Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Microsoft are telling the world that the sooner we all switch to using generative AI tools in our day-to-day lives, the sooner we will 10x ourselves. Yet the corporation are still only finding haphazard pick up by videogame developers, including some of their own studios.

As executive producer Susan Kath tells me, the Elder Scrolls Online team haven’t yet found a part of development where they can use it. “Right now, we generally use it for things like this,” Kath says, indicating our call. “A lot of us get a lot of use out of Copilot, for meetings, for summaries, inbox organisations, stuff like that.”

But, in the case of art, coding, or writing, generative AI is not something the team are using in Elder Scrolls Online’s development, and its adoption is still an open discussion within the studio. “I don’t know what our decision is going to be, because we’re still having conversations about where we go with that,” Kath says. “Obviously we all have strong opinions within the studio. Obviously Microsoft has invested heavily in this. That would be a thing that I would imagine we would talk about in the future.”

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As the price of RAM, GPUs, and even SSDs climbs ever higher off the back of AI data centre demand, it’s causing a significant price crunch for hardware manufacturers. “It is such a volatile situation at this point in time it is hard to figure out pricing,” Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said in a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast. “I don’t know if I can pick a number right now as I speak with you and [be confident in it] by the end of the podcast.”

The rapidly increasing prices mean the company are keeping schtum on how much their next round of gaming laptops will cost. “This is something that concerns me,” Tan explained. “The RAM prices are going up and we want to be able to make sure our laptops remain affordable and in the reach of gamers out there.”

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom during the CES podcast recording.

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Out today in early access, Turnbound is a tile and turn-based autobattler about mythical heroes trapped in a haunted boardgame, where the starting player is chosen by flipping a coin bearing a picture of a cat’s anus. It’s saying a lot for Turnbound’s mellow, fairytale ambience and rich, rosy tile designs that I consider the cat’s anus a positive – a touch of whimsy, rather than just, well, that feeling you get when you’ve been flashbanged by a picture of a cat’s anus. Rare indeed are the videogames that contain a cat’s anus, and rarer still are the videogames in which the cat’s anus isn’t grounds for a refund.

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Fine, we’ll let you hop in whatever the MMO equivalent of Superman’s phone booth is for a single round of free outfit transmog just before the launch of March’s Midnight expansion. So have degreed World of Warcraft makers Blizzard, in the face of vocal vexation among players unhappy about a sudden hike in clothes changing prices that arrived with the game’s latest patch.

This isn’t the only time Midnight’s ended up under a microscope fore money-related reasons prior to release, but it is the first time the ire’s been exclusive to fashionistas.

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Often, the gaming internet depresses me with *gestures expansively*, but sometimes, it delights me with some relatively specific and impassioned Thing like, in this case, a single-player aerobatics sim dedicated to formation flying. Created by Japanese indie CloveTek, Dancing Wings – The Aerobatic Simulator is as far from yer Ace Combats and Delivery Must Completes as you can get while still having wings. A bunch of wise guys have tagged it “Automobile Sim” on the Steam page, but ignore them! I expect they’re just sore about never having performed a genuine Immelmann turn. Here’s a trailer.

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A new Helldivers 2 patch has arrived ahead of the slightly delayed Redacted Regiment warbond also making its sneaky debut today, January 22nd. In line with that warbond’s stealthy shushness, this patch has seen Arrowhead add in new commando missions designed to reward those who know when to crouch-walk. They’ve also revealed that the slim build that’s been in beta for a little while is finally ready to take the reigns from the standard version and its very chunky install size.

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Ubisoft’s bloodbath of game cancellations and restructuring yesterday has attracted the expected fiery response from unionised workers, with the French game industry union Solidaires Informatique calling a half-day strike today. Cost-cutting and potential layoffs aside, the strikers are protesting against Ubisoft’s decision to mandate a full return to office, with workers given an annual allowance of work from home days instead – something a publisher executive has justified as a move “to enhance collective efficiency” and “the sense of belonging”.

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You ever accidentally find out that you’re the sovereign of an entire nation as dictated by a prophecy even though you’re technically just random nobody, and so you wind-up being the one to have to make all the decisions about how your nation is run? No? Well, that’s fine, but if you’d like that to be you, I’ll introduce you to Sovereign Tower, a management RPG where you send off your knights of the round table to deal with all manner of quests.

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This is probably the umpteenth time I’ve said I’m not someone who plays many shooters, but here I am saying it again, because an FPS has rocked up that has clocked my interest. It’s called Firestarters, an arena shooter that’s a bit like Quake, a bit like Rollerdome, and looks like good, bloody fun.

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I am going to level with you. My awareness of Lort up until this point has been non-existent. Never heard of it before today, it’s early access release day! But when you see a game called Lort, well, you at least need to take a little look. And as astronomically silly as the name is, it looks like a pretty neat, silly time, so, my predilection towards the inane has clearly worked out in my favour this time.

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