Terrifyingly, that last sentence is now a thing I can accurately write about games coming out in January 2027. Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy has just been confirmed as one such game, with the cRPG's heresy investigation set to commence towards the end of the month.

Read more

It is said that King Canute once placed his throne on the shore and commanded the sea not to get his feet wet, thus proving to his flattering courtiers that only God Almighty holds sway over the elements. "But sire!" I would have told him, if I'd been one of the aforesaid lickspittles. "Why not lay down spike strips and park a couple of flamethrowers in the shallows?" I would have said this because I have just been playing Swarmbreaker, a tower defence game that aims to prove there is no fluid body so awe-inspiring that it cannot be machine-gunned into submission.

Read more

Sega have revealed that over two million email addresses have leaked due to a cyberattack on Japanese email delivery provider Arara, whom the Like A Dragon and Sonic publishers use to distribute newsletters. Sega and Arara are currently busy investigating what happened in the breach, which doesn't appear to have affected the Sega accounts you can use receive in-game rewards and access a calendar which reminds you when it's Kazuma Kiryu's birthday. The companies have urged those who signed up for the affected newsletters to be wary of potential phishing attempts.

Read more

A group of "concerned Microsoft workers" have published an open letter criticising their employer's "speed-at-all-costs" approach to generative AI, which they argue is "harming our customers, colleagues, shareholders, vendors, and the planet". They accuse Microsoft leadership of trying to get people "addicted" to genAI, while making their own staff miserable by mandating AI usage.

Echoing the on-going BDS campaign against Microsoft's Xbox business, the writers contend that Microsoft have become party to "human rights violations" by selling generative AI technology to Israel's military during the latter's invasion of Gaza, which a UN commission has deemed a genocide. They're also critical of Microsoft's contracts with the USA's draconian Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. While seemingly not against generative AI in principle, they're organising against "the AI industry’s trajectory to continue to enrich AI’s powerful few", pointing out that AI companies now account for a terrifying share of the global stock market.

Read more

Whether RPGs are better off prioritising player freedom or endeavouring to have several doors slam shut every time you put another foot forwards in order to encourage multiple runs with different characters is, to put it bluntly, something I reckon will still be a matter of debate in the year 4000. We'll all have evolved in non-corporeal beings floating in a galaxy that's been racked by such change that even the six million copies of The Elder Scrolls 5 we've littered the Earth with will have been swept away into the great recycling bin on the gods' desktop, and there'll still be sniping going on about whether it's ok that Skyrim lets you be a master thiefssassin who leads the companions, knows every spell under the sun, and slapped up a world-eating dragon for fun.

For what it's worth, the game's lead designer reckons both games that do and don't let you do that have their merits when executed well.

Read more

I don't know what Edwin's been feeding the Maw in my off week, but when I entered its chambers this morning it had left game releases everywhere. Ceiling, walls, floor, they all glisten with games of every size and genre. Even after I hosed away the ones largely made with the assistance of generative AI, the sifting sieves fitted across the drains held a bounty of interesting releases.

Let's get to it, then, before the Maw wakes up and realises I've nabbed all its spoils.

Read more

Ostensible graphics card company and definite AI giants Nvidia have commissioned an independent investigation into themselves, amid reports that CEO Jensen Huang had an extramarital affair with a suspected Chinese spy.

Per both the New York Times and Nvidia themselves, Nvidia offered to go under the microscope after US intelligence organisations elected to investigate Huang’s paramour, Chinese national Alice Huang (no, uh, relation, and also known as Huang Le), on suspicion of sharing sensitive information with Beijing. The Nvidia-running, leather-jacketed Huang has thus far only copped to an unspecified affair, admitting in an extraordinary public statement that he was "unfaithful to my wife." Still, the two investigations are likely to start a bizarre new leg in the alread-messy AI arms race that the US and China have been indulging in for years.

Read more

Since time immemorial, North American and European publishers have racked their brains over ways to make their games sell in Japan, ancient heartland of mythical beings like Mario, Sonic, and Polaroid Pete. In the late noughties, Microsoft launched a big push to give Japanese youth the Xbox virus with such targeted console exclusives as Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey. And Rockstar once dreamed of making a Grand Theft Auto game set in Tokyo.

Speaking to me last week, Rockstar North's former technical director Obbe Vermeij shared a little about the abandoned project. Emphasis on the "little" – it doesn't appear to have gotten very far, despite recently unearthed allusions to "Tokyo PS2" in GTA 5's source code.

Read more

While its remastered upgrade might have broken cover in late September, The Witcher 3's extra expansion isn't set to join it until next year. With 2027 still a month and a bit away, a modder's taken it upon themselves to add a few more adventures to Geralt's time in Toussaint, Blood and Wine's gorgeous French-ish duchy, before the bloke from the river heads off to Letten for Songs of the Past.

Read more

Sundays are for waking up covered in sand. The roof of your house is missing. A small man stands in the emptied bed of a dump truck. "You know, everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6," he says. "You know, everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6," he repeats. "You know, everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6," he declares once again, beginning to move towards you this time. "You know, everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6." You realise your hands are tied down. Oh no.

Is he about to sit on your face? WAIT, THAT'S NOW ILLEGAL HERE IN THE UK. NO, PLEASE, DON'T SIT ON MY-time seems to slow as the bare backside approaches your visage. As its cheeks prepare to become as sandy as yours, you hear its wielder say: "And we thought, hey, given the moment..."

Read more

Years ago, I had this dream where I was parkouring through a greatly sunken version of Venice, no doubt sourced from the many hours I put into Assassin's Creed 2 as a teen who should have been studying for their GCSEs a lot more than they were. It's stuck with me after all this time mostly because of how much I wanted to capture that feeling again somehow, as the real Assassin's Creed didn't quite cut it. And lo and behold, there I was today browsing Bluesky when I came across Boars in Rome, a Mirror's Edge and Counter Strike Surf inspired parkour platformer set in a dystopian version of Rome.

Read more

I know what you want. The humble city builder isn't enough for you any more, is it? You need a cities builder, you can't just stop at one, but you don't want to build up an entirely different city on a new save file. If it were up to you, they'd all be on the same map, a motorway's worth of a drive away from each other. If we're talking contemporary cities, I can't help you, but if you can settle for numerous medieval towns across an entire county, then County of Fortune should do just fine.

Read more

By this point I'm probably safe in assuming that you all know EA are shutting down BioWare, and that Mass Effect 5 has been cancelled in turn. You may have also seen that an internal trailer for Mass Effect 5, or Universe as it was seemingly going to be called, was leaked not long after the news broke, and that Sam Hulick, one of the composers on the original trilogy of games, shared he was going to offer up his re-scored version of the trailer. Well, it's N7 Day, as rough as that will be for many of the developers on the game, but Hulick has stood by his word, and shared an oral glimpse at what the world of Mass Effect Universe could have sounded like.

Read more

About a year ago, the devs behind Path of Exile 2 delayed the game's 1.0 release to an unspecified point in time, only offering the hope that it wouldn't slip into 2027 (doing much the same about half a year later). But there's good news: it won't! As the action RPG now has a 1.0 release date locked in, alongside a look at what you can expect when it arrives.

Read more

It appears I was premature in suggesting that the closure of BioWare might quickly spell an end for Mass Effect 3's strangely good, preposterously enduring co-op mode. I reinstalled and logged on just last week, and easily found a series of packed lobbies. Still, it was always regrettable that 2021's Mass Effect Legendary Edition opted not to remaster this multiplayer component alongside its dolled-up main trilogy, thus failing to introduce to a new generation the joys of performing teleporting psychic headbutts as a millennia-old bipedal frog.

Read more

Early last month, Star Wars Zero Company developer Bit Reactor brought back a number of developers who had been furloughed before the game launched in August. At the time they did not specify how many devs were returning to the studio, with a separate report claiming more than half had become full time staffers again. Unfortunately, it does now seem like not everyone was able to be brought back, with a number of now former workers sharing word of having been laid off.

Read more

This is the last empty weekend before I go on holiday for a frankly indulgent three weeks. As such, it will likely be spent either remembering all the things my partner and I've not organised for the time we're away or racing to clear through the pile of things I've already remembered I've not organised for the holiday. Whatever the case, it shall not be restful.

Where am I going? Let's just say, I hope to return with some new pairs of glasses and a pair of trainers. If that doesn't give it away, I don't know what will.*

Read more

Age of Empires-influenced real-time strategy game The Fertile Crescent 2: Collapse of the Bronze Age leaves early access today, publishers MicroProse have announced, with the 1.0 version adding the final chapters of the singleplayer story. You'll also get your grubby fingers on the very same map editor developers Wield Interactive used to design the campaign.

I'm new to The Fertile Crescent 2 myself. I do like the sound of a strategy sim in which you guide a fugitive community through the Late Bronze Age Collapse. The land has been thrown into turmoil by the arrival of the Sea People, this being a loose historical term for assorted ocean-going migrants who, I gather, are often blamed for the crumbling of the Hittites among other once-glorious Bronze Age powers. I don't have much scholarly insight to share - I thought the "Sea People" referred to expansionist mermaids, at first - but I do have a trailer.

Read more

I may be very late to the party with this discovery, but I only just realised you can connect your Steam Wishlist to a third-party deals tracker. The beauty of which is that, once hooked up, you can see what games you've been pining for are going cheap not just on Steam but through any major shopfront across the internet.

I worry that I will be coming across as 'Use this one trick to save money – greengrocers hate it!', but it's already helped save my nephew more than £40. Even if it meant using a slightly underhand method.

Read more

Extremely good King's Field-style RPG Queen's Domain – or is it a Metroid Prime homage? Or a stealth Morrowind-up? We hacks simply cannot decide – has received its first proper patch, adding a hitherto "missing" throwing weapon, the Grave Knife, alongside a bunch of quality-of-life fixes.

They've stirred in the ability to disable screenshake, alongside some new icons to make status effects more obvious. They've also introduced "options to make some late game puzzles less frustrating", though they don't specify which. How frustrating! Still, it's a tidy overhaul for a game that has rapidly become one of my 2026 favourites.

Read more

I do not wish to "rule the streets" of Megacity West, dear creators of Airframe Ultra. I wish to be ravished by them, rubbing my face against the rusty corrugated metal of the shipping containers, and savouring the acid blue waters of the bay. I do not want to "become the one thing with freedom in a city of billions: A racer." I want to become the other thing with freedom in a city of billions: a person who slowly drives or – whisper it - walks around just looking at stuff, because gadzooks, this is one of the prettiest PS1 cyberpunk burgs I've laid eyes on.

Those eroded pastel chevrons. Those seductively wobbling vertices. That electric reef of a downtown backdrop, murderously luring your gaze from the on-coming trucks. That layer of invigorating crackle over everything. Every moment or so, I dismount from my hoverbike to inspect some concrete ruin I could swear I last saw in G-Police, or ponder the resemblance between a subway tunnel and WipEout 2097's Gare d'Europa. Then, somebody waps me in the skull with a stop sign at 300 kilometres an hour. But I was already stopped, frantic stranger! Your brutal poetic ironies are wasted on me.

Read more

EA have stuck a bunch of restored versions and ports of classic games, on Steam, GOG and the EA App. 25 games in all, including multiple entries in the Wing Commander and Ultima series, are part of the haul. Why's this happening now? Well, an EA producer stumbled across a cupboard full of old tapes, film reels and CDs.

Read more

GTA 6's PC release may come sooner than anticipated, according to former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij, because Rockstar and publishers Take-Two will be concerned about losing money to unofficial generative AI clones of the PS5 version, once it launches on 19th November. In general, Vermeij thinks that how to avoid having your games duplicated by chatbot herders is "the big question" right now for devs and publishers, particularly those who don't have the means to enforce their intellectual property dominions as vehemently as Take-Two do for Grand Theft Auto.

Speaking to me during a wide-ranging chatathon, Vermeij reflected on the early days of Grand Theft Auto development at Rockstar North in the 90s, and how the Noel-and-Liam-Gallagher-esque relationship between PC and console gaming has evolved. He shared a sweary anecdote about the company's difficulties getting the original GTA 1 to look the business on Sony's PlayStation.

Read more

Members of the consortium led by the Saudi Arabian government's Public Investment Fund and some private equity suits which took over EA this year in a leveraged buyout worth $55 billion reportedly have a new target in their sights. Unity, software company and makers of the game engine bearing the same name, have held talks with the consortium over a potential takeover, it's claimed.

Read more

My favourite kind of game that's obviously going for the vibe of a particular era of gaming is one that doesn't look like it's trying to be any other game from said era, moreso if someone told me it was a PS2 or a Dreamcast game everyone forgot about I'd believe you. CHRONO PUNK fits that vibe quite well, an action roguelite that looks like it's taking some cues from those aforementioned consoles, alongside the likes of Soul Eater, Jet Set Radio, Devil May Cry, and Spider-Man.

Read more

It feels like every single week for the past few years has been the infinitely quotable 30 Rock quote on repeat. That feeling struck particularly last month when EA decided to shut down the iconic Mass Effect and Dragon Age developer BioWare. That obviously resulted in the cancellation of Mass Effect 5, of which a leaked trailer and some, now former, devs made sound pretty interesting. But hey! At least there's a documentary coming next year all about the studio that managed to capture the studio's last days! Yeah, I'm not so convinced by this upside either.

Read more

Sometimes, you come across a game and instantly know it's for the sickos. Today that is Ablahshikar, a "turn-based salvage-survival CRPG adrift on the Candle Sea" where you rip out the organs of enemy warships to "rebuild your vessel into a doomed chimera," that is out now in early access. To be honest I could have just called it a CRPG and still labelled it as a game for sickos, yet everything that's going on here is obviously just doubling down on the sick factor.

Read more

Lord almighty, video games take a while to make, 'ey? Especially if you're just one person working on it by yourself. Such is the case with Faraway, out today, an arcade game that reminds me of the early days of PS3 indies "about a shooting star that creates constellations to stay alive," all made single-handedly by creator of cult-classic mobile game Eliss, Steph Thirion. Did I mention that Faraway took 16 years to make? Like I said, game development is a lengthy process.

Read more

Another day, another opportunity for some horsing around! I'm being literal here, to be clear, as a new update for The Legend of Khiimori dropped yesterday. It's called The Mongolian Expanse, opening up the map a whole lot more and making a sweep of other additions to the game.

Read more

No doubt eager as peas to help pay off EA's billions in debt, battle royale shooter Apex Legends is set to run another of its intellectual propertytastic crossover events. This one, starting on November 10th, stars Godzilla, of Godzilla Minus Zero, Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla (1954), Godzilla 2000: Millennium, Godzilla (1998), Son of Godzilla, and Godzilla (2014). I might be missing some.

Read more

In what feels a fairly cheeky move during a time when memory shortages have infamously made it pretty much impossible to buy a decently powerful new graphics card without spending approximately a gazillion pounds/dollars/dollarpounds, Nvidia have decided to put out a Steam demo that allows folks to re-live the feeling of unboxing a ludicrously expensive graphics card in 2006.

Read more

Goddess of Victory: Nikke, a gacha shooter/RPG developed by Stellar Blade makers Shift Up, has suffered a "security incident" which has seen its PC launcher potentially be infected with third-party malware. Thankfully, it seems a patch to make the launcher safe again has been quickly dished out, but publishers Level Infinite are still advising players who've booted the game up since September 27th to do some security checks.

Read more

After gifting Pillars of Eternity a turn-based mode for its tenth anniversary, Obsidian have now rolled out full PC controller support for both the RPG and its younger sibling Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. The support, along with some tweaks to Deadfire's turn-based mode, are currently out in public test form.

Read more

Calls for the Canadian government to help ressurect recently shuttered RPG makers BioWare have progressed from a single post by a politician to a petition with enough signatures that it looks set to be presented to the Canadian House of Commons for an official response. So far, 1,662 people from the country of maple syrup and also other things have signed this call for their leaders to consider stepping in.

Read more

Unionised workers at Dishonored developers Arkane Lyon have published a fresh statement about the progress of negotiations with Microsoft over the studio's potential closure. Aside from calling on Xbox management to make a redundancy offer proportionate to Microsoft's colossal market value, they accuse the parent company of creating the very economic conditions cited as a reason for closing Arkane, and thereby "sabotaging" development of the forthcoming Marvel's Blade.

Read more

Long waits between mainline entries in a series aren’t a new phenomenon, if perhaps a bit more common nowadays due to big games' ballooning development cycles. It took about 23 years for BioWare’s Baldur's Gate 2 to be followed up by Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3, though there were a decent amount of spin-offs and remasters peppered between the two.

The wait for The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel hasn’t stretched on that long quite yet, but as Bethesda finally revealed concrete details about it just in time for Skyrim's 15th birthday, it really hit home for me that TES VI will be tasked with restoring motion to a world where calendars have been stuck in the 201st year of the 4th era since 2011. Perhaps it’s because I’m still in my twenties and haven’t lived long enough to see that many things I like pause their forward march for this long before returning. There’s also a good chance my expectations of timelines rolling forward on a regular basis without the need for a whole new entry are coloured by the constant stream of new stuff fed into most games via updates and live service passes these days.

Read more

"Stardeus is in an early stage in terms of bulk and complexity, but it's already a pleasant blend of interesting ideas that generate a mostly relaxing vibe," wrote gallant star captain.exe Sin Vega in our 2022 analysis of Rimworld-influenced colony manager Stardeus. "One to watch for sure." Well, let it not be said that we weren't watching.

Read more

Star Wars has been back in the news recently because, to cut a long story short, the US alt-right have decided that Darth Vader was actually the good guy. We are not here to indulge such buffoonery. We are here to talk about Fate of the Galaxy, a free unofficial space combat simulator set during the events of the original Star Wars trilogy, featuring several mission-based campaigns and a stable of Imperial and Rebel Alliance ships that ranges from the quad-blasting X-Wing to Boba Fett's Firespray 31. Also, Naboo starfighters, if you really must.

It's a total conversion of poor dead Volition's venerable dogfighter FreeSpace 2, running on the open source Free Space 2 Open engine via the popular Knossos launcher. You don't need a copy of FreeSpace 2 to play it. You also don't need to pay. And nor do you need a whizbang PC – this bucket of bolts hums along happily on my i5-1145G7 with no dedicated graphics card. As the Rancor said to the padawan: finally, some good food.

Read more

Raw Power Games, an independent studio comprising veteran developers of The Witcher 3, Total War: Three Kingdoms, and Crusader Kings III (among others), have called on players for support after losing their funding - an existential threat to both the organisation and to their debut, the still-in-development historical strategy game Chronicles: Medieval.

Read more

Aha. Here it is.

Freshly poked live and right on time.

Now, we wait for the inevitable flood of mods, like the ceaseless current of add-ons which still flows into Skyrim.

Read more

Space station trading game Probably Stolen – Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim has been doing rather well on Steam, attracting over 162,000 concurrent players last night. I've been feeling the urge to fire it up again myself, after my brief launch-day trawl through its quagmire of black market economics and factional rivalries.

The game's big numbers come as a shock given that it began life as another, non-cyberpunk kiosk job sim called Deepspace Emporium, which still has a Steam page as of writing. Deepspace Emporium seemed doomed to fizzle out in obscurity. But publisher tinyBuild got behind it regardless, working with developers Questing Goose to overhaul the art direction and lay on extra brainchips. The gamble paid off.

Read more

The owners of Nexus Mods have ruled out instituting an outright ban on AI-generated works being uploaded the site, instead opting to expand their current rules on modders disclosing how they've used AI in making their mods. This latest move to address the waves of AI-created or AI-thumbnailed mods now hitting Nexus Mods on a daily basis follows Nexus' modus operandi up to this point, which has been simply to try and ensure AI usage is clearly labelled so prospective downloaders can make informed decisions.

Read more

Things are potentially looking up for Arkane, depending on how you feel about Ubisoft (and depending on who actually ends up acquiring them). I mention the Assassin's Creed developer because, reportedly, they're interested in buying the studio from Microsoft, having even made a bid for it. I'll go out on a limb here and say it's the whole being French thing, but uh, I'd really rather someone else bought Arkane.

Read more

You might have seen that for today's grub, Edwin decided to in part feed The Maw with Food Devils, an incredibly salacious, foodie take on Fire Emblem, as it was meant to release today. The only problem is, it's not actually out yet. That might prompt you to call Edwin a rotten liar and march up to his castle at the top of the hill on a dark and stormy night with pitchforks and torches, but I beseech you to wait, because it's actually Steam's fault. And potentially, it's the fault of all those awful AI games that have been flooding Steam recently.

Read more

You know, given the whole stealthy element of Thief-like immersive sims, I'm surprised there haven't been more of them with horror elements. There's Gloomwood, sure, but it's not as common as I'd like. That in turn then makes me curious about The Citadel Project, an immersive sim with some survival-horror elements set in a nasty, parasite-infected dark fantasy world, all apparently made by just one person.

Read more

The concept of fusing an RTS and an FPS always sounds like a fun one, and since 2023 Martin Melichárek has been trying to make a new take on the combination under the watchful eye of DayZ devs Bohemia Interactive through Silica. Today marks the day that Silica leaves early access and enters 1.0, fully fleshing out its hybrid and mish mash of Dune's Arrakis and Helldivers' Terminids.

Read more

Well, have you played Atuel? If not, you can do so within the next hour - it's a tiny, free, 25-minute walking sim, albeit one with little actual walking on account of you playing most of it as a river. More of a running sim, really.

Read more

For the time being, the world of Frostpunk remains a hypothetical, even if it's one that seems just that little bit more likely than I'd like it to be given who's in charge of the world. But at the very least, there are pockets of hope to be found in Frostpunk 2, namely with its newly revealed next bit of DLC, The Surge, a name that has been bequeathed to it for incredibly obvious reasons. Oh, you need me to explain them? Fiiiiine.

Read more

Helldivers 2 isn't slowing down any time soon, and according to Edwin's recent interview with Arrowhead CCO Johan Pilestedt, it'll continue to be Arrowhead's main priority for the future. As if Helldivers 2 wasn't full of enough horrors for our brave Super Earth Helldivers to shoot at for the betterment of galactic democracy, its next update is due to add an entirely new Terminid subspecies, the Noxious Terminids.

Read more

Bandai Namco have released the initial announcement trailer for Mobile Suit Gundam Battle Operation 3, a free-to-play team action game and a sequel to 2018's Battle Operation 2. The trailer is very, very pretty, showing off Gundam units clashing in large-scale battles and infantry fighting beneath the colossal mechas' feet (kinda like Titanfall, in having both human and mecha players in the same match). I'm sadly not yet enough of a true Gundam fan to recognise many of these units on sight other than the RX-78-2, but there's a real variety shown off here.

Read more

Praise Talos and whatever other Elder Scrolls deities you might worship. We here at RPS and in the wider gaming press finally have new material to use when hunting for images to symbolise The Elder Scrolls 6. No more will we be limited to that shot of some hills from the 2018 teaser, because Bethesda have shown off an elder scroll covered in sand while revealing the new game's subtitle and all but locking in a setting. As a recent report from The Verge claimed, it's called The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel and looks to be set in Hammerfell.

Read more

Less than a year after the announcement of their first game, and only four years after the studio's creation, Gang of Dragon developers Nagoshi Studio have been dissolved by a shareholders' resolution (thanks, Gematsu.) That also means a premature end for Gang of Dragon, which was announced at last year's Game Awards with a flashy trailer featuring Like a Dragon-esque realistic visuals, combat and exploration through Kabukicho, a couple new elements like actual gunplay and car chases, as well as the star power of actor Ma Dong-seok (a.k.a. Don Lee). Following reports in March that NetEase, the studio's source of funding, would be pulling said funding in May due to ballooning costs reaching around seven billion yen, the time has sadly come for Nagoshi Studio, having not found any alternative funding sources in the time since.

Read more

Following not the inherent liberal capitalistic framework of city builders like SimCity but instead a revolutionary (sorry) interpretation of planning and logistical simulation that prioritises centralisation and minute detail, Hooded Horse and 3DIVISION's Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic offers a tense, socialist look at what a citybuilder could be. Fellow contributor Sin Vega, in her 1.0 review, described it like this: "You have to build things to demolish things. That might be Workers & Resources in a nutshell. You're not managing budgets (money is exclusively for imports/exports), you're organising stuff." Now, having previously expanding out of the Soviet Republic and across the globe with the World Maps DLC, the next step for socialist citybuilding is, of course, space. Our Edwin outright predicted this two years ago, correctly calling that "the logical endgame here is to go to space." Good on him.

Read more

Despite taking the voice performances of actors and feeding them into machines to spurt out AI-generated mimicry, Embark CCO Stefan Strandberg insists that "we are not in the industry of replacing actors." In a new video posted to the Arc Raiders channel focused on audio design, Strandberg refers back to the infamous use of genAI in Arc Raiders to generate voice lines based on real voice actors' performances, something which the game was heavily (and rightly) criticised for before and since its release.

In that linked piece (thanks Oisin!), CEO Patrick Söderlund stated that they have been replacing lines that were originally generated with actual recorded lines, presumably because Arc Raiders has made quite a bit of money and now they feel that they can continue paying actors to record more lines, rather than just scraping their talents and avoiding the dreaded fee of paying professionals for their work. This choice already came after their previous game, The Finals, was heavily criticised for the exact same thing, which is just a fascinating series of decisions to consider.

Read more

Compulsion Games parted ways with former owners Xbox, having landed on the long list of things Microsoft were determined to ditch as part of multi-round mass cuts this year. Now, South of Midnight creative director David Sears has suggested that an eventual pulling of the rug was something he feared throughout the game's development, to the point where he seemingly doesn't think he'd have funded it if he'd been in the shoes of Xbox execs.

Read more

itch.io has unfortunately, much like Steam, long had an issue with genAI content being uploaded in droves, drowning out perfectly good games made by human hands. The apparent standard method against this, voluntary genAI disclosure, has been itch's primary tool to combat this wave of low-quality slop, but hasn't worked out too well; itch revealed a few days ago that 'the number of game pages being created per-day has doubled in the past two months'. Now, in attempts to further combat this, beyond just game assets requiring a genAI disclosure to upload as they have for two years, itch will be expanding the mandatory disclosure to tabletop games, books, comics, and soundtracks, as well as adding a 'no AI' filter directly into the search function.

Read more

A month or two back I penned a 1500 word whine about feeling too powerful in Blood of Dawnwalker. "Gimme a vampire sim in which I'm a pathetic vein-nibbling goblin," I wrote, using many more adjectives than that. Well, never let it be said that I'm biased against vampires, for I am equally keen to play an RPG in which I am the least capable vampire hunter in the universe. A vampire hunter who screams when he wakes up with his hair over his face. A vampire hunter who has to spray the vampires with antibac before staking them.

An RPG like Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish, perhaps, which presents you with a choice of Advantages and Flaws when creating a character. You have to balance these out on a gnarly weighing scale, before they'll let you through the game's front door. Here is a video showing all that off, together with a lot of sixpacks.

Read more

The most important thing to know about Bay 12: Mech Repair is that these are mechs of the MechWarrior or possibly Patlabor school – that is, basically WW2 tanks on hydraulic legs, with cockpits full of switches and wireframe displays. Their bodies are assemblages of pistons and reactors. They are not biomechs like the ones in Evangelion. An Evangelion Repair game would be… different. Less industrial, more Oedipal. You would dread removing the smallest piece of housing.

Read more

Anthropic have told their genAI tool Claude to start ducking requests from users to recreate or clone existing games, following a flood of folks using the tech to generate six-fingered remakes. Instead of risking infringing on the intellectual property of series or titles that companies which aren't Anthropic own, Claude will instead restrict itself to only generating "original" games slopped together based on whatever data it's drawing on.

Read more

Recently, I managed to dupe that preposterous hack Julian into signing a form committing him to alternate weeks of Maw-feeding duty. How he whined last Monday, as we strapped him into his neoprene bodysuit. How he begged for mercy, as we handed him his 12-foot Gallium toasting fork and elbowed him out the airlock.

Read more

After adding a whole new town to Fallout 4 last month, a group of modders have released another in their long string of extra quests for the RPG. This latest mission revolves around a dungeon delve in the Glowing Sea, where a mysterious bunker's just been unearthed.

Read more

The team behind Oblivion remake mod Skyblivion are being threatened with legal action by a former volunteer on the project, according a video posted by current lead Kyle 'Rebelzize' Rebel. The situation looks like it'll need resolving before the mod, which was originally set to release last year, can finally make its way out of the Imperial City sewers.

Read more

Legendary outpost builder Dwarf Fortress is getting a meat biome. A terrible netherworld of bone and artery. A sunken redoubt of gristle and gizzard. An appalling labyrinth of squirt and squelch. Honestly, the biggest shock here is that Dwarf Fortress doesn't appear to have a meat biome already. It certainly has plenty of florid descriptions of fatal injuries.

Read more

What makes Carrion interesting obviously lies in playing as the monster in a horror game rather than being the one chased down by it. The game's nasty tentacle monster still gives me the heebie jeebies, so I really would hate to be hunted by one. This is where I point you towards Gag Order, a shooter where you are in fact hunted by a disgusting cephalopod creature all while tracking down a distress signal.

Read more

December is certainly going to be the month of Dune. The biggest Dune of Dunecember will obviously go to Dune: Part 3, which is Duen out December 18th. A little bit before that, however, is a well-timed free expansion coming to Dune: Awakening. It's called Blood and Ice, which sounds gross, but hey, I guess free blood and ice isn't entirely a bad thing?

Read more

If you're something of a Portal or Half-Life head, you'll probably already be familiar with F-Stop, an unreleased Portal prequel that remained quite mysterious for many years. Back in 2020, a much deeper look was revealed in a semi-official capacity, revealing a pretty neat concept (that isn't so dissimilar to that of Superliminal). Now, all these years later, assets and source code for the game has leaked, and what exists of F-Stop is fully playable.

Read more

Let's start with the bad news: Final Fantasy 14: Evercold has been delayed. The good news, that doesn't matter all that much, as it's only a delay of roughly a month, and a release date has been set in stone too: February 23rd, 2027. It's cutting it a bit close to the seasons shifting towards spring, making the game seasonally inappropriate, but hey ho, February is still winter!

Read more

In this genAI world, every single leak that makes its way out into the world should be seen as more of a "leak" until proven otherwise. With that said, it does kind of seem like a remake of the first Persona game is on the way, with some footage supposedly leaking and showing it in action.

Read more

Sundays are for looking upon my DIY works and despairing. Strewn sawdust, spilled paint, and hunks of broken MDF litter my living room kingdom. When will it be over? When will I be free? When will I be able to reassemble my sofa, sit down with a cup of tea in hand, and admire my books, unpacked and arranged on perfectly fitted alcove bookshelves?

"Today?" I whisper hopefully in response to a paragraph of rhetorical questions. "Probably not," snaps back Reality. Especially if I don't get out of bed soon. Still, here in bed I can read the best writing about and not about games from the past week.

Read more

Like a tag team of oiled snakes that have entered a wrestling contest, theme is a difficult quality to pin down. A game can be well designed, but if it lacks a coherence between those mechanics and its appearance, narrative, and its framing, there is a dissonance that can be hard to ignore. I realise I've just stepped into an old argument by using the word 'dissonance', but Hocking was right, games that don't cohere can be jarring. A developer may desire that sensation of discomfort, but often it is accidental and unwanted.

(Much like opening an article with a simile about wrestling snakes when there is nothing connecting that image to a game about solitaire. It might be a good line, but it doesn't smoothly connect with the rest of the article to elevate its argument.)

Anyway, what does this all have to do with Forbidden Solitaire, a game in which you're delving deeper into a dungeon filled with horrors, progressing by clearing screens of cards? Well, it's an excellent example of how well-handled theming can raise a game into something more than its parts.

Read more

My scares should have been reserved for today, what with it being All Hallows' Eve and all, but my fright came on Thursday.

Read more

Warframe creators Digital Extremes have announced that their free-to-play fantasy RPG Soulframe will be available for everyone to download on 6th November, after two years in closed alpha. Finally, you serfs without "prelude" keys will be able to fire up Soulframe.com and make sense of my ranting about the sleeping animals on the lobby screen.

The new "open prelude" will land shortly before the game's 17th major update, Verse of the Veilands, which lets you grow your Omen wolfpup allies into rideable adult wolves by finding the ingredients for a special biscuit. More importantly, prelude 17 violently rearranges the game's wistful world, adding an Ubisoft-esque region purging system that is designed to guide new players a bit more emphatically towards the game's "votives". Aka, missions. Yes, Digital Extremes sort of have a bespoke term for every game feature in Soulframe. I find this can be either charming or maddening, depending on how much sleep I've had.

Read more

It would appear that Phantom Blade Zero (Phantom Blade 0? Zero? Let’s go with Zero) demanding more gigs than a mismanaged stadium is doing little to stop people playing the thing. It therefore stands to reason at least some folks will want to run S-Game Studio’s lightly Soulsy sword-em-up on the Steam Machine, so let us now examine how said GabeCube stands up to its effects-heavy martial artistry. With some settings proposals, natch.

Read more