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Mystical dark-fantasy RPG The Thaumaturge has been delayed into next year, as its developers say they’ll need until February to polish up the story-driven game to the standards they’re aiming for.
A bunch of MMO veterans led by one of the original producers of genre granddaddy EverQuest are working on a new online game that will use AI tools to create characters and have them interact with players. There’s also mention of blockchain-like asset ownership and ambitions of being the next metaverse.
Last time, you decided that auto-detect graphics settings is better than auto-level up. While it was a conclusive loss, I was still surprised and glad to see a fair few people rooting for the underdog. Always more interesting when it’s not a complete drubbing. This week, I need you to tell me who you are by telling me which rules you follow. What’s better: double-jumping or limitless inventory capacity?
It’s a good time to be a strategy game developer, according to Oxide Games, developers of Ara: History Untold, which happens to be a strategy game. Speaking to me during a showing of Ara – which is notable among turn-based 4X games for playing out every player’s turn simultaneously – the creators offered a rousing characterisation of the genre, suggesting that strategy games have somewhat shucked off their association with stifling complexity and elitism, thanks not least to the recent influence of board gaming.
Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master is a staff management game disguised as a dungeon management game. At the start of each week, your minions might choose to go on strike, demanding everything from more cells in the prison to fewer dwarves in the workplace. If that second example elicited a startled little “yikes”, then good, you’re paying attention. Your minions are also occasional racists – which at least makes some of the more brutal options at hand for dealing with striking workers more palatable.
You can sacrifice the entire picket line to your in-house demon lord, or terminate their employment without tribunal. You can also lock them up in those prisons they repeatedly claim are so lacking in cells. Or you can agree to their terms to expand the canteen and sack all of their shortest colleagues. But no matter which option you choose, minion strikes are inconsequential, only ever amounting to a comedy aside. Just as the turn-based Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk set out to skewer D&D, Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master is a brave and self-aware parody of dungeon management games. But it’s far too barebones to invest in seriously.
Recent GPUs, glisteningly muscled as they are, remain expensive. Enter the best early Black Friday graphics cards deals, offering up some rare opportunities to upgrade your PC’s most gaming-focused component without the usual financial devastation.
I’m exaggerating – for effect! – but there genuinely are some chunky savings to be had here, even on the very latest graphics cards with enhanced ray tracing and DLSS 3 support. It’s not just super-duper-high-end cards like the RTX 4080 that are getting cuts, either – the early deals I’ve found so far cover more affordable and/or mid-range far as well, like the Intel Arc A750 and RTX 4060 Ti. And there could be more to come, with Black Friday itself not rolling around until November 24th.
Have you ever watched critically acclaimed 1998 comedy drama The Truman Show and thought “What if the whole city was people who didn’t know they were in a TV show?”. That’s kind of the deal with American Arcadia, a puzzle–platformer about a dude who lives in an ultra advanced dome city that is for some reason 70s-themed, and is also a huge reality show for the Twitch generation.
I actually love the 70s theme. This combined with story-within-a-story-within-a-story framing, bits of lovely, almost Wes Anderson-esque art design, and some extreme multi-tasking combining 2.5D and 3D makes American Arcadia an interesting little treat. Do the twists upon twists get a bit over cooked? Maybe. But you can live with it.
If you happen to be a medieval monk illustrator trapped in the body of a modern videogames enthusiast, you might like Howl, a turn-based strategy game from Lion Song and Flower Collectors studio Mi’pu’mi Games. It’s powered by what the developers are calling “living ink”, an art style that fills in each papery map as you play.
The game certainly looks arresting: your cursor is a quill, the HUD is a collection of smaller parchment scraps, and the terrain is a slowly brightening wash of swirling colours, leaking beyond the outlines of trees and buildings. Lovely stuff. And what’s more, you get to beat up a bunch of wolves.
Larian’s king wizard (CEO) Swen Vincke is very eager to tell you about the studio’s next game after Baldur’s Gate 3. And also, a bit terrified, because after all, the response to Larian’s D&D adaptation has been rather rhapsodic. How on Earth do you replicate that level of success? The answer may lie in scripture.
Tactical extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov is adding vaulting, a recoil rework and new armour, as revealed in a developer livestream. Of the bunch, it’s vaulting – the act of clambering over a low wall – which has been greeted most feverishly by Tarkov’s community, a fact which is honestly not surprising.
