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Like the Turtle Beach Vulcan II TKL keyboard – except as astute readers will notice, this is a headset – the BlackShark V3 Pro is something I’ve welcomed into my everyday PC kit for months, yet apparently needed the invention of a new review format in order for me to talk about it. Whoops. Still, the length of that happy headwearing should tell you something: I like it, a lot.
I can’t get Fish Sticks out of my head. Not the food, but the stray cat with a squished face and stubby legs that I wrangled into my shack in Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s new roguelite strategy game, Mewgenics. The shop, the pub, the dentist; no matter where I go, I see his beady peepers deep in my subconscious. It’s the loss.
I sent Fish Sticks to the pits of hell to face the armies of Satan. Even though he had a nasty case of gastritis. Even though he slurped green goo that made his eyeballs bulge from his face. And he would’ve made it home, too, if it weren’t for a particularly pissed-off frog. The amphibian dragged him kicking and screaming into the path of the vacuuming jaws of a floating demon. The bastard gobbled him up. Him and his ability to pluck maggots from his allies’ rectums and swallow their souls. As he vanished into the demon’s belly, so too did my chances of passing his rectal soul-sucking powers to a new generation of adventuring cats.
Last week, Moon Beast Productions officially revealed Darkhaven, a new action-RPG in the spirit of Diablo II, but with a changing, destructible, procedurally generated world that both echoes Minecraft and takes inspiration from the Diablo modding scene. Moon Beast are made up of ARPG royalty – their senior staff include original Diablo senior designer, art director and writer Erich Schaefer, Diablo 2 art lead Philip Shenk and Diablo 2 programmer Peter Hu.
As you’d expect, the Darkhaven devs have many Thoughts about Diablo today, at once leveraging their credits for marketing (they’re about to launch a Kickstarter) and resisting the idea that they are making an unofficial Diablo sequel. I don’t get the sense that any of them outright despise Diablo IV – summarised by Alice Bell as “2023’s prettiest RSI machine” – but Shenk in particular argues that the game has squandered “the magic” of previous games by focussing on smooth progression and balancing and in general, “overly engineering the experience” in order to keep people glued to the game’s live service.
Genre soupy shooter Highguard‘s second big update arrives today, February 6th. It’ll deliver a new hero to guard those pesky highs in the form of Ekon, a bloke who can transform into a wolf. Developers Wildlight have also aimed to ensure the game’s gang of established heroes don’t feel left out by adding a free wolf mount, alongside a new map called Skydrift and a 3v3 ranked mode.
Civilization 7 has been through a sizeable array of changes since launch in February next year, amid some very uncivilised reactions to boat-rocking features like the new age format. The next update, Test Of Time, will restore the ability to play as one civilization through the whole game, while making changes to how victories are earned in the hope of creating some lategame variety.
All these tweaks and rejigs invite a more fundamental question. “Why didn’t they just launch it as an early access game?” I remember moaning to another journalist last year. I should have directed my moaning at executive producer Dennis Shirk, who says that Firaxis are tentatively open to the idea and, indeed, “jealous” of developers taking this approach.
Everything’s a show! Everything’s a show! Everything’s a show! Everything’s a show! Did you know Baldur’s Gate is a show? Well, it will be soon. One that’ll carry on from the events of Baldur’s Gate 3 and star characters both old and new. Baldur’s Gate 3 developers Larian, though, don’t seem to be directly involved outside of the show’s boss asking if he can pop into their studio for a chat.
“I think a lot of survival games are really boring,” Geoff ‘Zag’ Keene, founder of Deep Field Games, developers of Half-Life adjacent co-op survival game Abiotic Factor, said in a recent interview. However, despite these strong words, please hold onto your spit take for just a moment.
It’s not the first time Keene’s said something like it and, in fact, in the episode of The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook, he’s responding to a question about when he said it to cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer back in 2024. So, please, calmly swallow your spit take liquid of choice, so I can explain why I’m reporting on something Keene originally said two years ago.
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There is only so big a sigh I can let out at, well, everything that Ubisoft are doing currently. Last month, the company cancelled a number of its games, notably the Price of Persia: The Sands of Time remake, later proposing up to 200 job cuts at its Paris HQ, all of which led to a call for an international strike. Now, it sounds like Ubisoft have also cancelled an online Assassin’s Creed game.
I am very much of the opinion that for the most part, video games do not have a very good relationship with food. There are plenty of games where you can eat food and get some delicious HP back for it, but rarely is food the focal point narratively. So, ever since its announcement I’ve been quite excited about Dosa Divas, a turn-based RPG where you play as two sisters piloting a cute robot whose goal is to take down an “evil fast food empire.” And I’m more excited now, as it has a release date!
Ah, live service games. You put out a new feature, everybody complains about one thing or another, you say something like “we’ve heard your feedback” and change it the next time around. This, almost word for word, is exactly what’s happened with Arc Raiders‘ and its impending second Expedition, the details of which have been outlined in a handy blog post from developer Embark.
