Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Riot Games have announced that they will shortly fire “about 530” people, or 11 per cent of their global workforce, so as to “create focus and move us towards a more sustainable future”, in the words of CEO Dylan Jadeja. The “biggest impact” will be felt outside of core development, though they’ll affect at least one major internal team – the developers of Legends Of Runeterra. Riot are also binning off the Riot Forge publishing label, under which third-party developers create smaller-scale games based on Riot’s own intellectual properties.

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Readers with keen memories may remember that I recently self-described as being in my scented candle girlie era. I’m currently burning one called Starry Night, which is a nice fresh scent but it’s nowhere near as strong as I would like. I can never find fresh scents that are as long-lingering as the fruity or woody ones. Anyway, I have been discussing my new interest (and interrupting work meetings with pretend candle unboxing videos where I tell them to like and subscribe and check out my collab with WickManiac) with the rest of the Treehouse, which prompted us to talk about the idea of gamer candles. They exist! They’re just candles of lies.

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A new update for the PC Game Pass and Xbox versions of Palworld has fixed some of its many, many known issues today, but those hoping for some fixes to its online multiplayer options will sadly have to wait a little longer. Currently, those playing on Game Pass still don’t have the ability to join or create dedicated servers for up to 32-player multiplayer like their mates on Steam can. Instead, they remain limited to just 2-4-player co-op via the use of friend codes, meaning that Game Pass players aren’t having quite the same experience as their Steam counterparts.

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Ahhh, fast travel: the opinion generator. Speaking to IGN, Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno threw his own hat into the ring, saying that he’s keen to avoid fast travel in DD2 and would prefer that “players travel normally and experience the world around them”. If you’re someone who argues all games should let you teleport to the objective, then Itsuno thinks you’re wrong. Hey, he doesn’t mess about, and I don’t disagree with him, as long as the game isn’t actually wasting my time.

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When I am faced with Death, and that grim skeletal mouth asks me to choose the game we play to decide my fate, I have long believed I will pick Tekken. I’m not confident I will best the reaper in Iron Fist combat. But I cannot pass up the adrenally depraved possibility of successfully performing a ten-button airborne combo on mortality made manifest. It would be rad. It would be absurd and beautiful and I know, for a fact, that Death will play as Panda.

But will we play Tekken 8? Or roll back to Tekken 7? Hmmm. Let’s find out.

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Obsidian’s Avowed is a game for the more indecisive or changeable RPG player, with no “enforced” classes and an emphasis on easily respeccing and experimenting with different combinations of weapons and abilities. Or at least, that’s my overall takeaway from a new Xbox podcast interview featuring game director Carrie Patel and gameplay director Gabe Paramo. In the video, the pair delve a little deeper into last week’s Xbox Developer Direct showcase and how the game compares to their previous Pillars of Eternity games, which are set in the same world.

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Virtual reality-focused developers Wimo Games have joined the ever-expanding list of studios to be hit by layoffs and closure in recent months, as the Battle Bows and Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem studio confirmed their closure last week.

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The Nvidia tools used to create that raytraced Portal mod and other fanciness are now in open beta, inviting all and sundry to jazz up everything from Deus Ex to Garry’s Mod. Nvidia’s RTX Remix tech lets people fancify old games by injecting fancy modern lighting, new models, textures ‘remastered’ by AI, new environmental decoration, and other such fanciness, even if the game doesn’t have mod support. I’ll be curious to see what people make with this, though I am wary of artlessly pumping new tech into old games.

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Pocketpair’s monster-collecting survival game Palworld has rekindled the eternal debate over what exactly constitutes a breach of copyright. While the game’s mechanics are more reminiscent of Ark: Survival Evolved and other tree-punching, template-arranging wilderness sims, its monsters owe obvious debts to Nintendo and Game Freaks’ Pokémon games.

The developers have something of a track record on this front, with their older early access release Craftopia freely stirring in nods to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But what separates copyright infringement from a flagrant, but perfectly legal rip-off? Given that a lot of people are making the case for Palworld being copyright theft online, I thought it might be useful to seek insight from (ominous roll of thunder) an actual lawyer.

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The next Cyberpunk game from CD Projekt – currently codenamed “Orion” – might have multiplayer in it, according to co-CEO Michal Nowakowski. Please let it be some kind of deckhead ‘passenger-seat-driver’ mode, where you get to play a crusty celeb uploaded to another character’s brain implants, who strolls around the landscape as a hologram, offering gritty commentary on your Night City-based endeavours. Watch those corners, samurai! Hey, you missed an ammo pack. SAMURAI ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME.

It’ll be a while till we find out for sure: Orion is still in the conceptual phase, with CD Projekt expecting to have about 80 people working on it by the end of this year. The higher priority in 2024, it seems, is the next big steaming helping of The Witcher.

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