Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We factory sim perverts have all known the joy of combing a mile of conveyor belt tagliatelle for that one empty hopper or unplugged furnace that’s stalled the entire production line. Now, imagine that the stalled production line is producing plasma swords for your army of murder droids.

You need your army of murder droids to fight another army of murder droids, but unfortunately, all of your murder droids are now swordless, and therefore murder droids no longer. They advance placidly into the firestorm, falling like mown dandelions, while you run your cursor desperately over the hexagonal smokestacks. There it is! A misfiring 3D printer, right in the centre.

Read more

The ongoing RAM shortage (and subsequent and pricing explosion) is imposing a wider range of grim effects than even the Great GPU Famine of 2020. First came the death of one of gaming hardware’s most reliable memory and SSD makers, and now… uh… Larian’s new Divinity game is going to be more optimised for PC than it otherwise would have been?

That’s what Larian CEO Swen Vincke (clearly on a media tour – here’s him discussing Divinity with our Edwin) told TheGamer, anyway. Vincke notes that because the lack of affordable RAM options is making it harder to predict the horsepower of future PCs, “we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn’t necessarily want to do at that point in time.” That doesn’t sound especially horrible to me – higher performance on lower-end rigs ultimately means more players can join in – though nowhere in the full interview does Vincke acknowledge that the shortage is being directly caused and sustained by demand from data centres that power generative AI, a technology that Larian are using in Divinity’s production, and that Vincke himself is defending the use of.

Read more

Steam Replay, Valve’s yearly roundup of where all of the hours spent playing games in the Steamy place have gone, has emerged from its hidey-hole yet again. 2025’s edition is out now – you’ve likely already seen it if you’ve hopped into Steam since yesterday afternoon. Amid all the bits telling you that you’ve spent 1000 hours playing Umamusume: Pretty Derby thus far, the annual report’s dished out some fresh stats about how old the games everyone across the platform’s user base has been playing this year are.

Read more

Adhoc Studios still aren’t sure whether they’ll make a second season of Dispatch, their startlingly popular Telltale-style superhero comedy adventure, but they’re thinking about it very “seriously”. In brief, they’re not confident they can bottle the lightning twice, especially if they want to release another season before 2032.

Read more

Creative Assembly have taken us a little deeper into the biomechanical contours of Total War: Warhammer 40,000’s faction design, with a new development roundtable video featuring principal creative director Ian Roxburgh, lead designer Simon Mann and product owner for battles David Petry.

The short version: the starting faction balance is a question of both asymmetry and calculated familiarity. The Imperial Guard are for Total War traditionalists, with a straightforward emphasis on production and attrition. The Orks are comparably numerous, but they need to keep fighting or they’ll turn on each other, and have some unique capabilities based on repourposed tech. The Space Marines are all about precise usage of very small numbers of fanatical killing machines, with less capacity to build up an economy. And the Eldar are stealthy glass cannons operating out of remote Craftworld bases, who spend a lot of time trying to avert galactic calamities rather than just wrecking the other species.

Read more

“As the internet likes to tell us, it’s been a while.” Please keep waiting, there are some magazines over there if you need them. “It’s a process.” Shouting won’t increase the speed at which it happens. Do you “want the turkey that is in the oven for long enough to be delicious when it finally comes out of the oven”? Some of these are things I often have to say to my cat when the clock ticks to within an hour of feeding time. Some of them are things Todd Howard and co have said about The Elder Scrolls 6 in another little update that’s seen them declare yet again that it is coming and add that development’s going good thus far.

Read more

A few hours ago, reports surfaced that Larian are making use of generative AI during development of their new RPG Divinity – specifically, to come up with ideas, produce placeholder text, develop concept art, and create materials for PowerPoint presentations. In the same Bloomberg article, Larian CEO Swen Vincke sought to balance these revelations with the promise that Divinity won’t directly contain any AI-generated materials, commenting that “everything is human actors; we’re writing everything ourselves.”

As with generative AI in gamedev generally, the disclosure has sparked anger online – anger that is all the sharper for the love that has hitherto been directed at Larian, creators of amazing fantasy RPGs with sexy bears and demons. Inevitably, some of the outrage is from people who appear minimally familiar with game development, and in a few cases, haven’t read the report in full (unhelpfully, it’s behind Bloomberg’s paywall). Some of it, though, is from other game developers.

Read more

Friends, it is time to break into Jeff Bezos’s bunker and steal his porn. Jeff Bezos – so sorry! I mean J### B#### – doesn’t need his porn anymore because he’s dead.

Unfortunately, the bunker is now full of “RICH MAN DEATH RADIATION”, making it unsafe for humans. Fortunately, the people’s pervert committee have supplied us with some remote-operated drones that are capable of firing clones of themselves in the direction of the camera. To secure the B#### smut, you must accordingly point and click-hurl yourself around the bunker’s surprisingly soft and hazy confines.

Read more

Larian’s new Divinity RPG should spend a lot less time in development than their previous Baldur’s Gate 3 – or at least, that’s the dream. CEO Swen Vincke wants to release the game in “three to four years”, which seemingly includes an early access period.

For context, we first heard that Larian were officially working on a new game (two, actually) back in April 2024. Here, let me run those numbers through Rock Paper Shotgun’s in-house Mirror of Fate. Gosh. Assuming I have performed the rituals correctly, that means Divinity will launch out of early access in 2027 or 2028. In less positive news, Larian are reportedly making limited internal use of generative AI for tasks such as concept art development and internal presentations.

Read more

Larian’s new Divinity game is a turn-based CRPG that both builds on their achievements from Baldur’s Gate 3, and follows on from the events of Divinity: Original Sin 2. So sayeth Swen Vincke, studio CEO, in an interview with RPS following the project’s bloody and bawdy announcement trailer at the Game Awards last week.

Concrete specifics remain few as of writing, but I can tell you that this is perhaps more reboot than sequel. It’s an attempt to firm up and clarify Divinity’s narrative universe, both for returning Braccus Rex devotees and for Baldur’s Gate 3 players who’ve yet to try Larian’s non-D&D games. It’s also going to allow for more “freedom” than any Larian game before, thanks partly to running on a new version of Larian’s in-house engine tech. Ah, the eternal videogame promise of more freedom. I’m mostly just here for the piggies.

Read more