An appeal made by Activision Blizzard that blocked Blizzard Albany’s QA staff from unionising has been rejected by the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). GIbiz report the publisher tried to argue that the entire staff of Blizzard Albany should vote on the unionisation effort rather than just the development studio’s QA team, but the NLRB disagree.
When you vow to "get outside more" and "be more adventurous" in the new year, hey, Game Pass subscribers will be able to do all that indoors. Capcom have announced that Monster Hunter Rise will hit Game Pass in January 2023, a great entry in their brill beast-bashing series. Microsoft have also detailed some more of the games coming to Game Pass before then, including Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga next week. That one might be a fun way to distract the kiddywinkles over Christmas. Read on for more future Game Pass additions.
Sometimes when we get sent review code for a game, the PR will say that they'll be getting PC code later, but if we want we can have a console code so we can get a head start playing the game. There are a lot of reasons that might happen, but I'll be honest: it's never a great sign. I'm usually pretty chillaxed about the occasional wonky animation or frame stuttering when a game runs, but in this case The Callisto Protocol runs so badly on PC that if it were my child and the coach wasn't putting it in to play football - even as a sub in the last five minutes, you know, just to give it a go, like - I'd be saying, "Yeah, bench the sucker, I get it."
The stuttering and slowing down whenever anything moves is especially problematic in a horror game where your survival depends on quickly dodge-reacting to sudden threats. So I can't, right now, recommend you get The Callisto Protocol on PC. If Striking Distance get it running properly? Eh. Maybe.
Arctic's MX-4 thermal paste is my go-to choice for basically every system I own, from CPU/GPU test rigs to my own personal PC, so I felt that I should let you know that a hefty 8g tube of MX-4 is down to £5.87 on Amazon right now - a little more than 40% off its £9.99 RRP.
Microsoft's Xbox Series Wireless Controller is a great fit for PC too, and at the Microsoft Store today you can grab one for $39.99 instead of the usual $59.99 - and in a choice of black, white, blue or red colourways.
This is a great pickup for PC gaming, especially if you like platformers, racing games, action titles and the like, of which there are plenty on PC.
EA Dice would like to remind you once again that they are "all-in" on Battlefield, and their latest evidence is laying out their plans for updating Battlefield 2042 in 2023. Those plans include reintroducing classes, the first details on season four and its new specialist, and the confirmation that there will be a season five.
Sonic Frontiers split opinion like most Sonic games do when it released earlier this year. Even Ed in our Sonic Frontiers review was split between finding it fun and frustrating.
Well, maybe this will help: Sega have announced three updates to come in 2023, all of which will be free, and the last of which will add new playable characters and story.
Fantasy action RPG Path Of Exile’s been kicking about for nearly a decade, but it’s still receiving hefty chunks of fresh stuff every three months. The latest, roguelike expansion Forbidden Sanctum, was revealed fully today during a livestream by devs Grinding Gear Games. You can see more of what to expect when update 3.20 Forbidden Sanctum opens its doors on December 9th in the trailer below.
The long-awaited Path Of Exile 2 will be fully unveiled next year, first at Exilecon 2023 before heading to Gamescom in August for European players to check out in the flesh, devs Grinding Gear Games have confirmed. Path Of Exile 2 had been pencilled in for a 2022 release, but it’s now looking like the sequel could arrive in time for the series’ tenth anniversary. A beta is planned, too, and dates for that will be announced when the game is shown at Exilecon.
Kart racer Disney Speedstorm had a vague "2022" release date, but there's perilously little 2022 left. Developers Gameloft have now confirmed what you could have guessed: the game will now release sometime in 2023 instead.
Today's Google Doodle - the daily, sometimes-interactive twist on the search engine's logo - offers up a handful of arcade mini-games to play with in your browser. They're simple novelties, but there's also an edit button on each one that allows you to tinker with them so you can plop down your own walls, enemies, switches and keys. The Doodle has been built to celebrate Jerry Lawson, a Black video game pioneer and the engineer who led the team that designed the first home video game console to use cartridges.
The Amnesia series is returning in 2023 with another instalment in the long-running indie horror series, plonking us down in the already horrendous environments of World War I. With Amnesia: The Bunker, devs Frictional Games are also dialling down the scripted sequences in favour of a semi-open world survival sandbox. Steady your grip on your revolver and step into the dark to watch the trailer below.
For the last six months, I've been slowly picking my way through Company Of Heroes 2 for the first time. I'm about halfway through its campaign at the moment, but the rhythm of calling up replacements and reinforcing my squads hasn't quite been engrained into my hotkey fingers yet. I keep making the mistake of thinking I can just push through with my remaining forces, but as any COH stalwart will know, that kind of road only ever leads to total disaster.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I came to preview the latest build of Company Of Heroes 3's dynamic, Total War-style Italian campaign and seemed to be, you know, actually making some pretty steady progress as I pushed up its mission maps. I was, admittedly, only playing the opening levels of this particular campaign, and I also had the aid of a handy M4A1 Sherman tank providing some welcome backup muscle. But during my four hours with it, I felt more in control of the battlefield than I've ever done while playing COH2. I was making excellent use of its reinforcement options, and heck, I was even remembering to tell units to retreat back to the nearest aid post so I didn’t lose the buffs they'd earned through their new EXP-driven promotions and veterancy bonuses. Then I played a mission from its more linear North African campaign, and had a very rude awakening indeed. Why, hello, frantic pressure and torrents of death bullets from Company Of Heroes 2 again, it's been a while.
We've all worn the rose-coloured glasses when it comes to old games. It's a real hazard of the job when you started out covering stuff from the 90s. It's less common though, to fall afoul of whatever its opposite is. The uh, yellow-tinted glasses, maybe? My point is that I did you all a disservice when I described Emperor Of The Fading Suns as "an intriguing, ambitious, crap mega 4X" last year. It was a remarkable game, and more remarkably still, its developers Holistic Design Inc. recently updated it with a major patch, 25 years after its original release.
It's a lot better than I remember. And only some of that is down to the patch.
In the latest trailer for Ryū Ga Gotoku Studio's feudal Yakuza spin-off Like A Dragon: Ishin, you get to see Kiryu slash, punch, and gun his way through much of historical Japan. Our boy dishes out the heat in the gnarliest of ways, but it all culminates with the "Wild Dancer" fighting style which turns Kiryu into a spinning top of death. Sign me up. Get me a copy right now.
Some games are just December games. When the air turns biting, I hear their siren song in my bones. They Are Billions. Frostpunk. Phoenix Point. Factorio. None of them are exactly what you would call a Christmas-y game. In fact, they're all pretty bleak and threatening in tone. But they're also amazingly comforting.
Just imagine: sitting down in your favourite chair, electric heat pad on your back, cat on your lap, mug of hot chocolate or coffee by your side. Legions of undead roiling at the gates, trying to break through your cosy little town's defences. Ahhhhh. It's Christmas.
Never ones to be outdone, Valve are partnering with The Game Awards to give away one of their Steam Deck handheld PCs every minute during the three-hour livestream event on December 8th/9th. They're the 512GB model too, so you might want to raise an intrigued eyebrow and nod slowly. If you’re wondering which standouts from 2022 are up for awards on the night itself then here’s a video of host Geoff Keighley saying game names for ten minutes, below.
With two chunky single player campaigns and a sizable multiplayer component on the way, it's no secret that Company Of Heroes 3 is Relic Entertainment's biggest COH game yet. After playing a chunky new preview build last week, it's clear there'll be lots to dive into come release day on February 23rd. But when I sat down with vice president of production David Littman to talk more about their WW2 RTS, I was curious where their focus would lie after launch. While many love Company Of Heroes for its top notch campaigns, Littman told me they "still have over 400,000 players still playing COH 1 and 2 monthly" via multiplayer, which is impressive considering the last game in the series came out nine years ago. And when it comes to COH 3, Littman says they'll go "where the players are".
I knew the hulking Ogryn would be my class in Warhammer 40,000: Darktide as soon as I shot his starting gun: a shotgun which holds a single shell the size of a can of beans. Sounds excessive, but that's the kind of firepower you need when four outcasts face thousands of cultists, mutants, and demons. The follow-up to Vermintide is once again a Left 4 Dead-style cooperative first-person shooter with a fair whack of melee and, having played a lot of the beta and a little after launch, it's a joyously grubby brawl with a great cast of weirdos.
The RPS Advent Calendar is upon us, but as we open the first door of our end of year countdown, I get the feeling something terrible is waiting on the other side. I can hear the clanking of metal boots in the distance, accompanied by laser fire and the gurgle of orc laughter rubbed raw by some nasty disease. Dare we enter and embrace the chaos lying within?
*Deep breath* "It's CHRIIIIIIIIISSSSSTMAAAAAAAAAAS!" We emerged, blinking, into 2022 and, whaddaya know? It was a good year for games. We're feeling extra festive and are raring to count down our games of the year in traditional style. Tear back the little windows and stuff your face with The RPS Advent Calendar 2022!
Ray tracing has been temporarily disabled in newly released co-op accent simulator Warhammer 40,000: Darktide due to issues with AMD and Intel graphics cards. Devs Fatshark say they’re looking into what’s causing the problems. Anecdotal reports from the Darktide subreddit seem to suggest that ray tracing was staying on for people who’d set the fancy lighting technique to off. For now, Fatshark say they've turned off ray tracing by default for all players until they can figure out what’s going on and implement a fix.
Another closed beta for upcoming thwack ‘em up Street Fighter 6 is scheduled to commence punching on December 16th, Capcom have revealed. This time around you’ll have a chance to jump into the colourful gi of eight more characters in online matches and tournaments, along with a few bug fixes and balance adjustments. Battling concludes December 19th. You can see some very burly Fight Streeters going toe-to-toe, and fist-to-face, by watching the trailer below.
Need For Speed Unbound technically isn't out until December 2nd, but you can scoot in right now if you've got Game Pass and are willing to download EA's app. It's available as part of EA's Game Trials, so you'll only be able to play for 10 hours before you're kicked out, but that's time for cop chases and powerslides a-plenty.
I haven't played a Need For Speed game since I was 13 and this wasn't on my radar at all, but yeah, sure, let's drive. It looks just like the games I remember but with optional silly animated wings and dust trails.
Romance has never been Bethesda's strong suit, from Skyrim's barebones marriage system to Fallout 4's bonus-XP-granting fade-to-black cutscenes. Starfield will be a little more nuanced than that, suggests executive producer Todd Howard, offering more complex romance options than Fallout's.
That's just one detail from a nearly 3 hour-long interview Howard gave on the Lex Fridman podcast, where he also talks scrapping space strandings, and (gasp) why he prefers to play on consoles to PC.
In a game about someone navigating the competing pressures and existential angst inherent to choosing a career, it seems appropriate that an update would let them sack it all off and go fishing. Sable hasn't quite done that, because yesterday's update sends you hover-biking off after enough fish to earn the right to don the new, professional mask of a desert angler.
On your bike, then.
Half-Life 2 was the first game I ever played in VR. Back in the primordial days of 2013, I was lucky enough to get my ungainly sausage-mitts on an Oculus Developer's Kit – the prototype headset that eventually led to the Oculus Rift. Understandably given the name, there were not games for the developers kit outside of a few incredibly basic demos. But there was Half-Life 2, for which Valve had implemented a hacky VR mode that you could activate with some console tomfoolery.
It's time to say your goodbyes to Eivor - and your surprise, early hellos to a new character from Mirage, the next game in Ubisoft's eternal series of stab 'em ups. Asassin's Creed Valhalla's free, final content update has arrived a week early, sending Eivor off to North America for one last hurrah.
There are actually two links to Mirage, because this final chapter features *more* of its protagonist, Basim, who Valhalla persevere-ers will have already met. I bailed after 15 hours and so have very little idea what's going on, which is a shame because I'd love a chinwag with Shohreh Aghdashloo.
Minecraft Bedrock Edition has been updated to 1.19.50, bringing seven brand new default skins into that particular version of the survival crafting game. These newbies are more diverse than stalwarts Steve and Alex, and Mojang intend for them to be more representative of Minecraft’s global player base. Wave hello to Makena, Efe, Noor, Kai, Ari, Sunny, and Zuri. Watch the trailer below to see the new default skins teaming up to build a giant alpaca.
I'd argue that Azeroth's unending expansion has taken the shine off a world that used to positively sparkle. Still, no matter what I think about World Of Warcraft today, it still holds a special place in my heart as an important formative experience.
Even the time capsule that's Classic WoW probably couldn't capture the same buzz of the past, mainly because I, as a being of flesh and bone, am not a teenager anymore. But I'd argue there's one place that still captures the essence of WoW more than WoW itself nowadays: YouTube. Or to be more specific, channels which provide hour-long music and ambience from some of the game's most memorable zones.
Being interested in both sci-fi and strategy games, I’ve always wanted to reshape the galaxy. The free 3.6 Orion update for Paradox’s spacey grand strategy Stellaris is live now, and it's done that, but in a way I hadn’t quite imagined. Among the changes with this update are six new galaxy shapes to mix up the pattern of your interstellar empires a bit. Orion also rebalances fleet combat, bringing in elements of the open beta that began back in October. Paradox have chucked in a few reworks of bits and pieces from Stellaris’ numerous expansions too, including changes to the Utopia DLC’s Ascension path. You can see more about that by watching the video below.
Last time, you decided that dakka is better than overwatch (not Overwatch). It wasn't the most overwhelming victory of this scientific process so far, but it certainly was the loudest. More dakka indeed. This week, I ask you to pick between a cool form of human movement and some cool human speech. What's better: mantling or cool swearing?
Grand Theft Auto Online players are forbidden from using the game’s roleplay servers for “commercial exploitation”, according to new guidelines set out by developers Rockstar which includes selling loot boxes, virtual currencies, corporate sponsorships, and anything to do with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Sorry, crypto bros. The ban on crypto and NFTs echoes Mojang’s statement from this summer scuppering players who wanted to incorporate the controversial technologies into Minecraft.
For the last ten years, the XCOM designers at Firaxis have traded in 'if's and 'maybe's. If this shot lands, then maybe I can pull off this carefully calculated plan I’m brewing. It's exactly the kind of taut, knife-edge tension we've come to love and expect from their turn-based strategy games, but Marvel's Midnight Suns takes a different approach. As the titular demon hunters join forces with some famous Avengers faces to take down the evil sorceress Lilith and Marvel mega villain Chthon, there's never any question about whether your moves will or won't work here. You're playing as the world's most powerful superheroes. Of course, they’re going to work. And forget about cowering behind knee-high cover walls, too, because if you're not already bulletproof, you've certainly got the reflexes and supercharged muscle mass to soak up anything Lilith’s Hydra minions are going to chuck at you.
Question is, by tipping the power scales in your favour like this, do you risk destroying that delicate balance of risk and reward? At first glance, it's easy to think a more reliable set of heroes would end up dulling what made Firaxis' XCOM games so special, but the result is something equally thrilling. Given how the Marvel machine has drawn in and chewed up so much singular creative talent in the wider MCUniverse, Firaxis emerging with their cred intact is nothing short of extraordinary. Not only have they endured their radioactive spider bite, they've come out bigger and better for it, creating not only the best Marvel game I've played, but one of the best superhero games full stop.
The Crucial P5 Plus is the best value 'second-gen' PCIe 4.0 drive, with sequential speeds up to 6600MB/s that make it ideal for anything from mid-range to high-end gaming rigs or the PS5. Its TLC NAND and DRAM cache also mean that performance remains high even in sustained write scenarios, unlike cheaper QLC/no-DRAM drives.
The Crucial P5 Plus normally costs £100+, but today it's down to £92.51 on Amazon UK - one of the best prices we've seen for this model although not quite the best ever.
Free to play hero shooter Overwatch 2 welcomes Season 2 early next week, and with that comes some more hero balance changes and a new theme. This season, the game’s taking its inspiration from Greek mythology with a new time-limited mode, Battle For Olympus, giving the heroes some godlike powers early next year. You can take a look at some of what’s lined up for Overwatch 2 Season 2 in the trailer below.
The Core i5 12400F is a surprisingly excellent gaming CPU, offering the power of Intel's new Alder Lake architecture in a simple six-core twelve-thread configuration. The CPU supports PCIe 5.0 and DDR5, but it also works with cheaper DDR4- and PCIe 4.0-based hardware.
It's normally £200, but it's down to £167 on AWD-IT which is a pretty decent deal if you want to build a powerful gaming PC on a budget.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide's pre-order beta has drawn to a close, because tomorrow the full game will release proper. That's also when our opinions on Darktide will start to flow across these pages like so many heretics across the streets of Tertium. Perhaps you'd like to enjoy one last dose of concentrated marketing before that happens, in which case you can hop below to watch the Darktide launch trailer.
After a £69 discount (nice), the Crucial P3 has become the most affordable 2TB PCIe 3.0 SSD on Amazon. You'll now pay just £105 for this drive, a great deal that works out to just 5.3p per gigabyte.
The developers of the Yakuza series say that the beloved cabaret mini game will return in Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. That's good news for anyone who played Yakuza 0 and found it weirdly compelling to wring salarymen from their wallets by plying them with drinks.