The Crysis Remastered Trilogy is heading to Steam next month, a little over a year after it first launched via the Epic Games Store. The pack does what you'd expect it to: takes Crytek's three scifi shooters and spruces them up with modern rendering trickery.
QA testers at Blizzard Albany have won the right to vote on whether to form a union. The decision comes after arguments were made to the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The employees, organising under the name GWA Albany, tweeted that the vote would take place a month from today.
Deep Rock Galactic is a game about going to work, assuming your job is to extract space minerals from a shattered planet occupied by trillions of giant, murderous bugs. If it isn’t, it’s not too hard to pretend, and DRG’s another-day-at-the-office wit lends it a likeable levity that’s partly why I’ve played it almost every week for a year and a half.
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The last time we saw Amicia and Hugo de Rune in A Plague Tale: Innocence, the two homeless orphans were escaping the clutches of the Inquisition, trying desperately to find a cure for the cursed Prima Macula in Hugo’s blood. They were also fighting for their lives against thousands of bloodthirsty rats eager to devour them. These two have lived through more danger and trauma than anyone should have in a thousand lifetimes, and after the first game’s sort-of happy-ish ending, it got me thinking: when will these kids ever catch a break?
Turns out the answer is never. Asobo’s follow-up A Plague Tale: Requiem is just as gory and bleak as its predecessor and as the siblings continue to battle through a violent world that wants them dead, they'll both face difficult moral decisions in the name of survival. Oh, and there are more rats. Like, a lot more rats.
Konami might have just accidentally leaked the reveal of one of the new Silent Hill games due to be announced later this evening. Earlier this week, the publisher announced there would be a Silent Hill Transmission stream taking place today, October 19th, which would provide "the latest updates" on the series. At the time, there were no streaming links available, but in setting their YouTube page live this morning, Konami jumped the gun and included some of the game names being revealed. And it's the big one, folks. Spoilers within, obvs.
Activision Blizzard have confirmed the pre-load times for Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, detailing when pre-order folks can start downloading the game's campaign as part of its early access period, as well as when the rest of us mortals can start pre-loading in time for its release next week. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't release in full until Friday October 28th, but folks who pre-ordered the game can start playing the campaign as early as tomorrow, October 20th - and pre-loading begins this evening.
Last time, you decided that a game within the game just for funsies is better than temporarily piloting an enemy. It was another close result but ultimately you couldn't resist larking about, and I can't fault you for that (though if I could hop up on your shoulders and Ratatouille you into voting otherwise, maybe I would). This week, I'm asking you to pick between two very different types of movement. What's better: slide kicks or relocatable buildings?
The Sims series has always had a vibrant modding community, but for the first time Maxis are taking steps to make it easier. In today's Sims Summit stream, they announced that they were partnering with CurseForge to create a "moderated, curated space" for The Sims 4 players to download mods and custom content.
It's the middle of the month, which means it's time for another batch of Game Pass games to be detailed. For a start, today sees the day one release of A Plague Tale: Requiem, the followup to everyone's favourite Middle Ages ratventure. There are similarly big games to come before the end of the month, however, including Persona 5 Royal.
I used to think Ghostbusters was a fantasy about having a cool car and a slidey pole in your house. Now that I'm an adult I realise it's actually a fantasy about having ample free time to hang out with your friends in New York. But I suppose it's also about bustin' ghosts, which is what Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed's asymmetric multiplayer replicates. It's out today.
The Sims 4 is now a free-to-play game - and yet somehow this isn't today's biggest The Sims news. That's because, during today's Sims Summit livestream, Maxis also announced that the next The Sims is in-development. Currently codenamed Project Rene, it's a few years away, although we saw some early footage of its creative tools in action.
Robot damage hero Bastion has been unplayable in Overwatch 2 for the past week due to some unfortunate shenanigans with his artillery ultimate. It was only meant to be temporary, Blizzard said. Yet this increasingly lengthy absence from the game's resulted in some players treating the poor droid as though he'd passed away rather than becoming glitched out for a little while.
My initial instinct when playing Payday 2 was to be sneaky. If I could creep through banks, jewellery stores, and all the rest without being detected, surely that’d be awesome. Only, the pursuit of that was anything but awesome. It was a gruelling slog of planning and restarts with rarely a sliver of success. So, I chucked my silencer away and donned the biggest suit of armour I could find. Unsurprisingly, the biggest joy in Payday 2 is going loud, and it turns out I’m a big fan of playing stealth games that allow you to skip stealth entirely.
Collectible card game Marvel Snap has been released into early access on Steam as a free to play download. Hailing from some of the devs behind Blizzard’s successful digital CCG Hearthstone, Marvel Snap takes the House Of Ideas’ superheroic formula and runs with the current multiversal obsession of the MCU. The game also mixes in the art and variants you’d expect from Marvel’s comic book output.
Frog Detective 3: Corruption At Cowboy County hops onto PC on October 27th, a new trailer has revealed. This time around, you’ll be able to ride around a Wild West town pretending to be sheriff, although you seem to own a micro scooter instead of a horse for some reason. You can see more of what’s in store for the green detective by watching the trailer below.
The PC continues to collect PlayStation mascots like they’re Maccies Monopoly tickets. This time it’s adventuring iron-quiffed quipper Nathan Drake, courtesy of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, which is out on Steam on November 19th. And where there’s a Steam game, there’s usually a Steam Deck game, so Liam and I have both busted out the handhelds to see how well this remastered bundle of Uncharted: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy takes to more portable hardware. That includes the best settings to use if you want to play it on your own Steam Deck.
You can watch Liam’s video below to see how he got on, along with footage of how Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection runs in situ. After swapping notes we’ve settled on a settings guide that will get you consistently decent performance across both the individual games; if you’d prefer it in text form, read on.
Guildford in the UK isn’t a place that you’d expect to feature in games. It’s very much your typical British town, replete with shops, restaurants, and many, many double yellow lines. That’s why it’s pretty astonishing to see a section of Guildford recreated on a distant world in sci-fi exploration sim No Man’s Sky. Why Guildford though? Well, it's because devs Hello Games are based there. Their office and the surrounding streets have been constructed in-game by No Man’s Sky player Joan, a.k.a. Rasdar07, and shared in the base building chat on the game’s Discord server.
I loved Overwatch when it first came out. When the original game was fresh and new, I was experimenting with the characters just like everyone else. I found my niche in support, and got to be a pretty decent player with Mercy and Lúcio (I was particularly proud of the latter, because I flatter myself that he's quite difficult to play well). Then, you know, life happened. I didn't have as much time to play, and I just kind of stopped playing Overwatch.
I appear to have nodded off or something, because there are now 35 heroes on the roster, and Overwatch 2 is out. What. Who allowed this? I wish to speak to someone in charge. Jeff? Jeff From The Overwatch Team? Are you there? Jeff is still in charge right? Wait, wh-
A few more classics have made their way onto EA’s list of games they’re shutting down online services for, with Mirror’s Edge the most notable casualty for PC players. The shutdown will come into effect from January 19th, 2023, just overshooting the 13th anniversary of the game’s launch on PC. It’ll presumably affect the dystopian parkour game’s online leaderboards, and downloadable Ghosts of other players.
As has been tradition for many a year now (three), Mayor Bones Proudly Presents: Ghost Town's 1001st Annual Pumpkin Festival is back! I first reported on this free pumpkin carving game from Adamgryu (of A Short Hike fame) way back in 2020, when it was only the 999th festival, and Alice0 took a stroll around it last year, too.
This year the pumpkins are back, and better than ever. Download the Pumpkin Fest for pay-what-you-can on Itch, carve your very own pump with the tools provided, and place it among the efforts of others in a peaceful spooky scene. You can take a walk around and vote for your favourite pumps. But this isn't the only pumpkin game to enjoy! I've found a couple of others, too. It's the reason for the spooky season.
Respawn have revealed the next legend arriving in their free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends will be the game’s first trans hero, Catalyst. The latest season is called Eclipse, and brings the new map Divided Moon. The update also introduces gifting to Apex Legends, and there’ll be a brand new battle pass. Find out more about Catalyst’s backstory by watching the trailer below.
In a bizarre turn of events, Bandai Namco will stream a special jazz arrangement featuring select songs and "recognisable melodies" from Elden Ring's soundtrack. The event will be performed by a group of musicians led by award winner Kenny Garrett and upcomer Takuya Kuroda, so it's safe to assume the cats will really be cookin' out there. Although is Elden Ring's music all that memorable?
It’s officially the spooky season now, so that makes it a highly appropriate juncture for some survival horror. Good job that Capcom have announced they’re streaming a Resident Evil showcase this Thursday, October 20th, then. They’ve even roped in Resident Evil Village’s Merchant to narrate the trailer for it. Watch below for a quick look at what’s coming up in the showcase stream.
Reading the words "haunted house cleaning simulator," I knew exactly what diddy indie game Late Night Mop would be. And it is what I had thought. And it is what you will have guessed upon reading that too. And yet, I enjoyed my ten minutes binning rubbish and mopping up stains (just stains, don't worry about it). Then I played it again to see another ending, even knowing I am a big scaredy baby. Ugh. I will regret having played this next time I clean my flat at night.
The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time, is coming back for its second edition later this month - and let me tell you, with practically an all-new team in place since we last cast our votes, this year's RPS 100 is looking to be quite the shake-up compared to last year's list. This time, though, we wanted get you, our fair readers, involved as well. To that end, we're introducing The RPS 100: Reader's Edition, where you can vote for your favourite PC games of all time, to be published as a separate list that will be yours and yours alone forevermore. Want to get involved? Here's how:
I refer to Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines as "my favourite video game of all time" with such frequency that it's basically a catchphrase of mine. The thing is, though, I really dislike slogans; they're meant to stir up emotions while bypassing our capacity to think critically. So I thought this retrospective was a good opportunity to remind myself of why I still love this janky, weird ARPG about sad bloodsuckers so much, even 18 years after its release.
On this week's episode of the Ultimate Audio Bang, we deliver our impressions of Overwatch 2 and discuss whether Overwatch really needed a number "2" slapped on the end of it.
Valorant and League Of Legends developers Riot Games have completed their purchase of Wargaming Sydney, a support studio that’s previously worked on World Of Tanks and World Of Warships. The studio, which has been part of Wargaming since 2012, will be renamed Riot Sydney. They’ll be switching to work on Riot’s live-service games, including Valorant and League Of Legends.
Is it just me, or did Persona 5 never feel quite at home on the PlayStation 4? Sure, it looked gorgeous on a big TV, its bright colours popping all over your living room, but it always felt bit wrong to me. I think it's all about pacing. Persona 5's blend of turn-based combat and life sim elements hardly moves at a breakneck speed. There's a lot of reading. A lot of listening to your pals chat about their hopes and fears. A lot of pressing one button to progress a line of dialogue onto the next. Shoving that on your 65" 4K TV always seemed a bit overkill.
Basically, I never got into Persona 5 when it first launched on PS4. I played about three hours of it and then binned it off in favour of something else. In 2020, during a moment of first-lockdown madness, I bought Persona 5 Royal for full price, thinking maybe my issue with the original release was that there wasn't enough of it, but surprisingly discovered it still wasn't for me. At this point, I'd invested £100 into my "Do I like Persona 5?" experiment and was quickly realising the result was a pretty firm "No, mate, you don't". So when I sat down with the PC version of the game on the Steam Deck to test it out, I figured I'd play it for a few hours and then never touch it again. I was wrong. I was so very wrong.
I finished the original Persona 5 roughly four years ago, and it immediately earned my most coveted award: Edders Really Liked This A Lot, Perhaps More Than Anything Else. Since its updated and expanded Royal version dropped on PlayStation some years later, I've been afraid to make my return. You'd think I'd be itching to delve back into what's essentially the definitive version of the Phantom Thieves' adventure, and yet it's precisely because it blew me away the first time that I've been reluctant to go back.
Now? Now I feel silly. After playing the early portions of Persona 5: Royal, which finds itself coming to practically every remaining platform this week, including PC, my goodness me, it's wonderful to be back in Shibuya with the gang. Already it's the Persona 5 I adored, with new cutscenes and pacing adjustments to make it – somehow – even better. Have you never played Persona before? Good! Let me twist your arm. Gi-give, no - give it here!
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by ghosts, Midwest mall goth, immersive sim object-fiddling, and a whole lot of stylish violence.
The Steam Deck might be able to play modern AAA games on the go, but you should really crack out some classics of yesteryear from time to time too. It’s fun to see that there’s now a way to play old Game Boy Advance cartridges on Valve’s handheld, and they actually make the games look pretty sweet to boot. No, this isn't Valve following up their Switch emulator gaffe. Wave hello to the GB Operator.
The winner of this year’s Minecraft mob vote has been revealed, and it’s a giant creature called the sniffer. Sniffers are helpful beasties who can search up ancient seeds that grow into plants you can decorate with. The friendly cow-turtle-dog-thing won the vote held to decide Minecraft’s new mob, held for 24 hours between Friday and the start of Minecraft Live on Saturday. Sniffer topped the poll with more than half of the 3.5 million votes cast. You can watch the result being announced in the video below.
We might finally be getting another Silent Hill game after a decade of mostly, well, silence. Konami have announced that a “Silent Hill Transmission” is set for this Wednesday, October 19th at 10pm BST / 2pm PDT. No details have been shared about whether you’ll be able to tune in on YouTube or Twitch for the stream, but Konami shared a link to a page on their site so you should be able to watch it there.
In a bizarre twist to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series GPU rollout, it turns out there will be no 12GB version of the RTX 4080 at all. Nvidia announced an "unlaunch" of the graphics card, which would have sat below the RTX 4080 16GB and the RTX 4090, effectively cancelling it. The 16GB version will still release as planned on November 16th.
"The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right", reads Nvidia’s statement. "Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing. So, we’re pressing the "unlaunch" button on the 4080 12GB."
Sundays are for popping to the corner shop and buying a Lion bar. Before you tuck in, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
OlliOlli World is getting a final piece of DLC. Finding The Flowzone, which will be released this November, features a new bunch of levels to grind across - only these ones are set among the clouds. It'll also include new "Windzones" for catching greater air, as well as harder routes designed for the best players.
Have you ever been playing a game and craved some pizza? Of course you have. If you're like me, you crave pizza literally all the time. Well, a new mod for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is here to help. It lets you order a real world pizza delivery from Domino's via an in-game NPC. Magic.
Warhammer 40K: Darktide's closed beta is underway, which you probably already know if you're one of the people granted access to test the co-op shooter. If you don't have access however, there's still time as you can still apply and more players will be let in over the course of this weekend. You might also enjoy watching some streamers play so you have a better sense of it ahead of its release in November.
Blocky action RPG Minecraft Dungeons sees the arrival of the mob-packed Fauna Faire, its third seasonal update, on October 19th. Today’s Minecraft Live stream showed more of what to expect from the new season of Minecraft Dungeons, including four-player multiplayer for the Tower, a new merchant who handles enchantments, and a free new jungle biome level. I just like the look of the mob-themed onesies, personally.