Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We have all known the profound sorrow of getting two hours into an RPG and deciding that actually, Mum, I don’t want to be an elven druid anymore. Being an elven druid sucks ass. There’s barely any plantlife in the opening dungeon, so half my support skills are useless, and the only animal companion I’m qualified to conjure right now is a cranky squirrel. I’d much rather be a rogue. Look at all these elevated paths and pickable locks hereabouts! Look at all these shadows I could be skulking in, these precarious chandeliers directly opposite crawlspaces with rusty grills! Ugh, if only I weren’t a stupid diluted floral wizard!

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Between fifty game releases a day, and among them official successors and open source remakes, most 90s games your grandma bangs on about have some modern equivalent that somewhat fills the gap.

But not The Settlers. There hasn’t been a Settlers game since 1996. Whether they were good or not, its many sequels, as early as 3, started missing the point of the design. It’s the roads, man. The roads!

This isn’t about iconography for its own sake. It’s a design thing, an ethos. The heart of The Settlers was that your towns lived or died based largely on how well you designed your transport logistics. It was all about the roads. It doesn’t even fit into a genre really, let alone the lopsided RTS the sequels collapsed into. It sounds like a typical town builder, especially today when there’s a wealth of games about placing a woodcutter and a farm, but I’m tempted to say it’s not even about gathering resources.

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Right, so. It’s supposed to go as follows: Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Yakuza 3 Remastered, Yakuza 4 Remastered, Yakuza 5 Remastered, Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, then off into full-blown Like A Dragon land, and on to Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza. Easy. Except right now in my Steam library, it’s not. The Kiwamis are cheekily lurking behind Yakuza 6, and the LADs are before all of their more Japanese gangsterly-named siblings.

It’s chaos and anarchy. I can’t live like this. The good news is that thanks to the update Steam’s Client Beta has just gotten, it looks like I’ll no longer have to.

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EA have given us our first proper look at Battlefield 6‘s multiplayer, after revealing the game with a single player trailer last week. They’ve also confirmed the new shooter‘s release date – 10th October 2025 – and announced dates for a series of beta weekends in August.

The game they’re pitching is a return to the contemporary warring of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, after the mildly futuristic disappointments of Battlefield 2042. It’s got four familiar classes, the old Battlefield mode trinity of conquest, breakthrough and rush, and maps that incline towards close quarters combat or wide-open vehicular blasting or some blasphemous hybrid of the twain. It seems fine. And loud.

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$2,099.99 (was $2,499.99)

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If you’ve ever fired up Baldur’s Gate 3 and wondering why the likes of Shadowheart or Lae’zel’s portrait shows them glaring at you like they’ve been summoned into some kind of video call, I bring good news. Larian’s rectified this and one other infamous issue as part of the game’s latest hotfix.

Don’t get too excited, though. The devs are so keen to make sure no one gets their hopes up for any more major additions to the RPG now that its final patch is out of the way that they’ve dubbed this a “room temperature fix”.

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Punishing my tendency to never bother watching Nintendo Directs, Bandai Namco used today’s Switch 2-focused showcase to announce Once Upon a Katamari: the first mainline, non-remake Katamari game since 2011. It’ll be out on PC as well, come October 24th 2025, and while you’ll once again be rolling up entire societies around a swelling sticky ball, this one will span a range of time periods – so you’ll be able to knead whole new planets out of feudal Japan or ancient Greece.

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The next big patch for Dune: Awakening‘s now out there via Steam testing client, as devs Funcom look to test out its various tweaks before pressing go on full deployment next month. If you’ve been desperately screaming for the ability to slop out a bunch of blood and/or water at once, or have recently be chased by a swarm of griefy ornithopters, this is the patch for you.

In fact, the devs make clear that they’d really prefer it if you were to dedicate the bulk of your two-week-long patch testing time to those two things in particular. They’re also turning off taxes and sandstorms, the latter very much being the tax equivalent of the natural world, for the first week so bases won’t be at risk.

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The office seems to be empty save for a grinning little girl who yells “hey mister, wake up!” in what sounds like amateur Simmish, then immediately vanishes around the corner. The building consists of grainy, glass-walled compartments lined with illuminated facades displaying kanji letters, arranged along a central corridor. I think I’m on the ninth floor.

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Very long-in-the-works Elder Scrolls modding project Skywind has hit another milestone in its winding road towards an eventual release. The folks behind the mod, which aims to deliver a version of the series’ beloved third entry Morrowind remade in Skyrim‘s engine, have recruited the final three voice actors they were looking for to fill out the base game’s entire roster of characters.

Skywind’s still without any kind of release date, meaning it’s almost certainly further off than its Oblivion-centric sort of cousin Skyblivion, which is aiming to arrive this year. However, the regular updates we’ve been getting about it of late are encouraging signs that it will eventually let us into its heart chamber.

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