Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I bought Baldur's Gate 3 shortly after its release as a need than a want, when I was a year-and-half into my gender transition and hormone replacement therapy. Gender transition is not just an arduous journey of self-discovery, but also a profound and constant engagement with one’s own reality. I was desperate for some escapism, and Larian Studios’ much-anticipated new entry into the Baldur’s Gate fantasy RPG franchise offered the perfect rabbit hole to fall down.

As a child, my gaming habits were relatively stereotypical for a closeted girl: select female characters wherever possible, especially in RPGs. But the immersion almost always wears off. The trans inclusion in games like Dungeon Siege, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and others is effectively non-existent, and the result for transgender and transsexual players is a feeling that, even in fantasy worlds, we are invisible at best. Nocturne, a trans supporting character in Baldur's Gate III played by Abigail Thorn, has changed that experience for me. In an interview, Thorn shared some of her thoughts and experiences regarding Nocturne and trans representation in games.

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Videos of a cancelled Call Of Duty game from the early 2000s have surfaced on Xwitter, with the name "NX1". In the footage, you see classic CODisms like explosions and a first-person view of a character wearily making their way through a disaster. While the accounts sharing the videos are anonymous, a former Neversoft developer has stepped in to authenticate them and share a few details about the project, a "futuristic CoD game" that was in the works prior to the development of 2013's Call of Duty: Ghosts.

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Final Fantasy 6 is one of the most beloved Final Fantasy games in the series, so much so that even staff at Square Enix keep hassling series producer Yoshinori Kitase about when they're going to remake it and give it the full Final Fantasy 7 treatment. Alas, the prospect of such a project has had fresh water poured over it this weekend, with Kitase explaining that, given it's already taken them ten years to make Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (with a third entry to complete the trilogy yet to come), a Final Fantasy 6 remake would likely take twice as long as that to actually make. And you know what? I'm good, actually. The Final Fantasy 6 Pixel Remaster is good enough for me in this lifetime.

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In a conversation with Eurogamer's Bertie Purchie, game director Carrie Patel and gameplay director Gabe Paramo drilled down into some details on Obsidian's upcoming first-person fantasy RPG Avowed. Part of the Pillars Of Eternity universe, Avowed is set in a place called the Living Lands, an island continent with, I infer, very sedate night life, because Patel confirms you can't romance your companions.

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When times get tough and winter seems endless, just remember the wise words of many a mesh-back cap: keep on trucking. What welcome news, then, that yet another expansion is in the works for Euro Truck Simulator 2. The 'Nordic Horizons' expansion will offer new routes including through Finland's Lapland, Sweden's Norrland, and up through Norway all the way to the Arctic Ocean, with pretty things to admire ranging from bridges and tunnels to cute fishing villages and reindeer. That'll keep you trucking when daylight dips below six hours in Norway, though you might need to wait a few years for it.

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VR is at its best when it makes you feel like you're living in the actual future. Given how everything new and exciting ultimately becomes normal and mundane, this is perhaps an unfair expectation of technology that is now a decade old. Nonetheless, if you want me to sit with a shoebox pressed uncomfortably against my eyes for two hours like an ocular gom jabbar, then what's inside the shoebox better be pretty darned transformative.

Which is to say that LEGO Bricktales provided one of those moments. I was sat in my living room, with all its clutter visible through the Quest 3's coloured passthrough, and hovering above my table was a great big LEGO diorama of a jungle. All of it was rendered perfectly to scale, as if I could pick up the minifigs between my thumb and forefinger. Yet all of it was moving of its own accord, as if I'd somehow stumbled into a child's dream.

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Rocksteady and Warner's much-disparaged live service superhero snuff fantasy Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League goes into Deluxe-preorder-only early access today, Monday 29th January, at 9pm, or if you're from the UK or US east coast, Tuesday 30th January at 12am ET and 12 GMT. Non-Deluxe peons get to play it from Friday 2nd February. With just a handful of hours till the initial release we still don't have review code, which is generally a good sign that a publisher thinks the game in question is going to get a mild-to-severe kicking.

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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, I'm wondering what we're going to do with RPS once the games industry realises there's no point making or releasing any other games after seeing the ability to parry-counter dialogue by shooting that. A problem for later. In the meantime, check out this wide spread of attractive and interesting indie games!

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Gamers, non-gamers and those who Walk Between – lend me your ears, eyes and other sensory organs! It’s time for another week of new videogames and videogame news, as sponsored by that extradimensional terror known as the Maw. May our children forgive us.

Here are a few games releasing this week that we think could prove special: Mad Max-ish turn-based roguelike Outcast Tales: The First Journey (29th Jan), 1970s French detective sim Chronique des Silencieux (29th Jan), raunchy gay sci-fi visual novel The Symbiant Re:Union (29th Jan), Overcooked-style workplace comedy Speed Crew (31st Jan), swooping fantasy action-RPG epic Granblue Fantasy Relink (1st Feb), co-open world superhero murder party Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2nd Feb), gilded PS2 RPG remake Persona 3 Reload (2nd Feb).

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Sundays are for strutting around the place in your bathrobe. Let's waltz as we read the week's best writing about games and game-related things.

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I think fighting skeletons might be one of the most fundamental joys of video games. The more implausible its ambulation seems, the better, but I'm happy as long it clatters to the floor as a collection of distinct physics objects once I'm done.

Dungeonborne seems likely to satisfy. It's a "PvPvE extraction dungeon crawler" about delving deep below a dark fantasy world with friends, hitting skeletons and monsters with swords, and then leaving with their loot - or venturing further and risking it all.

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Bloodborne Kart is a fan game which aims to use From Software's gothic horror action RPG as the basis for a PSone-era kart racer. Or it was. Its developers say that Sony have been in touch and, as a consequence, "need to scrub the branding off." It'll stil come out after it a short delay, but it won't be called Bloodborne Kart anymore.

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Stardew Valley's 1.6 update is almost done, with developer Eric Barone saying he's "done adding major new content to it now." He's now in the "bug-fixing and polishing phase". When it does arrive, it'll be Stardew Valley's first major update in over three years.

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1200W power supplies are fairly few and far between, but if you're planning a truly high-end system with multiple graphics cards - or even multiple PCs! - then this level of power could come in handy. Right now you can pick up a 1200W Super Flower Leadex 80+ Platinum rated power supply for just $160 at Newegg when you use the code ASW4DN23229.

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LG's OLED TVs are brilliant for PC gaming at 4K 120Hz with FreeSync and G-Sync support - and if you want to pick up their premiere 2023 model at a discount, this is the RPS deals post for you. Right now both the desktop-sized 42-inch model and the living-room-size 55-inch LG C3 are 10% off at Amazon UK. After the discount, the 42-inch model is £809, while the 55-inch size is £1084 - great value for the amount of high-end TV you're getting!

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To hell with spring cleaning in spring. We've entered the miserable stage of winter where there's no snow and it's just unpleasant out, so what better time to really spruce up the rooms I'll be huddled up in for another two months yet. Let us consider the welcome arrival of fresh white snowbells a prompt to scrub hard. When spring starts, I'll want to be outside, instantly outside, not cleaning. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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Honkai: Star Rail’s version 2.0 will arrive at the start of February, adding a new area, three playable characters and new missions to the gacha space game, HoYoverse have revealed.

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A planned live-action adaptation of MMO Final Fantasy XIV is officially “dead”, according to the TV series’ producers. A combination of the pandemic and the “size and scale needed to do it right” are apparently to blame, with Amazon reportedly coming closest to making it a reality - but to no avail.

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I've played certain demos for longer than I have many full games, eking every last atom of enjoyment out of a single level or character, to the point that the final release felt like unnecessary bloat. I am already concerned the same might be true of Arco's demo, which is now available on Steam. You've hopefully read Katharine's breakdown of this "triptych of revenge stories set across the deserts, plains and forests of a fantastical, South American-style landscape". Well, now's your chance to get to grips with its nifty combat system, which is broken into turns with each turn's actions unfolding in real time.

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They might not have an enemy in Nintendo’s legal team just yet, but Palworld developers Pocketpair have a different battle to fight in the meantime: online cheaters in the immensely popular ‘Pokémon with guns’ survival game.

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Reikon Games, the developers behind cyberpunky top-down shooter Ruiner, have reportedly become the latest studio to lay off dozens of staff, with over half of the Polish indie said to have lost their jobs earlier this week.

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Graham has been bandying Abiotic Factor around the Treehouse as "Half-Life designed for co-op survival japes", which is obviously a noteworthy combination of words, so let's have a look at the Steam page, trailer, and gosh, there's a demo here too. That's Friday night sorted.

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My inbox is absolutely rammed with early Steam Next Fest demos at the moment. Honestly, did no one remember that February's Next Fest starts in, you know, February, in a week a bit's time this year? I'm all for getting a few things early to make the deluge of demos a bit more manageable to cover, but this year has just been a teensy bit insane. Now there's too many things to look at in advance, but hey, I'm making steady progress, and you've probably seen the fruits of a couple of these this week already. Next on the list is Dystopika, a toy-like sandbox citybuilder that's sort of in the same vein as the lovely Summerhouse I played earlier this week, but also lives at the exact opposite end of the mood and vibes scale. Whereas Summerhouse is about creating diddly little cute streets with sunny Mediterranean vibes, Dystopika is effectively: Build Your Own Blade Runner.

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As part of my commitment to hating everything, I have a minor grudge against "idle" games. Because they're not, are they? You have to supervise them constantly, not relax and watch them grow organically while eating a sandwich and only occasionally intervening like a neglectful goddess.

Writer's Rush is sort of, sort of an idle game, I'd argue. It's a low pressure, low stakes, super light sim that takes the barest hint of the clicker and crosses it with sort of-sort of-sort of score attack, and somehow works without quite feeling like either. Because, I think, of its charmingly, intentionally daft representation of what being a novelist is like.

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One game I heard and saw a lot last year but absolutely did not play was Pizza Tower, a fast and fiendish platformer inspired by the Wario Land games. A lot of people seem delighted to rocket around in the colourful adventures of pizzeria proprietor Peppino Spaghetti. People who are younger than me. People whose hands aren't gnarled claws. People who don't have one foot in the grave. It'll happen to you too. In the meantime, I hope you've enjoyed it, and suspect you might be keen to see more of the new playable character coming free in a future update.

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Good news, Horizon likers. Not only have Sony announced a release date for the PC version of Horizon Forbidden West's Complete Edition - mark your calendars for March 21st, folks - but they've also released a new trailer showing off all the various PC features. Chief among them for me is proper support for PS5 Dualsense controllers, which means you should be able to benefit from all the same haptic feedback ripples and adaptive trigger pulls of Aloy's bow as folks did on PS5.

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Now see here Ollie Toms, supposed guides editor of this supposed videogames website - if Enshrouded really does have "the best building system in the survival genre" then why does the floor of my hovel look like a petrified sneeze? I was innocently carving myself a nice stone foundation last night when the Devil jogged my elbow and I dug a massive, raggedy trench straight through it. I've spent an hour now trying to fill in the trench and flatten it out, to no avail. There's always a jaggedy bit right in the middle, and I'm getting displaced trypophobia from the awareness that my efforts have seeded the terrain beneath with random cavities.

What's worse, there is no mention of enhancing the floor-levelling functionality in this Keen Games forum post on Enshrouded's various launch issues, which they are even now racing to fix. Instead, it's all talk of frame rates, multiplayer stability and dedicated servers not appearing. Somebody rush me a cement mixer, stat, or I'm moving back to Valheim.

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The much delayed, rebooted, and delayed live service pirate 'em up Skull And Bones actually pencilled in a release date not long ago. Just when you thought it couldn't get any more remarkable, Ubisoft have also announced it'll get an open beta before it launches. In only a couple of weeks, you'll be able to sail the seven seas with a purple rarity cannon firing off common rarity cannon balls that you bought off a rank 25 landlubber with your Skullbucks. Cool!

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What do you do after running away from the big city to start a new life in the country? You run away from the country to start a new life in the big city, obviously. Arthur "Mr. Podunkian" Lee - a former contributor to ConcernedApe's genre-defining farmalot Stardew Valley - has announced Sunkissed City, a life simulation game set in a delightful coastal burb that's reportedly "pumping with funky vibes and quirky characters", together with migraines, stretches of dead water and horrible sewer monsters.

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Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth isn’t exactly spawned from the most hardware-bothering of game series. Most previous LADs, be they Kiryu’s Adventures in Punching or the more turn-based reboot have all been technically gentle affairs, and Infinite Wealth is ultimately another one. At the same time, it shares with Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name a newfound interest in PC-specific tricks. That means a full selection of DLSS, FSR and XeSS upscalers, plus DLSS 3 frame generation. Real yakuza might use a gamepad, but it seems real fuzz-haired RPG fantasists use graphics cards.

Let’s take a closer look, then, at how RGG’s latest crime caper performs on PC. We’ll also work out its best settings, to keep it running smoother than a legally distinct Segway.

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Adventure mode was one of my favourite things about Dwarf Fortress, mainly because it made the infamously complex management game more approachable by letting you play it like a more traditional roguelike. I'm excited, therefore, that Adventure mode is coming soon to the Steam version of the game, and excited even more so that it's aiming to make it even more accessible.

A new update on development which outlines exactly how the new premium version of Adventure mode differs from the original, including its plan for tutorials to guide new players.

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It's been a good few years for relaxing, puzzle-strategy games about spreading nature's glory. The future looks bright, too, thanks to Preserve, which seems to blend Dorfromantik's lush hexes with Terra Nil's gradual ecological recovery. You'll find the announcement trailer below.

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Berserk Boy first appeared on Steam in 2022 and immediately impressed as a fast-paced action platformer inspired by classics such as Mega Man. Then it vanished from Steam - and re-appeared, and vanished again, and so on.

It returned last year for a seemingly final time, and today it has a new demo and a release date: March 6th, 2024.

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Back in 2022, Blizzard announced that they were working on a survival game set in an "all-new universe". Not much more was known about the game except that the studio were actively ramping up recruitment, seemingly after having been working on the project since 2017.

This survival game has now been cancelled alongside today's news of sweeping layoffs across Blizzard and other divisions of new owner Microsoft.

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When I sat down at my desk after lunch today, I thought, I'm just going to give this demo for Balatro a tiny go, just to get my head round its poker-based roguelike deckbuilding. Cut to several hours later and I've had to forcibly shut the game down and wrench myself away from it just to write this post, because listen, you need to go and play Balatro's demo right now, because hot damn this is the good stuff if you're into roguelike deckbuilders. I also say this as someone who's never played or understood a game of poker in her life, because let's face it, regular poker is quite boring. Balatro, on the other hand, is poker that's turbo-charged with magic Joker cards, tarot card multipliers, and blind conditions that make a successful hand increasingly tricky to pull off. And it's coming out in full real soon, too.

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Room for another mass layoff post, before we end the day? This one is actually two separate stories but in a bid to conserve resources and make our frontpage slightly less depressing to read, I am going to roll them together. Black Forest Games, the Embracer-owned creators of the Destroy All Humans! Remake, are reportedly cutting 50% of their workforce - around 50-60 people. Outriders developers People Can Fly, meanwhile, have laid off 30 developers who were working on an unannounced Square Enix game.

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Punch some trees, get some logs, build a crafting bench. I'm bored of Palworld already, because it starts off the same as any other survival game. Of course it does! Here I was hoping for something a bit different - a legally distinct Pinser welcoming me into his home of angry cicada-likes - and I get another serving of derivative. Am I wrong in wanting a survival game that doesn't begin like the rest of them?

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We at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast have our finger on the beating pulse of current events, which is why we're going to talk about the accusations that are flying around Palworld, the new and extremely popular Pokémon-meets-Rust. Does it contain AI? Did it directly steal from Pokémon? Can The Pokémon Company sue? Probably not. But why does everyone care so damn much anyway? We give our vibes-based takes on the whole affair, which seems to be escalating every day (and will therefore presumably disappear soon).

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As far as bread goes, I'd say those unlimited top-ups you get with fancy meals can sometimes supersede the actual meal itself. A little swirl in olive oil and balsamic? Mwah, delicious. For a more regular transaction, I do love a multi-seeded loaf for the added texture. Now, would I say I like bread more than… anime? That's tough. But thankfully I don't need to decide, as there's a demo of a game out right now that combines both interests. In Aeruta you play as an anime girl who defeats monsters and uses their innards to fuel her bakery business. Perfect.

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Given that Microsoft have spent considerable time and effort becoming the biggest cock-of-the-walk possible, it does, I suppose, make sense that their layoffs are correspondingly massive. In an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Phil Spencer is very sad to reveal to the staff that, in order to grow, the combined powers of Microsoft's 22k-strong Gaming Division have to be denuded to the tune of 1,900 human beings. That amounts to about 8% of the division.

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