Auto Added by WPeMatico
It was announced earlier this year that Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy would arrive on PC in early 2024. Now we have a specific release date for the three Objection-able courtroom puzzlers: January 25th, 2024.
I love creative tools in videogames, from drawing Worms levels in Deluxe Paint to optimising r_speeds in Half-Life maps to using Minecraft worlds to generate 3D renders. That love has only been amplified by having a kid whose first instinct in any game is to create his own character, unit, level – whatever is available.
The best creative games inspire that creativity by having some innate flavour of their own, though. Some personality that inspires you to lean in, or nudge it in some other direction. By comparison, the new trailer for Everywhere, seems like metaversal porridge.
Each year, Steam announce the dates for upcoming sales and fests. The information is designed so that developers can opt-in to have their games included, and plan for the year ahead. But if you’re looking to buy a boatload of games, you might also want to plan when based on potential discounts.
Valve have now announced the relevant dates for the first four months of 2024.
This week we wrote some articles about the hilariously comprehensive Microsoft leaks, and Alice0 wrote one in particular about Bethesda’s plans to not remaster Morrowind. It is, she points out, understandable why the sanitised Bethesda of today would leave well enough alone: “2002’s Elder Scrolls game is an overambitious, odd, scrappy, and spiky beast. It is a game happy to leave you lost, confused, misunderstanding, weirded-out, frustrated, and stuck.”
Yet, Morrowind is loved! And in the comments of that article Nic Rueben mentioned the demo for Ardenfall, an RPG with no release date but a Steam demo. So off I toddled to have a look, and though I haven’t played much of it yet, I’m confident in saying that if you liked Morrowind you should check the demo out.
Paradox Interactive and new indie team C-Prompt have announced their debut 4X strategy game Millennia, which I got to play for an hour at this year’s Gamescom. With development being led by former Irrational Games co-founder Robert Fermier and Age Of Empires II lead designer Ian M Fischer, Millennia will see you attempting that classic quad of Xs across ten distinct historical ages, starting in the Stone Age before eventually ending up in a “post-modern future”, designer Ben Friedman tells me.
The twist here, however, is that you’ve also got what C-Prompt are calling ‘Variant Ages’, which let you bend the timeline to your will. Some of these variants are more historical in nature, such as an Age Of Monuments where everyone’s building Egyptian pyramids, Friedman explains, while others are more fantastical, with the words steampunk, alchemy and space alien invasions all mentioned in the same sentence. I had a good time with it during my demo, but the real delight was seeing my home army of Kyoto go and invade neighbouring settlement Telford, before going on to conquer Rome – as you do. So if historical melting pots are your kind of 4X jam, read on.
Cyberpunk 2077‘s Phantom Liberty expansion is attracting very positive reviews, and CD Projekt staff are naturally quite pleased about this. And also, very relieved. Released in 2020, the original Cyberpunk 2077 stands as an uncommonly thunderous example of overhype and project mismanagement, with technical issues at launch that extended from comical bugs such as disappearing penises to serious breaches such as graphical effects capable of triggering epileptic fits. CD Projekt have spent years attempting to address the underlying systemic and workplace issues and claw back some goodwill – hence, the general atmosphere on Xitter of developers needing to take five and stare at a flowerbed for a while. “It was a rough few years but there’s finally celebration and closure (for me at least),” posted senior level designer Seb Mcbride.
In RockPaperShotgun’s own Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty review, Graham summed it up as “perhaps the best expansion ever made”, which has gone down a treat with the developers. “Is it? Maybe!” cinematic designer Michał Zbrzeźniak posted. “I mean, the amount of work that was put into it results in what I think is one of the most robust and content rich expansions. But we also needed to really redeem ourselves!”
In fairness to rank-and-file CD Projekt developers, many of Cyberpunk 2077’s issues appear to have originated at the top of the ladder. Studio bosses confessed after release that they “ignored signals about the need for additional time to refine the game”, and CD Projekt Red investors eventually sued the company for making “materially false or misleading statements” about the condition of the game.
Ellis Tucci grew up playing games like Thief, System Shock, and Deus Ex. Now she’s making an immersive sim of her own. It’s called Spectra, and it’s set in the US in an alt-history 1972 where Soviet Union is the dominant military power after President Roosevelt was deposed in a fascist coup. You play as a Soviet agent tasked with infiltrating and fomenting revolution in a fortress city called Hiwatha.
Tucci wants Spectra to meet the criteria players will expect from an immersive sim. “To me, the immersive sim is the platonic ideal of the video game” she says. “I’ve tried to deliver on that immersion by creating an environment that is extremely interactable and flexible in the ways it can be used.” She explains that “a quite frankly silly proportion of the buildings in each map are enterable and that “you can turn off the lights, set traps, and use things like televisions, radios, or payphones as lures.”
It sounds like everything immersive sim fans want. But there’s one big difference between Spectra and the games that inspired it. Tucci is making it on her own. And she isn’t the only indie developer working in one of the most ambitious, developmentally complex genres in the industry. Games like Shadows Of Doubt, Fallen Aces and Gloomwood are merely the steam rising from the bubbling magma chamber that is indie immersive sim development, Like the recent revival of retro shooters, the indie space is on the verge of an immersive sim eruption.
The Baldur’s Gate 3 “no possibility left unpossible” choice-and-consequence train continues with the revelation that, if you break up with a lover in the game, you can slowly repair the relationship and spark a bit of your old chemistry. This might not sound earthshattering to anybody from outside the videogame world – what are you doing here? Run along and watch your silly non-interactive movies and TV shows – but it’s quite novel for a fantasy RPG in the BioWare tradition. In my experience, at least, most RPGs only give you the build-up to a character romance, then flash-freeze the relationship post-consummation, perhaps because you’ve unlocked a sexy “loyalty” companion ability and the developers don’t want to take it away from you. Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the few that thinks about how chemistry might come and go.
The Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty expansion releases next week, but before that, we have Cyberpunk 2077‘s 2.0 update, a free rework that adds vehicle combat, smarter cops and new skill trees and perks, including the ability to play a sort of Wild Magic hacker and a skillset I can only describe as Big Hammer Go Brrrrrr. CD Projekt tech support have shared region-specific download availability for the update, together with some advice for new and returning Cyberpunk 2077 players taking the plunge. Let’s have a look.
It looks like Counter-Strike 2 might soon be upon us. That’s if you’re reading somewhat generously into what could be a sly tease from Valve at a Counter-Strike 2 release date next week.
