Are Starfield‘s planets continuous spaces? Are they just collections of sealed-off maps that fake the presence of landmarks such as named cities beyond their invisible boundaries? I just don’t even know any more, but Starfield mod creators are looking into it. One intrepid soul, Draspian, has tinkered with the code to disable said invisible boundaries, and in the process, revealed that planetary maps do, in fact, join together, though as you might be expecting, Starfield doesn’t take kindly to being treated this way.
Here’s a thing. RPS now has a Tools section! But what does that mean for you, our readers? Well, it will depend if you’re the kind of person who consults our daily Wordle answer guides, as our first tool is, in fact, a Wordle Solver. It’s a new experiment we’re trying that’s been put together by our guides and tech teams, and the aim is to help you arrive at those sometimes tricky Wordle answers without, necessarily, just resorting to looking up the answer. We’ll see how it goes! And if you want to find out more about what it is and why we’re doing it, read on below.
Last time, you decided that interrupt attacks are better than a lore codex. Sanity prevailed, and I thank you. Though I realise I am now writing a lore codex entry about a great victory in the year 2023, so sorry about that. This week, I ask you to choose between upgraded movement or upgraded cardboard. What’s better: Fast travel, or upgrading cards?
Starfield is a surprisingly demanding PC game, requiring a fairly hefty GPU and CPU to run it smoothly at anything approaching max specs even at 1080p. And, alas, it’s just a bit much for the Steam Deck to handle unless you’re happy to sacrifice visual fidelity, framerate or – in most cases – both if you plan on spending your time doing anything except browsing menus (though there’ll be plenty of that).
Among Larian CEO Sven Vincke’s greatest hopes ahead of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s release was that it would get people interested in RPGs who had previously been turned off by them. This strikes me as a pretty tall order, given that Baldur’s Gate 3 is also one of the most in-depth RPGs you’ll play, but going by post-release responses, Vincke thinks Larian have managed it, thanks in large degree to more readable production values than you find in many RPGs.
Sea of Stars developers Sabotage Studio have confirmed that they’re already working on DLC for their warmly-received love letter to classic RPGs, along with their next standalone game. Helping them along the way is Sea of Stars’ fantastic reception, which has seen the game sell a year’s worth of copies in just one week.
In the grim darkness of the far future, the galaxy is your oyster. Or at least it will be, once you’ve played 100 hours of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, an RPG from Pathfinder developer Owlcat in which you can buy planets, configure your genocidal Dark Eldar friend to strike ten times a turn, and gaze on ruefully as a demon explodes out of your Psyker’s head.
An immediate and shameful disclaimer: I can’t match Nic Reuben’s deep knowledge of the 40K tabletop universe, which saw him ruminating upon the mysteries of the Koronus Expanse back in 2022, while holding Owlcat’s feet to the fire over the absence of space dwarves. The nearest I got to playing 40K as a lad was its Battlefleet Gothic spin-off (which none of my friends were interested in, so when I say “playing”, I mean that I sat in a room staring glumly at some unpainted Lunar-class Cruisers while other kids went out and climbed trees). The framing I’m working with instead, based on an hour of hands-off Rogue Trader gameplay, is that it’s sort of Warhammer Mass Effect, but with XCOM-style turn- and grid-based combat, and while there are opportunities to be a compassionate hero, you fundamentally only have the option of playing Renegade. Let’s dig in!
Every now and then I think back to my first experience of Fortnite, back in the dingy early-mid 2010s – a clever but laborious wave defence game inspired by Minecraft and CliffyB’s childhood memories of building sofa cushion forts. I compare this project, which seemed pretty much doomed at the time, with the globe-straddling free-to-play battle royale/concert venue/art gallery/Olympic sport/all-swallowing multiverse Fortnite has become, and I feel extremely old. My sense of time’s crushing burden is not alleviated for learning that Epic are staffing up for work on “a new experience in the Fortnite ecosystem”, which sounds a lot like a Fortnite open worlder. What fresh hell is this, Epic? When will enough be enough?
I never got round to playing Shiro’s 4X-plus-RTS adaptation of Dune, but chuckling spice baron Nic Reuben deemed it “intricate”, “polished” and “well-considered” in his early access review last year, and I trust his nose for these things. The game now has a 1.0 release date – 14th September 2023 – which will also bring a sixth major content update featuring the politically adept House Ecaz faction – who, if the press release speaks true, “wield power like a paint brush”. You love to see it!
Lightyear Frontier is not the kind of game that fits neatly into a 30-minute Gamescom demo. There’s so much to see and do in this laidback farming mech sim that by the time my demo ends, I barely feel like I’ve scratched the surface of it (and that’s even with the assistance of some handy secret dev cheats to show me some of the structures and features they’ve got planned later on in the game). Rather, this is a game that’s designed to unfurl slowly, bit by bit, over the course of several hours, and before we begin, developer Frame Break’s CEO Joakim Hedström tells me they’ve shortened the game’s opening sequence for this particular demo, just so they can get players right into the thick of things as quickly as possible.
But even on this whistlestop tour, there’s plenty to dig into and delight in here – not least its gloriously bright and inviting colour palette (take that, Todd). I got to sample its farming, its wonderfully weighty mech exploration, and even indulge in a little bit of, well, powerwashing. Yep, PowerWash Simulator‘s influence was well and truly felt at this year’s Gamescom, and I’m so very here for it.
