Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Want to get a powerful Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor for $50 off with a free copy of Starfield Premium Edition? B&H Photo in the US have you covered with their latest discount on AMD's fastest gaming CPU*, which sees the processor drop to $389 after debuting earlier this year at $439.

That's still a hefty chunk of change, but it's worth it for a gaming CPU that outfights the Core i9 13900K and trades blows with the much more expensive Ryzen 9 7950X3D, coming well ahead in some games and a tiny bit behind in others.

*Fight me

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Xbox's Elite Series 2 controllers are a great pick for PC and Xbox consoles alike, but they're also pretty darn expensive. Thankfully, you can pick up the cheaper Core version for significantly less money, especially if it's on sale - which is the situation right now! Amazon US are selling the Elite Series 2 Core in white for $99, a solid reduction from its usual price of $130.

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Honkai Impact 3rd, the hack-and-slash action game that shares its universe and characters with HoYoverse's more recent and better-known Honkai: Star Rail, is due to receive a massive update that will take the game to Mars - and seemingly leave one of its heroes behind.

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If you’re waiting for a Steam Deck capable of running Starfield at a decent clip, you’re going to be waiting a while yet. Valve has said that a more powerful Steam Deck will arrive at the end of 2025 earliest, with no major performance upgrade expected in the meantime.

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Sea of Thieves is lining things up for the launch of its 10th season next month, with a multi-month rollout of new features including guilds, a new world event type and a way to play without being attacked by other players.

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Hit manga and anime series My Hero Academia is the next pop-culture licence to take a shot at the battle royale crown, as the superhero series launches free-to-play online multiplayer game My Hero Ultra Rumble next week.

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My goodness, what a close thing. Fading Afternoon is a game of excellent vibes as you stroll around the city living your faintly sad life. It's also an incredibly cool 2D beat 'em up that is, at its best, comfortably the best I can think of. But the boundaries between the two are too frustrating to make it the legend it ought to be.

It's a sequel to The Friends Of Ringo Ishikawa, a game I didn't really vibe with. FA is much improved, a sort of pared down Yakuza game about beating rival gangsters up in between story bits about an ageing Maruyama trying to get the band back together after leaving prison and apparently not caring that he's dying. I do recommend it, but be prepared for some friction.

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If you enjoy tower defence, video games presented as fake PC desktop environments, and big sexy mouths in Hell, cast your innumerable unblinking eyes over Heretic's Fork. The deck-building tower defence game casts you as an employee of Hell tasked with punishing sinners by building towers and deploying troops using a demonic computer system. I've played a few hours since Heretic's Fork launched yesterday and while it hasn't quite enraptured my hellbound heart, I am enjoying figuring it out—and seeing what my paperclip helper will do next.

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I've really been trying with Starfield! I want to experience the space adventure that's been lauded by some critics as a 10/10 masterpiece, and by Bethesda as the most important RPG ever made. But I'm struggling, folks. I'm really struggling.

You see, I'd hoped Starfield's side quests would be a bit more fun than collecting magic space rocks. But basically every side hustle I've tackled have all been the equivalents of early MMO fodder and I'm so tired of them.

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Malenia, Blade of Miquella, is a menace. Even among Elden Ring’s cast of bastard-hard bosses, the Goddess of Rot distinguishes herself as an ender of lives, a relentless steel tempest that has shredded the most prepared and dextrous of adventurers. She’s also been beaten, rather soundly, by a man using only his mouth.

Or, to be more precise, a QuadStick FPS, a specialised game controller comprised of a mouth-operated joystick and several 'sip and puff' switches. It’s the favoured tool of professional streamer and Guinness World Record holder Rocky "RockyNoHands" Stoutenburgh, who in 2022 used it to become the first quadriplegic Elden Ring player to claim Malenia’s scalp. This was a win for a QuadStick as well: a showcase of how adaptive hardware and clever controller design could make games more accessible than ever, enabling players with disabilities to match and exceed the heroics of their able-bodied peers. And yet, there’s little sense – among disabled players, advocacy groups, or even controller manufacturers – that accessible hardware is entering its golden age. While major breakthroughs have been made, high prices and commercial concerns still carry the threat of willing, eager players being left behind.

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The polished-up 2.0 update for Cyberpunk 2077 is out now, ahead of its Phantom Liberty expansion on September 26th. I’ve been trying out both, partly to see if the 2.0 newly raised hardware requirement of SSD storage is a warning worth heeding.

Hard lines against hard drive installations are new to PC games, but it was only a couple of weeks ago when Starfield showed the dangers of crossing them. Broken audio, regular freeze-ups, load times so long you could measure them with a calendar... an SSD really is the only way to play Starfield, and it sounded like Cyberpunk 2077 would follow suit. "We advise against running the game on an HDD (or on a SD card on Steam Deck) due to lower bandwidth which may cause new content to not stream properly," reads CD Projekt Red’s 2.0 patch notes. That’s us told.

It's been a clear decade since the last entry in this co-op crimeathon FPS series, so I was interested to play Payday 3. Payday is exactly the sort of online multiplayer I can get behind: PvE with clear but theoretically malleable goals (theft!). But although compared to Crime Boss: Rockay City it's a crushing 60st monster truck tyre, Payday 3 isn't really reinventing the Payday 2 wheel. In some respects you might think it's rolling backwards, and while dedicated Payday 2 players may well switch over to the current gen iteration, you get the sense they'll be complaining about things the whole time.

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The scourge of Cosy/Cozy Gaming has finally come for Middle-earth, and more specifically the Shire, which I guess was pretty cosy/cozy to begin with. Wētā Workshop and Private Division have announced Tales of the Shire, a "heart-warming" experience that will release on PC in 2024. I've got a live action trailer for you, in which a young person doodles pictures of Hobbits, while seated at a desk intriguingly strewn with modern appliances such as laptops and assorted Lord of the Rings paraphernalia. The book she's doodling in contains sketches of celebrated locations such as the Green Dragon pub in Bywater, and there are drawings of dolls, Hobbit-holes and onions. Take a peek!

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The UK's Competition and Markets Authority have "provisionally" approved Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, removing the last major legal obstacle to the completion of the deal.

The CMA blocked the deal in April this year over concerns that it would "alter the future of the fast-growing cloud gaming market", and might lead "to reduced innovation and less choice for UK gamers over the years to come". Microsoft attempted to woo the regulator by agreeing to sell Activision Blizzard game cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft, and while the CMA have "limited residual concerns", they've largely accepted Microsoft's modifications.

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Baldur's Gate 3's Patch 3, which was so massive Larian held it back a day to test it properly, will release today, and it'll add an RPG feature many of us have been requesting since we stepped clear of the Nautiloid - the ability to change a character's appearance. Alas, it comes too late for the Wood Elf Druid I rolled during my first try at the 1.0 version. I wanted her to look like a sort of Kung Fu Galadriel, with cool tattoos and aerodynamic scars, but she emerged from the character creator looking like she'd been mugged by a packet of demon crayons. I've left my active character, a High Elf Sorceress, safely tattoo-less.

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Hifiman's Ananda open-back headphones aren't what I would call the most obvious choice for a gaming headset - they lack a microphone and debuted at $999, for one - but they also sound incredible, are super comfortable and are currently $600 off at Amazon in the US... so I thought this might interest the audiophile gamers out there!

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AMD's RX 7800 XT is one of their best graphics cards in years, offering a genuine boost in performance over the competing RTX 4070 with FSR 3 Frame Generation tech on the way. These cards are meant to start at £499, but as with all GPUs to get a good review prices on most models are far higher - so it's nice to see an Ebay 10% off code that brings these models back to down to the price of a base unit. Today you can pick up the Sapphire RX 7800 XT Pure in white for £499 using code COLLECT10 when you buy from Ebuyer via Ebay.

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It was announced earlier this year that Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy would arrive on PC in early 2024. Now we have a specific release date for the three Objection-able courtroom puzzlers: January 25th, 2024.

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I love creative tools in videogames, from drawing Worms levels in Deluxe Paint to optimising r_speeds in Half-Life maps to using Minecraft worlds to generate 3D renders. That love has only been amplified by having a kid whose first instinct in any game is to create his own character, unit, level - whatever is available.

The best creative games inspire that creativity by having some innate flavour of their own, though. Some personality that inspires you to lean in, or nudge it in some other direction. By comparison, the new trailer for Everywhere, seems like metaversal porridge.

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Ubisoft are planning to make Tom Clancy's The Division 3. The project was announced alongside news that Julian Gerighty, the current creative director of Star Wars Outlaws, would move across to be "executive producer for The Division brand" once that project is finished.

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Each year, Steam announce the dates for upcoming sales and fests. The information is designed so that developers can opt-in to have their games included, and plan for the year ahead. But if you're looking to buy a boatload of games, you might also want to plan when based on potential discounts.

Valve have now announced the relevant dates for the first four months of 2024.

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This week we wrote some articles about the hilariously comprehensive Microsoft leaks, and Alice0 wrote one in particular about Bethesda's plans to not remaster Morrowind. It is, she points out, understandable why the sanitised Bethesda of today would leave well enough alone: "2002's Elder Scrolls game is an overambitious, odd, scrappy, and spiky beast. It is a game happy to leave you lost, confused, misunderstanding, weirded-out, frustrated, and stuck."

Yet, Morrowind is loved! And in the comments of that article Nic Rueben mentioned the demo for Ardenfall, an RPG with no release date but a Steam demo. So off I toddled to have a look, and though I haven't played much of it yet, I'm confident in saying that if you liked Morrowind you should check the demo out.

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A lot of stuff happened over the past couple of weeks, so in this week's Electronic Wireless Show podcast we briefly round up some of the Unity nonsense, and some of the more interesting and/or funny bits of the Microsoft leak that happened at the start of the week. But what we really want to talk about is intellectual property rights! Bill Willingham, the man who came up with Fables (the IP that brought you The Wolf Among Us) declared via. blog post that he's making Fables a public domain property. What does that mean? Can we all just make Fables video games now? And what can we do with Sherlock holmes?

Plus: James broke the Lenovo Legion Go, I've been playing lots of games that aren't Starfield, and James recommends more music!

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Paradox Interactive and new indie team C-Prompt have announced their debut 4X strategy game Millennia, which I got to play for an hour at this year's Gamescom. With development being led by former Irrational Games co-founder Robert Fermier and Age Of Empires II lead designer Ian M Fischer, Millennia will see you attempting that classic quad of Xs across ten distinct historical ages, starting in the Stone Age before eventually ending up in a "post-modern future", designer Ben Friedman tells me.

The twist here, however, is that you've also got what C-Prompt are calling 'Variant Ages', which let you bend the timeline to your will. Some of these variants are more historical in nature, such as an Age Of Monuments where everyone's building Egyptian pyramids, Friedman explains, while others are more fantastical, with the words steampunk, alchemy and space alien invasions all mentioned in the same sentence. I had a good time with it during my demo, but the real delight was seeing my home army of Kyoto go and invade neighbouring settlement Telford, before going on to conquer Rome - as you do. So if historical melting pots are your kind of 4X jam, read on.

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Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion is attracting very positive reviews, and CD Projekt staff are naturally quite pleased about this. And also, very relieved. Released in 2020, the original Cyberpunk 2077 stands as an uncommonly thunderous example of overhype and project mismanagement, with technical issues at launch that extended from comical bugs such as disappearing penises to serious breaches such as graphical effects capable of triggering epileptic fits. CD Projekt have spent years attempting to address the underlying systemic and workplace issues and claw back some goodwill - hence, the general atmosphere on Xitter of developers needing to take five and stare at a flowerbed for a while. "It was a rough few years but there's finally celebration and closure (for me at least)," posted senior level designer Seb Mcbride.

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Ellis Tucci grew up playing games like Thief, System Shock, and Deus Ex. Now she's making an immersive sim of her own. It's called Spectra, and it's set in the US in an alt-history 1972 where Soviet Union is the dominant military power after President Roosevelt was deposed in a fascist coup. You play as a Soviet agent tasked with infiltrating and fomenting revolution in a fortress city called Hiwatha.

Tucci wants Spectra to meet the criteria players will expect from an immersive sim. "To me, the immersive sim is the platonic ideal of the video game" she says. "I've tried to deliver on that immersion by creating an environment that is extremely interactable and flexible in the ways it can be used." She explains that "a quite frankly silly proportion of the buildings in each map are enterable and that "you can turn off the lights, set traps, and use things like televisions, radios, or payphones as lures."

It sounds like everything immersive sim fans want. But there's one big difference between Spectra and the games that inspired it. Tucci is making it on her own. And she isn't the only indie developer working in one of the most ambitious, developmentally complex genres in the industry. Games like Shadows Of Doubt, Fallen Aces and Gloomwood are merely the steam rising from the bubbling magma chamber that is indie immersive sim development, Like the recent revival of retro shooters, the indie space is on the verge of an immersive sim eruption.

After the closure of original developers Troika, a long-awaited sequel announcement, delays and layoffs at Hardsuit, a secret change of studio (which led to further layoffs at Hardsuit), preorder refunds and the belated reveal that a developer best known for (very good) non-combat narrative experiences would be taking the reins, the only thing I really want to hear about Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 is that it’s definitely, absolutely going to reach the finish line. There are actual vampires that come back from the dead less often. But I'm piqued nonetheless by Chinese Room studio design director Alex Skidmore’s thoughts on how this Seattle-set World of Darkness action-RPG adaptation will differentiate itself from other games in the genre, and especially, how it will put its vampiric premise to use.

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The Baldur's Gate 3 "no possibility left unpossible" choice-and-consequence train continues with the revelation that, if you break up with a lover in the game, you can slowly repair the relationship and spark a bit of your old chemistry. This might not sound earthshattering to anybody from outside the videogame world - what are you doing here? Run along and watch your silly non-interactive movies and TV shows - but it's quite novel for a fantasy RPG in the BioWare tradition. In my experience, at least, most RPGs only give you the build-up to a character romance, then flash-freeze the relationship post-consummation, perhaps because you've unlocked a sexy "loyalty" companion ability and the developers don't want to take it away from you. Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the few that thinks about how chemistry might come and go.

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The Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty expansion releases next week, but before that, we have Cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 update, a free rework that adds vehicle combat, smarter cops and new skill trees and perks, including the ability to play a sort of Wild Magic hacker and a skillset I can only describe as Big Hammer Go Brrrrrr. CD Projekt tech support have shared region-specific download availability for the update, together with some advice for new and returning Cyberpunk 2077 players taking the plunge. Let's have a look.

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It looks like Counter-Strike 2 might soon be upon us. That’s if you’re reading somewhat generously into what could be a sly tease from Valve at a Counter-Strike 2 release date next week.

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Terraria makers Re-Logic have donated $100,000 to two open-source alternatives to game engine Unity, and vowed to donate to Godot and FNA every month from now on, after slamming Unity’s recent runtime fee plans.

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Less than 18 months after it acquired Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and Mythforce developers Beamdog, Embracer Group has reportedly laid off more than two dozen staff at the studio. Mere days after the release of its nostalgic co-op shooter, no less.

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Last time, you decided that capturing enemy buildings is better than hand grenades exploding on impact with enemies?. Can't say I disagree. I love a good frag but what's even better is capturing your munitions factory and using that to make more grenades to throw at you. Doesn't matter if I need to time or cook them if I have an entire production line behind me. This week, I ask you to decide who's the boss (baby). What's better: setting unit waypoints or receiving waypoints yourself?

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Evil Dead: The Game, the PvP co-op shooter based on the bloody comedy-horror movie series, survived till dawn - but not much longer. 16 months after its release, its developers are putting a stop to any new content for the multiplayer game. You’ll still be able to keep playing for the time being, at least.

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Prior to joining RPS and coming into a possession of an Actual Contemporary Gaming PC, I did all my gaming on a plucky Erazer laptop from circa 2014. The old warhorse has certainly had some adventures, to the point that it isn't really a laptop anymore but a hovering debris cloud of plastic and metal, constellated by strips of sellotape, from which a moving picture may be hesitantly conjured by means of screamed insults and the careful deployment of desk fans.

Among the sicker jokes I've played on various editors as a freelancer is to review triple-A games on this sorrowing technological Igor, which - I swear to you - physically flinches and begins to whimper frantically when presented with any game more demanding than Far Cry 2. Thing is, I'm pretty sure I can run Ubisoft's forthcoming Assassin's Creed: Mirage on this hapless relic. The publisher have released minimum and recommended system specs for their latest historical throat-slitter, and they're pretty dang reasonable.

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Nvidia's RTX 4070 is a great graphics card - but the release of the competing RX 7800 XT has put pressure on Nvidia to drop prices. Combined with a 10% Ebay discount that knocks £55 off the price of a unit from MSI, it's now possible to grab this GPU for just £490 - around the same price as AMD's RX 7800 XT while delivering around 15% better RT performance, while also packing in the frame-rate advantages of DLSS 3 Frame Generation and superior power efficiency.

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Farming life sims like Stardew Valley remain enduringly popular, and until Stardew dev ConcernedApe's Haunted Chocolatier arrives, there are plenty other games popping up like cute life sim mushrooms to horn in on our shared desire for a simpler, more rustic way of life. The route to this in Stardew Valley is actually quite hard, requiring mastery of several different interlocked systems that each ask a level of expertise that, on most days, I cannot be arsed to work towards. I love Stardew Valley, to be clear, but I hold no expectation of ever getting the most out of the farm space alloted to you as a result of your grandfather's death.

Fae Farm is a Stardewlike with a fantastical veneer and 3D graphics, but importantly it frontloads progress. It's slightly easier, in ways that seem small but cumulatively mean it takes up way less of your brain's runtime on bad days. For example: all activities, including watering your crops, use less energy than in Stardew Valley. This means you can run around clearing farm space and gathering resources, and have a working plot in just a couple of days. Heck, you can have a pretty full day in the mines before you've mechanised your farm. Game changer!

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Fractal Design's Ridge case is one of the best recent SFF (small form factor) releases, with a skinny design that can nonetheless support a surprising range of high-end hardware. The case debuted at $130, but spikes in demand pushed it north of $150 at many retailers. Today things are swinging the other way, as Newegg has knocked $20 off its MSRP to bring it to $110.

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Good news for fans of heavy artillery, less good news for lovers of sleek rides. Criterion Games, the British-based creator of the Burnout racing series and recent Need for Speed titles, will work primarily on EA and DICE's Battlefield shooters in future. The studio's first objective: improving the contemporary-set Battlefield 2042, which our Ed Thorn described as "an FPS package that has its fun moments, but one that's blighted by performance issues" back in 2021.

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Cyberpunk 2077's triumph was that it offered a sprawling story, dozens of hours long, which cohered around just a small number of themes. Or maybe even a single thesis: that the cynical, defensive, self-centred voice in your head - personified by ancient, soul-trapped, anarcho-rockstar Johnny Silverhand - offered only a literal dead-end, and that real rebellion in the face of a messed-up world lay in helping friends. It was Frank Capra with robot arms and samurai swords, and I ate it up.

V doesn't go to Washington in Phantom Liberty, but Washington comes to her. CD Projekt Red's major expansion to the first-person RPG opens up a new district and a new cast of characters, including the President of the New United States and an aging sleeper spy played by Idris Elba. The themes remain the same, but the thesis is being tested: how can you help your friends if you don't know who they are, and if their goals are mutually exclusive?

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