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Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag’s unexpected disappearance from the Steam store is down to nothing more exciting than a tech bug – and definitely isn’t a sign of an upcoming remake for the pirate entry in the stealth-action franchise.
Having already surpassed Skyrim and Fallout by becoming Bethesda’s biggest launch to date – with over six million players, according to the developer – Starfield has now smashed another of its predecessor’s records.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by cool fog, several grappling lines, and honestly just a great moody first-person animation for sitting down in an immersive sim. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!
Hitting pause in a video game is like dropping a wall across it. On one side of the wall lies what is called the diegetic space of the game, aka the fictitious world, which is generally the aspect that receives the most interest, the aspect that tends to attract the weasel word “immersive”. On the other side of the wall lie menus, settings and other features that form a non-diegetic layer of bald operator functions – technical conveniences and lists of things to tweak or customise, from graphics modes to character inventory, that are cut adrift in a vacuum outside of time.
In theory, the pause screen and its contents are not truly part of the game. There is no temporality, no sense of place, no threat, no possibility of play, no character or narrative, no save the princess, no press X to Jason or pay respects, no gather your party before travelling forth. As the scholar Madison Schmalzer points out in the paper I’m wonkily paraphrasing here, “the language of the menu itself emphasizes the menu’s position as outside of gameplay by labeling the option to continue as ‘resume game.’ The game world is always privileged as the site that gameplay happens.”
There was a time back in my school days when cardgames were all the rage. Everybody had a deck of playing cards in their pocket for cheeky 15 minute rounds of Texas Hold ‘Em between lessons, with Milky Way segments and Niknaks wagered in place of chips. Yes, I’m aware I’m starting to sound like Grandpa Simpson, and no, this wasn’t from some murky era before the invention of videogames. It was the heyday of the Gameboy Advance! I’m not sure what we were thinking. But two things: 1) decks of playing cards are cheaper than game consoles, and 2) part of the fun, possibly, was that nobody really knew how to play the ostensibly well-known cardgames we were playing.
With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect there may have been creative liberties taken with the rules at times. I knew hair-pulling wasn’t a legal move in professional poker. Anyway, I’m reminded of all this by Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers, a warped and mildly satirical, 90s-styled take on Blackjack from Purple Moss Collectors.
Bethesda are adding official support for Starfield mods in 2024, Bethesda Games Studios top banana Todd Howard has told Famitsu in a Japanese language interview. People are already modding Starfield, of course – the options range from “Potato Mode” functionality for lower-spec computers, through somewhat controversial Starfield DLSS mods, to the all-important Starfield script extender, which lets other modders add “scripting capabilities and functionality” to the game. But Bethesda have yet to release proper in-house tools, aka Creation Kit 2.
AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT graphics cards have proven surprisingly popular even into 2023, as new price drops (and relatively modest gen-on-gen performance increases for newer models) has left them as competitive options in terms of value for money.
Today we’ve got a deal on the RX 6800 non-XT, with an MSI model going for just under $400 at Newegg. That’s a $70 reduction from its usual price and $20 cheaper than the cheapest RX 6800 model on Amazon. That’s an awesome deal for a strong 1440p graphics card that comes with a copy of Starfield Premium Edition (which includes the Shattered Space story expansion, a digital art book, the game’s OST and a few weapon/suit skins on top of the base game).
I can’t get enough of physics destruction toolkits, whether it’s devastating dioramas with ballistae in Besiege or tunneling through the modernist homes of the affluent in Teardown. You can now add Abriss to that list.
Abriss has you destroying brutalist architecture in a futuristic cityscape using rockets, wrecking arms and laser pinwheels of your own design. Whatever you construct, the result is a glorious physics spectacle. After a little over a year in Steam Early Access, it hit 1.0 earlier this week.
If you spend your days refreshing the YouTube homepage in lieu of doing work, like I do, you might have at some point come across the work of Joel Haver. Haver makes, among other things, comedic rotoscoped animations riffing on science fiction and video game tropes.
It makes sense that Bethesda would have tapped him up to take the mick out of Starfield, then, given it combines both those tropes into a mockable whole.
Men of War 2 is moving its release date back to next year so that developers Best Way can add some extra technical polish to the upcoming World War II RTS.
