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Even as the consortium led by Donald Trump’s haunted finger puppet Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund proceed with their wildly leveraged $50 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts, Mass Effect executive producer Mike Gamble would like everybody to know that we’re just fine, you guys.
Blizzard are adding a new premium virtual currency to World Of Warcraft alongside player housing in the MMO’s forthcoming Midnight expansion. It’s called Hearthsteel, and is “purchased with real money using your Battle.net balance and used in turn to buy Housing items from the Battle.net shop and in-game shop,” as detailed in a blog post this week.
Europa Universalis 5 has its first public patch, which encompasses over 350 fixes. Among the bigger things it smacks with the heal-o-spanner (an actual game development tool, traditionally carved from the base of a Taito arcade machine) is the Steams achievements system, which will no longer shower players in plaudits they haven’t earned. On the plus side, you’ll now earn achievements even if you activate the “allow ahistorical” game rule.
I was nosing around for a feelgood story to perk you up after this morning’s depresso news stew. But then I thought: what have you done for me lately? So instead, we’re going to write up the release of Diggergun, a life sim platform game about burrowing for lithium, in which you lose a portion of your take-home pay to costs based on real-world current UK tax, national insurance, debt and household expenses. Glorious! That’ll teach you to show up here, expecting some kind of escapism.
Final Fantasy developers and publishers Square Enix have announced plans to lay off staff, with workers across “nearly all areas” of their Western business arms being affected. More than 100 UK staff are reportedly expected to be affected, with an indeterminate number of US-based workers also reportedly facing a future that’s up in the air. The reasoning given for the cuts centres around that depressingly ever-present word nowadays – restructuring – as Square look to cut costs and consolidate their focus around their Japanese development base.
You’ve probably noticed that there’s been only a sporadic amount of Nic Reuben in your RPS lately, and we’re sad to say that Nic is leaving the treehouse to resume his glittering freelance career. Please join us in saying goodbye and wishing him well before he jets off on his solid rhodium pleasure plane, never to return (unless we ask him very nicely to review a Warhammer game or something).
Last night was a bumper time for games being delayed yet again, with Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra quickly following in GTA 6‘s probably rather expensive shoes. Skydance New Media have now pushed the release of their superhero game “beyond early 2026”, with no concrete new release target given.
Rise of Hydra was previously delayed from what looked like it’d be a release around Christmas 2025 to early next year, with Skydance citing a need to spend more time polishing their World War 2-era costumed capers.
Hi everyone, GTA 6 has been delayed again. It’s now set to arrive on November 19th, 2026, about half a year on from the May 26th date it’d landed on following its last delay. November 19th, 2026 will apparently be a Thursday, just in case you were wondering.
With a final lick, the weasel expires. Its head is mine. I slink back to my nest and shove this new head onto my strangely thick duck neck. Then, I take off in a flutter and scutter of beetle wings and legs. I pass an Oscar the grouch-style bloke in a basket selling animal body parts for crystals. Ahead lies a giant salamander wearing a fedora. He asks me to go and steal some eggs from an ant queen who’s wearing an actual crown. I refuse. We fight. He keeps whistling for backup. My weasel head bites away, an openly terrified expression written across its whiskers.
That, in so many words, is Strange Seed, which came out in full yesterday and also has a demo I’ve gioven a go for this article. It’s a cartoonish evolution murderfest from devs Chronicle Games, who cite E.V.O.: Search for Eden and Spore’s creature stage as their inspirations.
I’m about an hour into Whiskerwood, the new city builder from Minakata Dynamics and publishers Hooded Horse, and I’ve already made an absolute mess of my coastline. A clever and charismatic hybrid of Against The Storm, Robin Jarvis novels and the settlement of North America, Whiskerwood puts you in charge of some mice building colonies on cuboid islands. The islands are lovely so far, their Minecrafty nooks and crannies crying out to be decked with gardens and windmills and cobblestone paths. But you’ve got taxes to pay, so the first thing you do is sink a bunch of mineshafts at random, scooping out coal and copper for the literal fat cats back at court.
