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While there are minor thrills to be had finding the very latest PC hardware in the Amazon Spring Deal Days sale, don’t underestimate the draw of an older favourite emerging with a new, knockdown price. So it is with the Intel Core i5-12400F: this was a great-value midranger when it was new, and now you get it at a true budget-tier price of £108.
You know when you remember a game really fondly and instead of ageing alongside you, it becomes more modern in memory? The Dragon’s Dogma 2 experience is, essentially, how I remember its predecessor Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. To me, DD2 feels like a remaster of the first, except it looks nicer, is more expansive, and features some rejigs to things like your AI pals.
Not that any of this is a bad thing! In fact, DD2’s closeness to the original makes it just as much of a joy as the first, where your grand adventure isn’t only grander, it’s still at the whims of a world governed by chaotic physics and the passage of time. Quirks remain, for good and bad, but ultimately this is an RPG where you make travel plans and the game does it best to dash them. It never gets old.
In what’s quite the shake up for Overwatch 2, Blizzard have announced that starting with Season 10, all of its heroes will be unlocked for all players. And this includes all new heroes going forwards, too, so the next hero Venture will unlock immediately for everyone when the latest season drops. Otherwise, there’s changes to unlocking premium skins, earning premium coins, and some tidbits on what we can expect from Season 11.
It’s GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they’ve had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It’s the usual pitch. “Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?”, asks Ubi’s official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is “Erm, probably no, actually?”
Still, the internet made good hay from the prototype image Ubisoft shared on Xitter, as many people took the opportunity to make fun of the dialogue from Bloom, a prototype man in a prototype beanie who wants to be your friend.
Bungie have announced a change in director on their upcoming revival of their classic shooter Marathon, amid reports the studio is once again shaking up its creative leadership. Former Valorant director Joe Ziegler confirmed his appointment on Xwitter last night, replacing long-time Bungie designer Christopher Barrett in the role.
Eight years after launching, Stardew Valley just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Update 1.6 arrived yesterday, with enough changes that the patch notes are 7308 words long. It bumps the farm-o-life sim’s co-op player limit to eight, adds hundreds of new items, opens up a new progression system for “powerful perks and items”, adds new events, lets you drink mayonnaise, and so much more that. Best of all, it lets you have more pets. New pets. Pets wearing hats.
Generative AI is all over the entertainment industries right now, and lots of people in games are making excited noises about finding new ways to integrate it into their products, from game developers and publishers such as Ubisoft and Square Enix to platform holders and hardware firms such as Epic and Nvidia. This new industry obsession is still taking shape, and there are lots of questions still to be answered about how much it might cost in the future, who will have access to it, and what it will actually help with, not to mention fears about job losses and other harms. But there’s a bigger question bubbling underneath all of this that threatens to burst the wobbly generative AI bubble: is the entire boom built on stolen labour?
Later this week, Payload Studios’ open world vehicular survival builder TerraTech Worlds launches into early access. As the name implies, it’s a bigger, bolder and more ambitious take on their still very popular sandbox game TerraTech, but according to Payload’s founder and CEO Russ Clarke, they’re viewing this new version as more of a successor to TerraTech than a full-bodied sequel. “The overall quality of experience is really a huge leap forward,” Clarke told me during a press presentation last week. “We’re not calling it a sequel because we felt that making it a sequel would be a bit too constraining.” Rather, it’s “more of a reimagining” of the original game, says Clarke, with a change in engine and fresh investment from Tencent allowing them to reach the full potential of their original vision.
Cyan Worlds today announced plans to launch their fancy real-time 3D remake of Riven later this year, coming with support for both VR cybergoggles and standard meatspace screens. Riven: The Sequel To Myst was the 1997 sequel to Myst, the 1993 pre-rendered adventure game which sold a million CD-ROM drives and launched a thousand specks of spittle from John Walker’s mouth. The remake previously had a longwinded name of its own, Riven: New Discoveries Of The Lost D’ni Empire, but now is simply named Riven. They should rebrand again and call it Riven: The Sequel To The Myst Remake.
If you’re keen to try out Sand Land, an upcoming action RPG from the developers of One Piece Odyssey and the creator of Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama, then I have some great news. There’s a demo out right now that lets you explore a portion of the sandy map, try out a handful of the characters, and ride some rusty vehicles ahead of its release next month on April 25th.
