Rock Paper Shotgun News, Tips, Tricks, Ideas

If you’ve been wondering what Valve’s been working on as their next game after Counter-Strike 2, the answer may be at hand. Details and screenshots for Deadlock, a third-person hero shooter with MOBA elements, have seemingly leaked out of a recent closed playtest, revealing a blend of Overwatch, Dota 2 and Valve’s own Team Fortress 2.

War never changes, and either does Fortnite's love of a crossover. Thus, Fallout and Fortnite are colliding as the post-apocalyptic RPG heads to the battle royale shooter’s upcoming next season.

As you might’ve heard, Hades 2 is out in early access, offering up the much-anticipated sequel to Supergiant’s mythical (and delightfully thirsty) roguelite. Though the sheer amount of polish and Stuff in even its pre-release form might have you thinking that a full 1.0 release can’t be too far down the line, the game’s creative director reckons we’ve still got around a year to wait before it’s considered all finished up.

Around a week after Microsoft shuttered a number of beloved studios with a track record of making excellent single-player, story-driven games, their newly-owned arm of Activision has revealed a brand new studio. Working on a new series of story-driven, triple-A games.

Creative Assembly, the studio best known for their strategy Total War series, are rumoured to be working on a licensed Star Wars title. ‘Rumoured’ is the key word here, mind. Dualshockers credit “a reliable source” with the information that “three new Total War games are currently in development,” and that “one of the three new projects is expected to be a Star Wars-themed Total War game.” There’s currently no further information beyond that, I’m afraid, although I’ve reached out to Creative Assembly for comment.

You might remember Enotria: The Last Song as the Italian-inspired Soulslike that shifted its release date from June to August to avoid Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree... but found itself nestled next to Black Myth: Wukong. Well, scratch that August release, as now it's been shifted back to September instead! But hey, there's a demo coming out real soon that'll hopefully give us a better sense of what the game's like. I imagine it'll involve a lot of fighting spindly monsters, dying, and resurrecting at whatever object they've decided will be the equivalent of Dark Souls' bonfires. Likely something Leonardo da Vinci made or drew or invented. That man's stats were specced high.

Open world crime-a-thon GTA 6 will release next “fall”, according to publisher Take-Two Interactive’s latest earning report, via Eurogamer. This narrows the previously announced release window of “2025” down by, uh, infinity I suppose? A year is an effectively endless stretch in terms of release calenders. But “Fall”, despite not being a real season, is something I can work with.

I've clocked up nearly 400 hours playing BioWare's big fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is not a stat I'm particularly proud of. I'm not ashamed either, partly because, as has been identified by artist Corey Brickley, via the Maw, there's a lot of filler. Brickley has collated a list of suggested mods to slim down Dragon Age: Inquisition from a potentially 80 hours-long epic to a trim 40 hour story-focused romp, which means you might be able to play through it again in time for the launch of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf - which is a direct sequel to Inquisition.

Hell-wandering roguelike Hades 2 has received its first proper patch, and it does everything the developers said it would. You now sprint faster and, significantly, you can gather more than one type of crafting resource per run (as long you've unlocked the tool that lets you gather that resource). This means Melinoë can now go fishing, dig up seeds, mine silver, and gain the trust of errant shades, all in a single night's work. There is a catch though.

Being offered a 4X game for free is definitely one of those cursed-monkey-paw situations. Sure, you’re saving physical currency, but at what price in terms of that most treasured and least tradeable of commodities, time? In the hours it takes to properly clean out a 4X game, you could probably build an empire yourself. OK, not a huge empire. An empire the size of the Vatican or the Principality of Sealand, perhaps. Maybe an empire that only covers the distance between your desk and your fridge. But an empire nonetheless. Go on, pronounce yourself God-Tyrant of your bedroom while you download Amplitude’s Endless Legend, which is 100% off on Steam till 10am PDT, 1pm EDT and 6pm BST on May 23rd.

Fans of odd games with multiple endings and themes of identity and oppression, rejoice! Or, maybe, not rejoice. Time will tell. In the latest issue of Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, Yosuke Saito, the series producer for Nier, teased that he might be working on something new with Yoko Taro and Keiichi Okabe, the director and composer for the Nier series, respectively.

Absurd Ventures, the company started by Rockstar Games co-founder and head writer Dan Houser after he left said juggernaut, are working on a new "open world action-adventure" game. That's according to recent job listings on Absurd's website (cheers Gamesradar for the spot), which mention such a thing. And to be honest, are any of us surprised? Not really. Will the finished product resemble GTA to some degree? I imagine yes. Am I happy about this? Yeah, go on then.

When they’re not banding together to take on Sony or attempting to reinstate fired community managers, it turns out that Helldivers 2 players just want to make sure everyone feels included. Included in the co-op game’s endless war of attrition to protect Super Earth from bugs, robots, and basic awareness of military propaganda, and included in just having mates. Enter player ‘dremskiy’, whose tragic booting from a private game in which they just wanted to make friends has resulted in so many friend requests that their Steam account won’t accept any more.

Our Edders, the RPSer I’d most trust to help me gank a rival covenant member with hammers, reckoned Pinocchio soulslike Lies Of P was an “instant must-play” in his review, and I was pretty fond of it myself. We already know that we’re due a sequel at some point the future, thanks to impressive sales. Director Jiwon Choi previously teased some DLC concept art, and now it looks like we’ll be seeing that DLC by the time the year’s out, according to a fiscal report.

As Ubisoft revealed Assassin's Creed Shadows they also released their earnings report for the financial year 2023-2024. Buried among the chatter of "profitable growth trajectories" and "B2B partnerships" was a brief note about looter shooter The Division Heartland. "Ubisoft has decided to stop development on The Division Heartland," it reads, "and has redeployed resources to bigger opportunities such as XDefiant and Rainbow Six." Ah, so this is the games industry equivalent of being summarily dumped by text.

After being unceremoniously thrown into the spotlight yesterday with a pre-reveal leak, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been given a proper unveiling via a flashy cinematic trailer, confirming both its leaked November release date and revealing that we’ll be playing as two protagonists for the first time in the series since Syndicate almost a decade ago. One of those heroes will also be the series’ first playable real-life figure: the African samurai Yasuke.

After teasing an upcoming chapter inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, Dead by Daylight has revealed its next killer pulled from the pages of the fantasy pen-and-paper RPG: Vecna, long-running mega-baddie and inspiration for the Stranger Things villain. He’ll be voiced by Critical Role dungeon master Matthew Mercer and haunt a new dungeon map, where you’ll be able to do battle as new elf and bard survivors able to roll a literal d20 when they crack open treasure chests.

Alzara Radiant Echoes is a clear love letter to golden age JRPGs, pulling inspiration from the likes of Golden Sun and Lost Odyssey for a 3D turn-based RPG set in a Mediterranean fantasy world. Dark Souls composer Motoi Sakuraba is on board, along with Genshin Impact and Fire Emblem artist Yoshiro Ambe. And if that hadn’t already sold me already, developers Studio Camelia are also paying tribute to the best Final Fantasy game: FFIX, obviously.

We’re just a couple of days away from Ghost of Tsushima’s PC release date, as the former PlayStation exclusive prepares to drop its Director's Cut - including its expansion and multiplayer DLC - on Steam. Having recently cleared up the question around whether you’ll need to sign in with a PSN account after the Helldivers 2 debacle - yes, if you want to play the co-op mode - developers Nixxes and Sucker Punch have now revealed that the login requirement will mean multiplayer won’t work on Steam Deck.

Wayfinder, currently a free-to-play RPG developed by Airship Syndicate, is undergoing a pretty drastic change in its upcoming Echoes patch. Right now it's a live-service game with microtransactions, but soon it'll continue as a paid co-op RPG with no in-game monetisation. And that's alongside promised tweaks to how progression works, too. Huh. It's often you see paid games go free-to-play, but this is an unexpected switcheroo.

I have a couple of takes on Nico Papalia's new RPG Athenian Rhapsody, which launched on Steam yesterday and still has a demo. The first is that it's a brighter, glitzier version of Toby Fox's Undertale that looks like it belongs on Gameboy Advance - a retro parody created in GameMaker whose turn-based combat houses many an inventive minigame, and whose writing doesn't so much break the fourth wall as moonwalk along the parapet, showering the player in poop, anime tropes and off-colour mental health advice.

The Sims 4 is nothing if not a teetering jenga tower of updates and add-ons and DLC packs, and the latter half of 2024 will be no exception for EA's life sim king. Yesterday saw the release of an update to the base game's swimwear, kicking off the updates teased in the recently-revealed new roadmap, Season Of Love. The roadmap video's vibe is that it and its partner saw you from across the bar and wondered if you'd be interested in joining them, and it kind of weirds me out.

I think most would agree that the artist formerly known as Twitter has never been in more need of a thermonuclear cleansing. The Musk era has transformed what was already fondly known as a hellsite into something at once more obnoxious and sadder, whether you're talking about the web3 grifters or the resurgent debate-me cryptofascists or the recommendation algorithm's perceptibly greater enthusiasm for quote-tweet flamebait.

Old-school FPS adventure The Explorator contains much more intense shooty violence than the adorable lizardy folk that populate it might immediately suggest. I really want to use the word ‘zany’ without irony here to describe its hand-drawn 2D style and animations, but I’m afraid that ship has long since sailed into the sun. I’ll go with ‘caffeinated’ I think. Like the Adult Swim cartoons it reminded me of, it’s got a sense of the sardonic and a penchant for violence, but still comes from a place of having recently devoured several bowls of suspiciously colorful cereal. Anyways, forget all that. I mentioned an FPS in the title, so I must assume you’re here for the violence.

Look, you've had 15 years to play that well-regarded time-bending puzzler sitting in your Steam library, staring at you this whole time. Well, now you can have another 15 years. Braid Anniversary Edition is out on Steam now, a high definition remastering of a classic indie. It got stuck in time following a few delays but it's finally defrosted now. The sharper look will appeal to pixel perfectionists, but there are also 40 new levels for serial rewinders. And - for those interested in the thought processes of designer Jonathan Blow - a bunch of developer commentary.

Do you love the smell of napalm in the morning? If so, you'll probably love the smell of Valheim's Ashlands biome, which has just launched for all players after a period of beta testing. Sadly, my computer is incapable of producing smells beyond a faint reek of encrusted pasta sauce and regret, but if it did, I imagine I'd even now be basking in the aroma of burning bone and feather, because that is what the 10 new creatures you'll meet in the Ashlands consist of, broadly. Shout-out in particular for the monster that resembles a combusting sink clog with spider legs. Very Possum-esque.

Thrones of Decay - the expansion for strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 that finally made it viable to steamroll the old world with a doomstack of 20 tanks, just as Franz intended - just released around three weeks ago, but developers Creative Assembly are already on their third hotfix. This one is mainly aimed at re-balancing an overly demanding new grudge system for the Dwarfs that punished players for stopping to enjoy a swift pint of Bugman’s instead of constantly being on the offensive, but also includes so many other fixes it’s veering into larger patch territory.

Minecraft is turning fifteen years-old and to celebrate Mojang are running fifteen days of giveaways from May 15th until May 29th. Apparently each day will offer up "a new free Character Creator item representing a different year of Minecraft history."

Prison Architect 2 was delayed last month from a planned May release date until September. Now it's changing developer. Double Eleven are parting ways with publisher Paradox Interactive after nine years working on the series, and a new studio, Kokku, are taking over.

Video games must be three hours-long or infinite and nothing in between. The latest Steam event is designed to celebnrate the latter. The Endless Replayability Fest runs from now until May 20th, "celebrating games and demos you can play over and over again."

A group of former XCOM and Civilisation developers have co-founded a new studio, Midsummer Studios, who plan to “revitalise the life sim genre” with their debut release. The latter doesn’t have a title yet, and is described as “a next-gen Life Sim that emphasizes player-driven narratives, allowing communities to share memorable moments that grow out of the creativity of players themselves.” According to former XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns director Jake Solomon, it’s “focused on the drama of modern life, where our players will write meaningful stories just by playing, and then share those stories with the world.”

Buckle up. A bunch of players are competing to cross the finish line of a brutally difficult tower of racetracks in racing game Trackmania, with a prize pool of $30,000 waiting for the first three drivers to reach the top. The course is a huge, winding gauntlet made of pieces suspended in midair, and even expert players have fallen from their positions over 1000 times, their cars hurtling back to the bottom of the tower to start again. The top contenders are currently trying to crack a difficult spot to reach the 12th floor, at which point the course will reveal unknown territory. They seem a little tired, which is not surprising. They are 11 days into the event.

As promised and/or threatened, depending on your perspective, open world game Fallout 4 has gotten some new graphics tweaks and bug fixes to smooth out the bumps caused by its previous “next gen update”. The update broke a bunch of mods, delayed a few interesting overhaul projects like Fallout London, and generally made everyone shake their fists at the sky and shout “Howaaaard!” Remember folks: auteur theory unduly credits a single creative for a group effort - the dice that Todd rolls every time he decides whether or not to break the game are also clearly to blame here.

The only thing I’ve stuck to regularly over the last twelve years is breathing, and I often forget to do even that. So it’s with all the awe and appreciation in the world that I dove into the demo for retro RPG Whispers In The Moss. It's been in development for twelve years, from solo dev Uncultured Games. It's set in a vaguely ancient Rome-inspired fantasy world brought to life through intricate and inventive ASCII, and scored with homages to the classics. Ah, but how does it play? You exclaim with evident interest, I assume.

Greek god pulverizing simulator Hades 2 is getting its first patch "later this month", say the developers. Two things are on their to-tweak list. First, something might change about the way resource gathering tools are used (the pickaxe you use to mine silver during a run, for example). Second, and perhaps more significant, is an upcoming change to the way Melinoë's dash and sprint work. We don't know exactly what that change is but, according to Supergiant, it has something to do with your witchy batterer's "distinct style".

I've played little of legendary survival sim The Long Dark, or The Short Dark, as I guess it has proven for me. I fell off the game after succumbing to my first wolf. But I've sampled enough to know that adding a "Misery Mode" to the game is sort of like upending a bucket of water over a drowning person. More misery in The Long Dark? Oh thank god, that's just what this notoriously easygoing wilderness adventure has been missing. And what's this, developers Hinterland are introducing a new predator, the Cougar, which will move into any area you're fond of and compete over territory. Finally, a bit of friction for what has previously been a stroll in the woods.

Elden Ring is already home to a lot of rotten creatures. Serpent snails that spit at you, ulcerated spirits with bark for skin, a big pair of hands. Now we know of another rotten creature who's going to join the roster when the Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC drops next month: a bloke who's head would make for an excellent lottery draw.

Genuinely legendary game designer Ron Gilbert – whose works include the classic adventure game Monkey Island, the RTS Total Annihilation (as producer), and the term “cutscenes” – is making a new game.

A while back Ubisoft revealed about a billion Assassin's Creed projects. The first of these to leap into the carefully placed haystack of release was Mirage, which I liked. Up next, it seems, is the artist formally known as Assassin's Creed: Codename Red. All we knew about red was that it would be set in feudal Japan, something fans have been clamouring for for literal years. Now we know that it's an AC game set in feudal Japan called Assassin's Creed Shadows, and it's getting an "official cinematic world premiere trailer" debut on YouTube tomorrow, at 5pm BST.

Deep in my heart I know that Hall of Fame-type accolades are largely just a way of dressing up a way of marketing your awards show/museum/whatever, but I also like to occasionally cast away the cynic in me and imagine a world in which this industry’s most important games and creators are rightly recognised, celebrated and preserved rather than being locked away in the vault of billion-dollar companies and left to rot. Imagine!

After rebooting Final Fantasy 7 as the trilogy of Remake, Rebirth and Really, You Went With That? (TBC), Square Enix are now planning to reboot themselves. Among the publishers’ revamped approach to making money - following a recent drop in profits, per their latest financials - is a more “aggressive” approach to bringing their games to more platforms than specific consoles (in other words, PlayStation) as exclusives, with a particular focus on “win[ning] over PC users”.

The last few weeks I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube videos (thanks, Evo Japan), and noticing that adverts during videos a) seem to pop up every 30 seconds or so and b) then last for an unskippable 30 to 60 seconds. My frustration with being bombarded by YouTube ads in videos for which I pay nothing to watch - meaning that I understand the necessity for ads of some kind to support creators and pay server bills - came to mind as I read about EA’s plans to explore inserting advertising into games, which I pay up to £70 a pop to play.

Almost 14 years to the day after Rockstar’s cowboy epic Red Dead Redemption released on consoles, and coming up on five years after its sequel beat it to PC, it looks like the original Red Dead might finally get a PC release.

This news post leaves me in a quandary, readers, because I will need to write a swear word for the sake of full journalistic transparency, but Google’s algorithms tend to frown on sweary articles. On the other hand, Google’s algorithms don’t like it when you spend whole intros handwringing about Google’s algorithms, either, so let’s stop, er, faffing around and speak of Doom. Id Software parent company Zenimax recently trademarked “IDKFA”, a string of letters that will be of deep significance to original Doom players, and which may therefore be evidence of an impending announcement.

The former lead writer of charming super-fascist simulator Helldivers 2 is working on a strategy and tactics RPG in the vein of Nintendo and Intelligent System's Fire Emblem games, which aren't available on PC and as such, are a complete mystery to you, a lifelong desktop warrior who would sooner cut their hand off than suffer it to brush against one of those filthy Nintendo witches, I mean Switches.

ROBOBEAT is the third one of these new-fangled rhythm FPS games I’ve played - after BPM: Bullets Per Minute and Metal: Hellsinger - and the first one I’ve actually clicked with. The concept evidently appeals to me enough to try out those other two, but I guess that I’m simply too much of a rebel-maverick-disruptor to play to the stiflingly enforced rhythms of somebody else’s drum. Something about ROBOBEAT’s roguelike shooting feels different though.

Back in the late 90s when all of you NORMIES were playing Diablo, I was playing a little-known Konami ARPG called Azure Dreams, which has alas never escaped PlayStation prison. It's a grid-based, upwardly mobile roguelitey dungeon crawler set in a big tower, each floor a semi-randomised maze of monsters (which you can capture), traps and pick-ups, where player and creature actions happen simultaneously.

Cheese and loyal pets (two important items on Maslow's hierarchy of needs) have been added to the co-op survival crafting game Abiotic Factor. The dairy product manifests as various suspiciously coloured cheese wheels which you can cook and eat, while loyalty comes in the form of freakish pets that can now follow your every move. The pets themselves are technically not new to Abiotic Factor, but their player-tracking behaviour is. "There is, as far as we know, no limit to how many pets can follow you at once," say the devs. Hmmm. I wonder if any scientifically minded folks will test such a hypothesis.

There aren't many ways left to put a twist on Stardew Valley, but suffixing it with "in space!" oughta do it. Little-Known Galaxy is out in a week, and currently has a demo on Steam, where you can sample many of the delights that you're used to from a Stardewlike when you're new in town: meeting the locals, growing potatoes, and tidying up the place. Also, raising alien pets, seeking out new life, and new civilisations... It all takes place on a spaceship, you see, and this has some ramifications to playing the game beyond reskinning everything to be shiny metal instead of picturesque mud. It's an intriguing proposition.

What if Scorn, but it's one that your mum got you for Christmas? That's easy, it's Necrophosis, baby. Much like Scorn, Necrophosis is also part-inspired by the dystopian surrealist works of Zdzisław Beksiński, which means lots of plucking brains out of sinewy bodies and plopping them into fleshy receptacles. There's a demo out now and while it's not outstanding, it tickled my curiosity more than I thought it would.

Brass-blasting rhythm game Trombone Champ honked its way into our hearts when it released in 2022. Since then, it's garnered a dedicated fanbase that have kept its spit-valve full to bursting with creations like this Final Fantasy 7 mod. Trombone Champ mods are special among rhythm games for consisting of two elements: the button-tapping composition of the song itself, and the background visuals. You honk-tap away while unicorns or giant close-ups of full English breakfasts cavort in the background. Although, if your breakfast is cavorting, you probably want to cook it a bit longer.

Instruments Of Destruction goes to the trouble of having a voiceover offer a preamble to each of its missions, but I don't need it. Its launch trailer knows I don't need it, as its own voiceover makes clear: "Take this vehicle, destroy those buildings. Do I really need to explain why?"

Samurai action-adventure Ghost Of Tsushima Director's Cut is due to launch on PC this coming Thursday, May 16th - but it'll be available on Steam in nearly 180 fewer countries than expected. That's because its online features will require players to sign-in to a PSN account, and PSN accounts are not available in those countries. This is effectively the same issue that recently enraged Helldivers 2 players.

Warner Bros., owners of the now-defunct Adult Swim Games publishing label, have contacted some developers about returning ownership of their game's Steam pages. The developers of both Small Radios Big Televisions and Duck Game shared the news on X yesterday. It's a seeming reversal of Warner Bros. stated policy back in March, when all Adult Swim Games seemed destined to be delisted.

Having brought the likes of Resident Evil’s Nemesis, Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head, Stranger Things' Demogorgon and Alien’s Xenomorph to its one-versus-many game of deadly hide-and-seek, Dead by Daylight is digging back into the vaults for its next classic killer. This time, it’s not horror video games or scary movies serving as inspiration for DBD’s next chapter, but 50-year-old tabletop fantasy RPG Dungeons & Dragons.

What is it Wendy Cope wrote? “Bloody Fallout 4 patches are like bloody buses. You wait half a decade for one, and as soon as that one breaks everything, Bethesda releases another just days later.” Yeah, pretty sure that’s it. Anyway, Fallout 4 will get another patch for the near decade-old game next week, presumably to help fix a lot of the problems its long-awaited “next-gen update” introduced two weeks ago.

The Rogue Prince of Persia, a game that is pleasingly candid in choosing its name for a roguelite Prince of Persia spin-off, has been delayed. It turns out that developers Evil Empire - they of very good roguelite platformer Dead Cells - saw the Hades 2 train steaming down the tracks, and decided to sensibly dodge-roll out of its way.

Harken to me, serfs! There's a big new patch for Manor Lords now available in beta testing for all players. Developer Greg Styczeń has blogged about it in depth. Yes, this is one of those update changelogs, the one that keeps on scrolling with hypnotic insistence till at last you tear your eyes away and look around and oh hell, it's night and why am I standing over this altar, holding a skewered doll?

As I have now casually mentioned in about 400 news posts, I'm moving flat soon. During the quest for a new flat - a quest I would slot somewhere between return to Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 and the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows in terms of overall hopefulness and unpleasant surprises - I toyed briefly with the idea of living in a mobile home.

The director of Paradox’s grand sci-fi strategy game Stellaris has insisted that the studio’s use of any AI-generated assets will be “ethical”, after revealing that latest expansion The Machine Age features AI voices for characters and used AI-generated art and text during its development.

Halo and Destiny developers Bungie have released their classic shooter Marathon for free on Steam, with sequels Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity to follow. The Steam ports are the work of the celebrated Aleph One community developers, who've kept Bungie's old Marathon 2 game engine going as an open source project - and who still have PC ports of all three games available on their own site, if you'd rather not truck with Steam.

Pteranodon-fanciers and Stegosaur-whisperers, please throw your velociraptor-skin hats skyward in adulation. Frontier have partnered with Universal to make a third Jurassic World videogame. It's one of three new management games inbound from the Elite Dangereux developer over the next few years, including a game based on one of Frontier's own intellectual properties.

Open world fantasy RPG Runes emits a deeply powerful aura. I can tell it’s deeply powerful because MSI Afterburner’s fan control immediately went mental after I loaded up its free Steam combat demo. What do you mean ‘unoptimised’? That alarming sound is simply my computer shaking with awe at the fearless flippancy required to leave enemies fully untextured so they resemble Metal Gear Solid’s cyborg ninja. The promise of an indie fantasy RPG drew me in, but I must admit, I almost didn’t bother writing about this upon learning the demo is just a pre-Kickstarter combat slice. But something about it entrances me. What it lacks in textures, it makes up for in sheer moxy. You can’t optimise moxy! You can either make MSI shudder in terror or you can’t.

Role-playing musical Stray Gods is getting DLC in which you'll play as sorrowful ghostly rocker Orpheus, the developers have announced. You briefly meet Orpheus in the base game while playing as leatherclad muse Grace, finding him moping in the underworld, eyes dripping with glam rock mascara. In the DLC he makes a musical comeback on earth, alongside messenger god Hermes. I've not stumbled on Orpheus in the other mythical game of this season, Hades 2 (he showed up in the first Hades but there's no sign he's reappearing in the sequel). So it looks like fans of the ancient Greek sadboi will have to flock to Summerfall's expansion when it comes out this summer.

“I like the look of Prey but I haven’t picked it up yet,” sounds the lament of the perma-wastrel, content to watch life’s most precious resource tick away then dissolve into the ether, never to return. “Looks good but it’s still 25 quid on Steam” sounds the cry of the fool unaware that all their possessions are but substanceless adornments to a life hollow for not having played, arguably, the only good video game ever made. “I didn’t like Prey anyway,” blowfish-ly puffs the deeply incorrect naysayer, unaware that they will never be invited to any of my birthday parties. Well, no excuses now*. Fanatical are doing a thing where you can buy FPS imsim Prey and two others from a respectable selection for a fiver.

Good news DayZ fans, there's a new map inbound that'll make survival even tougher than it already is! That's right, the upcoming Frostline DLC adds the Sakhal archipelago, home to a rugged environment where you'll battle against the cold and attempt to shoot nasty players at the same time. Oh, there are also volcanoes that prove an extra threat, too. And new diseases. Wonderful.

Former Microsoft senior PR lead Brad Hilderbrand has blogged about the recent closure of Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin, making a familiar case that Microsoft’s gaming division are now expected “to cut expenses to the bone” in the wake of the wildly expensive acquisition of Activision Blizzard and amid slowing growth of the Game Pass subscription business. In Hilderbrand’s view, Game Pass will likely never be sustainable or profitable. Microsoft’s only chance on this front, he says, is “to put all the world's biggest games on the service” – namely, Call of Duty, which still earns hundreds of millions annually in direct sales, or GTA 6, which, hahahaha.

Ah, it feels like only yesterday that Microsoft shut down Tango Gameworks, creators of Hi-Fi Rush, and now here's Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, telling Microsoft staff at an internal townhall meeting that "we need smaller games that give us prestige and awards" - a sentence we might plausibly lengthen to "...like Hi-Fi Rush".

I spent this morning being pseudo-profound about Animal Well and pseudo-elegaic about Tango Gameworks, so now it's time to get back to the Real Business - being a pseud on the subject of videogame gun balancing.

How to best describe strategy game Be the Ruler: Britannia when its alchemic reduction of traditionally full-on genres is what drew me to its free Steam prologue in the first place? A less demanding Manor Lords? A more casual Crusader Kings III? Total War with training wheels? It’s got shades of all these games, but thrown together with a wonderfully vibrant wood craft art style. It ends up as something I feel is going to be a lot more approachable for players who like the idea of massive medieval simulations but don’t care to spend time reading a Magna Carta-fat wiki to learn exactly what pop growth percentage is. I know what it is, and most days I wish I’d saved that brain space to e.g learn how to keep house plants alive instead.

Like us, you’re probably still reeling from Tuesday’s news that Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango and Prey’s Arkane Austin are getting shuttered by Microsoft. According to Bloomberg, these closures were just a part of a “widespread cost-cutting initiative” that’s still underway. All signs point towards more cuts to come, basically. ZeniMax studios seem to be the main target.

Among Us, the super popular game where you control a little bean guy to bamboozle your pals, is getting a bunch of new things this year. Developers Innersloth unveiled the game's 2024 roadmap, which promised new roles, lobby tweaks and better "Bean Fashion" among a few other bits and pieces.

Ready for a sentence that could only apply to the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink pop-culture smorgasbord of modern-day Fortnite? Here we go! A rucksack containing Star Wars’ Yoda has been temporarily banned from the battle royale game, after crashing games when players wearing the green Jedi master on their back do the Zoidberg Scuttle emote from Futurama.

It’s coming up on three years since the sequel to Darkest Dungeon hit early access, and over a year since it exited early access into 1.0. That means, however you count the days, it’s been a long time coming for one of the original game’s features to find its way into Darkest Dungeon 2: mod support.

The next Battlefield game after the underwhelming Battlefield 2042 will continue to lean on the series’ evolution into a live service offering, the CEO of EA has said, while revealing that the largest development team in the series’ history is currently working on the upcoming shooter.

Despite being hugely allergic to horses - my eyes once swelled up so severely at a local fair my wife had to guide me home - I continue to be absolutely spellbound by the animals. I’ve been rewatching The Lord of the Rings this week and I’ve been genuinely gripped by watching professionally trained horses galloping across the vistas of New Zealand, rearing up against tennis balls representing CGI orcs and charging down the incredibly steep slope next to Helm’s Deep. Not to mention my love of just riding endlessly in a direction on horseback in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey (helped by Kassandra's wonderful command of "Phobos!" to summon her mount).

A recent update for procgen whodunnit sim Shadows of Doubt added "Sharpshooter Assassins" with high-powered rifles to the game's glowering alternate-1980s cities, with players having to work out the killer's vantage point by deducing a bullet's trajectory, before proceeding to a secondary crime scene to search for a murder weapon and witnesses. The prospect of snipers certainly adds menace to the game's forensic sandboxing. The trouble is, the shooters aren't always as sharp as they could be.

Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, the next entry in the series of beloved dating sims with rpgs crudely affixed with Blu Tack to their walls, is set to arrive by the end of March next year. That’s according to an updated product slate released as part of a recent quarterly earnings report, as spotted by VGC and given the Jeff Grubb seal of approval.

Even as Nic spent this morning writing lovingly about frogs, I was watching trailers of frogs disintegrating beneath an unstoppable ant tsunami. The game in question is Empires Of The Undergrowth, an RTS from developers Slug Disco and Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse. The 1.0 version launches on June 7th, after almost eight years in early access during which Empires Of The Undergrowth has accumulated positive user reviews with truly antlike meticulousness. Here's the release date trailer, which you should not watch if you dislike seeing various larger insects and small animals getting eaten alive by ants.