Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Almost all of the games I'm interested in playing this November will launch on Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft's subscription service on PC will see the arrival of Forza Horizon 5, Football Manager 2022 and Unpacking.
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Almost all of the games I'm interested in playing this November will launch on Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft's subscription service on PC will see the arrival of Forza Horizon 5, Football Manager 2022 and Unpacking.
Roblox is back online after an extended outage which lasted three days. In a post on the Roblox site, Roblox CEO David Baszucki wrote that the outage was caused by "a combination of several factors."
Not content with pivoting to free-to-play games that their audience doesn't want, Ubisoft also want to be one of the "key players" in blockchain gaming according to CEO Yves Guillemot.
With Halloween behind us, it's time to ask: is the 1st of November too early to put up Christmas lights? Is it a grim sign of ravenous consumerism, or a welcome respite from the watching the year die slowly and painfully in its final months? As I untangled my strings of LED lights this morning, I realised that PC gaming is the most Christmassy of gamings. The colourful LEDs people cram into their PC's every orifice and pore aren't just any decoration, they're Christmas lights. That's their purpose. It always has been. Christmas is year-round for PC gamers. So here it is: merry Christmas.
I almost don't want to tell you what The End Of Dyeus is. Surprise and discovery are among the things I enjoy most in games, and they're too often undermined in the modern age. Damned kids, with your wikis and your hashed tags. It's a first person fighting and exploration game that drops you in a pastoral fantasy world with no instruction beyond "find Dyeus" and some straightforward control explainers. The only thing I dislike is that I have no idea how to pronounce it, dramatically limiting my pun options.
Spooky season might be behind us now, but man, it’s still pretty scary out there. My inbox sits at 576 unread emails, and in another tab I’m browsing heated clothes airers; things that I now realise are frighteningly expensive. But it’s not just mundane things in real life that give me goosebumps, it now extends to virtual white goods as well.
Right, so, there’s this fridge in Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy and no matter how many times I close it, it won’t stay shut. At first it was funny, but it’s since morphed from a sly chuckle to a howl of agony. My relationship with the game is like that thing Yoda from Star Wars says, “Fear leads to the Dark Side”. Well, I’m almost there, let me tell you.
Even though I’ve been dead excited about Weird West since its announcement last summer, when the time finally came for me to play a preview build last week, I found myself unusually hesitant. Primarily, this was because I loved the game’s concept so much (“What if Dishonored and Desperadoes III had a rooting tooting baby, then let it watch way too many horror movies?”), that I didn’t really want to face the possibility that developers WolfEye Studios might have fallen short on it. But more than that, I was worried I’d have to… well, make an effort.
For whatever reason, my enthusiasm to start new games has been taking one of its periodic dips over the last month or so, leaving me in the comforting arms of old favourites I can play on autopilot. Time and time again, I’ll get right to the point of hitting play on something, before convincing myself - completely unreasonably - that it’ll probably be a load of hassle for moderate reward. And however promising a sprawling, top-down immersive sim set in a world of haunted stetsons sounded, I was certain it would involve a lot of fiddling about with inventories, reading long screeds of text, and going on sidequests.
I’m delighted to say, however, that I was completely wrong. Because while Weird West does involve all those things (and features even more emergent complexity than the hefty dose I’d anticipated, to boot) I have not had a smoother time getting into a game in a long while. The build I played only featured one of the game’s five character campaigns, admittedly. But unless the other four are all set in a Tesco car park or something, I can heartily recommend it to you.
Battlefield 2042 has a new trailer ahead of its November 19th release, and this one is aimed directly at us PC folk. While the action itself is more of the near-future mega-bangs you’ve probably seen in previous teasers (or, indeed, the open beta), it’s all in service of demonstrating the PC-exclusive features: chiefly ray tracing, Nvidia DLSS and Nvidia Reflex support.
If you've already finished House Of Ashes, you'll have seen a wee trailer revealing that the next part of The Dark Pictures Anthology will be the "season one finale", named The Devil In Me. Bandai Namco have since publicly announced the next game in Supermassive's interactive horror story series, explaining a bit more of what's going on with the animatronic corpse. Bad news for would-be survivors: it's set in a replica of the infamous 'Murder Castle', a hotel built with traps and torture chambers by American serial killer H. H. Holmes.
The reason I enjoy Riot's FPS Valorant so much is because it has an excellent mixture of fun abilities and tactical gunplay, which is why I'm not sure what to make of its new character. Chamber is a French weapons designer who's set to arrive in the game's next Act on November 16th, and his abilities mostly involve spawning weapons. Not weapons you can buy normally in-game, but special weapons that he's made himself. Somehow, this feels like cheating.