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Wednesday, February 21st, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 9:48a | Helldivers 2 patch fixes quickplay and crash bugs as Arrowhead work on AFK kick option and login rate limits  Last night I tried to host a Helldivers 2 co-op mission and the "ready up" button froze up. I spammed it in a panic while the randos in my voice channel fumed at the delay. Then I popped us out of the drop pods, attempted to quit the game in embarrassment, and the PC promptly crashed. Another blow for managed democracy! I'm hoping that the ready up problem is one of the "various UI issues [that] may appear when the game interacts with servers" which Arrowhead are addressing in a future Helldivers 2 patch. Before that, there's patch 1.000.10, which fixes PC quickplay match-making bugs, gets rid of a crash issue when displaying mission rewards, and tunes civilian extraction mission difficulty, amongst other things. It's live now, and the full changelog is below. |
| 10:48a | The first Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree trailer is hours away, as last February release date hopes fade  Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree is getting a trailer today and it'll last for three whole minutes, which is more than enough time for folks to tear all of its finer details apart for several hundred hours. I for one, hope the trailer includes a hint of gameplay and not just like, a long cinematic with some croaky fella explaining how there's been another "downfall" or similar. |
| 12:04p | Today's new games struggle because "evergreen" hits like Fortnite "pull players towards them at all times", says former BioWare GM  Before founding Inflexion in 2021, Aaryn Flynn worked at BioWare. He's got credits on some of the studio's best-loved games, from Baldur's Gate 2 through Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic to Dragon Age: Origins and the Mass Effect trilogy. He was BioWare's general manager for several years, but left the company in 2017 following the release of the less-regarded Mass Effect: Andromeda. New survival sim Nightingale is his first early access project, and it's certainly been a learning experience, with Flynn obliged to rethink many of the things he learned about gamedev during his BioWare days. Speaking to me ahead of Nightingale's launch, Flynn talked about the difficulty of making headway as a new developer in an industry where the most successful competing live service titles have effectively become part of the landscape - indeed, a force of "gravity". |
| 1:58p | New "What is Kemuri?" video reveals much more and yet nothing about the cool co-op action game  Kemuri was first revealed at The Game Awards last December, a co-op parkour action game where you fight yokai and look cool from the creative and art director for Ghostwire: Tokyo, Ikumi Nakamura. The team at Unseen have done a seven minute video where talk a little bit about the content and vibes of the game, basically by just listing cool stuff. Think of something cool, and it's probably in Kemuri somehow. The video both excited and frustrated me, as it seems like an exciting game, but I very much feel the video does not answer the question posed by its own title. |
| 2:12p | Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun stomps on Game Pass next week  Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Microsoft are bringing Maneater back to Game Pass. Yesterday they unveiled the next batches of Game Pass additions and two are returnees, with the delightful fighty platformer Indivisible accompanying brutal shark 'em up Maneater. What's more important is that it's adding the game with the cutest little Nurglings, grimdark retro-styled FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. The rhetoric of 'purging xenos and heretics' surely doesn't apply to these darling babies. Read on for all the games coming to (and going from) Game Pass over the next few weeks. |
| 3:00p | RPS Game Club Asks: what do you think of Cobalt Core?  As promised last month, a new thing we're doing for RPS Game Club this year is asking you, our dear readers, what you think of each month's game pick in dedicated posts like this. Not just to foster some good old fashioned discussion among your good selves in the comments, but also as a way for those who aren't able to join us for the end-of-month liveblog session to still take part in what everyone has to say about it. We'll also try and stuff as many of your thoughts and observations into the liveblog discussion proper, too, to try and make it feel as communal as possible (and not just us waffling on about it for a full hour). So, folks, tell us what you think about the excellent Cobalt Core below. What you like, dislike, your favourite moments (or your most hated moments)... Anything goes. |
| 3:16p | Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree will release in June 2024  Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree will release on 21st June 2024, From Software and Bandai Namco have announced alongside the Elden Ring DLC expansion's first proper reveal trailer, which you can watch below. It's going to be a fine old summer for returning Tarnished and enjoyers of open world RPGs at large. |
| 3:59p | Last Epoch review: a vibrant time-travelling ARPG that makes percentage point stat increases fun 
Last Epoch is, as has been observed many times, a kind of middle-ground ARPG. You hold down a button to evaporate hordes of enemies from a top down isometric perspective, but, in a step further than Diablo 4, it has more in-depth, any-time crafting for entry level percentage perverts to eke out incremental slivers of health regen vs. damage. At the same time, it's less complex than Path Of Exile, which is where advanced percentage perverts go when they die. Last Epoch has been in early access for a while now, so there's a decent chance that you already know what you think of it now it's in 1.0. If you haven't yet dipped your toe in, then I can tell you it's very decent. It makes building an extremely overpowered mega-wizard very easy, and I liked it better than Diablo IV, I think. |
| 4:01p | Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree trailer confirms that Miquella is the star  Rise, Tarnished! Actually stay sitting down, because it's time to watch and think about the first trailer for Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree, which confirms that the Elden Ring DLC expansion will focus on Miquella, a rather tragic demigod character from the main game. Find the full video again below, together with my thoughts on just what the heck it all means. |
| 5:41p | Monster Hunter Stories, series’ chirpy turn-based spin on Pokémon, gets its first PC release in a new remaster  The original Monster Hunter Stories, the turn-based take on the long-running hack-and-craft series, will finally see a release on PC this summer in the form of an upcoming remaster. |
| 5:48p | I don't hate generative AI, I just hate that it's "The Future"  I've been looking back over my news pieces about artificial intelligence tools, generative image software and/or large language models and reflecting that what I really distrust about "AI" is the fact that AI is "the future". Saying that X thing is the future is de rigueur for technology marketing. It's something you hear repeatedly from videogames companies in particular, with their sequels and console generations and other chronological fixtures that form an endless staircase towards The New. |
| 6:17p | Elden Ring DLC will have a fight that’s just as hard as Malenia - and a poison swamp too  If you enjoyed the challenge of being sliced into ribbons by infamously difficult boss Malenia in Elden Ring, good news: upcoming expansion Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree will have an encounter that’s just as hard, according to Souls mastermind Hidetaka Miyazaki. |
| 6:50p | Bloodborne on PC somehow looks even less likely as director suggests we might be waiting for PS6 first  Find room to squeeze one more nail into the coffin scrawled with “Hopes for Bloodborne on PC”, as the head of developers FromSoftware has suggested that a Bloodborne remake might need to wait on another generation of console hardware. |
| 7:18p | Prison Architect 2 release date delay sees its development sentence extended by over a month  The 3D sequel to Prison Architect has failed to impress the parole board it seems, as it’ll need to spend a little more time behind bars. After being revealed with a March 26th release date earlier this year, developers Double Eleven and publishers Paradox Interactive have announced that Prison Architect 2 will now launch in early May after being delayed by over a month. |
| 8:10p | What's better: characters making 'bdbdbdbdbdi' noises while talking in text or cosmetics unlocked by challenges? 
Last time, during our special Valentine's Day experiment, you decided that Doomguy's pet rabbit, Daisy is better than health pick-ups looking like cartoon hearts. This one was decided by a Brexit-narrow margin, which shows me two things: 1) every vote counts; 2) love truly grows stronger once someone is gone (RIP Daisy). This week, I need you to decide between cheery chat and couturial challenges. What's better: characters making 'bdbdbdbdbdi' noises while talking in text or cosmetics unlocked by challenges? |
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