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Dungeons & Dragons company Wizards Of The Coast have apologised for “mistakenly” sending a legal takedown to the creator of a free Stardew Valley mod that adds a village inspired by and featuring characters from Baldur’s Gate 3. The mod has attracted praise from Larian CEO Swen Vincke, who was naturally a bit piqued when it was taken offline.
75 people have been let go by Eidos-Montreal, the studio announced yesterday. The Deus Ex and Tomb Raider developers laid off the workers because they didn’t have the “capacity to entirely reallocate them”, according to a statement. It’s a further blow to the workforce at the Embracer-owned company, following hefty cuts last year.
Dwarf Fortress co-creator and programmer Tarn Adams has made fleeting, whimsical allusion to the possibility of an Elf Fortress game in a new interview – a fleeting, whimsical allusion I will now pounce on and make an enormous deal of, because my goodness, man, you can’t just say “Elf Fortress” and walk off whistling into the sunset.
The topic arose during a discussion of why fantasy dwarves are a “fortuitous” archetype for a maddeningly system-driven game like Dwarf Fortress, in which half the fun is enjoying the tunnel vision of characters who will cheerfully neglect their duties and doom their brethren because, for example, they’re obsessed with crafting a mug that menaces with spikes of bituminous coal and alpaca wool. According to Adams, this is relatably “human”, though he muddies things intriguingly by dropping a reference to androids, and allows to weave stories around technical eccentricities and outright bugs, which can be read as instances of “dwarfy” fixation and excess. Elves? They don’t work the same way.
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IGN Live was already confirmed to return this June, but now RPS’s corporate papa has put a date on it. The in-person fan event, with streams for those who can’t attend, will return on June 7th-8th in LA, and tickets are on sale now.
I’ve hit the install cap on my storage drive more times than I’ve rage-quit in Apex. At some point, deleting a 90GB game just to download another becomes a sad cycle of SSD suffering. So yeah, when a bunch of top-tier M.2 drives go on sale, I pay attention. Amazon’s Spring Sale has been great for PC gaming deals, but it’s also the last day of the sale as well, so don’t delay on these latest price drops.
Jagex have announced RuneScape: Dragonwilds, a new open world co-operative survival game set in the same fantasy world as their ancient MMO. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, looks a bit like Valheim and Enshrouded, and will launch into early access this spring. Dragonwilds is set on the continent of Ashenfall, a wild place featuring dragons, and your overall goal is to “slay the Dragon Queen”.
I’m going to make the obvious prediction here: you will spend much more time in Ashenfall chopping down trees and composing their delicious, grainy innards into barn doors than chopping down any dragons, regal or otherwise. It’s a survival game, after all. The ratio of dragons to logging and carpentry in the first screenshots is a nail-biting 1:1 – if it weren’t for that subtitle, I might have assumed this to be a game about woodlands management with optional Smaug-bashing QTEs. Rather than dragon-felling cantrips, the announcement release gives prominent mention to a spell for summoning spectral axes to chop trees down for you, which feels a bit like a car salesman leading with the option to just buy a train ticket instead. Here’s the announcement trailer.
I used to think any old headset would do. Plug it in, hear the game, done. Then I bought a half-decent one and immediately heard footsteps I’d been ignoring for years. Now I can’t go back. If you’re still gaming with tinny audio and a mic that makes you sound like a drive-thru cashier in a hurricane, Amazon’s Spring Sale is your best chance to escape the audio troubles, and it’s also the last day of the sale as well, so don’t delay on these top discounts.
Doom is going medieval. Id Software’s next brutish shooter, Doom: The Dark Ages, was revealed with a shield-flinging trailer last summer, and we’ve since learned more about how it’ll actually play. Nic already summed up the new features but I gots something that Nic boy don’t: three hours of hands-on time with the Doomlad, including some dragonback dog-fighting, and a fifty-storey fistfight in a gargantuan mech. Let me tell you what it’s like.
If you handed me a deck of revolting Tarot cards and told me to heal a bunch of sickly, deranged medieval peasants, I would probably attempt to sew the cards together into bandages. Perhaps I would offer the nicer ones to children instead of lollipops, to distract them while I apply the leeches (lollipops did exist in the Middle Ages, I’m shocked to discover, but mostly in noble circles). Bloodletter has grander ambitions.
In this whispery, crazy-eyed deckbuilder, you’ll play Tarot-style cards to purge foul spirits who are seeking to possess and kill your neighbours. “Evil entities have crept into the hearts of the common folk, who teeter upon the brink of madness and death,” the developers explain. “Only thy bathhouse stands as a bastion against the creeping corruption.” It sounds like a mixture of Pathologic and Black Book and Pentiment. Here be’est the trailer.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘s dev team are “actively looking at” adding options for a more challenging jaunt through the throaty-poke ’em up’s incarnation of feudal Japan. “We’re looking at these things and monitoring what people say about the game,” creative director Jonathon Dumont told GamesRadar+ at this year’s GDC.
Shadows currently features four difficulty options for both stealth and combat, ranging from ‘story’ to ‘expert’, as well as the ‘guaranteed assassination’ toggle from recent previous entries, which ensures that when you stab a man in the neck with a large sharp piece of metal, he does not react with a blasé “ow! Nevertheless…”.
