Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

To be a person that looks forward to video games and DLC for video games is to also be a person that must do so knowing that, at this point in time, they are likely to be delayed. It is what it is! Perhaps the dismantling of our current economic system and rebuilding one that doesn’t put profits first would mean developers could take their time, but that’ll probably also take a while. As a result, we’re in a situation where, earlier today, developer TaleWorlds Entertainment announced that Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord’s first bit of DLC, War Sails, has been delayed.

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“BEING A TEENAGER SUCKS. So we made a videogame about it.” These are the opening words on the Steam page for Jenny Jiao Hsia’s Consume Me, a “life-simulation RPG” about feeling “stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school.” Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say many of you that are of a post-high-school age probably don’t want to re-experience it anytime soon, but Consume Me looks like such a good time I’m going to suggest you do so anyway, especially because it just got a demo.

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What do you think Islands & Trains is about? I’m not going to give you long, because it really is just right there in the name. As you’ve presumably already guessed, it is a quaint-looking sandbox builder where you make tiny diorama-like islands, adorning them with tracks for trains to choo-choo along. I told you, it’s a name that does what it says on the tin, and if it appeals to you at all, well, there’s some good news, as it just came out today.

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Day one patches are the curse that comes with the modern age of video games because development doesn’t end at the point of printing the discs we play them on any more. It sucks, it’s bad for preservation, but we’re stuck with them. However, it’s also a bit funny that Elden Ring Nightreign, due out tomorrow, May 30th, sort of has a day minus one patch that’s already available. Of course, unless you’re a journalist, YouTuber, or very friendly with your local video game store clerk who hooked you up with an early copy of the Soulslike, this won’t concern you for a good few hours yet.

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The Ukrainian government-run Center for Countering Disinformation have released a warning about a new free-to-play shooter, Squad 22: ZOV, which they say is a blaring propaganda instrument for the Russian military that “mythologises” the country’s invasion and bombardment of Ukraine since 2022. The accusation actually dates back to February this year, but it has resurfaced and picked up pace online now that Squad 22 is actually on sale via Steam. Valve have yet to comment.

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A voice actor who featured in Persona 4 has let slip that a remake of the school days JRPG is in the works, mostly because he’s frustrated the developers don’t want him back to perform as his original character. Yuri Lowenthal, who played clumsy bicycle crasher Yosuke in the original 2008 game, expressed some revealing annoyance with developers Atlus in a post on social media that has since been deleted.

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Cyberpunk 2077‘s sequel has shed its Project Orion codename and will now be known as… Cyberpunk 2. CD Projekt revealed the name change in their latest earnings results, according to which the new Cyberpunk RPG has just entered pre-production – roughly defined, the point in a game’s gestation when designers, artists, programmers and so forth meet to flesh out the concept, but before they’ve actually started making anything that’s supposed to form part of the finished game. There are now 96 people working on the thing, versus 422 for The Witcher 4, 49 on multiplayer Witcher spin-off Project Sirius, and 19 for an unannounced original game, Project Hadar.

The grousing, dilettante reader will object that this is scant material for a news post, especially given that CD Projekt are offering no guarantees that “Cyberpunk 2” will be the project’s final name – as they commented to the Verge, Cyberpunk 2 “just means it’s another game in the Cyberpunk universe.” But the dextrous maven of online news-mongering will notice that “Cyberpunk 2” is, in fact, an extremely compact and subtle piece of worldbuilding.

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I’ve never been so happy to see a spike trap as I was in Debugging Hero. At the start of each combat encounter, the demo for this roguelite hack n’ slash hands you several numeric cards and lets you pause the game to view both your and your enemies’ stats: health, damage, and durability. You then drag the cards on to the relevant stat to modify it, then unpause to continue real-time combat.

It’s a cute gimmick, letting you knock down high health enemies to a manageable number, or kill weak ones outright, or heal yourself. But it felt a tad shallow to carry a whole game, even one with dodges and parries in its real-time combat. Then, I entered a room with a trap tile that thrust sharpened spikes upwards at timed intervals, and realised I could manipulate the timer. I tuned it right down, and raucously chortled like a portly racoon at the bakery bins as it pneumatically skewered my idiot attackers.

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In 2023 EA opened a new studio named Cliffhanger Games, led by former Monolith head Kevin Stephens, and announced a new third-person, singleplayer game starring Marvel’s Black Panther. They’ve now cancelled that game and shut down that studio, IGN report.

According to EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, via an email sent to employees, this has been done to “sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities.”

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“Greebling” is George Lucas’s term for the decoration of spacecraft models with showy, superfluous details – clumps of antennae, bulky rivets, bulging pipes, anything that whiffs of function. Speaking as the human grown from the ashes of a child who once built the Death Star out of LEGO, I do enjoy a good greeble now and then, but it very easily becomes a parody of itself – like turning a machine inside out, but none of the exposed parts are meaningfully connected. Liliana, founder of Eridanus Industries and lead developer of space tactics sim Nebulous: Fleet Command, has more practical objections to greebling, based on her eight years in the US Navy: excess surface details are an absolute dust trap for radar waves.

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