Is waiting for Hades 2 to release starting to feel like a sisyphean endeavor? If so, push that boulder no longer. Supergiant announced yesterday that fans of the action roguelite can sign up now to be considered for an upcoming technical test, via Hades 2’s Steam page.
With the arrival of Amazon’s Fallout TV series last week came the dropping of another bombshell: the possible truth behind a mystery that’s gone unanswered in the video games for over 25 years. Before you read on, please bear in mind that spoilers for the Fallout TV show’s season one finale follow!
With Larian having now officially handed the reins of the Baldur’s Gate series back to Dungeons & Dragons owners Wizards of the Coast (and their Monopoly-making parents at Hasbro) - with the developers saying they have no plans to make any DLC or a sequel - the ball for a Baldur’s Gate 4 now sits in Wizards’ court. The good news is that, yes, they also want to make a follow-up to one of the most acclaimed and successful video games of the last few years. Just don’t expect that to necessarily be anytime soon.
World of Warcraft is setting a whole new story arc in motion with its next expansion, The War Within. If you can’t quite wait until this summer to see what the first chapter of the new Worldsoul Saga trilogy has to offer, you might not have to wait so long. Blizzard are running a beta for War Within that will give testers the chance to delve into the subterranean addition early - and sign-ups are now open.
Palworld, the viral survival game that stirred up controversy (and found plenty of success) on the back of being a Pokémon-a-like - with added guns and factory labour, mind - is now due to become the inspiration for its own generation of clones, according to the head of its developers.
The Crucial T500 is one of the best-performing PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market right now, going toe-to-toe with both the WD Black SN850X and the Samsung 990 Pro SSDs when hardware ed James tested it last year.
You have to spend a bit to get the top performance, especially now with memory manufacturers slowing production and SSD makers offering fewer discounts as a result. Fortunately, the 2TB T500 does have a decent discount going at the moment, worth $51:
The T500 takes the title of best high-end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD for gaming in the RPS best SSDs for gaming guide, and boasts ridiculous sequential speeds of up to 7400MB/s and 7000MB/s for read and writes respectively. It's worth reading through the list to see how it compares to other, but here's a quote from James that explains how the T500 has edged above the competition:
Six months is a long time. In that half-year you could fully grow a patch of delicious strawberries, plant the seeds, then grow another. Or you could squirm through three and a half successive Liz Truss premierships. Or, as Cities: Skylines 2 developers Colossal Order have done, you could take the technical mess of your long-awaited citybuilding game and reconstruct it into something that performs... okay, not well>, but better>.
Years before she worked on top-drawer point-and-clickers Return To Monkey Island and Thimbleweed Park, Australian game developer Jenn Sandercock was a junior designer on Team Bondi's historical open world game L.A. Noire. Eventually published by Grand Theft Auto developers Rockstar in 2011, L.A. Noire took seven years to make and is an especially notorious example of crunch culture and mismanagement. Sandercock joined in the middle of one such crunch period, and wanted to make life a little easier for her exhausted colleagues. "Everyone looked so miserable after literally years of hard work & crunch," she wrote on Twitter in 2018. "So late one night after work I baked 2 cakes for the office. I sent out a mass email & we all took 30 minutes to eat cake and talk." Sandercock began hosting weekly "Cake Days", baking a fresh batch in her own time to share around the office.
Rockstar were unimpressed, however. They thought Cake Day was evidence of poor productivity and, according to Sandercock, badgered Team Bondi leadership into forcing her to only share cake during official lunch hours. "Apparently the higher ups thought our entire office slacked off ALL the time because we had cake once a week," Sandercock wrote. She herself was told "that I was jeopardising my career". Sandercock hasn't let the demise of Cake Day cramp her creative interest in food, however. In fact, she's found a way to combine baking with game design. Sandercock is now the author of Edible Games, a book of recipes and instructions for concocting games out of food, and food out of games.
If you've been narked about favourite bits of Fallout not yet appearing in Amazon Prime's unexpectedly good live-action show, hold your horses. In an interview, the showrunners have talked about holding back certain "iconic elements" to do them in a hypothetical second season right rather than cram in all the greatest hits—and also so the show didn't "seem like it was written by people who just like spent 10 seconds reading the Wikipedia page for Fallout and didn't bother to like bring in some deeper cuts."
Following a mild-to-moderate outcry, Ubisoft have clarified that queasy worm gangster Jabba The Hutt isn't, in fact, a Star Wars Outlaws special edition or season pass exclusive. The apparently much-beloved star slug will appear in every edition of the game, but if you scrape together the credits for the Gold or Ultimate Editions, you'll get access to a Jabba's Gambit mission as part of the game's season pass.
It's a timely clarification, because I've just checked on Xitter and yes, #Jabbagate has been trending... in reference to unflattering photos of Donald Trump in 2016. And also, Steven Gerrard in 2020. And... Wrestlemania in 2017? Jabba is quite the meme these days, it seems.