H1Z1, the battle royale ’em up that Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene worked on before making his own Battlegrounds, is now going free-to-play. Developers Daybreak Game Company have announced that H1Z1 will switch to free-to-play at 10am PST (6pm UK time) today, which is a surprise coming only eight days after the game left early access. It seems a sensible move, given dwindling playercounts in the face of stiff competition from Plunkbat and especially Epic’s free-to-play Fortnite Battle Royale. Hell, I will now download it to at least have a go at that new Auto Royale mode which locks four players into a car as a squad battling with other fightcars. (more…)

I should probably give Fortnite another chance. When I took a look at it last year, it played like a less tense version of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds – but it’s increasingly embracing a wackiness and an eagerness to experiment that’s tempting me back in.

Temporary modes are one way that it’s toying with the battle royale formula. Today’s patch features the one which just went live, pitting 5 teams of 20 against each other. I wasn’t sold on the 50 v 50 mode from a few months back because it sounded like a recipe for lopsided drag-a-thons, but this setup should leave room for exciting comebacks. There’s no word on how long the mode will last, but previous events have stuck around for a week.

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This is Brendan, broadcasting live from rumour world, where everything is made of a nebulous candy floss-like substance. The locals call it hope. Amid this sticky cloud, a figure has formed. It s Geralt of Rivia, hero of popular Gwent spin-off, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The monster-hunting swordsman will make an appearance in another game later this year, according to CD Projekt Red community lead Marcin Momot. Some have asserted that he’ll be a guest character in upcoming fighting game Soul Calibur VI. Which makes sense given the close business ties between the Polish studio and Japanese publisher Namco Bandai.

It isn’t confirmed. But it does raise the question: who else deserves a place on the stage of history? I asked the RPS treehouse who they d like to see. Here s the list we all settled on. (more…)

We know that a third map is officially in development for Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, but we don’t know much beyond that. Where will it be set? What sort of landscape? Which unique quirks will it have? And vehicles, and weapons? One Swede has made his case for a snowy Scandinavian map with an impressive concept called N rdheim, overflowing with ideas from blizzard hazards and breakable thin ice to hovercraft and traces of a black metal gig. As fan concepts go, it’s real fancy. (more…)

We’ve all done it. You miss a jump by what feels like millimeters (you were probably miles off, admit it), and your first thought is ‘If only that platform were just a little bit higher’. If you could, at that moment, you’d reach out and bend the rules, just a teensy bit. Make it that little bit closer, or your jump just a little higher.

Semblance is an upcoming puzzle-platformer all about literally bending the rules, or at least the level. Use your head (and by which I mean ram it into things) to bend the level geometry, or even reshape your own body to open new paths. Come in and see the trailer, which should give you a better idea what to expect.

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One of the more interesting side-effects of the old barriers between PC and console gaming coming down has been a glut of older or lesser-known titles making their way across the pond and to our humble workstations-turned-toys.

Today’s unusual pick of the day is Damascus Gear: Operation Osaka, released simultaneously to Vita, PS4 and PC today. While I’ve been vaguely aware of this series’ existence (this being the second Damascus Gear on PC), it wasn’t until now that I noticed that this is blatantly Armored Core as an action-RPG.

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Correction: The early access piece was from a year & two weeks ago, not two weeks.>

We come from the land of the ice and snow~> From the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow~>

If you’ve been anywhere near the UK this past week, you’ll have probably seen Winter (with a capital W) coming back for one last clawing grasp at our dreary little isle. Perhaps some of you even took a liking to the sight of snow on the ground, and your breath condensing in the air. These people are wrong and bad, but we love them anyway.

Mercifully, we exile those poor, wrong-headed folks to the frozen north now, albeit in RTS form. Northgard, the clever little Viking town-building strategy game from French outfit Shiro Games is out now, after a well-received stretch in the icy fjords of Steam Early Access.

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Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they’ve been changed for better or worse.>

I ve got a robot chicken in the shed that parps out batteries. Do you want to have a look? No, seriously, she s next to the electrical sheep, and she s a proper money maker. Every day I teleport down to my little farm, collect all the wheat and cotton and kiwi fruits that have grown overnight, and fill my pockets with double-As.

The penguins at the spaceport pay loads for batteries, you see. They love electrical wool, too, but it s the metal chicken that s allowed me to give my bipedal mech a better drill arm, as well as giving me the funds to buy a few bars of tungsten and add another wing to my starship. A wing that I m planning to fill with chickens, of course. (more…)

FIGHTCRAB! You really can’t beat that title, both for accuracy and sheer satisfaction value in shouting it aloud, hence why I insist it be capitalized. The latest from oceanically obsessed Japanese indie outfit Nussoft (they of the quite bonkers Neo Aquarium: The King Of Crustaceans and its sequel, Ace of Seafood), FIGHTCRAB has been in the works for a while now, but yesterday they released their best chunk of gameplay footage yet.

Within, CRABS. And they FIGHT. Really, what more could you ask for?

FIGHTCRAB!

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The success of Crossy Road is a paradox that I’m still trying to work out. With age and experience, we’ve all come to accept that, as iconic as it may have been as an arcade trailblazer, Frogger was a little naff. How then, did a spiritual successor take over the world?

We’re still a bit baffled, honestly. Worse still, the people responsible (at least partly reformed as Mighty Games, formerly Hipster Whale) have continued to apply their retro-polygon aesthetics to other classics, such as the intentionally glitchy Pac-Man 256, and now the shmup genre as a whole with Shooty Skies, which is out and free-to-play on PC today.

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