Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Many of today’s game designers have, like me, grown up with Japanese Y2K style – the style of the late 90s and early 2000s that gave us not only fear of the end of the world due to a calendar change, but also the WipEout series, futuristic PlayStation 2 ads, and fashion that incorporated everything from glitter to holographic fabrics and cute crop tops.

In a media landscape that seldom shies away from homages and sequels, I’ve waited a long time for the influence of childhood favourites such as Dance Dance Revolution and Space Channel 5 to pop back up. After all, plenty of Western developers have taken inspiration from Japanese role-playing games, giving us Sea of Stars, Undertale and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, to name a few. Recently, I found some really cool games by Western developers that are living the Y2K dream with me, so it was time to dive into their inspirations and compare some childhood anime with some nerds.

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Julian Gerighty, a long-time key cog at Massive Entertainment, has announced that he’s departing the Ubisoft-owned studio after 12 years to go and work on Battlefield at EA. His departure swiftly follows Ubisoft revealing earlier this week that they’re planning to lay off staff at Massive, with a voluntary redundancy process late last year reportedly having not resulted in enough departures to stave off this bloodletting.

Meanwhile, the publishers have opted to take the opportunity of Gerighty’s departure to reassure folks that The Division series is just fine.

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DLSS 4.5 is out now, and while previous new versions of Nvidia’s performance-massaging upscaler would have required waiting around for game implementation – beyond the inevitable Cyberpunk 2077 debut, anyway – it follows more recent additions in letting you impose it upon existing games from the off. That’s done via the Nvidia App and its DLSS Override tools, which following an update on January 14th, is tooled up with what version 4.5 promises to be tangible visual improvements.

I’ve been testing it, both on this public Nvidia App release and on a pre-release beta build, and DLSS 4.5 can indeed deliver on the right settings. But it’s also more of a specialised tool than DLSS 4, and although backwards compatibility is welcome, it’s presented with an opaque naming system that has as much in common with algebra as it does with upscaling.

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I continue to have a soft spot for Soulframe, the new, sort-of-early access fantasy RPG from Warframe developers Digital Extremes, despite the fact that the lore writing is often wyrd to the point of giving me a concussion. Especially when it creeps into studio press announcements. For example, here is a snippet from the developer’s summary of Soulframey doings in the year 2025: “Together, we stepped into sap-dreams and freed Bromius from rotting roots. We Bestitched with a certain witch and crept into the crypts of The Circade.” …Right then! I expect you shall be tending to your ravens next.

Still, don’t let that turn you off. There’s a lot of gentle craft beneath the plus-plus-ultra world-building. Soulframe is a game that often comes alive in the quieter moments. Take, for example, the login screen, which I’ve just realised could be a hidden creature collection game.

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Amazon’s colonial fantasy MMO New World (latterly rebranded New World: Aeternum) is no longer available for purchase as of yesterday, and will be taken offline for good from 31st January 2027, the publishers have announced. The news follows the release of the game’s final major update back in October, amid mass layoffs at Amazon.

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I be a poor journo. Newly come from the official Ubisoft music YouTube channel. I spend my life in jeopardy.
Of a publisher suddenly turning around and saying that a sudden mass reupload of Black Flag‘s sea shanties was in fact just a case of behind-the-scenes issues, rather than another harbinger of a remake announcement.

Tp be fair, it did follow many reports about the badly kept secret that is the Black Flag remake and a PEGI rating that sure looks like it’s for such a game.

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I think we all want it to be true that the Monster Hunter Wilds’ infamously limp PC performance can be blamed upon, as was reported yesterday, an overzealous DLC checking process gumming up what might overwise be a perfectly fine-running beastfight game. Partly because it just sounds funny. Willing but frustrated graphics elves running about, harangued to distraction by a hairstyle add-on overseer nagging for licenses, like a Daily Telegraph reader demanding to know why you aren’t wearing a poppy on November 3rd.

The best part? All evidence suggests it genuinely is true – albeit only to varying degrees, and in the case of my own testing, nowhere near as drastically as in the originally discovered case.

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Abandon your plans to run for public office. If you don’t, you’ll not be eligible to apply to be a contestant on the Fallout Shelter reality TV series Amazon are now working on, following the success of their other Fallout show. Stop protesting, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be locked in a set resembling a vault and subsequently have your mind messed with as you and your fellow inmates take on a bunch of challenges.

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Alas and alack for Lickity Split, knight hero of The Fortress, prisoner of a villainous Sorceror King. ‘Twas I who named him (I wanted a pun on “Lich” and I’m fairly sure we’ve done “Lich My Balls” several times before) and ‘twas I who led him to his death a whole six rooms away from his cell… and ‘twas I who then resurrected him as a wizard and got him killed again, a mere five minutes later.

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You can’t take a step on Steam this week without stumbling over a body. Step forward and you’ll trip over a cold-to-the-touch mobster with a knife in their back. Step to the left and, oh God, it’s a wizened academic clutching a poisoned apple in their rigor mortis grip. But one step to the right and you’ll find the decapitated head of a curmudgeonly mayor who had recently made enemies of everyone in their small town. Yes, it’s Steam Detective Fest and murder is in the air.

Until January 19th, hundreds of developers are offering discounts and demos of their murder mysteries. With so many bodies piling up, it is hard to know where to start your investigations. So, to test the mettle of these murder makers, I set them a challenge.

How would they kill Humpty Dumpty and get away with it?

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