Latest News from rockpapershotgun
A news aggregator from various RSS feeds, like technology, gaming, development and general news sites.
Football Manager 2026 revealed, after last year's edition was left in the changing rooms
Namely, Football Manager 2026 has been announced by developers Sports Interactive, with a quick trailer.There's no release date as of yet.Refunds were issued to folks who'd pre-ordered the touchline-prowling sim, and the devs shifted their focus on to Football Manager 2026.
6 hours ago
Mafia: The Old Country now has a first-person driving mod that's ideal for capo cruisin', when it's not utterly terrifying
You can imagine, then, how keen I was to give its new first-person driving mod a go.I wasn't wrong either, the mod's great.Read more
7 hours ago
Bendy 1930s-styled roguelite Into the Unwell looks for laughs within its misery
Into the Unwell is a cooperative hack n' slash roguelite where your characters – cartoonish yet barely upright lost souls, one and all – draw fighting prowess from their vices.My vice, it turns out, is booting sentient pizza slices off cliff edges.Read more
8 hours ago
Valve explain why using PayPal for Steam purchases isn't currently an option in a whole bunch of countries
If you've tried to pay for something on Steam via PayPal over the past month and a bit, only to be told you can't, Valve have now offered an explanation as to why, pointing to a bank that previously handled PayPal transactions in certain currencies as having suddenly terminated its support.Folks in affected countries first noticed notifications informing them PayPal was "currently unavailable" in their part of the world around a month ago.Read more
9 hours ago
Krafton claim former Subnautica 2 leads have "resorted to litigation to demand a payday they haven't earned"
Krafton delay the game from a 2025 early access release to 2026 and fire three leads on it: Charlie Cleveland, Max McGuire, and Ted Gill.The company accuse those leads of abandoning their duties and argue the game wasn't ready for early access.The leads disagree and file a lawsuit.
11 hours ago
Save $30 on this esports-ready keyboard, and then you'll have one less thing to blame for your performance
We’ve covered a few keyboards recently, and while those are great for work and play, the Logitech G Pro X 60 is all about maximising your efforts in whichever competitive title you’re playing. Read more
20 hours ago
Monster Hunter Wilds’ PC performance patches will keep coming, if almost as slowly as the game still runs
The good news is that Capcom have committed to pushing through performance and stability updates into, at the very least, Winter 2025.The bad news is that Capcom also say they won’t have finished their performance and stability improvements until, at the earliest, Winter 2025.Read more
Itch.io's mass delisting of paid adult content has also affected safe-for-work games with yuri or lesbian themes, devs claim
Following Itch.io's mass delisting of adult games in response to pressure from payment processors, a new report includes claims from LGBTQ+ devs that safe-for-work titles with lesbian or yuri themes have also been affected.Both Itch and Valve changed their rules on adult content last month, with the issue evolving into a complex pointing of fingers which traced from the storefronts, to credit card companies, and on to an Australian protest group.Itch.io have since allowed free adult games back onto the platform, but paid ones currently remain on the naughty step as the storefront seeks new payment processors.
I've taken my desire for a new Burnout game down to the Paradise City in wplace
This has been one of the five thoughts that fill my head on a daily basis for years at this point, and thanks to a website that's letting people draw pixel art all over Google Maps, I've been given yet another outlet via which to let it out.That site is wplace, and it'll look familiar if you've been partial to the now defunct Reddit thread r/place at any point.Basically, anyone can hop into its map and colour in pixels to doodle over the top of any place on Earth, creating vast canvases of cool art and scrawled messages to whomever might be watching.
This RTX 5080 GPU is down to its lowest price ever at Amazon right now
We’ve covered a few deals on the RTX 5070 from various manufacturers in recent days, but today we’ve spotted its big brother, the RTX 5080, up for almost 20% off. Read more
Peak's Mesa update lets you shimmy your sandy butt up some sandy buttes, adds tornados and dynamite
Peak's had a big update from developers Aggro Crab and Landfall Games, and it adds a new Monument Valley-esque location for you to scale the cliffs of.Before you can go mountaineering among the sandy cacti and roaring tornadoes, though, you'll want to put on some suncream.Come on, at least take a parasol.
Remedy are still backing FBC: Firebreak despite a slow Steam launch, confirming its next "major update" for September
While admitting that FBC: Firebreak's launch on Steam "underperformed", developers Remedy have re-iterated their commitment to the co-op shooter in their latest financial report, saying that it remains "a solid game to build on" and confirming that a previously announced major update will arrive in late September.The report also gives quick mini-updates on the development of Control 2 and the combined Max Payne 1 & 2 remake, both of which remain on course.Read more
This Logitech G PRO X Superlight 2 may have too many names, but it's discounted at Amazon
We’re always on the lookout for the best gaming mice, but it’d be fair to say the name conventions are a bit of a mess.The Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 is a great example of this: Fantastic mouse, terrible name.Read more
This Lenovo Legion RTX 5060 desktop is under $1000 with a pair of discount codes
It’d be fair to say that PC gaming isn’t quite as accessible as console gaming for newcomers.Right off the bat, it’s obvious that a Nintendo Switch 2 is an upgrade over a Nintendo Switch 1, but while you, the discerning RPS reader, will have some understanding of processors, RAM, and those all-important GPUs, it’s not always easy for someone to jump in (short of grabbing a Steam Deck).Read more
Mass Effect 5 devs should "scapegoat" Veilguard and a Dragon Age trilogy remaster was pitched to EA, says ex-BioWare producer
Former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has discussed pitching remasters of the first three games in the series to EA, and made clear in the same interview that he's encourage the developers of the next Mass Effect game to "scapegoat" Dragon Age: The Veilguard "as much as they need to".Darrah's offered a lot of insight into life at BioWare since departing the studio back in 2022, with the veteran dev having done plenty of that via his own YouTube channel.This time, though, he was interviewed by YouTuber MrMattyPlays.
The Battlefield 6 beta’s hacking problem shows the difficulty in playing cat and mouse with cheaters
That’s despite BF6’s new and unusual requirement to enable Secure Boot, a BIOS-level security feature in Windows, ostensibly to prevent such do-badding.In response, a forum post attributed to EA’s anti-cheat team has played up successes in tracking and catching the beta’s cheaters, whose crimes allegedly range from classic wallhacks, speed hacks, and aimbots to cheats that reduce recoil or display enemy health and weapon info.However, it also concedes that Secure Boot "is not, and was not intended to be a silver bullet" – and in doing so, highlights the immense, perhaps impossible task that developers have of keeping cheater users out of their games.
Mafia: The Old Country review
These thoughts are about the impractical and inefficient curiosity Enzo Favara’s at the wheel of, but they’re also about Mafia: The Old Country itself.If you get a relative or mate who’s unfamiliar with the Mafia series to play Hangar 13’s latest work, I’m fairly convinced that you’ll have an easier time convincing them that they’d just sampled a remaster of a game from the 2000s than a new release from 2025.That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but at a time when games attempting to draw on nostalgia feel more unrepentantly nostalgic than ever, while new games often feel increasingly desperate to convey their newness, it’s certainly struck me.
Bithell Games are laying off most full-time staff, with the Tron: Catalyst studio "unable to secure a new larger scale project"
Some upsetting news from the past weekend: Bithell Games, the Mike Bithell-founded indie studio behind Thomas Was Alone, John Wick Hex, Tron: Identity and the just-released Tron: Catalyst, are laying off 11 developers.That’s "The majority of our full-time staff," according to a post on Bithell’s personal Bluesky account.Read more
Cyberpunk 2077 gets its most effective horror mod yet: a story-driven rent system featuring landlord selfies
You're about to read about landlords and the prospect of paying rent.There are, however, new landlords in Cyberpunk 2077, should you choose to install this mod that introduces a whole bunch of expanded mechanics and details when it comes to cyberflats.It's called Eviction Notice, and it's a substantial overhaul of how housing works in the futuristic RPG.
This week in PC games: deep-sea roguelite raids, first-person horror cookery, and a spruced-up Dawn of War
So, for this week’s rundown of new PC game releases, you’ve got me, fresh from my recent encroachments into WAWAPW and the Sunday Papers.You thought AI would steal everyone’s jobs?It was the hardware editors.
What's on your bookshelf?: Starcraft II writer and Warhammer design veteran Andy Chambers
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books!I'm obviously using regular in the metafictional sense here but my intentions are pure, I promise.Read more
The Sunday Papers
Sundays are for admiring for the nine different houseplants you successfully repotted on Saturday, a moment of quiet appreciation that lasts just long enough to forget that you willingly spent real money on bags of what could accurately be called dirt.And now it’s back.Read more
What are we all playing this weekend?
Thankfully I love foxes, and care little for the garden.Now then: what are we all playing this weekend?We'll start, then you can follow in the comments!
Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is a surreal tactical RPG journey into mythical underworlds from Six Ages' devs
Thousand Hells is the latest cool thing from Six Ages and King of Dragon Pass devs A Sharp.While they're working with Kitfox Games as publisher again, there's plenty of different stuff going on, including a move away from world of Glorantha as a setting.That's in favour of fantasy pastures new, inspired by myths of the ancient proto-Indo-European, Norse, and Mesopotamian varieties.
Ok is not ok, good is bad, great is the new great and BioShock 4 is coming out, as Take-Two boss stops short of claiming that up is down
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has reaffirmed 2K Games' assertion that the reportedly troubled BioShock 4, currently in the works at Cloud Chamber, will make it to release.The reassurance follows a report from Bloomberg earlier this week which reported that the game had failed a recent internal progress check, with the story specifically being tapped as an aspect that needs reworking, and some of the devs working on it have been reassigned to non-BioShock roles.Read more
How payment networks control the definition of acceptable sex in videogames
To speedily summarise a lot of very knotty reporting, last month a bunch of credit card companies and payment processors forced Steam and Itch.io to alter their definitions of acceptable sexual material in PC games.Seemingly faced with the prospect of having all transactions blocked, the two storefronts now require developers to comply with the extremely open-ended adult content policies of their financial partners.This has led to a spate of delistings or outright takedowns across Steam and especially Itch, with projects affected ranging from anime stepdaughter fantasies on Steam to bundles of self-described "games for girlthings with something wrong with them".
Jump gaps and ruin lives in 1000 Deaths, an offbeat 3D platformer about making decisions for jerks
The other half is dedicated to shaping the lives of four variously maladjusted losers (who, like the rest of their surroundings, resemble a child’s crayon drawings made flesh), the platforming challenges being punctuated by destiny-altering decisions to make on their behalf.Hints of VVVVVV, but with stronger notes of a Telltale adventure that’s been left in a microwave.Read more
Battlefield 6's beta been treating you to infinite loading screens? EA are on the case
Waiting's been a bit of theme during the early stages of the Battlefield 6 open beta, which has otherwise been earning a lot of thumbs up from FPS heads.If you've recently run into an never-ending loading screen while trying to jump into a Conquest match, the good news is that the devs have been working to solve those issues.While EA reckon the problem's specific to that game mode and the Siege of Cairo map, that doesn't look to have stopped plenty of players from running into it over the past 24 hours.
I love this keyboard and mouse combo, and now they're on sale at Amazon
I’m a bit of a sicko when it comes to keyboards, and have built the kind of collection that makes my wife duck for cover when I bring them up in conversation. Read more
Classic shooters Heretic and Hexen re-released as an "enhanced" bundle with cross-platform multiplayer and mod support
Heretic + Hexen is out now.The surprise re-release of these virtual spell boxes came as part of QuakeCon, with Nightdive Studios and id Software collborating to revamp more old school shooty things after doing the same with Doom and Doom 2 last year. Read more
Rally Point: This year's low-intensity strategy game for when it's too hot is... two! Of them. Two games.
The plan this year...This year's Low-Intensity Games For To Do Strategy Despite Grotesque Hot are Hyper Empire and High Strategy: Oradros.Read more
Microsoft have halted development on Just Cause devs' 70s co-op smuggler Contraband
Microsoft have brought development work on Contraband, the co-op smuggling game that Just Cause developers Avalanche Studios announced back in 2021, to a standstill.That's the official line, while a report from Bloomberg claims the game's been cancelled outright.Nothing had been been seen or heard of Contraband since its reveal to the world at E3 four years ago, and this sudden status update comes just weeks after Microsoft cancelled Perfect Dark, Everwild, and an unannounced MMO from ZeniMax as part of mass layoffs that saw around 9,000 staff lose their livelihoods.
The big laptop back-to-school roundup: Every hot discount that's live at Dell, HP and Lenovo
As an old man yelling about deals at the clouds, I’ve often felt a bit jealous of these back-to-school sales.By my recollection, unless you wanted a new writing pad, some stationery, or a backpack, these deals didn’t really exist.Read more
Folk Emerging is a fascinating 4X strategy game about prehistoric nomads that ends where Civilization begins
Folk Emerging describes itself as a turn-based 4X strategy game, but in practice, it's possibly more of a 2.5X strategy game, in that it puts you in charge of a nomadic hunter-gatherer community from before the rise of agriculture and the founding of towns and cities.As this developer update suggests, it's like the turn or two at the very start of Civilization when you just have one Settler unit, but stretched out across thousands of years, with a social element and rustic spreadsheet aesthetics that remind me of King Of Dragon Pass.It's got somewhat doofy cartoon Stone Age muzak, but is otherwise the most intriguing Civlike strategy game I've laid eyes on since the one that looks like an octopus murder scene - and whadayaknow, by happy coincidence there's a public playtest running from right now till August 18th.
Is This Seat Taken? I hope not, because the sitting-themed logic puzzler is out now
The logic puzzler with a name that's real awkward to stick midway through a sentence has surprise-released today, August 7th, right off the back of an appearance in a Nintendo Indie World showcase.When we woke up this morning, all we knew was that this game about telling people where to stick their bottoms would be coming out in August - a vague window previously announced during June's Whole Direct.Now, it be here.
Apex Legends' latest go at a compressed battle royale forgets the journeying spirit at the genre's heart
Apex Legends launched its Season 26 update this week with the new Wildcard mode, what must be its fourth or fifth attempt at a 'battle royale but faster' sideshow.If anything, Wildcard – with its tightened safe zones, generous respawn allowances and automatic loot pickups – is the most ferocious, cage fightin'est variant yet, its matches routinely playing out as breathless slaughters as crammed-in squads fight, die, and resurrect over a condensed selection of strongholds.It’s not the shooting, which is as crisp and dynamic as in any other Respawn FPS.
Promise Mascot Agency update adds Tony Hawk-level truck rail grinding I didn't know I needed, and new difficulty modes
Promise Mascot Agency, Kaizen Game Works' thing about running a business that revolves around costumed weirdos, fairly intense menu shuffling and a lot of driving around, has gotten a free update that adds in a host of new features.The ability to grind along rails like Michi's truck's a skateboard, for instance.Sure, you can already unlock the ability to fly said truck around the spooky Japanese countryside, but come on, if there's something every management game needs, it's tricks from the X Games.
Zangief basically gets his own game in Hades-style wrestling roguelike Realm Of Fame
Nonetheless, I think a Hades-style roguelite built around grappling sounds like a fun time, especially when it's set in a cursed Byzantine citadel.This is Realm Of Fame from Black Cube Games.Can you smell what the trailer is cooking?
Sony are confident Marathon will release by March 2026 and that their live service transition is paying off
Sony remain confident that Bungie's live service shooter reboot Marathon will launch within their current fiscal year - that is, before March 31st 2026 - and are fairly sure they'll be able to share an exact release date this autumn.They're also pretty upbeat about their live service business at large, which accounted for around 40% of first-party software revenue in their last financial quarter, though they acknowledge that they screwed the pooch with Concord, which got to exist in public for a whole couple of weeks before Sony kicked it into the sun.Read more
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 follows Battlefield 6's lead, will also require secure boot on PC
However, they are opting to mirror each other in one manner - both will require you to enable secure booting on your PC.As if summoned to do so by EA letting everyone know that this week's BF6 open beta would necessitate a delve in your BIOS to click yes on a thing in the name of eliminating cheating, Activision have revealed Blops is doing the same thing.Read more
Microsoft equipped Israel’s "indiscriminate" Palestinian surveillance operation with Azure cloud tech, claims report
A new joint investigation between the Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has claimed that Microsoft have worked with the Israeli military to store surveillance data on Palestinian civilians in Azure servers overseas, with some of that data allegedly being used to research and identify bombing targets.The report has led to renewed calls for game developers and players to join the recently launched Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Microsoft and Xbox gaming products and services - in particular, Minecraft, Call Of Duty, Candy Crush, and Game Pass.Read more
With Battlefield 6 beta queues stretching around the block, a "substantial increase in server capacity" should just have helped
If you've tried to hop into the Battlefield 6's open beta's early access period this morning and have ended up sitting a queue behind thousands of other folks in camo gear, then don't panic.Or at least that's what EA say, as their wrenches slam against the game's servers in an attempt to let more people in.With players stuck twiddling their thumbs in lines that can stick you as far away as 240-something thousandth from the front, the developers have been jolted into action.
Elden Ring Nightreign is getting an "endless mode" with special relics and "magmafied" bosses, claim dataminers
Some dataminers digging into Elden Ring Nightreign's files following the arrival of its Duos update claim to have uncovered some details about an endless mode.As reported by PC Gamer, said new mode is allegedly called 'Deep of Night', and will see you grouped with similarly skiller nighfarers to fight your way up through the ranks of a new rating system that players reckon could work similarly to Armored Core 6's rankings.Read more
This Lenovo gaming laptop with a 5070 is now under $1,300 with a huge back-to-school discount
Lenovo’s Legion 5 lineup has been getting consistently better in the last few years since James took a look at the 2022 model, and it’s now an OLED gaming laptop that packs a Blackwell GPU. Read more
You can still get early access to the Battlefield 6 beta but you'll have to watch 30 minutes of those awful Twitch people
If you failed to swipe an early access key for this week's Battlefield 6 beta, because you neither signed up via the Battlefield Labs programme before 31st July nor watched Your Favourite Creators play the game during the recent multiplayer reveal, then Don't Sweat It, Soldier, because Drill Sergeant EA Have Your Back in the shape of a last-gasp code giveaway. Read more
Lenovo's new Legion Pro laptop has an RTX 5070 Ti, OLED screen, and a pretty sizable $650 discount right now
We’ve already shown you how you can save almost $400 on the Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 10, but if you’re looking for a little more from your gaming laptop then there’s a saving on the Legion Pro, too. Read more
Former Dragon Age producer posts tell-all video about the messy birth of EA and BioWare's Anthem
Former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has posted a sprawling video about the development of Anthem, EA and BioWare's ill-fated mech RPG shoot-me-do.We've heard about this remarkably torrid period in the RPG developer's existence from other ex-BioWare honchos and anonymous sources, but perhaps never quite this extensively: the video tops out at an hour long, and this is just part one. Read more
Stickbossman, I think you'll find my chainsaw has an appointment
I'm the reason this building has water coolers, you know.Fine, I'll wait in the lobby.You here to see the giant purple mecha-execs that loom over the building too?
Persona 5 Royal is worth the price of Humble Choice alone this month
It’s a good month to be subscribed to Humble Choice, and not just because you get eight Steam keys for the price of one lukewarm Deliveroo.August’s headliner is Persona 5 Royal, and honestly, that’s enough on its own.Read more
Quartero, Dota 2’s new dealer of free hats, is a nice chap who surely won’t kill me and sell my skin
Valve, perhaps newly wary of financial transactions after being put over a barrel by Steam’s payment processors, have elected to give away a bunch of Dota 2 cosmetics for free – and are employing the kindliest, definitely non-murderiest of fellas to handle the goods.Sharply dressed satyr Quartero was added to Dotes yesterday alongside the 7.39d balance update, and now that he’s stuffed a Witch Doctor bauble into my hands for nothing, I can safely say that the chances of my burgled body being found behind the remains of his hastily abandoned shop are almost zero.Read more
The humans are revolting in Ashes Of The Singularity 2, the latest planet-scale RTS from Oxide Games
Stardock and Oxide Games have announced Ashes Of The Singularity II - or Ashes Of The Singularity 2, as people who hate unnecessary extra keyboard presses may prefer - sequel to the sci-fi real-time strategy game Brendy called "gorgeous, but plain", adding "there's nothing here that hasn't been done before and done better".The new RTS aims to improve that verdict by introducing: humans.Read more
League of Legends: Wild Rift exec producer says AI slop-looking anniversary video "did not hit the mark"
League of Legends: Wild Rift executive producer David Xu has said Riot "can and will do better," after sharing an anniversary video to the game's account on Chinese social media site Weibo that very much looks to be AI slop.However, Xu hasn't confirmed that the video did use AI in this sort-of-apology, instead claiming this was a "creator-made" video that'd found its way onto the League of Legends' spin-off's official channels.Read more
Please make the USA the villain in the next Call of Duty or Battlefield game
I'm not the first journalist to accuse Battlefield 6 of failing to read the room.The new Battlefield's single player story explores a near-future in which NATO has collapsed, a dastardly private military corporation has filled the power vacuum, and the USA's somehow-outgunned military must fight to reunite old allies under the Stars and Stripes.The campaign includes an invasion of New York, with street battles waged against the balaclava-huffing scoundrels of "Pax Armata" in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge.
After being "wrongly banned" from Steam over sexual content rules, horror game Vile: Exhumed launches for free
Horror game Vile: Exhumed, which sees you delving into a 90s computer to uncover a man's obsession with an adult film actress, has launched as a free download after being "wrongly banned" from Steam over sexual content, according to developer Cara Cadaver of Final Girl Games.Initially released via Itch.io (where that version remains live), the game was set to to debut on Steam on July 22, but had its page on Valve's platform pulled down.Cadaver and publisher DreadXP say "sexual content with depictions of real people" was the reasoning given for this by Valve, despit the game featuring "no uncensored nudity, no depictions of sex acts, and no pornography".
Battlefield 6's open beta makes enabling secure boot on your PC mandatory, because cheaters
EA have elected to make enabling secure boot on your hardware mandatory, as part of an effort to limit cheating.It's not that surprising a move, given the publishers opted to make it a hard requirement for Battlefield 2042 earlier this year.Read more
This comically large Samsung Odyssey Neo gaming monitor just got an equally gigantic discount at Amazon
Got three (or maybe four) monitors and want to condense things into one, suitably massive canvas for your work or the best ultrawide games?We might just have the deal for you.Read more
Peak devs highly unamused by "microtransaction-riddled Roblox rip-off" Cliff
Peak developers Aggro Crab have taken issue with an imitation of their game created in 100% non-problematic kiddy funhouse sim Roblox, saying that they'd prefer people pirate their creation than play its predatory WonkoVision double. Read more
Helldivers 2 patch puts a stop to the warp pack's cheekiest party trick, because "you are done, it is time to go home"
This is thanks in part to some cool tricks and glitches you can use it to pull off, with the game's latest patch having seen Arrowhead opt to outlaw the cheekiest of these.You see, for the uninitiated, each mission in the shooter kicks off with you descending onto a planet and therefore ends with you being extracted via shuttle back up to your ship.It's the circle of Helldiver life and it moves us all.
The best Steam Deck power banks
In an ideal reality, power banks for the Steam Deck would not exist, and we’d all be able to play our portable PCs uninterrupted from sunrise to sunset.For now, however, there are plenty of games that will cut a Steam Deck and/or Steam Deck OLED’s battery life to a couple of hours or less, so it’s worth getting them some help – especially for lengthy travels that would deny you the use of their own chargers.Read more
Silent Hill f has a big combat focus with weapon degradation and you know what, I'm sure it'll be fine
Here are the headlines: counter attacks, weapon degradation and an energy bar that lets you perform power moves and dodge in slow motion.It's apparently reminiscent of Dark Souls in that you have a stamina system and the dodge and counter timing can be tricky - a summary I would say also describes Punch-Out!There are no guns, just melee weapons that range from scavenged baseball bats to naginata polearms, looted from a spirit world of shrines and masked figures.
Unleash blunt force castration on execs when Stick It to the Stickman finally launches in early access this month
This kind of thing happens all the time in Stick It to the Stickman, the roguelite beat ’em up that Anger Foot devs Free Lives are set to release in early access form later this month.It's glorious enough to forgive any frustration you might have been left with when publishers Devolver Digital announced late last year that the corporate slapfest had been delayed into 2025.Read more
Come win the crowd in Bloodgrounds, a gladiator tactics RPG with Darkest Dungeon-style town management
The setup: you are a gladiator from a Roman-themed fantasy world, who has recently won his freedom in the arena.By becoming a gladiator manager himself, as he continues his quest for vengeance upon the Emperor who slaughtered his father.Read more
With Stop Killing Games-supported EU petition now closed, the campaign's loudest voice reckons it's "done about as well as is humanly possible"
The Stop Destroying Videogames citizens' initiative, the petition asking EU lawmakers to look into the issue of publishers rendering online games unplayable when official support runs its course, hit its deadline at the end of last month looking like it'd amassed more than enough signatures.With that phase over, the Stop Killing Games campaign that's vocally supported efforts like this is left to await the outcomes, whatever they might be.That's given YouTuber Ross Scott, who's become the loudest voice publicising this worldwide push for action on consumer rights when it comes to these sorts of server shutdowns, a chance to take stock of how things have gone to this point.
Battlefield 6 open beta maps and modes shared, as EA write an essay about tweaks based on Labs feedback
Battlefield 6's open beta kicks off later this week, and EA have now painted a picture of what you can expect maps/modes-wise, as well as in terms of the changes the devs have made based on Battlefield Labs playtest feedback.Plus, there's a new trailer that features yet more folks in camo running about amid booms.I'm glad to report that no helicopters, at least at a glance, look to have been harmed in the run up to this one.
This Power Bank is an ideal Steam Deck companion, and it's just $28 at Amazon today
The Steam Deck (and other handheld PCs) are fantastic devices, but there’s no denying they can chomp through battery pretty swiftly if you’re playing AAA titles. Read more
Build underwater cities out of Tetris pieces in Podvodsk, a game jam freebie from the Loop Hero developers
This is Podvodsk, a free game jam experiment from Loop Hero developers Four Quarters.The idea here is that you're trying to construct a tapering underwater city out of random clumps of building blocks, dangled from the bottom of a miraculously unsinkable surface platform.Each building both costs points and also, earns points based on different scoring criteria, and every time you play a piece, the screen scrolls irreversibly downward.
Call of Duty QA staff secure union contract with Microsoft to stop them being treated like cannon fodder
A group of QA workers at Call Of Duty studio Raven Software have officially signed off on their first union contract with parent company Microsoft and COD publisher Activision-Blizzard, in the run-up to the launch of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7.The contract is the result of years of negotiations, and offers some protection against the treatment of QA workers as disposable staff - hired to quash bugs shortly before release and laid off soon afterwards, with minimal odds of personal development or progression to other roles.Read more
This incredibly cool retro Xbox-inspired keyboard from 8BitDo is almost half price today
It’d be fair to say 8BitDo knows a fair bit about peripherals, but this one still caught us by surprise.The 8BitDo Retro 87 Xbox Edition is a mechanical gaming keyboard inspired by Microsoft’s original, monolithic black box.Read more
Wheel World, let me build weirder bikes
Nonetheless, I’ve struggled to engage with its parts system, which isn’t ideal given it both determines the performance of your haunted bike and, outside of the story, acts as Wheel World’s primary measure of progression.I agree with Brendy (who doesn’t?) that once you earn enough metal bits to replace the rusting starter parts, there’s very little to be gained from fine-tuning towards a particular spec – an all-rounder bike can win anything.And, given the game’s gentle difficulty, probably will.
2K comment on reports Bioshock 4 is in trouble: "we have a good game, but we are committed to delivering a great one"
The new Bioshock game in development at Cloud Chamber Games is in difficulties, according to sources of the multiple and anonymous persuasion.Announced in 2019, the game has reportedly failed a recent internal progress review, with its narrative found to be in particular need of revamping. Read more
70 seconds makes all the difference under the new Marvel Rivals approach to rage-quitters
Techno-loving hollowtooth Blade has joined the playable cast of Marvel Rivals, but he's not what I find most interesting about the free-to-play shooter's latest update.Developers NetEase Games have introduced a new system of penalties for ragequitters, keyboard-away-frommers, and other craven scumbags who abandon a competitive mode match early on because the dishwasher's overflowing, or similar. Read more
You can get an RTX 5070 GPU for under $550 right now at Amazon if you're a Prime member
While our man James wasn’t entirely convinced by the RTX 5070 when it launched, the GPU that replaces the 4070 Super has gotten better with age following driver updates. Read more
Fatekeeper looks like a spiritual successor to Dark Messiah, but where's the kick?
It is a fancy looking first-person RPG made with all the hyper detail and vivid lighting you might expect of a game developed in Unreal Engine 5.It is also conjuring a game worth conjuring: the heavy hitting fantasy brawlabout Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic.Read more
Another Skyblivion dev diary shows off the new dungeons and expanded cities Oblivion Remastered never bothered with
August 2025 now has as many Skyblivion developer diaries as there are modern The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion reimaginings: two, which in both cases remains a weirdly high number.But while last week’s Finishing Skyblivion focused on one volunteer’s attempts at getting the ambitious Cyrodiil-in-Skyrim mod over the line, this other vid makes a very specific pitch to those whose interest may have been diverted by Bethesda’s official Oblivion Remastered, showcasing how Skyblivion looks to more aggressively expand and rework the original RPG.Read more
This week in PC games: a new Mafia, a bustling Homeworld homage, a cosmic lighthouse and some strange jigsaws
The wifi network keeps changing its name to "Execute Order 66".It is time to smash the emergency glass and bust out a few favourites from my personal collection of morale-boosting videogame intros.And here are this week's most interesting new PC games.
Valve point to Mastercard restrictions as the payment firm deny influencing adult game removals
Financial service giants Mastercard have denied accusations that they sought to influence the recent removal of adult/NSFW games from Steam and Itch.io, claiming that they have "not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms," and that they allow all lawful transactions.It’s a brief and unequivocal statement, but Valve themselves have since suggested it might not be entirely accurate, telling PC Gamer that Steam’s payment processors objected to the availability of law-abiding adult games by citing one of Mastercard’s specific rules.Read more
The Sunday Papers
Sundays are for trying to find and exile the giant house spider that ran under my bed yesterday.I slept with the lights on and wrote most of this round-up standing on a stool.Here's a rich brew of thoughts from Sam Bodrojan.
What are we all playing this weekend?
It's been a funny old week for us at RPS, but the games will continue. The games must continue. Or else, what was this all for? Read more
Save over $800 on an NVIDIA RTX 5070 PC from Lenovo, now under $1,400
If you’re looking for a new PC that’s packing a recently-released NVIDIA 5070 GPU, then Lenovo’s new ‘Doorbuster’ deal might be just the thing. Read more
You can save hundreds on this Alienware Aurora R16 with an RTX 5080 in the back to school sales
Dell’s back-to-school deals have a whole host of laptop savings, but look a little deeper and there’s another Alienware deal. Read more
I'm still strapped to a rolling office chair with a ticking timer in a huge scary building
I met the weird little girl again.She was loitering in the shadow of a pillar on the eighth floor.I found her goblin-esque during our first meeting, but up close she seems relatively ordinary, a pale 10-year-old in a nightie with shoulder-length hair.
Dell's impressive Back-to-School deals include big savings on XPS models and more
Dell’s back-to-school deals are here, and they’re pretty great if you’re looking for a 2025 laptop. Read more
Graham Smith is leaving RPS, come say goodbye
The longest-running editor of Rock Paper Shotgun worked his last day on the website earlier this week, and has leapt quietly into the mysterious realm of the games industry proper.The emotional fallout of this departure is roughly the same as any other time RPS has watched a writer swan-dive out of the RPS treehouse and into the mist far below.Read more
Battlefield 6's PC specs don't look too lofty despite all the booms, and Steam players won't need the pesky EA App
Well, unless you're planning on buying it from the Epic Games store.You see, amid last night's info drop, EA have revealed at least an estimate of the specs your hardware'll need to have to run it, as well as the very important detail of whether you'll need to fire it up via (whispers) the EA launcher.Read more
After three deafening hours of its multiplayer, Battlefield 6 sure looks like a Battlefield game
Battlefield 6 releases on October 10th with the unenviable task of being both a quality combined arms FPS, and a successful apology letter to those burned by the series’ previous missteps.To try out its multiplayer ahead of yesterday’s big reveal event, I had to pass through two separate metal detectors at the venue’s doors, which I can only assume were there to prevent infiltration by disgruntled Battlefield 2042 players armed with tins of orange paint.Destruction that has a point beyond spectacle.
Finishing Skyblivion is a new dev diary series about the last leg of the Oblivion remake mod's run to release
With unofficial Oblivion remake Skyblivion aiming to arrive this year, one of its developers has kicked off a new dev diary series documenting the work they've been doing to get the massive Skyrim mod ready to emerge through the release gates.While the folks behind Skyblivion certainly haven't been shy when it comes to regularly showing off their progress, it's always cool to see more of the blood, sweat, and tears that's going into finally getting such a gargantuan undertaking into players' hands.Read more
Major payment firm behind Itch adult game cull say they themselves face "restrictions" from another banking firm
Itch.io have re-listed a bunch of free adult-themed games that were taken down as part of a recent massive cull of supposedly licentious materials under pressure from payment processors.Itch are still, however, working out whether and how to restore paid NSFW projects that were removed from public channels as part of their efforts to stop the payment companies suspending store purchases in general.In a further mild twist, one of the firms behind Itch.io's delistings, Stripe, have now informed the site that they themselves are acting under pressure from one of their own banking partners, without naming names.
In praise of one-job RPGs, the greatest antidote to FOMO
We have all known the profound sorrow of getting two hours into an RPG and deciding that actually, Mum, I don't want to be an elven druid anymore.Being an elven druid sucks ass.There's barely any plantlife in the opening dungeon, so half my support skills are useless, and the only animal companion I'm qualified to conjure right now is a cranky squirrel.
Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag voice actor claims Ubisoft threatened to sue him over remake tease
Some legally-minded landlubbers may have had words with Edward Kenway, captain of The Jackdaw and protagonist of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.Well, Kenway's voice actor Matt Ryan at any rate, who's been filmed at a convention saying that Ubisoft threatened to sue him over a previous video from another convention in which he teased a remake of the game.Read more
I was a fool for skipping Widelands, the only game as good as The Settlers
There hasn't been a Settlers game since 1996.It's a design thing, an ethos.It doesn't even fit into a genre really, let alone the lopsided RTS the sequels collapsed into.
Praise the Kiryu, Steam's latest Client Beta update will finally let you sort Like A Dragons and Yakuza into the right order
It's supposed to go as follows: Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Yakuza 3 Remastered, Yakuza 4 Remastered, Yakuza 5 Remastered, Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, then off into full-blown Like A Dragon land, and on to Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza.Except right now in my Steam library, it's not.The good news is that thanks to the update Steam's Client Beta has just gotten, it looks like I'll no longer have to.
Battlefield 6's full multiplayer reveal sees EA trying to rebottle the lightning of Battlefield 3 and 4
EA have given us our first proper look at Battlefield 6's multiplayer, after revealing the game with a single player trailer last week.They've also confirmed the new shooter's release date - 10th October 2025 - and announced dates for a series of beta weekends in August.The game they're pitching is a return to the contemporary warring of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, after the mildly futuristic disappointments of Battlefield 2042.
Baldur's Gate 3 hotfix takes care of Dark Urge spoilers, and politely hangs up your gang's buggy video calls
Larian's rectified this and one other infamous issue as part of the game's latest hotfix.The devs are so keen to make sure no one gets their hopes up for any more major additions to the RPG now that its final patch is out of the way that they've dubbed this a "room temperature fix".Read more
Once Upon a Katamari will have you rolling up the annals of history, and it’s coming to PC
Punishing my tendency to never bother watching Nintendo Directs, Bandai Namco used today's Switch 2-focused showcase to announce Once Upon a Katamari: the first mainline, non-remake Katamari game since 2011.It’ll be out on PC as well, come October 24th 2025, and while you’ll once again be rolling up entire societies around a swelling sticky ball, this one will span a range of time periods - so you’ll be able to knead whole new planets out of feudal Japan or ancient Greece.Read more
Our favorite SSD for Steam Deck is reduced by almost 40% at Amazon today
Yesterday, we shared how you could save on additional storage for your Steam Deck with some microSD deals, but if you’re looking for more of a project, today’s deal is for you. Read more
Square Enix turn an RPG into a town-builder with Octopath Traveler 0
Square Enix have announced Octopath Traveler 0, a prequel to the genteel 2019 RPG Katharine Castle hailed as...This is an outrage!I'm going to tell Katharine she sucks at writing and is terrible at video games.
Grounded 2 modding kicks off with cockroaches dressed as clowns, which is good for bugphobes, so long as they aren't also circusphobes
Grounded 2's come out this week, and as such folks have fired up their modding machines and got to work tweaking the garden survival extravaganza to their liking.Let's see here, we've got some of the usual useful changes, texture swaps, and...A mod designed to help folks who're afraid of cockroaches.
Dune Awakening's devs are testing a patch that'll let you deposit all of your blood and should help tackle ornithopter griefing
In fact, the devs make clear that they'd really prefer it if you were to dedicate the bulk of your two-week-long patch testing time to those two things in particular.They're also turning off taxes and sandstorms, the latter very much being the tax equivalent of the natural world, for the first week so bases won't be at risk.Read more
You can get a 34 inch QLED Alienware monitor for just over $600 at Amazon right now
Yesterday, we highlighted a steep deal on one of the best gaming monitors from Alienware, but if you’ve been looking for more screen real estate, you’ll be glad you held off. Read more
I'm strapped to a rolling office chair with a ticking timer in a huge scary building
The office seems to be empty save for a grinning little girl who yells "hey mister, wake up!" in what sounds like amateur Simmish, then immediately vanishes around the corner.The building consists of grainy, glass-walled compartments lined with illuminated facades displaying kanji letters, arranged along a central corridor.I think I'm on the ninth floor.
The unofficial Skyrim remake of Morrowind finally has a voice for every last character in Vvardenfell
Very long-in-the-works Elder Scrolls modding project Skywind has hit another milestone in its winding road towards an eventual release.The folks behind the mod, which aims to deliver a version of the series' beloved third entry Morrowind remade in Skyrim's engine, have recruited the final three voice actors they were looking for to fill out the base game's entire roster of characters.Skywind's still without any kind of release date, meaning it's almost certainly further off than its Oblivion-centric sort of cousin Skyblivion, which is aiming to arrive this year.
Hideo Kojima has "learned so many ways to kill people"
"People who are making military games, they probably don't know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun," said the Metal Gear man, in amongst pictures of himself dressed as various Minecraft skinpacks.Does Kojima know how to dismantle a gun?Read more
Valve upgrade Steam's trailer player, and all it took was trawling through something like 400,000 videos
The pipe-themed platform operators have casually gone through hundreds of thousands of videos as part of an effort to make Steam's trailer player easier to use and less likely to run into hitches as it shows you the video games.To put it how Valve do in their news post about the changes, they've improved the player's "interface and streaming to help you browse more quickly".So, much like the Steam store revamp that's currently in beta, Mr Newell and co want you to be able to zip around at the speed of sound.
Save on a microSD for your Steam Deck, with 1TB options discounted in US and the UK
While the Nintendo Switch 2 may have done away with microSD cards in favour of the faster (and pricier) Express variants, the standard cards have been pretty affordable for a while now in smaller sizes, which makes them ideal for Steam Deck usage. Read more
Get this QD-OLED gaming monitor from Alienware for just $765 with a handy voucher vode
We’re always on the lookout for the best gaming monitors, and while the catchily-titled Alienware AW3225QF might not be on that list, it’s certainly rated very highly if you look around. Read more
Subnautica 2 delay actually proves Krafton aren't mismanaging their games, says exec
According to Dongkeun Bae, Subnautica 2's delay from 2025 release to 2026 is proof that Krafton are doing a good job with that, actually.Whether Subnautica 2 was genuinely ready to release in early access this year is a key part of the whole fracas.The complicating factor is that there was a big bonus for the studio's workers tied to the game releasing this year.
Grounded 2's early access gets off to a flying start as Obsidian detail the next year of updates
Obsidian's survival game Grounded 2 has launched into early access, and the developers have one of those old-timey roadmaps explaining how it will change before the 1.0 release, give or take a few teasing redactions.This being a game about miniaturised children fighting insects, of course, the road in question may be only a few metres long. Read more
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 review: Starting, and finishing, at the bottom
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 is no such card.It is the most affordable of the RTX 50 series, undercutting the RTX 5060 by about £40 / $50, and it does come with a full set of DLSS 4 tools including Multi Frame Generation (MFG) support.Prices start around £220 / $250 and this overclocked Zotac model I’ve tested is £248 / $270, so it’s still going to be by far the priciest component in any budget PC build.
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound review
In the realm of pixel artistry, action platformer Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a pretty work of dither and parallax.It's full of set pieces reminiscent of a misremembered arcade's heyday.The whole game is less a mineshaft of nostalgia as it is a shale fracking job, flushing you with jets of high pressure pseudomemory.
Battlefield 6 won't cost $80, but EA aren't ruling out future price hikes "to capture the full spectrum of pricing"
The game of chicken between publishers and players over whether $80/£70 is an acceptable price for the shiniest of video games continues.EA have announced that, as regards their forthcoming shooter Battlefield 6, they don't think it is, but that may change, because they are never going to say no to more money. Read more
Peak cannibalism is delivered by the co-op climber's latest patch
Nestled among the notes for the climbing game's latest patch are the words "added cannibalism".The folks behind Another Crab's Treasure and Content Warning want you to casually nibble on your colleagues on the way.Read more
Elden Ring Nightreign Duos update delayed due to tsunami warning
Elden Ring Nightreign's patch 1.02, which'll deliver the Duo Expeditions players have been asking for, has had its deployment pushed back by a day due a tsunami warning.The update was orginally set to go out today, July 30th, but will now go out tomorrow, July 31st.Read more
We need to reclaim software's wishing well from the cruelty of generative AI
It pays to know your enemy, so before writing this piece I prompted the free version of OpenAI's ChatGPT software to probabilistically derive a short article in the style of Edwin Evans-Thirlwell from the years of my writing OpenAI have scraped and processed without my consent.The client clipped together a fair approximation of a self-aggrandising lefty writer with a privileged education and a tendency to wank up his intros, but I didn't think the output read much like me.Still, perhaps the fault lay with the imprecise 'engineering' of my prompts.
Oblivion Remastered mod delivers Tamrielic Teardown by letting you blow buildings to bits, with plans for full-blown house fighting
There are some mods with which that process can be accomplished via a single GIF.A new Oblivion Remastered work that makes it possible to hilariously reduce the contents of Cyrodiil's cities to chunks of flying rubble just by slapping buildings with spells is firmly in the latter camp.Before you get too worried about the karmic balance of the modding wizard powerful enough to make this sort of wanton destruction possible, it's worth bearing in mind that they've previously given players the ability to build new homes any displaced citizens could probably move into.
Parrying has never seemed more whimsical than in dollhouse soulslike Memoria Wake
I hope that both Nic and I will be at home in Memoria Wake, a new isometric action-RPG in which you can parry giant black cats with an umbrella.There's now a demo on Steam.Read more
Star Racer, a combat ship speedfest about evading the fuzz as an alien M.O.M, has zoomed out of early access
One of the games I've spotted as a result of this celebration of all things car-ish is Star Racer, which doesn't involve cars at all.It's a retro-style ship racer that lets you blast your fellow competitors to bits, feels very much inspired by the likes of F-Zero and Wipeout, and just emerged from early access the other day.Read more
Itch.io are seeking out new payment processors who are more comfortable with adult material
Itch.io have announced that they are seeking out new payment processing partners who are more willing to handle the purchase of NSFW games, after delisting or removing a vast swathe of games in accordance with the content restrictions of companies such as Paypal and Stripe.They've also offered an explanation for why they've recently delisted so many more "infringing" games than Steam, which has carried out its own cull of sexually explicit games under pressure from finance firms. Read more
My best PC gamer deals for today are all about discounted Samsung gaming monitors and graphics cards
Samsung’s latest gaming monitor sale is packed with big discounts on some of its best displays, from lightning-fast esports panels to massive ultrawides built for full immersion.If you're after crisp 4K visuals, OLED contrast, or high refresh rates for competitive play in today's deals, you're in the right place.I've also sorted out a round-up of every discounted graphics card I could find, so there's no excuses for swiping an awesome battlestation upgrade today.
Monster Hunter Wilds is getting an endgame expansion "ahead of schedule", as Capcom keep hunting player approval
Monster Hunter Wilds is now set to get an endgame revamp earlier than originally advertised, with Capcom having opted to chuck their established update plans for the next few months out of a window.While performance issues have proven to be the main achilles heel of the action game about hunning mons, the stuff you're left to do once you've slapped up Arkveld has been another source of player ire.Read more
Call of Duty launcher put on a space-saving diet, as Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3 go back to standalone downloads
You want to stick one thing, the thing you want to play, on your drive, but thanks to the series' launcher, end up accidentally sticking somewhere in the region of 200 to 300MB of various Call of Duty stuff onto your PC.Well as of today, the massive number you're quoted'll be slightly less beefy, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (the ones from the 2020s, not the classics bearing the same names) set to be banished from HQ and back to standalone downloads.Read more
Baldur's Gate 3's Amelia Tyler voices a cursed boardgame in this original Jumanji adaptation in all but name
You've got a bunch of nineties-to-noughties minigame compilations, a pachinko adaptation, and a few reportedly dismal games based on the recent Dwayne Johnson movies, also feat.Ludogram's just-announced streamerbait co-op horror game Invokyr seems to be cleaving a lot closer to the 1995 movie, which is itself based on Chris Van Allsburg's book from 1981.The game sees you and up to three others playing a cursed boardgame that transforms the house it's played in.
Sony are suing Tencent to "prevent irreparable harm" inflicted by Horizon knockoff Light of Motiram
Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West publishers Sony have called in the lawyers over Tencent’s upcoming Light of Motiram, arguing in a lawsuit filing (spotted by Reuters) that the post-apocalyptic action adventure looks a little too much like their post-apocalyptic action adventure.The case alleges that Light of Motiram, currently in development at Tencent subsidiary Polaris Quest, is a "slavish clone" of Guerrilla Games’ original series, and seeks to block its release on copyright infringement grounds.Read more
Despite Suicide Squad's fate, Warner Bros. look set to have Gotham Knights devs make a live service game
Warner Bros. Games aren't pushing the brakes on games with live service elements any time soon, despite the whole Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League debacle.A new job listing at Gotham Knights studio WB Games Montréal suggests their upcoming game will have at least some of those long-term servicey bits to it.Or, at the very least, its executive producer will need to be someone who knows what live services are and can do some live service strategising.
Good news, dorks - it is not too late to be a janky-ass wolf
We shall coordinate to bring down elk amidst the engulfing winter snows of the Yellowstone Caldera, duel with cougars under starbound skies, and do adorable bellywiggles in what is possibly our own poop, though I'm not sure if the simulation covers the entire lupine digestive cycle.If that's not enticement enough, we can do some wolf sex and raise a litter of cubs together.We shall manage our cubs by means of leather spreadsheets that look like they were recently mauled by hungry, horny wolves.
Killing Floor 3 review
Killing Floor 3 has an excellent headshot.It’s the kind of frisson-inducing gun/baddie interaction that most FPS games strive for and fail: somehow crisp and explosive at once, like popping a balloon full of wedding china.I just wish that, after hours and hours, this game would produce something else that excites as much as its dome-blasting.
Microsoft begin rolling out Xbox account age verification checks in response to UK Online Safety Act
Microsoft have become the latest company to start introducing age verification measures in response to the the Online Safety Act that's just come into force in the UK.Folks logging into Xbox services with a Microsoft account from today will start getting optional notifications directing them to verify they're over 18, with the checks becoming a hard requirement in early 2026.To be clear, these checks are UK-only for now, in line with this new legislation that aims to stop users who aren't verified as over 18 seeing content that's illegal or deemed unsuitable for children.
Itch post new list of banned NSFW content that would rule out certain Kojima games, plus GOTY 2024 Mouthwashing
Last week, Itch.io delisted thousands of games featuring various kinds of "NSFW" material, rendering them invisible to anybody searching or browsing the site.Other developers reported that their games had been taken offline entirely.Among the games delisted was Mouthwashing, Rock Paper Shotgun's game of the year 2024.
Team Fortress 2's summer update is here, and a group of players have penned an open letter to Valve about matchmaking
There are a host of new community-made maps, items, and taunts, in addition to a fair few bug fixes from Valve themselves.Cool to see, though one vocal group of players are keen to see the developers delve back in and make some changes to matchmaking, having penned an open letter to the Steamy company outlining hopes for the revised system that melds the very old old one with the slightly less old one the game's had since 2016's Meet Your Match update.Read more
The best Graphics Card deals for PC Gamers today
Amazon has rolled out major price cuts on the latest GPUs, making it a great time to upgrade your gaming rig.There are big savings across the RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti and 5060 series cards, along with solid discounts on AMD’s RX 7900 XTX, 7700 XT and 9060 XT.If you’ve been holding out for a new graphics card, this is one of the best times to buy.
Hollow Knight: Silksong will be playable at Gamescom, as Xbox offer first chances to fiddle with the ROG Xbox Ally
A demo of Hollow Knight: Silksong will be playable at this year's Gamescom, with Microsoft set to show it off in tandem with the first public exhibition of the ROG Xbox Ally handheld. Yep, the fates of this long-awaited Metroidvania sequel and Asus' Xbox-branded portable PC continue to intertwine, like star-crossed lovers.Read more
Cyberpunk 2077 modder makes NPC cleanliness optional in order to avoid popular "non-sexy mods" being "hidden unnecessarily"
The Cyberpunk 2077 modder behind a bunch of the game's most popular romance mods is set to make NPC showering an optional extra in two of their works, with the hopes that these "non-sexy mods" will no longer be "hidden unnecessarily".Their decision comes as a response to recent changes Nexus Mods have made regarding creations that're classed as "adult", something the modding site's done as a result of the Online Safety Act coming into force in the UK.Read more
A spidery new mech crawls onto the eternal battlefield of The Forever Winter
"The StiltWalker is a multi-legged destruction machine: equipped with multiple missile and machinegun weapon systems," say the developers in an update post on Steam.Just shoot some rockets at it."It is also equipped with a point defense system that can detonate explosive munitions that are fired at it from a distance."
Steam's redesigned store menu is out in beta, so you can take the freshly embiggened search bar for a spin
Valve have released a revamped Steam store menu in beta, so folks can give a number of changes a whirl and offer feedback ahead of the full rollout.As the pipe-themed company wrote in a news post about the menu emerging from the labs for this testing, the main goal of its changes is to offer "easier access to the places Steam users most frequently visit".Read more
This week in PC games: Hobbits, gigahorses, internet fixers, ninjas, hellships, junkbots and window cleaners
We shall not see his like again.Expect supernatural calamities in keeping with such a terrible loss: rains of frogs, Atari reinventing Pong as a 100 hour gacha RPG, mass hysteria.Here's what's new in PC games this week.
The Sunday Papers
As I mentioned last week, this is my last ever Sunday Papers as I'm leaving Rock Paper Shotgun (and Gamer Network) this coming Wednesday.I'm not sure how to meaningfully summarise twelve years on this site or twenty years in the field, but after several aborted essays I rediscovered the columnist's crutch: bullet points.Many of the values were instilled in me by my excellent colleagues (particularly the unimpeachable Alice O), and I only hope I lived by them more often than not.
What are we all playing this weekend?
Graham doesn’t want a big fuss about his last WAWAPTW, which is just as well, because I’m writing this at 4pm on a Friday and don’t have the energy to make one.Let’s save the goodbyes for a few days more, and in the meantime, simply share what we’re all playing this weekend.Read more
My best deals for PC gamers today include an Alienware x16 laptop and savings on premium keyboards and mice
Alienware’s Aurora mid‑range x16 laptop deal is the highlight today, coming in at the same price as the entry‑level model but with a stronger CPU.It’s effectively a free upgrade for anyone shopping smart.To round things out we’ve pulled together some of the best gaming keyboards and mice currently discounted and ready for headshots.
Devolver sign up to publish Quarantine Zone, in which you run the checkpoint during a zombie apocalypse
In Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, you play one of the hazmat-sporting goons at a government checkpoint during a zombie apocalypse.Your job is to let refugees through the gate one by one, and appraise them for evidence of infection. Read more
Once again, I have been flanked by ginger cats the size of office buildings in a racing game
You've barely touched your boost?" mentions a helpful fish in the trailer for roguelike racer Reality Drift, thus setting the new standard for all reminder pop-ups going forward.I tabbed this one because the phrase "racing game where your choices matter" intrigued me.Or the road signs that offer you a choice between 'space' 'cat land', and 'hell'.
Dear Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, please prove that an AI didn’t write your insulting, vacuous blog about why you're laying off thousands during a time of huge profits
Microsoft have published a memo recently sent to staff by CEO Sayta Nadella, which addresses the strange fact of Microsoft reporting net income in the ultrabillions while laying off thousands of supposedly "treasured colleagues".Most of the blog is a gusty, jargony paean to generative AI technology, in which Microsoft have made vast investments, and how it is going to "empower everyone to create their own tools" and create a "local surplus" of Ability To Do Stuff in Microsoft dominions worldwide.Read more
Indie gaming's only three genres have inevitably converged into grimdark Balatro with a whimsical egg idiot
And a roguelike to boot?!The trailer below features a desolate, hellish area called "The Pläins öf Päin" (umlauts mine) inhabited by lone egg idiot named 'eggo'.A curse on the egg idiot and his cracked shell, and a curse on the world for allowing this kind of tomfoolery to proliferate unchallenged.
Ubisoft date Assassin's Creed Shadows New Game+ mode alongside plans to make its open world more convenient
Assassin's Creed Shadows will get a New Game+ mode on 29th July, Ubisoft have announced in a video about their summer plans for the feudal Japanese open world stab-me-do.They're also working on a free Assassin's Creed Shadows update that lets you fast-forward the time of day, an ability that would certainly serve me well right now, as I contemplate the seven grim hours of video game journalism that separate me from the weekend.Read more
The Alienware Aurora 16X with an NVIDIA RTX 5070 is down to its lowest price since launch
Alienware’s laptop range this year includes the Alienware Aurora 16 and its more impressive Aurora 16X.Both are great laptops, but as you may have guessed from the ‘X’ in the title, the latter is the more impressive version.Read more
My best deals for PC gamers today include massive discounts on Alienware gaming PCs and GPUs
Today’s deals cover a full range of Alienware desktops, with discounts across RTX 4060 Ti up to RTX 5090 configurations.The Aurora line gives you clean, efficient builds for 1080p and 1440p gaming, while the Area 51 range steps things up for 4K and heavier workloads.You’ll find variations with faster RAM, higher wattage PSUs, and better cooling depending on what you need.
Battlefield 6 has finally been revealed, with a firmly anti-helicopter trailer and no release date
And what a reveal it was, with a trailer featuring enough explosions to satisfy Michael Bay for at least two hours - though without a release date to accompany it.Yep, we'll have to wait a bit longer to see if the October date recently cited by a prominent leaker is on target, as for now all we got was a tease of the campaign that ended in promo for a multiplayer reveal next week.Read more
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers' surprise PC performance problems call for emergency settings treatment
It’s not good.It runs slowly on max settings.DLSS 4 frame generation is either broken, or implemented in a uniquely vexing way.
Chill micro citybuilder Pile Up! just emerged from early access, and its devs want you to try fearmongering
Pile Up!, which is about strategically building cities on little islands, has just emerged from early access and gotten a bunch of new additions.One of these fresh things comes with an insistence from Turkish developers Remoob that you "try fearmongering".Read more
S.p.l.i.t review
You don't use the mouse in S.p.l.i.t, but you won't miss it.Axel and two associates are scrambling for root access to launch a malware attack on "the facility" - as in "death is the least of my worries.The game starts and I enter the group chat as Axel.
Sike, Hades 2 devs Supergiant had another pre-full release patch hiding under their himation
CD Projekt have been teaching us that lesson for about a year with Cyberpunk 2077, and now Hades 2 is the latest game to have its devs go 'no, wait, one more'.To be fair to Supergiant, they did specify that the roguelike's previous update would "likely" be the last one before full release.An eleventh early access patch has hit the underworld, but the devs swear it'll be the last one for realsies this time.
After 18 years, a surprise Half-Life 2 update makes it once again possible to beat a honking train on Highway 17
Half-Life 2 got a small surprise update yesterday which changed the speed of a train in the 2004 shooter's driving sequence (the level called "Highway 17").This change will let you once again beat said train in a game of chicken that it has been winning against most players for nearly two decades.Read more
Battlefield 6's release date appears to have leaked, jumping the gun ahead of its reveal trailer
Ahead of Battlefield 6's reveal trailer later today, July 24th, the camo-clad shooter's release date appears to have been shot out into the universe by a leaker.This time it's Dealabs' Billbil-kun, who'se got a strong track record when it comes to pulling back the covers on details about games and hardware prior to official reveals.Read more
Commit culinary crimes in management sim The Diner At The End Of The Galaxy
Things do start off firmly in Mos Eisley territory though.You recycle industrial trash heaps to clear space for dining rooms, where the shanky lookin' clientele sit on rusted barrels and order a soup made from canonically repulsive beans.The advisor informs me the beans taste so awful that they used to be illegal.
Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects
Others still are reporting actual takedowns "with no notice", halted payouts, and those who have previously purchased their games being unable to download them.Going by one image posted on the Itch Discord and shared on Bluesky by game developer Daffodil, filtering by the site's 'NSFW' category previously showed 28,114 results.It now shows 7,008.
Brütal Legend goes free to grab as Double Fine pay tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, but you'll have be quick
Brütal Legend, the heavy metal action-adventure Double Fine put out on console back in 2009 (before coming to their senses and doing a PC port in 2013), is free to grab as I write this, but won't be for much longer.Following the death of Black Sabbath frontman and general face of the metal Ozzy Osbourne earlier this week, the studio have decided to give out the game in which he talks to a roadie voiced by Jack Black for zilch.However, it's a deal that kicked off in the dead of the night UK time, and isn't set to run for much longer.
My best deals for PC gamers today include up to $1,200 off Alienware laptops and the best GPU deals around
Alienware’s top-tier laptops are seeing price drops up to $1,200, with RTX 5090 and 4080 options going for less than you’d expect.The iBUYPOWER Element Pro is still one of the best 4K‑ready desktop deals around, and we’ve pulled in a couple of high-capacity Anker power banks for anyone lugging around their Steam Decks and ROG Allys (Allies?).On top of that, we’ve got some of the best GPU deals going right now — including PNY’s 5060 Ti and other fresh drops still in stock.
This ROG Ally deal would have me tempted to give up my Steam Deck for one reason
Look, I love the Steam Deck. In fact, we’re such big fans of it in our home that I have an OLED and my wife has the LCD model I had before it. Read more
Grim and joyful deckbuilder The Royal Writ is coming for genre king Balatro next month
The Decking, if you will.Publishers Yogscast Games have announced that festive card-based roguelite The Royal Writ will launch on 7th August.But based on a quick snort of the Steam demo, The Royal Writ stands apart thanks to 1) immensely jovial animated storybook visuals 2) an interesting set of card sacrifice mechanics.
Wheel World review
For a low-stakes open world cycling game, Wheel World has a lot of lore.You wake up in the forest and discover a spirit called Skully, a ghost who offers the player a rusty bike and immediately ejects so much fantasy jargon and frontloaded backstory that I started to think it was an intentional joke.It's a short tour, lasting only about five hours, but it's five hours nicely pedalled.
Microsoft U-turn on charging $80 for The Outer Worlds 2 and other Xbox games, cue memes and pre-order refunds
In the US, The Outer Worlds 2 will no longer cost $79.99, but the low, low sum of $69.99 instead.For UK folks, that means a tenner's been knocked off what you'll pay to pre order the standard version of the RPG, which comes out on October 29th.Xbox and co will be doing the same with their other holiday period games this year, rather than pushing up how much folks are paying to £70/$80.
Autobattle your past self in Fool King, a promising strategy roguelite in which dice are soldiers
In this medieval roguelite autobattler, you must murder a skeleton monarch with dice.You will do this not by loading bags of D20s into a culverin and shooting the Fool King point blank, though yes, that sounds like an amazing lategame unlock.Instead, you will be rolling the dice to determine how many knights, peasants, wizards and crossbowmen you can summon to each battlefield.
Former Bethesda developer Julian LeFay, known as the 'Father of The Elder Scrolls', has died
His passing was announced by OnceLost Games, the studio he co-founded in 2019, and follows a years-long battle with cancer.LeFay stepped away from his most recent development post as technical director at OnceLost, where he'd been working on Daggerfall-inspired RPG The Wayward Realms alongside fellow Bethesda veteran Ted Peterson, last week.OnceLost revealed at the time that this was due to his cancer worsening, writing that LeFay's doctors had informed them "his time with us is limited".
PC peripheral makers "deeply apologise" for hosting malware in their mouse software, by accident
PC gaming mouse 'n' keeb manufacturers Endgame Gear have admitted to and apologised for unknowingly spreading malware, after an infected version of the OP1w 4k v2’s Configuration Tool software was left available to download from their website.After Reddit user Admirable-Raccoon597 raised the alarm, having installed the Configuration Tool and found the malware hiding inside, German tech site Igor’s Lab confirmed that the publically available application had been compromised for at least two weeks.Endgame Gear have since replaced the dirty software with an apparently safe version, and today shared a post admitting the oversight – though claimed no sensitive data was stolen via the server infrastructure that was hosting it.
Rat King has eaten my lunch, and now it's going to eat yours
Bad news everybody, I think I have discovered the game that is going to stop you doing anything else today.Witness the verminous splendour of turn-based puzzler Rat King, in which you simultaneously control two rodents who are exploring two different dungeons in splitscreen.But there is method to the madness.
League Of Legends fighting spin-off 2XKO dangles Vi in front of fans alongside a closed beta
Riot's spin-off fighting game with the terrible name, 2XKO, is getting a closed beta in a few months and, to entice fans to sign up, the developers have released a new video showing off pink-haired League Of Legends bruiser Vi doing some biffing.I know you like biffing, so I'm telling you about this despite being unable to reliably write the title of this free-to-play wrecker without carefully typing it out like my mum composing an email with a single forefinger.Read more
ZeniMax staff discuss Microsoft's "inhumane" mass layoffs and how the future looks for the "carcass of workers that remains"
Staff say the manner in which the corp let go of around 9k staff was "inhumane" and has left those who remain facing an incredibly tough future.An unannounced MMO in development at ZeniMax, codenamed Project Blackbird, was one of the games cancelled by Microsoft as part of the corporate bloodletting, with Rare's Everwild and The Initiative's Perfect Dark reboot also being canned.Just last week, the ZeniMax Online Studios United (ZOSU) union said they're still fighting on behalf of workers at the studio left in limbo by Blackbird's cancellation.
Splitgate 2 devs 1047 Games lay off more staff as the shooter heads "back to beta", eyeing a 2026 rerelease
Splitgate 2 is being taken "back to beta" by developers 1047 Games, who say it "launched too early" and are now planning to rerelease it next year.The move has reportedly seen the studio lay off 45 workers, and they've confirmed that the original Splitgate's servers will be shutting down in a month's time.Read more
SSR Wives is a sparky throwback survival horror with romantic intentions and iMacs for save points
Created by Hen Studios with a demo on Steam, it's a sour and sugary blend of survival horror and romantic visual novel.They are save points, the local equivalent for Resident Evil's typewriters.Read more
Until Dawn devs Supermassive lay off "up to 36" workers, delay interstellar horror Directive 8020
As part of this, sci-fi horror game Directive 8020 has had its release delayed to early next year.Meanwhile, Supermassive have confirmed that the development of puzzler Little Nightmares 3 hasn't been affected by these job cuts, with that game still being on track to come out October 10th.Read more
In acid-bright office shooter Gossamer Matrix you have to reload while managing a deskful of junk
Instead, you will be gunned down like the miserable office slob you absolutely are.Vikram Chandra's memoir Geek Sublime;and a bag of raisins.
Helldivers 2 wants you to make sure virtual citizens don't wet the bed, and also here's another free cape
No, it's not what your parents say whenever you tell them what you're up to for a living, it's what Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead are basically telling players with the shooter's latest major order.Get out there with those stabby flags and murder-death millions of the enemies Super Earth's citizens are most afraid of, in order to restore their faith in your ability to protect them by murder-deathing things.There's also another free cape for folks who helped solve a puzzle in May.
EA let Battlefield 6 players lock weapons to classes in latest scuffle over how much Battlefield should enforce teamwork
EA and DICE have decided to let players choose between locking weapons to classes in the forthcoming Battlefield 6, or being able to equip any weapon to any class.In practice, the decision to give players the option of locking weapons to classes is Serious Business.it's the latest manifestation of a debate that goes back to Battlefield's formative squabbles with rival FPS Call Of Duty in the noughties.
Space Marine 2 publishers reveal Hellraiser: Revival, a singleplayer horror with Doug Bradley returning as Pinhead
Such is (pretty much) the way of classic 80s horror film Hellraiser, and therefore such is the plot of the trailer for the very first full game based on it.Said game's a slice of singleplayer survival horror dubbed Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, from Evil: Within devs Boss Team Games and Space Marine 2 publishers Saber Interactive.Read more
Campaign asking EU to stop publishers "destroying" online games hit by anonymous transparency complaint
The Stop Destroying Videogames citizens' initiative, the EU petition that's part of the Stop Killing Games campaign, has had an anonymous transparency complaint filed against it.That's according to Ross Scott, the YouTuber who's become the figurehead of Stop Killing Games, which in case you're out of the loop aims to stop publishers rendering online games unplayable when official support ends.Instead, the movement wants companies to be required to put concrete end-of-life plans in place if they elect to do things like turn servers off.
Anti-porn group who tried to ban GTA 5 claim credit for Steam's sex game crackdown
As Valve suggested to RPS in a statement, it was either that or risk a credit card firm or bank blocking Steam purchases at large.Alongside all this, Valve also delisted a bunch of sexually explicit games, including a number of games that depict incest.Valve have yet to specify which games they've delisted as a direct result of the policy change, or which particular institutions prompted them to make this rather momentous shift.
Scientifically funny survive 'em up Abiotic Factor is hitting version 1.0 today, and your pets are in danger
Comedy is a vibe, not a substance, you buffoon.I have played survival crafting game Abiotic Factor for an unspecified number of hours, and have learned many things.Most recently, I learned that the developers are releasing it from early access peer review today, but the shiny version 1.0 comes with a few notes scribbled hastily in the margins.
Greedfall 2 studio Spiders set for layoffs that'll affect "most" of their animators and riggers, dev claims
Greedfall 2 developers Spiders are going ahead with a layoff plan that'll see "most" of their animating and rigging team affected, according to a post from a lead animator at the Nacon-owned studio.This LinkedIn post by Erwan Perrin, whose profile cites him as having been a permanent Spiders staffer since 2021, has been reposted by at least four other workers at the the studio.Read more
Ubisoft CEO responds to Stop Killing Games, and casually mentions a new Ghost Recon game's coming
Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot has responded to a shareholder question about the Stop Killing Games campaign - and in a very newsworthy corporate question and answer session, revealed that a new Ghost Recon game's in the works.To quickly recap, Stop Killing Games aim to stop publishers rendering online games unplayable after the cessation of official support.Ubisoft's response to their campaign comes around the time the group's petition to the EU to take action against the mass extinction of online games hits 1.4 million signatures.
I adore the Scavenger's Reign-style underworld of Cleanfall, in which you build airships out of bugs
I recently took on a garden allotment tenancy for what I now consider the tellingly low rent of £60 a year.It was a lot like playing the demo for Cleanfall, except that I can't build an airship out of flying jellyfish and flamethrowers and blast this stupid allotment into submission.Mind you, Cleanfall is evidence that an airship made of flying jellyfish and flame throwers will only get you so far.
You can now try frame generation in any Steam Deck game, with all the thrilling disclaimers and caveats of desktop frame gen
Over the past week or so, Steam Deck circles have been filled to their plastic curves with chatter over Decky Lossless Scaling: a plugin for the handheld’s Decky Loader toolbox that makes the game-agnostic frame generation of Lossless Scaling work, more or less, in the Deck’s main Gaming Mode.Quite the feat, considering Lossless Scaling itself is officially unsupported on SteamOS.The plugin, by developer xXJSONDeruloXx, is based on the separate lsfg-vk by PancakeTAS, which is in turn a Linux compatibility layer for the original, Windows-based Lossless Scaling (and, while I’m crediting folk, a nod also goes to YouTubeist Deck Wizard for pointing this all out first).
Cyberpunk 2077 patch 2.3 lets you ditch ridealong Keanu Reeves, but I raise you responding to his driving critiques via this mod
CD Projekt also added in the ability for you to dismiss the freeroam ridealong Johnny Silverhand they added in previously.However, over the weekend a modder's released something that might tempt me into bringing him back, if only so V can respond to being told off for crashing by sarkily calling ol'Reevsey mum.Read more
Hell Clock review
Many of those games are good, in the same way that many crisps are shaped a bit like Jesus.Something that changes the way you look at crisps forever.Anyway, Hell Clock is not that, but it does has a wicked sick knife spin attack, so carefree in its centrifugal flesh mangling that I resented every screenshot I had to take for making me move my finger off the funny spin button.
A surprise update for Fallout: Bakersfield, the Doom mod that rebuilds the RPG's Necropolis as a shooter level
A Doom modder who's been busy recreating the city of Necropolis from the original Fallout as the setting for some irradiated boomer shooting has released a fresh trailer to the public for the first time in years.Alexander 'Red888guns' Berezin looks to have been quietly beavering away at GZDoom WAD Fallout: Bakersfield since releasing its last teaser in 2022, having posted fairly regular update blogs for supporters on his Boosty profile.Read more
As Le Mans Ultimate emerges from early access, it’s still got work ahead to catch the top hardcore sims
I’ve had Le Mans Ultimate on my radar of things that let you drive around in realistic circles for the past couple of years, but I’d never dived into its early access.Part of that was being utterly spoilt for choice in terms of existing options when it came to getting my GT racing on, with the likes of Automobilista 2, Assetto Corsa Competizione, and even slightly older sims like Raceroom competing for pole position in the racing bit of my Steam library.Read more
This week in PC games: Wuchang, Killing Floor 3, open world spirit biking and some eerie glyph puzzles
Well, you can't have a biscuit - the only things I have to offer are new PC games.Here's what's coming down the chute this week.Read more
The current developers of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 are going "fully" indie again
with help from venture capital.Still Wakes The Deep and Dear Esther creators The Chinese Room have slipped the surly bonds of former parent company Sumo Digital in the course of a management buyout, with "facilitation" from Hiro Capital.Now "fully independent", they're focussing on the creation of original games, with two unannounced projects in the offing once they've finished developing Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.
Scrapped Evolve sequel revealed by concept art, including an asteroid mining station straight of Dead Space
But such thrills were sabotaged by the grindiness of the early game and by an infuriating deluge of paid DLC.Publishers 2K Games delisted it in 2018, after attempting to reboot Evolve as a free-to-play game.Even given the reaction to Evolve's nickel-and-diming, it seems unlikely a sequel would have stripped out the live service progression elements and reverted to something like the menu-light horror movie sandbox approach of the developer's previous Left 4 Dead.
The Sunday Papers
If you haven't heard: I'm leaving RPS on July 31st, bringing my 12 years with the site to an end (and 8 years spent with Gamer Network websites more broadly).This isn't like in 2021 either, when I nominally departed but continued to support the site from the management side and by writing evening news posts.I have plenty of thoughts, more than I can reasonably fit in one post or a hundred.
Warframe’s 2025 end of year update is all about The Old Peace, as hallucinated via communal Matrix bath
I couldn't tell you before googling it why one of my fellow article writers had declared in the chat for a recent press preview that Excalibur Prime users won't be spared when the revolution comes.I can tell you that its end of year 2025 update is called The Old Peace, and looks like it'll be a hoot.Read more
Soulframe’s getting a bear quest, and its devs want you to keep bearing with them as you wait for it to emerge from alpha
Fantasy MMORPG Soulframe remains nestled away in its closed alpha form as this year’s TennoCon arrives.Despite plans to open that beta’s doors to a bunch more folks over the course of this weekend, developers Digital Extremes are keen to keep Warframe's cottagecore sibling closed off for at least a bit longer.The good news is that they have a bunch of new stuff they’re planning to unleash into fantasy land soon, as they continue to build a strong fairytale-infused foundation for the tale of the natural world clashing with technologically-advanced invaders.
Soulframe director chats “Wiz versus Waz” and a demo he hopes will help prove it's not just a soulslike
No, not a wizard, a Wazzard.You best believe that when I got a chance to talk to Geoff Crookes and Sarah Asselin, creative director and senior community manager on Digital Extremes’ still-in-alpha fantasy MMORPG, I asked them.Is there a difference between the Wazzard of Wastes the player fights in the demo of the game shown off at this year’s TennoCon, and your regular neighbourhood wizard?
What are we all playing this weekend?
That is the sound of Saturday morning, sludging heavily over your head like a bucket of gunge in a 1990s children's game show.Don't let that sweet weekend slime slip through your fingers.It's time to fire up the graphical processifying machinery, or what many are calling the "personal computer", and play some games.
If you've given up on Civilization 7, Civ 6 is free with all DLC expansions for a limited time on Epic Games Store
Conveniently, you can currently get Civilization 6 for free on the Epic Games Store - the giveaway runs till 24th July.But the freebie does include access to all of the game's DLC and expansions, so might be worth bagging if you only ever bought the base game from a different store.For clarity, you do not need to stick two fingers up at Civ 7 while downloading the free version of Civ 6.
FromSoftware are reportedly working on an unannounced game alongside The Duskbloods that could release next year
Alongside working on The Duskbloods and Elden Ring Nightreign's post-launch bits, FromSoftware are reportedly deep in development on an unannounced game that could release next year.That's according to MP1st (via VGC), which claims said game is codenamed FMC, multiplatform and - based on "the nature of the source these details come from" - at an advanced stage of development.Read more
The Necromancer's Tale is the most I've enjoyed creating an RPG character in a while, and no I don't mean the walking corpses
I've only dipped my distal index fingerbone in The Necromancer's Tale, a just-released historical fantasy tactics RPG from Psychic Software, but I can at least report back that the character creator is a gentle joy, to the point that I was disappointed to reach the end of it.True to the promise/threat of "400,000 words of hand-written narrative and lore", it's a hearty choose-your-own-adventure prologue that follows the protagonist's infancy and early adulthood.Read more
Elden Ring Nightreign's next enhanced boss wave crashes against the shores of frustration at the end of this month
Elden Ring Nightreign's next wave of enhanced bosses have now successfully RSVPed to the big darkness party.They'll be arriving when the next cycle begins on July 31st.Though, for whatever reason, FromSoft haven't fully committed to a date until now.
Engineering puzzle designer Zach Barth almost made a Factorio-like automation game, but "got really bored really quickly"
The creators of Opus Magnum and Infinifactory may have dissolved their old studio Zachtronics and chemically regenerated as Coincidence Games, but there are still large traces of a Zach present.I caught up with designer Zach Barth to ask about perfectionism, the Factorio-like automation game he gave up on out of boredom, and how the team managed to make a story about factories in 1980s Japan feel human.Read more
Rockbeasts is about managing an animal band in a BoJack-style world, but it'll need to do more than horse around
There was a good thing that had once been and a horse man who was now years removed from it, but still clung on to the idea that the magic was still there.He was a bitter, selfish, washed-up star who so often looked back, rather than looking forwards.It was to his detriment.
Helldivers 3 is "hopefully many years away" says Arrowhead's CEO, who did not vote for gun
That said, the studio's bigwigs have provided a couple of hints at what the future might hold for them, with the latest being that Helldivers 3 is "hopefully many years away".Also, they aren't fans of players voting to rename a city on Super Earth 'Gun', which is a thing that's been going on in Helldiverland lately.Read more
4X strategy game Entrotria is in theory Galactic Civilizations but looks like a Jackson Pollock painting
Entrotria looks like a geode full of maggots, or the inside of a prehistoric fridge.Here's a trailer.Read more
Breath Of The Wild meets Banjo-Kazooie golem adventure Tall Trails is just plain nice
If you don't have anything else on this morning, perhaps you'd like to fill the life of a small clay golem up with purpose.It reminds me of playing old N64 3D platformers round my mate Liam's house between watching VHS recordings of Keenan and Kel, which is a nice place to be.It's also got Breath Of The Wild's stamina wheel and freeform clamouring, although you don't need to worry about that too much because you can stuff chilli peppers into your boot and use it like a jetpack.
Oblivion Remastered modder splices Fallout 3's level-by-questing into Cyrodiil, and my virtual knees are glad
Oblivion Remastered's devs knew that, and so opted to keep the classic "level up by doing the abilities you picked" approach, with some minor tweaks to make it less frustrating.If, however, you long to ding by being handed boatloads of XP simply from completing quests and killing NPCs by any means, a modder's got you covered.While working on fleshing out a full Fallout 4-esque settlement system for Oblivin' after midnight, MadAbormodding's decided to double down on the rads and bring Fallout 3's levelling system to Cyrodiil.
Valve are now removing a bunch of sex games from Steam to keep banks and card companies happy
Valve have begun removing a variety of sex games from Steam in line with their recent updating of the platform's rules and regulations to allow banks and credit card companies to essentially forbid certain kinds of "adult content".In a statement to RPS, a company representative confirmed that games are being delisted as a result of the rules change, adding that the developers in question are being given Steam app credits as compensation.The alternative, Valve suggest, is that banks and card companies might pull the plug on all transactions, and users in general would lose the ability to buy stuff on Steam.
The Dark Queen Of Mortholme is a reverse Elden Ring where you play the final boss
FromSoftware's RPGs have done much to explore the cycle of death and resurrection that games have historically taken for granted, but ask comparatively few questions on how the bosses feel about all this.What I'm saying is, when people talk about Dark Souls being about "overcoming adversity", they are lying to themselves. Read more
Mixtape is a suave and syrupy retro music love-in with a useful undertow of hustle
Mixtape isn't entirely the retro 90s nostalgia piece you might be expecting from trailers - it's also a playable job application.Protagonist Stacy Rockford is enjoying one last night in their east US hometown with childhood friends Slater and Cassandra, before Rockford sets off to chase a music supervisor gig in New York City.Mixtape is both a going-away celebration and, on some level, Rockford's portfolio project, edited together from teenage flashbacks and waiting to be thrust into the hands of a distant producer.
Pass Man: My doomed attempt to play Rematch as a support class
Specifically, no-one is doing it.It sounds to me, then, that Rematch is suffering from the same issue you get in low-ranked Dota 2 lobbies: everyone wants to be the superstar, the one who ends the match with the biggest numbers next to their name, oblivious to how few instances of the letter 'I' occur in the word 'Team'.Clearly, what’s needed is someone willing to do the dirty work as a passing-focused support character, and today, that would be me.
The Drifter review
The Drifter is sometimes quite silly in ways I don't think are intentional, and it managed to yank me right out of the experience more than once.It's stylish, moody, and pulls off the point n' click adventure game two-for-one: characters worth caring about, and also characters worth irritating by fiddling with their stuff.Mostly though, it's just got a great eye for an arresting scene or setpiece.
Paying the Subnautica 2 team their promised bonus would be "embarrassing", Krafton's CEO allegedly told the game's chief over lunch
The dramatic dismissal of three senior developers at Subnautica 2 studio Unknown Worlds gets messier by the day.In a publicly filed lawsuit, the three fired heads of the studio have accused publishers Krafton of all sorts of dirty tactics, ploys, and shenanigans to purposefully delay the game until 2026, all in an intentional effort to avoid paying a maximum $250 million earnout bonus to the studio.In one bizarre episode alleged in the lawsuit, Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland went to lunch with Krafton CEO, Kim Chang-han, who told him via translator that having to pay such an earnout would be "disastrous financially and hugely embarrassing" for the publisher.
Deals for today: The best of Alienware's Black Friday in July sale
Alienware is running Black Friday in July, dropping a bunch of desktops and laptops down to some of the lowest prices I’ve seen all summer.Doesn’t matter if you’re after a decked-out Area‑51 tower with an RTX 5090 or just looking for a leaner Aurora machine for everyday gaming, there’s something on offer.A handful of 16 and 18-inch gaming laptops are trimmed down by hundreds, which is rare for models packing things like 5070 Ti or 5080 graphics Read more
Former Elder Scrolls developer Julian Lefay steps away from his Daggerfall-esque The Wayward Realms as cancer worsens
OnceLost Games, the studio LeFay's been working with for the past few years, say they've been informed by his doctors that "his time with us is limited".The developer's best known for his work on the first two Elder Scrolls games, Arena and Daggerfall, alongside The Wayward Realms creative director Ted Peterson.Read more
Oblivion Remastered developers Virtuos are reportedly planning layoffs, with 300 workers at risk
That's according to reporting posted to Bluesky by Gauthier Andres of French outlet Origami.Andres' post dropped same day Virtuos lead game designer Adrien Jouannet appeared on a Cyberpunk 2077 livestream to talk about the studio's work with CD Projekt on the futuristic RPG's latest update.Read more
James Bond's license holders let IO be "a lot more daring" than the Hitman studio thought
Brendan and I once had a podcast conversation about Hitman in which we predicted that IO Interactive would be limited by James Bond's license holders MGM to a maximum of three toilet drownings, one fish spearing, and absolutely no duck explosions.While we can't yet confirm specifics, IO's franchise director Jonathan Lacaille has said that MGM were "a lot more daring than (the studio) thought" in a recent chat with Very Gary Computing.Lacaille actually credits Hitman's, um, restraint in helping them secure the license in the first place.
Bird-bashing soulslike Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has some PC system specs, and they are not brutal
Chinese action-RPG Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is out in a week, and it's high time we heard about the system requirements, which don't seem that high for a game in which you can lob lightning at supersized peacocks and leave a delicate furrow through new-fallen snow.An Intel Core i5-8400, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, 16GB of RAM and 60GB's worth of SSD are all they're asking for the chance to become an amnesiac pirate swordswoman during the age of the Ming dynasty, tasked with murdering a whole lot of bird people before she becomes a bird person herself. Read more
R.I.P Total War: Warhammer's arse ladders (2016-2025)
Time, of course, muddies the clear waters of specifics, but I'm basically sure he was talking about the ability for each of his men to keep a thirty foot ladder snuggled safely away in their rectal passage just in case they encountered any massive walls.Since launch, The Total War: Warhammer series has given each troop, from the lowliest Chaos Chosen to the bravest and most beautiful ratman, the ability to magic a ladder from nowhere during sieges.There's a mod for Total War: Warhammer 3 that removes them, but now the end of arse ladders is getting official support, including tweaks to hopefully teach the AI how to behave without them.
Come slide with me through loopy shooter maps in this homage to Counter-Strike's beloved Source engine surfing
Counter-Strike surfing is a modded game mode for Valve's bomb defusal FPS in which players skate through obstacle courses by means of a Source engine physics glitch.It has a proud history dating back to 2004, when modder Charles "Mariowned" Joyce discovered that it was far more enjoyable to slide off roofs than shoot people in his custom map Killbox.Now here comes SurfsUp, a free-to-play surfing game in the Godot Engine.
Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.3 motors into your life this week with new cars, auto-driving, a taxi service and more
It's mostly about giving you more options in terms of traversing the world, because adding in a whole metro system post-launch didn't do enough in that regard.The studio will not stop, even though they're now making Cyberpunk 2.They've worked with fellow developers Virtuos to add-in some new cars, a taxi system, self-driving cars, and other stuff not related to getting from A to B.
Civilization 7 is getting auto-explore for scouts, reminding me that I both hate and love auto-explore
The next major Sid Meier's Civilization VII update will make some fairly significant tweaks to Firaxis' latest and not, so far, greatest 4X strategy sim.We can expect a new commander, too - Trưng Nhị, sister to existing Vietnamese leader Trưng Trắc.Perhaps most significantly, the feature will re-introduce auto-explore mechanics for scouts.
Free shooter Straftat gets a 2v2 update and if my maths are correct this makes it twice as intense 1v1
Anyway, the update that adds these modes arrived yesterday and it also adds - surprise!- a ton of new maps.Which brings the game's total number of killing arenas to over 300.
"You can short a baby" in the sequel to Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator
But it means Strange Scaffold's sci-fi stockbroker sim was, at the very least, 2021's second best organ trading sim.Nice to see it's getting a sequel then, called...You aren't going to be trading babies," says head of studio, Xalavier Nelson Jr. "You're going to be trading stocks based on babies, which means you can short a baby."
This new co-op horror is like if the chefs of Overcooked got together for a night of R.E.P.O
Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking is essentially the four-player hangout horror of R.E.P.O but instead of ghost hunting you are collecting ingredients to feed a big monster its favourite dish."This isn't a place of honour," says studio head of Strange Scaffold, Xalavier Nelson Jr. "You aren't going to be making fancy Overcooked-style dishes.You will be beating a giant rat or a minotaur with a rolling pin, taking an object from their corpse, throwing it onto a grill on a beach, and then firing it into a kaiju's jaws with a catapult or a manganel."
Put Big Butt Skinner in Frostpunk 2, win $10,000 maybe
Frostpunk 2 developers 11 Bit are holding a modding competition in collaboration with mod.io, with $10,000 for the one that shows "the best in creativity and overall technical polish", which I assume is code for "If you send us another Thomas The Tank Engine we will come to your house and spit in your fruit bowl".There are also custom GPUs and "goodie packs" for runners-up.The competition is open until August 22nd, with the winner announced September 1st. Cheers, PC Gamer.
Best deals for PC gamers today: Over 10% off prebuilt gaming PCs and massive savings on M.2 SSDs
Plenty on the list today, not just graphics cards or SSDs but full prebuilt rigs, cooling gear, and network kit as well.There are some chunky savings on newer PCIe 5.0 drives, plus high-end gaming cases and power supplies that usually don’t budge on price.Read more
Officially licenced Like a Dragon spin-offs made by Roblox creators may be coming, and will have to stick to the karaoke lad lore
Enter Roblox, which is very much the terrifying user-generated everything platform's terrifying user-generated everything platform.The company that oversees it, Roblox Corp, have just announced a new "Roblox License Manager" that'll allow fellow corps to let Roblox players submit to build games based on stuff like Squid Game, Saw, and Twilight, then split the Robux revenue these games generate between the two parties.Sega have signed up and are offering the Like A Dragon series, but not to just anybody.
Subnautica 2 studio will get their bonus, says Krafton, but it's not the $250 million promised
In other words, they've been given an extension to hit their targets.After worker concerns and fan outrage, now the corp says "don't worry, we'll pay!"Although it's not the huge $250 million they were originally supposed to.
Valve change Steam's rules to let banks and credit card firms prohibit "certain kinds of adult only content"
And in particular, "certain kinds of adult only content".In other words, they are giving banks, ISPs and credit card companies some degree of control over Steam's definition of acceptable "adult only content".All of which potentially has rather dramatic ramifications, given that banks and payment companies have a track record for pressuring platform holders to nuke what they deem to be NSFW material.
Killing Floor 3’s next stress test launches today, and won’t share the last one’s five-year NDA
Cooperative monsterman shooter Killing Floor 3 found out this past Sunday, as players of its closed online stress test were asked to agree to a nondisclosure agreement (shared on Reddit) that would stay in effect for five years.Or four years, three hundred and fifty-four days after KF3 is supposed to launch, on July 24th.In a forum post, developers Tripwire Interactive have since declared that they stopped bothering to enforce within the test’s first hour, and apologised for making such a mad demand in the first place.
Avowed's summer update revamps fighter and ranger skills so those pesky wizards aren't having all the fun
This patch is the second of three seasonal updates Obsidian outlined that the game'd be getting over the course of this year.It's brought a substantial rework of fighter and ranger skills, some extra unique weapons for you to get your mitts on, Steam Deck verification, plus a bunch of other tweaks and fixes.Read more
Dark fantasy Frosthaven is a DM-free Dungeons And Dragons campaign in a box, and it's coming to Steam this month
Frosthaven digital is launching in early access on Epic and Steam at the end of the month, July 31st.The dark fantasy RPG will be £33.50, and it's Julian Gollop's Snapshot Games handling the adaption.Here's a trailer.
I just discovered a Dwarf Fortress cave diving roguelite
We are straining Rock Paper Shotgun's innovative "News To Me, Anyway" subcategory to breaking point with Anoxic Depths: Caves Of The Yendori, a turn-based spelunking roguelite from Studio Tectorum.The scurvy bean-counters among you might protest that it came out 10 years ago, possibly before some of you were old enough to read, operate video games, or count beans.Read more
I've found the best PC gaming deals in the Black Friday in July sale at Dell - save up to $750
We’ve covered the Dell Black Friday in July deals a few times in recent days, and they’re still coming.In fact, there are now so many offers that we’ve got a whole list of them here.Read more
There's a bunch of discounted AMD and Nvidia graphics cards now up to 50% off at Amazon today
I don't really need a new graphics card, but seeing prices drop by almost half gets my curiosity going.It’s not even just the big names like the RTX 5090 or the Radeon RX 7900 XT, even refurbished cards look tempting when they’re going for hundreds less.Here's the best deals I can find for your latest rig upgrade: Read more
Amazon still has a saving on Samsung 990 Pro SSDs even after Prime Day is over
Just when you thought Prime Day was over, we’ve mentioned it again and triggered all those flashbacks. Read more
Grab this 2TB WD Black mini SSD for Steam Deck at its lowest price so far this year
I recently ripped out my Steam Deck’s SSD and enthusiastically slapped in a WD Black SN770M 2TB mini SSD, and it's easily the smartest thing I’ve done with it that didn’t involve tinkering around in desktop mode. Read more
Tales of the Shire's system requirements have me considering grafting a graphics card to a Hobbit's bum
Its system requirements have just dropped, and they're pretty reasonable.In fact, its needs are so modest and homely that I'm wondering whether you might be able to run it on a Hobbit, provided you could find one in real life and staple some Nvidia - or AMD- branded plastic into the surface of its flesh.Read more
Helldivers 2's latest patch lets you impale baddies with flags, as the bots take aim at the Democracy Space Station
This one's patch 01.003.200, and it brings the latest in pointy flag tip technology, in addition to another round of weapon balancing.You'll need that flag stabbiness too, as the latest Galactic War twist has seen the Automatons try to wrestle control of Super Earth's space station.Read more
I'm travelling this week, and I wish I'd ordered one of these power banks for my Steam Deck
One of the best things about my job is that I get to fly around the world and go to events, and while I’m off to Warframe’s TennoCon this week (and very excited about it) there’s always a bit of a panic about what to pack to keep oneself sane on a long flight. Read more
ZeniMax Union say they're fighting for staff left in limbo by Microsoft cancelling MMO as part of mass layoffs
Now, the union that represents a number of devs left in limbo by that game's canning have issued an update about the process of fighting for their futures.ZOS' MMO, codenamed Project Blackbird, wasn't the only game Microsoft pulled the plug on as they let go of around 9k people.Read more
Finally, a game about a boy who thinks he's a tomb searching for a dead body to bury inside of him
You play as Kofun, a boy shaped like a keyhole tomb who is also sort of an actual keyhole tomb but also a boy who wants to fulfill his destiny as a keyhole tomb, namely by finding a dead body to bury inside of himself.He lives in a park with his mate Haniwa, who is a Haniwa.Haniwa's secret is that he's very good at calligraphy.
This Alienware Aurora 16 5060 gaming laptop for $1,100 is the best budget gaming laptop deal right now
Dell’s Black Friday in July sale has knocked the price of an Alienware 16 laptop down to $1,099.99, and while it’s not the perfect machine, it’s a decent price for a reasonably affordable mid-range gaming setup. Read more
Open world wuxia RPG Where Winds Meet is having a city-sized playtest this month
If you don't, you can watch the below trailer or read Ed Thorn's (RPS in peace) preview from 2023, in which he commented "I'm both excited to see more and a tad worried it could end up being a disjointed, overstretched mash".Then you can consider signing up to the game's next playtest, which runs from July 25th to July 30th.Read more
In bullet hell mining game Astro Prospector the real enemy is sleep
I'm writing up Astro Prospector for a couple of reasons: firstly, it reminds me of two childhood favourites, Atari's Asteroids and the less-known Crystal Quest for the Macintosh.And secondly, there's something appealingly perverse about a bullet hell of all gametypes that is always simulating the player nodding off at the keyboard. Read more
AMD's Ryzen Prime Day deals are somehow still live, here's the top discounts at Amazon
There’s still time to snag big discounts.We're seeing up to 39% off, which is rare for these processors.Amazon’s free 30-day Prime trial still applies, so there’s really no excuse to miss these while they’re hot.
Helldivers 2 players are pushing to rename one of Super Earth's cities 'Gun'
HD2 players aren't happy for it to end there though.They've been asked for their input in renaming the single city on Super Earth they've so far succeeded in rebuilding since all of that Illuminate invasion business, and they're voting for Gun.Read more
Master Of Command is a strategy game of crunchy musketry and Total War-style battles that tells the story of an army, not an empire
I know that because they emailed RPS saying that our "strategy features often spotlight smart, unforgiving systems".And what better way to show that than by covering this game, completely of my own volition and with no outside influence from cleverly worded PR emails playing on my sense of strategy-knower's pride.It looks suitably grand, and I really dig the idea of a strategy where the management isn't about empires, but the personal journey of your army on campaign.
Ancient Aliens vs Predator game briefly resurrected by Steam player thirst for Six Packs
Deep beneath the smog of a plausibly denied planetoid, there lurks a space hulk full of dessicated hand monsters, shorn dreadlocks and long-emptied Pulse Rifles.The vessel mostly lies silent, but every so often, an ancient server deep within the core crackles awake, beaming an ominous signal far out into the void, and the chitinous corridors come alive with flamethrowers and squelchy stabbing noises and oh, so much screaming.Also, the coveted chirping of Steam achievements.
Kaizen: A Factory Story review
"Fine" is a funny word.It can mean something is sublimely crafted, but it can also be used in a withering sense.Kaizen: A Factory Story is a fine game.
Whether you love stealth games or hate them, Eriksholm isn't worth your time
If you love stealth, you've likely got a library full of such games you've been meaning to get back to at some point.If you don't, you've likely been put off somewhere along the line by the sort of tired and punishing design tropes Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is full of.Naturally, I don't think it's worth your time either way.
Subnautica 2 leak is "authentic" say publishers who benefit the most from that leak
A battle between three former Subnautica 2 developers and their publishers at Krafton intensified over the weekend, after an internal document appeared online showing how the scope of the survival game has reduced during development.The source of this document remains unknown.Nevertheless, Krafton have since leapt at the chance to confirm its authenticity.
European Parliament vice president throws his support behind Stop Killing Games campaign
One of the European Parliament's vice presidents has voiced his support for the Stop Killing Games campaign, and said he's signed the group's petition to the European Commission to stop publishers rendering online games unplayable by shutting down their servers.The petition surpassed a million signatures recently, though there are concerns that some of the signatories are fake.Read more
This week in PC games: Stronghold, Destiny and Neverwinter Nights lead a host of drifters, necromancers and Pac-Monsters
The working week once again looms above us like a bulldozer driven by raucous and somehow loveable sheepdogs in top hats and cufflinks.Quickly now, lob a few new PC game releases under the caterpillar treads to slow its passage.Read more
Elden Ring Nightreign's inevitable randomiser mod is here to spice up your runs with extra funky map scrambling
Elden Ring Nightreign's gotten a randomiser mod, just in case the base game isn't quite maxing out your unexpected chaos-per-run meter at this point, despite its revamped bosses.While FromSoft's roguelike-ish twist on the established souls formula already switches things up in a manner that's a bit like a randomiser mod makeover of one of the series' traditional entries, modder thefifthmatt has still found ways to tinker with it.Read more
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War – Definitive Edition gets an August release date, with a chunky discount for Anniversary owners
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition is out August 14th, with a 30% discount off the $30 label price for owners of the Anniversary Edition.That discount applies to both Steam and GOG, and will be available for the "foreseeable future" (Fateweaver noises).Read more
What are we all playing this weekend?
You wouldn't believe how close I was to forgetting to poll everyone today for Playing This Weekend.In fairness, no one reminded me or sent me their paragraphs.Anyway, right on time as usual, here are the games we're clicking on this weekend!
Top city builder Against The Storm gets a grumpy bat faction and giant pooping birds in its next DLC this July
On the whole, I think I prefer the Fear and Loathing variety.Anyway, here's the trailer for Against the Storm's second DLC expansion, Nightwatchers, which will release on PC via Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store on July 31st.Read more
Sea of Thieves is getting paid custom servers next year, and Rare are switching up their approach to seasons
Big piratey thing Sea of Thieves will be getting custom servers as part of a paid subscription service in "early 2026", developers Rare have announced during a first-ever community direct for the game.That's far from all of the studio's plans, with wider shakeups also in the pipeline.It follows Rare being one of the studios affected by Microsoft's mass layoffs earlier this month, with Everwild being among the number of in-development games cancelled as part of the cuts.
New Jurassic World Evolution 3 breeding trailer explains the fine art of dinosaur bonestorming
Having taken a Dilophosaurus to their Dennis Nedry-esque plans for AI-generated scientist portraits in Jurassic World Evolution 3, Frontier are back to talking about a more wholesome form of generation - dinosaur sex.The game's latest trailer is a brief glimpse at the new breeding features, which allow you "to synthesise male and female variants, each with visible dimorphism" and have them do the ole horizontal tango "to shape the traits and markings of future generations."Read more
Latest Monster Hunter Wilds update aims to rally the Steam reviews and slay the wildest monster of all - FOMO
Capcom are fine-tuning the live service of livestock-murdering game Monster Hunter Wilds by making the Arch-tempered monster hunts a permanent fixture, rather than time-limited seasonal content quests.It's a bid to address the FOMO element that has dragged the game down to an Overwhelmingly Negative Steam user review consensus, though there are other things to blame for that, such as dodgy performance.Read more
Leading Total War: Warhammer 3's peasants to victory with an irresponsible number of trebuchets (French for 'very bucket')
The peasant infantry is basically just there to squishily hold the enemy in place for charges.However, I'm feeling revolutionary today, so we're staging a serf uprising.Conquer the entirety of Bretonnia.
Morsels is my game of the summer, a stinking collage of Nuclear Throne and Pokemon
A roguelike pixelart shooter from Furcula and Annapurna Interactive, its world is a relentlessly aberrant waste dump in which it often feels like the only sure way to differentiate objects is to pop them in your mouth, and hope they don't rupture, ignite or wriggle down your throat.Video game science has yet to devise and normalise control devices that are operated with your tongue, despite notable efforts, so during my hands-on, I'm forced to fall back on my untrustworthy eyeballs.Developer Toby Dixon has to step in frequently to point out that some of the game's oozing anomalies are there to empower me, not harm me.
Today's the last chance to upgrade your gaming headset with these Amazon Prime Day deals
Amazon’s throwing out some serious gaming headset deals for Prime Day 2025, but today is the last chance to grab one.Discounts are hitting as high as 45% on top-tier brands like Corsair, Logitech, Razer, and SteelSeries.Even if you’re not a Prime member, you can still snag the best prices by jumping on Amazon’s free 30-day Prime trial.
Subnautica 2 publishers Krafton accuse ousted bosses of abandoning duties, and now those ex-leads are suing
Subnautica 2 publishers Krafton have accused three recently ousted leads of "abandoning" their duties on the game, suggesting that this is to blame for it being delayed.That statement was almost immediately followed by one of the former Unknown Worlds bosses, co-founder Charlie Cleveland, writing in a Reddit post that a lawsuit's been filed by the trio against the company.That kicked off a war of words between the two sides, punctuated by a report from Bloomberg which alleged Krafton's call to delay the game was made just before a $250 million bonus was set to be paid to Unknown Worlds staff.
Shark Dentist is about operating on a fool's idea of a shark
The Jaws Effect is a reasonably well known phenomenon coined in a paper that explores the impact the 1975 film had on Australian policy response to shark bites, although the term is now used a bit more broadly to refer to how sharks are villainised in pop culture - villainisation obviously being an absurdly human and dramatic concept to apply to a hungry or scared fish.Jaws did actually result in an increase in shark culls, but its lasting legacy has also been argued to be more insididous.Depending on whether you're looking at stats from the UN or from conservation charities, the number of sharks killed or mutilated and harvested each year for fins and other parts ranges between about 10 and 100 million, and it's been argued this continues with relatively little pushback as compared to similar wildlife atrocities due to wide-reaching perception that ranges from apathy to vilification.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 drops in full today, so of course a modder already has Mary Poppins poppin' kickflips
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4, the latest nostalgia-fest about avian athletes artfully acing acrobatic boardiness, drops in full today, July 11th.Though, thanks to pre-order early access meaning the game sort of released three days ago, its modding community is already off and running.If you've spent the past few months watching old X Games reruns and thinking to yourself that all the shreddage might be better if Bob Burnqvist were an Edwardian nanny, a train chaser, or a gabagool enthusiast, I've got some good news.
Total War: Warhammer 3 gets the best bad news yet about future updates
Tides Of Torment, the next DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3, has been pushed back from its original Summer release window to later in the year, with September onwards sounding the likeliest from a new blog post.Ah, yes: Sea Elves are confirmed now, led by Sea Lord Aislinn.Expect more details from a new video in August, by the sound of it.
I've found some awesome last minute prebuilt gaming PC Prime Day Deals that are cheaper than building one
There’s a strong mix of Prime Day deals and direct offers from HP, Dell, MSI, and others, covering everything from compact gaming laptops to top-tier RTX 5090 desktops.It's the last day of Amazon Prime deals, so you can guarantee other retailers will put their prices back up after today too.Some builds are priced well below what it would cost to build yourself, and a few include extra savings with codes like LEVELUP20.
Don't miss these last chance deals on Steam Deck docks before Prime Day 2025 ends
Amazon’s dropped a ton of Prime Day deals on Steam Deck docks, but today is the last day to grab these exclusive discounts.Most of these are 20% to 45% off, with solid options for everything from budget setups to full desktop replacements.If you’re not a Prime member, Amazon’s offering a 30-day free trial so you can grab these deals without spending extra.
Helldivers 2's next warbond is full of funky alien tech, including a "(somewhat) stable wormhole" teleportation pack
Or, at least that's premise of Helldivers 2's latest warbond.Dubbed Control Group, it'll give you access to a bunch of experimental gear Super Earth's scientists have cobbled together from captured Illuminate tech if you opt to pick it up when it drops on June 17th.Read more
Owlcat welcome Mass Effect comparisons with their Expanse RPG, but say they're approaching choice and consequence "differently"
Not least from developers Owlcat themselves, who've namechecked the "iconic" RPGs as inspirations.In a recent interview with Polygon, creative director Alexander Mishulin said he's humbled, but that Osiris Reborn also has its own approach to choice, consequence, and storytelling that's a bit different from Bioware's sci-fi trilogy and also the other one (Andromeda was actually pretty solid though).Read more
Manor Lords publisher's time loop tactics RPG Every Day We Fight is out today in early access
Huge warehouses, bases, and ruins so stuffed with cover and walkways as to suggest the dominant species on the game's pre-alien invasion earth were sandbag piles.The city is explorable between battles with your gang of resistance members, letting you poke around and scavenge before sneaking into optimal positions for the next scrap against invading aliens.Read more
Attention, massive Baldur's Gate 3 tadpole hypocrites, this mod'll let you get stompy for the first time since 2023
Especially in a game like Baldur's Gate 3 that generally rewards you for embracing the chaos and behaving a manner that'd leave onlookers scratching their heads and slightly afraid.Sadly, there's one immensely satisfying bit of action those who play the the RPG as a tadpole-slupring hypocrite have, to the best of my knowledge, been unable to get in on since November 2023.Read more
The best last minute gaming mouse deals in Amazon's Prime Day sale
Was: $149.99, Now: $79.99, 47% off Read more
Fancy snooping around The Witcher 3 palace from Blood and Wine? Well, this mod gives it a book-accurate interior
It's been years, Gerry from the Riviera, but you can finally stop knocking on a certain Duchess' door in the hopes she'll let you see whether some Elven staircases are as spirally as you remember.A Witcher 3 modder has used REDKit to open those doors and had a crack at making a lore-accurate interior for Beauclair Palace, the posh setting of the fantasy game's Blood and Wine expansion.Read more
Krafton plan to delay Subnautica 2 and deny the studio a $250 million bonus
Subnautica 2 is being delayed into 2026 by its publishers Krafton, which would lead to the survival game's studio missing out on a previously agreed $250 million bonus, meant to be shared among employees.The revelation comes via a report from Bloomberg, and could finally explain why Krafton ousted the studio's most senior figures last week.Read more
The video game voice actor strike is over, with new AI agreements reached over 'digital replicas'
A new contract has been approved, "effective immediately".with 95% of participating union members voting in favour, with 5% opposed.The terms of the Interactive Media Agreement include increased performer compensation, including overtime rates, and "guardrails" against AI - "including consent and disclosure requirements for A.I. digital replica use and the ability for performers to suspend consent for the generation of new material during a strike".
Space Scum is a sci-fi strategy RPG take on Battle Brothers
So, here's a trailer.There's also a Steam demo from next month, although you can sign up for a playtest now.Read more
I've built Nvidia RTX 5070 and AMD Radeon 9070XT gaming PCs using last chance deals from Amazon's Prime Day
It's a goldmine for gamers this year, and I couldn’t resist weighing up a PC build.I dove into the discounts (Don't forget that free 30-day Prime trial) and built two monster gaming rigs.One powered by Nvidia’s brand-new RTX 5070 and another fueled by AMD’s scorching Radeon 9070XT.
You'll have to move quickly to save a third on this HP Omen 35L with an RTX 4080 Super
Just hours after we shared a huge deal on the HP Omen 45L with an RTX 4090, the manufacturer surprised us again with another deal that’s not likely to last long. Read more
The end is nigh, for Balatro and Wordle have had a terrible avian child
Of all the "what if Balatro, but" projects on offer, there are surely none so atrocious and indecent, so utterly irresponsible of conception and offensive to human dignity as Birdigo, which bills itself as "what if Balatro, but Wordle".For the uninitiated, Balatro is the rad poker roguelite that took the games industry by storm in 2024, while Wordle is what the New York Times do now instead of articles.Read more
Time Flies is about a bug finding god or learning guitar in something like 76.4 seconds, and it's got a release date
You live for a matter of seconds every playthrough, and in that time, you've got a bug bucket list of stuff you can do.Either way, this cool cousin/sibling to the equally bizarre Kids and My Exercise is coming out on PC July 31st.Read more
Oblivion Remastered performance improvements emerge through the gates with update 1.2, plus difficulty tweaks
This one's update 1.2, and it's headlined by the sorts of performance improvements folks have been begging for, plus some difficulty setting tweaks.In case you missed it, The Elder Scrolls 4.something's last update did many things, but by fair the most noteworthy was stopping a vampire from succumbing to the urge all men get.Read more
New charity game bundle raises funds to defend US immigrants against ICE
Back in June, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of alleged undocumented migrants in Los Angeles provoked a wave of protests.The Trump administration attempted to make hay from the situation, dispatching federal military troops to the city in a show of toughness, against the objections of California's own governor.Despite this cynical cultivation of a pressure-cooker atmosphere, the majority of protesters were peaceful, albeit justifiably loud and angry at having their neighbours seized and imprisoned by random thugs at the behest of a dime store Palpatine.
Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag Steam update sparks more remake speculation, but hold fire, sailor
Update: Ubisoft have confirmed that these updates to Black Flag et al were just rejigging of Steam pages "to reflect each game's accessibility options" in line with the new accessibility tags Steam introduced in June.Sadly, the publisher didn't explain what makes cameras comfortable.With folks keener for new info than they are booty, an update to the original Black Flag's Steam backend is the latest thing to fan the Remake speculation flames, but before you get excited about it, it's worth bearing in mind that a bunch of other Assassin's Creed games got similar tweaks yesterday.
I Don't Want To Be A Good Woman is a "museum of resilience" that explores sexism and repression in Iran
I Don't Want To Be A Good Woman is an abstract walking simulator that depicts the experience of being a young girl in Iran - a country that, as characterised by UN human rights investigators in September 2024, operates "a system, both in law and in practice, that fundamentally discriminates on the grounds of gender".It takes the form of a molten grey landscape strewn with faceless figures, floating symbols and text.Read more
Mortality Decomp. Killers is a free Post Void-like that scores you on how many doors you've "killed'
MDK is also Mortality Decomp.After each level, your score breakdown includes how many doors you've "killed".Read more
I've found the best last chance gaming keyboard deals in Amazon's Prime Day sale
there’s something in this Prime Day sale with your name on it.I’ve rounded up the best deals I could find—everything from custom-ready beasts to wireless wonders with serious discounts.Scroll through, see what catches your eye, and don't forget to activate that 30-day free trial of Prime.
Steel Hunters, the mech shooter from World of Tanks' devs, gets a shutdown date just three months after releasing in early access
Steel Hunters, a free-to-play mech shooter from World of Tanks devs Wargaming, was only revealed last December.An early access release in April this year followed that Keighley Awards cameo, and just three months on, the game's been given a shutdown date.Read more
Lo-Fi Games know you've spent a billion hours with Kenshi, so they're working on making the sequel's discoveries even less predictable
Chris Hunt and Natalie Mikkelson of Lo-Fi Games recently put out a video chatting about Kenshi 2, their approach to design and, uh, their shared hatred for fondue.It's a lovely, unadorned look at game development, with Hunt and Mikkelson talking through how they basically learned to do everything on the fly, from Kenshi's beginnings to Lo-Fi Games's current size of 30 people.Read more
The Last Of Us Part 2 gets new mode nobody asked for
Naughty Dog have released a new mode for The Last Of Us Part 2 Remastered that lets you play out the events of the story in chronological order.Nobody who has ever read a single book can understand why.Read more
Dune: Awakening devs are reimbursing players for a Deep Desert patch mistake that lost folks bases and gear
If so, you may be entitled to in-game compensation from developers Funcom, who've said sorry for a Deep Desert patch "oversight" that wiped out "an unfortunate amount" of bases and gear.You won't even have to enlist the services of a friendly neighbourhood Lionel Hutz or Saul Goodman either, DA's devs are already working to send out replacement stuff to affected folks.They've also pledged to tackle the cheating and item loss due to bugs that've been plaguing the game since launch.
Gorgeous Alien-style space horror Routine is finally nearing "the finish line", despite a key departure
Routine is still alive, baby!Development team Lunar Software have finally posted an update about their first-person 80s-themed space horror, which had Craig Pearson rhapsodising about Kubrickian smoothies back in 2012.Let's all celebrate by re-watching the last trailer.
I've tested these brilliant Steam Deck cases, and it's the last day to grab one in the Amazon Prime Day sales
Amazon Prime Day is ending today at midnight, which means it's also one of the best (and final) times to grab a case for your Steam Deck.From sleek travel bags to custom shells and heavy-duty protection, I reckon I've covered every form of case Steam Deck owners could possibly want.Plus, if you're not already a member, Amazon is offering a 30-day free trial of Prime, which gives you instant access to these last chance exclusive discounts.
HP is quietly clearing out its Omen RTX 4090 PCs, and at this price, it’s at least worth a look
Sure, Prime Day is here, but in its efforts to combat Amazon’s deals, HP is offering a gaming PC deal that’s better than you’ll find on any rival store. Read more
GeForce RTX 5060 Ti graphics cards are getting Prime Day price cuts, and yes, I mean the 16GB version
The RTX 5060 Ti is easily one of the standout GPUs from Nvidia’s troubled Blackwell generation.Stick with the 16GB edition (rather than the afterthought 8GB) and it’ll comfortably handle high quality settings on 1080p and 1440p, helped along by DLSS 4 and, if you fancy it, Multi Frame Generation.It also accounted for many of the better-priced RTX 50 graphics cards at launch, and as part of Amazon Prime Day, we’re finally starting to see some further cost cutting – including to one model at Amazon UK that’s dropped below £400.
I've found some great last chance Steam Deck power banks that are discounted in the Amazon Prime Day sales
The final day to snag some epic Amazon Prime Day 2025 deals, meaning after today these power bank deals are history.These Amazon Prime Day power bank deals are all packing serious power and will last long enough to play your Steam Deck on a long journey without worrying about a low battery.I’ve rounded up the best ones for the Steam Deck and similar handhelds, and they all bring serious wattage, smart features, and enough capacity to keep you gaming through flights, commutes, or couch marathons.
My favorite microSD cards for Steam Deck have been heavily discounted in last chance Amazon Prime Day deals
This is the last day to save a small fortune on these Steam Deck-ready microSD card Amazon Prime Day 2025 deals.They're rocking serious speed, capacity, and reliability without wrecking your wallet.From our favorite Micro SD card for Steam Deck Samsung Sonic editions to rugged all-rounders from Lexar, SanDisk, and Gigastone, each card here is a beast.
Cheap gaming mouse needers: may I suggest the Logitech G305 Lightspeed, down to £28 / $28 on Prime Day
Just for a change, I’ve decided to go through a whole deal day without mentioning the Logitech G502 Hero.Okay, how about this: I go through one without actively recommending the Logitech G502 Hero, and will instead scratch the mouse advice itch by noting how its wireless cousin, the Logitech G305 Lightspeed, is down a mere £28 / $28 as part of Prime Day 2025.Read more
Valve say controversial Mount & Blade: Warband mod accused of historical revisionism was taken down by creator
The mod, reported on by Automaton yesterday, was called "Gwangju Running Man" and was a total conversion that turned Mount and Blade's medieval warfare into an apparently warped depiction of 1980's student-led protests against the military coup of Chun Doo-hwan, which were violently supressed by the country's army.Around 200 people are estimated to have been killed during the uprising.Read more
Lord Of The Rings Online players finally complete the Great Hobbit Run by incinerating themselves in Mount Doom
It's an annual event hosted by Twitch streamer BurkeBlack in which hobbit players of Standing Stone and Daybreak's absolutely ancient The Lord Of The Rings Online try to walk all the way to Mount Doom, without taking on any quests.This year is the first year the community have made it to Sauron's hellmouth, and what better way to celebrate than by throwing themselves immediately into the lava.Read more
Eve Online has changed how pilots buy and sell its fancy golden space ticket known as Plex
The change affects Plex, a shiny type of trade good you can use to re-up your subscription to the game.From now on, the ethereal digigood will be sold on a magical "global" market across the entirety of space, as opposed to being sold locally from region to region.Read more
WD’s Prime Day deals include their two fastest gaming SSDs, at up to $110 off
Yet more of our best SSDs list is turning up in the Amazon Prime Day sales, and these are some bigguns: the WD Black SN850X, for my money the best NVMe drive around, and the WD Black 8100, a newer model that’s just parked its svelte metal bum on the throne of PCIe 5.0 SSDs.It’s still worth weighing them up against the Samsung SSD deals from earlier, as some of the drives are a tiny bit cheaper for an equivalent capacity, but past testing in the RPS labs (my desk) has proven both these WD Blacks as superlative all-rounders.Read more
In this austerely beautiful moonbase management game, "your only choices will be impossible ones"
If you dream of playing a game set inside a diagram of a spacebase from an Usborne Cutaway book published in the 1990s, Kuu is probably for you.If you dream of being very sad on the Moon, tending sickly plants for 30 days by Earthlight, then Kuu is also, probably, for you.If you enjoyed Citizen Sleeper but wish it was as depressing as, say, Anoxia Station, Kuu is also also, probably, for you.
Peak modders are delivering peak modding: here's one that fills your game with the skeletons of dead players
It's called Everest, and it fills your game with other players' dead bodies.That's more bones that you'll find at Crufts, and it looks to turn the co-op climbing game from Another Crab's Treasure devs Aggro Crab and Content Warning devs Landfall into the sort of morbid fun you can usually only have by chucking a frisbee around the garden of a crematorium.Read more
I've found the best Steam Deck accessory deals during Amazon Prime Day 2025
Amazon Prime Day 2025 is delivering big savings across Steam Deck accessories, and I’ve rounded up the best of the bunch.If you fancy upgrading your storage looking for a dock to plug into your setup, or grabbing a power bank that keeps the Deck running on the move, this list covers it.Everything here is discounted, but you'll need to be an Amazon Prime member to access the best discounts.
Prime Day sees the enduringly capable AMD Ryzen 5 7600X CPU fall to its lowest prices yet
Prime Days aren’t typically a good source of gaming CPU bargains – that’s more Black Friday’s thing.Present company excluded, however, as it turns out the oldie-but-goodie AMD Ryzen 5 7600X is currently hitting all-time lows with snipped tags of £128 on Amazon UK and $161 on Amazon US.Read more
The 4K, 144Hz gaming monitor I use is £135 off for Prime Day – and $200 off in the US with no Amazon required
Because I am currently using the LG UltraGear 27GR93U to highlight some savings on the LG UltraGear 27GR93U, a very affordable yet very tidy 4K gaming monitor that I bought for myself back in March.Still for a fair bit more, annoyingly, than you can now get it during Amazon Prime Day.Read more
With Need for Speed devs working on Battlefield, EA's beloved car culture site Speedhunters seems to have shut off its engine
Now, though, it looks like the EA-owned car culture site has gone dormant, with reports claiming it might have been shut down.This news comes as development of NFS at EA is on a hiatus, with devs at Criterion having been drafted in to help deliver the next Battlefield, though exec Vince Zampella has hinted that there are still plans for the racing series going forwards.Read more
The SteelSeries Arctis Gamebuds, gaming earbuds done properly, are 26% off for Prime Day
If RPS is going to wave around Amazon Prime Day recommendations, they might as well be for hardware we’d actually use, and ideally for kit that at least one of us owns ourselves.So it is with the SteelSeries Arctis Gamebuds, true wireless earbuds that have supplanted my Sennheisers as my pocketable sound providers of choice – and are currently 26% off at both Amazons UK and US.Read more
Very good strategy sim Shapez 2 hits 1.0 release in November, including a "permanent factory" mode
Throwing caution to the winds, he suggested that it had "turned the holy trinity of factory games (Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program) into a holy quartet."They've just announced that they hope to release the automation strategy sim into 1.0 this November, together with a new mode, proper modding support, and Steam achievements.Read more
Two of Samsung’s best gaming SSDs are on sale for Prime Day, and also it’s Prime Day I guess
At this current rate of expansion, it will therefore be just seven short years before the entire solar calendar is engulfed, with even hours being replaced as a unit of measurement by the duration of Lightning Deals.My small act of civil resistance against this temporally disrespectful future is to uh, have unknowingly booked three of the four days off before Amazon announced the dates.But while I’m here, I’m still on cog-in-machine duty, which is why I’m now informing you that a couple of (actually good) Samsung NVMe SSDs are going cheap.
Best deals for PC gamers today: Early Prime Day deals include AMD Ryzen and LG 1ms gaming monitor
Ryzen 5 5500 is a killer budget CPU with 6 cores and 12 threads, which is more than enough for gaming and multitasking.Pair that with the LG 32” curved QHD monitor at 180Hz for under $200 and you're basically upgrading your setup at half price.Toss in a Samsung microSD for storage expansion for your Steamdeck or Rog Ally X, a beefy 4TB Crucial SSD for speed and space, or even the HP Victus laptop with a solid CPU-GPU combo.
Call Of Duty: WW2 pulled offline amid hacking claims after it starts messing with PCs and citing random lawyers
If you had been planning to play Call Of Duty: WW2 - an FPS widely agreed by critics to be among the games released in 2017 - maybe do not do that, for the moment, because certain versions of Call Of Duty: WW2 may randomly show you pornography, send you insulting notepad messages and, at worst, fill your computer with ransomware. Read more
Vintage Story's devs are trying to save some of cancelled Hytale's soul by turning it into an adventure mode
Well, in the case of Hytale, it looks like one of the answers is going to be a new mode in another Minecrafty sandbox game.Yep, amid much chatter about potential Hytale revivals since the news of its cancellation and Hypixel Studios' impeding closure broke last month, the devs of Vintage Story are trying to make sure that at least some of the game's spirit lives on.Read more
Dying Light: The Beast wants to make you afraid of the dark again
Dying Light: The Beast is billed as a return to horror for the undead freerunning series, which took a tumble into Ubisoft icon-farming territory with Dying Light 2: Stay Human.I can’t remember enough about either previous game to make forensic comparisons, but I can say that I spent 15 minutes of my Beast hands-on being chased by what felt like a zombie decathlon team, and it was, on the whole, quite jolly. Read more
Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS review: Windows get ye gone
Lenovo already have, launching a new version of their Legion Go S that swaps Windows 11 for the more naturally portable-minded, as-seen-on-Steam-Deck SteamOS, and instantly becomes a better handheld for it.Better doesn’t mean excellent – the Steam Deck OLED is quieter, longer-lasting, and generally easier to handle.But between its wiser choice of operating system and relatively affordable pricing, the Legion Go S SteamOS is at least a refreshing change from the succession of fiddly, expensive devices that seemingly every non-Valve manufacturer has been siccing on each other.
Stop Killing Games' proposals would make online-only games "prohibitively expensive to create", argue EU lobby group
The Stop Killing Games campaign's petition to the European Commission surpassed a million signatures last week, meaning EU policymakers may soon be debating whether developers and publishers should have the option to render online games unplayable by shutting down their servers.Video Games Europe, a trade association who represent publishers and devs, have responded by outlining why they think that choice should stay on the table.It'll be interesting to see how any proper debates on the topic go, but the response is worth reading if you're still trying to decide where exactly you stand on the issue YouTuber Ross Scott and Stop Killing Games have been campaigning about since Ubisoft pulled The Crew offline.
Dune: Awakening's latest patch takes aim at PvP border campers, and dishes out some extra Landsraad rewards
It's also added some extra rewards to the Landsraad and switched up how goodies are distributed to PvE players.This patch comes as Funcom continue to respond to player feedback about the endgame loop, having already moved to split the Deep Desert between PvP and PvE in order to placate folks who aren't a fan of the latter.Read more
Subnautica 2 is "ready" for early access says co-founder ousted from studio, but the publishers seem to disagree
One of the co-founders of Subnautica 2 studio Unknown Worlds has made a statement about the dramatic reshuffle of management at the studio, saying that it "stings" to have the game and company taken away from him by publishing overlords Krafton.He also asserts that the game is "ready for early access", but that Krafton may disagree.Read more
Game Pass will "either kill everyone else, or give up", says Dishonored and Prey dev Arkane founder
Microsoft's subscription service is "an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade," Colantonio wrote, "subsidised by MS's 'infinite money'.I don't think GP can co-exist with other models, they’ll either kill everyone else, or give up". Read more
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 gets its first teaser, and you'd better "be prepared for sadness"
Well, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, the follow-up to that Cyberpunk 2077 Netflix anime, will make you nice and miserable when it arrives.CD Projekt revealed this past weekend that the upcoming series, which'll deliver a fresh standalone tale set in Night City, is currently in production.Animation studio Trigger have returned to work on Edgerunners 2, with Kai Ikarashi directing and Bartosz Sztybor wearing many hats as writer/showrunner/producer.
This week in PC games: Tony Hawk, eerie cat miners and all the speedrunning you can eat
Did you hear about the femme fatale who had to phone tech support?True enough, all of these witticisms are an offence against nature and you should write better ones in the comments.But first, let us speak of new PC games - and PC gaming news.
Romero Games have "completely" closed doors, but there's still hope for the Doom creator's new FPS
In short, the studio say they haven't closed doors, contradicting statements made by an anonymous employee that spoke to The Journal.They confirm that the funding for the game was pulled, although they're "currently evaluating" opportunities from "several publishers" to bring the FPS "across the finish line".According to one employee who spoke to Irish outlet The Journal (the studio is based in Galway), Romero Games have now closed, via PC Gamer.
What are we all playing this weekend?
And now I want more games about (or at least prominently featuring) owls to exist.Where's the owl MOBA, damn you?In lieu of that, here are the games we're all allegedly clicking on this weekend.
Best deals for PC gamers today: Epic gaming monitors, rapid M.2 drives and a handy accessory
There’s good value across the board, from fast storage and memory upgrades to dependable gear for your setup.A few of these are steeply discounted and won’t hang around long.If you’ve been thinking about upgrading or just need reliable hardware, now’s a good time to jump in.
Create sacred, obscene or cringey medieval art in the playtest for Scriptorium, an illuminated manuscript sim
Now, you can crap on their efforts by slapping together rad illuminated pages in seconds in a video game editor.That game is Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts, a book-adorning sim from the creators of pen-and-paper (hah!)It's got a playtest running till 10th July.
Mecha Break review
In Mecha Break you play as a booby anime statuette.She is the one driving the mech.Somewhere in Mecha Break is a good game, but you have to peel away the plastic tits and pushy sales screens to find it.
Oblivion Remastered modder delivering Fallout 4-style settlement building reckons the game can still "usher in a modding renaissance"
"It felt like a blank slate, just waiting to be experimented with," MadAborModding tells me.The modder, who’s currently working on expanding an impressive proof of concept for Fallout 4-style house building into a full-blown Cyrodiilic settlement system, says that Oblivion Remastered’s behind-the-scenes differences to other Bethesda games are what drew him to it. Read more
A hero for our times: Elden Ring Nightreign boss becomes unbeatable by refusing to show up
"I am going to screw on my happy cap and try to find some upbeat/quirky news, because I feel like we could do with a bit," I declared to the RPS Slack just now, after writing our eighth layoff/cancellation post this week."Amnesia flying meat orb!No seriously, I think Animus, Ascendant Light is really onto something, here.
The Elder Scrolls Online studio's canned Blackbird game was a nimble, high-flying shooter, claims report
The new MMO from the Elder Scrolls Online developers would reportedly have been a sci-fi noir affair in which players swing around tall buildings on grappling lines, and do aerial dashes while shooting and looting.Call it Destiny 2077.Call it whatever you like, frankly, because it has been abandoned as part of wider layoffs at parent company Microsoft, the outfit that made tens of billions of dollars in profit this past financial quarter, yet has decided to jettison thousands of staff in the name of "discipline" and "continued success".
Heist game Relooted takes playful, political revenge on both museums and looting sims
Room 17 of the British Museum contains an entire tomb - a two-thousand-year-old burial site framed by featureless lavenderbox walls, like an asset conjured up in a video game editor.Known as the "Nereid Monument" for the presence of sea nymphs among the pillars, it is thought to have been constructed for the Xanthian ruler Arbinas in what is now Türkiye, and appears in the Museum care of the 19th century British archaeologist Charles Fellows, who, in the Museum's words, "brought many antiquities back to England with the full permission of the Ottoman Turkish authorities".Modern-day Turkish repatriation organisations dispute this framing, naturally, and are campaigning for the monument's return to the lands on which it once stood.
Stop Killing Games' EU petition hits a million signatures, but "a significant number" could be fake
The Stop Killing Games campaign's petition to the European Commission has hit a major milestone, surpassing a million signatures.However, the YouTuber behind this effort to stop companies from rendering games unplayable by shutting down their servers is still asking for more folks to get their pens out and sign, due to concerns about fakery.If you're out of the loop, Ross Scott originally launched Stop Killing Games back in 2024, after Ubisoft pulled racing game The Crew offline.
Subnautica 2 creators offer no explanation for sudden regime change, instead promise "no loot boxes"
The game is still planned to be a single player survival adventure with optional co-op."It will remain a single-player first experience, with optional co-operative multiplayer.No battle pass. No microtransactions."
Leading Total War: Warhammer 3's peasants to freedom from their equine oppressors
However, I'm feeling revolutionary today, so we're staging a serf uprising.Conquer the entirety of Bretonnia.Indeed, the serfs of Carcassonne had suffered too long under feudalism's gussied-up protection racket, and the battle fought for their freedom had been long and bloody.
The best handheld PCs
A few years ago this would have just been a vaguely-ranked list of whatever portables were available, but after Valve demonstrated that the palm-resting format could not just work, but actually be good, handhelds have arguably become the most interesting and rapidly-changing thing in all of PC hardware.Even Microsoft are having a go, slapping their branding on the upcoming Asus ROG Xbox Ally – though here, I’m sticking strictly to the finest handhelds that I’ve tested and that you can buy.Read more
The spirit of Zachtronics lives on in Kaizen: A Factory Story
Kaizen: A Factory Story is the next mechanical puzzler from the people who made Opus Magnum and Exapunks.A demo hit Steam a few weeks ago, but it fell down the wrong side of a conveyor belt here at RPS and we all forgot about it until it jammed up our meticulous assembly line of articles and I had to jimmy it out with a big salad fork.Nobody has played this excellent developer's new game yet."
Age Of Empires-style RTS Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros wants to be as vicious as the best boardgames
Playside are pitching Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros as an RTS for Age of Empires lovers, but it may also hook your fancy if you’re into vicious bastard boardgames.Speaking to me shortly after the new strategy project’s announcement at this year’s Summer Game Fest, game director Ryan McMahon explored how the requisite filthy traitor element of this latest George R.R. Martin adaptation will percolate through the project’s main “sandbox” mode, in which four players vie for supremacy over the Seven Kingdoms.Read more
What's on your bookshelf: The Quiet Year and Monsterhearts designer Avery Alder
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books!Every week we stray further from videogames, and every week we regain feeling in body parts we'd forgotten we had.Read more
The Sunday Papers
Sunday! What more do you need to know? "AI is here to stay" is a common refrain. Mike Cook tackles the meaning and limits of that phrase, with apt comparisons to asbestos. Read more
What are we all playing this weekend?
For every so-called RPS staff member who doesn't respond to my increasingly angry messages, I will punish them by likening them to a particular alcoholic beverage.It's a punishment because I know nothing about alcohol, and so my reasoning will be entirely askew, I'm sure.Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.
The PowerWash clean ‘em up genre is dead, long live the sci-fi undertaker sim
You'd think there'd be more video games that are explicitly about clearing away corpses, given how many corpses players produce.Getting rid of bodies is a routine problem for developers, with a variety of crafty or cursory solutions.Dead bodies in games absorb computing resources that are needed for the next enemies along.
RTX 5090 vs RTX 5080 vs RTX 5070 Ti: Which laptop GPU best deserves to top your lap?
And, more importantly, which amongst them is worth buying.This time, let us consider the three most frame-abundant laptop GPUs in Nvidia’s current stable: the GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti, all namesakes of their variably desirable desktop counterparts, and very likely the graphics chips du jour if you’re looking at the speedier end of the notebook market.Read more
Battle Prose: The finale, for-now-le
The warming wool of fire and brimstone and an end to all that is and will ever be, pulled up over arrogant fools, shivering from just having come to terms with their own mortality, afeared they'd miss out on the important parts.It is the ultimate comfort, he always said, to believe that you'll tie with creation at the finish line, celestial mechanisms sputtering out in time with your own squishy innards.And yet, he could not help himself sensing finality on the wind.
Modded Cyberpunk 2077's 1000mph flying car reverse bungee jumping should be the world’s glitchiest olympic sport
There’s a little loading bar in the top right hand corner, and occasionally the darkness gives way to momentary visions of a chrome body shell floating in limbo, accompanied by a low robotic whirr.Suddenly my view of the car comes back.It’s jiggling about, blurrily textured as though it’s travelling at the speed of light, between an empty void of sky and a featureless brown-ish disc.
Sword Of The Sea is an enveloping, but not cutting meditation on "flow", Journey and vintage Tony Hawk
Back when Matt Nava was art director for glistering mountain pilgrimage Journey, he and his colleagues at thatgamescompany took a research expedition to California's Pismo beach, a swathe of desert that rolls right up to the Pacific Ocean.The spectacle of land and ocean overlapping did a number on Nava."But it's a beach, and so the ocean is right there.
Darktide’s new Arbites class is overrunning the far future with exploding, immortal dogs
The Adeptus Arbites are – in direct contrast to the frazzled convicts you normally play as – shiny-helmeted space cops, and the fact that they cost a tenner to unlock has done little to slow their near-complete takeover of the average mission lobby.Them and their dogs, the AI-controlled Cyber-Mastiffs that very slightly elevate the Arbites’ design above a naked Judge Dredd pastiche.Read more
What's on your bookshelf?: here's to 52 more edition
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books!The RPS content management system tells me that I have used the 'Booked For The Week' tag….52 times!I have forgotten to post a few times and there was a brief hiatus, but in terms of volume at least, I'm declaring this the column's official one year anniversary.
The Sunday Papers
Last week I mentioned that I was reading Tokyo These Days, a manga about the production of a manga magazine.Ever wonder if the oversaturated trailer showcases of not-E3 and demos of Steam Next Fest actually produce a return for developers?Simon Carless's always interesting newsletter GameDiscoverCo dug into the numbers to discover the top announcements of not-E3 and who won Next Fest.
What are we all playing this weekend?
Hehe. Hohoho. Ollie couldn't dream of such devious placement. This is my column now. Videogames? Yes, several. Here's what we're playing this weekend. Read more
I saw her in MindsEye
I saw her in minds, aye.I don’t know, but in MindsEye, I can’t stop seeing her.“Could have been worse,” Robin Hood says to me, hours after I saw her, “At least she wasn’t naked, on the toilet, or naked on the toilet.”
Samsung’s no-glasses 3D monitor could rise above gimmickry, but needs stronger game support to do it
Maybe a bit of both, but in any case, Samsung is having another go with its new Odyssey 3D gaming monitor.Outwardly resembling just another 4K IPS screen, its three-dimensification of select games involves collaborations with their original developers, with the final effect being delivered without the need for any glasses or headwear at all.A combination of eye-tracking cameras and an internal array of lenticular lenses produces the 3D effect, maintains it as long as your head stays roughly centred, and at least for me, manages to avoid inflicting agony of the eyes or brain.
In case you were wondering, no, the Nintendo Switch 2’s microSD Express cards aren’t good for the Steam Deck
I swear I don’t actually have anything against the Nintendo Switch 2, other than its suspect attempt at Zoom Meetings But Games and some slight jealousy that it got DLSS support before a PC handheld did.Even so, I do feel obliged to warn Steam Deck owners – and, in fact, anyone who has any current portable PC – away from microSD Express cards, support for which is one of the Switch 2’s key storage upgrades.Read more
See you in Hell, graphics cards, as Doom: The Dark Ages' path tracing update is out today
Today’s update for the meaty shooter sequel adds a selection of path-traced lighting, shadow, and reflection options, and while that all comes with Nvidia’s mildly performance-aiding DLSS Ray Reconstruction, my testing suggests even the most framerate-rich GPUs will pay a heavy price for its shinier hellscapes.Read more
Walkable Neocities: A website about potatoes, and a thing that is happening now
As of March 2025, free web revival host Neocities has over 1,000,000 websites.There is much more internet here than any one person will ever read, and simultaneously much less internet than is needed to even begin to challenge the quanti-dominance of the lumbering, needle proboscis'd mecha Moloch sometimes referred to as the hostile internet.Not all of it is good, but much of it is real and interesting or tells a story about the person who made it.
No-one told me Battle Brothers had gladiatorial arenas and this can only end excellently
"What do you mean the game didn't save?!", Thilmann had not so much asked Slackbladder as stowed the question in a sack of rocks, spat on the sack until no moisture remained in his body, then swung the sack at Slackbladder's forehead, leaving the thief dazed and more than a little soggy."What in Odin's gammy eye flap does that even mean?!". Read more
End Of Abyss is a Dark Soulsy shooter spawned from the bowels of Little Nightmares
I myself was surprised - perhaps even appalled - to hear that other journalists had been neglecting it.End Of Abyss, you see, takes place in an underground plate-metal labyrinth where every corner is a huddle of waiting shadows, every doorway a mystery, and every ventilation fan a web of fungal grot.This is a world that feels like it's holding its breath.
What's on your bookshelf?: dispassionate analysis of the eldritch runes edition
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books!No cool industry person this week.And I have eaten nothing but cabbage-wrapped beans for a week.
The Sunday Papers
The weather is supposed to be pretty nice by Sunday afternoon, according to the forecast as I write this, which means that Sundays are for going to the park to read.I'm making my way through Tokyo These Days, a short manga series by Tekkonkinkreet and Ping Pong author Taiyō Matsumoto, about a manga editor who quits his job at a publisher after his magazine folds, but decides to enlist the creators he admires to launch something of his own.If you don't understand the Switch 2, you won't understand the modern world, argues Stephen Bush in the Financial Times.
What are we all playing this weekend?
What's that? Sorry, mate. Can't hear you over all the sighs of relief now that Summer Game Fest is over and done with. You'd better write it down instead. Here's what we're all playing this weekend! Read more
Jump Ship’s demo grants a taste of its cheerfully shambolic space raids
My personal pick of this week’s Steam Next Fest demos is Jump Ship, which you might already know as that co-operative, 'Left 4 Dead meets FTL meets Sea of Thieves' space crew shooter previously known as Hyperspace.All our previous looks at Jump Ship, including Edwin’s GDC 2024 preview, have seen it in varying states of unreadiness, with more missing parts than the game’s own spaceship after one of its many 1 vs. Loads dogfights.This public demo, however, looks and feels fairly polished, allowing it to serve as a rather moreish showcase of its mission loops.
Baby Steps isn’t about humiliation, but the joy of disobedient flesh
I felt a sense of para-Wordsworthian abandon and intimacy with rocks and stones and trees, that I haven't ever felt since.I caught a trace of that feeling in Baby Steps, the new open world fail 'em up from a team led by Bennett Foddy, in which you move each leg of a body subject to believable physics, and the challenge is therefore to walk more than two paces without keeling over. Read more
Familiar choppiness makes Dune: Awakening’s PC performance less of a smooth wormride
And yet, Awakening has turned out alright, hoisting desert exploration and ominous sci-fi atmospherics above the tedious 24/7 resource gathering that has choked out certain peers.PC performance is workable too, with enough concessions towards low-end rigs, though it’s not crysknife-sharp either: some technical mishaps need a prompt patching, while Unreal Engine 5 is up to its usual stuttering nonsense.Read more
Resident Evil: Requiem has its own version of Lady Dimitrescu, but I doubt you'll be thirsting for this hag
Resident Evil: Requiem's first trailer tied it unambiguously to the wider Resiverse, with sweeping footage of a nuked and abandoned Raccoon City, but the slice of zombie survival I saw at this year’s Summer Game Fest felt like a pocket horror experiment in the vein of P.T. and Amnesia: The Bunker.I hope it’s not a one-off.I hope the whole game is like this.
Capcom's Pragmata is a clean and pleasant lunar shooter with a touch of God Of War
Still, the game I played at this year’s Summer Game Fest didn’t seem greatly the worse for its long spell in cryostasis.It’s a slick thinking girl’s shooter and a gratifyingly bright and clicky piece of lunar set dressing, with shattering robot enemies that put me wistfully in mind of Binary Domain.Read more
Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is a moody demon parry fest, but Sekiro can sleep easy for the moment
Towards the end of my hands-off demo for Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, Capcom introduced me to a bunch of ragamuffin ninjas who moult their injured selves when struck.That's the kind of freak factor I want from an action-horror series whose last major instalment released in 2006.A generous pinch of vicious little weasels who won't fight fair, to lift this Edo-era yokai hunt above the ranks of action games that just want you to combo and parry ad nauseum.
I am enthralled by Dune: Awakening's in-game radio drama and bad sitcoms
They play chiptuney classics from the original, 1992 Dune games that will drive you slightly mad even without huffing spice.But they also include full-blown radios drama based on various backstory events which unfolded before you arrived on-planet.It is like listening to a really intense episode of The Archers on BBC Radio Arrakis.
Crimson Desert is a dork ass enormity of an open world action-RPG
Some game demos, you write up after the expo because they need a bit of reflection;some game demos, you write up immediately because they are easy to digest, even through a droning fugue of jetlag;Read more
Skyblivion project lead and GOG chat about partnering up to release the massive Elder Scrolls mod following Fallout: London's troubled success
The massive modding project that’s remaking The Elder Scrolls 4 in Skyrim’s engine has been in the works for over a decade.Having not had their hard work torpedoed by Bethesda and Virtuos’ own Oblivion remaster, its team are currently grafting hard to ensure they’re ready when the time comes to pull the release trigger.With the mod now confirmed by GOG to be arriving on the PC storefront in 2025, assuming it makes its current release goal, I reached out to Skyblivion project lead Kyle 'Rebelzize' Rebel and GOG themselves.
What's on your bookshelf?: you are safe to lick the green books again edition
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books!No cool industry person this week.Instead, fantastic news: thanks to a new device that identifies trace levels of the arsenic once used to make book covers green, you can go back to laying fat St. Bernards on every sour lime flavoured tome you see, safe in the knowledge that the ones liable to give you the rare nosebleeding condition known as the 'hungry librarian' have been safely quarantined.
The Sunday Papers
Sundays are for playing around with the Nintendo Switch 2, of course.Jon Hicks, the former fifth Beatle of RPS and current co-host of Alice Bell's post-RPS podcast Total Playtime, has launched a newsletter.It's called Screen Grab and he's beginning it with a series of missives about the not-E3 showcases.
Pondering Geoff’s orbs
Partly in the absence of real surprises, and partly because the auditorium bass notes were making me feel queasy and dissociative, I spent a lot of this year’s Summer Games Fest showcase transfixed by Geoff Keighley’s balls.I am, of course, referring to the show’s animated backdrops, in which glutinous, gleaming orbs floated like nitrogen bubbles in a cosmic brain - sometimes tossed upon a tide of marbled petro-vomit, sometimes drifting over a scree of lava lamp effluence, sometimes hovering against sherbety silver Bermudas of arches and plinths. Read more
What are we all playing this weekend?
But we can at least aspire to embody its temperament on the inside.Probably best that way - a Dualshock controller doesn't have the same oomph on a quartet of cloven hooves.So, fellow ungulates - here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
Rally Point: An immense frustration test almost overshadows Burden of Command's narrative success
Burden Of Command is a lot like me, in that it deserves a lot of love but it's too frustrating and annoying to get it for long.The concept is promising: tactical battles with a small batch of soldiers, but as a "leadership RPG" instead of a regular wargame.But wow, did this game get me yelling for a while.
Could The Witcher 4's Kelpie be the best video game horse yet? We asked an expert
Still, however excited you were about that horse, I'd wager you weren't quite as happy as Alice Ruppert - consultant on the upcoming Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, and owner of the very best website about video game horses on the internet.Ruppert's initial reaction?"Tears of joy in my eyes when they showed the slow mo horse movement".
I Just Want To Be Single!! is an aromantic dating sim that’s rewriting the rulebook
"I Just Want To Be Single!" they yell.Tsundere Studio's debut, I Just Want To Be Single!!Billed as 'aromantic, asexual, and nonbinary', I Just Want To Be Single!!'
What's on your bookshelf?: Fallen London, Pathologic 2 and Skin Deep's Bruno Dias
Did you know that adopting language altered the position of the human larynx, making us more susceptible to choking on food?Proof, then, that the only truly fitting way to leave this world is to die choking on a book.Perhaps this week's guest can recommend a good one?
What are we all playing this weekend?
The fairy lights flicker, though they have not been plugged in since January.The screens in the corner where we all pretend to work lie cracked and cold.Here's what some of us - those who remain - are clicking on.
Elden Ring Nightreign’s faster, fightier Elden Ringing still works a treat on the Steam Deck
Elden Ring Nightreign might replace its source material’s sprawling RPG exploration with a mad dash around tightly-nestled hotspots, but under the bonnet, this is still essentially just Elden Ring with a quicker sprint and character models of hitherto-unseen birdpeople.Even the system requirements are, save for a minor CPU bump, a copy and paste job, confirming the feathers aren’t even that high-poly.As a result, this spinoff runs equally well on the Steam Deck, even appearing to take advantage of the same SteamOS/Proton tweak that made Elden Ring less stutter-prone on Valve’s handheld specifically.
How space strategy sim Nebulous channels eight years in the US Navy
"Greebling" is George Lucas's term for the decoration of spacecraft models with showy, superfluous details - clumps of antennae, bulky rivets, bulging pipes, anything that whiffs of function.Speaking as the human grown from the ashes of a child who once built the Death Star out of LEGO, I do enjoy a good greeble now and then, but it very easily becomes a parody of itself - like turning a machine inside out, but none of the exposed parts are meaningfully connected.Liliana, founder of Eridanus Industries and lead developer of space tactics sim Nebulous: Fleet Command, has more practical objections to greebling, based on her eight years in the US Navy: excess surface details are an absolute dust trap for radar waves.
My Battle Brothers have resorted to stealing ham from children
There exists in this world much which, if stripped of even one of its components, would be rendered naught but a frail illusion.An insult to god and man alike.It was going to be a long day.
This week in PC games: Elden Ring Nightreign and a giantess dating sim
Today, that squirrel is dead, and it is time to work again.Here's a hissing tide of PC games slithering their way out of non-existence this week.Read more
What's on your bookshelf?: Civilization, Old World, and Offworld Trading Company's Soren Johnson
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books!I am still cross-referencing my way through Blood Meridian, both incredibly vivid prose-poetic alchemy of the profound and harrowingly mundane, and also a bit like if a bible ate a pulp paperback then shat out a second, stupider bible with at least twice the people getting severed dicks shoved in their mouths.Read more
The Sunday Papers
Criticism is cruelty, writes game developer Oma Keeling.This isn't an argument against criticism, but a plea for a more honest embrace of why we write and enjoy writing critically.As someone who, through The Sunday Papers, seems to forever be arguing for a more ruthless games press, I appreciated this.
What are we all playing this weekend?
I, on the other hand, like to start my days off by soliciting opinions from some total barmpots to remind me that I'm pretty normal, actually.On which note, it's time to talk about our weekend gaming activities.Read more
The city of Eriksholm looks captivating, but I wish it'd sneak in some new ideas
It's an upcoming adventure game about some sneaky urchins from a fictional Scandilike country in the 1900s.We've previously described it as "a bit Dunwall and a bit Desperadoes".But, well, its approach to stealth veers bland and predictable.
Anno 117: Pax Romana is aiming to be a more flexible, distinctly Roman management game
New leaders to barter and play diplomacy with.Most of all though, it allows me to discover hitherto unknown depths of petty jealously, as I realise how much nicer everyone else's city layout is compared to mine.Read more
What's on your bookshelf?: why does crispbread exist and how can I stop this state of affairs edition
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books!No cool industry person this week (I'd like requests though.No Classical Gas), but I want to get back into the habit of posting the column regularly regardless, since the comments are always a medium good time, which is the maximum amount of good time allowed on a Sunday.
The Sunday Papers
I don't know what Sundays are for, or indeed any other moment of spare time.Listlessly re-watching YouTube videos and refreshing BlueSky then feeling bad that I'm wasting my time rather than playing the games I want to play or reading the books I want to read?For 404 Media, Nicole Carpenter - former Polygon reporter - wrote about how videogame sex scenes are made.
What are we all playing this weekend?
Somebody or something keeps digging holes in the notionally shared lawn outside my block, and the neighbours who actually own their flats are mounting a witchhunt.As far as I’m concerned, all this is divine vengeance on the building owner for having somebody mow the grass twice a month.The holes are an improvement.
I keep forgetting I'm supposed to actually pay my Battle Brothers
Four from a company of ten.There may be a time, I think, when the land our descendants travel over runs small despite its vastness; when the night that now belongs to wolves and animate dead becomes as commonplace as draped tapestry.the dead, sepulchral torches in a gravecold pit.
FBC: Firebreak is a great time, for a shooter with terrible guns
Power over the control of information.The institutional power of the Federal Bureau Of Control itself, in whose brutalist, labyrinthe HQ the game is set.The power of the archetypal ideas that give the altered objects their strength.
James and Nic kick a thing: Doom: The Dark Ages edition
Along with various punches, flail strikes, and shield thrusts, most of which aren't even allowed in football.The Dark Ages notably replaces the lavishly animated glory kills of recent Dooms with faster, simpler melee strikes, so reviewer Nic and I sat down for a gentle argument over whether this was a change for a better.Read more
A last-minute SteamOS update has saved Doom: The Dark Ages on Steam Deck, and it runs surprisingly okay-ish
Over the weekend, however, a purpose-built SteamOS Preview update stepped in, making the brawly sci-fantasy shooter playable on the handheld.Just in time for its launch on the 15th, no less.My main complaint with how The Dark Ages runs on desktops is the mandatory ray tracing effects that have, compared to the hardly much uglier Doom Eternal, slowed it right down.
The Fremen are the missing link in Dune: Awakening's efforts to be more than a survival game
But what if you could place your own moisture seals, rather than just tearing open the ones left by NPCs?I'd love to play a game in which you are constantly reading the barren landscape for the shallowest of shady depressions that can be plugged and converted into shelters.Think of the attentiveness it might teach, the sensitivity to the geometry of a world that can drain your O2 bar dry in moments.
What's on your bookshelf?: Game urbanist and author Konstantinos Dimopoulos
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books!I'm currently reading Dorothy Parker, who did more for the language than I'd previously though.This week it's game city design expert and author of Virtual Cities, Konstantinos Dimopoulos!
The Sunday Papers
Sundays are for enjoying the second heatwave of the year, but what are you going to do outside if not read?Aftermath interviewed video game trailer maker Derek Lieu for his take on the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer and why it's not very good.Read more
What are we all playing this weekend?
I bought a new electric toothbrush and it oscillates so fast it does that thing where my whole mouth feels unbearably itchy.Balancing this experience against the existence of hundreds of thousands of videogames to play, and I reckon the universe comes out of it with a roughly neutral standing.here's what we're all playing this weekend!
Doom: The Dark Ages doesn’t run badly on PC, but enforced ray tracing slows the pace
I’m liking Doom: The Dark Ages more than local reviewist Nic does, possibly because spending most of 2024 remoulding my brain to learn Elden Ring has unduly engorged the part that appreciates a good parry-and-riposte.C'est la vie demons, and colleague.There is one issue that bothers me, though: why, of all the games on Bethesda’s production lines, was this chosen to be the next game that follows Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in making ray tracing effects compulsory?
Europa Universalis 5 is so complex its developers will let you automate half the game
Europa Universalis 5 was announced yesterday, the official unveiling of a grand strategy game that has been an open secret since April last year, thanks to a long-running dev diary.I got some hands-on time with an early build of the map-happy historical simulation, and I'm delighted to report that the kingdom of Korea is struggling.He died of the common cold.
Everything we know about Europa Universalis 5
Europa Universalis 5 is posturing itself as the next grandaddy of grand strategy.It follows 12 years of updates and expansions to Europa Universalis 4, so it has some catching up to do.Like its predecessors, Europa Universalis 5 will be a deeply complex game.
The anti-heroes of Grand Theft Auto 6 look sexy and dull
The open world crime 'em up looks as flashy and expensive as you might expect from a Rockstar game, and we now know more about the game's story, particularly the two sexy reprobates you'll be playing as in the streets of Vice City and the swampy countryside beyond.They are horny, jacked, thicc, and pretty as a picture of your prettiest purple petticoat.Read more
The Sunday Papers
A one-week Sunday Papers break turned into three, prompted by the seemingly endless school holiday at Easter.Polygon, one of the last video game outlets with a reputation for long form reporting and feature writing, was sold to Valnet, a content farm best known for paying writers terribly and being founded by porn peddlers.Most of the staff were immediately fired.
What are we all playing this weekend?
For me, it's the first map in The Cycle: Frontier.Something about its bright look and thick alien atmosphere, and the many hours I inhabited it, has left its fingerprints on my mind.Surely you have such a game setting too;
Apex Legends Season 25 introduces Sparrow, who will definitely kill you
His debut is scheduled for May 6th, barely enough time for EA’s ink to dry on their mass laying-off of the people that made him (fifth most played game on Steam, y’know, maybe tells you something).He’s Space-Italian, has a folding bow on his arm, and - fittingly for how I feel about this game right now - is a massive bastard.Read more
Oh no, Battle Brothers is actually incredibly unforgiving of minor mistakes
and that, I'm sure you'll understand, is why I haven't washed my codpiece in fifteen years," concluded Rumjugs with a flourish, downing the last of the gutrot in a single guzzle.Just vastly preferred having recently consumed alcohol at all times and was prepared to sacrifice a range of basic necessities and niceties to achieve it.We were all a little shaken after watching Terry barely survive the last fight, although Rick Nipples' constant sobbing over his permanently disfigured face was keeping the boys in relatively good cheer.
What's on your bookshelf?: Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books!Laziness is, in it's own way, the greatest form of charity.This week, it's Magic: The Gathering, Vanguard Exiles, and many, many more's Richard Garfield!
What are we all playing this weekend?
How am I supposed to have my favourite Saturday treat (triple milk milk bowl) without milk!There's nothing on this website about milk at all, it's all video games!I can't make a triple milk milk bowl with that!
Oblivion Remastered’s modern makeover comes with modern performance snags
It’s more or less exactly what I’d have asked from a modern take, with refreshed visuals and UX improvements bolted directly onto Oblivion’s original, famously bent chassis.This hybrid engine approach, similar to that of Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, hands off the graphical rendering gubbins to an Unreal Engine 5 layer while keeping all the game logic to a modified version of what is otherwise just the 2006 backend.Still, the performance impact of Oblivion Remastered’s new look is not to be trifled with.
With the right settings, Oblivion Remastered won’t sacrifice Steam Deck support to the graphics gods
As a Steam Deck game, I already prefer The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered to the original Oblivion, and for reasons mirroring why the Deck itself still beats newer, faster handhelds: the performance might be lower but everything, as Toddy H himself would say, just works.That said, its 2025-ified visuals do present a relatively distinct challenge.But, drop the graphics settings to their lowest, and Oblivion Remastered simply looks like bum, to the point of undermining the point of the whole 'Remastered' thing.
RPS asks: please tell me your stupidest Oblivion Remastered anecdotes so far
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, I'm delighted to report, is still incredibly stupid.I first noticed its stupidity in the starting dungeon, where one of the emperor's guards got shunted around floatily trying to contend with a jug I'd placed in his path.It might be even stupider than the original RPG, because it all looks so modern that its mush brain is thrown into sharp contrast.
Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny is a crisp remaster of a charming relic
I'm a lifelong Resi fan but relatively late-coming Capcom devotee, so I find Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny's amalgam of more famed series hallmarks fun to think about - sitting as it does at the intersection of Devil May Cry's orb-sucking fighting game combat and Resident Evil's deliberate spatial awareness, fixed camera exploration and puzzles.But I've also got some second-hand nostalgia for this 2002 action game.Read more
What are we all playing this weekend?
Edwin had the lovely idea of increasing everyone's workload this week, by suggesting that we add a bit more meat to the bones of our responses this weekend, given that it's Easter here and we've got Friday and Monday off work.Which means more time to fill with games, in theory!Read more
Endless legends: how Amplitude bought their independence back from Sega
Sega are among the big games publishers who are currently feeding large swathes of their business to the flames of profit growth.In September 2023, they cancelled Creative Assembly’s looter shooter Hyenas and announced plans to cut costs across Sega Europe.Amplitude’s co-founder and CEO Romain de Waubert de Genlis tells me, however, that the Amplitude buyout wasn’t an emergency response to Sega’s restructuring.
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound will set your village on fire, as is only proper
But in the upcoming Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, it's going back to 2D, largely without Ryu.Your village will be burnt to the ground anyway."Because what would be a Ninja Gaiden game without it?" jokes game director David Jaumandreu of The Game Kitchen, who've been hired by Team Ninja to render those flames in old-school pixel art.
I want to film The Lord Of The Rings in Hollywood Animal, but my writers keep trying to make porn instead
When I inherited - pardon me, founded Endless Bear Studios at the flickering end of the Roaring Twenties, I had a dream.And that dream was to film Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy 30 years before Peter Jackson was born.Its one of many will-be classics I hope to "pre-make", as it were.
I got my least favourite Battle Brother immediately mutilated and I feel great about it
It was always going to end badly for Thillmann The Braggart. 30 gold, he told the brigands.Seconds after he raised the first reeking spoon of what he suspected was mostly reindeer shit to his lips, he projectile vomited straight in the face of their leader, and they jumped him.Death comes quickly in the turn-based tactics and open-world merc work of Battle Brothers, and victory comes hard.
What's on your bookshelf?: Mouthwashing's Johanna Kasurinen
While cleaning under my bed recently, I once again discovered my copy of the smallest physical book I have ever owned.It's a tiny handheld edition of the I Ching.I mean, I haven't actually read it, but wisdom is owning at least one very small book, is what I assume the gist is.
The Sunday Papers
Here's a roundup of some good writing from the internet last week.This list of Games Writing Words I Hate by Riley MacLeod at Aftermath sets out some words games journalists would do well to avoid.I wrote a similar list over ten years ago, and it's interesting to see many of the examples ("immersive", "IP", "franchise") are still used by enough writers to merit continuing complaints from professional editors like MacLeod.
What are we all playing this weekend?
Lots of good newsies this week from Triple-I, weren't there?Catching up on it all after the fact, I was making lots of appreciative rumbles.Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
James and Nic kick a thing: Sloclap's Rematch edition
Sifu and Absolver team Sloclap stuck a release date on their multiplayer footie game Rematch today - June 19th.Meanwhile, we've been shouting at each other in joy and defeat - sometimes both in the same six seconds - in the open beta.I'm leaving the article name open to sequels in case James and I ever kick a different thing together.
Endless Legend 2 is everything I love about 2014's best 4X, but on a map that's constantly changing
The legend goes that in the 12th century, King Canute plonked his throne down on the seashore and commanded the tide to go out, thereby empirically demonstrating to all the toadies at court that he was not, in fact, God Almighty.You don’t need to order the ocean to piss off in Endless Legend 2: it’s already in headlong retreat.Read more
The Sunday Papers
Sundays are for being on holiday, but that doesn't mean we can't produce a roundup of some links before we depart.For The Guardian, Sarah Thwaites spoke to developers of indie game hits about the freedoms of success and the pressure to repeat it.Read more
What are we all playing this weekend?
In addition to the excellent tales of game-playing and cat-contentedness we always get, I'd like anyone who's interested in partaking to tell me: what's the very best thing about that genre you don't like?What is it that always draws you back in before you remember that these aren't your sorts of games?While you ponder, here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
The UK games industry has a class problem - here's how one organisation is trying to fix it
"Last year we ran a big games careers festival in Downham, on the border of Lewisham and Bromley in London, in a leisure center in the heart of a very deprived community that hasn't seen anything like this in that space," Into Games CEO Declan Cassidy tells me over a call.A UK-based non-profit focused on enhancing social mobility in the UK games sector, Into Games reported last year that, in terms of socioeconomic access, game development has one of the worst records "of any creative or technical sector".Read more
Open worlds can afford to be small, as long as they feel vast
Last year Assassin's Creed Shadows associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois made headlines by revealing that Ubisoft's latest open world game had a "smaller" map than its predecessor, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.He compared it instead to Assassin's Creed Origins, which recreates roughly 80 square kilometres of ancient Egypt, next to Valhalla's exhausting 250 square kilometre expanse of land and sea.And secondly, the realisation that I don't really know what "bigger" and "smaller" mean in a video game, and I'm not sure anybody else does either.