Despite seemingly escaping the Embrace(r) of death through their sale to Take-Two at the end of last month, Gearbox Entertainment haven’t quite emerged unscathed. The studio has confirmed a number of layoffs shortly after the announcement of the sale, while clarifying that no positions related to the development of games were affected.
Vampire survival game V Rising has been kicking around in early access for a couple of years now, so there’s a good chance you may have already picked it up. If you haven’t but are curious to give it a go, you might want to grab it sooner than later. Ahead of the game’s full 1.0 launch, its price tag will be permanently raised to almost twice its previous cost.
Earlier today Tom Betts - founder of Nullpointer and former lead programmer at The Signal From Tolva developers Big Robot - emailed me about his new game The Horror At Highrook. In the space of a single, rollercoaster paragraph, Betts earned my curiosity by describing himself as a fellow Soul Reaver enthusiast, lost it again by criticising Soul Reaver’s camera - such insolence! - and earned it swiftly back by mentioning that he’s from Yorkshire. Then, he upgraded my curiosity into attention by describing The Horror At Highrook as a “clockwork narrative” horror experience that takes inspiration from Poe, Stoker and Lovecraft on the one hand, and from boardgames, wiki-hunting and escape rooms on the other.
This is a heady brew indeed. Also, there appears to be a cat in the game called Mr Tubbs, described as a “portly grey barrel of fur”. I entertain suspicions of Mr Tubbs. What fell secrets lurk behind his perfectly groomed exterior? Anyway, here’s the trailer.
With a desktop version of the RTX 4050 looking less likely with every turn o’ the Earth, the true entry-level GPU among Nvidia’s current generation solely remains in the realm of gaming laptops. It’s also, I’ll admit, overdue some consideration on RPS. Between the lack of cheap graphics cards among the desktop RTX 40 series, the year-and-a-bit that DLSS 3 has had to grow its compatible games library, and the Steam Deck reminding everyone that portable, low-end gaming can still be pleasurable, now seems like the RTX 4050’s time to shine. Or, at the very least, gently twinkle.
Do you remember the noughties fan warz over which game had the best terrain destruction physics? The victors of that particular forum skirmish were probably DICE's Battlefield games, with their woozy Frostbitten cinematography and dependable multiplayer tactic of having a whole team focus fire on a single capture point, gradually reducing it to stumps of foundation. But leftier souls may have preferred Volition's (RIP) Red Faction series, the third of which, Red Faction: Guerrilla, featured a granular demolition engine that you bash apart whole bases with a sledgehammer.
Well, Guerrilla's lead tech designer Luke Schneider is still in the architecture-ruining business: his and Radiangames's latest, the hopefully self-explanatory Instruments Of Destruction, leaves Steam early access on May 10th, 2024. Here's the 1.0 trailer.
It's a fond hope, a fool's hope, but perhaps 2024 will be remembered not as the year of Yet More Layoffs, but the year of Unexpected Hits. Surprise record-setters like Palworld, which I don't especially like, Helldivers 2, which I rather enjoy, and now Content Warning, which I'm still figuring out. If you missed it, the co-op horror game released on Monday with a temporary free promotion, and racked up a 200,000-player Steam concurrency last night. Published by Totally Accurate Battle Simulator outfit Landfall, it's sort of like Lethal Company in being about venturing into horrible places as a wibbly-wobbly defenceless explorer, but rather than gathering scrap for resale, you're filming yourself and the monsters in a bid to publish a viral "SpookTube" video, with tuber celebrity translating into cash for new equipment.
Each video is edited together automatically from your footage and accompanying voicechat, once you return from each trip to the Old World, and you can watch it all on an in-game monitor with a mocked-up chat feed and viewcount. It's a pungent, potted commentary on the machinations of Youtube celebrity, with heady notes of "cautionary tale about algorithmic content generation" and "cautionary tale about people endangering or hurting themselves being a dependable source of views". Urgh, I can feel an op-ed coming on. In the meantime, here's how the developers - a team of only five - are updating Content Warning following its launch success.
"It almost feels like proof-of-concept for a first-person Prince of Persia game, with an ever-so-gentle dusting of Portal," our Edwin said after playing free first-person platformer Grimhook when it launched in December. It's a cracking little game, parkouring about with the help of supernatural powers and a grappling hook, but ends right as it feels like it's getting started. I'd certainly be up for three hours of this, so how splendid to hear that the developers are planning to make a "complete" and fancier experience.
I have spent most of my working life looking at efforts to breach the FPS event horizon, and going 'OMG who cares, they literally all look the same?'. People like our hardware editor James then point and laugh at me, as an objectively wrong person. But according to a small study highlighted by the Guardian, I might have been right too! Turns out there's evidence that we might all see life at different FPS. That player might not be cheating, he might just experience Fortnite at a speed you don't.
The PC and console market grew by 2.6% to $93.5 billion in revenue last year, according to a new report by video games date company Newzoo (cheers, Kotaku!) That’s good, right? Growth is universally a good thing, otherwise all those nice, dead-eyed men in suits wouldn’t keep saying it was. You can’t just lie about growth, that’s a business crime. However, here’s some slightly more worrying news, depending on how much you value new ideas: Of all the game time that gamers spent gaming in quantifiable Big Year for Gaming 2023, just 20% of that time was gamed on games other than the 66 specific games mentioned in the report.
The Elder Scrolls Online is the elephant in the room where discussions of The Elder Scrolls 6 are concerned, though calling it an elephant is obviously missing the opportunity for a banger lore joke – “dragon”, perhaps, or even “Numidium”? Launched back in 2014 after seven years in development, ESO's hybrid of deceptively single-player-ish Elder Scrolls presentation with MMO fixtures attracted a lukewarm response, initially. “At its best The Elder Scrolls Online looks like a faithful addition to the lore,” intoned Brendy in our own launch impressions. “At its worst it is a derivative and uninventive anachronism.”
ZeniMax Online have made big strides with the game over the years, however - binning off monthly subscriptions and introducing a “level-free” format in the One Tamriel update in 2016. ESO has also swelled and sprouted steadily as a work of geography and history, with major chapters introducing areas hitherto only mentioned in dusty collectible tomes, or creatively reintroducing locations from the single player series – the forthcoming Gold Road expansion, out in June 2024, takes us to the West Weald in Cyrodiil, an area last seen in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.