Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Look, I love the Steam Deck. In fact, we’re such big fans of it in our home that I have an OLED and my wife has the LCD model I had before it.
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Look, I love the Steam Deck. In fact, we’re such big fans of it in our home that I have an OLED and my wife has the LCD model I had before it.
For a low-stakes open world cycling game, Wheel World has a lot of lore. You wake up in the forest and discover a spirit called Skully, a ghost who offers the player a rusty bike and immediately ejects so much fantasy jargon and frontloaded backstory that I started to think it was an intentional joke. Thank Cog (the god of cycling) that this loredumping is not habitual. The rest of the game plays out as a chill and happy-hearted racer in a small but well-crafted world of rolling vineyards, bumpy forests, and honking city streets. It's a short tour, lasting only about five hours, but it's five hours nicely pedalled.
Microsoft have done a U-turn and decided they don't fancy making a series that at least tries to satirise capitalism the face of a price hike. In the US, The Outer Worlds 2 will no longer cost $79.99, but the low, low sum of $69.99 instead.
For UK folks, that means a tenner's been knocked off what you'll pay to pre order the standard version of the RPG, which comes out on October 29th. Xbox and co will be doing the same with their other holiday period games this year, rather than pushing up how much folks are paying to £70/$80.
The Rat King is dead, long live the Fool King. In this medieval roguelite autobattler, you must murder a skeleton monarch with dice. You will do this not by loading bags of D20s into a culverin and shooting the Fool King point blank, though yes, that sounds like an amazing lategame unlock. Instead, you will be rolling the dice to determine how many knights, peasants, wizards and crossbowmen you can summon to each battlefield. I've been playing the prototype, and while roguelites are thick as wheat these days, this is a promising contender. Here's a trailer.
Developer Julian LeFay, a key cog in the early days of Bethesda and the development of classic Elder Scrolls RPGs Arena and Daggerfall, has died. His passing was announced by OnceLost Games, the studio he co-founded in 2019, and follows a years-long battle with cancer.
LeFay stepped away from his most recent development post as technical director at OnceLost, where he'd been working on Daggerfall-inspired RPG The Wayward Realms alongside fellow Bethesda veteran Ted Peterson, last week. OnceLost revealed at the time that this was due to his cancer worsening, writing that LeFay's doctors had informed them "his time with us is limited".
PC gaming mouse 'n' keeb manufacturers Endgame Gear have admitted to and apologised for unknowingly spreading malware, after an infected version of the OP1w 4k v2’s Configuration Tool software was left available to download from their website.
After Reddit user Admirable-Raccoon597 raised the alarm, having installed the Configuration Tool and found the malware hiding inside, German tech site Igor’s Lab confirmed that the publically available application had been compromised for at least two weeks. Endgame Gear have since replaced the dirty software with an apparently safe version, and today shared a post admitting the oversight – though claimed no sensitive data was stolen via the server infrastructure that was hosting it.
Bad news everybody, I think I have discovered the game that is going to stop you doing anything else today. Witness the verminous splendour of turn-based puzzler Rat King, in which you simultaneously control two rodents who are exploring two different dungeons in splitscreen. I know, I know – to lose one rat in a dungeon may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness. But there is method to the madness.
Riot's spin-off fighting game with the terrible name, 2XKO, is getting a closed beta in a few months and, to entice fans to sign up, the developers have released a new video showing off pink-haired League Of Legends bruiser Vi doing some biffing. I know you like biffing, so I'm telling you about this despite being unable to reliably write the title of this free-to-play wrecker without carefully typing it out like my mum composing an email with a single forefinger.
A new report delves into the behind-the-scenes chaos caused at Elder Scrolls Online studio ZeniMax by Microsoft's mass layoffs earlier this month. Staff say the manner in which the corp let go of around 9k staff was "inhumane" and has left those who remain facing an incredibly tough future.
An unannounced MMO in development at ZeniMax, codenamed Project Blackbird, was one of the games cancelled by Microsoft as part of the corporate bloodletting, with Rare's Everwild and The Initiative's Perfect Dark reboot also being canned. Just last week, the ZeniMax Online Studios United (ZOSU) union said they're still fighting on behalf of workers at the studio left in limbo by Blackbird's cancellation.
Splitgate 2 is being taken "back to beta" by developers 1047 Games, who say it "launched too early" and are now planning to rerelease it next year. The move has reportedly seen the studio lay off 45 workers, and they've confirmed that the original Splitgate's servers will be shutting down in a month's time.
The news comes following a mixed launch reception for the portal-filled shooter, which likely wasn't helped by studio CEO Ian Proulx controversially announcing that it was going live while wearing a MAGA-style “Make FPS Great Again” hat on stage at Summer Game Fest. The exec subsequently apologised for that boneheaded publicity stunt.