Hello everyone. It's a strange new frontier we're dropping into this week. James Law and I have produced words from our throats on the topic of Call Of Duty: Warzone. Yes, Warzone Audio Bang joins the Electronic Wireless Show and The PC Gaming Weekspot as Rock Paper Shotgun's third podcast. It's our hope that you can enjoy our fortnightly Warzone-related ramblings while you're doing things like cleaning the oven, or walking your cat.
Earlier this week, Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi unveiled his next RPG, Fantasian. Described as a "diorama adventure", as it uses real, handcrafted dioramas for its various locations, Fantasian looks pretty neat. There's still a lot we don't know about it at the moment, but one thing that really stood out during its initial reveal was its cool-looking battle system, in which you can send any monsters you encounter to an alternate dimension and biff them altogether at a later date so they don't interrupt the flow of exploration. Sakaguchi calls it the "Dimengeon Battle" system, and it sounds absolutely genius>.
Alas, the game is only coming to Apple Arcade at the moment, so it may never appear on PC, but the way Sakaguchi describes Fantasian's battle system has been stuck in my head all week. He talks about it specifically as being a "quality of life improvement to the classic JRPG genre," and it got me thinking. When did "quality of life" become such an important part of modern JRPGs, and will it change our relationship with our favourite JRPGs of yore?
Do you love products? I know I do. You can eat products, you can wear products, you can smear products all over your body. Products are terrific.
Publishers and developers have heard that you enjoy products, so they've taken to advertising some in their games. That's why we've centred this week's MSR on those video games that are trying to sell you stuff, like Lilt. Mmmmm, Lilt. The totally tropical taste.
In space no one can hear you scream. Well, unless you forgot to mute your mic.
This is a core conceit of surprise space-murder hit Among Us. But with multiplayer also> being a core part of the Among Us experience, muting mics and silence might not seem that meaningful. When you think about it, though, Among Us is all about that isolation coming from an Alien-style disaster unfolding in deep space. Every round is a set of scales perfectly balanced between paranoid quiet and heated debate. And it's the silence that makes Among Us one of the most compelling multiplayer experiences I’ve ever had.
Good news for all you Apex Legends fans who've been asking for a solos mode: Respawn Entertainment are about to add a new option that'll let you drop into the battle royale on your lonesome. It arrives on March 9th, alongside the game's Caustic-themed Chaos Theory Collection Event, and a new game mode that adds small pockets of Apex's deadly ring inside the arena's safe zones (well, not-so-safe zones anymore).
If you fancy playing with the daft Destiny 2 exploit which lets 12 players cram into activities very much not intended for 12 players, good news: Bungie aren't patching it out just yet. In their latest weekly dev blog, they said they do plan to fix the glitch (or try to, at least), but we have a while yet to enjoy raiding with a "clown car of Guardians". Oh, and Bungie want to know: would you rather dress up as a monster or a dinosaur?
I've given the free demo for third-person looter-shooter Outriders a whirl, and it is very much what you'd expect from a game that requires shooting, alongside some looting. Although I did crash to desktop a lot, and the strength of the motion blur gave me a headache. That was less good. Thankfully, a patch for the demo is on the way which is set to fix these issues and some other annoying bugs too.
Every day I wake up craving a new game that will fill the Hollow Knight-shaped hole in my heart, and I think Aeterna Noctis might just about do it. It's an upcoming 2D metroidvania that will have you slicing your way through evil baddies in settings that look like they're straight out of Hollow Knight. You're not a bug in this one though, you're a human man with a cool shadowy sword who's trying to regain his kingly powers.
While Diablo 2: Resurrected is giving Blizzard's seminal action-RPG a honking great 3D makeover, the game beneath is similar enough that apparently you can even load your old saves to continue playing. If you have them. And if you'd want to? I think it would be in your best interests not to.
Introversion, makers of Prison Architect and Uplink, are running a Fail Masterclass. Each month they reveal a new prototype for a game they've decided not to make over on their YouTube channel, and then make the prototype available to buy. All the money goes to the charity War Child.
This month's cautionary tale: Nanotech, a game about building microscopic creatures in a petri dish and giving them simple, gobbling behaviours. It looks neat.