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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – aka the game that inspired and then was overtaken by Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode – is seemingly borrowing a leaf from its cartoony cousin’s playbook by resurrecting its original map.
As a somewhat deflating example of the money-churning might of GTA Online becoming the sole focus of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 5 efforts over the last decade, the actor who played Trevor in the ridiculously well-selling crime epic has teased some details of planned story DLC that would have turned the controversial protagonist into a James Bond-style spy. The pack supposedly got as far as shooting with the actors, only to end up cancelled and folded into a GTA Online heist.
Welcome back to Should You Bother With, the RPS hardware column that combs away the fluff surrounding PC gaming gear to reveal a smooth, hairless core of pure consumer advice. This time: Hall effect keyboards, a relatively fresh flavour of desktop peripheral that’s been gaining traction with manufacturers for the switch design’s supposed durability and reliability benefits. These represent perhaps the first major challenge to mechanical keyboard hegemony, but you may be wondering: who’s Hall? What’s their effect? And does it actually make for a better gaming keyboard? Time to found out.
Sand Land is like a sanitised manga-ish Mad Max Fury Road, where there are fewer explosions and nobody huffs paint and screams “Witness me!”. So, arguably, a less cool Mad Max. In this incarnation it’s an open world action game with light RPG elements; in previous incarnations it is a manga and anime by the creator of Dragon Ball. My takeaway from playing Sand Land the game is that it is a tremendous advert for the manga and anime, in the sense that everything good about Sand Land the game is from those, and I would rather be reading or watching them instead.
When, in town building simulation Manor Lords, you erect your first manor, it feels natural to place it in the center of your humble 14th century European settlement. It presents as a locus of power, where your character avatar resides. Also, it’s right there in the title. I built mine down a side road, between oxen posts and granaries, for no real reason but free space. The more I play, the more it feels a fitting place. Not sidelined, exactly, just not especially loud. I need the taxes it brings to pay mercenaries to see off bandits, but lords – their whims and ambitions – don’t set the tone here. Parchment and seals aren’t as important as tilled earth; as winter snow, spring thaws and autumn harvests. So, despite the title, this sedate, curious, and intricate sim isn’t really about lords, nor manors. Not half as much, anyway, as it is about manure.
Armadillos, the grumpy pistachio nuts of the animal kingdom, have been added to Minecraft in a recent mob update. You can brush them to harvest “scutes”, the boney armour plating of the animal’s back, which you can then use to craft armour for pet wolves. Speaking of wolves, this update also sees an explosion in canine diversity, with eight varieties of the wolf now appearing across different biomes. Awoooooo!
Players that put more than two hours into pre-purchased or advanced access games will now be exempt from Steam’s refund policy, says Steam, the maker of said policy and thus the final word on how it is implemented. As spotted by the Verge, this change is intended to combat a loophole where filthy time criminals could fill their stolen boots with ill-gotten fun pre-release, then get their money back.
Zenless Zone Zero is the next action-RPG from Genshin Impact developers HoYoverse. Where Genshin is all Zelda-style pastoral greens, Zenless is an urban fantasy. It’s expected to release sometime in the first half of 2024, and you can now pre-register on all platforms.
Songs Of Conquest is a strategy-RPG with some of the most handsome pixel art around. Steam tells me I’ve played its Early Access release for 0.7 hours, which was long enough to know that I wanted to play more and would wait for version 1.0. I won’t have to wait much longer. It’s now got a May 20th release date.
Royale-battler Fortnite will soon allow players to hide a handful of emotes the developers concede are “sometimes used in confrontational ways”. This includes the emote reported as the most-used in Fortnite’s seven-year history. That’s either a worrying indictment of the game’s players, or a (more?) worrying indictment of universal human psychology. What is the offending animation? Well, turns out people don’t like being laughed at.
