Rock Paper Shotgun News, Tips, Tricks, Ideas

The winners of the 2024 Independant Games Festival were announced at GDC last night, and it was Visai Games' Venba that came home with the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. The cooking adventure was up for four IGF awards in total, including nominations for Excellence in Audio, Narrative and Visual Art. But there was no runaway winner at this year's IGF Awards, with all prizes going to completely different indie games. Come and celebrate the full list of winners below.

If you're an MMORPG fan who's been waiting patiently for news of Riot Game's swing at the genre, then I'm afraid you'll probably have to wait quite a while longer. Riot co-founder Marc Merrill announced that the project has been "reset" and won't appear for "likely several years", with one of the main reasons being a "need to do something that truly feels like a significant evolution of the genre".

In a powerful move, one of the two devs behind Cryptmaster announced the delightful typing-based dungeon crawler's release date last night during his acceptance speech after it won the Independent Games Festival award for Excellence In Design. Powerful. May 9th is the day, so you have time to practise your touchtyping with Mavis Beacon. I really enjoyed playing Cryptmaster's Steam Next Fest demo, so I'm excited for the full game.

We’ve known that a Marvel game from former Uncharted writer-director Amy Hennig has been in the works for years, learning in 2022 that it will focus on Captain America and Black Panther during World War 2. Thanks to a proper reveal during today’s State of Unreal event, we now know that it’ll be called Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and we’ll be able to play it sometime in 2025.

Bungie’s reboot of their nineties pre-Halo debut shooter Marathon seems to be slowing down its pace a little in order to get across the finish line, with a change in director and a delay meaning the multiplayer-only loot-shooter reimagining of the FPS is now expected to arrive next year - or potentially even after that, according to recent reports.

After channelling the atmosphere and gory terror of Dead Space (though alas, not its reception) in 2022’s sci-fi horror shooter, The Callisto Protocol is apparently now looking to the likes of Hades to inspire a new roguelike spin-off set in its universe, currently codenamed Project Birdseye.

It's GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they've had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It's the usual pitch. "Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?", asks Ubi's official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is "Erm, probably no, actually?"

In what's quite the shake up for Overwatch 2, Blizzard have announced that starting with Season 10, all of its heroes will be unlocked for all players. And this includes all new heroes going forwards, too, so the next hero Venture will unlock immediately for everyone when the latest season drops. Otherwise, there's changes to unlocking premium skins, earning premium coins, and some tidbits on what we can expect from Season 11.

It's deeply frustrating and disappointing when games get pulled from store shelves due to licenses expiring, and too few ever return. So it's great news that almost four years after Sega stopped selling Obisidian's fascinating spy thriller RPG Alpha Protocol on Steam due to music rights expiring, it has returned to sale on GOG. I'm always surprised that Alpha Protocol hasn't reached serious cult classic status because, as much as parts are distinctly wonky, the globetrotting sneak-o-shooter fizzes with ideas for intense dialogue, branching plot, and reputation systems with consequences. You do feel like a spy going up against the world, backed up only by shifty allies and a ridiculous pair of giant sunglasses.

Eight years after launching, Stardew Valley just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Update 1.6 arrived yesterday, with enough changes that the patch notes are 7308 words long. It bumps the farm-o-life sim's co-op player limit to eight, adds hundreds of new items, opens up a new progression system for "powerful perks and items", adds new events, lets you drink mayonnaise, and so much more that. Best of all, it lets you have more pets. New pets. Pets wearing hats.

Bungie have announced a change in director on their upcoming revival of their classic shooter Marathon, amid reports the studio is once again shaking up its creative leadership. Former Valorant director Joe Ziegler confirmed his appointment on Xwitter last night, replacing long-time Bungie designer Christopher Barrett in the role.

Just when I thought I was past being surprised by games adding battle royale modes, Blizzard today announced one for World Of Warcraft. Plunderstorm will drop 60 pirates onto the Arathi Highlands to fight monsters, loot chests, level up, acquire abilities, and beat the hell out of each other as a storm closes in. It's initially due to run only for several weeks and will use wholly separate characters, though you can unlock cosmetics for your main wizards.

Later this week, Payload Studios' open world vehicular survival builder TerraTech Worlds launches into early access. As the name implies, it's a bigger, bolder and more ambitious take on their still very popular sandbox game TerraTech, but according to Payload's founder and CEO Russ Clarke, they're viewing this new version as more of a successor to TerraTech than a full-bodied sequel. "The overall quality of experience is really a huge leap forward," Clarke told me during a press presentation last week. "We're not calling it a sequel because we felt that making it a sequel would be a bit too constraining." Rather, it's "more of a reimagining" of the original game, says Clarke, with a change in engine and fresh investment from Tencent allowing them to reach the full potential of their original vision.

Microsoft have confirmed the waves of games coming to Game Pass in late March and early April, headlined by the expected addition of Diablo IV. This is the first Activision Blizzard game coming to Game Pass since Microsoft's ridiculous $69 billion acquisition, with more due to follow. Beyond that, look forward to games including mech-riding farming game Lightyear Frontier and the colossal alien invasion strategy game from the XCOM Long War team, Terra Invicta.

Cyan Worlds today announced plans to launch their fancy real-time 3D remake of Riven later this year, coming with support for both VR cybergoggles and standard meatspace screens. Riven: The Sequel To Myst was the 1997 sequel to Myst, the 1993 pre-rendered adventure game which sold a million CD-ROM drives and launched a thousand specks of spittle from John Walker's mouth. The remake previously had a longwinded name of its own, Riven: New Discoveries Of The Lost D'ni Empire, but now is simply named Riven. They should rebrand again and call it Riven: The Sequel To The Myst Remake.

If you're keen to try out Sand Land, an upcoming action RPG from the developers of One Piece Odyssey and the creator of Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama, then I have some great news. There's a demo out right now that lets you explore a portion of the sandy map, try out a handful of the characters, and ride some rusty vehicles ahead of its release next month on April 25th.

In the run-up to Total War: Pharaoh at the end of last year, a slightly strange question popped into my head: "What if someone made a Total War game that also had the handsome anime looks of Fire Emblem: Three Houses?" Clearly, it was also a question on the minds on Japanese indie developers ThinkGames Inc, who have just announced their debut game Valiant Tactics EX. The 38-second long reveal trailer paints quite an enticing picture ahead of its Steam launch on March 29th, and that's not even the half of it either. For Valiant Tactics EX isn't just an anime Total War-like. It's also a whopping great deckbuilding game.

Valve have launched Steam Families on the Steam Beta Client, a suite of new and refreshed family sharing options that replace Steam's existing Family Sharing and Family View features. The idea is that you'll now have a single location where you can manage your family's games from, as well as have more control over what and when other family members can play.

HoYoverse have announced that sign-ups for Zenless Zone Zero's next closed beta test are now available. While the start and end dates of the next closed beta haven't been unveiled just yet, we do know that there's going to be a new character to play, a new faction, new missions, and overhauls to the game's combat and exploration. I'd imagine it's worth a look if you're into Genshin Impact, or are into your anime fights. Either one will suffice.

While cloud gaming is very much not at a point where I want it to be the main way I play games, if I ever will, I do appreciate having the convenience as an option. Being able to play a game away from my PC can be handy. So it's neat that GOG have announced they're teaming up with Amazon to make select GOG games playable through the Amazon Luna cloud gaming platform "soon". Sure, I might be tempted to take a nice stroll through Night City while slouching about with my laptop that absolutely cannot run Cyberpunk 2077.

Solo developer Billy Basso's enigmatic Metroidvania Animal Well has been dated for May 9th, publishers Bigmode announced yesterday. In it, you'll explore a vast labyrinth of tunnels, solve puzzles and escape its many mammalian-based horrors, all of whom are out to gobble you up in one fell swoop - though as a strange, tiny little blob creature the size of a chicken nugget, it's unclear both what you are, and why exactly you're so appetising to them. Well, it probably has something to do with looking like a sentient chicken nugget, I suppose. Come and watch the release date trailer below.

It's GDC week over in San Francisco at the moment, and such a high concentration of video game developers in one place can only mean one thing: The Maw has turned its ever-dribbling gaze to America's west coast, and is preparing to bask in all the fresh learnings being shared about how last year's best video games were made and created. Edwin is one the ground there for us, so we wish him well in his news gathering and interview appointments. Back home, the news cycle still continues apace, with lots of great releases big and small coming up over the next seven days. Here's what we've got our eyes on.

If you’ve ever suspected that harvesting crops in Stardew Valley is faster in one direction than another, validation is at hand. The beloved farming sim’s creator has confirmed that the long-rumoured quirk is real, as its incoming 1.6 update prepares to fix a bug dating back almost a decade.

I’ll be honest: fried eggs are my least favourite way to enjoy the versatile food. But even a noted fried-egg hater like me was left salivating over a pan full of sizzling yolks by my first look at strange yet mesmerising upcoming sci-fi cooking sim Arctic Eggs.

Developers happy to mimic the style of Hollywood blockbusters in their video game soundtracks are stopping video game music from advancing, one of the best to ever do it - Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu - has said.

Mojang have announced a new Minecraft subscription service, the Marketplace Pass, which grants access to a catalogue of "150+" community-created Minecraft thingy-ma-bobs. Skins, adventure worlds, survival spawns, mashups, bizarre textures - with a Marketplace Pass, the wider monetisable universe of Minecraft is your (rented) oyster, except that this being Minecraft, the oyster looks like a weird underwater trapdoor. Here's a trailer.

The co-creator of long-running free-to-play fantasy MMO RuneScape has revealed the project his new studio has been working on for the last ten years. Surprise! It’s a new free-to-play fantasy MMO. But Andrew Gower and developers Fen Research insist that Brighter Shores will balance its nostalgic feel with a fresh approach to the well-worn genre that Gower himself helped wear in over two decades ago.

Port-o-remaster publishers Aspyr yesterday launched the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, bundling together the two 'What if Battlefield but Star Wars?' shooters originally released by Pandemic Studios and LucasArts in 2004 and 2005 (not to be confused with Dice and EA's uncolonic Star Wars Battlefront games from the mid-tensies). It's one of those rereleases that exists mostly for consoles which never saw the games in the first place, made a bit useless on PC by the fact that you can still buy and fully play the originals for half the price. It's made even less useful by launching in a right wonky technical state, with bad lag, crashes, and reportedly only three 64-player servers online at first.

What do you reach for when you're waiting in line at the supermarket, or waiting in a shop doorway for the rain to stop, or even while you're waiting for a game to finish downloading? I don't mean to assume, but let's face it, it's probably your phone, where some idle doomscrolling likely awaits you, or some other, time-wasting distraction that will help fill the dead air between one task and the next. Well, While Waiting is a game that delves into precisely this fundamental human question: what is the best thing to do while waiting for something else to happen? It's from the makers of the very good puzzle game Moncage, and its newly released Steam demo is a pure, fidgety brilliance.

Pocketpair have popped up a trailer for Palworld's first new raid battle boss, Bellanoir, who is "coming soon" to the monster-catching survival game in a big old Palworld update that will also include some fixes and additional anti-cheating measures. First impressions: it's an evil Goth girl with a jellyfish where her legs should be.

If you're fond of the fairly specific blend of doomy theology, rich art direction and Soulslike-tinted metroidvaning encapsulated by Blasphemous, you might also enjoy Saviorless from Cuban team Empty Head Games and publisher Dear Villagers, which now has a PC release date of 2nd April.

Final Factory has already impressed via a couple of demos. It's effectively 'Factorio in space': you construct space bases by chaining together machinery, protect by commanding ships and turrets to fight off alien invaders, then explore the galaxy to secure more resources.

The Epic Games Store's spring sale is underway, from today until March 28th. That makes it twice as long as Steam's spring sale, which also started today. I'm not sure if that makes it twice as exciting, but here's what does: Deus Ex Mankind Divided is free to keep for the next week.

As if colony sim RimWorld doesn't already have enough ways for your sci-fi frontier adventurers to die, a new expansion titled Anomaly is goiong to add "all manner of monstrous, mysterious, and maddening threats". It's out in around a month, and will be paired with a free 1.5 update for the base game.

It's hard for me to get a read on Steam sales, because my relationship and access to games is defined by my work. So I ask you, as the Steam spring sale starts: are Steam sales as big a deal as they used to be?

Helldivers 2's Cutting Edge Premium warbond, aka DLC battle pass, is now available to buy in-game, and it is chock-full of oddball gadgetry such as lightning shotguns, burst-fire laser rifles and experimental armour. As with the Arc Thrower stratagem, the lightning shotgun fires arcs of electricity that conduct between players and enemies alike, but there's a fresh armour perk, Electrical Conduit, which reduces arc damage by 95%, allowing close-knit teams of Helldivers to roll around the battlefield frazzling themselves without much penalty.

The studio behind unexpectedly decent Mickey Mouse life sim Disney Dreamlight Valley are venturing into another fantasy land where anthropomorphic animals adventure with human chums, the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons & Dungeons. Today Gameloft announced they're making a D&D game offering a "hybrid of survival, life simulation and action RPG". They don't have much more to share about the game, not even a name, so presumably it won't be out for some time. Whatever it might be, it's headed to PC and consoles.

This week's announcement that Embracer are selling off Saber Interactive to new company Beacon Interactive has cast further doubt over the future of one of Embracer's bigger projects, the much-delayed Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic remake. While Embracer have yet to actually state this out loud, it sounds like the KOTOR remake will be a "joint project" between Saber and Embracer. It also probably won't be out in the next 12 months. Given the project's repeated disruptions and delays, I suspect many of us will settle for the game coming out at all.

Crow Country and its spooky, mutant-stuffed theme park will be opening its gates on Steam on May 9th, developers SFB Games have announced. It's the first of two games from the Tangle Tower micro-studio coming to PC this year, the other one being The Mermaid's Tongue, which will be picking up the adventures of their Tangle Tower detective duo on a marginally less spooky-looking submarine later this year. Crow Country, however, is a very different kettle of fish, combining chunky, PS1-style Final Fantasy 7 character models with early Resident Evil tank controls and panicked monster shooting.

Saber Interactive have parted ways with Embracer Group, buying back the rights to both themselves and numerous other studios in a deal initially valued at $247 million. The deal includes 38 ongoing game development projects plus the rights to 3D Realms, Slipgate Ironworks, New World Interactive, Nimble Giant, Mad Head, Digic, Fractured Byte and PR agency Sandbox Strategies, as well as Metro developers 4A Games and Pinball FX maker Zen Studios via options.

While we felt it wasn't an amazing game, we quite liked The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria's dwarven survival antics. It was a bit of cosy fun for a group of pals, and thankfully, open-ended co-op play looks to be the focus of the next big update, which adds a new sandbox mode that lets you pick rocks and sink pints free of storyline constraints. Not to mention new armour, weapons, and quality of life improvements like the ability to pause your single player sessions.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink has received a sizeable game update, which adds a new, difficult quest, The Final Vision, some additional camera and aim sensitivity settings, and new Steam trophies. That's in addition to a brace of bug fixes, character-specific balancing tweaks for multiplayer, and assorted quality-of-life improvements, including visual and audio indicators to indicate when you've lost your buffs.

After two years slumbering in the coffin of early access, vampire survival game V Rising is lifting off the lid and rising into a full 1.0 release. Having previously been announced with a somewhat vague Q2 launch window, we now know exactly when V Rising’s 1.0 release date will be: May 8th.

I’m not personally familiar with Nexon’s 2010 MMO Vindictus, but its upcoming action-RPG spin-off Vindictus: Defying Fate is looking like a fairly flashy mix of Celtic mythology, dodge-and-slash swordplay and some sharp visuals. Luckily for me and you, we’ll be able to give it a go for free for the next week, as the game’s pre-alpha playtest is now live over on Steam.

Not content with being one of the best single-player experiences of 2023, Sea of Stars is readying the modern-classic RPG to become one of this year’s most delightful multiplayer games. Developers Sabotage Studio have revealed that three-player co-op is on the way, letting you adventure through the entire campaign with a party of pals.

Discord is making a play to not simply be the software you use to talk while playing games with your pals, but the software you use to play them too. The ubiquitous chat client already lets you play a handful of approved games inside itself without dowloading or launching anything seperate, along with other 'Activities' like watching YouTube together, and next week it will open up to a whole lot more. Discord will let all developers make their own Activities, wanting to jam in more games and social hangout experiences and stuff. I'm broadly up for things removing faff from getting casual hangout games running with pals.

Palworld developers Pocketpair have announced a new Palworld Testing program that asks players of the wildly popular monster-catching survival game to help test future updates and provide feedback on the game, ahead of new content drops being released to the general public. Players can sign-up via a Google Form now if they wish, though Pocketpair stress that "the testing branch is not intended for free play or experiencing new content early, so we hope that only those of you genuinely interested in bug hunting and testing will apply." And presumably, those genuinely interested in also not being paid for their free QA support.

One of my favourite 'jokes'to do is parody Raymond Chandler, i.e. I shout "She had legs all the way up to her thighs!" and then laugh at myself. Chandlers's trademark "blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window" kind of zingers are very hard to do well, so it's better to say you're doing Philip Marlow badly on purpose. The trailer for Nobody Wants To Die seems like it's self-seriousness is actually self-awareness. I mean, I kind of refuse to believe that hard-boiled future crime detective James Karra saying "I'm in the business of secrets... But it's more of an addiction... And I like 'em straight... No chaser..." while sipping from a glass of amber liquor isn't indulging in some amount of winking and nudging.

CCP Games have shared a few more details about Project Awakening, a new game or at least, "survival experience" set in the Eve Online universe, which is getting a closed playtest from 21st May 2024. Project Awakening is a single-shard affair - that is, one in which all players inhabit the same world, rather than being split up across servers or instances. It's "built upon the principles of freedom, consequence, and mastery within a living universe", and "represents the next step in CCP Games' journey to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life", which, you know, wind your neck in.

After almost four years in development, Dark Souls 3 mod Archthrones is set to release a demo on March 15th. If you were unaware of said mod, it's a Patron-funded expansion that puts Dark Souls 3 on an alternate storyline in a way akin to Demon Souls, with a hub area home to five gateways that'll transport you to five worlds. If there was ever a reason to return to Dark Souls 3, this is probably it.

Fallen behind on Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn’s story? Whether you’re still yet to finish Endwalker or are looking to pick up the MMO for the first time in anticipation of enjoying a lovely summer holiday with your fellow Scions of the Seventh Dawn, you’re going to have to work before your Warrior of Light can kick back in next expansion Dawntrail; there won’t be a free way to simply jump to the latest chapter of the story for free anytime soon.

There are 137 Pals in Pocketpair's monster-catching simulator Palworld, which might sound like plenty, but the serial Palworld player is an insatiable creature, always clamouring for new beasties to capture, pet and exploit, even as the developers encourage fans to play other games while they wait for the next Palworld update. If you've already bagged all the available Pals and are hungry for more, you might be interested in Palworld mod Breed Unreleased Pals, created by ShameIHaveNoFriends, which grants access to three animals who exist in the game's files but are not, strictly speaking, available to players.

TopSpin 2k25 was announced in January, the first entry in the tennis series since 2011. It turns out there's not long to wait before it's served up either, as it now has a release date of April 26th.

Six month's after Payday 3's disastrous launch, Starbreeze have parted ways with their CEO, Tobias Sjögren. In an update to investors, Starbreeze's board said that the company now requires "different leadership", and they've appointed former CEO of Focus Home Interactive Juergen Goeldner as interim CEO.

Tribes 3: Rivals is out in Steam Early Access now. The fast-paced, capture-the-flag shooter has been through several betas over the past year, and now has a post-launch roadmap of updates that includes new weapons, maps and class abilities.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom already has a descriptive name, but its new trailer omits it in favour of a better encapsulation of its pitch: "You're a N64 taxi and there's no jump button?". The video itself is sixty seconds of pure, colourful joy, and it ends on a release date: April 9th.

Children Of The Sun instantly shot to the top of my personal most-wanted list when it was first announced at the start of February alongside its accompanying Steam Next Fest demo, and happily, publishers Devolver Digital have now set a release date. It's coming real soon, with its single-shot murder bullet puzzles hitting Steam on April 9th - and to celebrate, there's a flashy new release trailer to go with it. Come and be dazzled by its exploding headshots below.

Former Star Wars Jedi series director and God Of War developer Stig Asmussen has founded a new studio, Giant Skull, to work on "gameplay-driven, story immersed action-adventure games set in captivating worlds". Based in Los Angeles, Giant Skull are even now developing a new "AAA single-player-focused action adventure" that runs on Unreal Engine 5.

An alleged trailer for Spider-Man: The Great Web has leaked online - Spider-Man: The Great Web being a cancelled Insomniac Games comicbook adaptation with a focus on co-op multiplayer. I am not going to embed the footage because I’m not sure if doing so would cause screaming Spider-Lawyers to crash through my window – best of luck finding tall objects to swing from in darkest West Yorkshire, webheads! - but I will do you the great honour of describing the footage below.

Having played Nightingale a bunch for early access review, I wasn't entirely convinced by its mixture of survival and Destiny-esque power level grind. I also wasn't too keen on its slew of bugs and tricksy interface. Still, the devs are hard at work fixing things, as the latest patch squashes major crashes, material losses when building, and further improves the UI.

The latest Helldivers 2 PC patch makes life a bit easier for players fighting the Terminids, aka monstrous hellbugs, on difficulty level 7 or higher, with tweaks to spawn rates for Chargers and Bile Titans, while increasing the spawn rates of certain other, less heavily armoured Terminids to fill the gap. The developers have also lowered the health of the Charger’s head, allowing for instant takedowns with a Recoilless Rifle or EAT-17, without (in theory) entirely doing away with the community’s treasured "leg meta", which sees players blasting the juggernaut’s limbs to sabotage it.

Capcom announced last night that Monster Hunter Stories, a 2016 Nintendo 3DS spin-off from their megahuge monstermashing series, is coming to PC in June. They've remastered it with a wee visual refresh, fully voice acting, a concept art gallery, and more. We've actually already had the sequel on PC, 2021's Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin, so it's nice to catch up.

I remember revealing at some point that my most-played game is actually a free-to-play picross game (picross, also called nonograms sometimes, being the logic puzzle game where you colour in squares on a grid to reveal a larger picture). You can imagine my intrigue when I saw that Tents And Trees, a picross-ish puzzle game previously on Switch and phones, is coming to PC on April 24th. That's a couple of months away, but you can play the short demo on Steam now to get a taste. It's slick and clean, and I like it!

I've written a bit about playing Helldivers 2 as a solo diver, noting that Arrowhead's frenetic shooter holds up surprisingly well when you rudely insist on treating it like an open world stealth sim, a la Metal Gear Solid V. The developers have weighed in on this front, commenting that strictly speaking, Helldivers 2 doesn't support stealth at all. It's just designed in an "agnostic", systems-first way and this in itself makes stealth a possibility. It's also a quiet attempt to capture something of the intricacy of a full-blown military simulator, while still being a very "arcadey" game at heart, which owes a little to Arrowhead's own collective time in the military.

It seems only fitting that Ghostbusters has become the movie franchise that refuses to die, returning for a smattering of so-so (at best) reboots and sequels on screen and elsewhere being relegated to another rich vein of nostalgia to be mined for cash. Speaking of, Destiny 2 is getting Ghostbusters cosmetics next week!

Despite being the game that pioneered and popularised the battle royale shooter, it seems that PUBG: Battlegrounds has increasingly ended up left in the shadow cast by Fortnite’s ridiculous popularity, Lego and Eminem collabs, and big, flashy season changes. It seems that the earlier battle royale game is planning to borrow at least one leaf from its rival’s playbook this year, though.

The second season of pretty damn excellent multiplayer team shooter The Finals is landing later this week. The hacker-themed Season 2 will introduce a new playstyle with world-altering gadgets, a brand new five-on-five game mode, an extra map, beta support for private matches and more.

While we’re yet to get a hard release date for Final Fantasy 16 on PC, it sounds like it won’t be too far off. That’s going by recent comments by producer Naoki Yoshida, who also suggested we can expect a demo before it’s out - which should also be a good chance to test your rig against its apparently hefty hardware requirements.

In a real "no thanks, I hate it" move that seems to be aimed at making me, specifically, have some kind of coronary event, Walker Labs and Readyverse studios have announced a new battle royale game, designed with Ernest "I Tip My Hat To You, Sir!" Cline. Cline, who you will remember is the writer of Ready Player One, is apparently one of the co-founders of Readyverse, and I'm sad to see he's still in search of a second idea. Open (that's the name of the game, but it's in all caps in their press assets) is an "immersive multiverse filled with nostalgia-infused biomes featuring characters and cultural legends across iconic franchises", coming to early access this year. Also it somehow involves web3.

The crossover throwdown of MultiVersus will return to officially launch on the 28th of May, Warner Bros. announced today. The return will come almost a year after they closed its open beta, which ran for a striking 11 months. The platform fighting game sees Batman, Bugs Bunny, Arya Stark, Steven Universe, and other characters from across different WB shows and movies coming together for a Smash Bros.-style square go.

A new week has slouched into view, and with it a slight shift in The Maw's terrifying visage. A new presence can be seen through the mist, perched on its shoulder, whispering tendrils of video game news nuggets into its greedy, hungry ear. The Maw appears sated, but will the distraction hold while we await the return of our news editor Edwin, whose long weekend sojourns won't conclude until tomorrow? We pray and hope it will be satisfied in this relatively quiet week of game releases and newsy happenings, lest it turn its awful gaze upon us with a wrathful vengeance. FEED THE MAW.

More developers have confirmed that they have been told by Warner Bros. Discovery that their games will imminently be delisted from digital storefronts. Soundodger+ and Fist Puncher are both due to vanish, following in the footsteps of puzzle game Small Radios Big Televisions, whose developer announced its imminent delisting earlier this week and released the game for free in response.

Remember when Ubisoft announced they were working on a movie adaptation of hacking series Watch Dogs, before it was even released? I sure didn’t! Well, allow us both to be reminded of something from over a decade ago, because the Watch Dogs film is still apparently A Thing. It’s more of A Thing now, too, because it has actual names attached rather than just a corporation’s vague “excitement” about licensing out its IP.

The sequel to emotional 2014 World War I adventure game Valiant Hearts: The Great War has hit PC, after a year and change locked down to mobile devices and a Netflix subscription - and a decade after its predecessor.

After cracking open its virtual Pandora’s Box using the magical key of “shooting it with a lot of bullets”, Fortnite’s mythical next season is due to roll out later today. Chapter 5 Season 2 - or Myths & Mortals, if you prefer - will bring a pantheon of god powers, locations from Greek mythology and, uh, Korra from the Avatar: The Last Airbender sequel, who has a gun now I guess.

Akira Toriyama, the mangaka whose work in video games included designing the characters for two of the most influential RPGs ever made, Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest, on top of creating one of the most influential series across all of pop-culture in Dragon Ball, has passed away.

The second part of Dune is out at the moment, and it has resulted in that most filthy of perversions, discourse - a pastime in which only the most unsavoury characters indulge. Is Dune appropriative? Is the appropriation the point? Whatever the case, Funcom want you to know that their upcoming survival game Dune: Awakening has nothing to do with any of that, posting a short Xeet from the official Awakening account that's the written equivalent of sticking your arms straight out, waving your hands, and going "Woahwoahwoah, hang on a minute."

Polish developers Mighty Koi have announced The Night Wanderer, a new sci-fantasy Soulslike RPG with metroidvania level design – yes, yes, tick those genre boxes! - in which you are a grim bearded swordsman exploring an alien world that looks a bit like pre-industrial Scandinavia.

If you wanted to buy any of the games in the Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection, Dungeon Keeper, or Sim City 3000 - but didn't want to do it on GOG where they were already on sale - then rejoice! EA has made these classics and more, and for some reason The Saboteur, available on Steam for the first time. You can see the full list of games here. I don't have anything specific against The Saboteur, but I do think it's very funny that the list goes, like, "beloved game from the 90s, beloved game from the 90s, 7/10 action game from 2009, beloved game from the 90s". Also, I can take the opportunity to make fun of Graham and James, the tallest wrongest boys at RPS, who apparently both liked it.

Dragon's Dogma series director Hideaki Itsuno has announced that the meat you can cook in Dragon's Dogma 2 is, in fact, "real meat". There's been a certain amount of PlayStation-instigated speculation about whether the meat is CGI-generated, following the last round of Dragon's Dogma 2 previews. Speaking to Japanese site 4Gamer, as translated by Automaton, Itsuno revealed that the game's scenes of sizzling flesh are derived from live action film of steaks being grilled - partly for the sake of authenticity, and partly to save money versus creating computer models of meat products. You can cook several types of meat in Dragon's Dogma, each of which has its own cutscene, and a number of Dragon's Dogmatists are already performatively salivating at the prospect on social media.