Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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Ask RPS… anything you like (round two)!

Hello folks. It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these (apologies for that), but off the back of our free month RPS Premium trial in September, I wanted to put out another call for reader questions from our fine crop of supporters – as an extra thank you and benefit for your continued support of the site. This is your opportunity to ask us, the RPS editorial team, questions about games, the site, the way we do things, and other things we like. These questions will then be answered in our semi-regular (ish, sort of, as best we can) Ask RPS column, which is a public post available to everyone. So come and tell us what’s been on your mind in the comments below.

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Diablo 4 and Modern Warfare 3 won’t release on Game Pass till next year at the earliest

Much like a Call of Duty player inching up the stairs behind a wily sniper, Microsoft are closing in on final, final approval of their multi-billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, having more-or-less won over the UK’s competition and markets authority. The company expect to bring it home by 13th October.

Aside from hastening the arrival of a grim future that consists of a giant, mechanised Phil Spencer engaged in a trans-Pacific staring contest with Nintendo, this also means we can expect new and recent behemoths like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Diablo 4 on Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service. But not for a while, it seems.

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Say hello and welcome to our new Reviews Editor, Ed Thorn!

Good news, folks. Today, I’m very pleased to announce our new Reviews Editor, and it’s our very own Ed Thorn! After spending two and a bit years flexing his typing arms as our senior staff writer, Ed will now be stepping up to wrangle our reviews section into bigger and better shape than ever before – or rather, he already has, as he officially took over the role at the start of October. He will henceforth be known not simply as Edders, but as the new and improved Reviews Edders, so please come and congratulate him on his ascension in the comments below.

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Frame-rate and resolution discourse is “getting a bit out of hand”, says Alan Wake 2 dev

In the nicest possible way, and with the greatest of respect, Remedy’s comms director Thomas Puha would like people to stop fixating on frame-rate and resolution and get on with their bloody lives. Or at least, that’s my summary of his thoughts following the recent announcement on Xitter that Alan Wake 2 will have a performance mode on PS5 and Xbox Series X, allowing consoleers for whom responsiveness is a priority to eke a higher frame-rate out of a game “built from the beginning as a 30fps experience focusing on visuals and ambiance.”

Puha has subsequently been chatting to press about the creation of the mode and Alan Wake 2’s visuals at large. In what has become a time-honoured ceremony for any AAA game developer a month or two before release, he took a moment to observe that focussing on frame-rate vs resolution is missing the wood for the trees. (The trees in question do take a toll on Alan Wake 2’s performance, but we’ll get to that further down the page.)

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Your girlfriend is burying you alive – what are you going to do about it?

I do love a game that tells you upfront what it’s about while making nary a lick of sense, and visual novel Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful is certainly that. You are, indeed, being buried alive. The person burying you is your girlfriend, who waves aside your protests that you aren’t dead yet, pointing out that this is exactly what a dead person would say if they were trying to avoid being buried. Can’t fault the logic.

Click the downward arrow below the animated image of your girlfriend burying you alive and you’ll discover a murky fungal blackscreen where cartoon rats periodically try to eat you, unless you click to get rid of them. Below that, there’s a kind of Alice in Wonderland-style alcove in which a tousled lady with a rat on her shoulder reassures you that being buried alive ain’t so bad. As she points out, “underground is like, the only place to escape capitalism, plus it’s nice and cool”. Again, I can’t fault the logic. Then she offers to play cards with you. The cards in question have rats doodled on them, including a wonderfully festive rodent Joker. There is passing mention of a “rat god”.

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If Anthem is the “anti-BioWare game”, then James Ohlen is correcting the balance

“Baldur’s Gate II set the model, and I obviously loved that model,” says James Ohlen. “But there were a ton of people at BioWare who didn’t like it.” During leadership meetings over the course of the Canadian designer’s 22 years at the RPG studio, he’d sometimes feel totally outnumbered when talking about the importance of story. “Game developers don’t get into the industry to create stories, they get into the industry to create games,” he says. “And so there’s this conflict between game developers and story – my entire career it’s been a constant fight.”

Ohlen picked his side early. He was telling BioWare stories even before he joined the company. The meeting of Minsc and Boo, one of the most enduring partnerships in PC gaming, came about in a tabletop Dungeons & Dragons game he ran as a teenager. Then a comic book store manager, he took advantage of his premises to guide no fewer than three concurrent D&D groups through their campaigns. “I didn’t really have much of a life outside of Dungeons & Dragons,” he says.

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The Talos Principle 2’s demo is a “specially tailored” intro to its gorgeous sci-fi puzzles

Fans of grassy stone megastructures, winding scholarly backstory, and dinky robot guys are in for a treat this week, as Croteam and Devolver Digital have released a demo for The Talos Principle 2, offering a “specially tailored” assortment of first-person puzzles and philosophical musings ahead of the game’s November release.

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