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The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro is down to £169 with this deal at Amazon UK – a great price for one of the best wired gaming headsets for PC and PS4/PS5, which debuted at £249 and normally costs around £200. I’ve been using one of these headsets with my PS5-based racing setup for months, and I’ve found it comfortable, good-sounding and very convenient to use thanks to the included second-gen GameDAC.
The Case Of The Golden Idol is a fabulous, point-and-click detective game, and one of our favourite games of 2022. It’s got a brand new expansion which adds three new cases out today, which is good news if you’ve already played the rest of it.
If you haven’t played any of it, there’s now a new demo that lets you play the first three cases in your browser for free.
Dota 2 summer update is out now, and among its many additions are several designed to make “Dota a better place to play, together.” It includes a “dislike” button that lets you filter out people you’d rather not play with in future, a new reporting system, real-time review of toxic chat, and more.
Embracer Group have announced that they’re closing down Volition, the Illinois, US-based developer best known today for Saints Row and Red Faction. The announcement – which coincided with the predictably uproarious lifting of Starfield’s review embargo, though I’m sure the timing is purely accidental – comes as part of broader restructuring at Embracer Group following a multiple-year acquisition spree, which Alice0 reported on in June.
I don’t remember this at the time, but there were complaints about Skyrim‘s map when it came out, because it was just an extreme zoom out on the world. It wasn’t dense with information; the map markers were often kind of an “it’s in this area” guideline that were even less helpful if what you needed was in a barrow or otherwise underground. Starfield raises the bar by taking the bold step of having a map that is almost not a map.
I’m referring here to the planet surface map. The starmap is, like a couple of things I’ve experienced since being hustled through quite an accelerated inciting incident (Starfield’s equivalent of Patrick Stewart dying in a sewer after he’s charged you with saving the world), reminiscent of Mass Effect. You can select different galaxies, which have one or two solar systems in them, and then can zoom down and select specific planets or moons or whatever to warp to. Once you’re wombling about on the surface being a naughty little space captain – or whatever, I don’t judge what you’re up to – well baby, I hope you like blue voids with a bit of topography.
Brought to you by the teeming brains behind Snake Cave and Eat Shit With Divine, Starfield is an experience of almost bewildering scale that defies easy summary, but I will do my best. In this much-anticipated sci-fi action epic, you step into the spaceboots of Prince Starfield, a fully customisable, unvoiced protagonist who must battle a cosmic menace in the course of a familiar, but thrillingly woven narrative with unabashed political dimensions.
Not to be confused with NickTitle’s rather more contemplative game of the same name, to say nothing of Kenneth Nietfeld’s swashbuckling romance Rick Starfield: Hero of Space and Time, or indeed Starfield from Graek Tarmikos, an avant garde reinterpretation of Breakout, joeAmerica Gayms’ Starfield is a straightforward but engrossing blend of action and customisation elements. It’s the same heady brew of role-playing possibilities we’ve come to expect from the resourceful creator of Abandoned Bog.
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.
