Exciting times! Liam and I have wrapped Inventory Space episode two, in which we documented several weeks of us returning to Bungie’s live service behemoth Destiny 2. We found it to be an FPS delight, but one that’s wrapped in a taxing MMO.
One thing I can’t stop thinking about are the game’s piss-coloured walls. They appear right at the beginning of the game’s latest expansion Lightfall and I genuinely believe they summarise Destiny perfectly.
Having spent several weeks with space orbs and triangles, Liam and I have returned from our intergalactic escapades with a spot of news: Inventory Space episode two is a go! It's a video series in which we spend our precious free time with live service games to see how much they demand from our schedules, and whether we're truly able to experience the best of them without crumbling to dust.
So, please join us, as we tackle Bungie's FPS behemoth Destiny 2. Was it worth our time? And crucially, is it worth yours?
Want a big-ol' SSD for your games, media and what-not? The Crucial P3 Plus is currently reduced at Best Buy, where the massive 4TB size is down to $225. That's nearly $40 off its previous price and a great value for a drive of this spec.
For the record, the P3 Plus is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, with up to 5000MB/s reads and 4200MB/s writes. It uses QLC flash in a DRAM-less design, but with HMB technology - so it uses your computer's RAM as its cache. That allows it to provide surprisingly excellent performance, although we'd still recommend a higher-end TLC drive with a DRAM cache for the most intensive workloads, like 4K video production. For gaming and regular use though, this is a great choice!
I rarely enjoy adventure games, and in fact resent them for pinning that term for a genre that almost never feels adventurous. And yet I don't quite want to say that 24 Killers is an exception, because confining it to any genre feels reductive, let alone one that will probably put you off if you're anything like me.
It's a tiny bit like a Stardew Valley or Gleaner Heights, or any of those "do chores until you run out of energy" games, but mostly it's a "hanging out and being slightly weird" game.
Father forgive me, for I have spent the weekend conversing with the damned. No, I haven’t gone all Alan Moore and grimoired up a demonic pal to go gallivanting around the big Tescos with. That is next weekend. Instead, I’ve been playing Diablo 4’s beta, closed to all except an elite cadre of press, pre-orderers, and, uh, chicken enthusiasts. And so, axe in hand, I set forth, confident that whoever I found myself temporarily adventuring with would at least be fortified with adequate protein to wield rippling gains against the lords of hell.
Mouse-clicking connoisseurs of a certain age may remember a time when the name Blizzard was synonymous with the most gorgeously impressive CGI cutscenes your tiny mind had ever been blown by, and while Diablo 4’s lengthy introduction comes at a time where there’s far too much widespread talent for any one studio to claim that crown, it is still a goshdarn treat to take in. Not just technically, either. This chronicle of a cursed expedition is a mission statement for Diablo’s new (old) tone, and it sets the scene for things to come spectacularly - even if that tone straddles the line between gripping and noticeably self-concious about past accusations of cartooniness.
Sundays are for tipping dust from your vacuum into the bin and getting a deep sense of satisfaction from it. Before you pat the drum, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
I write this a few days before you'll read it, for tomorrow is St Patrick's day, which is a bank holiday for me. I believe in Ireland this is traditionally spent destroying green food die, and complaining about Americans calling it "Patty's day", but time will tell. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to play video games, or if that will be some sort of sacrilege, but I'll definitely be able to at the weekend, right? The RPS treehouse at large will be sampling a variety of delights, it seems.
Here's a neat trick: if you want a high-end gaming laptop but don't want to pay over the odds for it, consider the Corsair Voyager A1600. If you buy it from Corsair's US web store, add a PC case like this one and then use code NEWBUILD, you can pick up the laptop and the case for significantly less than the cost of the laptop alone.
In fact, this $1800 laptop that debuted in December last year for $2300, complete with Ryzen 9 CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, 2TB of NVMe storage, a 16-in 2560x1600 (16:10) 240Hz display and Radeon RX 6800M graphics card, goes down to just $1536. And you get a free case, essentially, which you can resell later if you don't need it. Or keep it and build a PC in it, because these Corsair cases are actually really lovely!
We don't normally focus on gaming laptops when it comes to deals, as there's little you can upgrade in most machines. One thing that is usually possible is a RAM upgrade, and today we've discovered a good price on a 32GB kit of DDR4-3200 RAM from TeamGroup. Right now this Elite 2x16GB kit is available for £70, more than £30 less than its usual price. If you'd like your laptop to be equipped with 32GB of RAM for gaming or content creation, and you're currently on 16GB or less, this is a nice little upgrade for the money!
Layers Of Fear — recently quietly renamed from its working title Layers Of Fears> — is a game that requires a bit of explanation. It shares its title with the 2016 game of the same name, and is being overseen by original developers Bloober Team. But it's neither a remake nor a reboot; although, in some ways, it's both of those things. It's more a "reimagining" of the whole Layers Of Fear series to date, as well as its apparent swansong. It incorporates ground-up remakes of the two-and-a-half existing games in the series in Unreal Engine 5, alongside a new gaiden chapter complementing the first game, and a brand-new framing narrative tying the whole lot together.
I recently sat in on an early preview presentation of Layers Of Fear, chatting with creative director Damian Kocurek. Listeners to one very specific episode of the EWS podcast might recall that I'm something of a Layers Of Fear lore theorist, so of course I was delighted to nerd out over what this new(ish) game is all about. Similarly detail-oriented horror fans out there will hopefully share my excitement when I tell them that yes, the rats are back, and you can even catch a brief glimpse of the Rat Queen.