Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I have been sort of enjoying former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah’s reinvention as a Youtuber who trades insider BioWare anecdotes for merch. He’s got an actual T-shirt line, including a T-shirt for babies upon which Mark threatens to “pump NFTs” unless you buy his gear. Respectable Crazy Uncle energy. Maybe don’t invite him to your kid’s baptism. But maybe do watch his new video about what might happen to EA’s many development studios in the wake of the company’s $55 billion acquisition by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the gilded suits of Silver Lake.

The tl;dr/tl;dw is that Darrah thinks EA’s various sport game teams, like Madden and EA Sports FC, are probably fine under the new privately-owned EA. Those games bring home a lot of bacon, after all, and EA’s new dads in Riyadh are keen on sports in general. He’s less confident about the studios clustered under EA Entertainment, and especially those such as Darrah’s old joint BioWare who might have more pronounced cultural objections to the new ownership, based on the kinds of stories they tell.

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Am I good at chess? I’ll take no for $1500, Alex. But do I love a funky twist on games that are older than time itself? You bet your bottom dollar I do! Enter Below the Crown, a chess video game that is also a roguelike, ,and is also a turn-based strategy game, and is also a dungeon crawler on top of that. It’s a lot! It also works very well, and in a demo that just came out today (alongside an early access release date), there’s a suggestion of something a touch more… unsettling… going on under the hood.

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Ananta, whether it ends up being a good game or not, is clearly a confident one. You have to be brave to so blatantly, we’ll say, borrow from so many different games. Like many anime-esque games of its ilk, it will live and die by its characters (which, by the way, you won’t have to gacha roll for), of which it seems to have in spades judging from that first gameplay trailer. These characters will all play differently too, and according to Ananta’s producer Ash Qi, the dev team wants you to think of them like Avengers members. Comparing your new thing to an older, widely loved thing is always a safe move!

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There just doesn’t seem to be a good time to release a game right now, does there? We all saw the way that Hollow Knight: Silksong scared away plenty of games, even games with completely different genres. And sometimes it’s just a case of a particular month being stacked – just this month alone there’s Ghost of Yotei, Battlefield 6, Pokemon Legends Z-A, Ninja Gaiden 4, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, Dispatch, Arc Raiders, the list truly goes on. So, I really can’t blame developer Digital Sun, who’ve announced that Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault has been delayed.

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When you review a game, if you don’t know anyone else that’s also reviewing it, it can be a bit difficult to guess how it might be received overall. There’s normally some assumptions you can make, but with a series like Silent Hill, a series where the general consensus is all over the place from game to game, it’s certainly not easy to predict. I myself ended up being quite fascinated by Silent Hill f in my review of it, but in a recent interview series producer Motoi Okamoto said that despite an overall positive reception, you shouldn’t expect every consequent game to be just like it.

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Right, there’s just a constant wall of bad news at the moment, so how about something a bit nicer. Earlier this year, Summerfall Studios announced that the Kickstarter for their demonic roguelike deckbuilder Malys didn’t work out, so they’d be releasing it in early access instead. Much like Kickstarters themselves, early access releases are risky business too, but it appears that at the very least it’s worked well enough to grant the game a 1.0 release.

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Dune: Awakening developers Funcom have announced plans to lay off an unspecified number of workers, citing the same need to “restructure” that’s essentially become a byword for games industry job cuts at this point.

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Microsoft are reshuffling their Xbox Game Pass subscription tiers and hiking the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass in certain regions. You’ll now need to pay $29.99 a month for Ultimate – a 50% jump, with pricing for places outside the US to follow. PC Game Pass subscriptions are going up from $11.99 to $16.49 monthly – around 40 percent higher.

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“Deserts, deathclaws, and raiders”, alongside a “New Vegas feel” with Walton Goggins’ Ghoul as the face. These are the main ingredients for Fallout 76’s Burning Springs map expansion, which is set to arrive in early December this year.

In case you weren’t clear as to how Bethesda are pitching it, a hands-off preview attended by RPS saw 76 creative director Jon Rush introduce Burning Springs thusly: “Based on the success of season one of the Fallout Show, we can expect to see several million players returning to Appalachia for season two. People [who] have seen the show and want more of that storytelling, more of that New Vegas feel will get it all in Fallout 76: Burning Springs. Burning Springs is in total tonal tandem with season two.”

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Remember Prototype, the super hero game which saw Radical Entertainment explore what might happen if a hoodie enthusiast was given shape-shifting powers? Well, it’s recieved a sudden and mysterious steam update which adds to its credits, fuelling a fresh bout of speculation that a remaster might be on the cards.

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