Someone ring up Slayer, because it's going to raining blood in Borderlands 4 soon. That being the natural way to precede the arrival of the shooter's first paid DLC bounty pack next month and a free December update that'll bring a weird tree fight to the endgame.

All of this stuff will lay a pre-Christmas foundation for the arrival of a fresh vault hunter early next year. That hunter, whom Gearbox showed off a little while ago out of contept for chronological reveals, is Randy Pitchford's magic cowboy spirit animal.

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Sundays are for getting your 10,000 steps in, apparently. I bring this up specifically because I’ve been crap at exercising recently and I need you, RPS readers, to shame me into doing it more, much as you did when I admitted on the podcast to rarely using sunscreen. I’m counting on you, everyone.

In exchange, here are some good writings, mostly about games, from the past week or so.

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Someone's managed to force their way through the doors of the RPS Treehouse, and like a cat that knows it belongs wherever it pleases, he's settled himself in the corner he's deemed comfiest, and refuses to budge. Ah well, might as well mic him up and ask him what he's playing this weekend.

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Drive faster, she screams as a cacophony of meepy noises, it's coming! I know, headstand lady, I know, comes my response from behind the wheel. We'd be safe if I hadn't botched one of the switchbacks and gently skidded into a low wall. I'd best put my foot down if I want to escape the demo of mysterious delivery driver Truckful without finding out what happens when a little truck is swallowed by a bigger truck.

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Update: Build a Rocket Boy have provided RPS with the following statement:

Every one of our former team members poured passion, creativity, and hard work into our games and our studio. Parting ways with people is never easy, and we were deeply saddened to make that decision. We didn’t anticipate having to make redundancies after launch, but we approached the process with care and transparency, meeting all our obligations. We’re listening closely to feedback from former employees and are committed to learning and growing from it.

Original story continues below:

Following the inauspicious launch of MindsEye and subsequent layoffs at developers Build A Rocket Boy, 93 current and former staff at the studio have signed an open letter demanding an apology, while accusing Build A Rocket Boy's senior leadership of having "consistently mishandled the redundancy process" and mandating "unbearable levels of overtime" around the game's launch.

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Right, it's that time again. Get ready to slide back down the ladder of powerfulness, because mandatory wipeage is required to stick everyone back on the same trajectory ahead of [insert new thing here]. No, say the developers of shooter Arc Raiders. They will not bow before the mandatory wipe gods at this time, instead trying out a voluntary wipe system dubbed Projects.

Yep, rather than leaning on the same unavoidable resets which plenty of extraction shooters and survival games employ to ensure newbies aren't always guaranteed to run into folks with more levels someone playing a platformer in a regularly-stopping elevator to the sun, Embark Studios plan to do their own thing.

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Earlier this week, a group of former ZeniMax developers revealed that they'd formed a new worker-owned studio in the aftermath of Microsoft's mass layoffs. It's called Sackbird Studios, and the logo's a bird with a sack. Following accusations that this bird looked like it could be AI-generated, the studio have responded that it isn't, but some of the images on their website were.

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Battlefield 6 marks the first time, in all my years of hardwaring, that I have been summoned to someone’s house> in order to make a PC game work. I can’t offer this Jim’ll Fix It service to everyone, not least because IGN’s lawyers have issues with the name, so I’ll just say this: Enabling Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 is inconvenient, but not as fiddly as it sounds, and can be done with at most a couple of toggles in your BIOS/UEFI’s Security section.

As it turns out, that’s probably the worst of BF6’s hardware worries. I don’t know who forgot to tell DICE that all FPS blockbusters must now be callously demanding graphics card shin-kickers, but in both the campaign and multiplayer, this seems to run quite... well? Likely well enough that as long as you’re on any reasonably modern rig, you might not need to do much twiddling with the visual settings.

Still. Let’s have a go at it anyway.

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Altruism is a funny concept. Most of us can agree that bestowing a generous gift of greening shelf-stable bread-like product on the local park pigeons is a nice thing to do, but what of the knowledge that moulders in the back of our minds all the while, telling us: keep this up long enough, and you'll definitely end up with a loyal army of skyborne scavengers willing to enact your every destructive whim at a mere flick of your wrist? Feed them the really good bread, they might even let you throw them at things. From super seeded, to superceding god. Here's the trailer for The Bench.

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This week's Borderlands 4 patch has arrived, firing some gear balancing tweaks into the looter shooter's innards, then probably dropping a cringey catchphrase. Developers Gearbox have also revealed some of what's in store for the larger patch that's set to arrive next week, with performance fixes back on the menu alongside some more in-depth balancing that'll touch "those unintended interactions" folks have been relying on for overpowered builds.

It's all in the line with the nice rhythm the studio have settled into following an initial flurry of activity in response to the game running not goodly on PC out of the gate. Last week brought a big patch featuring the first round of vault hunter balancing tweaks, so this week sees a chaser precede the next shot.

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