Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Obsidian’s first-person action-RPG Avowed is one of our 75 most anticipated games of 2024, but according to a report, it’s been booted back into early 2025 to avoid “very busy period” on Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service. Thanks, Microsoft. Do you know how long it took to cobble together that 2024 list? I still get hand cramps.

The report in question is from The Verge’s Tom Warren – as sturdy a source as they come. Writing on his Notepad blog (paywall), Warren claimed that Avowed is in “good shape”, and that the delay is “more a matter of wanting to give the game breathing room during a very busy period for Xbox Game Pass”.

Obsidian accidentally let slip a 12th November release date for Avowed in June in a developer blog. On Game Pass, that would have put it up against Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (19th November) and the much-delayed post-apocalyptic shooter Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl (20th November). I’m not convinced that qualifies as a “very busy period”. Outside Game Pass, it would have to reckon with Assassin’s Creed Shadows (15th November) and, perhaps most worryingly for Obsidian, BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard (not dated yet, but due to land in EA’s third quarter 2024, after 1st October).

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According to certain Terran lore, God created the universe in seven days. Well, I got up this morning and made a small suburban village with a hospital, school, police station and a cafe in the space of 20 minutes. This is the backwater burg of Edwitherington. Population: 8 – one for every non-residential building in town. Major imports: ornamental lampposts, because I like to cultivate an old-timey mood. Major exports: traffic jams, because I’ve laid out my village in the form of a small crescent leading back to the freeway, which means that there are two traffic light junctions about 100 metres apart.

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Hey, remember that 2017 roguelike called Midboss? Or that 2020 platformer called Super Bernie World, where you attempt to transform the US as a retro-fied Bernie Sanders? Yes or no, Kitsune Games have put out some good stuff in the past, and now they’re back with a Super Bernie World followup: Kitsune Tails. Again, it’s a Super Mario-inspired platformer, but this time it’s a wonderfully queer rescue mission inspired by Japanese mythology in a way that’s cutesy and colourful. And it’s out today!

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Hardened battle royalists will remember Caldera, the sandy island map of bunkers and palm trees in Call Of Duty: Warzone. It got shut down last year as Activision focused their efforts elsewhere, making the map unplayable. But you can now revisit those bullet-strewn beaches. In theory, anyway. Activision have released it as a 4GB open-source project that can be explored in a 3D model-viewing tool. That’s cool. But among their reasons for doing so, there lies a predictably grubby logic: they want people to use the data to train AI.

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In my brief time with massive Fallout 4 mod Fallout London, I’ve read a delightful terminal entry about a scientist who named his favourite radiated shrew “Big Dave,” thwacked several of said Radshrews with a walking stick, gulped down some expired pink wafers, and been informed of train delays due to “leaves on the track.”

“A British transport joke!” I said to myself, marinating in the sufficient amount of crown-mandated mild amusement. “Our organ-floggingly expensive yet vital public services are crap!” I was having a good time. Then the game public transported me straight to my desktop, and continued to do so at regular intervals over the next few hours, ranging from “just as this conversation was getting good” to “just as my save was about to load.” My upper lip almost quivered, I tell you.

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Well, would you look at that! I just got done pining for the merest whiff of Dungeon Keeper when what should appear on Steam but a free prologue for delightful voxel-arty management sim Dungeon Tycoon. I’m using the word ‘appear’ because, following yet more industry layoffs yesterday, I’m choosing to adopt the brain of an idiot as to shield myself from the crushing reality of material conditions. So, anyway, the magical game goblins whacked the demo on Steam, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. Thanks, adequately compensated and unionised gobbos!

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I’m hooked on Dune Imperium, a deckbuilder and worker placement digital board game I’m only just beginning to get my head around. Here comes some news to send my head spinning again: the Rise Of Ix expansion is out now, which adds three new factions, six new leaders, a new mode and much more.

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BioWare have said that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is due for release sometime this autumn, causing many to predict it would arrive in September. That seems unlikely now, as EA say the RPG is due to launch in their financial third quarter which begins October 1st.

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Braid: Anniversary Edition “sold like dog shit” according to creator Jonathan Blow.

Blow discussed the remasters sales performance across several Twitch streams since its release back in May, going so far as to suggest that the studio’s “future is uncertain” as a result of low sales.

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Destiny and Marathon developers Bungie are laying off 220 people – around 17% of their total workforce – as studio heads try to offset a financial crisis brought on by “overly ambitious” expansion, individual project “misfires”, and a wider economic downturn in 2023. Bungie are also transferring a further 155 roles to parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment, and are spinning out an untitled incubation project – an “action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe” – to form a new PlayStation studio.

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