Day one patches are the curse that comes with the modern age of video games because development doesn’t end at the point of printing the discs we play them on any more. It sucks, it’s bad for preservation, but we’re stuck with them. However, it’s also a bit funny that Elden Ring Nightreign, due out tomorrow, May 30th, sort of has a day minus one patch that’s already available. Of course, unless you’re a journalist, YouTuber, or very friendly with your local video game store clerk who hooked you up with an early copy of the Soulslike, this won’t concern you for a good few hours yet.
The Ukrainian government-run Center for Countering Disinformation have released a warning about a new free-to-play shooter, Squad 22: ZOV, which they say is a blaring propaganda instrument for the Russian military that “mythologises” the country’s invasion and bombardment of Ukraine since 2022. The accusation actually dates back to February this year, but it has resurfaced and picked up pace online now that Squad 22 is actually on sale via Steam. Valve have yet to comment.
A voice actor who featured in Persona 4 has let slip that a remake of the school days JRPG is in the works, mostly because he’s frustrated the developers don’t want him back to perform as his original character. Yuri Lowenthal, who played clumsy bicycle crasher Yosuke in the original 2008 game, expressed some revealing annoyance with developers Atlus in a post on social media that has since been deleted.
Cyberpunk 2077‘s sequel has shed its Project Orion codename and will now be known as… Cyberpunk 2. CD Projekt revealed the name change in their latest earnings results, according to which the new Cyberpunk RPG has just entered pre-production – roughly defined, the point in a game’s gestation when designers, artists, programmers and so forth meet to flesh out the concept, but before they’ve actually started making anything that’s supposed to form part of the finished game. There are now 96 people working on the thing, versus 422 for The Witcher 4, 49 on multiplayer Witcher spin-off Project Sirius, and 19 for an unannounced original game, Project Hadar.
The grousing, dilettante reader will object that this is scant material for a news post, especially given that CD Projekt are offering no guarantees that “Cyberpunk 2” will be the project’s final name – as they commented to the Verge, Cyberpunk 2 “just means it’s another game in the Cyberpunk universe.” But the dextrous maven of online news-mongering will notice that “Cyberpunk 2” is, in fact, an extremely compact and subtle piece of worldbuilding.
I’ve never been so happy to see a spike trap as I was in Debugging Hero. At the start of each combat encounter, the demo for this roguelite hack n’ slash hands you several numeric cards and lets you pause the game to view both your and your enemies’ stats: health, damage, and durability. You then drag the cards on to the relevant stat to modify it, then unpause to continue real-time combat.
It’s a cute gimmick, letting you knock down high health enemies to a manageable number, or kill weak ones outright, or heal yourself. But it felt a tad shallow to carry a whole game, even one with dodges and parries in its real-time combat. Then, I entered a room with a trap tile that thrust sharpened spikes upwards at timed intervals, and realised I could manipulate the timer. I tuned it right down, and raucously chortled like a portly racoon at the bakery bins as it pneumatically skewered my idiot attackers.
In 2023 EA opened a new studio named Cliffhanger Games, led by former Monolith head Kevin Stephens, and announced a new third-person, singleplayer game starring Marvel’s Black Panther. They’ve now cancelled that game and shut down that studio, IGN report.
According to EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, via an email sent to employees, this has been done to “sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities.”
“Greebling” is George Lucas’s term for the decoration of spacecraft models with showy, superfluous details – clumps of antennae, bulky rivets, bulging pipes, anything that whiffs of function. Speaking as the human grown from the ashes of a child who once built the Death Star out of LEGO, I do enjoy a good greeble now and then, but it very easily becomes a parody of itself – like turning a machine inside out, but none of the exposed parts are meaningfully connected. Liliana, founder of Eridanus Industries and lead developer of space tactics sim Nebulous: Fleet Command, has more practical objections to greebling, based on her eight years in the US Navy: excess surface details are an absolute dust trap for radar waves.
Elden Ring had a starting class named the Wretch that gets a club and some ratty underwear filled with dreams and nothing else, and there’s something special about the first few hours in Limgrave playing them, scavenging your first pieces of mismatched armour and build-defining treasures. The first time you hit a site of grace, that initial stat boost feels like a deific power surge. Insomuch as Elden Ring’s most memorable stories run tangential and emergent to its static lore, this early fraught scramble is the player’s self-woven tale at its most captivating. Soon enough, though, the feeling is gone. You’re as powerful as god, desiring nothing but more bulbous Albinauric skulls to toss on the pile.
Elden Ring: Nightreign feels unique among FromSoft’s modern catalogue for its flippant attitude toward a convincing sense of place, and so regrettably sacrifices much of its studio’s identity as committed worldbuilders, even while amplifying some of their more peculiar and interesting beats. It’s tempting, then, to ask why it exists in the first place. On a generous day, I’d say that Nightreign exists to recreate – over and over – that same, wretchedly gratifying early-game feeling. Where every scrap of progress feels like a milestone, dull smithing stones shimmer like silver, and each incremental bonk stat increase is a hero’s journey in miniature.
There exists in this world much which, if stripped of even one of its components, would be rendered naught but a frail illusion. Roast pork without applesauce? An insult to god and man alike. A sword without a hilt? Merely sharpened iron, stripped of use or dignity. As our band of eight rode into Heuwiller – Thillmann at the head as befitted his command, Slackbladder at the back as befitted our nostrils – a dark cloud fell upon us. For what is a village without a single poxy alehouse in sight? Nary a trough full of fermented carrot juice. It was going to be a long day.
Ho, Lethal Companions! Put down your airhorns, let fall your precious armfuls of plastic fish, and prick up your freakin’ ears. Something is coming to 2023’s breakout horror multiplayer game. Something that will make the music boxes and springhead marionettes look like child’s playthings! I mean, like the child’s playthings they already look like, but without the parts that make them horrifying. That something is… to be announced, but I considered the below teaser text pithy enough to be worth a shout regardless.
