Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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How the checklist conquered the open world, from Morrowind to Skyrim

There’s no genre like the open world for inducing choice paralysis, so it’s fitting that I’ve been agonising over how to begin this irregular article series on open world games for months. I have a lot of material, oodles of interviews with developers of all shapes and sizes – big shops like Remedy and CD Projekt, smaller studios like Ace Team and Awaceb, all holding forth on such topics as whether Elden Ring or Zelda did bandit camps better, and how you make a forest feel endless. There is so much you could talk about, so many trails heading off in all directions, but perhaps it’s best to begin with the more personal and superficial question that inspired this investigation: how did the open world game get so boring?

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Wuthering Waves was unleashed on the Steam Deck, but only for one day

Wuthering Waves, that recent gacha RPG of anime styling and impenetrable jargonblasting, just didn’t work on the Steam Deck when it launched in May. It also doesn’t work right now. But for one brief, debatably glorious day on June 29th, it did. And thus, Deck owners who’d persevered through a slightly fiddly installation process (explained here by YouTubesmith Deck Wizard) could finally take their first joyous steps into Wuthering Waves like a David Hasselhoff-buoyed East German in 1989.

Unlike the Hoff, it wouldn’t last. Within hours, Steam Deck players were being booted back out of the game by a hitherto-unseen anti-cheat failure. What gives? Or gave?

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Your paper RPG character sheet itself is under attack in CrossOver: Roll For Initiative

The tabletop equivalent of “buying books and reading them are two different hobbies” is surely the difference between buying sexy tabletop RPG manuals and actually dragging your mates on to Discord for a few hours to stumble your way through a module. It’s the dogeared Fighting Fantasy from a carboot sale kid in me, I think. Something about reading worldbuilding snippets organised into numbered tables just hits in a way a novel doesn’t. Such tantalising ephemera is the name of the game in Microprose-published CrossOver: Roll For Initiative. It’s a wave defense where you play match-3 to collect dice, then spend them on fireballs and mace swings to stop tiny bastards from marauding all over your actual character sheet and attacking your stats.

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New Resident Evil game confirmed, with the director of Resi 7 at the helm

Capcom spat a little squirt of news bile on us yesterday, like a hideous zombie vomiting up demos and release dates. One of the smaller chunks was a brief comment by Resident Evil 7 director Koshi Nakanishi, who confirmed that a new Resident Evil game is in the works. That’s not too much of a surprise – big franchise gonna franchise – but still, it’s nice to hear. “It was really difficult to figure out what to do after [Resident Evil] 7,” he said, “but I found it. And to be honest it feels substantial.”

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You can grab both Fear & Hunger games for 30% off each in the Steam Summer Sale and you either absolutely should or absolutely should not do that

The Fear & Hunger games are pitch-black horror RPGs quite unlike anything else I’ve ever played, taking aspects of JRPG, survival horror and adventure games and distilling them into something I’d be tempted to call bleakly nihilistic if they didn’t display so much evident love for their craft. They also both start with a content warning listing “extreme violence, gore, sexual violence, and drug usage”. You’ll want to take this seriously, and just to be clear: the third item on this list does manifest in some tasteless, albeit brief, ways in the first game. It’s a frustrating blemish on what is otherwise an incredibly evocative and creative series, though you can download a mod to censor the more egregious bits. You will miss the full effect of critically severing an ogre’s massive schlong, however.

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Demon-battling escort ’em up Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess gets a demo on Steam

When Edwin disappeared into the hot mists of Summer Games Fest we couldn’t know he would return with a crazed look in his eye, raving about “phantasmagorical mulch” and insisting: “As of this week, I am seriously excited by tower defence.” That’s because he played Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess, the upcoming action strategy game about defending a maiden from colourful monsters and recruiting villagers to cleanse demonic defilement. Developer Capcom released a demo for the game yesterday, ahead of its July 19th release date. So now the rest of us can join Edwin in becoming entranced by the swirling colours of this sword-swinger.

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