Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The servers of shooter Arc Raiders had a bit of a "wobble" on Sunday, as many would-be raiders of the arc queued up to get in. Developers Embark have now decided to offer those affected by the outage some free in-game as a make good for said server swoonage.

The wobble came on November 2nd, as the game was hovering around the 300 to 330k concurrent player mark. It's left a brief, but unmistakeable dip in the SteamDB graph. Think one of those heart machines having a quick blip before regular beats resume.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Yo ho, Civ 7's 1.3.0 update arrives today, November 4th. While it's headlined by additions to naval combat and the sea itself in line with the arrival of Blackbeard in the Tides of Power DLC, Firaxis have now gone into specifics as to what it's doing in terms of changes and tweaks to existing civs.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Pillars of Eternity's much-anticipated turn-based mode debuts in PC open beta form on November 5th, with Obsidian seeking more input on their very nice tenth anniversary gift before rolling out a final version. That's not to say the devs haven't already been working to ensure "very reasonable criticisms" of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's own turn-based mode, though, as outlined by director Josh Sawyer in the beta's announcement video.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Unfortunately, we are here yet again with another games studio that will seemingly be closing its doors for good. A couple of years ago, Greg Street, known for his work on World of Warcraft and League of Legends, set up Fantastic Pixel Castle. There, it was announced at the time, he would lead development on an MMO codenamed Ghost, with NetEase serving as publisher. Except in a LinkedIn post earlier today, Street shared that Fantastic Pixel Castle will be shutting down.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Friendslop games may come and go, but the (for all intents and purposes) progenitor of them all, Lethal Company is still the one I think of most. It's scary, it's funny, it's otherworldly, literally, there's so much mystery to it that you just want to spend time in its world. But while it will likely go down as solo dev Zeekerss' most notable work, he did just release a brand new horror game 10 years in the making. And in a recent interview, he spoke of how he got his start in horror, and the roots that make up his latest work.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Sims is in an odd place right now. In September, it was announced that the game's publisher EA had been sold to Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners. This unsurprisingly was met with concern from Simmers, particularly in relation to the series' generally pro-diversity stance, and whether or not it will retain that in the future. And in a recent interview with art director of the original Sims and a lead designer on The Sims 2, Charles London, the developer shared why he felt it was "incredibly important" the games include same sex partnerships.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Marshal, if my hastily scribbled, made-up blackboard equations are correct, we should witness a double event within the next year or two. No, not a double kaiju event. A double kaiju clean-up event. Somewhat to my surprise, job sims in which you dismember dead Godzillas are a thing, now. And by thing I mean that there are at least two of them on the way.

It’s going to be a battle for the ages. Alien vs janitor: whoever wins, we… get to walk around outside without stepping in puddles of Mothra bile. Please, sir, join me next to this second blackboard full of hastily scribbled, made-up equations while I slap them haphazardly with a cane and shower everybody in spittle.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that a majority of the data that various AI models train themselves on do so without getting any sort of permission to do so. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, as they say, though in the case of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, they probably shouldn't have taken that lesson to heart. That's because Japan's Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) has requested that the AI developer stops using Japanese media to train its text-to-video model Sora.

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