Yes, GOG had a sale only last week, but now the site is running another sale. And this time, they're calling it 'The Big Deal Sale'. Why is it a big deal? Because in addition to there being upwards of 200 items on sale, there will apparently be something "absolutely, definitely, positively special" for everyone who visits the site on Tuesday (or Wednesday in Australia).

What's on sale? Nex Machina is available with a 45 percent discount, while Her Story, Banished and Shadowrun: Hong Kong are all available for 75 percent off. Other massive discounts include Oxenfree (75 percent), Satellite Reign (85 percent), Firewatch (55 percent) and The Witness (60 percent). 

There's plenty more where these came from, and you've got until September 25 to peruse the list. As for what tomorrow's "absolutely, definitely, positively special" thing, I've got no idea what it is, but I'd guess it's a free game of some variety.

Grim Dawn developer Crate Entertainment announced earlier this year that two new classes, the Inquisitor and the Necromancer, and a new Illusionist merchant would be coming to the game in a future DLC release. We haven't heard anything more about it since March, but today the studio released a new trailer revealing that the expansion, entitled Ashes of Malmouth, will be out next month. 

The expansion will add two new chapters to the game set in the Ugdenbog and fallen city of Malmouth, which appears to be somewhat more urban than the game's other locales, but still entirely grim. The new classes—Masteries, technically—will add more than 60 new abilities to the game, and of course there will be a pile of new items to collect, constellations to figure out, and bosses and mini-bosses to fight.   

A specific release date hasn't been set, but even though it's going to miss its original public estimate of the third quarter of this year, it "is absolutely coming in October," Crate said. "It is very probable that it will be on the earlier end of the month, but we want to make sure that recent engine changes and bug fixes have enough time to cook so that you have a smooth and enjoyable experience when you dive into Ugdenbog and Malmouth itself." 

Grim Dawn: Ashes of Malmouth will sell for $18 on Steam, GOG, and Humble (where the full game is currently on sale for $10, by the way), and is free for owners of the Loyalist Edition of the game.   

In the hours after the release of Cosmic Star Heroine, after a night of chittering anxiety, a week of frantically digging up lingering bugs, and four years of programming and polish for a project that was originally dreamed up as a Kickstarter all the way back in 2013, art director Bill Stiernberg realized there was something wrong. A fraction of his playerbase were drawing their guns only to watch as some of the enemies on the other half of the screen immediately despawned. 

Cosmic Star Heroine is a globetrotting RPG built directly out of the bones of legendary 16-bit adventures like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6, complete with an old school battle system. But now the spectacle of its treasured, multi-tiered combat was broken.

"There’s this [boss battle] against a giant mech enemy where you fight its two arms, and the battle would start with one of the arms disabled because of this bug," says Stiernberg. "They’d be only fighting one arm, and afterwards they’d be like 'well, that was an easy battle.' It drove us crazy. We didn’t know why these enemies were just vanishing."

The culprit was the Bagman—an NPC that self-destructed upon defeat, doing damage to the other monsters in his party. Stiernberg liked the design (it was originally concocted by a Kickstarter backer) but there was one particular programming error left undiscovered during testing. If the Bagman was the last enemy to die in an encounter, it would leave a residual tag on the enemies in future encounters. That meant when NPCs loaded in with that tag attached to their data, their health bars immediately dropped to zero. 

Thus, the mystery of the despawning enemies was solved, and Stiernberg heaved a sigh of relief. Perhaps you’re wondering why the bug wasn’t caught sooner, but Zeboyd Games is made up of exactly two people. They did what they could. 

"There were only a few testers, myself included, and we knew to attack the guy first because he self-destructs, so you don’t want to leave him alone," says Stiernberg. "That made it really hard to catch."

Undercooked big-budget games get pushed out the door before they’re ready all the time, and crises like Stiernberg’s Bagman are not limited to the indie scene. But still, major games routinely escape rocky launches through the concentrated power of corporate infrastructure. Take Rainbow Six: Siege, a tactical shooter that was lost in the shuffle after its 2015 release. Through the combined efforts of PR liaisons and a multi-continental development squadron, today Ubisoft can rightfully name that game as one of the most successful FPS platforms on the planet.

Zeboyd Games, of course, does not have the same luxury. Stiernberg and his partner Robert Boyd are veterans at working without a harness. Together they’ve made the lovable Cthulhu Saves the World, and episodes three and four of the rebooted Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. So what happens when an indie developer is staring down release-date chaos? What’s it like knowing that your publisher’s paratroopers aren’t on their way to bail you out?

As Stiernberg tells it, it sounds like hell.

"I don’t think I can understate how little sleep I got," he says. "We had this release date that we absolutely had to meet, because we were launching on PlayStation 4 at the same time, and we needed to be available for a promotion they were doing, which is a very important thing for any developer, especially a small one. I was testing constantly in every spare moment, and I was reaching out to anyone who was going to receive a review key. That was stressful too, because there were certain things we wanted to get in before we sent those codes out, which is obviously not ideal."

 Don’t Panic

One of the things Stiernberg remembers best is the crucial day-one patch he needed to deliver to the PS4 servers. Neither he nor Boyd had a ton of experience working for the platform, and unlike Steam, where developers can configure their game's code in a moment’s notice, they found themselves stuck in a lengthy licensing phase to get the update online. "We keep getting these errors, and we're going back and forth with these Sony people on email every two minutes," he says. "And at the same time we have people writing Steam user reviews, and we have people on Twitter sending us screenshots of the PS4 pre-loading screen saying, 'Hey look! It says it unlocks in one hour and 15 minutes! I'm excited!' and I'm like, 'I'm excited too, but not for the same reasons!’"

Of course, most of the controversies a developer faces on launch day aren’t quite as heartbreaking or inscrutable as a bugged boss that makes other enemies vanish. For the most part, Stiernberg spent time working with a stubborn trailer that refused to appear on the PlayStation landing page while keeping a watchful eye on bug report threads on the Steam forums. That doesn't mean those smaller issues are easy to brush off. Eventually, Stiernberg says, it will seem like there are a thousand things to do, and that can put a lot of pressure on a small team. Especially in a marketplace like Steam with such a volatile trending page.  

This is a panic that every developer faces. Jean-Francois Major co-founded Tribute Games, the studio that released the excellent roguelike Flinthook earlier this year. His advice is to take a deep breath and move methodically.

"It's so easy to panic and want to address every issue or concern. Make a list, communicate with your players and evaluate what needs to be addressed and how. If it's not a critical bug fix, you shouldn't be hot-fixing the next day. Plan how you will implement these changes and make sure they fit your vision of the game," he says. "Some of the comments might also be non-issues. Take the Destiny 2 shader changes for example. It blew out of proportions at launch and quickly died off when people got further in the game and noticed they were drowning in shaders."

Stiernberg agrees. "The more you do, the better you feel. Even if it’s little stuff," he says. "If you’re on a team, keep in regular communication with them, because they’re going through the same thing. And keep making progress, it goes a long way [to calm] your anxiety."

 No plan survives contact with the enemy 

If you spend enough time reading about this industry you’re eventually confronted with the unassailable fact that building a game from the ground up is one of the hardest things anyone can do, especially if you’re working without a publisher. There is no real contingency plan in a Kickstarter mandate, and truthfully, Stiernberg and Boyd don’t have to live like this. 

They could pack up Zeboyd and go get jobs at a much larger company, where they could off-load a lot of the responsibilities they held themselves accountable for during the Cosmic Star Heroine cycle. Jobs where they don’t have to run the marketing, the programming, the art, the writing, and the press relations all while making sure an enemy called 'the Bagman' is working properly. This is true for dozens of indie game developers, but despite how punishing this business can be, they remain. Stiernberg tells me he couldn’t imagine it any other way.

"I could never get away [from game design,]" he says. "Nothing else that I’ve done has ever consumed my mind in the way this does. I'm constantly thinking about, 'How can I improve this, how can I do this better, how can I push this further?' If it didn’t mean that much to me personally I don’t think I could do this… it’s a double-edged sword. It can be crushing to be responsible for all of these things, but the satisfaction, the sense of pride in how you were able to do all of these things, is hugely important."

Bill Stiernberg stayed up for a week straight. Every moment was another microscopic disaster. He got himself high and low on reviews, he pored over the same code he stared at for years, and he says it was worth it. He and Robert Boyd were doing it all. Keep that in mind the next time you find yourself struggling to play through a buggy launch.

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The Call of Duty: WWII story trailer is out, and as you might expect it's filled with gunfire, explosions, evil Nazis, and fresh-faced young men struggling to come to grips with the essential immorality of war, even when it's waged in pursuit of the greater good. 

Sledgehammer co-founder Michael Condrey said in May that the new CoD will not give players the opportunity to view the war from the German perspective, and if there was any lingering doubt, this trailer quite clearly puts it to rest. Not that there's ever been any question that the Nazis were (and are) the bad guys, but I don't recall any previous game putting such an obvious emphasis on it. The villain even has a pronounced facial scar, a telltale sign of the worst of the worst, even among a vile lot like Nazis. 

"Call of Duty: WWII tells the story of Private Ronald 'Red' Daniels, a young recruit in the U.S. First Infantry Division who experiences combat for the first time on D-Day, one of the largest amphibious assaults in history," Activision said. "After surviving the beaches of Normandy, Red and his squad will fight their way across Europe, engaging the enemy in iconic battle locations such as the Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge, as they make their way into Germany." 

Setting aside the excess of "Red" (as every Lee Marvin fan can tell you, the First Infantry Division is also known as "The Big Red One"), that synopsis unfortunately indicates that Activision and Sledgehammer have no interest in not "rehashing every World War 2 shooter campaign ever," something we suggested would be a good idea back in May. 

"Activision should surprise us if it's going to give Call of Duty the shot in the arm it needs right now," we wrote at the time. "So much of the initial, positive reaction to Battlefield 1, after all, was because it dared to take us to a place and time we hadn’t seen much of in war games before. It had the guts to explore the unexplored. Another D-Day level in 1440p with better textures and face capture isn’t really that." 

Call of Duty: WWII will be out on November 3. A multiplayer beta is set to come to the PC on September 29. 

Despite an unlucky launch day, Larian's latest RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 came roaring out of the gate last week, enjoying both critical acclaim and remarkably strong sales for what is, let's be honest here, a pretty niche genre. Yesterday it broke the 75,000 concurrent user mark on Steam, today it's even higher—a little over 85,000, according to Steam Spy—and even more impressive than that, Larian boss Swen Vincke told Eurogamer that it has already sold nearly a half-million copies.   

"It is fantastic, but it is also way beyond what we expected. We're close to hitting 500,000 units sold which is a number I believe it took us two or three months with Divinity: Original Sin 1," Vincke said. That's actually pretty close to the mark: The original Original Sin came out on June 30, 2014, and Vincke said in a mid-September blog post that it had achieved a half-million sales somewhere prior to that. 

That success presumably makes a console release of Divinity: Original Sin 2 very likely, but Larian's priority right now is the PC release. "We're now focused on delivering our first patch for the PC version, something that is scheduled for this week," Vincke said. "Lots of players means lots of support issues coming in and we're trying to service them as fast as we can. After that, it'll be a long, well-deserved break for the team and then we'll boot up our machines again to work on the next things."   

Larian rolled out a hotfix yesterday that should take care of problems that players have encountered when saving games, and Vincke said that the studio is also working on issues with its servers, which have apparently struggled under the unexpected load. But the problems clearly aren't putting off RPG fans: Original Sin 2 remains atop the Steam Top Sellers chart and holds fourth place on the Game Stats list, behind only PUBG, CS:GO, and Dota 2. 

We're still working on our full Divinity: Original Sin 2 review—while you wait, here's a good list of ten things you should know about the game before you get started on your adventures. 

After teasing its beastly Feral Tribe last week, Shadow of War's latest short puts you in the driving seat. The question is: do you feel like slaying or saving?

That's something you can answer in the following 'Friend or Foe' interactive trailer, which recreates the game's esteemed Nemesis System, and ends by letting you decide the fate of your Follower or Nemesis. 

Upon selection, you'll be whisked off to the game's official site where you'll then view the repercussions of your actions. Look, see:

That there is the work of Hollywood movie people Neil Huxley and Fabian Wagner—who're collectively involved with Avatar, Watchmen and Game of Thrones. Which is also pretty neat. 

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is due October 10. Until then, here's James' words on its spider mercs and singing uruks, and here's some of my own on its fire-breathing dragons. 

I'd like to blame my school's layout on poor planning, but that would assume there was any planning at all. As I do in every other game where you build stuff, I just sort of built stuff, which is why children arrive to start their lessons by walking through an area designated for garbage and winding up directly beside another area designated for garbage. Will these fresh-face tots feel their hearts swell with school pride when they walk in the front door each morning and are greeted by the sight of a janitorial closet, a bathroom, another bathroom, and a third bathroom?

I'm here to find out. I've been playing Academia: School Simulator, which is now in Steam Early Access. It looks a lot like Prison Architect (Ryan Sumo, PA's artist, co-founded Squeaky Wheel, which is developing Academia) and it plays a lot like Prison Architect, too. Everything from the art to the UI to the building and management systems are extremely reminiscent of Prison Architect, except your building is full of kids instead of prisoners—though it's not difficult to draw some parallels between public education and incarceration.

Beginning with just some grassy terrain and a handful of expectant workers, I lay down tile floors, build brick walls, and zone for classrooms, a cafeteria, and a kitchen. I initially forget to put in bathrooms, though I'm sharp enough to notice that my students keep running outside to pee in the bushes. Let the trauma and embarrassment of school life begin!

I add the required fittings for each room: desks and chalkboards, toilets and sinks, fridges and ovens, tables and chairs. There's no power lines or water piping to deal with (at the moment at least), so you just plunk something down and it works. I hire staff members: teachers, custodians, cooks, and a few extra laborers.

Kids come to school, they mill around in areas like the 'club' room or computer lab, they go to class (in fact, oddly, they get there before the teachers do). They track dirt everywhere, they leave litter lying in the hallways, they complain about being hungry or bored. Especially hungry. After a few days pass I notice kids are sitting in class thinking about burgers, and then they go to the cafeteria and think about burgers, and then they go back to class where they think about burgers. I glance at a kid using the toilet. His thought is: burgers.

Clearly something is wrong, and not just the fact that I'm sitting here watching a high school freshman take a dump while reading his mind. It looks like my cooks aren't cooking and there are food deliveries piling up outside. I fire my cooking staff, replace them, but everyone in the school is still thinking burgers without ever getting any burgers. Finally, I check the Steam forums which say it's a known bug and restarting the game may help. Once I restart, the kitchen staff hops to, brings in food, cooks it, and serves it. The kids go back to thinking about science and books.

I continue building, adding more classrooms to accommodate a crowd of transfer students, I rezone some rooms for sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and I add a statue at the school's entrance which I hope will pull the eye away from two large garbage areas that I can't be bothered to relocate. I build a place for the faculty to hang out and commiserate over their low pay, and I'm even kind enough to take a moment to rescue the school medical staff, several workers, and two teachers who have been trapped in a wing of the school I forgot to build doors on.

Despite my various blunders, my school remains profitable for the most part. I've satisfied the requirements of all the grants available (as in Prison Architect, these are little challenges that earn you additional money), and I've currently got 80 students on my way to 100, once I build a few more classrooms (hopefully at least a couple with doors on them). My kids aren't especially thrilled with my school, but apart from littering and having impure burger-related thoughts, they're all behaving.

At this point in Academia's development, it doesn't feel like there's much depth to the simulation, but I'm going to keep my eye on this game. I love Prison Architect, and If enough layers are added to Academia it could be as interesting and compelling a game as PA, though I'm also hoping Squeaky Wheel has plans to distinguish themselves from Introversion's prison sim with some new and different gameplay systems. It's off to an enjoyable start, anyway.

Academia: School Simulator is in Early Access on Steam. It's also got an official site where you can follow its development. Just finish your homework first.

Last week, Black Desert Online developer Pearl Abyss revealed its fantasy MMO has sold over 530,000 copies on Steam and has 7.65 million registered players. That number is likely to increase in the near future, as the first part of the game's free Kamasylvia expansion is due to launch on September 27. 

In a lengthy list of patch notes also revealed last week, Pearl Abyss noted that four new servers boasting the server group name 'Kamasylvia' had been added, before saying: "You know what that means… Kamasylvia Part 1 coming real soon!"

According to the Black Desert Online official Twitter feed, "real soon" is now next week.

As reported by MMORPG.com, the first slice of Kamasylvia will bring with it new quests and background details on the Dark Knights and Rangers. A new location named the Old Wisdom Tree will also be added into the game—and while there are no level requirements for entry, Pearl Abyss suggests higher-leveled will naturally fare better.   

MMORPG also suggests "group-based content" by way of the Altar of Training awaits players, so too does a tier nine Pegasus that can glide after double jumping. A survival mode mini-game can also be unlocked by fulfilling specific quests. 

The first part of Black Desert Online's free Kamasylvia expansion is due September 27. Here's the add-on's preview trailer that launched earlier this year:

As you may have spotted us chatting about recently, Uppercut Games is an Australian-based indie outfit whose team is comprised of ex-Irrational devs. Its latest game, City of Brass, draws from BioShock, Indiana Jones and Arabian Nights, while adding a splash of permadeath, procedural generation, and rogue-lite mechanics along the way. It's out now on Early Access and has dropped a new trailer. 

First, here's that: 

Set in a gorgeous "opulent" city, players are tasked with whipping and grabbing their way around the game's procedurally-generated and manipulable maps—"making it to each trap-infested level’s exit before the sands of time run out." 

Scheduled to live in Early Access for around six to 12 months, City of Brass' current state serves 12 level campaigns—each with new gear, relics and enemies. Over time, new bosses, districts and secret areas are planned, while the so-called "final battle", which will unfold differently depending on the decisions the player has made to that point, will be held until final release. 

"The initial Early Access version already has a core experience in place: players can dive into a 12 level campaign with hours of replayability, revealing new enemies in each level, discovering gear and relics, encountering fresh traps and evolving their tactics," says lead designer Ed Orman in a statement. "We’re in Early Access to help us balance and tune the gameplay systems, and we will steadily add more content as we approach Final Release."

City of Brass is out now on Steam Early Access for £18.99/$24.99. A limited time discount cuts that down to £15.19/$19.99.

Since its reveal at this year's E3, Call of Duty: WWII has spent much of its time teasing and demoing its incoming installment's multiplayer features. Last week, Sledgehammer Games announced both its PC beta dates and its system requires, and now the developer is lining up new information on its single player campaign. 

As revealed via the game's official Twitter feed, a 'Story Trailer' is due later today—while the remainder of the week will feature trailers and info segments named 'Meet the Squad', 'Meet Your Allies', and 'Real Battles. Real History' respectively.

As Shaun reported last week, the Call of Duty: WWII PC beta is set to run September 29 through October 2. Taking place on Steam the beta is open to everyone, meaning preorder are not required for access. 

Call of Duty: WWII is due November 3, 2017. Find out if your PC makes rank by checking out its system requirements.