Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

On paper, Final Fantasy XIV doesn’t do a very good job of encouraging fishing. FFXIV’s lead director and producer Naoki Yoshida — known as Yoshi P — wanted to create something that was “fun, but relaxing”, and there aren’t a lot of material rewards for the time you put in. You can sell the fish or break them down into other materials, but really the only reason to fish is for the sake of fishing itself.

And yet today Final Fantasy XIV is home to a close knit fishing community of over 27,000 people. This single shared interest has spun off into many different directions, including fishing as a competitive journey, the process of building a space for the hobby itself, and even a kind of metagame. But the main thread tying these all together is the love for fishing, and the community’s central hub is actually located outside of the game – in a Discord server called Fisherman’s Horizon, lovingly nicknamed Fishcord.

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There comes a point in every diary playthrough when the Comet of Invention meets the Cowpat of Diminishing Returns, when the Foot of Unbridled Agency meets the Covert Hedgehog of Limited Design, when Fucking Around meets Finding Not Much Out. I fear we are reaching that point with the life and times of Mary Read, my Starfield character and nowadays quite accomplished space pirate, who has sworn never to land on a planet ever again.

Immediately after conquering the Chimera in Part 2 of the Starfield No-Planet Run, I commandeered a UC Longsword II on the other side of the same system. The Longsword has proven a predator without equal, charging straight through opposing craft even when they’ve got several levels on me, its unforgiving autocannons forming the dominant bassline of every encounter. Frankly, it’s getting repetitive, and while the obvious remedy is to plunge cackling and crying into a star system with an AI threat level in the high double digits, I doubt that will really alter the rhythms of Starfield’s ship combat – it’ll just mean I have to do some grinding.

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I didn’t sleep a lot at the weekend and nothing interesting happened during the week (please bear in mind that we recorded this episode of The Electronic Wireless Show podcast before Unity made any announcements) so we decided to look at how Starfield is doing post-launch. Plus, Nate has been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and has thoughts about it, so that’s double SEO juice for this episode.

There’s double beans metaphors this week, and James talks about the latest Steam Decklike, the Lenovo Legion go, which is like if a portable PC made love to a Switch, kind of. Some fun recommendations this week, too, especially if you like cathedrals.

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Longtime readers will know that I really appreciate a good kick in a vide-oh my god I’ve been working here that long. Anyway, I like a kick, and I like a game that manages to actually be funny, and I have been playing Deathbulge: Battle Of The Bands. You do the math(s).

I actually wrote about Deathbulge in a round up of best demos in a Steam Next Fest back in 2020, at which time I enjoyed the RPG antics of a band entering a cursed Battle Of The Bands competition and finding out that it’s a fight to the death. The full thing came out a month ago without my noticing, and got past the endpoint of the demo. It’s fun! I’m enjoying the combat, which is both real-time and turn-based, and has some surprisingly deep tactics attached to it. But more importantly, the full Deathbulge game starts in a town where you enter houses by kicking doors in.

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When the Lenovo Legion Go revealed itself, I was unconvinced by its portability credentials but enticed by the wireless mouse transmogrification of its detachable, Nintendo Switch-like controllers. A sparkling sliver of Swiss Army handheld design, providing a familiar taste of desktop play that the Steam Deck or Asus ROG Ally could never achieve without a USB dock.

Turns out, now that I’ve tried the Legion Go for myself, I was worried about the wrong thing. It’s nowhere near as heavy or cumbersome as it looks, and while the breakaway controls remain an exciting prospect, they also risk introducing an acute pain point. At the very least, the model I tested proved highly vulnerable to lead-handed RPS hardware editors, because I left the building very much with the impression that I’d broken it.

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After a couple of days of furious game developer reactions, game engine company Unity have backtracked a teensy bit on their plan to charge developers who meet certain revenue and copies-sold thresholds a “runtime fee” for every installation of their game.

The company will only make developers pay extra for the first installation of a game on a new device – so no fees for reinstallations, in theory, and no prospect of spiteful players “install bombing” games to drive up costs for their creators. However, the company haven’t stated how or indeed, if they can distinguish legitimate from illegitimate installations in advance, seemingly because their method for tracking installations is based on “estimates” using a proprietary data-gathering system, which they aren’t able to discuss in depth.

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Minecraft Live 2023 will take place on 15th October, Mojang have announced, and it’ll bring both details on the game’s future – in particular, the forthcoming Minecraft 1.21 update – and yet another Mob Vote, aka pitched battle between various groups of players over which cute or alarming block monster gets added to the game next.

Minecraft! After a month reporting on the barren planets of Starfield and plundering the rather more involving dungeons of Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s almost steadying to remember that these supposed titans are but momentary flickers, transient particles in the sunken Creeper eyesocket of Mojang’s behemoth. And what a time to rediscover the game. Vanilla Minecraft has always felt like an autumnal creation to me, even before they added all the pumpkin heads – a game of long nights and campfires, with an ambience derived from Tove Jansson’s Moomin books. Anyway, here’s the teaser trailer for Minecraft Live.

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The director of both Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and this year’s Jedi: Survivor is departing EA after close to a decade at developers Respawn.

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Last time, you decided that upgrading cards is better than fast travel. I think the outcome is partially from a love of cards, and partially a dislike of the impact fast travel has had on game design. Can’t deny it’s convenient, mind. This week, I ask you to pick between taking things you want and something that should always have been ours. What’s better: capturing enemy buildings, or hand grenades exploding on impact with enemies?

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Bethesda has detailed a number of incoming quality-of-life improvements and expanded graphical options headed to Starfield in a regular series of updates.

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