Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I hate Discord with the intensity of a supernova falling into a black hole. I hate its ungainly profusion of tabs and voice channels. I regret its cybersecurity breaches. I resent that the PRs use it for every virtual press event. I’m furious that I have to download 12 updates whenever I remember to turn it on. I despise the feisty and cloying loading screen trivia and service messages. Show me the “empathy banana” again, you weird little gopher beetle. I’ll put you in the microwave.

I also dislike that Discord now assumes I’m “teen-by-default” and restricts my access appropriately unless I go through some kind of age verification process, though I can understand the rationale, given some of the awful things that have happened via Discord. Already in play across the UK and Australia, this new “age-assured” approach is now being rolled out worldwide to create “a safer and more inclusive experience for users over the age of 13”. Rather unnervingly, Discord’s new age verification system includes an “inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age.”

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Aethus is a crafty new sci-fi survival game in which one woman and her flying drone pal excavate a layered underground world on behalf of a galactic megacorp. You’ll create a surface base from holographic modules, gather evidence about a doomed science expedition, research a wacky new element, and unearth the dirty secrets of your employer.

It sounds a lot like Coffee Stain’s Satisfactory, with opportunities for automation later on, but it’s viewed from an elevated third-person perspective, and appears more narrative-driven. Satisfactory through the eyes of Diablo? I can – as we space miners like to say – ‘dig it’, though I’m quite weary of games about being the lonely stooge of some breezily villainous extraction racket. This particular seam of satire has long since been gutted. I am ready for games in which we go to other planets for Nice reasons. I feel like that ought to be possible. Anyway, here’s a trailer.

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Nioh 3 “is less punishing” than Nioh 1 and Nioh 2, according to our reviewer Jeremy Blum. In a fine example of the Duality of Man, this observation forms part of a sentence in which Jeremy also confesses to smashing a hole in his desk with his controller. I can only imagine the destruction if he’d run into one particular “very rare” Nioh 3 bug, recently patched out, which causes the game to corrupt your save data if you end the game while praying at shrines.

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Excuse me, coming through. I’m Kazuma Kiryu, and I’m on my way to speak to some gruff yakuza lads about what their local gang war means for my orphanage. You can tell I’m serious because I’m riding a prototype segway dressed in nothing but a swimming cap, goggles and shorts. Now move, I’ve goons to beat up at two, photos to take at three, a biker gang war to resolve at four, and I also need to somehow fit in time to run around town waving my flip phone at strangers.

Once that’s done, I’m all good to head home to the kids I’ve left unattended. There’s no time to kick back, though. Vegetables must be planted, fish caught, bags sewed, and homework helped with.

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Last year I covered the demo for Void War, robotically describing it as FTL meets Warhammer 40,000, because that is what it is, and sometimes, you have to call a Spade Marine a Spade Marine (I did enjoy the demo, as flagrantly combinatory as the game may be).

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Late last year, horror game Horses was denied a release on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Both Valve and Epic judged that Santa Ragione’s surreal work violated their rules regarding adult content, while the studio have asserted the the game “uses challenging, unconventional material to encourage discussion” rather than sexually titillate.

Now, an interview given by one of the Epic Store’s executives has reignited the war of words between the storefront and Santa Rangione, with the latter accusing Epic of making “provably incorrect statements about the game’s content”.

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Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties‘ director Ryosuke Horii has addressed the controversial casting of actor Teruyuki Kagawa in the remake, which has resulted in fan backlash due to a 2022 report from Shukan Shincho detailing sexual assault allegations against the actor. Kagawa apologised at the time, but didn’t specify what he was apologising for or confirm the events reported in Shukan Shincho’s article.

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Hello reader who is also a reader! It’s finally time for another edition of our thrillingly erratic column on game developers and their bestest books. This week, we’re having our ears bent by Marcia Shange, chief operating officer of South Africa, Johannesburg-based developers Nyamakop, creators of puzzle platformer Semblance and the forthcoming postcolonial heist ’em up Relooted. Cheers, Marcia! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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For all of their faults (the list may be endless), the interesting thing about live service games, when done well anyway, is the way they can change from day to day. There’s an actual living quality to them that, even if I’ll always prefer them, a singleplayer game can’t capture as well. One such game that can change quite drastically is Arc Raiders, with its varying map conditions and events, swapping in and out at the whims of its developers. This rotation isn’t something universally loved, but CEO Patrick Söderlund has said that they’re here to stay.

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Last month, Ubisoft pretty unceremoniously cancelled a bunch of games, the most notable of the bunch being that long gestating Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake. This came as part of a major restructuring at the company, putting up to 200 jobs at their Paris HQ at risk, ultimately leading to a call for an international strike, and the firing of one Assassin’s Creed designer. It’s all a concerning mess, and now the creator of Prince of Persia and lead designer on the original Sands of Time Jordan Mechner has shared his sympathy to devs affected by the remake’s cancellation.

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