"In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay," Austrian journalist and Marxist Ernst Fischer wrote in The Necessity of Art. "And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it." I can't help but feel he'd very much appreciate Wreckfest 2's fourth early access update, which has added in a tool you can use to brush detailed rust, dirt, and dents onto the canvas of your old banger. Said tool has been given a suitably glorious name: CRAP-IT.

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Ten hours into Arc Raiders, I felt betrayal's sharp sting for the first time.

The round began with generosity. I met a fellow raider who had dropped me a rare shotgun as well as a damaged heat sink to upgrade my workbench. They asked nothing in return. It was one of many friendly encounters I've had roaming the surface of Arc Raiders' hostile maps, but I also felt my heart rate rise: when you die you lose everything you're carrying, so I knew I had to reach an extraction point quickly and quietly.

On the way, I met another player. We exchanged "don't shoot" emotes followed by our actual voices on proximity chat, agreeing to cover each other until the exit. I even dropped him some bandages.

Fool.

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The servers of shooter Arc Raiders had a bit of a "wobble" on Sunday, as many would-be raiders of the arc queued up to get in. Developers Embark have now decided to offer those affected by the outage some free in-game as a make good for said server swoonage.

The wobble came on November 2nd, as the game was hovering around the 300 to 330k concurrent player mark. It's left a brief, but unmistakeable dip in the SteamDB graph. Think one of those heart machines having a quick blip before regular beats resume.

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Yo ho, Civ 7's 1.3.0 update arrives today, November 4th. While it's headlined by additions to naval combat and the sea itself in line with the arrival of Blackbeard in the Tides of Power DLC, Firaxis have now gone into specifics as to what it's doing in terms of changes and tweaks to existing civs.

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Pillars of Eternity's much-anticipated turn-based mode debuts in PC open beta form on November 5th, with Obsidian seeking more input on their very nice tenth anniversary gift before rolling out a final version. That's not to say the devs haven't already been working to ensure "very reasonable criticisms" of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's own turn-based mode, though, as outlined by director Josh Sawyer in the beta's announcement video.

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Unfortunately, we are here yet again with another games studio that will seemingly be closing its doors for good. A couple of years ago, Greg Street, known for his work on World of Warcraft and League of Legends, set up Fantastic Pixel Castle. There, it was announced at the time, he would lead development on an MMO codenamed Ghost, with NetEase serving as publisher. Except in a LinkedIn post earlier today, Street shared that Fantastic Pixel Castle will be shutting down.

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Friendslop games may come and go, but the (for all intents and purposes) progenitor of them all, Lethal Company is still the one I think of most. It's scary, it's funny, it's otherworldly, literally, there's so much mystery to it that you just want to spend time in its world. But while it will likely go down as solo dev Zeekerss' most notable work, he did just release a brand new horror game 10 years in the making. And in a recent interview, he spoke of how he got his start in horror, and the roots that make up his latest work.

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Marshal, if my hastily scribbled, made-up blackboard equations are correct, we should witness a double event within the next year or two. No, not a double kaiju event. A double kaiju clean-up event. Somewhat to my surprise, job sims in which you dismember dead Godzillas are a thing, now. And by thing I mean that there are at least two of them on the way.

It’s going to be a battle for the ages. Alien vs janitor: whoever wins, we… get to walk around outside without stepping in puddles of Mothra bile. Please, sir, join me next to this second blackboard full of hastily scribbled, made-up equations while I slap them haphazardly with a cane and shower everybody in spittle.

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I'm sure I don't need to tell you that a majority of the data that various AI models train themselves on do so without getting any sort of permission to do so. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, as they say, though in the case of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, they probably shouldn't have taken that lesson to heart. That's because Japan's Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) has requested that the AI developer stops using Japanese media to train its text-to-video model Sora.

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