Folk News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Greetings, Adventurers!

A new train game is picking up steam in the train game community, with Railroader picking up 97% positive reviews on Steam since its December 7 Early Access launch. A sim of both driving the trains as well as routing them, choosing cargo, and picking passengers, Railroader looks to appeal to both the sim crowd and the less-hardcore folks who enjoy games like Euro and American Truck Simulator—even roping in a few strategy and transport sim types who enjoy games like Transport Fever.

By Phil Owen on

Games Workshop retail staff have a rough job, from low pay to consistent unreasonable targets from upper management, so it’s with all the love and respect that I tell you about the animated lad that my 14-year-old friends and I used to make fun of for liberal use of the phrase “If a Space Marine walked in here right now…” It was always accompanied by wildly enthusiastic gesticulation meant to convey the absolute unit-tude of said Space Marines (8 feet tall in Warhammer 40,000’s lore). I bring this up because it perfectly sums up the thorny issue behind marketing these yoked stormtroopers: Space Marines are very expensive for something so small, forcing Games Workshop to make the legend of these tiny plastic soldiers tower over the reality.

Old School RuneScape is grindy even by MMO standards. It can take months to reach the max level in just one of the game's 23 skills, and literal years to hit 99 in all of them, which is a major end goal for many players. That being said, if I had, I don't know, 43 guaranteed years of pre-paid premium membership ahead of me, I'd probably feel a little comfier knowing for a mathematical fact that I've got all the time in the world to grind the MMO at my leisure. 

The Game Awards played host to a lot of world premieres tonight, with one apparently being this sort of dark fantasy action-RPG game that, if nothing else, looked absolutely beautiful. Then halfway through, it was revealed that this was the latest game from Moon Studios, the folks behind Ori and the Blind Forest and its follow-up, and suddenly things made a ton of sense. Their new game with publishers Private Division is called No Rest For the Wicked, and it seems to showcase the team going even bigger than they have before.

Monster Hunter is easily one of the biggest video game franchises for Capcom, and they have continued to see the franchise thrive over the years. So, it’s not surprising to see this IP continue to have new releases. Today, during The Game Awards, it was unveiled that a new Monster Hunter video game installment is coming our way. We saw rumors and leaks that this franchise would show up, so for fans of this IP; this is undoubtedly an exciting reveal to check out.

When Geoff Keighley takes the stage for The Game Awards, it's expected that there might be a new game releasing before the end of the night. This year, that game is The Finals, the highly-destructible FPS from ex-DICE folk that attracted hundreds of thousands of players to its open beta last month.

Well folks, we finally know the Baldur's Gate 3 Xbox release date. It's, uh, today. Like, now. Surprise!

So after 2023, folks might be cautious about any new game that combines Arkane and vampires, and rightfully so. But at The Game Awards tonight, Arkane Lyon – AKA the ones behind the Dishonored games and Deathloop – came and debuted their latest game with Bethesda, which featured a cinematic with a barbershop in Paris that had a lot of crucifixes and a creepy atmosphere. At the end, though, the customer in this barbershop was revealed to be none other than one Eric Brooks, AKA Blade. Yep, Marvel’s favorite daywalker is officially getting a new game, as seen below.

Visions of Mana is the first new game in Square Enix's legendary JRPG Mana series, and it looks absolutely incredible.

Former Tango Gameworks designer Ikumi Nakamura stepped on the stage of The Game Awards to reveal the first game from her studio, Unseen, called Kemuri.

Big Walk is a game about hanging out and getting lost in a big weird world, and it's currently in development by the team who brought us Untitled Goose Game and Push Me Pull You. Announced at the 2023 Game Awards, it's coming in 2025.

Get your wallets ready because the soon-to-be “Dearly Beloved” Sora amiibo is on its way. The latest Super Smash Bros. amiibo arrives on February 16.

Greetings, Adventurers!

Before we get into what else we could see at tonight's event, let's have a recap of all the nominees shall we?

Rockstar may have pulled a Fortnite dances on a few people, as Florida Joker expresses his disapproval.

A new report from IGN says the situation at Bungie following layoffs and reports of sinking Destiny 2 player numbers and revenues is even more dire than is widely known. Morale at the studio has reportedly plummeted amidst what is described by IGN's sources as management indifference, and the report says Bungie could even be subject to a full Sony takeover if the upcoming Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape fails to meet expectations.

On the latest episode of the Game Developer podcast, we had a far-ranging chat with Strange Scaffold creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr. Nelson's outfit just put out its largest game, El Paso, Elsewhere, earlier in the fall, to significant critical acclaim. We talked a great deal about the game and its many inspirations.

Influential British developer Jeff Minter, whose four-decade career spans the likes of Tempest 2000, Polybius, Space Giraffe and Revenge of the Mutant Camels, will be the focus of the next interactive documentary from the folks behind the roundly excellent Making of Karateka and Atari 50.

League of Geeks, the development studio currently working on space strategy sim game Jumplight Odyssey and turn-based political strategy game Solium Infernum, has announced cuts to over 50% of its workforce. That includes the entireJumplight Odyssey team, putting the early-access game’s development on hold indefinitely. 

Our sixth major update, Splintered Souls, is currently being tempered in the scorching flames of the Burning Hells and will be released on December 14. While you wait, we’re providing you with a look at the new mystical companions called Familiars, along with other nightmarishly enjoyable features coming in this update.

One more grim notch for the 2023 games industry meat grinder. Australian indie studio League of Geeks is laying off over half its staff and pausing development «indefinitely» on early access starship management game Jumplight Odyssey.

Glorious fantasy RPG Baldur's Gate 3is full of a wonderful roster of diverse and interesting characters, all of which help to make it one of the best RPGs of the decade so far. However, one mod aimed to callously erase the LGBTQ+ identities of certain characters from the game before it was banned by the folks as Nexus Mods. 

Australian studio League of Geeks is pausing development on Jumplight Odyssey indefinitely after making over 50 percent of its workforce redundant.

Since Legion, lore aficionados have speculated on what Azeroth's World Soul is and what exactly that means for us. Content creators Taliesin & Evitel teamed up with our own lore specialist, DiscordianKitty, to lay out the possibilities in this very insightful piece.

Yesterday, after literally years of speculation, rumors, and leaks, Rockstar finally dropped the first teaser for Grand Theft Auto VI. The trailer has gone over well for the most part, although some were surprised to note that the game will only be launching on Xbox Series X/S and PS5, not PC. Rockstar has made a habit of this over the years, but the industry has changed and outside of console exclusives either developed or paid for by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, it’s extremely rare these days for a big AAA game to be released exclusively on console without a PC version. May as well grab those extra bucks from PC players at launch, right? So, why are Rockstar and Take Two Interactive sticking with the console-first approach when almost everyone else has abandoned it?

Today there was a good change to how Rogues' Deadly Brew, Saber Slash, and Envenom runes work while in groups with other rogues in Classic World of Warcraft Season of Discovery. Now all of these rune abilities work like you would except — two rogues, two Deadly Brewers, two stacks of Deadly Poison on the target and no problem at all. Prior to this change the Deadly Poison that triggered from the very powerful Deadly Brew rune could only be applied by one Rogue per target.

While most folks are desperate to know when Rockstar Games will release Grand Theft Auto 6 after teasing a 2025 window in the highly anticipated game’s first trailer, I’ve spent all day trying to answer a much different question: When the heck does GTA 6 actually take place?

GTA 6 trailer 1 dropped on Monday and confirmed that Rockstar is taking us back to Vice City, the fictional Miami-inspired setting of 2002's GTA: Vice City. Naturally, as more than 20 years have passed, the vibrant city has seen quite the glow-up, and so the good folks at the Future Games Show have remade the new trailer using familiar scenes from the OG Vice City, showing exactly how far we've come from the days of polygonal palm trees and cityscapes.

Ned Luke, best known to many as Michael in GTA 5, was among the fans most excited for the GTA 6 trailer. In a two-hour watchalong and react stream on his personal YouTube, the voice actor shared his thoughts on the long-awaited open-world follow-up, and boy were a lot of those thoughts about butts.

The wait is finally over. It's been 10 years since GTA 5's release and now players have finally got the first look at the upcoming installment, GTA 6. However, it didn't happen in the way the devs wanted. 

Rockstar prematurely released their trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI hours before its release. And they’re not too happy about it.

Inkle are hands down one of the most interesting developers in terms of their treatment of narrative. From their most famous title, 80 Days, to my personal favourite, Heaven’s Vault, they have a knack for telling incredible stories in innovative ways. It’s no surprise, then, to hear that I was hugely excited to get my hands on their newest title. A Highland Song is a departure for Inkle in terms of genre and style but very much continues their impressive track record.

We got our first look at the Fallout TV series last week with a trailer on Saturday preceded by a behind-the-scenes report from Vanity Fair, which included looks at the show's main characters and surprisingly bright and colorful post-nuclear world, and of course some words from Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard. The report also included a small and frankly baffling detail for fans to look forward to: Vault Boy, the real-world mascot of the series and in-game avatar of fictional megacorp Vault-Tec, is going to get his very own origin story.

A Grand Theft Auto 6 developer has expressed their disappointment over the game’s trailer leak, and subsequent early publication, on Monday.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. The next installment to the beloved Dragon Age franchise has been in development since 2015, but it’s been a tough game to pull off. Years later, we’re still waiting for the game to make its arrival. However, to help celebrate Dragon Age Day, the folks at BioWare have released a new trailer to help tease the game more. Fortunately, that teaser also came with a confirmation as to when we can expect the full game to drop. 

By Justin Clark on

By Phil Owen on

The folks at NetherRealm Studio showed up for the Brazilian CCXP expo, and they brought their first look at Quan-Chi. The sinister sorcerer is joining the Mortal Kombat 1 roster this year after being the co-big bad of the game’s story mode.

Marvel Crisis Protocol is years into development, with tons of expansions being released after the original core set was launched. In October, Atomic Mass Games re-released the original core set with new sculpts for minis, new command cards, new leadership abilities, and more. This is great for bringing new players into the game, but by changing what was included in the box (although it mimics the original) allows longtime players to get new content as well.

The Fortnite Big Bang event has taken place now and Eminem's appearance has brought about some major changes to everyone's favourite battle royale. This wasn't any normal concert!

In the year since ChatGPT launched to the public, there has been endless speculation about jobs that could be made obsolete by artificial intelligence, but at least one lucrative new skillset has emerged and shown some staying power: prompt engineering.

Over the past few years, there have been scattered hints Microsoft would like to bring their Xbox Game Pass service to rival consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch. Talk about this heated up in a major way recently, when Xbox CFO Tim Stuart said they want to get Game Pass on “every screen that will play games,” including PlayStation and Nintendo consoles. Juicy!

Baldur's Gate 3's new epilogue just dropped in the latest patch, finally giving the characters some much-needed closure. We'll go light on spoilers for individual character interactions since these will be largely personalised to how your playthrough went down. But regardless of your actions, almost every epilogue has one thing in common - a lot of teasing for a sequel.

Playing Terraria usually means accepting the rules of its pixel world — killing bad guys makes you entitled to swollen bags of treasure, some fish live in honey, and, before you catch them, all fish are cryptically invisible. The 12-year-old action-adventure sandbox game has mostly held on tight to these basic rules, but this week things changed. This week, its developer Re-Logic announced one major change in a forum thread: Terraria will soon have visible fish as part of its 1.4.5 update, to be released in 2024. 

NVIDIA's DLSS 3 Frame Generation & AMD Fluid Motion Frame technologies were never meant to work together but the folks at Quasarzone somehow managed to get both running in games and saw up to 3x boost in titles such as Cyberpunk 2077.

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The next major patch is about to hit Baldur’s Gate 3 on PC and PS5, and to prep for its arrival Larian Studios is suggesting that some players do something unusual: uninstall the game.

We’re nearing the end of the year folks: this is it!

Without any warning whatsoever, the two Remnant games suddenly appeared a few hours ago on the Game Pass library. Any subscribers, on both console and PC, can now access the games.

Dell & Alienware seem to be preparing a range of next-gen laptops for consumers which will be powered by Intel's latest Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs.

Circle March 22, 2024 on your calendars, folks, because we have a certified Barbenheimer gaming moment coming up, with Dragon's Dogma 2 and Princess Peach: Showtime! set to launch on the same day.

PlayStation Plus is pretty much necessary for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 platforms. There are a few benefits to getting this subscription service, and one of the biggest is access to online multiplayer. Meanwhile, free games are given out each month to reward players for subscribing. That at least gives players something new to enjoy monthly between those big releases that are on your radar. Today, thanks to the official PlayStation Blog, we have word as to what games are coming to the subscription service this December.

Good news, folks, Geralt is bound for your coffee table. So says Restoration Games, publishers of card and miniatures game Unmatched, who announced today that it's partnering with CD Projekt Red to bring a bunch of Witcher-themed stuff into the game over the course of two new sets. 

By Charles Pulliam-Moore, a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the live-action project announced in October is still in the works. If you don’t recall, CD Projekt Red revealed that they partnered with Anonymous Content to develop a live-action project based within the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Not much has been unveiled yet about what this project will entail; however, you won’t see it launched next year. That’s at least according to CD Projekt Red. 

Chucky, the maniacal killer doll of the Child’s Play series, is the latest Killer to join Dead by Daylight. Behaviour Interactive’s asymmetrical multiplayer horror game has featured the likes of Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Alien’s Xenomorph as playable Killers, but none of them presented the (vertical) challenge that Chucky did. The Good Guy turned slasher presented a unique challenge for Behaviour, and he’s received an equally unique implementation.

Looney Tunes fans were up in animated arms earlier this week, when Max looked to announce that the entire show was being removed from its platform. Now, though, the streamer has revealed it was a false alarm.

It's all too easy to forget that Nvidia's AI-accelerating uber-GPUs started off as little more than an experimental offshoot from graphics chips for gaming PCs. So, if we do end up as slaves to artificial overlords, we really will only have ourselves to blame.

After Bungie confirmed that Destiny 2‘s much-anticipated 2024 DLC, The Final Shape, was getting pushed back to early June, the game’s director has decided to add a bit more context. Since Bungie’s been going through a rough patch recently, it shouldn’t be surprising that Joe Blackburn would chime in, too.

The Fallout TV series is set to debut on Amazon Prime Video early next year, and today a new article in Vanity Fair revealed a ton of interesting new info about the series. It seems the Fallout show will stick relatively closely to the source material, with the usual factions you’d expect – Vault dwellers, the Brotherhood of Steel, the Ghouls, ect – but it isn’t a direct adaptation of any of the games.

Remnant II has had a solid run since launching earlier this year, attracting over 2 million players with its unique combination of looter-shooter action, Dark Souls vibes, and Unreal Engine 5 visuals. I had some reservations about Remnant II, criticizing its gunplay and underwhelming approach to loot in my review, but I’ll admit the game’s sprawling procedurally generated world offered plenty of innovation and promise. Remnant II had a lot of the right pieces, it just couldn’t quite fit them together.

Turns out what everyone wants from Baldur's Gate 3 DLC is a masquerade ball - and who can blame them?

The Switch eShop has been bombarded with late-comer indies, AAA releases, and first party Nintendo games for weeks.

Baldur's Gate 3 players have managed to work out precisely where on the map the RPG actually takes place.

Every Christmas, my family refuses to believe that all I really want is a gift card for the PlayStation store or Nintendo E-Shop. A present needs to be more than an envelope or a voucher code, they tell me. Now don't get me wrong, the presents they end up getting me are lovely, and I'm always grateful to receive them, but I don't think they realize that a wallet top-up so I can get a hold of the games I've missed throughout the year is quite honestly the best Christmas present I could ask for.

If you’re a PC gamer who uses a PS5 DualSense controller, then we have some good news courtesy of Valve.

A Starfield player has successfully accomplished one of the weirdest runs we've heard of yet - finishing the game by only whacking enemies with their gun.

Here it is, folks: Black Friday has arrived with full force. For PS5 owners, there's a standout deal on Amazon for the latest entry in the Final Fantasy, priced at just $35—a remarkable 50% discount. This presents an excellent opportunity to grab a fantastic game at an impressive price, especially considering it's less than a year old. If you haven't experienced this game yet, time is of the essence to seize this offer. Our initial review in June bestowed it with an amazing 9/10, a verdict we still stand by. This 16th installment in the franchise definitely deviates somewhat from the series' typical expectations, but it's unquestionably a game worth playing.

There’s a whole slew of big changes coming to Destiny 2 with the release of the Season of the Wish on November 28. Aside from getting rid of Legendary Shards, for example, Bungie is also about to finally push out the working version of the long-awaited Fireteam Finder.

This year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III hasn’t gone over great guns with fans, and so, a lot of them are already turning their attention to next year’s CoD experience. We know the next Call of Duty is being developed by the dependable folks at Treyarch, will almost certainly come under the Black Ops banner, and recent evidence has pointed to the game being set in around the First Gulf War. Well, new sources have emerged to “confirm” the Gulf War setting.

The house that PUBG: Battlegrounds built is branching out from battle royale. Krafton announced in its latest financial report that its latest game from PUBG Studios is «Project Black Budget,» an extraction shooter planned to release in the second half of 2024.

Over the past few years, Asmodee around the globe has been buying up smaller companies and putting all those titles under their grand banner. To many, Asmodee is the Disney of the board game world, and rightfully so. They own a ton of properties, win dozens of awards each year, and continue to push high quality games out to market. As we head into this holiday season, here are a few of the more recent games from Asmodee that we think you should consider for those board game loving folks on your list! Plus, see how you can enter to win an Asmodee Prize Pack as the bottom of this article!

Despite its gameplay debut going over as well as Snorlax clearing a high jump, WB Games’ and Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League moves on — shattered femurs notwithstanding. And you may be able to try Suicide Squad later this month during a closed alpha playtest you can sign up for now.

Gaming is an expensive hobby these days, and one that can be quite the time sink if you're also trying to hold down a full-time job, have a family and social life, keep up with the latest Netflix shows, and still eat and exercise to a healthy level. 

The Treachery in Beatdown City: Ultra RemixDLC builds upon the tactical street fighting of the original game, adding new moves, locations, enemies, and tunes. With the original game having such a precise, challenging turn-based hand-to-hand fighting system, how do you carefully build onto it without breaking the original release?

Here's a plain and simple truth: PC gaming isn't as cheap a hobby as it used to be. And here's another: times are tough out there, and money for many of us is tight. The holidays are approaching, the cost of living is on the rise, and generally most of us are watching our wallets and trying to save a bit of cash wherever we can. So how do you upgrade your gaming setup, or treat yourself to a little something PC gaming during these challenging times?

On the one hand, it’s kind of incredible that Noah Hawley and his collaborators have found five television seasons’ worth of ways to riff and elaborate on Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo. It’s a textbook open-and-shut kind of affair, a story about Midwestern criminals and what they would do for “a little bit of money.”

AMD's Threadripper PRO CPUs have done the impossible, shattering the 200K barrier in Cinebench with insane amounts of multi-threaded efficiency.