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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Heist game Relooted takes playful, political revenge on both museums and looting sims

Room 17 of the British Museum contains an entire tomb – a two-thousand-year-old burial site framed by featureless lavenderbox walls, like an asset conjured up in a video game editor. Known as the “Nereid Monument” for the presence of sea nymphs among the pillars, it is thought to have been constructed for the Xanthian ruler Arbinas in what is now Türkiye, and appears in the Museum care of the 19th century British archaeologist Charles Fellows, who, in the Museum’s words, “brought many antiquities back to England with the full permission of the Ottoman Turkish authorities”. Modern-day Turkish repatriation organisations dispute this framing, naturally, and are campaigning for the monument’s return to the lands on which it once stood.

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Subnautica 2 creators offer no explanation for sudden regime change, instead promise “no loot boxes”

The studio making underwater survival game Subnautica 2 have promised fans that “nothing has changed” despite a recent drastic change in leadership at the company. The game is still planned to be a single player survival adventure with optional co-op.

“Nothing has changed with how the game is structured,” said a statement posted to Unknown World’s website yesterday. “It will remain a single-player first experience, with optional co-operative multiplayer. No subscriptions. No loot boxes. No battle pass. No microtransactions.” Okay nameless statement, this still dosn’t clear anything up.

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