Play it on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC Current goal: Get some gaming spooks in for the season
This year, Halloween fell on a Thursday, and I was so busy with work and other things that I didn’t manage to make much time for spooky gaming in the days leading up to it. I still have a hankering for some interactive scares, however, so this weekend, I hope to play one of the landmark games in the history of survival horror, officially translated into English and released in the States for the first time: Clock Tower. The new version, Clock Tower: Rewind, comes to us courtesy of WayForward and represents my first real chance to play the 1995 SNES horror classic.
I actually don’t know much about the original Clock Tower, and I’ve kept it that way on purpose, as I want to go in knowing as little as possible and figure it out for myself. It’s scarier that way. But in short, it’s a 2D, survival horror point-and-click game that tells the story of Jennifer, a teenage orphan who’s adopted by a family with a big, spooky manor, and finds herself stalked by a horrifying entity known as Scissorman. WayForward’s release lets you play an enhanced version of the game “which features numerous gameplay additions and quality-of-life refinements,” and I may check that out as well, but for starters, I’ll be playing in Original mode, and experiencing the game just like it was when it scared the socks off of so many Japanese players way back in 1995. Sure, it may be November now, but I’m gonna linger in late October for just a little bit longer if it’s all the same to you. — Carolyn Petit
Kenneth Shepard, Moises Taveras, Carolyn Petit, Ethan Gach, and John Walker
When I play a smaller game that really has an effect on me, I’m usually cool with not getting more of it. The advantage of artful, smaller-scope projects is that they can concisely say what they need to say without being beholden to all the forever-game nonsense that infects the AAA space. However, I’ll make an exception for Black Tabby Games’ horror visual novel Slay the Princess, one of the best games from 2023. The Pristine Cut expansion incorporates its new material smoothly with that of the original release, giving you more of what makes it so great and serving as a welcome reminder that this is an incredible game.
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For the uninitiated, Slay the Princess is, on its face, about killing a monarch. Your character wakes up in a strange forest, told by a narrator that he’s meant to find a cabin where a princess awaits, locked in its basement. Allegedly, she will destroy the world if she’s allowed to escape, but do you just take the narrator’s word for it? Whether you do or not will see the story go down one of several different paths. It could end in the princess’ demise, she could retaliate and kill you, or a number of other things could happen, but one way or another, someone will leave the cabin forever changed…until the entire scenario starts over from the very beginning.
Slay the Princess’ time loop starts the same way each time, but it never ends like it did before. Each time you descend the stairs of the cabin, you’ll find that what was once an unassuming princess has turned into one of several different unspeakable horrors. Some you’ll slay, others will slay you. Each route preys on different fears and disgusts, as the princess turns into monsters, animals, ghouls, and other terrifying creatures, all punctuated by Black Tabby’s stellar, evocative writing and the game’s excellent voice cast. The Pristine Cut mostly just offers more of all that good stuff, and the new routes it introduces are worth seeing. If you’ve never played Slay the Princess before, these new horrors are woven into the game for you to stumble upon, flowing naturally in its time-loop structure. Slay the Princess is the kind of game that can get swaths of new story without stepping on the toes of its core premise, so even after I’d had my previous experience with it, I was more than happy to dive into what new horrors Black Tabby had concocted.
Screenshot: Black Tabby Games / Kotaku
One of the new routes The Pristine Cut introduces to the game utilizes its time-loop structure to show the unspeakable horror that is monotony in your love life, and it reminded me that Slay the Princess’ horror comes not just from the terrifying forms the princess takes, but from how its situations play into human fears and phobias about our relationships with others. I spent a lot of time in 2023 singing Slay the Princess’ praises but after a year away, I wondered if I might have cooled on Black Tabby’s brand of romantic, psychological horror. It turns out coming back only solidified for me that this is an incredibly special game. If you’ve never played Slay the Princess, there’s never been a better time to walk down the stairs of the cabin.
The Crimson Diamond is AVAILABLE NOW!! (Launch trailer)
Play it on: Steam Current goal: Solve an old-fashioned mystery
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how I was captivated by Unavowed, a point-and-click adventure from the folks at Wadjet Eye. Well, I’ve finished that one (it was great) just in time for a brand-new entry in the genre to come along. And while Wadjet Eye’s output is most reminiscent of ‘90s adventure games that offered full voice acting and elegant drag-and-drop interfaces, this new game, The Crimson Diamondfrom designer Julia Minamata, is influenced by an earlier era of adventures, ones that ran in EGA and had you typing in what you wanted your character to do. I can’t wait to explore its mysteries.
The Crimson Diamond is perhaps most reminiscent of Sierra adventures, especially the Clara Bow games which saw their plucky heroine tossed into murder mysteries during the roaring ‘20s. Itcasts you as Nancy Maple, a young woman investigating the discovery of an unusually large and valuable diamond in a town in northern Ontario, Canada. It’s clear from the trailer that her investigations will find her encountering people with motives of their own, some of them sinister, and land her in no small amount of peril. Sign me up!
People often talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to purely graphical interfaces as a net good, as if text parsers were just a crutch, a relic from the genre’s early days that we no longer needed, but I’ve always thought of them as two fundamentally different approaches, each with their own strengths. I think there are ways in which the presence of a text parser can encourage creative thinking that a purely graphics-based interface doesn’t always allow for, and in addition to digging into the plot of The Crimson Diamond, I’m eager to see how it uses this design element that so rarely gets employed in modern games. All in all, it sounds like a perfect fit for a cozy weekend. —Carolyn Petit
Austin Williams, Carolyn Petit, Moises Taveras, Kenneth Shepard, and Ethan Gach
Officially, Valve—the company behind Steam, Half-Life, and more—has yet to announce its next big game. However, thousands of people are currently playing and posting about Deadlock, Valve’s next big game, literally right now. So uh, what’s going on?
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Thanks to leakers and dataminers, we’ve known about a Valve-developed multiplayer game for a few years now. Before it was Deadlock, it was likely codenamed Neon Prime. At one point since it reportedly started development in 2018, the MOBA/character shooter hybrid was possibly going to be set in the Half-Life/Portal universe, but that has seemingly changed based on gameplay leaks that occurred in May. Now, it seems a rumored playtest for Deadlock is currently underway, with the game developing a community of players on Reddit.
As spotted by IGN, over on SteamDB—a third-party website that tracks various stats about Steam games and players—Deadlock’s player count has been steadily increasing over the last few months. In the last few days, the game cracked 18,000 concurrent players. That means it’s one of the top 65 most played games on Steam, and Valve has yet to even tweet about it or release a trailer.
IGN reports that Deadlock’s current early access period is using an invite system, letting players on Steam grant access to other players. It’s understood that Valve is allowing players with early access to talk about the game online with other players, but videos and screenshots still seem to be under a strict NDA. Many are posting about the game and how much they like it on the Deadlockthegame subreddit.
That means we are in a really weird and somewhat unprecedented situation. A new Valve video game is gaining thousands of players on Steam, it’s got an active subreddit, and we’ve even seen videos of the game in action. Deadlock is real. It’s a thing. It’s Valve’s next game. Yet, officially, Valve has yet to announce it or even tease it.
Many players assume that a full-on reveal for Deadlock and an open-access beta are coming sooner rather than later, with many suggesting September. But for now, we have to wait and see when Valve will decide to announce a game that thousands of people are playing and which already has guides and tier rankings. Strange times. Meanwhile, Valve might be working on Half-Life 3based on some recent leaks. Strange times indeed, folks.
Garry’s Mod, a popular 2006 sandbox game that emerged from the modding scene around Valve’s Source software, has recently been issued takedown notices by Nintendo. As a result, Facepunch Studios, the developers of Garry’s Mod, are in the process of removing about 20 years’ worth of Nintendo-related content from the game.
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In an update to Garry’s Mod’s Steam page, the developers stated, “Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down. This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.”
The update continues, “Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them. They don’t want you playing with that stuff in Garry’s Mod – that’s their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can.”
Despite Nintendo’s litigious nature, not to mention its fierce protectiveness over its brand image and that of its mascots, the notice from Nintendo comes as a bit of a shock. As the update goes on to note, Nintendo content has been hosted on Garry’s Mod for close to 20 years. Models of countless Nintendo mascots like Mario have been ported over to the Source engine for the enjoyment of anyone playing Garry’s Mod since the very beginning. It’s strange for Nintendo to suddenly come out of the blue and enforce a takedown of this much content, especially since the flexibility of the Source engine in Garry’s Mod was a large part of the appeal behind the game, which was popularized in the early 2010s by a slew of gaming Youtube personalities playing multiplayer social-deduction games in Garry’s Mod such as Prop Hunt and Trouble In Terrorist Town. Of course, you could also argue that Facepunch was, at times, a little too lenient about what they allowed on Garry’s Mod, making sense of Nintendo’s decision to take action after all this time.
Nintendo-themed add-ons seem to have begun getting taken down a few months ago, though Facepunch didn’t publicly divulge that the company had issued the takedowns until earlier today. The process has been “ongoing” since then, and the developers are still working to remove all of it, which is an understandably Herculean task.
It’s so much, in fact, that at the very end of the update, Facepunch jokes that, “If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot.”
Well, this is weird. Pinups of Lara Croft appear to have gone missing inTomb Raider I-III Remastered following a patch earlier this month to fix a bunch of bugs. Whether intentional or not, some fans are now calling it out as heavy-handed censorship of retro classics.
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Publisher Aspyr released the game’s second update on April 11 and mentioned a litany of changes, but nothing about up-scaled posters of Lara Croft being removed from the locker room in the Sleeping with the Fishes level for Tomb Raider III: The Lost Artefact. Though they still appear when playing with the original graphics settings on, where they look like pixelated postcards, the walls they’re on are now blank when players switch to the remastered graphics settings.
Their removal was first noticed on the Tomb Raider subreddit, before the discovery began trickling out to other corners of the internet last week. “I thought it was bullshit, but nope, Crystal Dynamics played the OG fans. They censored out the pictures in the update,” tweeted one person. “Updates should never be used to retroactively censor games, it’s a form of theft. Any company that engages in this bait & switch behavior should go bankrupt,” tweeted another. To be clear, the original versions of the posters are still available in the games when played in the 1990s mode.
A warning at the start of the remastered collection informs players that Crystal Dynamics, the studio behind the original games, chose to retain offensive stereotypes and imagery to “acknowledge its harmful impact” rather than erase those parts of the series’ legacy. Neither Crystal Dynamics nor Aspyr seemed to have a problem with the pinups previously. In fact, they were promoted as one of “ten remastered details you might have missed” a week after the collection’s launch.
Shortly after the latest patch removed the posters, NexusMods user Dario108 uploaded a mod to restore them in the PC version of the game. Timur Gagiev, the maker of popular open-source port OpenLara, who ended up working for Aspyr on the remasters, retweeted Dario’s link to the mod without saying anything further. Some took this as a sign that the change was intentional despite some potential disagreement behind the scenes.
Aspyr and Gagiev did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Earlier today, players noticed that Spec Ops: The Linewas no longer available to purchase on Steam, leading many to fear that the acclaimed third-person shooter had been quietly delisted without warning. Sadly, 2K has since confirmed that is the case, and the publisher has also explained why it pulled the landmark shooter.
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Developed by Yager and released back in 2012, Spec Ops: The Linewas a reboot of the lesser-known Spec Ops franchise. Like those past games, The Line was a third-person military shooter. However, the 2012 reboot garnered critical acclaim at launch thanks to its narrative which depicted a solider in the deserts of Dubai slowly losing his grip on reality, offering a meta-critical take on the way some military shooters glorify the horrors of war. While it didn’t sell as many copies as 2K would have liked, the game has gone on to become a cult favorite among shooter fans. And now, it’s no longer on Steam.
On January 29, folks began to notice that Spec Ops: The Line had been removed from Steam and other storefronts, like Fanatical. People wondered if 2K had delisted the game, possibly due to expiring licensing rights on some music featured in it. And that seems to be the case, according to a 2K spokesperson.
“Spec Ops: The Line will no longer be available on online storefronts, as several partnership licenses related to the game are expiring,” explained 2K in a statement sent over to Kotaku. No specific licenses were named, but among the noteworthy music tracks included in the game are Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Rooster” by Alice in Chains.
The publisher assured players that owners of the game will still be able to download and replay Spec Ops: The Line “uninterrupted” but it will no longer be easy to buy a digital copy moving forward. Currently, the game is still for sale on GoG, but the above statement seems to indicate that will change soon.
“2K would like to thank our community of players who have supported the game, and we look forward to bringing you more offerings from our label throughout this year and beyond,” said 2K in its statement.
While there had been talks of a sequel for years, it seems 2K isn’t even willing to tease that and instead is just letting Spec Ops: The Line fade away like a mirage in the desert. It’s just one more game—on an ever-growing list—that will be harder to play as the years go by.
According to new data, it appears that Valve likely made about $1 billion from digitalCounter-Strike 2 (previously Global Offensive) cases and keys in 2023. Yes, that’s billion with a “B.”
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In Valve’s immensely popular free-to-play tactical FPS Counter-Strike 2, players can get cases by playing and earning them through level drops, or purchase cases from Steam’s community market. These cases come in different variants and can contain extremely rare and valuable cosmetic items like weapon skins. But once you have a case, you don’t just open it. You also need a key, which must be purchased either directly from Steam or from other players on the community market. And because CS2 is very popular, this lootbox system is making Valve a lot of money.
As spotted by Dexerto, third-party website CS2 Case Tracker recently released its 2023 year in review for cases. And the biggest stat is the estimated $980,000,000 that Valve earned from players buying keys to open cases. Because keys are just digital items that unlock cases, it’s not like it costs Valve all that much to make them or maintain them so the company likely absorbed almost all of that staggering figure as profit.
But wait, that massive $980 million stat is only how much money Valve likely made from the sale of keys. It doesn’t factor in the 15% cut they get from every case sold on the community market. When you factor that in, it becomes very likely that Valve made well over $1 billion on cases and keys in 2023 alone.
That probably is one of the reasons Valve isn’t in a rush to make new video games. They don’t really need to. Instead, they can sit back and let Steam and Counter-Strike fund all their virtual reality experiments and other hardware projects. Honestly, it’s a miracle we ever got Half-Life: Alyx.
One last stat for the road: According to CS2 Case Tracker’s data the most popular day to open cases was Wednesday. Why? I don’t know. But there you go. You can now likely win a bar bet with this weird bit of trivia.
Indie multiplayer superhit Among Usis bringing together a whole host of other popular indie games—including Undertale, Untitled Goose Game, and Celeste—into one giant cosmetic bundle available to buy in-game until February 2024.
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Among Us, a 2D cartoonish multiplayer-focused game where players have to figure out who can be trusted and who is a murderous imposter, got huge in 2020 thanks to Twitch. However, the game—developed by small studio Innersloth—actually launched in 2018 to little fanfare. Once Among Us exploded online, the devs dealt with burnout and pressure as they updated and ported it to more platforms. Now, it’s playable basically everywhere and has a large audience that eats up each update—including its latest, which turns it into a greatest-hits collection of indie gems.
On November 28, developer Innersloth announced the “Indie Cosmicube” a new cosmetic pack for Among Us that contains outfits inspired by seven different indie games: Untitled Goose Game, Undertale, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Celeste, Castle Crashers, Alien Hominid, and A Hat in Time. Players will need 7,000 beans—a freely earned in-game currency—to get this pack of cosmetics. Once purchased, they must equip it and play matches to unlock all the outfits and items inside the pack.
“Our team was so excited to bring the stylings of [these games] to life in Among Us,” Innersloth said. “They’re indie. We’re indie. It’s like that Spider-Man meme, but instead of pointing, we’re crying because we love each others’ work so much.”
In total, this new cosmetic pack contains 25 hats, 18 skins, 12 nameplates, 9 visors, and 6 pets. If you do the math, assuming you include the option of not wearing some things, this one cosmetic pack offers up to 8,091,720 possible visual combinations.
Among Us’ new set of cosmetics won’t be around forever, though. Players only have until February 2024 to earn 7,000 beans and purchase the pack before it leaves the in-game store.
A new update for Valve’s first game, 1998’s beloved first-person shooter Half-Life, has fixed an old, small, and annoying animation glitch found in one of the game’s most memorable levels. And fans, myself included, are very excited about it.
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The original Half-Life has plenty of memorable moments throughout its campaign. But one of the most famous has to be chapter six, “Blast Pit.” In this level, players are introduced to a big alien tentacle in a still-impressive set piece in which it crashes through a window in a missile silo and drags away a helpless researcher. However, for a very long time now, an animation glitch has made this moment look wonky and broken.
VideoGameCinema / Valve
Last week, Valve released a large 25th-anniversary patch for Half-Life that added in old cut content and new maps, fixed numerous glitches, and even made the game verified on Steam Deck. It was a great patch! However, even after that big update, the Blast Pit animation bug remained. Even after two smaller patches were put out by Valve to fix some minor issues created by the 25th-anniversary update, the Blast Pit bug was still in the game. It taunted players, myself included, who went back to replay the game for the 100th time. A developer who worked on Half-Life even recently commented on the broken animation and joked that it needed to be fixed. And now it finally has after many, many years.
On November 22, Valve released another small patch for Half-Life designed mostly to fix a few more problems the big update introduced. And in the patch notes, I spotted a note that caught my attention:
Fixed timing for the sequence where a tentacle grabs a scientist in Blast Pit.
Could it be? Had Valve finally fixed this tiny error that had lingered for decades at this point? I quickly hopped into Half-Life, loaded up Blast Pit, and watched that helpless scientist get grabbed and pulled away. But this time, he was actually connected to the tentacle and not floating multiple feet in front of it. I might have whispered, “Wow.”
Over on the Half-Life subreddit, players are also celebrating the fixed animation. “Those crazy bastards did it,” one user replied. “That little bug annoyed me so much for some reason, so I unironically consider Half-Life a better game now that it’s finally fixed lol,” posted someone else.
While I’m happy Half-Life is getting so much love from Valve right now in the form of all these updates and fixes, I’m also curious as to why. Sure, it’s the game’s 25th anniversary, so it makes sense to update it.
But things like this make it feel as if a group of devs, or maybe even just one Half-Life superfan within Valve, are on a mission right now, just digging into the game and fixing long-standing bugs. And Valve seems to be okay with it. And you know what, I’m okay with it, too! I salute whoever is responsible for improving Half-Life all these years later.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is dense, but really rewarding once you’ve gotten the hang of all its systems which include tk. For some, the RPG’s combat has been particularly challenging, because it’s so embroiled in the game’s deep systems.
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I’m about 40 hours in, and I’m still learning all the little nuances that can make a huge difference in a combat arena. If you’re struggling with fighting goblins, ghouls, and other beasties in Faerûn, here are a few general tips for getting out of a fight alive.
Distribute your healing items
When you’re looting or buying items in Baldur’s Gate 3, you’re probably not swapping through each character to do it. I know I don’t, at least. Most of the time, I let my main avatar character hoard everything until he becomes encumbered under the weight of it all. But inventory management is a huge part of successful combat encounters. You can’t just buy a bunch of healing potions and head out into danger. You need to manually give each of your party members some of your recovery items so they can be self-sustaining.
This applies to both health potions and Scrolls of Revivify, items necessary to revive your party members should they die in battle. No, I don’t mean fall in battle, I mean die in battle. This happens when a party member has been downed by an enemy attack and has either laid on the ground for too many turns without using the Help command to get them back into the fight, or is struck before you can get to them. Sometimes, your main character might be the one dead (though you can loot Scrolls off their corpses), or they might not be able to get to a fallen ally. So having a wide spread of your healing items is just good practice.
Shove your enemies off high places
As we said in our general tips guide, shoving enemies off high ground is one of the best ways to cut a fight short. Why waste time and turns whittling down an enemy’s health when you can simply push them off the side of a cliff? If you can position characters near high-ground enemies like archers or spell-casters, you can use Shove as a bonus action to send them tumbling down into a chasm. But depending on a character’s class, you can also learn abilities that help you do this. After leveling up my Warlock character, my Eldritch Blast ability now has a force effect that pushes enemies a great distance when I fire it at them. This has helped me take out enemies at a distance who were bold enough to perch themselves on high ground, unaware that I would send them falling to their deaths. Characters with high-strength builds like Lae’zel and Karlach are optimal, but spellcasters at least have some chance to pull off a good Shove. Always look for opportunities to knock someone down a peg. Or a ledge.
Image: Larian Studios / Kotaku
You might as well Jump
Movement is a key part of Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat. Each character has a specific distance they can move each turn, but there are several ways to expand or alter how they move. Jumping is one of the best ways to get some added value out of your movement , and it doesn’t take any of your actions, as it’s technically just an extension of walking. This helps you not only move over obstacles, hazards like fire or other traps, but can also give you some high ground if your character can reach them with a Jump alone.
Area-of-effect abilities are invaluable
No matter how big or small a combat arena is, the best teams can create and control space. Area-of-effect spells and skills are crucial in gaining and maintaining the upper hand in a fight. There are a few notable ways to make large areas dangerous to your enemies. Some of this can be through one-off abilities like the spell Cloud of Daggers, which creates a concentrated whirlwind of sharp objects for anyone to walk through and take significant damage. Placing this at a choke point can ensure your opponents inevitably walk through them and lose a chunk of health. I’ve taught both my character and Gale this spell and we’ve been able to control large parts of a field with it. Sometimes I’ll even push an enemy back into it with a well-placed Shove or Eldritch Blast, and then they have to walk through it again to reach us. Usually that’s more than enough to take them out.
If you want to control space without it being in a static area of effect on the field, abilities like Spirit Guardians will encircle its caster in a damaging aura that follows them as they move around the field. Close-combat enemies will inevitably have to get in close and take damage just to reach you. I had a fight against an army of rats in a small space, and casting Spirit Guardians meant that as they funneled toward my party they all immediately died as their 1 HP was lost.
Pay attention to how elements interact
Baldur’s Gate 3 has a lot of abilities that work in tandem with the elements. Some crowd control abilities like Grease and Web can trap or slow down enemies in a wide radius, then you can follow up with a fire-based attack or spell that will ignite the entire area, burning all the enemies within it. There are a ton of interactions like this that can help you use a foe’s attack to your advantage. If your whole team’s been covered in Grease, move everyone out of the affected area but position yourself where your enemies will have to walk through to get to you, you can ignite it and turn what was once an obstacle into an asset.
Screenshot: Larian Studios / Kotaku
Sneak in if you have to
Not every character is built to run into a fight head-on. But luckily, Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you tools to sneak in should you feel so inclined. This can be both helpful to get a better position and ambush your foes, or, in some cases, it can help you avoid combat entirely.
Every character has the Hide ability that, if you pass stealth checks, can help you navigate around a group of enemies. But also, using abilities like Invisible, Misty Step, or Dimension Door can help you get around enemies without detection.
Ungroup party members for better setups
Some of those maneuvers are easier to pull off if you split your party up. Ungrouping your team will let you move individual characters without the rest of the party following. For example, say you ungroup your spellcaster who knows Invisible, so they’re able to freely move around a battlefield unseen, reach high ground, and cast an AOE spell on the enemy team before any of them are the wiser.
This also works to ensure your team isn’t all clustered together when your opponents start to swarm you. Depending on the fight, you can use this to file in characters on different sides of a battle, letting you spread out, cover more ground, and keep your team from getting wiped out in one well-placed explosion.
It’s fine to run away sometimes
Say you’re surrounded by an enemy team and things are looking real rough. You know if you move even an inch you’ll be struck by an Attack of Opportunity that activates by walking away from an enemy in close proximity. Slap that Disengage action and you can retreat without worry. Enemies will still come after you, but this will let you move for at least a little bit without worrying about getting whacked in the back of the head with an enemy mace.
Destroy the environment (in an eco-friendly way)
The longer Baldur’s Gate 3 is out, the more we’re learning about how much abilities can interact with the environment. There are a lot of destructible objects, such as bridges, that you can use to your advantage. See a bunch of enemies on a bridge headed your way? Check if it has an HP bar you can cast a ranged attack on that will blow it up and send your foes falling down into the hole below. Or preemptively destroy it before your enemies can even get on it to reach you.
Hirelings let you craft your party
Sometimes you just don’t have the tools and abilities you need to pull off a strategic play. Perhaps you spec’d Gale with too many support abilities and now he’s not built to do as much damage as you like, or maybe you made Shadowheart too damage-heavy to help you create a good crowd-control setup. Respecing your characters is an option, but you can also just get a Hireling. These are essentially additional, preset party members who occupy certain classes/races, but are customizable beyond that. This can both replace lost or missed party members or just give you a greater sense of control over the character builds you’re working with. They cost 100 gold to hire and you’ll have to wait until you unlock Withers, who joins your camp after you explore the Dank Crypt in the Ravaged Beach at the beginning of the game, to hire them.
Screenshot: Larian Studios
Don’t be too precious about resources
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a pretty resource-intense game. On top of the items you’ll need to replenish, you also have Spell Slots that give you a limited amount of spell uses before you have to do a Long Rest. You can run out of these resources in just one fight, which means you need to be really deliberate with their use. However, being strategic doesn’t mean you have to hoard things. Generally, you’ll come across enough supplies to do Long Rests to heal up and get your Spell Slots back naturally through looting. If you haven’t, buying food from merchants is a quick, often cheap way to get those supply numbers up. But also, you bought healing potions for a reason. You have Spell Slots so you can use them. It may take some time for you to get comfortable using a consumable resource, but I’m telling you now, the game is a lot more generous with these things than it might appear at first.
Throw your junk items at enemies
Part of looting is eventually realizing that you have a lot of junk in your inventory. While there might be some temptation to drop stuff you don’t actually need, keep in mind that you can use Throw in fights to just fling the garbage you’ve picked up at an enemy to do damage. High-strength characters like Lae’zel and Karlach will get the most value out of this, as they can throw heavier things farther, so if you’re looking for someone to hold onto all the trash you’ve found on your journey, prioritize them. But spread it around, too. You wouldn’t want anyone to become encumbered and lose movement speed.
Team Fortress 2 has now been with us for over 15 years, and for some reason, developer Valve just decided to jack the maximum number of players who can join a server at once up to 100. Valve doesn’t actually recommend you play with that many people, and warns that the game doesn’t properly support that many players, but that hasn’t stopped the community from creating chaotic 100-player TF2 servers.
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Valve’s online class-based FPS,Team Fortress 2, isn’t a spring chicken by any definition, having first been released back in 2007 for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. And while the console versions have been long since abandoned, the PC version on Steam has continued to receive hundreds of tiny, medium-sized, and significantly large updates, all of which have been free. The latest update to the classic shooter has provided gamers with an option to set the world on fire and invite 99 other TF2 players into a single server.
On July 25, Valve released an update for Team Fortress 2. The patch notes reveal a pretty lengthy list of tweaks and changes, but the one change that caught the attention of many was the quiet announcement that the game’s maximum player count had increased from 32 to 100.
Valve: Don’t make 100-player servers, Gamers: LOL
Also in the patch notes? A warning from Valve letting players know that this new max player count is totally “unsupported” and “not recommended.” In other words, Valve isn’t going to spend time fixing bugs introduced by playing with 99 other folks. If shit breaks, that’s just how it goes. You were warned, after all.
Freddy210hill / Valve
As you can probably guess, even with that warning, many players have already fired up servers with the new max player count, and the chaos that followed was incredible. Watching people play on 100-player servers feels like looking into an alternate dimension in which Valve teamed up with Sega to put out a Total War: Team Fortress 2 spin-off.
Unsurprisingly, playing Team Fortress 2 with this many players causes some issues. Players are reporting lots of lag, poor framerates, broken models, collision problems, and even some instances when the game just crashes completely. That’s not surprising considering this is a 16-year-old game that was never designed to handle 75 people, let alone 100.
But also, I love this so much. Good for you TF2! There is something very impressive about 100 people in a single TF2 match. It’s like an old car making a long road trip after years without a tune-up. It might stall a few times, overheat, or even lock up, but it gets the job done. Brings a tear to your eye, really. It’s also a perfect time to let people create high-player-count servers, as Team Fortress 2 is setting player count records on Steam following the last big update.
Remember that awful looking The Last of Us clone, The Last Hope, that got released earlier this month? Well, it turns out the game is much worse than the trailer first suggested. Apparently, the whole game is only about 20 minutes long, takes place in one street, and is a broken mess.
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Let’s cast our minds back to last week. That’s when a horrible-looking Nintendo Switch The Last of Us clone went viral online. A trailer for the game looked like a blatant copy of Naughty Dog’s award-winning franchise, complete with its own Ellie-like companion. It was even called The Last Hope. Yeah, the people who made it weren’t being subtle about where they were pulling their “inspiration” from. Most would agree, it looked bad, but now thanks to Digital Foundry, it’s clear this is much worse than we thought. In fact, it might be the worst game of 2023.
In a new upload on Thursday, the video game tech analysts at Digital Foundry ripped The Last Hope apart in a video that is about as long as the actual game.
Digital Foundry / West Connection Limited / VG Games
Where to even begin? For starters—this might be the most shocking—the entire game seems to take place mainly on one U-shaped street in a generic city. Thanks to the game’s reliance on Unity store props, it’s a rather confusing place. American flags can be seen next to European power outlets. Other assets also don’t seem to work together, with some being far too detailed compared to other, lower-res objects scattered about.
Playing The Last Hope is a frustrating, bad experience
When you actually start to play The Last Hope, you’ll also notice that the framerate is horrendous, often dipping well below 30. This makes it hard to play, as the game’s performance goes up and down constantly. What also makes it hard to play is that the game seems to have barely been playtested. As shown in the Digital Foundry video, it gives the player very limited resources.
For example, your stamina meter doesn’t recharge over time, limiting how many times you can swing your baseball bat. And there are only three MREs, that partially refill your stamina, in the entire game. Bullets are also rare, meaning that if you miss too many shots you could end up in an unwinnable situation.
At one part, players have to use a lockpick to unlock a police car, and while doing this you can be killed by zombies. The problem is the game doesn’t tell you this is happening. So you do your lockpicking, finish, and exit to a screen that simply states “You Dead.” This means that you’ll need to clear out the area of zombies before starting the lockpicking mini-game. But based on Digital Foundry’s math, you can only kill around 65 zombies with the resources offered in-game. So don’t miss a single shot, don’t sprint (as that wastes stamina), and also hope the game doesn’t randomly crash during all of this, erasing your progress in the process.
Oh and keep in mind that it’s only about 15 minutes long, assuming you manage your limited resources correctly and don’t get stuck trying to open a door that can only be opened with the “E” key. (Note: The Switch doesn’t have an E key.)
The Switch’s digital store is filled with this crap
And it’s easy to laugh at it, which I did and continue to do. But it’s sadly not an oddity on the Switch’s eShop, which in recent years has become filled with shovelware garbage that, some might say, is getting very close to scam territory. Not that I’m calling The Last Hope—a game that can be completed in 15 minutes and looks to be directly ripping off The Last of Us using poorly cobbled together Unity assets—a scam. Just, you know, some people might be saying that.
I think some folks just assume these shovelware games are bad and don’t think much of it. But I think Nintendo should try to bring back some quality control to its store.
For one, so many indie devs are working really hard on games that end up getting lost in a massive sea of content. Pruning some of the worst, most broken shovelware from the store might help these devs find more success. The Switch platform also has a lot of younger players and they or their parents might not know better and waste some money on something awful, broken, and terrible. Something like The Last Hope.
Online vehicular shooter War Thunder made some changes to the way its economy works recently, and players of the game are so upset that not only have they review-bombed the game to hell and back, but the developers have been forced to take extremely apologetic actions in response.
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Basically, a game that has over the years become increasingly pay-to-win—as well as becoming a dumping ground for state secrets—recently implemented economy changes that made it even harder to get anything out of the game—especially progression—unless you were regularly spending actual money.
Players, fed up with the exploitation, did one of the few things available to them: they took to Steam to leave negative feedback, posting thousands of messages protesting the changes and attacking developers Gaijin. At time of publishing the game’s Steam review section looked like this:
The most popular negative review sums up the situation nicely:
I didn’t want to leave a negative review, but Gaijin’s blatant contempt for their own players has forced my hand.
War Thunder is a game like no other, with a comprehensive damage system, combined arms, and variety of beautifully modeled tanks, aircraft and ships.
Unfortunately, this “uniqueness” has left Gaijin with little real competition over the years. What started off as a “free to play” title has over time become less and less free. Gaijin keeps adding nations and vehicles, while at the same time increasing repair costs and lowering RP/SL gain. A premium account isn’t enough to comfortably progress anymore, now you also have to buy premium vehicles in every nation.
For the new players reading this, Gaijin has recently admitted that they balance free vehicles around a negative SL income for average players. That means they WANT you to lose money by playing, so you’ll be forced to buy a top tier premium vehicle.
In response, Gaijin have cancelled the most recent and punitive economic changes—though this will do little to reverse the gradual trend that had already alienated so many long-time players—and posted one of the sorriest apology statements I have ever seen:
Dear players,
Firstly, we would like to extend our sincerest apologies to each and every one of you. We deeply regret the fact that our actions have let you down, and that we have failed to adequately address the concerns you have voiced over time. We share your passion for the game, and it pains us that our decisions have not lived up to your expectations.
Over the past week, we’ve been diligently analyzing the feedback you’ve provided. We acknowledge and agree with your concerns regarding the balance of the economy (Silver Lions and Research Points), as well as modification research. We have therefore prioritized addressing these issues as our immediate concern.
We are in the process of creating a plan to tackle these problems. While we have made some initial progress in understanding the scope of these issues and potential solutions, we anticipate providing a more detailed roadmap by the 14th of June.
We understand the urgency you feel for changes to be implemented, and we assure you, we share your eagerness. However, given the scale and complexity of a project like War Thunder, some time is required to ensure that any changes we make are both effective and beneficial to the player experience.
We are also continually reviewing the vast array of other feedback and suggestions we receive. Rest assured, these are important to us and will be addressed, but at this moment, our first priority remains the game’s economics and progression.
We are truly sorry for the disappointment and frustration that we have caused. We commit to you that we are doing everything we can to improve the game, and regain your trust.
Thank you for your understanding and patience during this time. We value your continued support and your dedication to the game we all love.
In 2021 Mythic Games, with the backing of Ubisoft, announced a Kickstarter campaign for an officially-licensed board game adaptation of Rainbow Six: Siege. Two years later, Mythic are asking people who already paid for the game to pay a bit—and in some cases a lot—more.
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The game, simply called 6: Siege, is pretty much what you’d expect: two teams of operatives do battle on a tactical map, one side attacking, the other defending. And as you would also expect from an officially-licensed board game appearing on Kickstarter, it is supposed to be huge, promising all kinds of plastic miniatures, expansions, 3D buildings and terrain.
In 2021 you could get the game in three tiers: a basic $69 copy, a deluxe $199 version and an even more premium $269 edition. That last one came with a lot of stuff: five “years” of expansions, multiple map packs, extra units, a neoprene dice tray, 3D buildings and even a little laser pointer so you could quickly and accurately determine line-of-sight stuff.
Now, in 2023, with the pandemic having wreaked havoc on the board game industry, Mythic (via Wargamer) have posted an update on their campaign website stating that, as things currently stand, the money that people paid during the initial campaign isn’t going to actually cover their manufacturing costs.
As a result, they’re giving backers three choices: they can pay more money, they can wait for prices to come down and receive their games at some point in the future, maybe, or they can ask for a refund. Backers of the $69 edition are being asked to pay an additional $39, $199 backers will need to pay $99 more and the $269 backers are being asked to pay an extra $129.
…the combined crises of COVID and the war in Ukraine, which we had not anticipated, have changed the international situation. Prices have literally exploded in all areas, and the estimates on which we based ourselves before and during the Kickstarter campaign are absolutely no longer relevant.
To give you some examples, the cost of paper and cardboard has increased by 50 to 100% on average (the paper we use for example has gone from $600 per ton to $1200 per ton), the cost of labor in China where our games are produced, assembled and shipped has also doubled from $4 to $8 per hour. The cost of energy, plastic and raw materials has increased by almost 50%. Finally, while container fees have recently dropped from their ridiculous highs (but not back to pre-crisis prices), the cost of the Last Mile has skyrocketed and has never been higher. On our side, it must be said, we spent much more than expected in the development of the game, with more people than we expected working on it and longer than we originally estimated (which caused extra costs, but also has the advantage of having an optimal, well-tested, varied and balanced game in the end).
Wildly, this isn’t the first time Mythic has had to do this; their Darkest Dungeon adaptation had to ask for extra money as well, something that 20% of backers refused to do. In this case Mythic’s update says that “If we do not reach the commitment rate, we commit to reimburse all contributors for these additional costs by the amount of their contribution”, and that “At the end of the fundraising period, if we have reached the minimum commitment to go into production, we will start printing.”
While I have a lot of sympathy for board game publishers and manufacturers right now, these conditions aren’t new; I wrote “Board Games Are Having A Bad Time” in April 2020, and this game was Kickstarted a year later. For Mythic to have not gone overboard with allowances for pricing variations during such tumultuous times reflects poorly on their campaign planning, and fans are right to be upset at being not only asked to pay more, but to pay so much more.
It’s also yet another example of the dangers inherent in the arms race so many board game publishers are trapped in on Kickstarter, offering increasingly obscene amounts of plastic miniatures and other luxuries with their games in an effort to appeal to backers, all the while making their projects far more expensive—and thus risky—to actually make.
I’ve contacted Mythic to clarify what exactly happens to the whole campaign if the “commitment rate” isn’t met, and will update if I hear back.
Wartales is currently in Early Access on Steam. It’s being developed by Shiro Games, the French studio behind the Viking RTS Northgard. And it has been taking up a lot of my time this month.
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There’s a lot going on in Wartales, a lot of influences getting thrown into a pot and swirling around each other, so the best (or at least most succinct) way I’ve seen it described is “Wartalesis a medieval open world role-playing game with turn-based combat in which the player leads a group of mercenaries.”
It’s mercenary management, basically. With some fighting. And a story. It’s like the management side of XCOM added the dietary and resting needs of a survival sim, then decided it wanted to go on a little RPG adventure. I have heard people say there’s some Mount and Blade here. Others say this is very close to Battle Brothers.
I could go on. But instead of continuing to confuse and bury you in references to existing video games, please just watch this release trailer instead:
Wartales – Official Release Trailer
I’ve been playing the game all week, and—this part is important—what I’ve played has been fantastic. The turn-based combat, while not exactly breaking new ground, works well enough. Your travels are full of story-driven quests full of morally ambiguous decisions, which as anyone who has played medieval-adjacent role-playing games will tell you, are the best types of decisions. The survival-style management of your party, which means everyone can die and you can hire replacements, has the same Fire Emblem, XCOM-y pull it always does when a game entrusts you with a (digital) person’s life.
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Fighting in Wartales is resolved through turn-based combat, in a way that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever played a turn-based tactics gameScreenshot: Wartales
Know why I’m loving the game, though? It’s that viewpoint. While the camera zooms in for battles and conversations, most of your time in Wartales is spent wandering around an isometric overworld, your party meandering their way through forests and mountain passes and lovely little rural laneways.
It’s well-established here that I am an enjoyer of good isometric video games, and this is one of the nicest I’ve ever seen. It’s a whole game based around those scenes in Fellowship of the Ring where you see everybody striding across mountains and grassy plains. It’s combination of lush landscapes, slow pace and wide horizons makes this game seem vast, like it’s a world so big and full of possibilities that you’re about to get lost in it, but that’s also so quaint and immediate with its concerns that you don’t mind simply walking around for ages taking in the sights.
It doesn’t feel like a stage, or a level, or a map. It feels like a world.
I emphasised “what I’ve played” earlier because, by a lot of people’s accounts who are a lot further into Wartales than I am, everything that makes the opening hours such a blast—the feeling of wide open spaces, the constant resting and eating to keep your soldiers happy and breathing, the overworld battles—starts to become a bit of a grind later on.
Maybe it does, and when this game gets out of Early Access and I get that far, I’ll see if that’s actually the case. But for now, around 15 hours in, the open-ended mission structure that lets you take on contracts at your own leisure means that, for all its potential as a day-waster, its actually perfectly suited to what’s become a pretty busy part of my life, as I can jump in, finish a contract or two, set up camp, save the game then revisit it the next time I get a chance.
Epic Games held a little showcase at the Game Developers Conference earlier today, called State of Unreal. Designed as a way to keep everyone who makes games up to date on what’s in store for the industry-dominating Unreal Engine, the highlights are also obviously interesting to anyone who plays games as well.
Both Epic and some external studios took the opportunity to show off some of the stuff they’ve been working on in Unreal Engine 5. The shortest video, and perhaps most impressive, is this clip from Ninja Theory’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, which highlights some incredible facial animation capabilities (using Metahuman, which we’ve written about previously):
State of Unreal – Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II | GDC 2023
It still doesn’t look real, there’s something about the exaggeration of the lips and her teeth that I can’t fully explain, but it still looks amazing.
Another subject of the technical showcase was action RPG Lords of the Fallen, with a more conventional look at how games are made using the engine:
Lords of the Fallen – State of Unreal Technical Showcase Trailer GDC | Wishlist: PC, PS5 & Xbox X/S
Next up is this gameplay demo from Infinitesimals, a backyard bugs game that I’m pretty sure was first announced years ago, but which is still in development. This clip is a little more developer-focused, but still gives you a look at how Unreal Engine 5 handles the scale of a large open world:
Infinitesimals – Unreal 5 Gameplay Demo | State of Unreal 2023
And finally we’ve got this driving video, which is not just an ad for Unreal Engine and Epic’s Quixel, but for EV company Rivian as well (their car’s dash screens run on the Unreal Engine). This one is showing off some lovely foliage, along with some impressive driving physics as well (it’s particularly neat how the car will hit small rocks that will then fly away):
Unreal Engine 5.2 – Next-Gen Graphics Tech Demo | State of Unreal 2023
While it’s expected to take everything shown at these presentations with a grain of salt, it’s encouraging that three of the four videos here were of actual games currently in development, meaning that the usual “well, your actual games aren’t going to look this good” caveats we normally need on these posts aren’t quite as needed here.
Both Portal games are always a joy to rediscover, even if you’ve already played them countless times. Portal 2’s co-op campaign, Cooperative Testing Initiative, is no different. It’s a fantastic series of puzzles along five official testing courses, each with its own number of testing chambers, that lose none of the mainline Portal puzzles’ charms. Instead, the sequel’s co-op campaign deftly weaves in two-player gameplay mechanics in increasingly complex ways. Each course focuses on a specific testing mechanic, all seen in Portal 2, but reimagined with co-op play in mind.
Portal is also an excellent choice because it’s so approachable. It doesn’t take too long to get the hang of the movement and physics, so even if your partner (or you!) isn’t a “Gamer,” they can still have a ton of fun with this pickup.
You can play local or online co-op, as well. It’s available on PC and Nintendo Switch (and PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, if you’ve still got those plugged in).
I know it is still available and being played, but Team Fortress 2 can at times feel like a game from a different age. Partly because it is, but also because it’s so old—and has gone so long without a major update—that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was on its last legs. But no!
The game’s website—which charmingly hasn’t appeared to have been updated since the game’s launch—hummed into life today, posting a news blog called “Attention, Steam Workshop Creators!”. It says that not only will the game be getting a “a full-on update-sized update” later this year, with “with items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints and who knows what else?!”, but that the update will also include some contributions from the game’s community as well.
Steam Workshop Creators, can we have your attention please. The following message is so urgent, so time-sensitive, we made the executive decision to skip TikTok and Twitter entirely and break the glass on the most bleeding-edge communication technology available.
Welcome to the future. Welcome… to a “blog-post”.
“Wow!” you’re probably thinking. “I forgot how hard reading is!” Yeah, it’s scary how fast you lose that. Don’t worry, we’ll be brief:
The last few Team Fortress summer events have only been item updates. But this year, we’re planning on shipping a full-on update-sized update — with items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints and who knows what else?! Which means we need Steam Workshop content! YOUR Steam Workshop content!
So get to work! (Or back to work, if you were already working but got distracted when the entire internet simultaneously found out about this state-of-the-art blog-post.) Make sure to get your submissions into the Steam Workshop by May 1st, so they can be considered for this as-yet-unnamed, un-themed, but still very exciting summer-situated (but not summer-themed) (unless you wanted to develop summer-themed stuff) update.
According to a report from The Hollywood Reporter, Waller-Bridge is attached to the live-action show as a writer, though there’s no word on whether or not the Fleabag star will be in front of the camera at this time. Alongside writing, she’s set to act as executive producer alongside Ryan Andolina and Amanda Grenblatt, who both recently left Amazon to found their own production company, and have worked out further deals with Bezos and co. to work on projects like the Tomb Raider series.
If you’re unfamiliar with Waller-Bridge’s work, she is known throughout the internet for her role as the titular character in Fleabag, a two-season series (also produced by and streaming on Amazon) which is also one of the few examples we have of what perfect television looks like.
Fleabag is two seasons of perfect television.Image: Amazon
You want to watch two short self aware seasons about a woman trying to claw her way out of emotional detachment and grief? It’s streaming on Prime. Don’t thank me, because it will ruin you for days. Come for Waller-Bridge’s sharp writing and performance, stay for Andrew Scott as the Hot Priest.
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This series will be the third time Tomb Raider has seen a live-action adaptation, with Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander portraying Lara Croft in two separate film series. At the moment, it remains unclear if this show will be based on the classic Tomb Raider games or the survival-oriented settings of the reboot series.
While the Amazon adaptation is in the works, developer Crystal Dynamics is also in the midst of developing a new Tomb Raider game. The studio was recently acquired by The Embracer Group after Square Enix sold it and other studios off in an effort to downsize and shift its focus onto other things like blockchain.
