Shortly after you finish celebrating the arrival of next year, a plague will rock up. Well, the full version of Pathologic 3, a game in which you play a doctor tasked with saving a town from a mysterious contagion will rock up. I’m sure that if you turn off all of the lights and pay someone to sit in the next room coughing every two minutes, the difference’ll be negligible.
The year is 3025. Real life recieves a patch which renders you able to see every item you own with such fidelity that your eyes basically become microscopes. This is cool, your friend says, we’re now only a little bit behind the level of detail Skyrim modders have kitted out 2011’s finest lizard yelling simulator with.
If you’re wondering what’s inspired me to reach for my crystal ball, it’s the emergence of yet another Skyrim mod which takes the RPG one step closer to featuring as many dynamically moving parts as our own reality. It allows folks across Tamriel to look at a calendar and decide they need a fresh hairdo without any input from your character, who’s then left playing catch-up on all the new trims like a distant aunt at a family gathering.
There’s a container. It needs to be moved. Get in this big crane thing and move it. That’s the short and sweet summary of the Steam Next Fest demo for Docked, Saber Interactive’s latest addition to their ever-expanding roster of simulations based around jobs which require high-vis gear.
The bumper sticker plastered to the rear of the pickup in front of me reads ‘please let me merge before I start crying’. Behind me, an angry mob are starting to sharpen their pitchforks and light their torches. The next stop beckons, and I’m not going to make it on time. There’s nothing I can do. For I am Bus Bound in this Steam Next Fest demo, and that bus is too large to slice through gridlock like a hooligan.
Now, some leaked screenshots might offer a bit more of an idea as to some of the stuff you’d have been able to get up to in between patting various creatures and swinging a staff around.
Someone ring up Slayer, because it’s going to raining blood in Borderlands 4 soon. That being the natural way to precede the arrival of the shooter‘s first paid DLC bounty pack next month and a free December update that’ll bring a weird tree fight to the endgame.
All of this stuff will lay a pre-Christmas foundation for the arrival of a fresh vault hunter early next year. That hunter, whom Gearbox showed off a little while ago out of contept for chronological reveals, is Randy Pitchford’s magic cowboy spirit animal.
Drive faster, she screams as a cacophony of meepy noises, it’s coming! I know, headstand lady, I know, comes my response from behind the wheel. We’d be safe if I hadn’t botched one of the switchbacks and gently skidded into a low wall. I’d best put my foot down if I want to escape the demo of mysterious delivery driver Truckful without finding out what happens when a little truck is swallowed by a bigger truck.
Following the inauspicious launch of MindsEye and subsequent layoffs at developers Build A Rocket Boy, 93 current and former staff at the studio have signed an open letter demanding an apology, while accusing Build A Rocket Boy’s senior leadership of having “consistently mishandled the redundancy process” and mandating “unbearable levels of overtime” around the game’s launch.
Right, it’s that time again. Get ready to slide back down the ladder of powerfulness, because mandatory wipeage is required to stick everyone back on the same trajectory ahead of [insert new thing here]. No, say the developers of shooterArc Raiders. They will not bow before the mandatory wipe gods at this time, instead trying out a voluntary wipe system dubbed Projects.
Yep, rather than leaning on the same unavoidable resets which plenty of extraction shooters and survival games employ to ensure newbies aren’t always guaranteed to run into folks with more levels someone playing a platformer in a regularly-stopping elevator to the sun, Embark Studios plan to do their own thing.
Battlefield 6 marks the first time, in all my years of hardwaring, that I have been summoned to someone’s house in order to make a PC game work. I can’t offer this Jim’ll Fix It service to everyone, not least because IGN’s lawyers have issues with the name, so I’ll just say this: Enabling Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 is inconvenient, but not as fiddly as it sounds, and can be done with at most a couple of toggles in your BIOS/UEFI’s Security section.
As it turns out, that’s probably the worst of BF6’s hardware worries. I don’t know who forgot to tell DICE that all FPS blockbusters must now be callously demanding graphics card shin-kickers, but in both the campaign and multiplayer, this seems to run quite… well? Likely well enough that as long as you’re on any reasonably modern rig, you might not need to do much twiddling with the visual settings.