Auto Added by WPeMatico
Star Wars: The Old Republic‘s ongoing development switched last year from creators BioWare to Broadsword, with promise that the 13-year-old MMO would continue to receive new story content and improvements.
The approaching update 7.5 looks to bring both, alongside a Spring Abundance festival that includes “seed collecting, dancing, pie-baking, animal rehabilitation, and a galactic egg hunt.”
Chuck the original Half-Life and Minecraft into a reactor core with Lethal Company and the resulting, bleating, pustulant abomination might look a bit like Abiotic Factor, a one-to-six player first-person survival game from Deep Field Games and Playstack, in which a bunch of stranded boffins must find their way out of a massive underground lab.
On the one hand, you’ve got to deal with interdimensional horrors of various flavours, such as multiple-storey cryptids and squishy skinless wolves; on the other, invading squads of Combiney soldiers. Fortunately, you’ve got a big fat Ivy League brain stuffed with knowledge of killer gadgets, base construction, subterranean farming and battlefield medicine. My increasing phobia for survival games notwithstanding, I think this looks and sounds like a hoot – and it’s out now in early access. Here’s the launch trailer.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is a legendary drawing of a nude with his arms and legs reaching towards the rim and corners of a circle and square. It’s often invoked as an archetype for the humanist worldview of Man the Measure and Centre of all Things, holding a perfectly proportioned universe in shape. Rin D’Lorah, the heroine of new narrative RPG Sky Of Tides, is a bit like the Vitruvian Man, and the result is a game I find at once bewitching and powerfully offputting in its refusal to satisfy the conventions of the genre.
Over the past while a few games have had post-launch patches, the exemplars being Starfield and Stardew valley, which have post-launch patches of different kinds and for different reasons. We take some time on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast to talk about this patch of patches, and what it was like in the good ol’ days, where a broken game came out and stayed broken, gosh darn it!
Nate isn’t here today, which means I can make fun of him for owning fish, or whatever it is he does, but in his stead James steps up with an RGB lighting-themed game where I have to guess what accessories people stuck lights on to turn into gamer accessories. This is because Razer stuck RGB lights on a pandemic mask and are in trouble over it now. Naughty Razer. Plus, we talk about the games we’re playing right now, and dish you up some juicy recommendations at the end of the show.
For someone who’s spent an embarrassing amount of my life staring at virtual maps, I am a downright directionless dunce when it comes to geography. Not ‘the country of Africa’ bad, but certainly not good enough that you’d want me on your pub quiz team. Also, I still do the Shredded Wheat rhyme internally when I have to follow directions. However, I do enjoy making maps turn a different colour in strategy games, Total War chiefly among them. Well, one such map is expanding before my confused idiot eyes, that being Total War: Pharaoh’s. It’s getting a new, distinctly Mesopotamia and Aegea-shaped bit. I believe that’s just south of Eastopotamia and Wegea.
As reported by Chinese outlet Campfire Camp, spotted by GamesRadar, and machine translated by Ian Games of the Ian Games Network, and then delivered fresh to your eyeballs by me, Nic Reuben of Reuben Paper Shotgun dot com, Elden Ring expansion Shadow Of The Erdtree will be the only DLC released for the world stomping rpg game. That’s according to FromSoftware’s sadistic DM and notable swamp troll Hidetaka Miyazaka, although it doesn’t sound like he’s trolling this time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
