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I’ve been looking back over my news pieces about artificial intelligence tools, generative image software and/or large language models and reflecting that what I really distrust about “AI” is the fact that AI is “the future”. Saying that X thing is the future is de rigueur for technology marketing. It’s something you hear repeatedly from videogames companies in particular, with their sequels and console generations and other chronological fixtures that form an endless staircase towards The New.
Rise, Tarnished! Actually stay sitting down, because it’s time to watch and think about the first trailer for Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree, which confirms that the Elden Ring DLC expansion will focus on Miquella, a rather tragic demigod character from the main game. Find the full video again below, together with my thoughts on just what the heck it all means.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Microsoft are bringing Maneater back to Game Pass. Yesterday they unveiled the next batches of Game Pass additions and two are returnees, with the delightful fighty platformer Indivisible accompanying brutal shark ’em up Maneater. What’s more important is that it’s adding the game with the cutest little Nurglings, grimdark retro-styled FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. The rhetoric of ‘purging xenos and heretics’ surely doesn’t apply to these darling babies. Read on for all the games coming to (and going from) Game Pass over the next few weeks.
Before founding Inflexion in 2021, Aaryn Flynn worked at BioWare. He’s got credits on some of the studio’s best-loved games, from Baldur’s Gate 2 through Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic to Dragon Age: Origins and the Mass Effect trilogy. He was BioWare’s general manager for several years, but left the company in 2017 following the release of the less-regarded Mass Effect: Andromeda. New survival sim Nightingale is his first early access project, and it’s certainly been a learning experience, with Flynn obliged to rethink many of the things he learned about gamedev during his BioWare days. Speaking to me ahead of Nightingale’s launch, Flynn talked about the difficulty of making headway as a new developer in an industry where the most successful competing live service titles have effectively become part of the landscape – indeed, a force of “gravity”.
Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree is getting a trailer today and it’ll last for three whole minutes, which is more than enough time for folks to tear all of its finer details apart for several hundred hours. I for one, hope the trailer includes a hint of gameplay and not just like, a long cinematic with some croaky fella explaining how there’s been another “downfall” or similar.
Last night I tried to host a Helldivers 2 co-op mission and the “ready up” button froze up. I spammed it in a panic while the randos in my voice channel fumed at the delay. Then I popped us out of the drop pods, attempted to quit the game in embarrassment, and the PC promptly crashed. Another blow for managed democracy!
I’m hoping that the ready up problem is one of the “various UI issues [that] may appear when the game interacts with servers” which Arrowhead are addressing in a future Helldivers 2 patch. Before that, there’s patch 1.000.10, which fixes PC quickplay match-making bugs, gets rid of a crash issue when displaying mission rewards, and tunes civilian extraction mission difficulty, amongst other things. It’s live now, and the full changelog is below.
Kingmakers has too much going on to easily summarise, but I’ll try. Really, though, you should just click below and watch the trailer, which will surprise and delight you with its twists and scope in a way my words will not.
Gigantic, the free-to-play team brawler from a former StarCraft and Guild Wars designer, which launched (fully) in 2017 and closed the following year, is returning as Gigantic: Rampage Edition. It’s no longer free-to-play, but a “premium and definitive release” of the original, and it’s due on April 9th.
In 2023, more than 500 games earned more than $3 million (around £2.3 million) in gross revenue via Steam, according to Valve. The stat was shared as part of their annual summary, a breakdown of the platform’s past year in terms of new features and performance.
I always love it when stuff I’ve legitimately bought appears on sale, and that’s the case today with this XPG Caster DDR5 kit that’s 10% off on Amazon UK today. That brings this 32GB dual-channel DDR5-6000 CL40 kit to £64, a great price for this spec – especially for an RGB-enabled model.
