This week, Destiny 2 started a new season, Warframe added spaceship battles, Forza Horizon 4 added a battle royale mode, Red Dead Online added a bootlegging business, and American Truck Simulator added a new truck. Read on for more of the week s PC gaming patches in The Weekly Updates Update.
Daybreak Game Company last night announced plans to shut down PlanetSide Arena on January 10th, 2020. The free-to-play battle royale FPS spun off from PlanetSide 2 launched into early access on September 19th, so that’s less than four months. Daybreak say it hadn’t attracted enough players to sustain the sort of large battles it’s meant to. The servers will shut down, the game will become unplayable, and people who paid real money for DLC or microntransaction cash will receive a refund.
As I am writing this right now, I still exist in that dreamlike anticipation prior to the UK general election. I don’t know yet what the results will bring, but I sure am tense about it. And so, it has been helpful to delve into an eensy bit of escapism. Video games do an alright job with taking one’s mind off things, and today I am especially grateful for Robert Yang’s Gay Western Game Jam. The jam took inspiration from a period of late-1800s American imperial expansion, but made it gay. All cowfolk are welcome here; all interpretations. What might The Old West look like if it were tweaked a bit? What new stories can be told about riding horses, or gay kissing, or the seemingly-endless American landscape?
Queer stories of reclamation and redemption are often about identity, and so there is a sort of power in queer stories about land, space, and the American west. The Gay Western Jam only just wrapped up, so these picks are fresh from the game jam mines.
And there it goes, the last full moon of the year. We’re getting darker and darker in the run-up to the winter solstice on the 22nd, which feels so far away right now. But you know what beams a huge amount of light right into your face? Video games.
What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
The Star War is the only thing I have been playing outside of work for weeks now. I am becoming intimately familiar with its workings: the push and pull combat, and also of the Force Push and Force Pull powers. It is a brilliant game that I love, but that I also find full of contradictions. Here are my five best and worst things about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. The twist is that each thing is both a best AND a worst! Haha!
Oh sure the dream of the dying wild west is grand and all, but Red Dead Online now offers players a grander dream: being Veronica Lodge off Riverdale. Rockstar today launched the Moonshiners Update, letting players start their own hooch business and build up to running a speakeasy. Get a pal to pretend to be Archie, running around beating up criminals. Another mate’s cutting about as Veronica, quietly offing people with her serial killer genes. Just don’t let yourself be someone else’s Reggie. Oh! Right, moonshining. Yes.
Party members were not being launched into space by cows then falling to their mock-deaths in The Outer Worlds, it turns out, but the truth isn’t much less strange. Obsidian Entertainment last night released a big bugfix patch for their sci-fi RPG, including a fix for the problem of the game sometimes declaring you’d failed companion quests because your pal had died – even though they were clearly alive. Obsidian tried to pin down this enigmatic bug for ages but its cause had proved elusive. Quality assurance lead Taylor Swope told the story of this bughunt on Twitter, and it’s good. The cause is a bit like Wile E. Coyote realising that the Road Runner has once again tricked him, and for several seconds he has been standing on thin air.
Like a heavily-sponsored Santa Claus, the Game Awards swept in last night and left us a pile of presents to unwrap. If you did the smart thing and slept through the event, you’ll have missed a bunch of new announcements. Alice O and Graham did some amazing work in writing up as much as they could as it happened, but a few sly games snuck past ’em. Plus, sometimes it’s just nice to have everything all in once place. Here’s everything that was announced.
Two weeks into the RPS Advent Calendar already! Let’s take up arms, brave companions, and batter down this door together. With a frying pan.