November 2022

Today marks the 25th anniversary of strategy classic Age Of Empires, and to celebrate Xbox Game Studios have announced a ream of updates coming to Age Of Empires II: Definitive Edition next year. Technically, the main bit of news from tonight's anniversary stream is that both Age Of Empires II: DE and Age Of Empires IV will be arriving on Xbox consoles in 2023 (that, and Age Of Mythology is coming back), but the upshot of all that is that the PC versions will be getting the very same benefits, including controller support, crossplay with consoles and cloud gaming support.

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Last week I reviewed New Tales From The Borderlands and I really didn't like it. This was upsetting to me; this may come as a surprise, but I try to avoid playing and reviewing games I think I won't like. I don't want to go out of my way to be mean, and I also don't want to spend hours not enjoying myself. I go into almost every game I play actively wanting to enjoy it (the exception being things like Succubus, which I can only assume are trying an avant garde technique to plumb new, unexplored depths of badness on purpose).

As it turned out, a lot of other reviewers did like it. I'm not going to object to that, because it takes all sorts to make a world, and so on. Rather, it made me wonder if I'd sort of hallucinated how much I liked the first Tales From The Borderlands. How fantastic it was, managing to be both the best Telltale game and the best Borderlands game in one, was a big part of why I was so excited for New Tales. It came out a long time ago, and I hadn't played it for a while. Maybe it wasn't how I remembered. Maybe I'd changed, you know?

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When Adam Isgreen, creative director at World’s Edge, first played the Age Of Empires series, he was still working at Westwood Studios on Command & Conquer. “The first thing I was impressed about more than anything with this series was just like, wow! History! That's really smart," he tells me. "Like, there's no need to explain anything to people. You don't have to be like, oh, there's a laser gun or this is a magic missile. It's like, it's a wheelbarrow. I know what that does!”

To Isgreen, it’s this level of accessibility that’s carried Age Of Empires all the way to today’s 25th anniversary. The instantly legible historical warfare - “pikemen, ranged units and cavalry” - paired with randomised maps that promised, effectively, an infinite amount of replayability; “It just had a lot of features that I think players really loved and kind of defined itself along those features in a way that, yeah, it's just outlasted everything else.”

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Praise the sun! Dark Souls II's online features for the Scholar Of The First Sin edition are back up and working after months of being down. Back in January, FromSoftware deactivated online features for the Dark Souls trilogy on PC due to the prominence of hackers and security concerns. Recently, Dark Souls III servers were reactivated (before being deactivated and reactivated again) and now it's Dark Souls II’s turn. The base version of Dark Souls II will have these features “made available at a later date," but for now, Scholar Of The First Sin players can continue to invade the fallen kingdom of Drangleic and scribble down messages for others.

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EA held their first Behind The Sims Summit last week, revealing plenty of Sims updates, including a very early look at the next game in the series, Project Rene. Despite this big news, discussion around the event has focused on EA’s lack of community representation, as they only included one “black simmer” onscreen during a stream full of other content creators. Black content creators have been a significant part of The Sims' online presence for years, creating custom content, mods and more.

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What are you doing for the next ten minutes? Nothing much? Alright, here's what you're doing: playing Greaser, a wee free visual novel about riding a Cronenbergian biomechanical motorbike along an endless unreal desert highway. It's playable in your browser so kick-start on over to Itch.io right now. I don't know what else you're doing this morning that'll get your engine running more than adventure, self-discovery, and erotic motorbike maintenance.

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Welcome to the 2022 edition of The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. This is the second time the RPS Treehouse has gathered together to hash out our collective Bestest Bests from across the ages, and lemme tell you, this year's list has seen tons of movement compared to last year's ranking. Not only are there buckets of new entries, but there's been plenty of upward and downward shuffling of old favourites, too. So come on in and find out what's made the cut.

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The Radeon RX 6950 XT is the fastest AMD graphics card in the world, and will remain so until at least November when AMD is expected to announce a new range of next-gen GPUs. It originally debuted at $1000, undercutting the RTX 3090 Ti at $1500, but third-party models could cost much more - such as this $1200 PowerColor Red Devil. Today though, with that whole 'impending release of better graphics cards' thing, the 6950 XT is down to $800 at Amazon, which is an awesome deal for the level of graphics performance on offer.

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Folks, I’ve got some bad news. Victoria 3 is not a game where you play the clone of the clone of Posh Spice. I was all geared up for some science fiction-tinged Spice Girls shenanigans, but I was left bitterly disappointed. However, I’d already installed it, so I decided to check it out and see what kind of game it actually is. Turns out that Victoria 3 is a grand strategy game, just like its Paradox stablemates Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron.

Trying to classify Victoria 3 is pretty damn important. Unlike, say, the Total War series, Paradox’s grand strategy titles are differentiated by a lot more than their time periods. Hearts of Iron its WW2 military ticker on its sleeve, while Crusader Kings (my personal fave) is secretly an RPG, just one that happens to cast you as the ruler of a country, rather than a random wandering murderer. Figure that out and you grasped the appeal of the game, especially for people who may lack interest in - or be downright put off by - the historical era it covers.

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The Corsair 5000D is a rather good PC case, but as it's fairly new it's normally quite expensive - like $165 on Amazon expensive. So it brings me good cheer to announce that Woot are doing the case in white or black for just $99.99, the lowest price we've ever recorded for this model.

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Horror games are great and all that, but what about games that make you the monster? Yeah. Chew on that for a second.

I'm not just talking about games that belong to the horror genre, either. In fact, spare those asymmetrical multiplayer games that are all the rage with their worryingly young audiences, there are few actual horror games that let you assume the role of the villain. But that doesn't mean there isn't a deluge of titles where you play as a creature so vile, so menacing, that the residents of their worlds undoubtly view the player as evil incarnate. Far from it. The games on this list may not all be spooky in tone, but your character is still the stuff of actual nightmares.

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House Castle has been on a bit of a horror binge this month, what with it being Spooky Season and all. Not because we're die-hard horror buffs - if anything, we're both lifelong wimps when it comes to this stuff. But buoyed by a growing resolve to tackle our collective cowardice head on, October has seen us watch, play and read several of the big horror classics we've been too chicken to attempt in the past. Over the course of it all, though, there's been a gnawing, slightly dreadful realisation slowly bubbling away beneath the surface. Far from being scared by these horrible things, I've often come away feeling no emotions whatsoever. I have remained unmoved, neither frightened, unnerved, or creeped out. Just plain, simple indifference. The Japanese Ring? Nothing. I Saw The Devil? Nah, mate. Lake Mungo? More like Lake Yawngo.

I was beginning to think I'd lost the capacity to feel anything at all. Heck, the real horror show this month has been the collapse of the entire UK nation state, and yet I still cannot bring myself to muster anything beyond a tired sigh. Then I got to the second act of Resident Evil Village's Shadows Of Rose DLC and, oh yes, hello fear. It's been a while, hasn't it?

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Alright folks, bear with me, because it doesn't look like this one is going to get less messy. As reported by Tech News Space, it appears that Robert Kurvitz, the lead developer and writer on Disco Elysium, is suing Studio ZA/UM, the development studio of Disco Elysium, via his own company Telomer. Kotaku AU seem to have corroborated this, finding a record on the Estonian Ministry of Justice's website showing Telomer has filed an application against ZA/UM Studio to "obtain information and review documents", which you can see for yourself here.

This comes after Martin Luiga announced (in a frankly kinda weird post) the dissolution of The ZA/UM Cultural Association, and that Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and art director Aleksander Rostov were no longer working at Studio ZA/UM.

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Season 15 of Apex Legends is ziprailing its way towards us at a frightening speed. When it lands at the end of the month, it'll bring with it a new Legend, just like every new Season - but even more significantly, Apex Legends: Eclipse will introduce the fifth Apex map, a big and beautiful multi-biome arena called Broken Moon.

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During a 30-minute livestream this weekend, Genshin Impact detailed its upcoming 3.2 update titled ‘Akasha Pulses, the Kalpa Flame Rises,’ set to launch on November 2nd. The 3.2 update will add tons of new stuff to the game, including two playable characters, a conclusion to the Sumeru Archon quest, and much more.

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Silent Hill: Townfall’s announcement was decidedly cryptic, but fans have since found various secrets hiding in the trailer. Announced during Konami’s Silent Hill Transmission broadcast last week, Silent Hill: Townfall is being developed by No Code, the studio behind the spooky Observation. The trailer was light on details, with a speech about crime and judgement playing over footage from a Pocket Television, but some eagle-eyed - or perhaps eared - fans have uncovered messages hidden in the audio that might give us a hint of what Townfall is all about.

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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 extremely athletic handwashing, handpainted art, a cute witch, and more. Come see!

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Square Enix's forthcoming farming sim Harvestella is the first of the publisher's games to offer a non-binary gender option in a character creator.

It's still something of a rarity for major game developers to specifically include non-binary representation in addition to male and female. But for the Harvestella team, its inclusion feels "completely normal", producer Daisuke Taka told Eurogamer.

"I think it's completely normal these days for non-binary to be included in gender selection," Taka said.

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UPDATE 2/11/22: The Last of Us' TV adaptation will indeed arrive in January, HBO and UK broadcast partner Sky have now officially confirmed.

As expected, the series' first episode will debut on 15th January in the US, which makes for a 16th January launch here in the UK.

These dates were previously glimpsed in promotional material and listings for the series visible to subscribers - more on all that below.

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Netflix's ongoing grasp for a chunk of the video game pie continues with the streaming service's announcement it has now snapped up Spry Fox, the studio behind the likes of Triple Town, Alphabear, and last year's Cozy Grove.

Netflix shared the news - which comes just shy of a year since the streaming service took its first tentative steps into gaming - on its website, saying Spry Fox's focus on "cosy, original" games would help it "accelerate our creative development in another beloved genre and add to the growing variety of Netflix's games catalogue that will have something for everyone."

It's unclear what today's news means for Spry Fox's previously announced publishing partnership with Epic Games, which was intended to result in a "multiplatform nonviolent persistent" MMO "designed to encourage friendship and reduce loneliness in the world".

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Playground Games' long-awaited Fable reboot continues to staff up with the news that Andrew Walsh, whose credits include senior writer on Horizon Forbidden West and associate narrative director on Horizon Call of the Mountain, has joined the team.

Walsh - whose writing career has spanned everything form The Division 2 and Prince of Persia to UK TV shows Emmerdale and Byker Grove - revealed his new role on Twitter, writing, "So, Albion has beckoned once again. I'm delighted to announce that I've had the chance to join the wonderful team [at Playground] working on the new Fable!".

As his tweet implies, this won't be Walsh's first dalliance with the Fable series; he was also lead writer on Fable Legends, the ill-fated free-to-play multiplayer-based spin-off, which was cancelled in 2016 when Microsoft made the decision to close developer Lionhead Studios.

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In an appropriately spooky bit of news for All Hallows' Eve, Ghostbusters VR has re-emerged following its announcement tease earlier this year with a brand new subtitle - Rise of the Ghost Lord - and 2023 release date on PSVR 2 and Meta Quest 2.

Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, a collaboration between Sony Pictures Virtual Reality and developer nDreams, promises to unleash an "extensive and engrossing" spirit-bothering adventure playable either solo or co-operatively with up to three friends.

It also waves goodbye to the series' traditional home of New York City and makes the jump to San Franciso, taking players on a tour of some familiar sights - including the Golden Gate Bridge - as they attempt to thwart the titular Ghost Lord and his army of malevolent spirits.

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Portal 2's director Josh Weier has spoken more about the game's cut content and given background information on why features were cut or how they came to be.

The team that worked on Valve's first-person puzzle adventure masterpiece have openly talked about cut content in the past. At the Games Developer Conference in 2012, writers Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek talked about features that were cut such as Garfield references, multiple endings, and Wheatley's early demise. Later that year at PAX Prime, Wolpaw also revealed Valve had planned to have protagonist Chell marry a turret during the game.

10 years on, speaking to Did You Know Gaming, Josh Weier has weighed in with his own insight on why these bits were cut and where they stemmed from during development.

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The Uncharted series made the jump to PC earlier this month with Naughty Dog's Legacy of Thieves collection. And, where there are PC games, modders are never far behind, ready to put their skills into action.

One such modder is Raq (whose name you may recognise from our Tomb Raider Anniversary piece). They have created the Elena mod for Legacy of Thieves which, as I am sure you have guessed already, puts Elena into the spotlight by reskinning series hero Nathan Drake as his wife.

I am a big fan of the Uncharted series as a whole, and of Elena Fisher especially (you may be able to spot a poster of her on my wall during Newscasts). With this mod being a particularly notable one for me, I contacted Raq to find out more about why they siezed the chance to bring Elena to the fore.

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EA has signed a three-game deal with Marvel, beginning with its previously-announced Iron Man project.

That's according to Bloomberg, which reported today that the FIFA publisher had inked a deal for a further two titles featuring Marvel characters.

There's no word yet on which other Marvel faces might star in these games, which EA studio might be making them, or when they will see release.

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The new DF Direct Weekly arrives, with myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia diving straight into a packed week of news... though we kick off with our own God of War Ragnarök impressions a whole week after the preview embargo lifted. Unfortunately, media outlets were prohibited from showing their own captured footage which essentially precluded us from producing a video, but in the wake of the impressions pieces that did follow, we did feel compelled to share some initial thoughts - and the extent to which Ragnarök leverages the power of PlayStation 5.

As you'll hear in our discussions, this seems to be a very different proposition to Horizon Forbidden West, where there was a clear night and day difference between PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions. I won't spoil John's hands-on thoughts too much, but I think it's perfectly valid to consider the PS5 version as similar to the idea of what a PC version would look like: the same core game, but ramped up significantly in terms of clarity, performance and other 'ultra settings' niceties. We'll be sharing our full tech review as soon as the main embargo lifts.

It's also fair to say that we're hugely excited about the reveal of the new RDNA 3 graphics hardware later this week - and it represents a golden opportunity to AMD in the wake of the highs and lows of the Nvidia RTX 40-series launch. RTX 4090 is a simply tremendous - but extremely expensive - piece of hardware, but questions marks around the RTX 4080 were enough to see the 12GB model 'unlaunched' while the 16GB edition has it all to prove. There's also the RTX 4090 power adaptor issue adding to the controversy (a story that took a new turn over the weekend after excellent GamersNexus coverage)

I must admit, there was an element of selfishness involved in this podcast. I'm currently doing a creative writing course in my spare time (rather than in my news stories, ho ho) and one of the things I'm struggling with, weird as it is to admit, is the idea that I can write anything. I don't have to be bound by the rules of this world, or any world, or any rules. I can conceive of something totally and utterly new. And that's... I still can't quite wrap my head around it.

But my guest on the podcast today, Cassandra Khaw, has long made their peace with this, producing works of - usually - pitch black horror that I'm not sure I'd have the nerve to imagine. The most famous of their pieces is probably the novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth, which was a USA Today bestseller when it came out roughly a year ago.

So I wanted to find out from Cassandra, who seems to imagine new stories at the speed other people think of things to eat for dinner, where their ideas came from and how to shape them from there. I also wanted to find out where their life-long love of horror came from - and I was treated to a wonderful real-life Malaysian horror story when I asked.

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Games industry Twitter stalwart Nibel, who built a following of 450,000 for regularly tweeting breaking news and memes under the handle @Nibellion, has today quit the social media platform.

"After some introspection, I've made the decision to focus my time and energy elsewhere and move on from Twitter," Nibel tweeted today, now from a locked account. "This marks the end of my video games coverage and my active participation in this platform. Thanks to everybody for the fun times!"

In recent days, Nibel had begun posting on Patreon and planned to launch a Discord channel for followers to join. Both of these have also been scrapped, however.

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Twitch Streamer GinoMachino has completed the world's first Elden Ring all bosses no hit run.

After two months of planning, the streamer finally finished the challenge on 25th October.

There are 165 bosses in the game, which GinoMachino defeated without a single hit.

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Today is the spookiest day of the year. Now, in honour of this occasion, Breath of the Wild modders have released a new fan-made DLC for the game known as "The Halloween Hunt".

Waikuteru (whose name you may recognise from the Breath of the Wild 'Second Wind' mod) worked with fellow modder Sockpoppet to create this haunting DLC. It includes new challenges, armour, weapons and NPCs. Oh, and there is also a new boss to defeat - The Phantom Rider.

"The time of the year has come and so came the mysterious creature too," proclaims a bodiless voice in the DLC. This voice then bids Link to make haste to Korok Forest, to help these spirits of Hyrule before it is "too late".

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God of War developer Sony Santa Monica Studio has said it is doing its best to block Ragnarök spoilers ahead of the game's launch next week - but that ultimately, it cannot completely stop the flood of leaks now spreading online.

Over the weekend, God of War creative director Cory Barlog said it was "completely fucking stupid" fans have to "dodge the spoilers" after retailers began selling Ragnarök copies well ahead of the game's official launch on Wednesday 9th November - still more than a week away.

Now, Sony Santa Monica has offered its own less-sweary official comment, asking fans to be considerate of others, and advising those who wish to remain unspoiled to "mute any keywords or hashtags associated with the game until release day" when browsing social media.

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There was a run of things that happened to me in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord that perfectly summed up my early-game experience with it.

It began with me finding a way to cheese the game. I'd discovered I could take down groups of enemies on my own, up to a dozen of them, simply by riding out of their reach on my horse and slowing down just enough to carefully aim my bow and headshot them. One by one, they'd fall. If it weren't for the arrow limit - around 27 depending on the quiver - I'd have taken on entire armies. And it was beginning to be very profitable for me. I was finally threatening to make the dent in the world I'd been struggling to make.

But then Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord - the latest in TaleWorlds' series of strategy action RPGs that's just left early access - suddenly decided not to let me do it any more. It decided I needed troops to command, because that's what the game is about: commanding armies in battle - think Maximus in opening scene Gladiator, where he's riding with the troops through the forest. You can, in a Total War-lite way, shout orders to your troops, using the F-keys and a time-slow mode to command them (it's fiddly). So, I bought troops.

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Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka has confirmed that Sonic Frontiers "isn't similar at all" to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Since the game's reveal, fans have made the comparison with Nintendo's adventure due to Sonic Frontiers' lush green open setting and that hero shot of the hedgehog looking out over a wide landscape.

But in an interview with Shacknews (spotted by TheGamer), Iizuka has clarified that Sonic Team's game is more linear and - for the millionth time - open zone, not open world.

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A NASCAR driver pulled off a wall ride stunt on the final lap of the Xfinity 500 race at Martinsville Speedway yesterday.

The inspiration for the move came from NASCAR 2005, according to driver Ross Chastain.

"I played a lot of NASCAR 2005 on the GameCube which I had growing up," Chastain explained in his post-race interview. "You could get away with it," he continued, referring to using the move in-game, "and I never knew if it would actually work [in real life]."

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Call of Duty fans were quick to praise Modern Warfare 2's Amsterdam level, with many complimenting how accurate Infinity Ward's in-game depiction of the city was to real life.

However, the hotel manager of Amsterdam's Conservatorium Hotel is less happy about the establishment - known within Modern Warfare 2 as Breenbergh - showing up in a game that "[encourages] the use of violence".

The hotel is now considering its next possible steps in response to this inclusion.

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Xbox boss Phil Spencer has made Microsoft's plainest promise yet around the future of Call of Duty on PlayStation platforms.

Speaking to the Same Brain Youtube channel, Spencer pledged to keep releasing Call of Duty games on Sony's consoles "as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to".

The future of Call of Duty on PlayStation has become a contentious topic for regulators such as the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is currently scrutinising Microsoft's planned $68n takeover of COD publisher Activision Blizzard.

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Immortality and Her Story developer Sam Barlow has said he was asked by Tesla to put his game in a car for the exposure.

Last week, Tesla owner Elon Musk bought Twitter and now, as The Verge reported, the social media platform plans to charge users $20 each month for verification.

In the wake of this, Barlow had his own story to tell about Tesla.

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What makes a great video game opening? With recency bias, you might say The Last of Us Part 1’s devastating introduction. But the best kind, I think, are able to successfully capture and distill the experience of the game as a whole.

It’s the feeling I got when I recently replayed Nier: Automata on Switch. Mostly, I was playing to test the port, and I didn’t have time to play more than the opening. But what an opening it is! Narratively, the stakes are high given 2B is the sole surviving android on a suicide mission against the enemy machines, but from this epic prologue, you get a taste of its combat that’s more like a feast, the way it changes between genres and perspectives, culminating in a multi-stage boss battle that could be the final boss in any other game.

Another game I recently replayed was Marvel’s Spider-Man, again just to test out the Steam Deck. I wouldn’t call it the better game but it arguably has a stronger game opening than Naughty Dog’s opus. That moment you first pull back the trigger and effortlessly take to the air as the web slinger himself is just electrifying, and as you go from swinging through Manhattan to taking down the Kingpin and his goons, it’s a fast-moving tutorial that breaks down the fundamentals of Spidey’s Arkham-inspired-but-playful combat. By the time Fisk is in cuffs, I’m happy to call it a day, just in time before the game’s open-world bloat materialises. But I’d take this over the literal cold opens of GTA 5 or Red Dead Redemption 2 that are practically divorced from their open-world USP.

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Ikea has issued a cease and desist demand to an indie horror developer insisting they change their unreleased horror game in a bid to stop press and players alike from comparing it to its global furniture chain.

The Store is Closed - which we told you about a couple of weeks ago - is a haunting mash-up of Endnight Games' The Forest (which incidentally saw its sequel, Sons of the Forest, recently delayed) and the humdrum of everyday life, and comes from indie developer Ziggy.

Whilst it doesn't use any of Ikea's products, names, or branding, Ikea believes the developer is infringing on its copyright and has sent in New York legal firm Fross Zelnick. Consequently, Ziggy - who's based in the UK - has ten days to make the changes or face legal action.

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Scorn is one of the most visually distinctive games released in recent times. Clearly inspired by the work of HR Giger, the game's environments marry mechanical intricacy with biology to create a highly unnerving experience. It's sci-fi, but not hi-tech, with analogue mechanics, skeletal metalwork, and the occasional glimpse of something truly alive.

On the surface, Scorn looks like a first-person shooter, but it has more in common with Myst or The Witness than Doom. This is a slow-paced, brooding title that requires puzzle-solving and careful exploration - but with a small team at the helm and a nearly 10-year development cycle, is this Unreal Engine 4-based game properly polished? And on Xbox Series X, just how good is AMD's FSR 2 image reconstruction?

Scorn's visual design is pitch-perfect from the moment you look at the title screen. The environments are highly ambiguous - vaguely mechanical, but ribbed with bone-like arches and inlaid with vascular tubing. Everything is dilapidated, worn and glistening with moisture. But some mechanisms still seem to work, and hint at some larger, unknown purpose. As you progress, the organic elements take over, with guts and veins splayed out all around. Humanoid creatures can be found, fused into bizarre arrangements or discarded like trash. Your character is no different - shortly into the game, you're attacked by a parasite, which slowly envelops you. The game's style is strange, uncomfortable, and wholly unique in gaming.

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