Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Every now and then I think back to my first experience of Fortnite, back in the dingy early-mid 2010s – a clever but laborious wave defence game inspired by Minecraft and CliffyB’s childhood memories of building sofa cushion forts. I compare this project, which seemed pretty much doomed at the time, with the globe-straddling free-to-play battle royale/concert venue/art gallery/Olympic sport/all-swallowing multiverse Fortnite has become, and I feel extremely old. My sense of time’s crushing burden is not alleviated for learning that Epic are staffing up for work on “a new experience in the Fortnite ecosystem”, which sounds a lot like a Fortnite open worlder. What fresh hell is this, Epic? When will enough be enough?

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I never got round to playing Shiro’s 4X-plus-RTS adaptation of Dune, but chuckling spice baron Nic Reuben deemed it “intricate”, “polished” and “well-considered” in his early access review last year, and I trust his nose for these things. The game now has a 1.0 release date – 14th September 2023 – which will also bring a sixth major content update featuring the politically adept House Ecaz faction – who, if the press release speaks true, “wield power like a paint brush”. You love to see it!

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Lightyear Frontier is not the kind of game that fits neatly into a 30-minute Gamescom demo. There’s so much to see and do in this laidback farming mech sim that by the time my demo ends, I barely feel like I’ve scratched the surface of it (and that’s even with the assistance of some handy secret dev cheats to show me some of the structures and features they’ve got planned later on in the game). Rather, this is a game that’s designed to unfurl slowly, bit by bit, over the course of several hours, and before we begin, developer Frame Break’s CEO Joakim Hedström tells me they’ve shortened the game’s opening sequence for this particular demo, just so they can get players right into the thick of things as quickly as possible.

But even on this whistlestop tour, there’s plenty to dig into and delight in here – not least its gloriously bright and inviting colour palette (take that, Todd). I got to sample its farming, its wonderfully weighty mech exploration, and even indulge in a little bit of, well, powerwashing. Yep, PowerWash Simulator‘s influence was well and truly felt at this year’s Gamescom, and I’m so very here for it.

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Friend, are you weary of talk of blockbuster space-faring RPGs and blockbuster D&D adaptations and blockbusters in general? Do you yearn for the older, simpler days before the great Unrealification and the invention of sex scenes, when people called a spike pit a spike pit, and you could count all the different colours in a screenshot on your fingers? Do you, in fact, reject this framing of retro-styled 2D pixelart games as “older” and “simpler”, regarding it as condescending and false? Look, shut up already. I’m trying to tell you about Isles of Sea and Sky from developers Jason Newman, Dan Collver and Craig Collver.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 released with plenty of bugs, but to their credit Larian have been releasing plenty of patches in the weeks since its launch. The most recent, hotfix #5, is live now – and it resolves several game-breaking bugs, a particular romance blocker, improves performance in multiplayer, and much more.

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Ring the bell, everybody, it’s time for another round of game developers telling players that they don’t really understand what a “game engine” is. The spark this time is little-known science fiction adventure Starfield, which I believe we’ve reported on before. The game has a few obvious foibles – in my experience as a space pirate, NPCs sometimes struggle to navigate their surroundings, and then there are those stark disconnects between planetary surfaces and orbital space. Hiccups such as these have led a few players to wonder whether the game might work better using different technology, and in particular, Epic’s much-trumpeted Unreal Engine 5. Isn’t Bethesda’s proprietary Creation Engine, which the company have been updating since 2011, getting a little long in the tooth?

You’ll find a lot of the discussion below this post from Digital Foundry boffin John Linneman on Twxter, which has attracted both gloating PlayStation fans (remember, Starfield is Xbox-only in console land) and a number of thoughtful replies from some fairly senior game developers. This conversation goes back a fair way, of course – people have been ragging on Bethesda for using “the same engine” for years. And there’s a definite air of world-weariness to some of the developer responses.

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The name Nextorage might not mean much to you, but this storage company was founded by Sony Japan employees in 2019 and acquired by NVMe SSD controller manufacturer Phison in 2022 – making them well-placed to deliver some high-quality SSDs. Today, their flagship NEM-PA2TB 2TB SSD is down to $109.99 at Newegg, where you can even pick up a $10 gift card with the purchase – neat.

For context, that ties the best price we’ve seen for a 2TB NVMe SSD, although this option comes with a heatsink and is therefore a better choice for many PC and all PS5 owners.

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Former chairman of PlayStation Studios Shawn Layden has Thoughts and somewhat dire warnings about the videogame industry’s future, though what exactly he means by “the videogame industry” is a little open to guesswork.

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Among the feats a new player of FromSoftware’s Souls or Souls-adjacent fantasy games must perform is conquering your fear of giants. From the Stray Demons of Dark Souls through Bloodborne’s Cleric Beast to the dragons of Elden Ring, you must learn not to be awed by creatures who look they could kill you with a sneeze. You must learn to run towards that titanic knight with the enormous shield, rolling between its colossal ankles, using its stature against it. You must learn to see past the visual overkill of a swing that would surely fell a skyscraper, registering only the effects on your poise and health bar. It’s a learning curve, for sure, and that makes the modding of mechs from Armored Core 6: Fires Of Rubicon into Elden Ring a little more than the usual act of mischievous fanservice.

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You may have seen that Alice Bee has started a “land on every planet” run of Bethesda’s Starfield. By total coincidence – I promise you it’s accidental, I was so pleased – I’ve been working on a “land on no planets” run of Starfield. The reasoning for this is as follows: people say that outer space is the worst part of the game, because it’s just an irritating interval between the maps where the majority of quests, loot, intrigues, etc are found. It’s a fast travel loading screen you can fly about in. But what if you double-down on the space stuff?

What if you never descend from orbit, not even to repair, modify or upgrade your ship and offload inventory? What if, rather than buying new ships or building them, you progress exclusively by boarding other captains and making off with ship and cargo? How well does Starfield scrub up as a thoroughbred space sim that leans towards bloodthirsty piracy? Here to answer these questions is Mary Read, my custom character and budding astral freebooter. She’s named for her distant ancestor, the legendary 18th century English buccaneer Mary Read. She’s had a crack at life on shore, setting foot most recently on Earth’s Moon, but from this point on, her fate and fortune lies amid the stars. Arrr!

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