rockpapershotgun

The announcement includes a fair number of work-in-progress screenshots, including a peek at some future tech. SCS explain, “as you can see, all of them taken in the new light system. Please be double sure to keep in mind that everything shown is under heavy development and might not represent the final product.” Wyoming might be a way away, as SCS do say “this DLC has only just begun to take shape....

To explain what’s going on, it’s time to use some maths (oh god I hope I get this right). Back in Season 6, players could earn 54,000 CP (Challenge Points) each week to level up their battle pass. You got a new level when you hit 9k, 18k, 27k, 36k, and then the final 54k, meaning you could get five levels a week from this alone - more if you completed challenges that just straight up awarded a level....

There are quite a few changes and adjustments, a big one being that Larian have chosen to tone down the prevalence of fire surfaces. I tend to have a laugh about all the fire in Larian’s chaotic combat but I admit it’s been a while since I played Divinity: Original Sin 2. I might be less enthused if I’d more recently suffered accidental immolation. Larian say that in just the past week, players have died 78,293 times by fire....

It’s basically a walking simulator where your goal is to wander through five different zones, each slightly more trippy than the last. Here’s a video with some of the highlights of my playthrough (quick warning that it was quite jittery in parts, but I’ve chopped those out as best I can). Zone 1 is a large industrial market kinda thing, where clothes are displayed on railings and shelves, and NPCs (models?...

What lies over yonder war horizon? We don’t exactly know, but we do know something with Battlefield in the name is planned for next year. First of all, here’s your last dose of space fun. As well as the new map, you can now play the Hoth, Tatooine, Yavin 4 and Death Star II maps in Supremacy Mode, which is Battlefront 2’s name for big scraps over capture points. A couple of those include flyable spaceships, and there’s new cosmetic guff, too....

And that’s how I was introduced to the Stellaris mod scene. It’s almost too big to comprehend. Several thousand files on the Steam workshop. Stories, fixes, races, and so much more. People have animated the eyebrows of the most meagre Star Trek races for your strategic fun. They’ve created solar system sized weapons to make the endgame more of challenge. You can mod absolutely everything about Stellaris, so let’s go....

Over on the game’s Steam page, players are reporting issues such as repeated game crashes to serious performance issues that don’t seem to square with the specs in their systems. Codemasters are clearly aware, and have been responding to some of the negative ones with a request that folks use their official form to report feedback. “On November 5 we rolled out a patch for PC players the further improves performance across the board....

But after just a day with it, I have high hopes that Empire Of Sin, the extraordinary prohibition gangster simulation coming from Romero Games on December 1, is going to hit the big time on both fronts. The key phrase here is “just a day”. It’s not too often I’ll want to keep playing a game for more than two or three hours in one sitting. I got six hours with this one, and I was genuinely aggravated that I had to relinquish control of my burgeoning crime project....

F4NV has been in production since at least 2017 - and while they’ve been posting work-in-progress tidbits for some time now, this week the collected mod-makers behind F4NV released a major “showcase” trailer for the ambitious mod, just in time for the Obsidian spin-off’s tenth anniversary. Good grief, has it been that long already? Sure enough, it does very much look like Fallout: New Vegas rendered in the more up-to-date stylings of Bethesda’s Fallout 4....

343 Industries shared yesterday that “All Ring 3 blockers have been resolved at this time for Halo 2 and Halo 2: Anniversary flighting to begin on Friday, 4/17.” If that sounds like a whole lot of jargon, well, it is. The long and short is that 343 are now allowing players to test Halo 2: Anniversary. 343 refer to tests for the Master Chief Collection as “flights,” and the “rings” are different groups of folks who are invited to participate....

As a teeny little Russian nesting doll, you’re able to stack inside anyone slightly bigger than you, who can in turn stack inside anyone bigger than them, and so on. It’s the circle of life or something. When you become one of these larger dolls, you’re able to perform abilities specific to that character. There are dolls that can tap dance, dolls that can fart, dolls that can scream “MAKE WAY!...

Ismail posted his flight’s progress, tracking how closely his in-game flight and real flight arrived at certain landmarks on the way to Amsterdam. For the most part, it sounds like the simulation was impressively synced up with real life. Throughout the flight, Ismail notes that entering and exiting the clouds happened nearly seconds apart in life and in game while even the distance above the clouds while at altitude seemed to match....

“In some ways it’s very similar to our previous games—it’s about travel, it’s replayable, and has a strong branching narrative,” Inkle explain. “In other ways, it’s very different. This game has a side-on perspective and has 2d platforming elements, which is very much uncharted territory for us!” Their next game does have a proper title, Inkle say, though they aren’t ready to reveal it just yet. It’ll be known as the “Untitled Highlands Game” in the meantime....

The developer-focused sessions include a bunch of talks on accessibility in games (like Gears 5), some info on Project xCloud, and there’s even a talk from Rare about Sea Of Thieves (which, naturally, I’m unreasonably excited about). “Come learn about the latest cloud and game development technologies from Microsoft, go behind the scenes with the creators at Xbox Game Studios and the ID@Xbox program, and level up with deep technical talks and panel discussions led by industry leaders,” Microsoft say....

Of course, having not seen or used a PlayStation 5 myself yet, I have no way of telling just how effective those tiny little dust catchers actually are yet. It might be launching in a lot of countries today, but it doesn’t come out in the UK until next week. For all I know, their tiny fingertip-sized openings might be just too small to get a vacuum over them effectively, and there’s also no telling how frequently they’ll need to be cleaned, either - which, let’s not forget, also requires you to remove the white cover fins every time you want to access them....

“Idk what the real killer was for me but maybe it was 2-2-2 lock, maybe it was bans I’m not sure… I just know it was hard for me to log on to play and I didn’t have fun in scrims/ranked at all anymore.” These are all fair reasons. While Overwatch introduced things like role locks and hero bans to try and improve on stale metas (remember GOATS?), I can see how these restrictions hold a lot of pro players back....

Titled Chris Delay’s Fail Masterclass, the series kicks off with a playable peek at Order Of Magnitude - a game that made it in front of Matt Cox’s hands at Rezzed before ultimately being shelved. Described as a mix of Kerbal Space Program, Factorio, and (ugh) Elon Musk’s lofty SpaceX patter, Introversion’s stellar industry plans hoped to craft a game that would take humanity from the smouldering ruins of old Earth to system-spanning megastructure builders....

Nate: “Uno, but the Banner Saga”. That’s my take. It’s a game about knocking cards off a big pile, based on which ones have numbers one lower or higher than the one you’re holding. But you’re a depressed, tired wizard. Matt: Can we talk about the wizard first? I want him out of the way. He’s a resurrected mage from olde times, now back to undo the apocalypse. The entire story is him just rolling up to places and saying something dreary about how alone and sad he is....

Rune 2 has gone through nothing but drama over the last year - which most recently involved its publishers accusing Bethesda and Zenimax of intentionally sabotaging the game. You see, a bunch of Rune 2’s original devs at Human Head got snapped up for a new Bethesda studio, Roundhouse, right as the game launched last year, and allegedly refused to hand over the game’s code. Rune 2’s publishers, Ragnarok Game, sued to regain control of it, but their beef didn’t end there....

If you can unlock 12 characters in platformer roguelike Spelunky 2 (on top of the four you start with), then you will also unlock seeded runs. A seeded run lets you type in an eight character code from a limited selection of letters and numbers, and play the set of procedurally generated levels that follow. More importantly, it lets you play that set of procedurally generated levels over and over again....