Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

There are moments where Sons Of The Forest matches the sublime paranoia of Subnautica. There’s that same lurching, exquisite tension as you delve deeper and deeper into darkness where you are not welcome, supplies dwindling, footfall echoing, monstrosities skittering about in the black. On my most intense plunge into one cave, I groaned aloud as the path I was praying must be the exit twisted back on itself, sending me first down a rope, and then into a long slide down, down into the earth, back into the spindly clutches of pale, bifurcated mutants. When I finally saw the sun again, I could have cried.

It’s still a bit wonky, but the full 1.0 release makes the Forest a fuller, livelier and more inviting (or else alluringly off-putting) prospect for a wander – even, as in my case, a wholly solo one. Consider this your cue to peel open some skin pouches.

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As the video games industry violently contracts to ensure shareholder satisfaction at the cost of making thousands upon thousands of people unemployed, Skylanders studio Toys For Bob have announced they’re splitting from Activision Blizzard and Microsoft to go independent. Good for them, but maybe too late for some. Earlier this month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that it seemed Activision Blizzard were closing Toys For Bob’s California headquarters and laying off 86 people. Still, the new independent Toys For Bob say they’re working on something new and “exploring a possible partnership” with Microsoft.

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It feels pretty appropriate that my last deal post for RPS is for my favourite PC peripheral: the humble mechanical keyboard. This mechanical keyboard is more humble than its peers too, with a $30 asking price that is absolutely exceptional for a name-brand keyboard that gets rave reviews: the Keychron C3 Pro.

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If Helldivers 2 hasn’t quite scratched your itch for reducing robots into piles of scrap, upcoming physics-based brawler Mecha Mayhem might. Gang Beasts in a world of Gundam-like bots, the fighting game lets you literally tear your enemies into pieces before repurposing their dismembered parts on your own bot.

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Smite 2 was revealed as a standalone sequel to the third-person god-battling MOBA last month, using Unreal Engine 5 for a visual overhaul on the front end while making a number of significant gameplay and balance changes behind the scenes. Ahead of its planned alpha test this spring, developers Titan Forge have now shown off how the game’s Conquest mode will be evolving.

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Immortals of Aveum saw a very rough debut last summer, with the first-person magic-shooter from new studio Ascendant and EA reportedly suffering poor sales and mixed reviews – resulting in almost half of its developers being laid off mere weeks after its launch. Despite being a reported $125 million flop that “no-one bought”, its director believes that it could still go on to find an audience yet.

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The creators of Tomb Raider I-III Remastered have apologised to players for releasing an unfinished version of the game on the Epic Games Store, following a series of unflattering comparisons between versions on ye olde social media.

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GTA 6 developer Rockstar Games are reportedly ending hybrid working and requiring employees to return to the office full-time, with a view to being in “the best position to deliver the next Grand Theft Auto at the level of quality and polish we know it requires, along with a publishing roadmap that matches the scale and ambition of the game.” That’s allegedly from an email to staff sent by head of publishing Jenn Kolbe.

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Rocket Rat Games co-founder John Guerra remembers the exact day he started working on Cobalt Core‘s first prototype. He and his fellow co-founder Ben Driscoll had just spent a week playing Daniel Mullins’ mysterious roguelike deckbuilder Inscryption at the end of October 2021, but the combination of a bad storm and a power outage ended up forcing Guerra to decamp from his home in Massachusetts and stay with some family until it all blew over. “I got back late on Halloween, just in time to put out a bowl of candy for some kids, and then the next morning we started Cobalt Core,” he tells me.

The pair had been working on a range of different prototypes in the months leading up to this lightbulb moment. As development on their debut game, the spaceship building puzzler Sunshine Heavy Industries, began winding down, “we were throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall,” he says, including games in 3D, a platformer, with Driscoll revealing they even had “a Terraria-like one for a couple of weeks” with a grid-based world that characters bounced around in. But it was playing Inscryption that brought everything to a head. Both had spent hundreds of hours with Slay The Spire, but “Inscryption proved to us that there was still a lot of space to explore in the genre,” says Guerra. And with increasing calls from Sunshine Heavy Industries players begging them to let them fly the ships they were creating in its shipyard sandbox, “you can kind of see how that went from A to B”.

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In Shakespeare’s Anthony And Cleopatra, said famous woman says “Give to a gracious message an host of tongues, but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt.” I.e., when you have good news you can go round the houses, but if you have bad news – like sending an all-hands email to the staff at EA to let them know that, less than a year after the last round of layoffs, a further 5% of them are getting booted – then you should just come out and say it as quickly and simply as possible.

This is, apparently, not a sentiment ever internalised by Andrew Wilson, EA’s CEO. Yesterday, when he announced to everyone at EA that a bunch of them were losing their jobs (again), he first spent three paragraphs talking about how EA is doing great, leading the industry, getting increasing engagement from fans, optimising their global footprint and sunsetting games oh yep, there it is, that’s the “you’re about to be unemployed” language right there. The company is moving away from “the development of future licensed IP” and toward “our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities”. Therefore: 670 ish devs (by Eurogamer’s count) must go.

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