Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Medieval city builder Manor Lords was Steam’s most-wishlisted game prior to release, and has now managed the feat of transmuting that anticipation into broad enthusiasm and very healthy sales. Not too shabby, considering that it’s mostly the work of just one person, Grzegorz Styczeń of Slavic Magic, who has hopefully found time to sleep now and then between fielding bug reports and preparing the game’s first patches.

Styczeń understandably doesn’t have much time for interviews right now – those troublesome archers aren’t going to balance themselves – but yesterday I spoke to Tim Bender, CEO of Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse, about how Styczeń is getting on. The answer, apparently, is: pretty good, because Styczeń has a healthy approach to early access development in keeping players close, without quite handing them the wheel.

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Remember that bit in that Guy Ritchie film where Dexter Fletcher shoot a guy and then throws a glowing jar over his soldier that summons a bunch of skeletons to help him out? Me too! Must have been the direct influence for Sea Of Thieves‘ new Season 12, which launched earlier this week with a bang – from two smoking barrels! Among the additions in this season of the ever popular salty sea-dog open-world adventure are double barrel pistols. They deal less damage per shot but have higher rate of fire, and you can charge them up to fire both barrels at once.

On the other end of the weapon scale are new throwing knives, capable of sneak attacks, light slashes, or, you know, throwing. You can nab any throwing knives you see lying around, too, which is fun. But honestly, the Bone Caller tool (the aforementioned jar of skeletons, which has a great Jason and The Argonauts vibe) and the Horn Of Fair Winds are are probably more useful. The winds from said horn can make your ship go faster, but can also put out fires or crowd control enemies, or for some reason make you swim faster? I don’t think that makes sense, to be honest, but the horn has limited uses so as not to make you an unstoppable wind machine.

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Roll7, developers of bright skateboarding games OlliOlli World and dual-wielding bloodsport Rollerdrome, are being closed down as part of large scale layoffs by parent corp Take-Two Interactive, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. The British studio has been responsible for some great stuff over the years but the report says they’ll be following the fate of Kerbal Space Program 2 developers in being laid off.

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Starfield’s biggest update since the Bethesda space game came out last year (remember that?) is arriving in a couple of weeks – with its Steam beta already live now, if you’re interested in poking around. The chunky patch finally tidies up the game’s oft-complained about surface maps to make them easier to navigate, as well as introducing new difficulty options, a decoration mode for the inside of ships and a bunch of other tweaks and fixes.

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Your feelings on Funko Pop probably fall into one of two categories: you either hate the black-eyed, copy-paste figures modelled on pop-culture characters with a burning passion, or you own enough of them to construct a small fortress and defend your newfounded Funko nation from the government. Either way, it looks like the first video game starring the ubiquitous toy collectables might somehow scratch your itch.

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Last month, GTA 6 publishers Take-Two Interactive announced plans to “rationalize” their “pipeline” by laying off five per cent of their workforce – around 580 people – and cancelling various games. As part of that, they’re reportedly now doing away with 70 positions at their Seattle offices – Seattle being the home of the Take-Two-owned Intercept Games, the current developers of space sim Kerbal Space Program 2.

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4X-meets-real-time-strategy game Sins Of A Solar Empire 2 will finally launch on Steam this summer, Stardock and Ironclad Games have announced, a couple of years after going into technical early access on Epic Games Store. I loved the first Sins and so did Kieron Gillen (RPS in peace) whose 16-year-old review dwells appreciatively on the spectacle of cruisers and frigates bouncing to hyperspace on the very edge of a solar system. We don’t seem to have written about the second one – time to change that, I guess. Here’s the Steam release announcement trailer.

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Last week a Catholic media ministry (not sure what that is but okay) called Catholic Answers created a generative AI priest chatbot called Father Justin. Fr. Justin used a large language model to answer questions about the Catholic church and Catholic orthodoxy, and if you have any familiarity with how people love to test AI chatbots – or you read the headline of this article – then you know where this is going. Fr. Justin, who was already kind of controversial anyway, offered the sacrament and claimed to be a real priest to Futurism, and gave the thumbs up to baptising a baby in Gatorade in an emergency.

Catholic Answers (who have the domain Catholic.com; gotta imagine His Holiness wishes he’d moved quicker on that one) then defrocked Justin, making him a lay theologian in a suit jacket, jeans and an open collar shirt that gives him a “me and my wife saw you across the bar” kind of vibe, when before he had the whole dog collar kit and caboodle.

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Yesterday, coinciding with the release of the Thrones of Decay DLC, Total War: Warhammer 3 jumped 90 places in the Steam charts, trailed closely by the three lord packs that make up the strategy game‘s latest expansion. Those lord packs are now the three top rated expansions in the series’ history, and the base game itself saw a huge uptick in positive reviews. The last day also saw a peak player count of around 66,000, putting it ahead of giants like Palworld, Rimworld, and Fallout 76. None of this would be especially notable, however, if this wasn’t a complete turnaround from how things have been for the best part of a year now.

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A player-run troupe of actors will be performing an adaptation of Richard III in Fallout 76, featuring a “ghoul” in the lead role. They’re partly inspired by the recent Fallout TV show, which puts a jaded cowboy ghoul in a pivotal role and has lead to an increase in players of the online multiplayer RPG. This production will likely be more faithful to the bard than to Amazon Prime. It will open with the lines: “Now is the nuclear winter of our discontent.”

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