Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As a valued RPS supporter, you’re likely aware that you possess legal ownership of the fleeting thoughts I have right before falling asleep at night. It’s actually in the T&C, right under the bit about Horace’s claim on your organs. Good news: such interruptions are plentiful, and so too will be content. Here’s my latest:

Am I doomed, I asked myself, to live in wishful longing for the myriad gaming experiences I could have had if I didn’t tend to get obsessed with a few specific games, both digital and tabletop, that take up all my leisure time?

Obviously I didn’t phrase it like that. It was more like ‘whawhaohhnoo’.

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As World Of Warcraft Classic – an MMORPG that is, confusingly, a new version of the old version of World Of Warcraft – enters phase 3 of its Season Of Discovery, PCGamer has an interview with some of the devs where they talk about the decision to not run Player Test Realms – servers where they roll out the new content to smaller numbers of players to road test it. This means that when they launch new stuff for Seasons Of Discovery it’ll probably break more often, but it means players get to discover brand new things together. Which is great! And the developers think it’s good too.

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Thrones of Decay, the upcoming expansion for strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3, will now be available to purchase as either three separate faction packs, or as a bundle at a discount. So, if you don’t fancy shelling out the full £19.10 for all three factions, you can grab new bits for either Nurgle, the Empire, or the Dwarfs for £7.49. If you do buy just one to start off with – say, to get a feel for the quality of Thrones of Decay as a package – you’ll get a 15% discount on the remaining two packs in the future.

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Goblin Stone released almost a month ago, but we haven’t written about it yet, and it feels like you should know about it. It’s a turn-based RPG, it’s a roguelike with permadeath, it’s got XCOM-style base-building, its got card-based combat; it is extremely your sort of thing, if you’re the exact statistical average of Rock Paper Shotgun readers.

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Ubisoft racing game The Crew shut down on March 31st, rendering the game unplayable for everyone who bought it since its release ten years ago.

In response, YouTuber Ross Scott has launched Stop Killing Games, “the largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games”. The initiative exists to encourage people to petetiion their governments about the issue.

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I’m not much of a reality TV watcher. Genuinely, I’ve been humiliated on this count in RPS morning meetings, with certain “colleagues” whose names rhyme with “Malice Knell” making references I don’t understand and laughing at my expression of hurt and confusion. My grasp of reality TV basically ends with the finale of the very first season of Big Brother, feat. Nasty Nick. But you could argue that you don’t need to watch reality TV to understand and enjoy reality TV, because the basic reality TV thrill of forming weird parasocial attachments to people who are role-playing as themselves is now the golden rule of digital society generally.

“‘Reality’ stuff is huge now, and it’s not just reality TV,” says Nicole He, designer of The Crush House – an enticing, absurdist and engrossingly unpleasant new sim from Reigns and Card Shark developers Nerial. “It’s any kind of celebrity or influencer or streamer or something like that – there are so many parasocial relationships in that way, and I think that really started with reality TV, and then [continued] in the era of social media. It’s one of those topics that we don’t talk about in an explicit way, necessarily, but it’s something that you hopefully think about as you’re playing the game.”

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You could say that the best Steam Deck case is the one you get for free, and to be sure, I have no qualms with Valve’s bundled carrier. Especially not the one you get with the 1TB Steam Deck OLED, which adds a neat mini-case in the form of a removable liner. Still! As you’ll see here, you do have a choice of worthwhile upgrade options, ranging from conventional hard cases with extra accessory storage to clever protective sleeves that combine impact resistance with improved handheld grip. The best way to avoid Steam Deck damage is to not drop it in the first place, as Sun Tzu probably said.

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‘The Wild Bastards’ is about the best name I’ve heard for a gang of alien outlaws in a space-western, good enough that let’s skip past the fact that the game was announced last year and we’ve only just noticed. Wild Bastards is the follow-up to Void Bastards, 2019’s roguelikelike first-person shooter about a prisoner in a corporate nightmare forced to raid derelict spaceships on a wild goose chase. This time, it’s leaning into crime, jaunting across the galaxy to resurrect a game of legendary outlaws, the Wild Bastards. Allow me to repeat that name: the Wild Bastards. Alright, now come watch the gameplay trailer.

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A terrible confession: I almost fell asleep during the presentation for Motion Twin’s Windblown. This wasn’t really Motion Twin’s fault. It was the afternoon of day four at GDC, my adrenaline reserves were spent, and there I was, in a warm, shuttered hotel room, with two men gently bombarding me with French-accented details of synergies, stackable trinkets and i-frames (I’m aware that the scenario I’ve just described is probably somebody’s kink – let’s move swiftly on).

Windblown itself is an airy, bright fusillade of Saturday morning cartoon vibes, a series of breakneck arena fights waged on procedurally generated island chains floating against a whirlpool sky. It’s all shaping up very nicely, and if I’d been playing the demo, I’m sure it would have woken me up better than any emergency deluge of instant coffee. But watching somebody else tear through this stratospheric world simply overloaded my depleted senses, and I came perilously close to nodding off.

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In response to gold generation and item exploits in action rpg game Last Epoch, developer Eleventh Hour have released a statement on Steam admonishing those responsible and reaffirming their commitment to preventing further exploits on “both a technical and user level.”

The statement, which also mentions nefarious goings on involving the very much banned RMT (real money trading), details the recent fixes released to combat these issues, as well as the identification and banning of accounts found to have broken the game’s terms of service.

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