You may have heard that Stardew Valley had had another huge update in December bringing a new farm map and some cool endgame secrets. It’s not the just the main game though, some of Stardew’s biggest mods were updated on the same day, including one of my personal favorites, Stardew Valley Expanded. This giant mod has also gotten its share of new characters, content, and a new farm map too.
Everything going terribly wrong is the theme of most of my Divinity: Original Sin 2 experiences. Fire everywhere, right? Speedrunners know this big RPG’s ins and outs much better than I do, but it turns out even they aren’t impervious to disaster—or fire. This year’s D:OS2 speedrun during the Awesome Games Done Quick marathon went totally off the rails but was an even more fun watch because of it.
When AMD unveiled their pair of next-gen Big Navi graphics cards at the end of 2020, there was hope that they’d bring some much needed competition to Nvidia’s latest crop of RTX 30 GPUs. Leading the pack was AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT, a £600 / $650 graphics card that aimed to take on Nvidia’s more expensive GeForce RTX 3080. Alas, the 6800 XT fell short when it came to matching the RTX 3080’s raw performance speeds, and AMD’s continued lack of any kind of frame rate-boosting DLSS competitor technology meant its ray tracing performance was also a bit underwhelming.
Now, I’ve finally been able to test the other Big Navi card in AMD’s initial RX 6000 line-up, the RX 6800. While its pricing and availability are all over the shop these days, this normally £529 / $579 graphics card is supposedly primed to sit alongside Nvidia’s similarly-priced RTX 3070. Can it succeed where the 6800 XT failed?
As with oh so many games originally planned for 2020, Bulletstorm devs People Can Fly’s shooter Outriders has slipped into 2021. They’ve announced a new date now, a bit later than the February mark they’d previously mentioned. The good news is that they’ll be putting a free demo in players’ hands in February instead and launch will happen not too long after in April.
All of game development is magical, truly, but there is a very special kind of excitement when environment artists unveil their work. A senior game designer over at Respawn Entertainment has done just that, showing off what some Medal Of Honor: Above And Beyond levels looked like before and after she turned them over to environment artists. It is, without exaggeration, wonderful.
Games about destruction tend not to do the whole destruction thing very well. Put it this way: for years Red Faction has been the banner for destruction in games, despite its most recent instalment releasing nine years ago and its core being rather more about shooting than destruction. While you can destroy lots of things> in Red Faction, there’s not much of a game> in it.
Thankfully, we now have a new banner destruction game: Teardown, a game in which you can destroy pretty much everything. But Teardown’s serendipitous and difficult journey from tech tinkering to release taught lead developer Dennis Gustafsson something important about the whole idea of letting players demolish stuff. “There’s this expectation that more destruction in games is always a good thing. But actually, it’s really, really hard to design something around a fully destructible world.” (more…)
Loved-up modders have managed to let Cyberpunk 2077‘s male V get sweaty with Judy, who in the game only becomes pals with gals. Their romance even has voice lines from male V. But while this has some players crowing about ‘cut content’ (a deeply cursed phrase, that), it’s all just noise distracting from the real hole in Cyberpunk 2077’s roster of eligible bachelors: why can’t I date Brendan, the vending machine?
If you fancy some new space flight shenanigans to kick off your 2021, then you might be pleased to learn Everspace 2 comes out in early access soon. Moving away from the roguelike style of the first Everspace, the sequel is a single-player looter shooter that plonks players into a big open-world campaign. It hits early access on Steam and GOG on January 18th.
Xbox Game Pass for PC is starting off the new year strong by adding the mysterious What Remains Of Edith Finch. It’s a first-person exploration game poking round the strange, sprawling house built by the possibly-cursed Finch family over generations. It’s a bit of an RPS fave, and will arrive on Microsoft’s subscription service on January 14th. This is one I’ve been meaning to get my hands on for ages, so now I truly have no excuse.
Lovecraftian RPG The Sinking City is available to buy again, after an ongoing legal dispute between developers Frogwares and publishers Nacon saw it removed from digital storefronts back in August. According to a statement from Nacon, the dispute is still pending in French courts. But, for now at least, The Sinking City is back for sale on Xbox One, and will be available on Steam and PS4 again soon.