When I unlocked the Bone Prison specialization for my Mark for Death spell, I forgot to read the fine print. Though a wall of bones now encircled my enemies, my once insta-cast spell now had a nasty side effect: a 20-second cooldown. But I was delighted to find that I could now cast another spell on each individual bone piece, turning my new bone prison into a cascading wall of death. Any trade-off that ends with a cascading wall of death is a good one.

Last Epoch hit Steam Early Access on April 30 after six months in closed alpha, adding a proper prologue and extending the campaign to four chapters. Although it’s a traditional hack and slash action-RPG, the world and story structure are clearly inspired by Chrono Trigger. I zip around to different eras that eventually lead to an apocalyptic future I need to prevent. It’s a neat idea but the writing isn’t really what's keeping me playing. Take your stupid ledger and give me my skill point, Elder Erza.

The early game is primarily played in the future Ruined Era, which features a bunch of brown and black caves and ruins with the same endless parade of blobby purple enemies. Limited and boring enemy variety frustrated me in the early game. It didn’t help that Last Epoch, like most ARPGs, is mind-numbingly easy for the first few hours, and there seems to be no penalty for dying. It wasn't until I dug further into its skill system that I found what separates Last Epoch from Diablo and Path of Exile.

In the alpha I played a primalist, a combination barbarian and druid ripped straight out of the 1982 film The Beastmaster. The primalist can summon wolves, saber-tooth cats, a bear, and even a giant scorpion once I unlock the Beastmaster mastery tree (sadly no ferret friends). 

Each of the five classes (four are currently playable in the beta) has three mastery trees that operate much like Diablo 2’s skill trees, pumping earned skill points to increase my stats, grant new bonuses, and occasionally unlock a new mastery-specific skill. I could've taken my primalist in the direction of a lightning-flinging shaman or a shape-changing druid instead. Having a giant scorpion alongside my wolf pack was neat at first, but the pet-heavy melee build grew boring to control quickly.

In the new Early Access release I traded in my fur babies for bone bros with an acolyte, which is basically a Diablo 2 necromancer. While the primalist can gain an impressive number of animal allies he has nothing on the legion of dead the acolyte can employ, including skeleton guards, mags, archers, and a gigantic bone golem. Once I unlocked the Sacrifice skill my playstyle evolved into summoning and exploding my disposable buddies into a hilariously gory mess, which paired excellently with a passive skill that had a chance to give me a shield with every minion death.

With the acolyte's skills I began to really appreciate Last Epoch’s skill customization. It’s a brilliant evolution of Path of Exile’s labyrinthine web of upgrades and Diablo 3’s rune modifications. 

Instead of juggling a bunch of active abilities or sifting through mountains of useless and infinitesimal passive upgrades, I can focus on the few specific skills I enjoy using, such as modifying my Summon Skeleton skill to only summon mages because they come with adorable hats and capes. Once I realized I was gleefully sacrificing them every few seconds, though, I started to rethink my skeleton specialization. Experimenting with different skills and discovering fun combos is the heart of what keeps me playing. 

The crafting system is also doing some clever things for an action-RPG. These games are all about RNG loot drops, but Last Epoch’s crafting helps alleviate the pain of searching for just the right traits and modifiers on specific items.

Crafting can be done directly from the inventory, and once added to the crafting menu, materials don’t take up any inventory space—though I’m not sure why don’t they simply get added to the crafting menu in the first place. Crafting can add new effects to items like increasing mana or minion damage, and specific crafting shards can also enhance existing stats on an item. There is a tiny risk involved with crafting: The more I enchant an item, the bigger the risk of fracturing it. A fractured item isn’t destroyed, but can’t be enchanted any further (there are also special glyphs that can protect against fracturing).

Crafting materials were plentiful enough that I found myself constantly tweaking and enhancing every decent item I found. Finding great items was still enjoyable (and you can’t enhance unique items), but crafting gave me a satisfying level of control over my gear that few action-RPGs allow.

While I enjoyed the underlying skill and crafting systems, Last Epoch is noticeably rough around the edges. The graphics look like they belong in a game made somewhere between Titan Quest (2006) and Path of Exile (2013), and not in a way that's charmingly retro. There's little detail and a muted color palette, particularly in the Ruined Era. The UI needs some major improvements as well—there’s no way to tell how a skill is going to improve until you commit a skill point to it, and selling, examining, and comparing items requires a needless amount of holding Shift, Ctrl, and Alt. I suffered from a number of stuttering moments and framerate drops, and the game frequently locked up when I tried to exit.

There is at least one shining beacon of light in Last Epoch’s presentation: The music is outstanding. ARPGs are usually perfect for listening to podcasts or videos in the background, but I never wanted to silence Last Epoch’s stirring orchestral score. I'd welcome Last Epoch’s soundtrack into my Game Jams Spotify playlist right alongside Diablo 2.

I remember a time not too long ago when I was desperate for any new game in my beloved loot pinata genre, but the playing field has changed over the last several years. Diablo 3, Path of Exile, and Grim Dawn have had long lives and keep on going. Even Titan Quest has made a comeback with its Anniversary Edition. In its current state Last Epoch doesn't do enough to really distinguish itself from its more established brethren—its clever skill system can't make up for its other shortcomings, particularly as the Early Access version is currently singleplayer only. Hopefully a long stint in Early Access will make it a stronger contentendor when it launches fully in Spring 2020.

Epic's acquisition of Rocket League studio Psyonix earlier this week resulted in a predictable reaction: A review bombing campaign that hit the game with more than 2,700 negative reviews on Steam since May 1. Yet in spite of that effort, the user review rating, including recent reviews, remains "very positive." 

That's because of the system Valve implemented in March that excludes "off-topic review activity" from review score calculations—effectively an anti-review-bomb shield. An asterisk on the Rocket League review chart leads to a message stating that "this time range has been marked as containing an abnormal set of reviews that we believe are largely unrelated to the likelihood that you would enjoy the product."   

The reviews themselves remain visible in that section of the Steam listing, so you can still see entries like, for instance, the one from the player with nearly 1,900 hours of playtime who spends multiple paragraphs describing how great the game is before giving it a negative review because, "You sold your honor." 

The backlash comes despite the fact that neither Psyonix nor Epic have said that Rocket League will be removed from Steam, and in fact have pledged to continue supporting the Steam edition for existing owners, even after the game goes on sale on the Epic Store. For now, nothing has changed except the studio ownership, and even that may not be a dramatic shift given the longstanding relationship between Epic and Psyonix: Rocket League is obviously the studio's best-known game, but the Psyonix website says it has also worked on Epic games including Gears of War, Bulletstorm, Unreal Tournament 3, and UT2004. 

Review bombs are nothing new, but it's interesting to see Valve's anti-bombing mechanism in action, and I think it might actually prove to be a reasonable compromise solution to user review abuse: Committed players get their say, but casual "need something new" browsers won't be forced to dig down to figure out why the recent reviews of a phenomenally popular game have suddenly tanked. As the great philosopher once said, a good compromise leaves everybody mad. 

The following discussion and images are NSFW. 

Update: As of May 7th, GOG has come back to me with a statement in response to DC's comment in the below article that the retailer "wouldn't even return our emails". I've edited the article below to contain the statement, but for ease of reading, I'll put it here too. "Unfortunately, we haven’t found a single email coming from FOW Interactive, be it on our publicly shared inboxes or Bizdev people personal ones. We’re going to check with whom the devs were trying to contact, to understand what happened."

Edited story: FOW Interactive's Subverse, a pornographic genre hybrid game that will probably remind you superficially of Mass Effect, ended its Kickstarter campaign with over £1.6 million this week. How do I put this? It's not my sort of thing—but it's made so much money and generated a strong response from a certain type of player (15,000+ comments on the Kickstarter page and counting). Reaching 58,730 backers shows some obvious demand for what Subverse offers. 

It's described as "a tactical RPG/SHMUP hybrid that takes place in a fully explorable galaxy where you get to be the Captain of your very own ship... which is crewed by the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit." There will be 10 'waifus' total in the game, and as well as earning their loyalty and having sex with them, the shoot-'em-up part is set in space, as you control a ship called the Mary Celeste. The tactical element, meanwhile, with its isometric-style camera, made me think of XCOM. Collectively, the game should take at least 30 hours to finish, according to the Kickstarter FAQ, and the first episode is aiming for a summer release.

"I've heard many people say this is an extremely ambitious project but it's not really," creative director DC tells me via email. "It's a simple and stylish little tactical game with sex elements thrown in as the reward so we are trying set ourselves up for a smoother development cycle."

From movies to games

StudioFOW's background is in CG pornographic movies, many of which are parodies involving game characters. For example—and for the love of god, do not search for these at work—there's BioShag: Trinity and Lara in Trouble, which feature familiar female game characters in scenarios I won't describe here (here's a great Kotaku piece that touches upon both videos). I can't say I was comfortable sitting through snippets of them to write this piece. 

I ask DC why he thinks the Kickstarter campaign has made so much money. "I'm not sure I can pinpoint a single factor to be honest. I think we had a really positive and confident pitch that grabbed a lot of people by the balls and then our existing fanbase (which is pretty massive) came out in force to help snowball the Kickstarter. The surprise factor in all this was that Subverse became a kind of symbolic pledge for many first-time Kickstarter supporters who are unhappy with the current state of the gaming industry... but that's totally not what we set out to do, we just wanted to make dick lasers and big bouncy anime titties."

In the Kickstarter pitch video for Subverse, the voiceover begins with "From the studio that was banned from Patreon...", before describing the reason why, which is a werewolf performing a sexual act on a woman. I ask about the background behind the Patreon ban, which was communicated to backers in late 2018. "Patreon's ironically named 'Trust and Safety Team' seems to have a problem with werewolves," says DC. "Apparently 3D pornography featuring werewolves is totally against Patreon's newly updated terms of service, so our comedy movie 'Mila Red Riding Hood' landed us in hot water with them." Patreon's policy on nudity has a separate paragraph on pornography, which is not allowed on the platform. 

I reached out to Patreon to ask for a response to DC's claim above, and it provided this statement. "StudioFOW was removed for violating our Community Guidelines as we don't allow glorification of sexual violence, including bestiality."

With StudioFOW's film background, I'm curious about its team's collective experience making games. "We've been making 3D movies since 2014 and have been quite successful with those. We've also made a few small interactive titles within our core team that have been big hits on Newgrounds. 'Queen of the Jungle' for example has over 7 million views. But we were lacking serious programming know-how in the team so we added some developers with Unreal 4 experience, and started working on Subverse late last year. The developers would prefer to remain anonymous for now so I can't cite their prior portfolios at this time." The profiles of the team on the Kickstarter page, rife with pseudonyms, make for interesting reading. As do the FAQs, for that matter ("Can I get my desired waifu pregnant?"). 

I'm keen to know more about the tactical element of Subverse, since that's the kind of system I've seen imitated a lot, but rarely done that well. "It's not really similar to X-Com, it's a much more simplistic combat system," DC says. "For example, we have no cover or overwatch mechanics. It's much more fast paced, despite being turn-based. A typical mission in Subverse takes around 3-5 minutes tops to complete, and in X-Com for example it can take upwards of 30+ minutes. It's still challenging to build however, because we're learning as we go. It's only our first game so we're trying to not overcomplicate things too much when it comes to combat."

I ask how the different components of the game are connected. "Your waifus can be used in both Shmup and tactical portions of the game. Their overall level determines their combat effectiveness in both portions, and it also determines how loyal they are to your cause. It's all tied together rather nicely, and the great thing about our game is that when you level up you not only get some standard RPG stat increases but also a talent point to spend on a love scene of your choice. The stats also don't get too complex, there's just enough under the hood to keep things ticking along nicely without bogging the player down."

The Kickstarter campaign shied away from expensive physical rewards—instead focusing on adding elements like an extra 'waifu', animations, and a digital manga. "We were extremely conservative with our stretch goals, only adding features that we were 100% sure were scalable. We even stopped adding stretch goals after a certain point altogether, but the pledges kept rolling in despite there being no more rewards. I think people appreciated our conservative approach to the campaign."

The tone of the Kickstarter page says a lot about who the game is aimed at, and I won't pretend I didn't raise an eyebrow a few times while reading it. Even knowing it's deliberately outlining itself as a comedy sex game, I ask how much the developers think about taste, tone or how they portray sexuality, which doesn't get a particularly satisfying response. "For me it's all about just having fun. Life is short, so you might as well bang some alien babes before you get put six feet under."

Selling on Steam

I'm interested to know what kind of content restrictions developers of games like this have to be aware of, since the game is planned for a Steam release. "We want to avoid the super extreme fetishes and darker themes, as they don't mesh with our creative vision for Subverse. It's a very satirical and lighthearted game so we have to maintain that tone with the sex as well." DC is pretty confident the game's audience is "around 90% men and 10% women, based on prior statistics from our website, analytics and surveys." That's pretty self-evident from the Kickstarter page. 

I ask DC if he thinks it's important games like Subverse are sold on Steam—it's listed as 'adult only' when you visit the game's page. "I think Steam and Valve need to be commended more for their open approach to their storefront. In contrast, GOG love to champion themselves on social media as gamer-friendly and paragons of free speech, but they wouldn't even return our emails." GOG responded to that with this statement. "Unfortunately, we haven’t found a single email coming from FOW Interactive, be it on our publicly shared inboxes or Bizdev people personal ones. We’re going to check with whom the devs were trying to contact, to understand what happened."

"Meanwhile we've had zero problems with Valve even when we used their Source Engine for some of our previous movies. Sure there is a lot of shovelware on Steam as a result of the 'anything-goes' policy but there are filters and tools in place for consumers to make informed decisions on what they are buying." 

Compared to the range of other porn games that are out there, I ask DC what he thinks sets Subverse apart. "We have a space station shaped like a giant butt. And also, an alien with six testicles." Now that I think about it, I've never played a game with those things on PC. 

Back in January we wrote about Daughters of Ash, a long-in-development mod for Dark Souls that adds piles of new material to the game. At the time it was only available for the original 'Prepare to Die' PC release of Dark Souls, but now compatible with the 2018 Remastered release of Dark Souls, too. 

Here's a general description: Daughters of Ash "changes a great deal of the game's content, restores some cut content, and adds many new events and encounters. Its core aim is to replicate the feeling of playing Dark Souls for the first time."

There are new enemies, new bosses that are meant to be interesting and not just hard, lore items, item-items, and more, all using original game assets. So certain objects you've seen before (or ones you've never seen because they were cut during development) will have different uses in the game, but you won't see any jarring, out-of-place fan-created creatures or amateurish texture work in here.

This Remaster release also marks a 1.4 update to the mod, which the developer has been tinkering with since its Prepare to Die Edition release a few months ago. You can read a more detailed rundown of what Daughters of Ash adds to Dark Souls in this Reddit post.

You can download Daughters of Ash from Nexusmods. Note that the developers say "if you play it online, you will almost certainly be banned. Setting your Steam to Offline Mode before playing is the safest way to play Daughters of Ash."

Just a month after its release on March 28 (although it's not technically released because it's still in Early Access, but whatever), the third-person roguelike shooter Risk of Rain 2 has surpassed one million units sold.

"To give you guys a little bit of context, it took us almost 5 years to hit that same number on Steam for Risk of Rain 1," developer Hopoo Games said. "We are excited to see how many of you are jumping into RoR 2. Thank you all so much—we feel very lucky." 

The studio said that it's continuing to work on the new content announced in last week's development roadmap, which will bring all-new content to the Risk of Rain setting. But future updates "will weave in some returning content from Risk 1," it added, including Risk of Rain 1 survivors. More information, and "teasers of what's to come," will be revealed at the update approaches release. 

"We hope our first content update plants the seeds necessary to continue growing Risk of Rain 2 into an even better game for players.. This patch will also include quality of life updates and bug fixes!" Hopoo wrote. "As a reminder, we will still be shipping patches containing bug fixes, alongside full localization, before the first Content Update."   

Hopoo confirmed that the one million mark is actually one million units sold, independent of the 2-for-1 promotion that helped it achieve 500,000 players in its first week of release: A rep said the redemptions on that promotion are approaching 200,000, so the player count is "theoretically" just over 1.2 million—not bad for a sequel to a six-year-old, two-person indie joint. Risk of Rain 2 is currently expected to leave Early Access and go into full release in the spring of 2020.

The next Call of Duty will be announced before June 30, Activision confirmed in a conference call with investors. We don't have a name yet, but rumours point to it being Modern Warfare 4. 

In an earlier earnings call, Rob Kostich, president of publishing said the latest game in the series would have an entirely new campaign "rooted in some of the franchise's most important history", feeding the rumours about it being another Modern Warfare. 

During yesterday's call, Kostich told investors that Activision planned to reveal Call of Duty later this quarter, adding that the publisher felt "incredibly good" about Infinity Ward's latest.

COO Collister Johnson tackled the subject of keeping players fighting beyond launch. “We need to do even more to maintain the breadth of our Call of Duty player base beyond the launch quarters, and the Call of Duty team is hard at work on that for this fall’s big content release."

Call of Duty has already been shown off behind closed doors, with a quartet of American football players recently getting a sneak peak. A video of the event appeared and some were convinced they could hear "Modern Warfare 4" in the background, but it's very hard to make out and I'm not convinced.

With E3 2019 kicking off on June 11, expect to see Call of Duty making its first appearance before then. 

Cheers, VG24/7.

Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, which we've been eagerly anticipating for the better part of a decade, will be making an appearance at Gamescom this year, and not just behind closed doors or in hands-off demonstrations. TaleWorlds will letting the public get their hands on it for the first time. 

Because of the limited time and the number of people who will likely be wanting a shot, it's the multiplayer modes that will be shown off. That means you'll miss out on the campaign and all the sandboxy, RPG stuff, but you'll get a good look at the combat system in Captain mode and 6v6 skirmishes. 

When TaleWorlds introduced skirmishes in March the developer also teased an upcoming closed beta. There's still no date for that, nor launch, but apparently all the work being done on the Gamescom demo brings the team "ever closer to the release of the game". 

More details about Gamescom will be offered in a future blog, along with the developer's plans for the beta.   

Gamescom will from August 21-24 this year, and you can get tickets here. 

I'm not sure where the hivemind is at re: Shrek, but I'm quite averse to him. Maybe as I age and attain greater emotional intelligence, I'll be able to deconstruct my ill-will towards Shrek. Is it the dopey smile? Is it his association with Smashmouth? Whatever the reason might be, I'm happy he's now modded into Sekiro as an enemy.

Thanks to modders Dropoff and Katalash, you can now replace the chained ogre mini-boss with Shrek. It's quite well done, as you can see in the below embedded Tweet:

I haven't finished Sekiro and never will, so seeing one of the game's early difficulty spikes suffer the indignity of being Shrek pleases me greatly. You can check out the mod here.

People loath the new Sonic film trailer. When it comes to soulless and opportunistic game-to-film adaptations, it's hard to remember anything prompting quite this much outrage (although maybe that's because it's 2019 and everyone is really angry all the time). 

It's easy to understand the reception: the Sonic in the forthcoming film doesn't look much like the Sonic of old. In my opinion, for what it's worth, he does at least look a bit more like a hedgehog than before. But that doesn't make the new design any less... terrifying. 

The outcry hasn't been lost on the film's director Jeff Fowler, who has taken to Twitter and promised to change the design. This is not insignificant: while it'd be easier to retro-fit CG graphics rather than, say, Jim Carrey's Eggman character (who looks just fine), for a director to make such drastic changes after an expensive promotional trailer has been released, and after the film's titular "iconic" character has been revealed, is quite massive.

"Thank you for the support. And the criticism," Fowler wrote. "The message is loud and clear... you aren't happy with the design and you want changes. It's going to happen. Everyone at Paramount & Sega are fully committed to making this character the BEST he can be..."

It's hard to imagine there being any enduring artistic value in the Sonic film, but then, maybe there will be. Either way, it's weird to see a director so quickly cave to the demands of vocal internet fans. Stand your ground! Maybe the new Sonic design means something to you. Or maybe he looks like that for another valid reason. Maybe we're meant to hate film Sonic. Either way, it's changing. 

Update: Sorry, folks, but mere minutes after our story went live, Valve confirmed that the teaser is in fact a fake. It's still pretty cool though. You can read my our initial thoughts on the presumed-fakeness of the video in the original story below:

Original story: A very impressive teaser that turned up today on YouTube has a lot of people wondering if a new Left 4 Dead game has suddenly sprung a big leak, or if Valve is perhaps trying its hand at viral marketing. It could be—Valve did recently tease a new "flagship" game coming this year, after all, and this wouldn't be the first time we've heard whispers of Left 4 Dead 3—but the far greater likelihood, sorry to say, is that it's a fake. 

For one thing, the video is complete and polished but purely environmental, which isn't at all how Valve rolls: Left 4 Dead is frantic and visceral (check out this L4D2 teaser for evidence of that), and this, for all the atmosphere it stokes, is not. The zombie hand at the end is suspicious as well, because it's a direct copy of the original L4D hand rather than something indicating the third game in the series. Joke about Valve's inability to get to "three" if you will, but I can't see it breaking an established pattern on a major game franchise just to nod-and-wink at a silly inside joke. 

I think the presence of real-world products in the game, like Pepsi and Life, also points toward fakeness. You can't just throw stuff like that into your game or your promo materials without some sort of licensing deal, and there's no evidence of that—and I don't see Valve doing that sort of thing in one of its game worlds anyway.

So it's possible that this could be a surprise L4D3 leak, but only very, very (I mean, very) slightly possible. We've reached out to Valve to ask, just in case, but I'm confident enough to call it now: Very nicely done, yes, but also very fake.