It’s another day, another Subnautica 2 dev vlog, this time one with a big focus on multiplayer. This ability to play with, heaven forbid, other people is one that developer Unknown Worlds very much understands is not for everyone, given the first game’s big focus on isolation and ruffing it yourself. So, this vlog is all about explaining why you don’t need to worry if you like to go solo. And also to show off a dive elevator.
More like space the final funtier am I right (cue canned laughter that goes on a touch too long)? Besiege, the physics building game about building all manner of medieval machinery to destroy your enemy, has taken you to all kinds of lands and with its 2024 expansion, The Splintered Sea, a few oceans too. But with its newly revealed follow-up expansion, there’s nowhere to go but up (because it’s set in space, hence my absolutely hilarious opening line).
The single most offputting thing about a game like Arc Raiders, i.e. an extraction shooter, is that every single other person you meet in-game is Schrödinger’s asshole. They could be a friend who you share a story or some loot with, or they could mercilessly gun you down at the drop of a hat. It’s certainly not for everyone, but in the game’s latest update, a new PvE event has arrived encouraging everyone to walk hand in hand together to defeat those big bad bots.
Management at Scottish studio Build A Rocket Boy, makers of notoriously panned GTA-like MindsEye, have reportedly installed monitoring software onto the PCs of their staff without informing the workers beforehand. The move appears to be linked to ongoing claims from BARB executives that the game’s prospects have been deliberately sabotaged by third parties.
2XKO, Riot’s League of Legendsfighting spin-off, is having its development team significantly cut back not long after release. Game Developer report a Riot spokesperson as stating the publishers have put plans in motion to lay off around 80 developers on the game, about half of the global team who’ve been working on it, with the potential for some of the affected workers to land in new posts at Riot.
I hate Discord with the intensity of a supernova falling into a black hole. I hate its ungainly profusion of tabs and voice channels. I regret its cybersecurity breaches. I resent that the PRs use it for every virtual press event. I’m furious that I have to download 12 updates whenever I remember to turn it on. I despise the feisty and cloying loading screen trivia and service messages. Show me the “empathy banana” again, you weird little gopher beetle. I’ll put you in the microwave.
I also dislike that Discord now assumes I’m “teen-by-default” and restricts my access appropriately unless I go through some kind of age verification process, though I can understand the rationale, given some of the awful things that have happened via Discord. Already in play across the UK and Australia, this new “age-assured” approach is now being rolled out worldwide to create “a safer and more inclusive experience for users over the age of 13”. Rather unnervingly, Discord’s new age verification system includes an “inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age.”
Aethus is a crafty new sci-fi survival game in which one woman and her flying drone pal excavate a layered underground world on behalf of a galactic megacorp. You’ll create a surface base from holographic modules, gather evidence about a doomed science expedition, research a wacky new element, and unearth the dirty secrets of your employer.
It sounds a lot like Coffee Stain’s Satisfactory, with opportunities for automation later on, but it’s viewed from an elevated third-person perspective, and appears more narrative-driven. Satisfactory through the eyes of Diablo? I can – as we space miners like to say – ‘dig it’, though I’m quite weary of games about being the lonely stooge of some breezily villainous extraction racket. This particular seam of satire has long since been gutted. I am ready for games in which we go to other planets for Nice reasons. I feel like that ought to be possible. Anyway, here’s a trailer.
Nioh 3 “is less punishing” than Nioh 1 and Nioh 2, according to our reviewer Jeremy Blum. In a fine example of the Duality of Man, this observation forms part of a sentence in which Jeremy also confesses to smashing a hole in his desk with his controller. I can only imagine the destruction if he’d run into one particular “very rare” Nioh 3 bug, recently patched out, which causes the game to corrupt your save data if you end the game while praying at shrines.