Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I am currently juggling two playthroughs of Starfield with very different aims. While Sayer the Space Scoundrel is having trouble getting around as they engage with the main story, I have started another character to engage in some nonsense (to the extent that there is any in Starfield) – the first of such I’ve detailed here.

I’ve said it before, but you’re my very best friend, so we’re going to play Starfield together. Join me as we step, wobbly and uncertain like Bambi on ice, into Bethesda’s huge and partially procedurally generated space RPG universe for the adventures of Turbo Eclipse (I used an astronaut name generator intended for a child’s party), a spacefaring nerd who longs only for the thrill of science. Yes, we’re going to visit every planet in Starfield. Or at least as many as possible before I lose every single one of my marbles. And hey, planets look kinda like marbles! Strap in, spacefarers. Let’s put this proc gen through its paces.

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As someone with a general aversion to online competitive modes in games, I’m always grateful when someone, for once, especially in this age of endlessly bland multiplayer experiments, thinks of the solitary solo player. I’m especially grateful when us single player preferers get a knowing nod of acknowledgement in fighting games, too, which are so naturally geared toward pitting your skills against other human beings that anything involving playing against the AI is often either an afterthought or so threadbare that you can’t help but feel like you’re missing the point.

But that’s still, for my sins, how I like to consume fighting games when I occasionally play them – which isn’t often, I’ll admit, for exactly the reasons described above – and so when I sat down for my Mortal Kombat 1 demo session at Gamescom this year, I was pleased to see not just a very slick story mode in attendance, but also a new single player challenge mode called Invasions that publishers Warner Bros described as “a giant interactive board game” that “lent into action RPG” territory. Its numerous node-based missions looked substantial based on what I played, and the idea of applying a seasonal service model to it, endlessly rotating in new locations and missions every so often – a whole different Invasion, so to speak – is actually something I’d be very much behind. It, that is, I was a) good at Mortal Kombat, and b) the missions I played during my demo weren’t quite so… err… boring.

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“It’s incredibly weird for anybody who knows me that I’ve become the romance guy,” David Gaider tells me. “I’m the least romantic guy. Especially when I get to the characters saying ‘I love you’ to each other…” Gaider mimes the sickliness of the scene and his own horrified response. “Apparently I did it so well on Baldur’s Gate II that James Ohlen kept handing me this stuff. And, god, I hated it so much.”

It’s weird, in fact, that Gaider wound up working on Baldur’s Gate II at all – let alone that he became synonymous with Dragon Age and romanceable companions afterwards. At 27 years old, he ran a hotel in Edmonton, Alberta – the same city where, unbeknownst to him, Bioware was busy making its name. Once it came time to make a sequel to Baldur’s Gate, Bioware cast around for local writers, and a friend recommended Gaider, who had played D&D in the ‘80s before it fell out of fashion.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 is a relentlessly horny videogame, Alice B wrote back in August, and that certainly describes the shock I felt when noted Githyanki grouch Lae’zel abruptly told me that she was down to clown, a whole three hours in. “Ms Lae’zel, I happen to be a graduate of BioWare Sex University,” I told her sternly, adjusting my robe. “If I’m going to have a torrid liaison in an RPG it’ll be 60 hours from now, just before the final battle, and let’s face it, I’m more likely to get scared of alienating party members and end up friendzoning everybody.”

Lae’zel proved persuasive, however – “I like the way you stink,” was how I think she phrased it – and one risque fade-to-black later, we were triumphantly entwined in post-coital bliss. Well, at the risk of empirically demonstrating that romance is dead, it turns out that might have been a technical problem. According to Larian CEO Sven Vincke, Baldur’s Gate 3 characters were accidentally encoded to have very low standards at launch. Haha, I certainly can’t relate!

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One of the bigger Discourse torpedoes aimed at Starfield‘s glittering hull over the past month has been its strict division between planetary surfaces and outer space. Space sim fanatics were dismayed to learn that you can’t actually fly down to the surface of the planets you’re orbiting – instead, you hit a button to initiate a loading break and a landing cutscene, which makes outer space feel more like a glorified airlock chamber than, well, outer space. This segmented approach has prompted many unflattering comparisons with No Man’s Sky, in which you can manually pilot through the atmosphere.

Players and critics were similarly disappointed by the apparent inability to manually fly between planets in different orbits – instead, the game invites you to pick a destination from your star map or while using your spaceship’s scanner HUD, with the journey condensed to a cutscene, again. Well, I bring news on this front. You can actually fly “to” and perhaps even “between” planets in Starfield. But there are some buts. Buts of astronomical dimensions. Onward!

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After much umming and erring which I’m sure has nothing to do with any Sony exclusivity agreements, Square Enix have confirmed that Final Fantasy 16 is, indeed, coming to PC. “We are aware that many of you have been asking for a PC version”, producer Naoki Yoshida said in a statement on the platform formerly known as Twitter. “So allow me to take this opportunity to officially announce that development on a PC version is currently underway.” There’s no Final Fantasy 16 PC release date as yet. Yoshida hopes to be able to share more – together with some insights on the first wodge of Final Fantasy 16 DLC – “before the end of the year”.

Final Fantasy 16, hmm. Wait a minute, I reviewed that on console! That’s the one I got all the death threats about! Let me give you a summary.

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Samsung’s 870 Qvo SATA SSD is one of our favourite drives for gaming, offering a huge amount of storage for a very reasonable price. Today that goes double, as the 4TB 870 Qvo has dropped to £161 on Amazon UK, considerably less than the £300 it cost back in February. This is a great way to add more game or media storage to your system on the cheap, especially if you’ve already filled up your available NVMe M.2 slots.

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It begins. Starfield is out and while its official modding tools aren’t yet available, that hasn’t stopped its community from getting to work. For example: if you’re getting distracted by Bethesda’s latest throwing up XP and location-discovery messages in big fonts at the centre of the screen during combat, the BetterHUD mod should help.

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Earlier this week, Dota 2‘s summer update was released and included new tools for filtering toxic and unwanted players fromy our matches. Now Valve have taken an extra step of their own by declaring that “smurfing is not welcome in Dota,” and permanently banning 90,000 accounts involved in the practice

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This week’s news that the amazing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew will be Mimimi Games’ last hurrah has left me absolutely devastated. As the kids might say, I am shook. Besides being a bestest best in class tactics game with great characters, a witty script and deviously designed stealth puzzles to blast and backstab through, Shadow Gambit did that very rare thing that’s seemingly eluded both other types of strategy game I’ve played recently (*cough*The Lamplighters League*cough*), and even Mimimi’s own work in the past – and that’s teaching you how to actually have fun with its large cast of murder pirates through its brilliantly-conceived bespoke tutorial missions.

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