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League of Legends is set for some big changes as part of an overhaul targeting a 2027 release, Riot Games have confirmed following a report on the coming revamp by Bloomberg. Yep, the MOBA’s devs have pulled the trigger on their official announcement a little earlier than planned, waxing lyrical about laying “the groundwork for League’s next era” now, rather than waiting to reveal all in the new year.
Last year, myself, Brendy and Graham got fearfully excited about Straftat, a bountiful free 1v1 FPS with map designs calibrated to nostalgiafuck anybody who ever played Quake over an LAN or hoarded shareware CDs. Our fever burned all the hotter for knowing that Straftat is the work of them wot did Babbdi, the amazing Brutalist exploration game from 2022.
Brendy and Graham have now left the Treehouse, alas, so there is nobody here to get excited with me about VHOLUME, a first-person parkour game from one of the Straftat developers. I am sitting alone in my room, sorrowfully punching the air, tears pooling around my ankles and threatening to short-circuit the PC. Just as well it’s a single player experience, I guess.
Having launched with plenty of tarmac and dirt spaghetti for your car to be violently spit from into a tree or hedge, Assetto Corsa Rally now features the usual third type of surface that’s rallied along. Supernova Games Studios have let snow and ice encrust their sim in its biggest update since it took off from the early access start line.
“That’s not a minotaur, that’s a stand-in for the child star of a classic 90s Christmas movie,” I yell while playing Minos’ free holiday reskin, Minos: Home A-Labyrinth. Devs Artificer have temporarily transformed the demo of their maze-building roguelike – due out in full next year – into a legally distinct parody of Home Alone’s burglar-hurting antics you can play for free.
Silent Hill f is one of the few Silent Hill games set outside Silent Hill itself. It transports players from the eternal doldrums of Maine, North America to 1960s Japan, and casts you as a school student in the foggy village of Ebisugaoka. It’s very good, thanks not least to a thoughtful and poignant story from Ryukishi07. Appetites are now whetted for a Silent Hill package tour, and Konami producer Motoi Okamoto already has a few ideas about where he’d like the series to go next. Ideas that, admittedly, make me nervous about the possibility of ham-fisted cultural misrepresentation.
At 5 pm, most week nights, I’ve gone out to scavenge among the vestiges of humanity for loose wires and leftover air fresheners. But right after I get back from the Kilburn Tesco Metro, I boot up Arc Raiders and do the same, except this time with friends. (Classic joke structure ACTIVATED.) That is the magic of videogames.
Despite returning to extraction shooter Arc Raiders time and again, exploring its ruined Earth in 20-minute sessions while keeping out of the reach of the flying robots hunting for fleshy humans, there’s always a wrinkle when judging multiplayer games: are you playing because the game is good, or because it’s lovely to catch up with the ol’ gang?
What music do you expect from a 4X game? As regards historical 4X games, I predict a mixture of triumphal philharmonics orchestra and noodly period skits, as though wandering between the main floor and the giftshop in some museum of empire. If it’s a fantasy game, I think of choirs blaring wordlessly or singing doggerel Latin or Welsh. If it’s a sci-fi game, I think of choirs and synth.
I haven’t heard any choirs so far in Hard Void, though I may have encountered some synth. As regards the trailer and demo, it deals exclusively in heart-battering techno. It sounds like 3am in a club I wouldn’t have been old enough to get into, when this kind of stuff was in vogue. I can picture the bouncer glaring at me. Gosh, the bouncer sure has funny-shaped pupils. Mates, I fear the bouncer may be Lovecraftian.
We factory sim perverts have all known the joy of combing a mile of conveyor belt tagliatelle for that one empty hopper or unplugged furnace that’s stalled the entire production line. Now, imagine that the stalled production line is producing plasma swords for your army of murder droids.
You need your army of murder droids to fight another army of murder droids, but unfortunately, all of your murder droids are now swordless, and therefore murder droids no longer. They advance placidly into the firestorm, falling like mown dandelions, while you run your cursor desperately over the hexagonal smokestacks. There it is! A misfiring 3D printer, right in the centre.
The ongoing RAM shortage (and subsequent and pricing explosion) is imposing a wider range of grim effects than even the Great GPU Famine of 2020. First came the death of one of gaming hardware’s most reliable memory and SSD makers, and now… uh… Larian’s new Divinity game is going to be more optimised for PC than it otherwise would have been?
That’s what Larian CEO Swen Vincke (clearly on a media tour – here’s him discussing Divinity with our Edwin) told TheGamer, anyway. Vincke notes that because the lack of affordable RAM options is making it harder to predict the horsepower of future PCs, “we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn’t necessarily want to do at that point in time.” That doesn’t sound especially horrible to me – higher performance on lower-end rigs ultimately means more players can join in – though nowhere in the full interview does Vincke acknowledge that the shortage is being directly caused and sustained by demand from data centres that power generative AI, a technology that Larian are using in Divinity’s production, and that Vincke himself is defending the use of.
Steam Replay, Valve’s yearly roundup of where all of the hours spent playing games in the Steamy place have gone, has emerged from its hidey-hole yet again. 2025’s edition is out now – you’ve likely already seen it if you’ve hopped into Steam since yesterday afternoon. Amid all the bits telling you that you’ve spent 1000 hours playing Umamusume: Pretty Derby thus far, the annual report’s dished out some fresh stats about how old the games everyone across the platform’s user base has been playing this year are.
