Fans of pretty little scenes, dolls’ houses, landscaping, and clicking on things might fancy a look at Quiet As A Stone, a game I have for several months struggled to explain well. These wee rocks are floating in space, right, covered in trees and grass and rocks and things, and you can click to cut grass and break stones to get scenery pieces like plants and trees and walls and new rocks to redecorate the scene as you please. It’s a quiet and pleasant curio, and it’s now launched on Steam with a big update.

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In especially well-timed fashion, Epic Games – they of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite – have announced they’re going head to head with Steam with the Epic Games Store. The new storefront will open via web and the Epic Games Launcher before the end of 2018. Enticingly for developers, Epic have announced that they’ll only be taking a flat 12% cut of revenue, less than half of Steam’s 30%. This announcement comes days after Valve underwhelmingly announced they’ll slightly reduce their cut, but only for multi-million dollar hits.

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Let me try to capture the feeling of Just Cause 4 in an anecdote: I’m currently attaching tethers to the side of a giant warship to drag it from the hill on which it is perched. I’m aiming to get it back into the water where it would much prefer to be. And it’s working! Slowly but surely, with enough tethers, the boat is inching down the grass and rocks. Why am I doing this? Because this is where the ship landed after a helicopter fired on me, causing the 150m, 2000 ton vessel to impossibly flip up high into the air, spin around and around and around for a bit, and then like a big metal leaf, float down gently onto the hillside. This is Just Cause 4 at its best. Just Cause 4 is a colossal mess.

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The units should feel like humans, says Oskar St lberg, co-creator of Bad North, a strategy game about little soldiers defending their islands against bad Vikings. They re quite stylised; they don t have faces and barely have arms, but they should feel human in their behaviour and what they re capable of doing. They should feel fragile and it should look like fighting is a courageous effort.

You might be surprised about how much work Bad North does to make your tiny soldiers human. They lead surprisingly full, if short, little virtual lives, and some of the fullest are led by its doughty pikemen, whose weapon of choice presented their creators all manner of weird problems.

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Bethesda are correcting more of Fallout 76‘s slop, both in the game and the whole situation around it. Today brings a patch expanding the stash storage limit and fixing several crashes, among other things. And after silently swapping advertised canvas bags in the 175 ‘Power Armor Edition’ for nylon ones, then offering a dribble of microtransaction currency in apology, Bethesda have relented and are having canvas bags made for the rubes. Congratulations on your enduring, hard-wearing reminder of that time you spent 175 on a bland game.

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Valve have banned Dota 2 player Carlo “Kuku” Palad from their upcoming ‘Major’ tournament in China over a racist comment he made mocking Chinese players in a non-tournament game earlier this year. Kuku’s team, TNC Predator, initially tried to pass a cover-up story and have further muddied waters with unsupported claims that Major host city Chongqing’s government threatened to cancel the tournament if he attended. Now Valve have stepped in and accused the Filipino team of behaving unprofessionally and “making the situation much worse than it needed to be.” straight-up banning Kuku from the tournament and docking TNC points on this year’s Dota Pro Circuit.

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In a move that irked some people, Bobbleheads don’t work the same as they once did in Fallout 76, being temporary buffs as opposed to permanent upgrades. They still increase your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats, or affect weapons used. Since they’re more plentiful, there’s a huge number of places where you can find them just lying around, so this guide will have more on their locations, exactly how to obtain them, and when it is best to collect duplicates. (more…)

Ever since people ventured into Appalachia, it soon became apparent that Magazines work a fair bit differently in Fallout 76. Instead of being permanent upgrade, Magazines are now consumable temporary buffs that provide traits such as weapon specific boost or damage increased against certain enemies. Since they work slightly differently this time, there are more places that you can find them, this guide will have more on their locations, exactly how to obtain them, and when it is best to collect duplicates. (more…)

Fallout 76 has been out for a while now and even though there are now players who have explored the entirety of Appalachia, there’s no better time to emerge from Vault 76 and make your mark in the world. This is not the typical Fallout game though, as this one is online, with a ton of other changes on top of that; from how Perks work to setting up your own CAMP. This guide hub will go over some of these major changes, as well as explains things like hunger and thirst, Bobbleheads, multiplayer, and more. (more…)

True fact: you can only take two RPS team members with you on any journey. Do you take John, who knows where to stand on the platform so he’s in front of the doors when the train stops, and Alice Bee, who always has an open bag of cheddar at hand?

Yes, that’s exactly who you take to open door number 4…

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