Larian CEO Swen Vincke has consulted his magic mirror, cast the bones and offered up a pinch of insight on Baldur’s Gate 3‘s next few patches. Tantalisingly, these include a few changes asked for by players. “Our focus now is fixing any issues you report, but we are listening to suggestions,” Vincke wrote on Xitter. “Current roadmap: a) Hotfix 4, b) Patch 1 (+1000 fixes and tweaks), c) Patch 2. The latter will already incorporate some requests.” What could those requested incorporations be? Here are a few possibilities derived from my own crystal ball.
LG’s 27GN950 monitor is one of my all-time favourites, as it’s the perfect complement to a high-end gaming PC. You get a 4K resolution for pin-sharp graphics and text, a 144Hz refresh rate and Fast IPS panel for excellent motion handling, and a 27-inch span that fits easily onto a desk or monitor arm. After debuting at an eye-watering $800, this monitor has dropped on Amazon.com to a more reasonable $543.
Remember the Samsung CRG9? This absolute unit of a gaming monitor impressed erstwhile hardware editor Katherine when she reviewed in 2019, and four years later you can pick up this 49-inch super-ultra-wide gaming monitor for £440 off its UK RRP – when you buy it in “opened – never used” condition from Samsung’s UK Ebay account.
Being a reviewer during Big Game Season often feels like being chased through a massive, winding building in a serial killer movie (or possibly Until Dawn). You gallop shrieking and blundering round a corner and are confronted by a series of ominous doors with labels such as “Baldur’s Gate 3“. You only have a few seconds to pick one and dive through, sweating in the knowledge that each door leads to a confusing network of corridors that exist wholly apart from each other – that each door not opened is a route to an Elsewhere you are doomed to never know, unless you’re commissioned to do a, haha, “retrospective” 10 years later.
This summer, in my previous dishonourable capacity as a freelancer, I barged through the doors marked “Zelda” and “Final Fantasy 16”, then spent a frantic moment trying to force the “Baldur’s Gate 3” door to open, before giving up and throwing myself under a heap of unedited features. Now, in the relative lull before the monster named Starfield crashes through the ceiling (yes, I know, I’m mixing my scenarios – it’s the end of the day and I’m tired), I emerge from the heap reborn as RPS News Editor, and peer back fearfully at some of the doors I left unopened. By far the grimmest and grandest of these is, of course, Diablo 4.
Paradox has posted a Cities: Skylines 2 developer diary in which it discusses the new game’s rather elaborate-sounding economy simulation. This follows equally knotty breakdowns of the game’s zoning tools, which allow you to mix architectural styles, and its road traffic system, which will hopefully dispense with some of the original Cities: Skylines’ pathfinding issues. In unravelling how individual agents – households, businesses or city services – function within the simulation, the post also touches on the topic of homelessness, a subject the 2014 game left unaddressed.
Sclash is gorgeous. That’s not the reason I’m writing about it, but it definitely helps. Style can’t fix a bad game, but it can elevate a decent one about, say, a little hand-drawn 2D samurai running across the world stabbing dudes for peace. Little Jinmu does a lot of running to the right, a lot of slashing, and probably very little parrying and punching once you figure out the power attack.
There is, bluntly, not a lot to it, especially while its online mode is still listed as “coming soon”. But even with remote multiplayer, I see this as more of a diversion for friends to enjoy than a serious competitive fighter and intentionally so.
I enjoyed it though. Actually, I think I enjoyed it more for that, though it does perhaps limit its audience.
I used to be into deserts, but ever since Kenshi I have become a swamp fangirl. I also consider nomadic cultures to be woefully under-represented in games. You’d think, then, that a game about a nomadic Iron Age people larking about in a horrible swamp would be made for me, but unfortunately, Gord is somehow both a game where you can feed a child to a forest-dwelling horror, and a game that’s kind of dull.
It’s the only memorable thing that happened, and I did it to save time. The horrors are sort of demi-gods who you occasionally threaten you with plague unless you satisfy some demand. The alternative is to attack them, which the game stresses is extremely dangerous. I might rationalise the choice as the lesser evil, one life sacrificed to spare the lives of several, but the reality is that sending all those dudes back and forth across the map just sounded like too much hassle.
I’ve been itching to play The Lords Of The Fallen since I discovered that it’s a closet Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver homage (see my bio), with a sorcerous lantern that lets you switch between the living and unliving worlds of Axiom and Umbral. Each realm has a different layout, architecture and ambience, and you’ll need to alternate between them to expose routes and bypass obstacles, as indicated by clumps of ashen butterflies, making your way back to Axiom by means of an Effigy of Emergence.
You’re also dropped into Umbral when you die, which gives you another chance to bump off whatever it is that slew you; die a second time, and you’ll have to restart from one of the game’s Vestige bonfires. Another thing to worry about: the longer you spend in Umbral, realm of death and despair, the more numerous the monsters that spawn from its shadows. I’m hoping the two-worlds mechanic will usefully mutate the game’s many debts to Dark Souls into a brand new playstyle (though as Ed Superior noted in his Lords of the Fallen hands-on, it stands up pretty well as a straight Souls clone). It already poses some fun possiblities for the ever-thorny question of multiplayer.
As in Dark Souls, players can invade each other’s worlds for glory and plunder, with certain parts of the world specifically designed for PvP. The twist is that only the host player is in charge of world-switching. So if some wannabe saboteur appears standing on an Umbral-only platform, all you have to do is switch dimensions and treat them to a “date with gravity”, in the words of Hexworks head of studio Saul Gascon and Creative Director Cezar Virtosu (thanks MP1st).
Comedy platformer Orbo’s Odyssey is a game about being locked in your boss’s office. Here are some things I might do if I were locked in my boss’s office (sorry Katharine): approve expense claims, sift their browser history for blackmail material and oh, who am I kidding, what I’d really do is perch on the desk, quiet as a churchmouse, waiting to be let out. Orbo’s boss keeps an… atypical office, however. It harbours product portals that take you to alternate worlds, hewn from the same seam of weirdness as Psychonauts.
Bethesda has published a timeline detailing events in the Starfield universe from before the player’s arrival. The scrollable chronology, which runs from 2050 to 2160, charts the origins of the war between the United Colonies and Freestar Collective factions, who sound more and more to me like the Union and the Confederacy in the US Civil War. We’re also told about the formation of the Constellation organisation, a group of swashbuckling pioneers who are concerned with the origins of certain mystic Artifacts. And we get to read a little about a few key Starfield characters, such as space cowboy Sam Coe, careworn ex-soldier Sarah Morgan and sciencehunk Barrett. But the timeline also leaves plenty of mysteries. Join me, as I make a show of poking around in the collapsing space-museum with my tricorder.
