Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Time for another week desperately shovelling quotes, release dates and trailers into the Maw, our weekly news liveblog and also, an abyssal abomination poised to guzzle the waking world and all forms of existence, unless we can satisfy its hunger for headlines. The year is starting to pick up, with a few intriguing titles slated to drop this week in addition to the widely acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, out 18th Jan, which Katharine has called “a deep and challenging Metroid-like with some of the best platforming this side of Moon’s Ori games”.

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Bethesda has already laid out their update schedule for Starfield in 2024, which includes updates every six weeks beginning in February. There’s an update coming before that, however, and arriving on the Steam beta branch next week. It won’t add major new features but includes “over 100 fixes and improvements”.

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Overwatch 2 is going to receive some changes designed to make teamwork easier, and to make bad teamwork less frustrating. The latter is more interesting, because one of Blizzard’s proposed solution is giving Tank and Damage heroes “a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive”, which would make them less reliant on Support players to heal everyone.

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11-year-old game Resident Evil Revelations recently released an update that apparently introduced DRM, only to swiftly roll back the patch after complaints from players that it reportedly caused performance issues. Capcom aren’t giving up that easily on their vow to crack down on mods, though.

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It’s been almost seven years since Danganronpa V3 brought a close to the trilogy of gloriously twisted murder-mystery visual novels. With several of the series’ biggest names going on to release their next game as an exclusive for the Nintendo Switch, there’s room for a properly good successor on PC. Or why not successors? Last year’s exceptional Paranormasight is definitely in the running, and 2024 is already looking promising thanks to the reveal of Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter.

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A fan-made remake of Team Fortress 2 in the Source 2 engine has been cancelled after the ambitious project, three years in the making, ran into a double-whammy of recent development issues and a legal takedown from Valve.

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The two best parts of a Choose Your Own Adventure book are when you initially feel out the shape and paths at the start, and then when you grow tired of dead-ends and faff and just start cheating. The same seems true for Reigns: Three Kingdoms, the latest in the decision-making story series, which arrived on PC (and Switch) yesterday after a year exclusive to Netflix’s inexplicable library of mobile games. Once again, you will decide the fate of a kingdom (this time, China) by swiping left or right on binary decisions. Unfortunately, you cannot cheatily flick through to interesting parts nor use your finger as a bookmark. Not even if you jam it into a USB port. I did try.

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Kainga Colon Seeds of Civilization is one of many, many games that I didn’t get on with for some reason or other in early access, and has subsequently sat in my pile long past a 1.0 release, neglected and generating a vague guilt. It’s come some way since, but its edges are still a little rough, with (usually) minor bugs and limited feedback wrapped up in a design that’s influenced, of course, by that vague shimmering ghost of Rogue (and thus is innately bad and you’re all just wrong). So yeah, it kinda has problems.

But I like it. Weird, huh?

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In addition to resolutions, new years are always good times to start thinking about the futureeeee, with or without a wibbly oooOOOoooOoooOh intonation. Predictions about what’s going to happen over the next 12 months abound, some of which are more spurious (and light-hearted) than others. But such near-sightedness is not what we’re concerning ourselves with today in this latest edition of Ask RPS. We’re looking much further ahead, thanks to this excellent question from MiniMatt.

They ask: “Dearest RPS, This being your 150th year in PC gaming [Ed: this question was submitted in 2023], please tell us what the next 150 years hold? Will VR become universal? Will the desktop PC box survive or will we all move over to laptops & steam decks? Will industry continue to consolidate or fragment? Get yer nostradamus on and tell us Peter Molyneux’s future.

Indeed, a lot has changed in the world of PC gaming since our esteemed founding in 1873, so come and find out our best guesses for what the future holds below.

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Bandai Namco have slapped a release date on Ilca Inc’s Sand Land, which isn’t a dodgy themepark created by an over-ambitious building supplies firm, but an action RPG adaptation of the same-named manga by Akira Toriyama, in which a titchy demon searches for the Legendary Spring and goes to war with a king who is hogging all the water.

It’s out 26th April 2024, and alternates beat ’em up action with cartoon tank customisation, in a sort of Dragon Ball X Mad Max homage with chunks of Dragon Quest thrown in for good measure.

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