Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Vapourware! We all say we despise it, but everybody loves thinking about games that spend an eternity in limbo, whether due to chronic mismanagement or simply because the developers feel no need to rush. So many teasers to unravel, so many conspiracies to bake from the most ludicrous of breadcrumbs, so much delicious exasperation to wallow in as yet another year goes by without a new trailer. Hollow Knight: Silksong is no longer vapourware, barring some extreme last-minute drama. Announced in 2019, it will finally launch this Thursday 4th September. To mark the occasion, we of the Treehouse have been chatting about our favourite examples of vapourware, if “favourite” is the right word.

Your contributions are very welcome. A question of terminology for the physicists in the comments: what should we call a vapourware game that has actually released? Condensedware? I await your complex mathematical explanations. In the meantime, here’s James.

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The developers behind The Crew Unlimited, a community project that aims to make Ubisoft racer The Crew playable again following its unceremonious shutdown last year, have announced a release date.

If you need a bit of a refresher, Ubisoft’s decision to take The Crew’s servers offline in March 2024 rendered it totally unplayable even for those who own a physical copy, due to its online-only nature. That’s since served as the spark for the Stop Killing Games campaign we’ve reported on as its organisers have petitioned lawmakers across the world to ensure companies are required by law to put concrete end-of-life plans in place, when they decide to switch a game’s servers off. It also set a group of Crewers off on a quest to make the game playable again.

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I should say, up front, that I believe A Storied Life: Tabitha means well. Although it joins a swelling collection of cosy/’wholesome’ games that also happen to be about death, it’s more grounded than most, forgoing grand scenery and grander metaphors to simply have you clearing out a deceased loved one’s house while patching up her unfinished memoirs. All perfectly earnest and untoward, it would seem, and yet I walked away from my Gamescom demo last month feeling uneasy – especially about how its puzzle aspect undermines, rather than enables, its posthumous storytelling.

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It’s been a little while since we got another Cyberpunk 2077 tease that makes folks wonder whether CD Projekt are about to u-turn on adding more stuff to it yet again. Here one is, though, and it invites us 2025 dwellers to help out a president who isn’t elected in-universe until 2065.

Is it evidence that the NUSA have invented time travel tech that also allows Cyberpunk characters to migrate into our own reality? Is it just a way to spice up some promo for something like a livestream or minor reveal? I mean, almost definitely the latter, but the former’s a lot more fun to consider.

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NetEase have shut down T-Minus Zero Entertainment, a studio founded in 2023 by former BioWare developer and Star Wars: The Old Republic executive producer Rich Vogel.

The studio had been working on an online multiplayer sci-fi action game, with contributions from a number of ex-BioWare and Bethesda staff including Fallout 76 design lead Mark Tucker and senior producer Scott Malone. However, that project and T-Minus Zero Entertainment’s on-going existence are not a good fit for “current market conditions”.

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No videogame fantasy setting will ever disquiet me as much as an empty business park at night under blue and yellow floodlights. A business park, or the access road down the side of a corrugated steel warehouse, where the alcoves cast by the LEDs look like a procession of hooded figures beneath the fixed, unblinking blackness of the sky.

I can’t actually be present in that scene, mind. I don’t belong there. No being does, not even the people who come by day to fill the striped lines with cars or raise the shutters on the loading bays. Instead, I have to be travelling past very fast. Preferably, I will be looking out the window of a train that shows the place for only a few seconds. I will feel as though I’ve glimpsed another planet’s scrolling surface in a mirror. Except this isn’t right. I will never find the words for it. Nothing written above is adequate. Balls.

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Remember when, back in the day, you made the trek through the ashlands to Red Mountain? Within, you encountered an unforgettable foe. “Come, Nerevar. Friend or traitor, come. Come and look upon the Heart, and Akulakhan. And bring Wraithguard… I have need of it”, they said. “Heed my words. I am Malenia. Blade of Miquella. And I have never known defeat.”

Okay, so maybe not, but it’s a nice image with which to open the news that a modder’s managed to port the entirety of Morrowind‘s landmass into Elden Ring. It’s still very much a work-in-progress, as you might expect given its version of Vvardenfell’s populated by copies of the same random woman and goats, but it certainly makes for a surreal watch.

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Escape from Tarkov is finally emerging from an early access period that will have lasted nearly a decade, when its full release on November 15th rolls around, and you’ll soon be able to grab it on Steam.

Yep, it’s taken yeaaaaarrrssss. Tarkov’s initial alpha release came on August 4th, 2016, just a few days before No Man’s Sky arrived for the first time, and just after a little game called Stardew Valley dropped. Think about what you were doing back then. I was a teenager, still far from the job-having husk I’ve since morphed into.

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Stardew Valley will get at least one more significant game update, says Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, mere months after stating that he doesn’t “want to just be the Stardew Valley guy.” It’ll be called update 1.7, and the trimness of the numbering implies that it’ll be a large one. For context, Stardew Valley update 1.6 brought eight player PC co-op, new crops, a lot more NPC dialogue, a mastery system, new pets, and the ability to give those pets hats (which caused a few problems).

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Team Cherry have confirmed release times and price points for Hollow Knight: Silksong. It’ll cost $19.99, €19.99 and ¥2300 at launch on Thursday 4th September, with pricing for other regions such as the UK to follow. As an indication, the above pricepoints equate to around £17, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they charged £19.99 for it, purely for the sake of symmetry.

It’s traditional among games journalists to illustrate pricepoints in terms of high street chain cups of coffee. But this is Silksong, a game anticipated as fervently as the ancient Mayans once anticipated the coming of an eclipse, so I will resort to more ornate means of comparison: Silksong will cost you 4200000th as much as a B-52 Stratofortress. It will cost you three-sixteenths of your soul on a rainy Friday, or two-sixteenths if the sun is out. It will cost you considerably less than they could probably charge for it. I’m not saying we should be grateful, mind, but we can breathe a sigh of a relief that this isn’t being published by EA, Take-Two or Microsoft.

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