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Bloodsucking build ’em up V Rising got its first major Early Access update earlier this year. Its next major update will be its 1.0 release and it will arrive sometime in “the second quarter of 2024”, according to a new developer post which also details underway engine upgrades and details features-to-come.
Unreal Engine and Fortnite publisher Epic Games are making an absolutely enormous round of job cuts. As announced by founder and CEO Tim Sweeney in an email to staff today, the company will lay off approximately 830 people, totalling “around 16%” of their workforce, in order to achieve “financial sustainability” following a period of heavy investment and lower-than-hoped returns from Fortnite.
With release just a couple of weeks away on 13th October, Lords of the Fallen has a new gameplay overview trailer – a dripping cinematic layer cake of gore and gristle, which introduces you to the game’s god-blighted fantasy world and the many different ways you’ll expire within it, be it having a boss inconsiderately drop a load of golden swords on you, or getting mobbed by spooks in the underworld according to an escalating “dread” level, which is sort of GTA’s old heat system but with more Grim Reapers.
As a child of the early internet, games like Hypnospace Outlaw can’t help but resonate quite deeply with me. This was the internet as I remembered it, goddamnit, and the fact it mixed in a compelling corporate conspiracy story in between its pages was just the icing on an already fine cake (in GIF form, naturally, with a MIDI tune of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons blaring out from your internet browser for good measure). But in revisiting Hypnospace for this month’s RPS Game Club, there was one page in particular that really brought the rose-tinted shutters down on me. It was beautiful, lovely April, Hypnospace’s virtual pet hamster, who can live, snooze and poop on your desktop, and maybe turn a slightly sickly shade of green if you don’t pay enough attention to her.
As with most things in Hypnospace, I can only assume that April and her fellow gaggle of virtual pet friends are riffs on real-life virtual pet games Catz and Dogz from the late 90s, which, yes, as a ten-year-old girl at the time, I was absolutely obsessed with. Developed by the now defunct PF Magic, Catz and Dogz 3 were arguably two of my most formative PC games growing up, and cor, I miss those dumb beasts so very much.
Counter-Strike 2 released last night and has duly taken over from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as Steam’s most-played game at the time of writing, but individual player reactions are a bit mixed. Valve’s new/revamped free-to-play FPS sports a range of exotic features and fixtures, from swirlier, reactive smoke to new server architecture, but it has launched without many of the modes, maps and functions Global Offensive diehards are accustomed to, after a decade of updates.
The Creative Assembly’s Hyenas – a sci-fi extraction shooter about robbing Martian billionaires, which Ed deemed “a surprising amount of fun” when he saw it at Gamescom – is no more. Sega have cancelled the forthcoming looter FPS together with several unannounced titles – a stripping-down of the publisher’s European business in response to financial losses Sega are blaming partly on Covid.
There’s been a certain amount of confusion and alarm over the announcement of Nakwon: Last Paradise, a dingy third-person zombie survival adventure with a big emphasis on stealth, from the creators of Dave the Diver, a bright, breezy uramaki roll of a game that mixes restaurant management with side-on undersea exploration. Is this kind of like when Prince of Persia went all edgelord with Two Thrones? Do I need to call Mintrocket’s parents and ask for an intervention?
Thing is, if you take a step back from each game they’re actually very similar. Both are fundamentally about scouring dangerous places for resources and ferrying them back to a safe area where you can sell them off. Both pit you, a mediocre human, against strange and unearthly creatures. Both are sort of about redeeming scenario concepts we all hate – in Dave the Diver’s case, the water level, and in Nakwon’s case, the stealth mission. See, this is practically a remake! Let’s have a look at the trailer.
Look alive, jarheads! Grab your Glocks and drop your – well, whatever you’re holding that isn’t a gun, unless it’s a kitten or something, in which case tuck it gently under your arm and brace yourself for the news that Valve have finally released the public version of Counter-Strike 2, the long-awaited free-to-play technical upgrade (and replacement) for perennial Steam chart-topper Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, after six months in limited access. You can download it here.
Last time, you decided by 72% against 28% that setting unit waypoints is better than receiving waypoints yourself. Given how loudly people decry receiving waypoints, I’m a little surprised it was that close. And that’s how we know we’re doing science. This week, I ask you to choose between mastery of place and mastery of time. What’s better: improvised environmental weapons, or skipping across a timeline flowchart?
Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 update arrived last week alongside new (and truly excellent) expansion Phantom Liberty, bringing a host of tweaks and improvements in an impressive climax to the originally technically-troubled and artistically-questionable game’s quite staggering redemption arc.
