Beware minor spoilers for Chairbound in this piece. I think they're minor. I have no idea what's truly significant in this dreary purgatory of flourescent lights and rippled glass facades. Only one thing seems guaranteed: I have to get out of here in 10 minutes or I'm doomed.>

I met the weird little girl again. She was loitering in the shadow of a pillar on the eighth floor. I found her goblin-esque during our first meeting, but up close she seems relatively ordinary, a pale 10-year-old in a nightie with shoulder-length hair. At least, until she burbles distorted sounds at me and runs away into the darkness. I gather she is looking for her "toy". I don't think it's the rubber duck I'm holding.

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Dell’s back-to-school deals are here, and they’re pretty great if you’re looking for a 2025 laptop.

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Graham is gone. The longest-running editor of Rock Paper Shotgun worked his last day on the website earlier this week, and has leapt quietly into the mysterious realm of the games industry proper. The emotional fallout of this departure is roughly the same as any other time RPS has watched a writer swan-dive out of the RPS treehouse and into the mist far below. There is sadness tinged with hope. "There goes another one," you think, smiling through a single tear and imagining their future life far from these branches.

Only this time, well, it's Graham.

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Right, if your hearing's recovered enough from the sheer blaring blastiness of yesterday's Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal, I'm here to tell you a couple of things you'll probably be happy about. Well, unless you're planning on buying it from the Epic Games store.

You see, amid last night's info drop, EA have revealed at least an estimate of the specs your hardware'll need to have to run it, as well as the very important detail of whether you'll need to fire it up via (whispers) the EA launcher.

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Battlefield 6 releases on October 10th with the unenviable task of being both a quality combined arms FPS, and a successful apology letter to those burned by the series’ previous missteps. To try out its multiplayer ahead of yesterday’s big reveal event, I had to pass through two separate metal detectors at the venue’s doors, which I can only assume were there to prevent infiltration by disgruntled Battlefield 2042 players armed with tins of orange paint.

Still, try it out I did, with most signs pointing towards BF6 being genuine about its promised return to Battlefield staples. The classic four classes instead of specialists. Destruction that has a point beyond spectacle. And most importantly, large-scale multivehicular warfare that isn’t nearly as organised and cinematic as the choreographed trailer.

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With unofficial Oblivion remake Skyblivion aiming to arrive this year, one of its developers has kicked off a new dev diary series documenting the work they've been doing to get the massive Skyrim mod ready to emerge through the release gates.

While the folks behind Skyblivion certainly haven't been shy when it comes to regularly showing off their progress, it's always cool to see more of the blood, sweat, and tears that's going into finally getting such a gargantuan undertaking into players' hands. Then again, maybe I'm just partial to trippy glimpses at Uriel Septim's detached head floating in the development void.

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It's time for another bulletin from the exciting world of desexindexification. Itch.io have re-listed a bunch of free adult-themed games that were taken down as part of a recent massive cull of supposedly licentious materials under pressure from payment processors. Itch are still, however, working out whether and how to restore paid NSFW projects that were removed from public channels as part of their efforts to stop the payment companies suspending store purchases in general.

In a further mild twist, one of the firms behind Itch.io's delistings, Stripe, have now informed the site that they themselves are acting under pressure from one of their own banking partners, without naming names. They'd like "to support adult content in the future". Nonetheless, Itch are still looking for new payment partners who are happier to process this kind of material.

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We have all known the profound sorrow of getting two hours into an RPG and deciding that actually, Mum, I don't want to be an elven druid anymore. Being an elven druid sucks ass. There's barely any plantlife in the opening dungeon, so half my support skills are useless, and the only animal companion I'm qualified to conjure right now is a cranky squirrel. I'd much rather be a rogue. Look at all these elevated paths and pickable locks hereabouts! Look at all these shadows I could be skulking in, these precarious chandeliers directly opposite crawlspaces with rusty grills! Ugh, if only I weren't a stupid diluted floral wizard!

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Avast, fellow salty sea-dogs. Some legally-minded landlubbers may have had words with Edward Kenway, captain of The Jackdaw and protagonist of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. Well, Kenway's voice actor Matt Ryan at any rate, who's been filmed at a convention saying that Ubisoft threatened to sue him over a previous video from another convention in which he teased a remake of the game.

If you're out of the loop, this is the Black Flag remake the publisher haven't confirmed is coming, but has been reported to be in development several times over the past couple of years.

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Between fifty game releases a day, and among them official successors and open source remakes, most 90s games your grandma bangs on about have some> modern equivalent that somewhat fills the gap.

But not The Settlers. There hasn't been a Settlers game since 1996. Whether they were good or not, its many sequels, as early as 3, started missing the point of the design. It's the roads>, man. The roads!

This isn't about iconography for its own sake. It's a design thing, an ethos. The heart of The Settlers was that your towns lived or died based largely on how well you designed your transport logistics. It was all about the roads. It doesn't even fit into a genre really, let alone the lopsided RTS the sequels collapsed into. It sounds like a typical town builder, especially today when there's a wealth of games about placing a woodcutter and a farm, but I'm tempted to say it's not even about gathering resources.

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