Most of the time, life sucks. On rare occasions, however, the moons line up. Having spent a few hours this past weekend playing the Steam Next Fest demo of cosy campervan survivabuilder Outbound, I returned to my desk on Monday and stumbled across a campervan mod for my long-time vice Cyberpunk 2077.

Naturally, I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to compare the experience of driving around the countryside in a mobile home twice.

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The team behind Electronic Arts-published early access skateboarding game Skate have announced that they're laying off an unspecified number of staff. Well, I say that, Full Circle have actually announced that they're "transforming as a studio", which happens to entail "making changes to our team structure" which impact some folks' jobs.

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Valve's Lionel Hutzes have been summoned to slide down the fireman's pole and deal with yet more legal wranglings involving the behemoth behind Steam. New York state attorney general Letitia James has filed a lawsuit against the company for allegedly violating gambling laws via the use of loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2 and Team Fortress 2.

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Ubisoft's latest bout of executive musical chairs continues with a report that Clint Hocking, creative director of Far Cry 2, Watch Dogs Legion, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe, has left the company.

We have Very Gary Computing to thank for this bit of scuttlebutt. Apparently, Hocking's departure was communicated to staff this week by Assassin’s Creed’s new leadership team. Jean Guesdon, the brand’s just-appointed head of content, will take over as creative director for Hexe.

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I’ve long thought of STALKER 2’s gunplay as an underappreciated component of the eerie survival shooter. It’ll never top anyone’s FPS all-timer list but its shootsticks are thunderously bangy, handling with both weight and smoothness, and your own barely-there mortality usually flavours encounters with a delicious high-stakes tension.

The only shortcoming is a lack of visual drama, but that can now be addressed with Cazanu’s new CinematicFX mod: where missed bullets hitting innocent masonry would previously amount to an understated thunk, scenery impacts now throw up vast clouds of dust, smoke, and debris. Cinematic effects, indeed.

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Gather round, lovers of classic RPGs. The enhanced editions of the first two Baldur's Gate game, plus Icewind Dale and BG expansion Siege of Dragonspear, have gotten their first patch since 2021. Well, I say gotten, patch 2.7 is only out in Steam beta for now - it'll hit GOG too further down the line.

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Amazon have released UK studio Maverick Games from a deal to publish the story-led open-world driving game the latter have been working on for a number of years. The split leaves Maverick, founded in 2022 by ex-Playground Games devs including Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, looking for a new partner. Though, they say they're already in "active dialogue" with such folks.

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Reigns: The Witcher narrative designer Oscar Harrington-Shaw thinks Geralt of Rivia has a promising future as a private eye. “Another source of inspiration which I quite like leaning on, which the games do and the books do, is hard-boiled crime detective stories,” he tells me, when I ask whether his work on Nerial’s latest narrative card RPG has given him any wild notions for Witcher projects. “Geralt actually sort of lives in that world. So it could be cool to have like a spin-off neo noir crime detective film. Almost like Knives Out, even, but with Geralt as the detective.”

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