Alright, I know you’re high on Starfield, you’re intrigued by Guardians Of The Galaxy, and you’ve been vibrating with excitement ever since you got your first look at Elden Ring gameplay, but you might as well put all of them to the back of your mind for now. The heavy-hitters of E3 aren’t coming out any time soon, so you’re better off shifting your focus onto video games that you can play over the next four weeks.
During E3, we saw a bunch of new gameplay for Ubisoft's upcoming stealthy alien shoot 'em up, Rainbow Six Extraction (formerly known as Quarantine). It's a spin-off from the tactical shooter Rainbow Six Siege, and I think it looks good - PvE offshoots of PvP games are my jam. But while the new footage showed how a typical mission would go in Extraction, it left me with a lot more questions. So, I reached out to Ubisoft to ask game director Patrick Méthé for a little more detail on how things will work.
To be honest, my main goal was to find out if Caveria would be able to tackle aliens to the ground and interrogate them, but it sounds like they probably won't be doing that (which is a missed opportunity, if you ask me - one of her abilities in Siege is that she can question downed enemies to reveal player locations).
As we quest towards the September release of Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous, our little group of adventurers is being guided to the upcoming cRPG’s largest city. The latest dev diary details Drezen, "the biggest fantasy fortress we've ever built." The stronghold looms large on the horizon, and will eventually become a hub for the player to rest, trade and more. But it’s more than that: the design of the city is tied to the player’s choices as they progress through the world, and the rebuilding process has some drastically different outcomes.
To make way for the upcoming Final Fantasy 1-6 Pixel Remasters, the current versions of Final Fantasy 5 and Final Fantasy 6 will be pulled off Steam later this month. Since these are the ugly mobile ports, I think it's safe to say they won't be missed, though. Both Steam pages for Final Fantasy 5 and 6 have been updated with disclaimers that they'll "no longer be available for purchase after July 27th 2021". They then say you should buy the remastered versions instead which are "coming soon".
Dyson Sphere Program is possibly the most ambitious game I've ever played. It's certainly the most ambitious game that manages to deliver on its promise. That promise? Factorio, but in 3D, set in a galaxy of multiple spherical planets, and with the goal of creating a Dyson Swarm megastructure around a star to harness its energy.
I mean, come on. How can any development team deliver on such a promise? Let alone a development team of only five people?
Ever since its surprise launch on Persona 4 Golden on PC last summer, there's been a decent amount of chatter about PC versions of other Atlus games. Sega have said that the port's success on PC had them considering more PC ports in general and they've now attached a recent number as context for that consideration. P4 Golden has now sold over a million copies on Steam, Atlus say, which sure does seem decent for the port of a game from 2008.
After spending some time under wraps, Rainbow Six Extraction recently emerged with the expected announcement that it would be ditching its former name "Quarantine". What it isn't letting go of, Ubisoft say, are all of the oh so many operators in Rainbow Six Siege. With so many to choose from, Ubisoft aren't designing new operators for their Left 4 Dead-like co-op shooter. Instead, they're going to be bringing some player favorite operators to Extraction, along with some who "haven’t received the amount of love we think they deserve".
Diablo IV is still an unknown amount of time away from launch, but Blizzard are keeping up with their quarterly blog posts digging into details about the next big hack 'n slash RPG. Up for show and tell this time is Diablo 4's character customisation, which there sure is going to be a heck of a lot of for a game largely played looking down at the top of your own head. That's because Blizzard are planning some flashy "cinematic" moments with your very own character, they say. Don't forget to dye your armor while you're at it.
Samsung's 980 SSD, the Korean chaebol's latest budget NVMe SSD, finally fulfilled its purpose today when UK retailer Scan discounted the 1TB model by £27. That puts it down to £89 and change, the lowest price we've seen and in the same league as other low-cost, high-performance NVMe drives like the Crucial P2 and WD Blue SN550.
The Samsung Odyssey G7 has been discounted to £469 on Amazon UK today, beating even the Prime Day Lightning Deal price by a good £30. That's the cheapest we've ever seen this model, and a terrific deal for a 32-inch 2560x1440 monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate and DisplayHDR 600 certification.