I like Sunset [official site] for its sense of place, for its lighting, for its drip feed of story, for the emphasis on subtle change and human scale in an event games tend to deal with via guns and power fantasies and super tech. But when it comes to the relationship building which lies at the centre of the game Sunset can stumble. Here’s Wot I Think.>
Hey! It’s a new and final episode of COGWATCH, a weekly video series in which Quintin Smith examines one mechanic in one game. This week, the BOSS COG that is miserabilist, boat-bound roguelike Sunless Sea [official site].
2014 was the first year since 2002 to not receive a new Need for Speed game, but Electronic Arts said they’d bring the racing series back for 2015 and here we are. EA today announced the game named simply Need for Speed [official site], a “full reboot” of the series.
Details are thin for now but the important stuff: yes, it’s set in an open world, and yes it’s set in perpetual night. It’s due this autumn and being made by NFS Rivals developers Ghost Games, a studio which absorbed a whole load of folks from Burnout Paradise devs Criterion. There’s a trailer.
Most of all, I m not sure wot I think of Epanalepsis. I ve played it through three times now. I still have very little idea what it s about, both in terms of its cloaked narrative, and its reason for being. And yet I find myself looking at it somewhat fondly.>
Our Graham was the one to post about the BBC making a “factual drama” about the Grand Theft Auto series and Jack Thompson’s crusade against video games, perhaps because I could only frame my response as a series of contorted facial expressions. But no, really, they are doing it, and it’ll star Daniel Radcliffe and Bill Paxton. Well, if they don’t get shut down.
Take Two Interactive, the owners of GTA makers Rockstar Games, have filed a lawsuit against the BBC for trademark infringement. See, they’re none too pleased that they haven’t been consulted.
You can’t swing a dead (giant) rat without hitting a big ol’ RPG these days. In the last couple of months, we’ve had the party-based pleasures of Pillars of Eternity and the bold, handsome excess of The Witcher 3. Divinity: Original Sin is flexing its systemic muscle for another bout and there are plenty of other attractions waiting in the wings.
Despite all that competition, Torment: Tides of Numenera [official site] could be one of the most intriguing RPGs in years. The spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment promises to outweird the rest of the pack, if nothing else, and the new video below shows the range of environments that will be on show. It’s like watching a showreel of five or six RPGs crammed together – sci-fi and horror cheek-to-cheek with swords and sorcery.
I d almost forgotten the feeling. I d begun to wonder if maybe, just maybe, I was deluded in my belief that adventure games could create coherent pathways, difficult yet fun puzzles, and characters whose motivations extended beyond the need to reach the next screen. What a relief it is, then, to play sci-fi dystopia Technobabylon. Here’s wot I think.>
Update: that big ‘600 fixes’ patch was actually the launch day update, RED have clarified. Also, patch 1.03 just came out with performance improvements and graphics settings tweaks. So, the ini-editing patch… soonish?
If you have a snarling panther of a PC, a rig which belches black smoke, a box with so much airflow it hovers two inches above your floor, good news: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [official site] will add options to make it even prettier. A future patch will expose editing .ini files to turn up flora density, push out draw distances, fiddle with post-processing effects like sharpening, and more.
Tabletop Simulator [official site] and all its boardgame-replication and physics-enabled table-flipping will leave Early Access on June 5th. The switch to a full release might not mean much since updates will continue, but it will also see the price increase and herald the addition of the first DLC, an officially-licensed digital recreation of the card game Superfight.
