Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Diablo 4 has been on the back-burner amid the chaos of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield’s launches, but much like an arch-demonness putting together the pieces of an inter-planar conspiracy, Blizzard have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes. The action-RPG‘s next big round of additions, the Season of Blood, launches on 17th October alongside the Steam edition of the game. It introduces a new season journey and questline, a new season event, and some skulking new enemies of the Nosferatu persuasion.

The new quest sounds quite fun from the promotional materials. It sees you investigating a mysterious outbreak of punctured necks, recruiting a local Van Helsing named Erys, and tracking down a Dark Master, while harnessing 22 juicy new vampiric powers care of some pact armour. The latter range from turning into a cloud of bats, through cursing people, to treating yourself to a spontaneous bloodbath so as to enhance your channeled skills, The trade-off is that you’ll have to acquire yet another Diablo 4 resource, potent blood, to perform these tricks.

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The Electronic Wireless Show podcast returns to one of our recent previous messes to discuss Payday 3. More specifically, we look at the post-launch changes the devs are making in an effort to improve matchmaking and wait times. Specifically, we use this to think about games that have changed their reputations after a rocky start, what with Cyberpunk 2077‘s recent 2.0 update. What are the circumstances that allow games to do that? Why are they such outliers? How do we think about reviews in the context of something like No Man’s Sky?

We’ve also been playing some big recent games, so tune in for discussions of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, a call for pirate games, and a hilarious misunderstanding about Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

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“But what if there were dinosaurs???” is a setup that goes a long way with me, as a Jurassic World Evolution player and defiant fan of Capcom’s Exoprimal, and in this case, that setup rests atop a tasty-looking fruitcake of references to Warcraft and Stronghold. Woah there, Dr Grant – what the hell are you talking about? Why, the just-announced Dinolords, of course – a blend of strategy and action-RPG from Northplay and Ghost Ship Publishing, in which you raise troops and build castles to fend off armies of T-Rex-riding Danes. Here’s a trailer.

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CD Projekt have released the full patch notes for Cyberpunk 2077‘s 2.01 update, which as you might recall, stops people tumbling through certain elevator floors when the frame-rate drops. Out now on PC, the update spans many other technical fixes and improvements, some of them specific to the recently released Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty DLC.

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Very much like an assassin sliding a poison needle into your wrist while shaking your hand, Ubisoft have added Denuvo‘s anti-piracy/anti-cheating DRM software to Assassin’s Creed: Mirage in the game’s day-one update, aka patch 1.0.2. We’ve known for a while that the game would use Denuvo, together with the VMProtect software, but what’s baking the noodles of many players is that the Denuvo functionality has been snuck in after the Assassin’s Creed: Mirage review embargo, denying critics the chance to assess its impact on the game.

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Kitfox and Bay12 have struck the earth, manufactured a thousand stone blocks, and laid out a roadmap for the Dwarf Fortress Steam edition’s Adventure Mode, together with some forthcoming updates for the existing fortress management mode. Adventure Mode, in case you’ve been living under a rock (which I guess you probably have, if you’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress), is the open world roguelike RPG element of the game, which lets you roam the enormous realm you’ve generated and even tour/loot/disturb the unquiet spirits of your own, abandoned fortress. Alas, there’s no word on a release date for the Steam edition’s Adventure Mode beyond “not this year”.

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Another Crab’s Treasure hooked me with its underwater Soulslike premise and cutesy charm. But once you take a closer look at the game’s polluted ocean, filled with plastic shells and weapons, the comparisons to Dark Souls get a little clearer. This is a quiet and kinda melancholy post-apocalypse. We can now find out whether the crustaceans lean on cuteness or sadness more in the game’s new demo, released just yesterday.

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The price of Steam Deck SSD upgrades continues to fall, as Integral’s 2230-sized PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD has dropped to £69.95 at Amazon UK. That’s a great price for a drive that more than doubles even the highest capacity Steam Deck sold by Valve, and makes a tremendous upgrade for 512GB and 256GB Steam Deck owners too.

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The Hitman series soon turns 25 years old, but Agent 47’s unwrinkled face doesn’t carry the “what am I doing with my life?” stress that normally accompanies such a birthday. Developer IO Interactive is instead celebrating with both new and returning events coming to the stealth infiltration mega package that is Hitman: World Of Assassination.

IOI are dropping the game’s next Elusive Target mission, called The Drop, on October 27th. The forthcoming mission sees Agent 47 enter (infiltrate) a shadowy Berlin club to party until he forgets what day it is. He may or may not murder a DJ who’s secretly also a drug lord while he’s there. Our new target is actually modelled off of real-world deckman, DJ Dimitri Vegas. Returning events include the Bad Boy (available October 13-23rd) and Food Critic (available from October 20-30th) missions.

Should you wish to take the stealthy shenanigans on the go and don’t yet own a Steam Deck, there’s some good news. IOI are also releasing Hitman: Blood Money on mobile this Autumn, with a Switch release following in Winter. Hitman has always played more like a methodical, violent puzzle game for me, rather than a purely stealthy-shooty one, so I can imagine that it probably works well on smaller screens regardless.

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Creative Assembly’s Hyenas – the recently cancelled extraction shooter about space Robin Hoods – was supposedly publisher Sega’s biggest budget game ever. New details about the game’s development claim that a lack of direction, slow progress, and an engine change turned the once hopeful “Super Game” into the canned FPS that it sadly is today.

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