Royale-battler Fortnite will soon allow players to hide a handful of emotes the developers concede are "sometimes used in confrontational ways". This includes the emote reported as the most-used in Fortnite's seven-year history. That's either a worrying indictment of the game's players, or a (more?) worrying indictment of universal human psychology. What is the offending animation? Well, turns out people don't like being laughed at.
Stand by for a missive from RPS corporate parent ReedPop. Transmission begins! Ah, it's about gaming events. So, Reedpop's EGX expo and MCM Comic Con are joining forces. They'll both take place side-by-side in the ExCel London this year, on 25th-27th October.
EGX, of course, will feature a bunch of classic and upcoming games, while Comic Con is laser-targeted at our respected allies in the world of on-paper image-based storytelling with speech bubbles. EGX's headline partner is TikTok this year, which makes this a perfect nexus of entertainment artforms. All we need is a puppetshow now and possibly a semaphore stand, and the ritual will be complete.
I'm the kind of awful person who looks at the background actors in TV shows and wonders what life is like for e.g. the old woman who sells birdfeed in Trafalgar Square in Mary Poppins when said upper-middle class domestic isn't singing about her. What fate the Warcraft grunt when he is too old to work work? It's probably pretty bad, right? Now let me slop Innkeep down in front of you like a big bowl of rat stew. Developer Daniel Burke furnished me with a little playable slice, and boy, Innkeep is a grim old time. I mean that as a compliment.
In it you run a big pub with room for a lot of grizzled adventurers, in a dog-eat-dog dark fantasy RPG sort of a world - think a roadside pub in one of the early seasons of Game Of Thrones, before everyone hated it. You do a lot of plate-spinning drudgery like cooking, cleaning, and serving, but also eavesdropping, rumourmongering, and knowing when to slip in a ribald joke as a distraction while you size up a mercenary's sword.
Nestled within a seemingly ho-hum patch for Horizon Forbidden West’s PC edition is a change I’ve been crossing fingers and ritualistically sacrificing metal dinosaurs for since release. At last I can behold those glorious words: "Resolved performance regression when enabling Nvidia Reflex On+Boost." Finally!
Afternoon, conveyor belt fans! Good news, I think I may have discovered the first genuinely cosy automation game. Attempts have been made at cosy automation and automated cosiness in the past – Satisfactory is on the sunnier side, providing you enable the right settings, and Shapez 2 has lots of rounded edges. But IDK, there’s something about the ravages of mass industry that doesn’t quite gel with zoomorphic raccoon baristas and other such wholesome trappings. Have you ever encountered a cuddly smokestack? How about a cuddly just-in-time network?
Combine cosiness with automation, and a lot of the time, you end up with some kind of macabre joke, like Palworld. Or at least so I thought before I discovered Sweet Transit, out now, which seemingly resolves everything by means of a hearty injection of trains.
Sometimes, I hear critics describe something as ‘actively hostile’ to the act of playing it, but with something close to admiration in their voices. I've always felt that I, too, would like to one day find an artwork that I could describe in the same way. Partly because it sounds like an interesting experience, but mainly so I could steal that line and feel like one of those elite, urbanely perceptive, multiple trouser-owning critics.
Well, today is not that day, because indie horror IRIS isn't, in fact, actively hostile towards the act of playing it. It's more a case of passive disdain. Is it a ‘good’ game? Probably not. Ah, but is it enjoyable? Buddy, not even slightly. But it is intriguing>. I am intrigued, reader.
Were we to pluck up a passing stoat, or wandering pigeon, and inspect their entrails for omens as regards the quality of mythical roguelike Hades 2, we would find ourselves covered in blood and perhaps a little wiser. But I have been given strict editorial directions not to kill any more small creatures for gambling purposes. So let us instead use the semi-public "technical test" as a portentous looking glass from which to discern whether this hell-hopping sequel seems promising. Fine by me, the approach is no less stabby.
No Rest for the Wicked launched into early access as a bit of a fixer-upper, even by the standards of its 'buy now, play finished game later' model. The good news is that the grim action-RPG’s wonky performance is already being straightened out, with two of its three hotfixes thus far delivering a noticeable improvements, even on older graphics cards.
Speaking to RPS regular Jeremy Peel in a new feature about RPG design, Amazon's Fallout TV show and his time working on Pentiment and Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian's Josh Sawyer has reflected a bit on what Fallout: New Vegas owes to Black Isle and Interplay's very first Fallout from 1997. "A lot of the philosophy that I approached New Vegas with was the philosophy of Fallout 1, or how I interpreted it," Sawyer observed. "Fallout 1 was foundational for me in understanding how role-playing games should be made."
So far, my main problem with Lethal Company – this month’s RPS Game Club game – is that I’m getting better at it. I’m more efficient at clearing up scrap, less prone to fear-spasming inside out when a monster attacks, and have become wise to most of the haunted houses’ deadliest tricks. All of these, it turns out, make Lethal Company a worse game.