The Epic Games Store has started testing out achievements, which is nice. I like it when I do something ridiculous in Slay The Spire and a little picture comes up acknowledging how awesome I am (and ideally just how small a percentage of people are awesome in the same way). I would like this for Epic-only games too.

They’ve shown off some for Ark: Survival Evolved, but beyond that it’s not clear which games currently have them.

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Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord does allow you to develop settlements into money making machines, but in order to get the most gold flowing through your town, you need to ensure that you have the right infrastructure in place. Setting up workshops is key to doing this and there are some workshops that are better for your specific towns than others.

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I want to like Sea Of Thieves so badly that I’ve convinced myself I do> like it, even though deep inside I find it quite dull to play. I don’t understand why I find it dull. The premise is superb, it looks great, and I know lots of folks who routinely have the time of their lives being weird, balloon-bodied pirates. I just can’t seem to see what they’re seeing.

Well, that’s not strictly true. The few sessions I have played, with folks here at RPS, have been a right laugh. But without sounding like a bit of a poorly elephant, I mostly put that down to my colleagues being fun people to hang out with, rather than to anything we actually did in the game (although firing myself out of a cannon at a kraken was fairly noteworthy). Even if the fun I’ve had is largely down to company, mind, I’ll still applaud Sea Of Thieves for providing such a pretty, easygoing place to hang out.

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If I’ve learned anything from Jurassic Park over the years it’s that running a dinosaur zoo is a harrowing undertaking. No less harrowing in Parkasaurus, it seems. These dinos may be neon-colored and wear tiny hats but they can still escape and munch on your guests. You can start running your own park and tending to its giant inhabitants when Parkasaurus graduates from early access on August 13th.

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Crystal Dynamics’ latest War Table video for upcoming Marvel’s Avengers premiered today, during which they gave a look at what sounds like a pretty stacked beta. They go over all the many mission types you’ll be able to play through prior to launch and gave a teaser for the first hero they plan to add to the crew when the game’s properly out.

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Summer is for squares, according to me, the liker of snow. So I’m quite glad to see that Frostpunk‘s next DLC expansion is putting an emphasis on the “frost” bit after its prior expansion, The Last Autumn, was a prequel story taking place before endless winter set in. On The Edge is set after the original Frostpunk campaign, sending some New London residents out into uncharted territory on August 20th.

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Have you had enough vampires yet? No, of course not. There are still flocks yet to come this year, a number of them hailing from the World Of Darkness setting. We’re still expecting big RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 sometime this year, and it looks like it’ll be joined by another visual novel in the same world. Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows Of New York is planned for 2020 as well.

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Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game about cutting up spaceships with heavy industrial tools for cash. It’s a thrill to drift in zero-G, slicing and chopping and severing hull panels, superstructures, cockpits, airlocks, partly because the way you take them apart is up to you. You know what you have to do as soon as you get into space; you just need to figure out how.

That was also the experience of developer Blackbird Interactive as it began to develop Shipbreaker and brought it to Early Access. The theme quickly crystallised, but figuring out how freeform cutting would actually work was a lot harder, setting stern technical challenges that were never really solved, posing questions about player freedom that resulted in surprising answers, and causing spaceship designers’ nightmares.

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The folks that are bringing you Wasteland 3 are also working on another cold and deadly hellscape, only this one’s got 19 other players in it. Frostpoint VR: Proving Grounds is a team-based shooter where two groups of ten battle it out in a military base in Antarctica. It’s planned to hit VR headsets later this year.

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I’ve already posted about Valorant‘s new upcoming agent, but now she’s official. Following an accidental leak, Riot have unveiled Killjoy in the way they meant to: with a trailer that looks like one of those commercials for stupidly expensive gadgets you don’t need. She’s a turret-packing, grenade-chucking, robot-deploying hacker who looks a bit like ex-RPS vidbud Alice Liguori.

I’m being snarky but I do quite like the trailer. And Alice Liguori.

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