As an on-off Arma 3 fan (250 hours seems like nothing in the Arma scheme of things), I generally find the base game not much of a game. Even with all the DLC, it’s still more of a sandbox for you to fill and play, but that’s what it was built to do. Others agree, which is why there are 89,000 mods on the Arma 3 Steam Workshop. Here’s some of the best.
In the end, the finals of the 2021 Total War: Warhammer World Championship come down to an overextension. French finalist Alfredino’s Archmage of Fire, leading his High Elves from the back of a giant eagle, pushes past the safety provided by ranks of elite archers. His Russian opponent Evenstar's Wood Elf caster drops a Tempest spell. The arcane whirlwind plays havoc with Alfredino’s Archmage, leaving the elf caster wounded and near immobilised. It’s then the Wood Elves’ deadly arrows come, sealing the Archmage’s fate.
Losing a general is always a morale hit, but for players this practised, it isn’t always a death sentence. In this case it’s a disadvantage Alfredino, despite some excellent cavalry plays, never quite manages to recover from. The finals wrap, and Evenstar takes the lion’s share of the $4,200 prize pool. A relatively humble figure, as far as organised e-sports go, but this isn’t some sponsored, glitzy event.
It's almost three years since La-Mulana 2 launched, which is just about long enough for you to possibly have solved its many mysteries by now. How fortunate, then, that the makers will release an expansion for the explore-o-platformer later this year. Announced over the weekend, The Tower Of Oannes will send adventurers on a mega-difficult new quest to investigate a lost tribe from the subterranean cradle of civilisation.
Striking up a romantic relationship with a character in Mass Effect 3 will earn you a lovely picture of their face that sits on the desk in Commander Shepard's quarters. It's a nice touch, but for Tali romancers it's particularly special, because it means you actually get to see her face without her helmet on. Unfortunately, in the old ME3, that picture of Tali was a stock photo of a model edited to look a bit alien. But now in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, BioWare have swapped it out for a much more "realistic" pic.
Sundays are for doing some guided meditation to wind down. Before you take a deep breath, let's read this week's best writing about games.
Mod communities tend to follow predictable arcs, so it's often possible to predict what work users will create long before it exists. For that reason I thought to myself today: Microsoft Flight Simulator has been out for a while, I wonder if anyone has made a mod that lets you drive a car around its world yet.
Bingo.
I'm often too lazy and tired to learn full fat strategy games these days, but I still long to make tiny men do my bidding. Ed's too tall for me to get my kicks at work, so I turn to microstrategy games to scratch the itch.
Warpips seems to fit my needs. It's a tug-of-war strategy game that's just entered early access, in which you build a squad, spawn units, and push towards an enemy's base without much direct control over your units themselves. I've played it for half an hour and had a good time, and you can see it in action in a trailer below.
Yesterday saw the release of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, a remaster which used AI to upscale many of the original game's textures so they look better at 4K.
That's nothing compared to what Intel are working on, however. In a video called "Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement," embedded below, Intel show Grand Theft Auto 5 after it has been run through a neural net to make the streets of Los Santos look more photorealistic. It works.
A recent Fall Guys update on Steam included a bunch of files in a folder called "BackUpThisFolder_ButDontShipItWithYourGame". The folder, which is auto-generated by Unity, includes a bunch of source files. The files were removed the following day, but their leak is potentially bad news for devleopers Mediatonic and their efforts to stop cheating in Fall Guys.
It's Final Fantasy's Digital Fan Fest this weekend, and last night's streams brought a series of new details about Endwalker, Final Fantasy 14's next big expansion. Chief among them, the news that it will launch on November 23rd.
Hop below for an extremely melodramatic extended CG trailer.