Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A group of Activision Blizzard workers have teamed up with a union to file charges of unfair labour practices, accusing the company of "intimidation and union busting". This comes less than two months after a California state agency sued the company for alleged discrimination, harrassment, and retaliation. The new charges filed with the labour board claim that Actiblizzard have attempted to stop employees from discussing working conditions or working together to improve them, in violation of labour law.

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Hollow Ponds have released a video detailing the real-world inspirations behind their 2020 puzzle game I Am Dead, a game about a ghost returning to their hometown and view it through new (dead) eyes. The cultural specificity in I Am Dead becomes clear as the two lead developers, Richard Hogg and Ricky Haggett, discuss how the British seaside town of Hastings influenced the creation of the game’s fictional setting Shelmerston. It's 25 minutes long, but it's a lovely watch.

Hogg and Haggett give insights on the various buildings, objects, and jokes from Hastings that infiltrated their way into the game. The video shows off previously unseen concept art, photography, diagrams, maps and mood boards that were used in the development of I Am Dead. You will also learn a lot about the town Hastings.

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How can you carry over weapons and powers in Deathloop? Deathloop is a darkly comedic action-adventure game which sees assassins Colt and Julianna attempting to kill each other time and time again over the course of a single looping day. The titular loop resets itself if the day ends before Colt can kill all eight Visionaries (including Julianna), or if Colt dies three times in a single mission. When this happens, Colt wakes up at the beginning of the day with everything reset — including any weapons, powers, and trinkets he managed to pick up during his last trip through the loop.

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There are lots of spill-resistant keyboards, including some in our best gaming keyboard rankings, but you hardly ever see mice with similar protection. Despite the fact that they’re always right next to the keyboard, and thus just at risk from low-flying beverages. There are at least two, though: The SteelSeries Aerox 3 and Aerox 3 Wireless. According to SteelSeries, these were the first gaming mice on the market to receive IP54 certification, effectively guaranteeing protection against dust ingress and water splashes.

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Next week, reviled former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher will rise from her grave to bring Hell back to Earth, and only one space marine can stop her. Announced today, Thatcher's Techbase is an upcoming mod for classic Doom which ventures in the tenth circle of Hell (aka the United Kingdom) to battle the demonic forces of the Iron Lady. Modding politicians into games is a vintage jape but Thatcher's Techbase makes a real effort with custom art, its own campaign, music from Paradise Killer's composer, and apparently even the voice behind Demeter and Persephone in Hades. Watch this trailer.

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Like a splash of cold water to the face, I Am Fish is a wonderfully refreshing physics platformer. This isn't a grim tale wrapped in layers of metaphor, or a walking simulator that guides you slowly through a field of feelings. Here, you are simply a fish. The bowl is your prison. The ocean is your freedom. Now imagine Ian Mckellen with the same gravitas as he had playing Gandalf in Lord Of The Rings, except with a farmer's cap on. He is peering into your googly, goldfish eyes. In a west country accent, he bellows, "Swim, you fool!"

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How many weapons are there in Deathloop and how do you get the best ones? Deathloop is about two assassins locked in a time-looping duel to the death, so naturally, there are weapons aplenty in this game. Thanks to the titular loop, you aren't always going to be able to hang on to every weapon you pick up, so knowing where and how to get your favourite weapons back is going to be important.

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“What’s with all the meat everywhere, anyway?” my Death Trash alter ego Mildred asks. “It’s just there. Grows.” the meat merchant replies. “Maybe we’re living on a planet full of flesh and right now we’re standing on a crust of stone and dirt. So, do you want a piece of meat now?” I really don’t. But Mildred does. After all, this mystery meat is the main healing item in the game. It’s what keeps you and the world around you alive. It’s harvested from the ground like precious stones, the literal blood flowing in this grotesque world’s barebones economy, eaten raw and served in meat bars.

But where does the meat come from? Whence the amorphous flesh blobs and pools of blood? From another planet, another dimension? There are no animals in this strange ecosystem apart from Fleshworms. The strange meat seems to be linked to another mystery, the advent of the flesh titans (which are exactly what the name suggests). Soon we discover that we are able to commune with the meat and, through it, speak to a enigmatic being called The Oracle. The meat is a kind of universal consciousness, a flesh and blood information highway, into which those who are attuned to it can plug in. Whether the meat and the flesh titans are good or bad for humanity is up for debate, and there are factions that deify and others that hate them, vying for power. The clot thickens.

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Kitfox’s recently released dating sim Boyfriend Dungeon has a novel premise. In Boyfriend Dungeon you date sword people: humans who transform into weapons that you can take dungeon crawling. And no, not sex dungeons. Classic video game dungeons with loot and monsters. On paper, Boyfriend Dungeon sounds like the best six-ish hours you could have in a game, combining the endorphin rush of monster-slaying with a cast of hotties that’ll make your heart flutter. Sounds like a great time… except one of these hotties slid a sword right through my heart.

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The Steam Deck, Valve’s attempt at a fully portable handheld PC, has taken another step towards being an actual product. In a Steam blog post, Valve have shown off the Steam Deck dev kits that are leaving the roost to provide game developers with some hands-on time, ahead of the planned launch this December. They grow up so fast, eh?

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After running an Age Of Empires 4 closed beta test for lucky ticketholders, the makers now want absolutely everyone to pile in and click men as hard as you can to see if the game explodes. The historical RTS is holding an open "technical stress test" this weekend, from Friday to Monday, to give the multiplayer backend a sound kicking and see if it stays stands. In short, hey, you can play AO4's multiplayer for free this weekend.

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If there's one thing I hate in this life, it's having to lift my hand onto the Esc key so I can press it to skip logos. Ideally I only lift my arms to deliver food to my maw, or to express my lack of care. So it's nice that someone has already identified which files to delete to remove the logos at the start of Arkane's new shooter Deathloop.

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Scifi grand strategy Stellaris's free 3.1 update, titled "Lem", is out now. This is the first update created by "The Custodians", a new team formed within developers PDS Green focused on free, quarterly updates which tweak game balance, add new content to old DLC and fix bugs.

The "Lem" update does all three, changing how tradition trees work, adding new features to old species packs such as 2016's Planetoids, and rebalancing some Civics and Origins.

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The WD Black SN850 is a tremendously fast PCIe 4.0 SSD, capable of hitting some outrageous speeds - up to 7000MB/s reads and 5300MB/s writes. That makes it a great choice for any PC that can handle it (as well as the PS5, which gets external SSD support tomorrow). It's been discounted on Scan to £145 today, where you'll also get a free Akasa NVMe heatsink in the bargain.

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Mods are amazing and can never get enough love, so I'm glad to see that co-operative cave-diving FPS Deep Rock Galactic now has official mod support. It includes mod.io integration for browsing and installing mods, an in-game mod manager, and clearer communication for players joining modded servers, among a lot of other changes.

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Dell's S2721DGFA has had a storied history, starting out as a critically acclaimed 27-in gaming monitor that no one could actually buy, to slowly becoming available over the months and finally now to being a great value option in the wake of several big price cuts.

Today, the S2721DGFA has hit a historic low thanks to a code at the Dell UK site: using the phrase DAE40S at the checkout will knock the price from its usual £329 to just £265.94, a £63 savings and more than £100 cheaper than the same monitor at Amazon. That's an incredible price for one of the best gaming monitors on the planet.

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Funcom have acquired the Cabinet Group, the company which owns the intellectual properties Conan The Barbarian and Mutant Year Zero. Funcom have already developed several Conan games by licensing the IP, including the MMO Age Of Conan and more recently the survival game Conan Exiles.

The announcement also mentioned that a new game is currently in development which will star Conan and "many of the characters in the Robert E. Howard universe."

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The latest Cyberpunk 2077 patch is small, but the bugs it fixes aren't. 1.31 addresses issues that only affected some users, but they include issues that would halt progress on critical quests if they happened. The patch is live now.

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Ever since Sony began releasing PlayStation-exclusive games on PC too, many have been clamouring for more of the big'uns: God Of War, Spider-Man, chuffing Bloodborne for god's sake please Bloodborne. While Sony are still being coy about which games are coming our way, hopes were raised by a recent leaked list of games pulled from the digital guts of GeForce Now, which included a mention of God Of War for Steam. I wouldn't get too excited just yet. While Nvidia have confirmed the list itself was real, they say some games on the list were "speculative".

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Yes, we all know the game has a very cool look, and all of us enjoy playing a good time loop game, but what actually is Deathloop? Thankfully, Matthew's played the first few hours and is here to enlighten both you and I.

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Welcome to the RPS guide on how to install an SSD, which you’ll note is not titled “How to install an SSD or hard drive”. Yes yes, old-timey mechanical drives are cheaper, and better if you need terrabytes upon terabytes of space, but when you can buy a good-quality NVMe SSD like the WD Blue SN550 at £70 for 1TB…I mean, you should probably do that instead.

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The annual Met Gala event took place last night as some of the world's most famous people gathered to celebrate fashion. This year's theme was "In America: A Lexicon of Fashion", which is wildly inaccurate since most of the attendees decided to dress as video game heroes and villains. Fashion brands like Balenciaga and Versace designed outfits that wouldn't be out of place on a JRPG antagonist or in a Platinum game. Let's look at which celebrities decided to take the Paragon route and dress as a hero and who decided to go full Renegade, dressing as a video game boss.

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The mysterious army of Grand Cathay have finally been revealed for Total War: Warhammer 3, wearing their Chinese influences plainly. Grand Cathay have existed in the world of Warhammer (Warlore? Lorehammer?) for almost 30 years but not fielded a full plastic army, so one had to be created for Creative Assembly's fantasy strategy game. Led by dragons in human form, they field forces including Jade Warriors, towering Terracotta Sentinels, and the Celestial Dragon Guard. Come meet 'em in the new trailer below.

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Parkour enthusiasts will need to wait two months longer to prance around an open-world city full of zombies (and zombies-to-be), because Dying Light 2 has been delayed again. Previously due December 7th, and spring 2020 before that, Dying Light 2 is now scheduled to launch on February 4th, 2022. The developers, Techland say they need extra time to make it good, yeah?

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The first-person brawler Zeno Clash games have been long-time favourites here at RPS, and when Chilean developers ACE Team announced they were making a new game set in their weird and wonderful Clash universe back in July, we were over the moon. Admittedly, Clash: Artifact Of Chaos' reveal trailer left a lot of unanswered questions at the time, but the good news is that we've got an early sneak peak at a new developer diary that tells us all about the game's story and what to expect when it eventually releases next year.

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Wondering how to collect and fully upgrade all the slabs in Deathloop? Slab abilities are the paranormal powers in Deathloop, the game's take on Dishonored's Void Powers and Prey's Neuromods. When playing as Colt or Julianna there are five of these slabs to pick up, as well as several levels of upgrades for each.

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Wrangling flying pigs, saving a nerdy kid from the school bullies, cooking up exquisite dishes to appease a local casino boss whose slot machines you accidentally rinsed with your trusted lucky coin... These are the stories most adventure RPGs would stuff into their ever-growing sidequest menus - distractions meant to provide extra flavour to the world you're meant to be saving, or which hold bountiful supplies of EXP to level up your skills and weapons. Not so in Eastward.

In this impressive debut from Shanghai developers Pixpil, these humdrum slices of life are placed front and centre, forming much of the narrative backbone that drives the game forward. This is still a game that's ultimately about saving the world from a mysterious and all-consuming miasma, but it's also one that makes damn sure you know what you're doing it all for - and that's its striking cast of NPCs. As you busy yourself with the minutiae of their everyday lives, Eastward makes every person (and robot) count in this deadly post-apocalypse, and the result is an affecting, detail-rich tale that owes as much to the action of top-down Zelda games as it does to the role-playing intimacy of Earthbound.

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I appreciate when a remaster of an old game looks like my memories of the original, a rose-tinted vision which would crumble if I looked at even one screenshot. Blizzard and Vicarious Visions have managed that with Diablo 2: Resurrected, from what I've seen, and a new trailer focuses on the redone cutscenes. And yeah, this is how I remember D2 cutscenes looking? They were dead fancy and high-tech, yeah? Must have looked like this?

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The last time I got some brief hands-on time with Amazon's upcoming MMO New World, I emerged from Aeternum feeling pretty positive about this new kid on the massively multiplayer block. Crafting, in particular, had me pretty excited. But having spent a big chunk of time in its open beta, I've come away feeling a bit, I don't know, bleh? If anything, I just wanted to go back to my beloved Final Fantasy XIV.

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A couple of weeks ago, Respawn Entertainment said they were going to get rid of tap-strafing in Apex Legends, but now it seems they've changed their minds. Tap-strafing is a movement exploit that allows players to keep their momentum after slide-jumping, letting them make speedier turns than they should. Unfortunately for Respawn, they say getting rid of this tech has some "unexpected side effects", so tap-strafing gets to stay in the game, for now.

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AMD have launched a big update for their Radeon Software app and Adrenalin drivers, unlocking a clutch of potentially frame rate-boosting features for those with recent AMD graphics cards and CPUs. The new version, 21.9.1, also includes a Windows 11 driver that gets Radeon Boost, Radeon Anti-Lag and Radeon Image Sharpening ready for Microsoft’s next big OS launch.

In the meantime, those with both a Ryzen 5000 series CPU and a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card – those lucky enough to have found one in stock, I should say – can take advantage of Radeon Software 21.9.1’s updated overclocking feature. In previous versions, it was possible to instantly overclock your graphics card with a single click; now you can do the same with both the GPU and CPU at once. Provided they’re from these specific product lines, mind.

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Dishonored and Prey devs Arkane have released their latest superpowered sneak-o-shooter, the time-looping Deathloop. It's good, everyone tells me. However, one word of warning: a fair number of PC players are complaining about stuttering framerates, enough to bring it down to a 'Mixed' review rating on Steam. That's the sort of wonky time you don't want. If you want your initial loop o' death to be as slick as blood, maybe wait a bit in the hope of a fix?

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The description under the latest trailer for Craftopia explains that its developers "combined many features we find enjoyable, such as hunting, farming, hack-and-slash, building, [and] automation" in making the game. It does not explain whether catching giraffes in Pokéball-like traps counts as "hunting", or whether blasting cows into space with a baseball bat is "hack-and-slash."

Craftopia remains every game that has ever existed, from Zelda to Factorio, just as it was last year - only now it's available via Xbox Game Pass.

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Darkest Dungeon 2 will launch in early access via the Epic Games Store on October 26th. Developers Red Hook announced the date via Twitter earlier today, after first announcing a 2021 release date in October of last year.

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Twitch, the livestreaming platform, are suing two users for allegedly organising "hate raids" against streamers. According to the complaint, these users began in August 2021 to "attack these streamers by flooding their chats with bot-powered Twitch accounts that spew racist, sexist, and homophobic language and content" in violation of the Twitch terms of service.

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The winner of the men's US Open tennis final called me a legend yesterday during post-match interviews. Daniil Medvedev was explaining the strange celebration he did immediately after his victory. "Only legends will understand what I did after the match is 'L2 + Left'."

And I did understand. L2 + Left is the best celebration from the FIFA series.

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The Samsung 980 Pro SSD is one of the very fastest drives on the market, thanks to its PCIe 4.0 connection and 7000MB/s flash memory, and today it's been heavily discounted... on Amazon Germany. I know what you're thinking, but with a bare minimum of effort you can get the 1TB drive for £136, way below the current UK price of £172. Here's how it works.

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The Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti is currently available for purchase at its recommended retail price, a headline that would have ludicrous to write a few years ago but now constitutes major news. Scan in the UK have stock of the high-end card at its £1049 RRP, stock that has seemingly persisted for a few hours - one of only a handful of times that an Nvidia RTX graphics card at RRP hasn't sold out immediately. If you're building a high-end rig, I'd say this is a great option - as long as you can't find an RTX 3080, at least.

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Fredrik Wester, the CEO of Paradox Interactive, has publicly expressed regret for "inappropriate behaviour" towards an employee at a company event in 2018. This comes shortly after someone leaked the results of a union survey which revealed many employees felt they'd been mistreated at the company behind games including Crusader Kings and Hearts Of Iron. "Accountability starts from the top," said Wester.

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If you’ve read Brendan’s Deathloop review, you’ll know Arkane Lyon’s latest is a frequently hilarious time-loop shooter that’s worth getting trapped in. And if you’ve seen its official PC system requirements, you’ll also know it makes some big asks of your hardware. At least, in theory. After a few hours of testing it appears the minimum requirements aren’t quite so minimum, and it’s possible to get slick frame rates in Deathloop even on older graphics hardware – especially if you make a few choice settings adjustments.

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