Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: plagues, vikings and ancient cities.
If you'd asked me a week ago to give you the whats and wheres and whens of ancient Mesopotamia, my history-deficient brain wouldn't have had much of a clue. Now, though, thanks to Nepos Games' engrossing old-school city builder, Nebuchadnezzar, I feel like I've an entire history lesson's worth of facts and figures with which to regale you.
That surprising bounty of actual historical context is just one of Nebuchadnezzar's lovely touches, niftily informing the structure and difficulty curve of its main campaign so your Mesopotamian city's rise from a couple of huts to a sprawling metropolis unfolds through the gradual introduction of chronologically correct new buildings and other mechanical complexities. You're essentially discovering new stuff at the same time your city's founders would have done in their own historical timeline.
Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Rise is coming to PC, with a port due to come out early in 2022.
Monster Hunter Rise marks the debut of Capcom's hugely successful series on its own RE Engine, with the Switch version due out towards the end of March. It introduces new traversal options and, of course, new monsters to hunt down, and looks set to be one of the gaming highlights of 2021.
Monster Hunter World saw some 16.8 million units shifted, with the profile of the series finally being raised in the west. Capcom will surely be looking to replicate some of that success with Monster Hunter Rise as it extends beyond the Switch.
Developer BioWare's highly anticipated new Dragon Age game is reportedly now a strictly single-player experience, with EA having pivoted its demands for a live-service-style game following the success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and the failure of Anthem.
As reported by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, sources familiar with the matter say the next Dragon Age title was previously being designed with a heavy multiplayer component.
The project reportedly first entered development in 2015, but Bloomberg says the original vision was rebooted by EA and BioWare in 2017, in a grasp for long-term monetisation. This reboot - supposedly dismissed by some employees as "Anthem with dragons" - is said to be the reason behind the departure of creative director Mike Laidlaw that same year.
Subnautica: Below Zero, the standalone expansion to Unknown Worlds' brilliant 2018 underwater survival adventure, will finally be getting its full version 1.0 release on 14th May.
Below Zero will have been in early access for nearly two and half years by the time May comes around (its predecessor, by way of contrast, was in early access development for slightly longer, at just over three years), and its full launch will see the game make the leap to Nintendo Switch, alongside Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.
If you've not been keeping up with developments, Subnautica: Below Zero takes place after the first game and challenges players, cast in a new role, to survive on a previously unseen part of ocean planet 4546B - through familiar systems of building, crafting, and exploration.
Nightdive Studios has confirmed its long-in-the-works System Shock remake will finally launch this summer, and, to give players a taste of its enhanced action, a new demo launches today.
It's been a long and eventful road for the System Shock remake, which was originally intended to be a remaster of Looking Glass Technologies' classic first-person sci-fi horror before ballooning in scope. By the time its Kickstarter commenced in July 2016, it was being referred to as a "reboot" and, after a rocky period of development, Nightdive announced it was putting the project on hiatus after letting "things get out of control".
Despite those rough few years, Nightdive eventually managed to get the project back on track - albeit by essentially restarting with more focussed goals - and development's been steadily ticking forward ever since, with the studio providing frequent updates on its progress.
Call of Duty: Warzone's new point of interest has arrived - and it's absolute carnage.
Drop into Verdansk right now and you'll see the new Shipwreck in the bottom right hand corner of the map.
It's the Vodianoy cargo ship that's been threatening to crash into the map - and, as expected, it's got zombies on it.
Although it sounds a little like the Norse idea of Ragnarök, shortly after Valheim's launch some players discovered a serious "world-destroyer" bug that could reset your progress - a problem that was very much not intended. Thankfully, developer Iron Gate Studio has today rolled out a patch to address that, so now the main bug you need to worry about is the Deathsquito.
As reported by players at the time, it seems the world destroyer bug was indeed connected to logging out and pressing ALT+F4 at the same time. Following the patch, this will no longer cause the end of days.
Elsewhere in the patch notes, Iron Gate explains the biggest change is the "updated socketed backend" which should help improve connection issues. Vulkan support has also been added for Windows users to help with some crashes related to GPU drivers, and can be enabled by adding "-force-vulkan" as a launch option in the Steam properties menu for Valheim.
Xenomorph and Ripley from the Alien franchise are coming to Fortnite.
The characters are the latest in a string of retro tie-ins to be added this season, such as Predator (free for Battle Pass holders), Terminator, Sarah Connor and outfits from Tron. Street Fighter characters Ryu and Chun-Li also joined last week.
An in-game portal teasing the arrival of Alien's heroine and antagonist has been found on the Fortnite island, while the latest audio log, below, has plenty of hints.
CD Projekt yesterday announced that the next update for Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed until March, following a severe cyber attack that held source code and internal documents to ransom. A new report by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has now detailed exactly how disruptive the attack was, leaving employees locked out of their workstations for two weeks and scrambling to freeze personal accounts.
According to the Bloomberg report [paywall], most CD Projekt employees are currently working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic. As a result of the cyber attack and CD Projekt's refusal to pay the ransom, employees have been unable to log into the company's virtual private network for weeks - leaving the majority of developers unable to access the tools and systems required for their work. Some employees were also asked to send their computers to CD Projekt's IT staff to check whether malware had been installed during the attack.
On top of this, the report says the hack may have exposed employees' personal information, such as Polish identification numbers and passport details. CD Projekt apparently asked staff to freeze their accounts and report the breach to "relevant parties".