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Ahead of Final Fantasy 14’s next massive expansion, Dawntrail, arriving this summer, Square Enix recently put out a graphical benchmarking tool. Dawntrail’s benchmark is especially noteworthy as it’s the first time we’ve really been able to put the MMO’s much-anticipated graphical update arriving with 7.0 into practice and see what sort of demands it might make on our hardware by overhauling the 10-year-old game’s visuals.
In the most unsurprising news you might read today: Amazon are going to make a second season to their very popular Fallout TV show. That means one more season until we get Liam Neeson, right?
Lured like an unsatisfied sailor by the siren song of alleged performance woes, I’ve been giving No Rest for the Wicked a cursory benchmarkin’, and yes! The isometric ARPG does suffer from all the early access wonkiness you’ve likely heard about already today.
Capcom are working on another Dragon’s Dogma 2 patch, and this one take as its target the dreaded dragonsplague, which causes the game’s AI-controlled pawns to go nuts and murder everybody, including story-critical NPCs, if you allow it to go untreated for long enough. It’ll reduce the infection frequency of dragonsplague, which is spread when pawns mingle with other pawns online, and make the symptoms more obvious. Pawns already get glowing eyes when they’re dragonsplagued – I guess they’ll be all the glowier in future.
I don’t remember much about my grandfathers anymore, only that they were once there and they loved me, and now they are gone. So if I were a small child with quarreling parents and I stumbled across a hidden abandoned lab housing a horrifying shapeshifting psychic lifeform, perhaps I would also try to want this maybe-a-demon to be my grandpa. That’s the premise of Growing My Grandpa!, a delightful little indie horror game about feeding, teaching, and caring for “a grandpa-like entity”. It came out in 2022 and I kept forgetting to post about it, but it’s still great so I’m telling you now, okay.
It’s starting to feel like ConcernedApe (aka Eric Barone) may in fact be a modern day Sisiphus, destined to work on Stardew Valley forever. Following on from the mega update of 1.6 a month ago, and 1.6.3 soon after that, the hardy perennial farming game has a new 1.6.4 mini update. The key addition this time is more new layouts that will appear after you reach the bottom of the mines, and more layouts for the volcano mines too. If you’ve not played Stardew Valley you might wonder why there are deep mines and volcanos, and to you I say “Pah! You should play Stardew Valley.”
1.6.4 also has a lot of bug fixes (including fixing disappearing pets, new pets being a key feature of 1.6) and some balance changes, as well as a host of fixes for modders and modded players. ConcernedApe said early on that 1.6 would be an update for modders, so it’s nice to see that being supported. You can read the full patch notes here.
We’ve suffered some body blows recently, but perhaps none will ever be as winding as the news I now deliver to you: Alice0 is leaving RPS. She recently celebrated 10 years here, so that should tell you something about how much of an influence she’s had over the tone of the site over it’s lifespan. Truly, the site won’t be the same without her – so let’s take the opportunity to celebrate here work here.
Timed perfectly off the back of the Fallout TV show’s success, Fallout 76 players can start testing out Skyline Valley, a new woodland area in the game’s upcoming major update. There’s a new public event to try, as well as combat readjustments that’ll be drip fed over the course of the test period. Anyone who owns the game on Steam can give these things a go, which is a bonus, too. I think I own it? I genuinely can’t remember. Anyway, yes, maybe I’ll hop in and see how things have changed since, errr, launch.
While Cities: Skylines 2 has made progress on the performance front, not everything about the troubled citybuilder is on the up. In fact, player reception to the recently released Beach Properties DLC has proven so un-sunny that both developers Colossal Order and publishers Paradox Interactive have issued a joint statement apologising for the state it launched in.
The letter, addressed to Cities fans and signed by Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen and Paradox Interactive deputy CEO Mattias Lilja, also promises refunds for anyone who bought Beach Properties. Or, in the case of those who got it through snapping up Skylines 2’s Ultimate Edition, compensation in the form of three Creator Packs and three radio stations. The contentious DLC is also going free to anyone who’s yet to put money down.
Warhorse have revealed Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, sequel to the 2018 open world action-RPG which you will likely remember for a couple of reasons: 1) its ostensibly faithful but inevitably skewed representations of race, gender and class in medieval Bohemia, which were amplified by its creative director Daniel Vávra’s qualified endorsement of Gamergate, and 2) being a moderately entertaining, buggy and mucky chivalric fable in which you have to worry about keeping your sword sharp and eating food before it rots.
Going by the announcement video, the new game is the same game but with more cash to burn. It’s the work of 250 people, with Jan Velta returning as composer. According to Vávra, “what we are making now is what it was supposed to be in the beginning, but we were not able to do it because we didn’t have enough resources and experience.”
