I know this sort of thing has been said before around these parts, but in scanning through the endless reams of Steam Next Fest demos earlier this month and trying to work out what these games are and whether they’re worth downloading, I truly believe it’s a sentiment that’s worth repeating. When I first saw the name C.A.R.D.S RPG: The Misty Battlefield appear on the Next Fest landing page, I instantly thought, ‘Yes, here we go, now we’re talking’.
Well, my first thought was actually, ‘Gee, if only there was an easy way to know what this game’s about based on just the title alone,’ but that’s just me being facetious. Ultimately, I have a lot of respect for this kind of naming convention, and the fact it’s also being made by the Octopath Traveler developers Acquire is really just the icing on the cake.
Credit to Nightingale, I’ve been enjoying the early access form of Inflexion’s gaslamp fantasy survival crafter a fair bit more than I did its older stress test build. The UI is cleaner and tighter, and I’ve had more space to explore (and enjoy) the mysterious nooks of its magic ‘n’ moustaches world. There’s potential here, but it’s very much the raw kind, especially when performance needs as much work as it does.
Besides relying on upscalers like DLSS for truly smooth running, Nightingale currently has a serious stuttering problem, and bumping into an ugly graphical artefact or even a hard crash is worryingly common. I’ve pulled together an optimised settings guide (down below) so that you don’t need to drop the visual quality lower than is strictly necessary, but do keep in mind that this is early access with emphasis on the early.
Yesterday I was off sick with a fever and, as I often do when I’m laid up ill, immediately set out to consume the most nihilistic and depressing entertainment media I could find. On the film front, I watched Session 9, in which some men hired to remove asbestos from a collapsing 19th century asylum do not have a very nice time. On the game front, I played The Tribe Must Survive, a colony management sim from Walking Tree Games GmbH and Starbreeze Publishing, which is now available in early access.
After launching Nightingale into early access on Tuesday, developers Inflexion Games (led by former BioWare CEO Aaryn Flynn) have quickly realised a big miscalculation: lots of players want an offline mode. The gaslamp fantasy survival game requires you be online even if you want to play by yourself, which dovetailed poorly with server issues at launch to frustrate folks. Inflexion say that early in development they needed to make a choice between focusing on co-op or offline first, and now think they made the wrong call. They plan to remedy this, but it’s not yet clear when they’ll actually add an offline mode.
From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki has acknowledged that members of the Dark Souls studio had misgivings about Elden Ring‘s shift to a full-blown open world format, while qualifying that Elden Ring’s vision for an open world was never “traditional”. Rather, Elden Ring is an “open world” game in the same way that Dark Souls is a “hard” game, Miyazaki feels. Confused? Well, this is the godfather of the notoriously unforthcoming Souls series we’re talking about. I’ve never interviewed the guy, but I suspect he composes his responses using the game’s soapstone messaging system.
Intel’s Optane drives are legendary in PC tech circles, offering random performance and low latency that remains unmatched amongst PCIe 3.0 drives. This Intel Optane 905P drive is the biggest they ever made at 1.5TB, and now it’s reduced to $380 when you use code SYADP2Z384 at Newegg.
For systems that accept PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0 drives, I’d recommend sticking with our usual gaming SSD recommendations, but for PCIe 3.0 systems this is a fascinating option that emphasises random performance against sequential speeds. I recorded some of the very fastest game load times with this drive when I tested it against other PCIe 3.0 options, and its random write speeds are competitive even with later generation PCIe 4.0 alternatives.
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is a popular mid-range graphics card that delivers good rasterised performance with best-in-class RT and upscaling/frame generation features. Normally it costs around $550, but today you can get a three-fan Gigabyte Windforce model for just $530 thanks to a $20 off voucher at Newegg. To get this price, just use code VGAEXCGBET625 at the checkout.
Project L, Riot’s long-gestating fighting game which is focused on 2v2 tag team fights, finally has a real name. It’s “2XKO”, which is both awkward to type and to say.
Satan has vanished, the throne of hell lies empty, and eight Archfiends are all jostling to be its chief seat warmer. It’s a great setup for a role-playing strategy game, and the allure of plotting, scheming, backstabbing and shmoozing your way to victory remains as enticing today as it did when Solium Infernum first came to PC in 2009. At the time, it launched to relative obscurity, and was mostly kept alive by dedicated play-by-email multiplayer groups. It was through one of these groups that Armello developers League Of Geeks first came into contact with it, and now, years later, have taken on the task of remaking Solium Infernum for a modern audience.
The original Solium was, by all accounts, an intensely knotty and dense affair, impenetrable to newcomers, or at least to those who were unprepared (or unwilling) to study and absorb all the countless variations and statistics involved in creating your own unique Archfiend. It was a bit like creating a D&D character sheet, only about ten times more complicated, and whose strategic implications may or may not have made themselves apparent until it was far too late. You could biff yourself before you began, in other words, and League Of Geeks have made admirable attempts to tame and streamline this unruly hell beast, doing away with a lot of that initial fussiness. As is perhaps fitting for the theme here, there are unfortunately still a few pesky gremlins causing mayhem behind the scenes at time of writing (I’m pointing the finger at literal bug queen Beelzebub for this), but for the most part, there’s good fun to be had in this new incarnation of Solium Infernum – and particularly if you have some willing friends who you soon hope to call enemies.
As Helldivers 2 continues to be struggling with its own success, suffering wildly overloaded servers that make it sometimes tricky to even log in, a new patch today has added a feature to help alleviate the pressure. Having previously capped the number of players to 450,000, developers Arrowhead have now added an auto-kick to stop people hogging those precious slots while not playing. After 15 minutes, AFK players will now get booted. It’s clearly not the big fix needed but hopefully fresh duct tape will help hold the co-op shooter together until more permanent solutions arrive.
