Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

How about that Steam Machine, ‘ey? Consoles are now computers and computers are now consoles. What a topsy turvy world we’re living in! I’m sure you have lots of questions, a lot of which I hope can be answered by James’ hands-on look at the thing, but you may still be wondering how you’ll know what games will actually work on it. The Steam Deck has its fancy verified badge that certifies that a game runs on the handheld, and it turns out that same badge is one that’ll come in handy for the Steam Machine.

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Oh I do love a win! Today’s is quite a surprising one, coming in the form of Jagex willingly removing some microtransactions from RuneScape after more than 120,000 people voted in favour of having them permanently removed from the game. To be frank, I am genuinely unsure if I have… well, ever seen a company do this simply because everyone hated them so much.

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Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is, in Dominic’s own words, “merely okay.” I haven’t played it myself, so I can’t comment there, the general consensus seems to be in agreement on that point however. The Chinese Room are working on turning that around at least! Today they released a new patch for the RPG, containing a bunch of fixes, and offered up a small roadmap of improvements and DLC to come.

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With as young a medium as games is (and it is young, as old as we all might feel), it’s no surprise that it would burgeon new genres, and that said genres would be called into question. Metroidvanias! That’s a potentially silly one, with a common argument being that it tells you nothing about the genre itself. I prefer Japan’s search action as a name myself, though I am but one humble games journalist. A genre I hadn’t called into question until today, however, is extraction shooter, a name that a former Bungie lead apparently disliked so much he tried to get the studio’s marketing team to make something else up for Marathon.

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Back in my university days, a few friends and I played Yulgang Online, also known as Scions of Fate. An early 2000s Korean MMORPG with a Chinese martial arts theme, Yulgang was one of dozens of free MMOs we dabbled in. While we never got beyond the “kill X number of things to level up” grind, it was novel to run around in a wuxia-themed world, which was a rarity in localised-into-English PC gaming back then.

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Doings are afoot in the retrofuture scrapmetal world of Arc Raiders. Developers Embark have announced that a major new update called North Line will roll out tomorrow, 13th November at 1.30am PT, 4.30am ET, 9.30am GMT and 10.30am CET. It’ll add Stella Montis, a region beyond the Rust Belt that is described as “cold, pristine, and filled with the remnants of humanity’s lost ambitions.” I am picturing a landscape awash with Betamax cassettes, Bored Apes and Soviet space shuttles, where Raiders pick through old branches of Toys R Us.

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Gah! I’ve lost them again. My precious brows and burns, they’ve gone walkabouts! Luckily, The Outer Worlds 2 latest patch aims to take care of instances of misbehaving hair. That’s far from the only fix in what’s a very beefy list, with companion buffs, crash corrections, and instances of weird NPC antics also having been tended to.

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If I wanted to party anywhere in the Marvel universe, I’d be reserving my beanbags and buckets of lentil chips for Dr Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. It’s a big posh wizard’s mansion, full of shelves of worrisome books and glass cabinets housing all manner of mystical nonsense that would make for an easy conversation starter, and probably some mildly apocalyptic drunken high jinks.

I mention this because players of Marvel Rivals appear to agree with me. According to publishers Nexon, a lot of you have been hosting impromptu mixers in the Sanctum Sanctorum when you really ought to be murdering each other dead. They don’t call it a “Doom Match” because it’s about speed-dating with your mortal adversaries, lads. Still, Nexon are nothing if not bendable in the face of customer whim. The meet-ups in Sanctum Sanctorum have inspired them to release a full-blown non-combat map set in New York’s Time Square, where 100 players can rub shoulders without yoinking each other’s arms off.

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Last week, Game Developer reported that the organisers of Geoff Keighley-fronted industry awards show/advertising extravaganza The Game Awards had revealed that they’ve got no plans to do anything with their Future Class initiative this year. That’s left the programme, founded in 2020 with the goal of highlighting up and coming talents in and around game development, facing a black hole of a future. Even worse, those featured by the initiative during the years it did run have been left feeling frustrated and unable to access the webpage which confirms they were ever part of the programme.

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Stray Children begins with your inexplicably dog-faced orphan being invited out at night by a peculiar, grinning man. You follow him through empty streets to a secret room in an underground train station, packed with elderly computing equipment. The man tells you that this used to be your father’s workplace. He warns you not to touch one of the computers, then shambles off theatrically for an indefinite toilet break. With no other option save heading home alone, you poke the forbidden console and are promptly sucked inside it.

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