Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A fresh report has shed a bit more light on Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s famously difficult time in development, offering info on culture clashes between BioWare’s different teams, and revealing that the game was re-written due to concerns about its banter being too snarky.

The report, from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, goes through the whole sordid story of Veilguard’s journey from in-the-works single player game, to in-the-works online thing, back to in-the-works single player thing, parts of which you’re likely familiar with at this point. There’s also a bunch of context as to how wider events across the studio and publisher EA influenced the game that ended up hitting shelves after a decade or so of development.

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A group of prominent Fallout 4 modders will be livestreaming the creation of a big mod over a single weekend later this month. It’s part of a charity drive led by voice actor Wes Johnson, probably most famous for providing the dulcet tones of mad Daedric prince Sheogorath in Oblivion and Skyrim.

The gang – led by Kinggath and the team behind the popular Sim Settlements mod – will be letting viewers decide the specifics of the mod via a stream this weekend, with the actual mod creation streams then taking place on Twitch across June 28th and 29th.

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I’ve always found Dune: Awakening an oddball concept – it’s been repeatedly made clear, by Zendaya no less, that Arrakis will immediately kill, flay, and digest anyone who pokes a toe into its sands without an impossible sci-fi techsuit and a lifetime of edged weapons training. Not, you’d suspect, an obvious setting for a survival crafting game where genre conventions demand you begin life as some naked loser picking up sticks.

And yet, Awakening has turned out alright, hoisting desert exploration and ominous sci-fi atmospherics above the tedious 24/7 resource gathering that has choked out certain peers. PC performance is workable too, with enough concessions towards low-end rigs, though it’s not crysknife-sharp either: some technical mishaps need a prompt patching, while Unreal Engine 5 is up to its usual stuttering nonsense.

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Mindseye, the game from ex-Rockstar president Leslie Benzies-helmed studio Build a Rocket Boy, has arrived. Its launch has gone, er, a bit glitchily, currently landing the game at a mixed reception on Steam. That said, the studio have at least confirmed an update designed to improve Mindseye’s performance is on the way.

If you’re out of the loop, the sort of GTA-ish/Cyberpunk-ish game’s road to release had been plenty weird prior to it breaking cover. Build a Rocket Boy co-CEO Mark Gerhard had seemingly suggested on the game’s Discord server that he believed people were being paid to say negative things about Mindseye, and two other high-profile execs had departed the studio not long before release.

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Ian Proulx, the CEO of Splitgate 2 developers 1047 Games, has apologised for wearing a ‘Make FPS Great Again’ cap while talking about the game’s battle royale mode on stage at Summer Game Fest. As you might have guessed, the hat drew unfavourable comparisons to US president Donald Trump’s MAGA hats.

It’d have been a pretty dumb, controversy-baiting stunt for a games company CEO to pull at any point in recent history, but especially hasn’t gone over well given the timing. As the SGF show happened, a large number of anti-ICE protests also began in response to violent immigration raids, and later that weekend Trump deployed the National Guard onto the streets.”

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One minute you’re flicking through Steam’s Next Fest demos, and finding one that looks to be included despite having come out in May. The next, you’re desperately firing missiles into the rear end of giant monster truck, a sole red light glaring out from its metallic behind, as though it’s mega-pissed that it seems to have gotten stuck in a cluster of trees. Given that, it should be easy prey for the ordnance strapped to the bonnet of my very Mad Max-ish muscle car coated in enough sheets of metal to fence off several allotments.

This is Mad Metal, though, an indie game whose murderous enemy cars have minds of their own and move more like automotive animals than simple machines.

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Herdling is an odd little game. How do you begin to sell the idea that a (presumably emotional) herding simulator might be quite interesting? Yes, people love their farming sims as a band aid form of escapism, but a lot of those games are in the first instance much more about farming and not farm animals, nor the way you interact with said animals. Herdling is all about that, as the whole goal is to guide a group of strange horned beasties up a mountain.

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We don’t really get to write about Playdate, that bespoke games console with a built in crank, here on RPS very much because it is very much not a computer (though former EIC Katharine did review it back when it launched). Well, not in the way we need it to be for our purposes. But I have an excuse to do so today! Over the weekend at the PC Gaming Show, a trailer for the Panic-published, faux-streaming service Blippo+ was shown off, one that captured my attention quite quickly.

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When you have a game that is so run focused like Elden Ring Nightreign, balance is the key to not getting someone to throw their controller at a wall, cursing their own birth as they do so. Up until now, there were parts of Elden Ring Nightreign that certainly weren’t balanced, though that mostly came down to a few bugs. As of today though, there’s a new update you can download for the roguelike which brings in some much needed fixes.

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Finding Lies of P: Overture a bit too hard? Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you just “get good” like those randos you see littered all over Twitter. I’m actually here to say that you’re not alone on this one. The story expansion for the conceptually weirdest Soulslike in town dropped during Geoff’s Onslaught Of Generally OK Announcements (aka, Summer Game Fest) as a surprise release, and it seems like the general feedback so far has been “please make it a bit easier so Twinkocchio doesn’t get battered so hard.”

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