Vintage Story’s devs are trying to save some of cancelled Hytale’s soul by turning it into an adventure mode

How do you sort of resurrect a Minecrafty sandbox game that’s been blown up by a feature creeper before it could be released? Well, in the case of Hytale, it looks like one of the answers is going to be a new mode in another Minecrafty sandbox game.

Yep, amid much chatter about potential Hytale revivals since the news of its cancellation and Hypixel Studios’ impeding closure broke last month, the devs of Vintage Story are trying to make sure that at least some of the game’s spirit lives on.

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Stop Killing Games’ proposals would make online-only games “prohibitively expensive to create”, argue EU lobby group

The Stop Killing Games campaign’s petition to the European Commission surpassed a million signatures last week, meaning EU policymakers may soon be debating whether developers and publishers should have the option to render online games unplayable by shutting down their servers. Video Games Europe, a trade association who represent publishers and devs, have responded by outlining why they think that choice should stay on the table.

It’ll be interesting to see how any proper debates on the topic go, but the response is worth reading if you’re still trying to decide where exactly you stand on the issue YouTuber Ross Scott and Stop Killing Games have been campaigning about since Ubisoft pulled The Crew offline.

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Dune: Awakening’s latest patch takes aim at PvP border campers, and dishes out some extra Landsraad rewards

Evacuate your Deep Desert tents, Dune: Awakening‘s latest patch enacts a timer tweak aimed at eliminating cheeky PvP zone border camping. It’s also added some extra rewards to the Landsraad and switched up how goodies are distributed to PvE players.

This patch comes as Funcom continue to respond to player feedback about the endgame loop, having already moved to split the Deep Desert between PvP and PvE in order to placate folks who aren’t a fan of the latter. Griefing’s also been a big topic of debate, with ornithopters proving just as deadly as those big worms.

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Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 gets its first teaser, and you’d better “be prepared for sadness”

Are you pretty happy right now? Well, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, the follow-up to that Cyberpunk 2077 Netflix anime, will make you nice and miserable when it arrives.

CD Projekt revealed this past weekend that the upcoming series, which’ll deliver a fresh standalone tale set in Night City, is currently in production. Animation studio Trigger have returned to work on Edgerunners 2, with Kai Ikarashi directing and Bartosz Sztybor wearing many hats as writer/showrunner/producer. Right, from here on there’ll be spoilers for the first Cyberpunk Edgerunners series, so you’ve been warned.

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Romero Games have “completely” closed doors, but there’s still hope for the Doom creator’s new FPS

Romero Games announced last week that they’d lost funding for their upcoming FPS in the wake of Microsoft’s latest mass layoff spree. According to one employee who spoke to Irish outlet The Journal (the studio is based in Galway), Romero Games have now closed, via PC Gamer.

The closure has affected 100 workers, writer The Journal, with one anonymous staff member calling it “a big shock” – especially since they’d had meetings with “the publisher” the day before. While the publisher aren’t named directly, former staff have mentioned Microsoft cuts in their announcements.

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Best deals for PC gamers today: Epic gaming monitors, rapid M.2 drives and a handy accessory

Checked the deals this morning and found some epic picks worth sharing. There’s good value across the board, from fast storage and memory upgrades to dependable gear for your setup. A few of these are steeply discounted and won’t hang around long. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading or just need reliable hardware, now’s a good time to jump in. Let’s get into it:

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Create sacred, obscene or cringey medieval art in the playtest for Scriptorium, an illuminated manuscript sim

In bygone ages, Christian clerics would spend decades hunched over scrolls of vellum and parchment, ornamenting the text with scenes of questing knights, creeping chimera, spiralling verdure, and perhaps the occasional bare bottom, as a treat. They would sacrifice their wits and tendons to the cultivation of microcosms, planted in the eyes of capital Os, or growing around the bars of capital Es.

Now, you can crap on their efforts by slapping together rad illuminated pages in seconds in a video game editor. That game is Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts, a book-adorning sim from the creators of pen-and-paper (hah!) strategy game Inkulinati. It’s got a playtest running till 10th July.

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Mecha Break review

In Mecha Break you play as a booby anime statuette. She is the one driving the mech. This is a leery game of lasers and ass shots, and sometimes even manages to elicit moments of exciting robo-a-robo combat. You fight other players across a splatter of multiplayer modes, and may often feel the crunch and weight and whirl of a Gundam-esque ground-to-sky battle of wits and bullets. But there is always a boob or two waiting for you after the heights of battle, jiggling over endlessly popping screens of free-to-play gubbins. Somewhere in Mecha Break is a good game, but you have to peel away the plastic tits and pushy sales screens to find it.

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A hero for our times: Elden Ring Nightreign boss becomes unbeatable by refusing to show up

“I am going to screw on my happy cap and try to find some upbeat/quirky news, because I feel like we could do with a bit,” I declared to the RPS Slack just now, after writing our eighth layoff/cancellation post this week. The very next thing I click is a link for a game about building hell. Not today, Satan. “Amnesia flying meat orb! Amnesia flying meat orb!” suggests James. James, you are not helping. Why are you never helping. Oh, what’s this? An unbeatably broken Elden Ring Nightreign bossfight? Perhaps this is the champion who will lead us out of our endless technofeudal apocalypse. No seriously, I think Animus, Ascendant Light is really onto something, here.

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The Elder Scrolls Online studio’s canned Blackbird game was a nimble, high-flying shooter, claims report

The new MMO from the Elder Scrolls Online developers would reportedly have been a sci-fi noir affair in which players swing around tall buildings on grappling lines, and do aerial dashes while shooting and looting. Call it Blade Runner Spider-Man. Call it Destiny 2077. Call it whatever you like, frankly, because it has been abandoned as part of wider layoffs at parent company Microsoft, the outfit that made tens of billions of dollars in profit this past financial quarter, yet has decided to jettison thousands of staff in the name of “discipline” and “continued success”.

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