Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Dune Imperium is a fabulous strategy game about becoming the biggest spice boy on a sandy planet I presume is called Dune. I love it despite never having read the Dune books or watched the Dune movies, because the digital version taught me everything I needed to know about Barry Harkonnen, Oscar Isaac, the tall guy from Guardians Of The Galaxy, and their insatiable pursuit of space nutmeg.

Now the board game’s first expansion is headed to the digital version of the game, and it’s called Rise Of Ix for reasons I definitely understand.

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It’s said that every time Deus Ex is mentioned, someone reinstalls it. If that’s true and you read RPS, it’s possible you’ve reinstalled Deus Ex around six hundred times by now.

That’s where the comprehensive Randomizer mod comes in, which remixes the immersive sim’s levels to make the experience fresh every time. It’s also just received a major update which, among several other additions, lets you pet the game’s dogs and cats.

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Team Fortress 2‘s received its first major update in yonks last year, and then the nearly 17-year-old game promptly broke its concurrent player record. Still, talk to one of those players and you’ll find all is not well with Valve’s shooter, which is apparently regularly overrun by bots and cheaters.

Some players are now reporting “a large ban wave” targeting users of aimbots, however.

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Mika and The Witch’s Mountain appears to be an unofficial video game adaptation of Kiki’s Delivery Service, which is a Studio Ghibli film about a witch who decides to go postal, but not in the Running with Scissors sense. Created by developers Chibig and Nukefist, it’s a “mini open world” game about carrying packages by broomstick while investigating the titular mountain, flying through hoops a la Pilotwings, and savouring the balmy inconsequentiality of an island that reminds me of Super Mario Sunshine. It also now has an early access release date, 21st August, and a charming new trailer.

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We didn’t get to Sandfall and Kepler Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 while covering Microsoft’s summer showcase a couple of weeks ago. If memory serves, when they ran that particular trailer I was busy sponging swampwater out my eyes after writing up South Of Midnight, while Nic had become so vociferously agitated over the debut of Doom: Dark Ages that he was no longer solid and tangible enough to operate a keyboard. Graham, meanwhile, had absconded with Joanna Dark to Immersive Sim Land and Matt, poor Matt, had fallen into a Locust sinkhole while “omnimanouevring” around Black Ops 6. But if one of us had been free and willing we might have had enthusiastic thoughts about this “evolution of JRPGs”, in which you are trying to thwart a self-serious artist who is about to magically murder everybody over the age of 32. It is, alas, too late for me.

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The makers of Cyberpunk 2077 host a podcast every once in a while, in which the studio’s developers chat about what’s going on in the company. In the latest episode, they’re discussing their (relatively new) Boston studio and how it’s spearheading the as-yet-enigmatic sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. There’s a lot of middle-managey chit chat but one thing that stood out was one developer’s earnest remarks about what he considers some of the sci-fi RPG’s shortcomings.

“I see that we didn’t push the envelope far enough in some places, for instance,” said Paweł Sasko, Associate Game Director at CD Project RED. “Like, let’s say the homeless crisis… when I look at it, I’m like, we weren’t far enough in ’77. We thought that we were dystopian, but… we just touched the surface.”

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I think I’ve written about it a bazillion times here on RPS, but I do think Elden Ring is a massive open world game that’s a bit too large and in charge. I reached the exhaustion point once, and now the DLC’s come out, I’m scared I’ll reach it again despite the fact I think it’s very good. It’s interesting then, that FromSoftware’s president Hidetaka Miyazaki sees Elden Ring as “the limit” for FromSoftware in terms of project scale (cheers The Guardian for the interview, and PCGamer for the spot). I think it’s a great thing, personally.

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Assassin’s Creed fans “can be excited about some remakes” of the older games in the open world series, permits generous soul Yves Guillemot, via one of those odd promotional things disguised as a conversation. They’d like to “revisit some of the games we’ve created in the past and modernize them,” Ubisoft told Ubisoft about Ubisoft.

Elsewhere in the blog, Guillemot repeatedly praises what he sees as the potential for generative AI and how it “can enrich NPCs to be more intelligent, more interactive,” saying this could “potentially extend to animals in the world.” So, look forward to remake Ezio putting glue in his pizza sauce I suppose?

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Frostpunk 2 is being delayed so its developers have time to address player feedback gathered during the beta earlier this year. The survival citybuilder was originally due to begin shovelling orphans into the furnace in July, but those dear children now have a reprieve until September 20th.

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You can tell when a major Steam sale goes live, because the Steam store stop loading. If you can make it past the “something went wrong” message you’ll find that the Steam summer sale is now underway.

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