Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller has posted a lengthy blog on Steam about the transition from 6v6 player matches in the first Overwatch to 5v5 in the poorly received free-to-play sequel. It’s a juicy read for armchair designers and lapsed Overwatchers like myself, packing in analysis of class roles and the shift from the free choice of heroes to single hero picks and enforced team compositions.

In broad strokes, Keller summarises how the Overwatch experience has drifted away from “player freedom and creativity in order to create a more balanced, consistent and competitive experience for players”. It’s possible, however, that Overwatch 2 will swing back in the other direction, as Blizzard are now “exploring how we can test different forms of 6v6 in the game to gauge the results”, with a view to restoring some of the joyful chaos that saw entire teams of Reinhardts charging the objective in formation.

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A time capsule is a boxful of objects from today’s world, buried or otherwise hidden away so that people from the future can rediscover and understand current Hot Trends such as wearing mismatched socks or electing washed-up businessmen with fascist tendencies. Unless, that is, it’s a time capsule in sci-fi ocean survival game Subnautica, in which case it contains: THE FUTURE. Developers Unknown Worlds have been sneaking pictures of the forthcoming Subnautica 2 into the original game’s time capsules, offering glimpses of its flora and fauna.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Except, as reader’s of last week’s edition will know, this is a lie. There are no industry folks, cool or otherwise, in this week’s column. It is simply a placeholder – as voted for by you ravenous spine-fiends – while I take a break for the rest of July.

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I like a good factory game, but there’s a fine line between “I enjoy this” and “I am uninstalling this before it ruins my year.” I can’t tell on which side of the divide Shapez 2 will fall, but I’m planning on finding out when it launches in Early Access next month on August 15th.

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Grimdark hack-and-slasher No Rest For The Wicked has received its first major update – or the first that isn’t focused on bug fixes and performance improvements, anyway. It focuses on revamping the Crucible, the endgame’s repeatable roguelite, adding more randomisation to arenas and a new system of player buffs.

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Paradox Interactive appear from the outside to be a company run by dice roll. That was the case earlier this year when they cancelled Sims competitor Life By You and closed its developers, weeks after it had missed a project release date.

“It is clear that we have made the wrong calls in several projects, especially outside of our core, and this must change,” writes CEO Fredrik Wester in an interim financial report, released today.

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Demos were once a cornerstone of PC gaming and they arguably will be again thanks to events like Steam Next Fest. The latest update to Steam seeks to make those free slices of potential delight easier to find for players, and easier to promote for developers.

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In a recent interview, the director of The Elder Scrolls Online said that if you made Morrowind today, it would struggle to find an audience. “If you play that right now,” he said, “there is no compass, no map, literally the quests are like ‘go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west’… And if you did that now, no one would play it. Very few people would play it.” Well sir, have you heard of a little open world RPG called Dread Delusion? It’s pretty good. And what’s more, it has just added a whole new area with – let me see – a giant floating squid creature with an entire town of citizens living inside its shell.

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I don’t know what the longest-running early access game in history has been (perhaps Project Zomboid?) but I know that zombie survival game 7 Days To Die is definitely up there. We first reported its appearance back in the dark ages of 2013. For context, that was the year Grand Theft Auto V came out. Whoa! Okay, calm down, sorry, I didn’t mean to panic you. Yes, the arrow of time is inviolable. We are all marching steadily towards our graves, I know. But at least now 7 Days To Die has finally released its fully baked version 1.0.

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I keep seeing those adverts for that Ray-Ban and Meta collaboration, where like, they’re smart glasses that let you browse the web with your eyes? Anyway, yeah, they don’t appeal to me at all. Not as much as “Dateviator” glasses, which come courtesy of Sassy Chap Games and their upcoming dating sim Date Everything! As the title suggests: you date everything, from kitchen sponges to lampshades, as they morph into absolute fitties once you’ve donned the special specs. It looks incredibly dumb but in the best possible way.

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