Like these two fellows in the image above, or rather a man and his apparition, you’re probably sitting back with a cold brew wondering when you’ll be able to play Borderlands 3. Not only that, but you’ll be wanting to know if you can even run the game or if you need to make a few modifications to your gaming rig. Fear not, weary traveller, we managed to capture Claptrap and somehow managed to get the information out of him.

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Alexis Kennedy, co-founder of Failbetter and writer and designer on Fallen London, Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator, has been accused of being an abuser and “well-known predator” by several prominent women in the games industry, including an allegation from a former colleague at Failbetter. The allegations came as part of a recent wave of similar stories shared on Twitter, among them allegations made against composer Jeremy Soule and developer Alec Holowka. Kennedy has denied the allegations on Twitter and via a statement given to RPS, while Failbetter say they “believe and stand with everyone who has come forward.”

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Oh, to be a Mac owner. Not that we’ve got it great on PC – my rig’s been bricking it since last week’s Windows update, after all – but it’s been a long time since a big OS update killed half of my game library. Desktop gaming always gets around to leaving a generation behind, though. 32-bit applications have been on the chopping block for a few years – and with this month’s “Catalina” update, Apple are making the first move towards killing them off for good.

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Want a taste of what ‘next-gen’ graphics are going to look like? Well, the clever folks over at Square Enix’s Luminous Productions studio (the wizards wot made Final Fantasy XV) have just released a brand new tech demo called ‘Back Stage’ doing just that. Made in collaboration with Nvidia, this real-time ray tracing demo isn’t related to any particular game per se (or at least none that we know of), but its depiction of a woman having a chill moment doing her make-up in the mirror sure is a technical feast for the old eyeballs. Here’s the demo in full:

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What is best in a multiplayer survival sandbox? To crush your enemy, see him driven before you, and hear the adulation of the arena’s assembled crowd because all survival sandboxes must end in a fight club eventually. That’s now possible in Conan Exiles even on PvE servers, thanks to a new item added in an update yesterday. The new Battle Standards let players create duelling zones where anyone can issue PvP challenges to anyone. Build an arena, slam down the flag, and start rumbling. The update has added more, but frankly my interest is in the inevitable recreations of Kirk and Spock’s duel in Star Wars Episode II: Amok Time.

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Back in 2015, we posted about a prototype called The Endless Cylinder, from ACE Team, in which a small long-nosed animal wanders around a surreal planet. This prototype has now reemerged as The Eternal Cylinder, and is a proper game and everything. Although it’s all more polished, not a whole lot has changed from that original proof of concept (showing that it was probably a very good proof of concept in the first place). But it does now have a reassuring voiceover giving a bit of direction.

This was added because, said Carlos Bordeu, co-founder of the studio, “the game is so weird in some ways” that players do need something to grab hold of at first. I grabbed with gusto. It may have been my favourite thing I played at Gamescom, though it’s still being tweaked and perfected.

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I did not expect Gears 5 to feature an extended Hamilton parody. And yet here we are: escaping a besieged city by hunkering down in a theatre, its walls pasted with the iconic image of Alexander Hamilton pointing to the stars. Only it s not Hamilton, but Nassar Embry, who Gearspedia tells me was the founder of the Coalition of Ordered Governments. And it s not just an easter egg, but a committed bit: rooms full of Georgian era wigs, collectible lyric sheets (Lin-Manuel Miranda has nothing to fear) and a fight with a meat beast on a rotating stage set to Embry s soundtrack. Squint and it s another room of waist-high cover, sure, but the jazz hands are a jolly distraction.

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Good news, everyone. The boffins down in the labs have been hard at work down in R&D, plugging test punks into each other. No, don’t mind the gore… watch the bloodied arm, please>. CD Projekt Red have crunched the numbers, and the news is in. This morning, the studio confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer is on its way.

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A lot of beef has been thrown over Overwatch‘s Role Queue. It kicked off back in July, when Blizzard chose to restrict professional Overwatch League team compositions into ‘2-2-2’ builds, requiring equal representation from Damage, Tank and Support roles. They did this in the middle of the latest tournament. It was weird.

I don’t watch or particularly care about the pro scene, but last night’s update means the same system applies to Quick and Competitive Play and so directly affects me. I have thoughts!

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I don’t think we ever see the extent of Wilmot’s horror. He’s a square in charge of a warehouse, single-handedly responsible for storing and serving up hundreds of amorphous objects. We, the player, only see those objects from the top-down, a step removed from the abject terror of categorising off-colour melon slices that simultaneously resemble 50% of an egg. Maybe reality is less blurry from his perspective, but I doubt it. Wilmot’s Warehouse is a world of raw pictorial language, and an ingenious platform to explore how language works in our own world.

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