Cyberpunk 2077, which was slated to be out this April, isn't going to make it. CD Projekt Red dropped the news today that its big ugly-future-RPG has been rescheduled to September 17.
The full delay announcement is below.
R. Talsorian Games, the company that created the Cyberpunk tabletop RPGs that Cyberpunk 2077 is based on, expressed support for the delay on Twitter.
Horace is an unpredictable platformer with a narrative bent and plenty of mechanical twists. It's not what it always seems, but to find out more you'll need to take it for a spin yourself. Thankfully, it's free on the Epic Games Store for a week.
OK, maybe you can find out a bit more before you take the plunge. Here's Dominic Tarason's take on why this weird platformer is more than worth a look:
Six hours into Horace and after several genre shifts, I officially gave up trying to predict what this narrative-driven adventure was hiding up its sleeve next. What started as a gentle if cutscene-heavy platformer about a robot butler and his quest to clean up rubbish had metamorphosed into a grand, generation-spanning adventure, dense with pathos, some dark humour, plus some genuine tragedy when you least expect it. Best, then, to go with the flow and see where the story took me.
You can grab Horace for free on the Epic Games Store until January 23, followed by monochromatic puzzler The Bridge.
Slay the Spire's The Watcher is the game's fourth playable character, and she's finally here. This blind monk heads into battle wielding a staff, but much of her power comes from her ability to enter different stances, each of which drastically changes the way she plays.
Correct use of these stances holds the potential for incredible power, but also make Slay the Spire's 4th character tough to master. Here’s how to get to grips with her, as well as a couple of deck ideas to get you going.
The Watcher’s most important mechanic is her use of stances. There are three different stances which allow The Watcher to use other cards; Calm, Wrath, and Divinity. The Watcher cannot have No Stance.
The Watcher starts each encounter in No Stance, which has no effect on her other cards. The two most common stances are Calm, which grants 2 energy once you leave it, and Wrath, which causes The Watcher to both deal and receive double damage as long as she remains in it.
The final stance is Divinity. When The Watcher enters this stance, she gains 3 energy, and while in it, she deals triple damage, but will automatically leave Divinity at the end of her turn. This is the most powerful stance, but the most difficult to enter. While Calm and Wrath can be entered and exited by a number of cards, Divinity is only activated by gaining 10 Mantra, a resource only gathered by a small number of cards, or by playing the card Blasphemy, which kills The Watcher at the beginning of her next turn.
Timing is key when playing as Slay the Spire's Watcher. Many decks leverage her ability to retain cards until they can be used most effectively by swapping stances. The easiest way to do this is by using Wrath’s damage multiplier, but doing so makes it easy to open yourself up to unnecessary damage.
It’s a good idea to keep a card to hand that will let you enter Calm: not only will using that stance help avoid any extra punishment, it’ll provide extra energy ahead of your next move. Similarly you can use Divinity to empower your attacks more with less risk, but be careful not to overcommit.
Like the other three classes, The Watcher begins each run with a starting relic and a basic deck. She starts with four strikes and defends, and one card for entering Wrath and Calm—Eruption deals 9 damage and enters Wrath, while Vigilance grants 8 block and enters Calm. Your starting relic is Pure Water, which grants another card, Miracle. This, at the start of each combat encounter, costs nothing, but grants 1 bonus energy. Miracle is automatically retained at the end of each turn, but is exhausted on use.
Retain Deck
This kind of build requires plenty of patience: it build up to an extremely powerful attack that aims to sweep your opponents aside in one. Naturally it relies heavily on Retain cards, but also on Establishment, a Power that reduces the cost of a card by 1 each time it’s retained.
Offensively Retain decks benefit most from Windmill Strike, which gains 4 damage every time it’s retained. If you can hold a sufficient amount for long enough, they’ll not only be free, but also capable of dealing huge damage, especially when you’re in Wrath. More importantly however, you’ll need cards that'll keep you alive long enough for this deck to ramp up in power. Perseverance and Protect are key to this, with the former's effectiveness over time being particularly helpful.
Retain also requires the ability to swap between stances quickly. While Eruption and Vigilance are helpful for this, Crescendo and Tranquility are useful alternatives. You’ll also want plenty of draw, for which Scrawl is likely to be a crucial card: it'll help fill your hand with important cards.
Mantra Deck
While Wrath and Calm are the most common stances, Divinity shouldn’t be overlooked. Like Wrath, it allows for increased damage output, but it’s less risky and provides bonus energy. Entering Divinity costs 10 Mantra, and the aim of this deck is to gain this resource as often as possible, to help you quickly enter Divinity without suffering the risk attached to Blasphemy.
Only four cards provide Mantra. Devotion is a Power card that gives you 2 every turn, which makes it an integral part of the deck and extremely useful if you’re able to upgrade it or play multiple copies of it. Prostrate only provides 2 Mantra, but costs nothing and also provides a small amount of Block. Pray provides 3, as well as Insight, a 0-cost card which lets you to draw extra cards. Worship is a little more expensive, but provides 5 Mantra. One more card, Brilliance, interacts with Mantra, dealing increased damage depending on the amount acquired during battle, which offers a potent offensive solution. Equally Damaru is a useful relic, as it provides 1 Mantra per turn.
None of these cards are particularly good on their own (with the possible exception of Brilliance), which makes Mantra decks something you’ll likely want to pivot to over time, rather than something to commit to at the start of a run. If you go with it, get a good amount of Block and Draw cards, but don’t forget that you’ll also need offensive cards to exploit Divinity’s damage buff. With any luck, you won’t need to rely on Wrath at all, so using Calm cards is a better early game strategy.
Whichever deck you choose, Slay the Spire's The Watcher benefits from a few key relics. Anything that provides extra energy, like Ice Cream, Happy Flower, or Gremlin Horn helps pull off those important offensive turns. If you’re using many cards at once, relics like Shuriken and Ornamental Fan shouldn’t be overlooked. Damage reduction or Block relics like Orichalcum and Fossilized Helix should help stall, especially if you’re going for longer-term strategies.
Rocket League's new arena, the Forbidden Temple, is a fetching car-ball battlefield all decked out reds and purples, and it will be available to everyone from January 20 to celebrate Chinese New Year.
Along with the Forbidden Temple, the Lucky Lanterns event will also let you earn red envelopes that can be redeemed for New Year rewards, including some very flashy cosmetics for your wee cars, including paper dragon kites and new dragon-themed skins. Get your hands on limited-time golden lanterns and you'll also be able to unlock items from Champions Series 1, 2 and 3.
If you've taken a break from Rocket League, you might have missed a spot of controversy that hit the game late last year. Psyonix has done away with loot boxes, normally a cause for celebration, but the community wasn't too chuffed with what replaced them: an item shop that tipped over the game's economy.
Along with the shop, players can now get blueprints that can be crafted into a new item, at the cost of some credits. While it's removed the randomness of the old system, it also means you can't get lucky and net yourself a rare item for the price of a single (no longer available) key. Since the update, however, Psyonix has reduced most blueprint prices, with the exception of black market items.
Complaints seem to have died down since the price reduction, so hopefully everyone is in a better mood this year.
The Lucky Lanterns event kicks off on January 20 and ends on February 10,
Over the last two years, mindfulness and mental health apps have skyrocketed in popularity. Self-care and wellbeing apps were named Apple's top trend of 2018 with an abundance of apps like Fabulous, Calm, Headspace, Shine, and Joyable packed with meditation techniques, healthier habits, breathing exercises, and audio pep-talks. According to Marketdata (via the Washington Post) the market for these kinds of services topped $1 billion in the US and have continued to release into 2019 and 2020.
Self-care and mental health apps have become a viable market for business as more people are investing time in their mental wellbeing. Some apps are even taking it further by offering professional help to app users. But is e-counselling the way forward? Eliza is a visual novel that grapples with this complicated topic. Developed by Zachtronics, Eliza explores a future where digital therapy and e-counseling are an accessible and on-demand service available to everyone.
The story is about a one-to-one AI counseling service named Eliza and the woman who created it, Evelyn. Eliza is an AI therapist that listens to patients and replies through a human 'proxy'. The company behind the AI, Skandha, believes that having a human proxy makes the computer's clinical script and sound warm and understanding. The AI listens to the user and then recommends breathing exercises, VR experiences, medication and the use of a wellness app. The story follows Evelyn as she decides to reconnect with the group who helped her develop Eliza. This might seem like science fiction, but Eliza was inspired by real projects.
"I saw this demo of this research project, which was a virtual counselor," Eliza developer Matthew Bruns says. "It had a camera trained on the person who was talking and it did all these metrics on their face to see if they were smiling, or laughing or sad and track their movement. It had a low poly Second Life-looking avatar that would talk to you.
"It was a research project that was funded by DARPA, which is the Department of Defense's research arm. They were thinking about how they could, they could treat soldiers with PTSD. I remember sitting there seeing this demo and it brought about this dystopian feeling. Imagining being 20 years old and being sent to Afghanistan then coming back with PTSD and they won't even give you like a real person to talk to."
The research funded project Burns saw was the SimSensai and MultiSense healthcare support project. Burns also decided to name the AI therapist after a computer program from the 60s of the same name that was designed to emulate a psychotherapist, a program that you can still chat with.
Burns also took research from a bunch of other wellness apps, the online counselling app BetterHelp that lets you speak to a therapist, WoeBot the CBT and mindfulness chatbot, Wysa the AI life coach, and Youper, an emotional health assistant. Eliza is an extension of these apps, and in the game, it's a revolutionary program and a useful service for many people with mental health issues. But, like with many real-world mental health technologies, there is something else beneath the surface.
As the story continues, Eliza's corporate higher-ups decide to introduce a new 'transparency' option in Eliza that patients can willingly opt into. The transparency option promises better results as long as the program, and it's human proxies, can look at the patients' personal information. This information is not only seen by the human proxies but is also gathered into valuable data that Eliza's parent company can do with as it pleases. E-couselling and therapy apps can make a world of difference to its users, but Eliza asks the question: at what cost?
"Therapy should be like one of the most intimate things that you share with people," Burns says. "And yet, it also feels weirdly clinical and medical in a way. That's something I wanted to represent in the game. People are talking about some of the darkest, most intimate things about them and yet it's also being processed through this mass data centre.
"Regardless, I didn't want to just say that Eliza is 100% bad because sometimes being prompted to talk with someone who sounds like they're listening is good and so I wanted to reflect that complexity there."
It really is a complex topic. In Burn's world, Eliza is a revolutionary counselling device that genuinely helps people and changes their lives. At the same time Eliza reflects a major problem with the dangers of health monitoring technology.
There have been plenty of apps that record a person's physical body—blood pressure, pregnancy, body weight, menstrual cycles—and now there is a movement towards mental health profiling and tracking. A 2018 study by Science Direct found out of 61 prominent mental health apps, almost half of them did not have a privacy policy explaining to users how their personal information would be collected, used, and shared with third parties.
One of the most popular apps for depression on Apple's store, Moodpath, actively uses third-party tools to share a user's personal information with both Facebook and Google—it discloses this information under section seven in its privacy policy. It's no secret that Facebook actively buys and sells user data on a mass scale.
There are numerous other examples of the sharing of people's personal data. There's the controversy behind the previously mentioned counseling service app BetterHelp. It was revealed that the pregnancy tracking app FLO was sharing its user's data with Facebook. These monitoring apps even have a future role in the workplace—Activision Blizzard is encouraging its employees to use health tracking and family planning apps.
As you play the game, you discover that Eliza's parent company, Skandha, is collecting the private information that people reveal in their sessions.
"It was very important to me to make that feel as insidious as it is in real life," Burns explains. "It's very easy to like create a science fiction story where there's a dystopia and the evil corporation very obviously does evil. It's all dark and with neon colours, and it's always nighttime and raining right? But that's not what it looks like in real life. There's a moment at the very beginning of Eliza when a man talks about how he's severely depressed but at least things look nice."
Eliza is an important reflection on our lives and culture; examining a world where people's deeply personal experiences are being churned into data. Burns captures this sentiment perfectly in a single sentence from one of the characters: "thousands of people reveal their most intimate secrets to their therapists every day, this is just a more efficient way to complete that information transfer."
"It's not some fantasy like this is a thing that's happening right now," Burns says "I was talking to someone who worked at Amazon and I was telling him about the premise of Eliza and he just said, Oh yeah, we're working on that. People are talking to their Amazon Alexa and that data is going to Amazon so there's nothing even that fantastical about it."
Eliza helps us reflect on how our information is being used, by whom, and for what purpose. It warns of what could happen when invasive data collection techniques are used to gather information from vulnerable people.
Welcome to our guide to all of the PUBG glider spawns. One of the key risk/reward choices you need to make in any battle royale game is whether you're happy to cover long distances if that means alerting your remaining rivals. Now that the new Motor Glider has arrived for PUBG season 6, that gambit is even more acute.
That's because this bright yellow beast is loud, but you may need to make a last-gasp choice to get yourself out of a hot zone or an area at risk of being consumed by The Circle—if you can reach the necessary speed of 70km/h to take off. You must also fill the engine before it's started, so you'll need to hold your nerve. That said, it helps that the PUBG Motor Glider is a two-seater: one of you can pilot the thing with another providing covering fire.
But even if you decide to take the risk on piloting a Motor Glider, you'll need to know where you can find them. So, to rain down battle royale death from above, here's how many PUBG glider spawns there are, and where they're located.
After a period of testing of the new vehicle, the number of locations in which you can find the glider has decreased. Originally, according to PUBG Labs, "we used to have 10 motor gliders spawned in 10 spawn locations, so 100% spawn rate on each location."
In other words, the glider spawn locations were effectively fixed, but now, once you approach a spawn point, it has a 25 percent chance of appearing now that the glider has transitioned to the live game: "We'll be changing this to 10 gliders randomly spawned in 40 spawn locations." That said, expect more testing, and potential spawn tweaks, to continue.
Thanks to PlayerIGN we know know the locations of all the glider spawn points. In the tweet above you can see the 40 each on Erangel and Miramar, the only two maps to feature the vehicle so far. Remember though, even if you are near one of these spots, there's only a 24 percent chance it'll be there right now. If you're lucky, buckle yourself in and enjoy an airborne chicken dinner on me.
The previously leaked Stadium map appears in a new Rainbow Six Siege in-game event, which will run for five consecutive weekends in the lead up to the Six Invitational 2020 next month. Live now, the 'Road to Six Invitational Event' is centred around the familiar bomb defusal mode, and while it's unranked, it'll play by the rules of a ranked match.
The map itself looks cool: it's a glass walled training ground built inside a stadium. Players will have access to all operators, though crucially, none of them will actually die. "Each Operator will be wearing a SIM-SUIT that has been developed by R6-LABS," reads the Ubisoft rundown. "It is their first layer of clothing, worn beneath all of their combat gear. The SIM-SUIT provides real-time telemetry of all contact the Operator receives and calculates its simulated damage, providing near-instantaneous feedback." In other words, this is as friendly as Siege gets.
There's also an associated Battle Pass, with a free and a paid tier: you can see some of the loot in the trailer below. The Rainbow Six Invitational takes place in Montreal from February 14-16. While you wait, here's what Morgan thinks is in store for Siege in 2020.
The Humble Sweet Farm Bundle is, as the name suggests, concerned with a life of raising crops and tending herds. But "farming," in this case, is defined very loosely. At the $1 tier, for instance, you get Niche, a "genetics survival game" in which you create and evolve your own species; MagiCat, a platformer about a cat in a hat (but not the hat); and Evergarden, a narrative puzzle game set in a magical forest.
Beat the average, currently a bit north of $7, and you'll also get Equilinox, a "relaxing nature game" that lets you create your own unique ecosystem of plants and animals; Ultimate Chicken Horse, a party platformer about forcing animals to perform life-threatening stunts; and Samorost 3, a wonderfully bizarre adventure about hippies in space.
The farming finally comes into focus for $10 or more, which will top the package off with Stardew Valley, the hit retro-fantasy about life on a farm you inherit from your grandfather. The other games in the bundle are worth the price of admission, but this is the real attraction: We called Stardew Valley "the PC's best farm-based RPG" in our 2019 ranking of the 100 best games on PC. It normally goes for $15 by itself on Steam, so this is a good way to pick it up on the cheap and get some really good bonus games on the side. (Samorost 3, my personal favorite, usually sells for $20, so that's a solid steal too.)
The bundle also includes the Niche, MagiCat, and Samorost 3 soundtracks. Funds raised will go to support Sweet Farm, "the first non-profit sanctuary in the world to address the impacts of factory farming across animals, plants, and the planet." It's available until February 4.
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In Path of Exile, trading items with other players is a whole other game in itself. Nearly every piece of loot you find while adventuring can be traded away, and if you know the right stuff to look for you can make an absolutely absurd amount of money. But what if you don't know how to trade in Path of Exile? Don't sweat it. This guide covers all the basics.
If you've just started playing, a big part of what makes Path of Exile cool is its complex bartering economy. Unlike, say, Diablo 3, there's no single currency like gold that you use to purchase items from NPC vendors or other players. Instead, trading in Path of Exile is done in a variety of currencies that also double as crafting resources. When you sell loot to a vendor, they'll also pay you in these currencies. It's a little bit complicated, but don't sweat it too much—before long, you'll start to get the hang of things.
Unlike other online RPGs, Path of Exile doesn't have any sort of in-game infrastructure to facilitate trading with other players. There's no auction house to browse, so the only way to trade is to physically find a person and manually start a trade with them. It's a pretty standard interface where you can each drag items from your inventory into the trade window, which requires both players to agree before the trade is finalized.
To find out what other players have for sale, use Poe.trade. This tool, built into Path of Exile's website, let's you search through items that other players have marked for sale.
Here's a quick rundown of how this process works:
The below image shows where the whisper button is, since it's hard to find.
This is a little bit trickier and will require you to also spend a little bit of money. In order to list items for sale and make them appear on Poe.trade, you need to have a premium stash tab. The chest found in every main hub and your hideout is your stash, and it normally comes with just four basic tabs (think of them like pages) for you to store loot in.
Premium tabs have a few extra features:
Don't worry, though, making a tab public doesn't mean anyone can come and take your items.
The video below is also an excellent guide to trading by YouTuber Engineering Eternity.
In Path of Exile's microtransaction shop, you'll find a category for stash tabs that offers a bunch of different tabs that suit various purposes. Some have special layouts for organizing your crafting items, maps, or other unique types of loot you might find. If you play Path of Exile seriously, it's worth investing in a few of these tabs.
Here are the two I recommend buying to start:
With your new premium tab, you can now right click it to set its color and also set it to public. You have two options for how to sell items:
For now, you'll probably want to individually price your items since you only have one premium tab and the value of loot can vary wildly.
When you drop any gear into this premium tab, you can right click it and set its price, choosing how many of a certain type of crafting resource you want someone to pay for it. Then, assuming it's priced reasonably and is an item people actually want, other players will soon start messaging you.
I could give a whole seminar on what items are worth selling to other players and which ones are worth dumping at an NPC vendor. There is no simple answer to this and items value can change wildly over the course of a patch. But there are some simple steps you can take to find out if an item might be worth some money.
Since Poe.trade lists all other people trying to sell that item, the first thing you can do is search for similar items to yours and see how much of a price they fetch. This works particularly well with Unique items (the ones with the brown names). But it's also important to remember that even two Uniques can have a wildly different value depending on the layout and color of their sockets and their overall item level. For example, if you find a Unique at level 13, it'll be vastly weaker than the same Unique found by someone who is level 80.
If your search doesn't return any results, cast a wider net before giving up. Use the advanced search to filter by the item's base type and pick a wider range of item levels to see other items that are similar but not exactly the same.
The above video by Engineering Eternity is a great resource that breaks down what items you should be looking for while playing. It doesn't tell you how much you can get for those items (since prices are shifting all the time), but it will help you understand what stats to look for on gear.
As I mentioned above, Path of Exile doesn't have a generic currency like gold used for trading. Instead, players barter using crafting materials. Called orbs, these each have a variety of effects that are useful for modifying items that, in turn, affects their overall value. However, the de facto standard (what you could think of as the equivalent of a dollar) is a Chaos Orb. These are relatively rare, but once you reach Path of Exile's endgame you can expect most transactions to require a certain amount of Chaos Orbs—so you should always hold onto them when you find one.
This website shows a breakdown of the major currencies and what the conversion rate is to other crafting currencies. As an example, right now you'd need around 160 Orbs of Alteration, which are super common, to get a single Chaos Orb. Path of Exile's rarest item, the Mirror of Kalandra, costs a whopping 48,300 Chaos Orbs.
When deciding on what items to sell, I'd say that unless you're guaranteed a Chaos Orb, it's probably not worth your time. Players certainly sell items for much less—and it's possible to make a fortune that way—but more casual players should be out exploring dungeons instead of trying to play the market, unless that's your thing of course.
My default position on piracy is that it's bad and you shouldn't do it. Entertainment has value, and if you are entertained then you should be willing to pay for it. That said, I also acknowledge that it's not always a simple, black-and-white situation. Which brings us to the story of Danger Gazers, "a post-apocalyptic roguelite top-down shooter" released earlier this month that saw a big boost in sales after its developer uploaded it to The Pirate Bay.
Danger Gazers is $10 on Steam, but if you don't feel like dropping a tenner, that's okay too. "This torrent was officially brought to you by ShotX. This is the latest DRM-free version of Danger Gazers (1.1.0), there's no catch here, no Steam only features, just the fully functional game," the torrent description says. "As a developer, my only request would be to consider supporting and buying in case you like Danger Gazers and want more indie games in the future."
The developer, Shota Bobokhidze, went deeper into his reasons for sharing the game on TPB last week on Reddit. "There are people who can't afford the game, some want to play the game before buying, some that never buy games. Just trying to help those people out and make the best of the situation," he wrote.
"There are a lot of ways to show support if you want to without buying the game, such as spreading the word about DG, sharing the torrent, feedback, whatever it is you can come up with. And finally, I hope you have fun and enjoy the game!"
The TPB release wasn't a "planned PR move," Bobokhidze told TorrentFreak, and he didn't promote it on social media or his studio website, as he wanted to reach out to the pirate community specifically. Nonetheless, the response so far has been "amazing," There's also been "a noticeable boost in sales," which he specified to Polygon as a 400 percent increase in sales over launch day.
"And it didn’t stop there, some kind individuals went out of their way to donate more than twice as much (as the $10 purchase price) and I received countless emails from all the people who showed their support," he said. "I'm thankful that my message was clear and thankful for all the support."
The Steam numbers are still dire: Steam Charts indicates that Danger Gazers' all-time peak concurrent player count is 7, which isn't great. But it's also available (and currently on sale) on Itch.io, which is apparently where supporters ponied up extra cash. (Itch.io enables purchasers to pay more than the list price for games if they want to.) Bobokhidze said in his Discord server that he's also planning on setting up a Patreon so fans can support ShotX's work more easily.