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Woah! Last week Gamescom 2023 happened, the biggest consumer event for video games in the woooooooorld! The Electronic Wireless Show podcast gives you our definitive take on what was hot and what was not from Geoffcom’s Opening Night Live, and points you towards some of the previews and interviews our crack team has from the show floor. This week there’s plenty to talk about re. What We’ve Been Playing as well, because James has been cramming in a bunch of small games. Fun!
It’s high time for another RPS Game Club chat! This month we’ve been pondering Aperture Desk Job: a “playable short” Valve created as a Steam Deck accompaniment, yet still manages to squeeze in some deliciously ironic character beats and at least one mantis-based tragedy. We’ll be discussing it in the liveblog below from 4pm BST, and we want to know your thoughts too. Liked it? Loathed it? Have design feedback for the toilet turrets? We wanna hear ‘em, so join us by posting in the liveblog widget’s comments bit. See you in an hour, ish.
Over the past week, dataminers have been rifling through Baldur’s Gate 3‘s code and have discovered a dragon’s hoard of alleged “cut content”. It’s hard to specify what they’ve unearthed without accidentally sounding the Major Spoilers trumpet and initiating Armageddon, but the supposed buried offerings include additional areas, swathes of dialogue, storylines, cutscenes, characters, romance opportunities and even deities. Given just how much Larian’s gargantuan RPG gives you to play with, I am kind of thankful for a generous amount of stuff being “left out” – certainly, I don’t need any more romanceable NPCs, I’m already fending them off with a broomhandle. But the news has gone down badly with a few players, and especially those who feel the game’s overall quality takes a dive in acts 2 and 3.
Developers have come to Larian’s defence, amongst them David Gaider, former Baldur’s Gate 2 and Dragon Age writer, who is nowadays creative director of Summerfall Games, creator of the very earwormy STRAY GODs: The Roleplaying Musical. “Not surprised to hear of the amount of stuff apparently cut from BG3,” Gaider wrote on Twix. “BG2 had a mountain of stuff cut over its development, some early and some even after lots of work had gone into it… almost every game does. Every DA game did. Heck, even Stray Gods had some considerable cuts.”
It’s a stormy night. The lights are off. The doors are locked. Somewhere, a woman is singing. Somewhere else, a phone is ringing. The sinks are full of gunk and there are children hiding in the cupboards. Oh, and the darker stretches of floor are covered with writhing tentacles. This is Holstin, a Polish survival horror experience in which you merrily rove an isolated town that, based on 14 minutes of fumbling around in exactly one very unwelcoming house, already seems a match for Silent Hill in terms of existential squalor. A public playtest is underway, and I’ve got a trailer for you through the jump.
Officially unveiled at this week’s Panic Games Showcase, Arco is a triptych of revenge stories set across the deserts, plains and forests of a fantastical, South American-style landscape. It’s a part of the world we don’t often get to see in games, and its stunning pixel art (and tiny cute little llamas) instantly caught my eye when I got to play an early mission from it at last week’s Gamescom. Made by four developers spread across the globe, the official genres listed on its Steam page describe it as a tactical turn-based action adventure RPG where you guide four separate heroes in their fight against the ominous sounding Red Company. But just saying it’s turn-based is doing Arco a disservice, I think, as it’s also a little bit real-time, a little bit simultaneous turns, and all pretty brilliant, if you ask me. Here are some very early impressions of it.
Today is Starfield early access release day, providing you bought the pricier editions, and senior Bethesda boffins are feeling appropriately festive, and probably also totally exhausted. Bethesda Game Studios director and executive producer Todd Howard has sent an email to staff thanking them for their efforts and ruminating a bit on Starfield‘s “long and winding” development, which began with Howard chatting to ZeniMax Media’s now-passed co-founder Robert Altman in the wake of Skyrim’s enormous success.
Sea of Stars seemed primed for success: it’s got a gorgeous art style, is soaked through with nostalgia for the turn-based (J)RPGs of yore – but with a modern sensibility to its clever gameplay – and comes from the devs behind ingenious platformer The Messenger. Those stars have indeed aligned, as Sabotage Studio announced that the throwback hit has already passed 100,000 sales on its first day.
The original Destiny storyline opened following the collapse of a vast Terran civilization at the hands of an invading, amorphous Darkness and its various alien accomplices – an advance stymied only by a benevolent Big Dumb Object known as the Traveller. It cast you as an ancient warrior, resurrected by a flying robot to reclaim humankind’s old dominions together with their antique, storied weapons and gear. So much of its appeal for me, back in 2014, was the mystique of that reclamation process, bolstered by alternately zany, obnoxious, fragmentary and/or intriguing writing that expanded upon the viral mythological element in Halo.
Fast-forward nine years, and Destiny 2 has turned the destruction and loss of history wrought by the Darkness into a seasonal – or as it’s shortly to become, “episodic” – content “cadence” (a term that stems from the Latin word for falling) of erosion and restoration, with areas, weapons and quests stripped periodically from the game due to a mixture of technical pressures and commercial priorities. It’s sort of become the very thing you’re fighting, but where the Darkness aims to engulf and extinguish the Guardians of the Light, Destiny wants to keep you engaged.
Far bet it from me to complain about Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot: The London Case introducing more incongruous eye candy, after my previous conniptions over Hot Hipster Poirot with his ankle-grazer trousers and his sexy egg-shaped head, but tick tock, it’s himbo Hastings o’clock. Released on Steam this week, The London Case takes young Poirot to, err, London, charged with protecting a famous painting along with a representative of the insurance firm. Naturellement, the painting is stolen from an apparently locked room under everyone’s silly noses, and thus begins Poirot and Hastings’ first puzzle caper together (for who else is our insurance representative?).
Technically, of course, they met in The Mysterious Affair At Styles, when Captain Arthur Hastings was on leave from the front during WW1, but one of the things I like about this series is how it takes what it wants and gently buffs away the rest. If you’re going to adapt, then adapt! Like The First Cases, which came out in 2021, the game itself is largely a process of pointing and clicking through crime scenes to find clues, and then joining them in a big mind map akin to what you’d find in a Frogwares Sherlock Holmes game. But having Hastings along does make it a bit more fun, because his role is to be a bit of an idiot.
Before Diablo 4 came out, Blizzard had concerns that their latest ARPG would tank the popularity of their most recent entry in the series, Diablo Immortal, Blizzard’s franchise general manager Rod Fergusson tells RPS. Immortal, which launched last year as a free-to-play MMO game, left quite a bad taste in our mouths when it launched on PC, especially when it came to the prohibitively high cost of its various microtransactions. Despite this, though, the game’s continued to enjoy great success over on mobile, but even Blizzard weren’t sure whether its popularity would last once Diablo 4 arrived.
“One of the things that we were kind of nervous about initially was that when Diablo 4 landed it would sort of cannibalise Immortal, and that everyone was just going to be, ‘Oh we’re just playing Immortal until Diablo 4 comes out’,” Fergusson told me at Gamescom. As it turns out, they needn’t have been so apprehensive. “In fact, it was the opposite,” he says.
