A splash of mud here, a battered bumper there. An engine held together with duct-tape and hope. Every car has a story, and Dirt 5 is no exception. This week, Codemasters got behind the wheel of their flashy new motor to deliver us a new trailer, crashing new story beats straight into Dirt 5’s career mode and confirming an October 9th release date for Dirt 5.
The celestial bodies have spoken. Outer Wilds‘ interstellar time-loop has reset once more – and this time, Epic exclusivity has been removed from the galactic equation. After making the announcement back in March, Mobius Digital’s clockwork solar system arrived on Steam today – leaving you with no excuse for not picking up the RPS crew’s favourite folksy space romp.
Electronic Arts this week introduced their Positive Play Charter, an updated set of player rules forbidding racist, sexist, homophobic, and other abusive behaviour in their games. The Apex and Battlefield publisher’s new Charter does cover similar ground to their existent rules, which basically said ‘hey don’t act like a racist dickhead’ and have evidently been ignored by many dickheads. The move is still good because: 1) the rules are more clear; 2) EA say they’ve put more resources into moderation and reporting to enforce them.
After a year of speculation, I’ve finally had a chance to play Humankind, Amplitude Studios’ much-anticipated competitor to the Civilization series, and while I only got to play through the very first era of the game on a single map, I can say for sure we’ve definitely got a contender here. I’m hesitant to say how strong a contender until I’ve seen more of the game, since I think Humankind’s brand of satisfaction is going to lean heavily on the way the outcomes of your decisions stack across thousands of simulated years. But the fact that I could see, even in the early game, how the calls I made might have ramifications for centuries to come, was a promising sign.
240Hz gaming monitors are all the rage among competitive esports circles at the moment, but I have to admit that I’ve never felt creakier or more decrepit playing games than I have with AOC’s C27G2ZU plonked on my desk. To be clear, I’m not casting shade on the monitor itself. This 27in, 1920×1080 gaming display has an absolutely top quality curved VA panel, and its AMD Freesync Premium support works beautifully with Nvidia and AMD graphics cards alike. It’s not one of Nvidia’s officially certified [cms-block] (yet), but it’s a fantastic gaming monitor nonetheless. I am, however, officially too old to keep up with its blistering 240Hz refresh rate.
AI bots are technological marvels. To think! We’ve imbued blips and blops with a semblance of sentience, turning code into pseudo-autonomous agents that can chat as they run around a virtual world. Unfortunately, people have been using this power to spew racist bots into Team Fortress 2. Players report seeing these bots enter their games, deploy game-breaking hacks, and spam the chat with racist slurs.
Valve haven’t explicitly acknowledged the problem, but they have introduced some measures that might help.
Students in Poland could soon play This War Of Mine as part of their education, as developers 11-Bit Studios today announced the grim survival game set in a war-torn city will be on next year’s school reading list. It’ll be recommended for those studying sociology, ethics, philosophy, and history, and will be available free to schools. While schools have used games for years, it’s pretty neat for a game to get so formally recognised – and such a non-edutainment game.
It’s only June, but we may have to close entries on the “weirdest marketing strapline of the year” awards, because Gigabyte have gone and smashed it, while also scooping up the “oddest freebie” trophy at the same time.
That strapline is “DO WHAT TASTES RIGHT!”. Is this a suggestion that you should eat their Radeon graphics card, or a warning that you should not?
If your laptop can barely muster up the computational strength to read Rock Paper Shotgun without a whole lot of wheezing and complaining, then it likely struggles with anything but the simplest games. One solution to this is GeForce Now which, for those unaware, lets even the weediest hardware play big releases by streaming them from Nvidia’s own ridiculously powerful servers. It’s like your PC is being possessed by considerably more powerful hardware – in a nice way.
At the PC Gaming Show last week, lovely woodland survival sandbox Among Trees was revealed to be in early access on the Epic Games Store. Like, right now. I got very excited and have been playing it in my spare moments ever since. My early access review will be along soon, but before that I wanted to highlight one thing in particular that I’m enjoying about the game, and that is its lovely little mushrooms.