Time for another sorry week of heaving news-fuel into the Maw’s thousand-and-one gullets and urgh, what’s that brooding stench? It reeks of embargoes in here. The air is foul with it. This week is the week of the inaugural Triple-I Initiative showcase, aka the IIIIs, aka a 45-minute dollop of trailers and announcements from such studios as Slay The Spire creators MegaCrit and Darkest Dungeon developers Red Hook. We know of a couple of the announcements in advance; others, we’ll learn about alongside you on 10th April.
I like close combat tactics, directing troop actions on a timeline, and breaching and clearing, but a recent revisit to Door Kickers revealed I no longer had the patience for its fiddly UI and grim scenarios.
No Plan B looks intriguing, then, for featuring all of the things mentioned above that I like, an unknown quantity of the things I don’t, and for having released on Steam this week.
Behind its DLC microtransactions, Dragon’s Dogma 2’s most divisive element is arguably Dragonsplague, the pawn-infecting sickness that your AI companions can catch while questing online and may eventually drive them to murder entire settlements’ worth of NPCs.
Helldivers 2 is getting a new premium warbond next week, offering some explosive new options to take into battle, aim at an enemy bug or robot, and then accidentally kill your entire squad by mistake. Or maybe that’ll just be me.
Relic Entertainment, the freshly-independent developers of Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Age of Empires IV, have confirmed a number of job losses. The layoffs come just a week after the studio announced their sale from former owners Sega, returning them to independence after two decades.
Fulqrum Publishing have just released a story trailer for New Arc Line, a new steampunk fantasy RPG in which dragons rub shoulders with zeppelins, and dwarves are as abundant as air pollution. I hadn’t heard of it before and am quite interested, partly because the game sports some wonderfully mangled and colourful dystopian maps, and partly because it’s a story of immigrants trying to find their way to an inevitably deceptive “shining city of progress”, rather than the typical Chosen One fare.
Your family specifically are afflicted by a fatal disease. Your initial and perhaps overall goal in New Arc Line is to find a cure, of course, but who knows, along the way you might have to “get your hands dirty”, “rise from the bottom” and become some sort of absolute bastard. Take us away, trailer!
“Craft technopunk gear or master the arcane arts, fight, steal or smooth-talk your way to the top and become the hero or villain you want to be,” reads the Steam page. “You will not have to face the trials of this world alone, however; find your companions and gather your party, make foes and allies, fall in love, get involved in a massive conspiracy, and change the course of history forever.”
For a handheld PC, the Steam Deck benefits an awful lot from having a mouse and keyboard plugged into it, and nothing enables this marriage of portable and peripheral like one of the best Steam Deck docks. And it’s not just USB connectivity that gets a boost – external displays, rock-solid Ethernet connections for game downloads, and power delivery all make dock usage a preferable alternative to simply hooking up Bluetooth accessories. Along with a microSD card (and possibly a better case), these stand/hub combos are definitely among the tools that any regular Steam Deck wielder should have.
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’.
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.
