Despite it being only Wednesday, the Black Friday deals jamboree is well and truly under way. With more deals than you can shake a stick of RAM at, now is the time to get some tasty PC gaming deals on the cheap, especially if you’re after some nice new hardware. To help you make sense of all the deals madness, I’m here to help, as I’ve gone and gathered up all the best PC gaming Black Friday deals I can find, including deals on graphics cards, gaming monitors, SSDs, laptops and more. Yes, my soul is now nothing more than a withered husk, but at least it saves you the trouble of trawling through the internet yourself in search of the best savings. On that note, let’s get down to the business of all them deals, shall we? Here are the best Black Friday deals the internet has to offer.
The world ended this week. We documented the whole thing. But the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, will not go quietly into the abyss of human history. It’s not going to be felled by the atomic blast of Fallout 76. It s going down screaming. Screaming about the best post-apocalyptic games out there, that is.
Hinterland Studio creative director Raphael van Lierop delivered some disappointing news yesterday when he announced that the third episode of The Long Dark, which had been set to go live in December, isn't going to make it. But that bad news actually arises from bigger-picture good news—although the good news in question is the result of even more serious bad news. It's all kind of complicated, so I'll let van Lierop explain.
"Some of you might be clued in to recent industry turmoil and a spate of closures, Telltale being the highest profile of these. A bit lesser known, but really big news for our local Vancouver game dev community, was the complete shutdown of Capcom’s Vancouver studio," he explained in a blog post. "About 200 people lost their jobs, and in the weeks following we scrambled to interview people to see if we could help them, and to see how we could build up our own development strength."
"Fortunately for us, we already had several ex-Capcom Vancouver people in the studio, so we were able to identify high performers who would fit in to our culture well. As a result of the Capcom situation, along with some other people we were interviewing at the time, we’ve hired six new team members in the last month. This is Hinterland’s most significant growth in the past five years."
Hinterland was able to "bulk up" its animation department in particular—limitations in its technical capabilities are why the first two episodes of The Long Dark shipped with voiceless dialog scenes—with two new animators and the purchase of Capcom Vancouver's "nearly new" motion capture equipment. It also added two new programmers, a new artist, and a new tester, and it's continuing to interview other people, including former Telltale employees.
It's enough that the studio is considering splitting itself into separate teams, one working on the Wintermute story and the other dedicated to the sandbox survival mode, and it's also completely changed the studio's outlook on The Long Dark development going forward. There's the rub.
"Suddenly having access to all this new development talent and the motion-capture gear makes a huge difference to what we can accomplish in Episode Three. I’ve decided that I’d like to be able to use these new resources—along with the new motion capture equipment—to add more content and polish to Episode Three," van Lierop wrote. "This means it won’t be ready for us to ship in December."
There's no word on when episode three will be out, but on the bright side, he confirmed that the Redux versions of episodes one and two will be ready in December. "Everything has been re-written, re-recorded, and re-animated. There are also new mission beats that didn’t exist before, things that flesh out the experience and story of Wintermute," he continued.
"In December, you’ll be able to play these Redux episodes and get a great sense of what to expect in Episode Three and beyond, as these now serve as the template for how we’ll approach all our mission and narrative content moving forward."
The darker side of the bright side (I told you it's complicated) is that existing saves won't be compatible with the Redux release, so Hinterland will be deleting them. If you haven't started playing Wintermute yet then you should probably wait until the Redux chapters are live, and if you're in the middle of a playthrough and want to finish it, get on it.
The Long Dark is currently on sale on Steam, by the way, for 75 percent off—that's $7.50/£6/€6.
The third episode of survive ’em up The Long Dark’s story mode Wintermute will not arrive in December as planned, developers Hinterland have announced, though the revamped ‘Redux’ versions of the first two should hit next month. The reason for the delay is good news, really: they’ve picked up new team members and a 36-camera motion capture setup from recently-closed studio Capcom Vancouver and want to put them to good use on episode 3. If I got a fancy toy like that, I’d also probably put a lot of things off while I played with it.
Developer Hinterland has announced that it's delaying the release of sub-zero survival game The Long Dark's third Wintermute story episode. It will no longer be launching in December, as had originally been anticipated.
Episode Three, which follows on from the last year's duo of opening chapters, continues the adventures of Dr. Astrid Greenwood, and will include new survivors, a new region to explore, plus new details on the First Flare event that engulfed Great Bear Island in the endless winter. However, writing in a new blog post, The Long Dark director Raphael van Lierop explained that the studio has chosen to delay its release "to add more content and polish".
This, van Lierop explained, follows a number of new hires from the now-defunct Capcom Vancouver (Hinterland says it's also looking to bring on ex-Telltale staff with a narrative background), enabling the developer to significantly expand its team. The new art, animation, and programming talent - not to mention the acquisition of Capcom Vancouver's motion capture equipment - has made "a huge difference to what [the studio] can accomplish in Episode Three", and Hinterland says it intends to take full advantage of these new abilities.
Whilst raw forms of horror work through shock and disgust, the eerie is felt more as a threat. Perhaps something seems to hover over or follow you — there s a rustling just behind you, or a shimmering in your peripheral vision. Usually eeriness pertains to places rather than people. Places that seem to move, shift or even act when they really should lie still. This sense is just as likely to be found in an empty room as an open moor. Sometimes, however, this sense manifests, becoming a force that can reach out and grip us. (more…)
