Month: September 2024

Every now and then I wonder where SteamOS is. The obvious answer is: it’s on the Steam Deck, dummy. But ever since Valve released the original Steam Deck it’s been talking about creating a general install that would allow you to drop its impressive Arch-based Linux distro onto other, non-Decky devices. And finally, we have the first tantalising glimpse of a general SteamOS install almost within sight, because the latest beta release (via SteamDeckHQ) has one line that has got me rather excited: “Added support for extra ROG Ally keys.”

That’s exciting because every SteamOS release has been purely tailored for installation on Valve’s own Steam Deck, with a general install being always frustratingly just out of reach. This, however, is the first time I’ve seen the patch notes referring to a fix being in place specifically for an installation of the operating system on a different company’s device. 

For many years all we’ve had on that front has been a recovery image file that kinda allows you to drop SteamOS 3 onto other devices. Valve says “for all the tinkerers out there” that this is not quite SteamOS 3 as a standalone install, and it “may not work properly” if …

Andrew C. Greenberg, co-creator of the foundational Wizardry series of RPGs, has died at the age of 67. The news was shared to Facebook by his collaborator on Wizardry, Robert Woodhead, and also to Twitter by developer and game design professor David Mullich.

It’s hard to overstate Greenberg and Woodhead’s influence on RPGs and PC gaming. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was one of the first recognizable RPGs you could play on a home computer, a translation of tabletop RPGs and the games developed for the mighty PLATO mainframes present on college campuses at the time to the humble Apple II.

Wizardry was among the first⁠—if not the very first⁠—RPGs to give you control of an entire party of characters, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses. Wizardry tasked players with exploring a sprawling, wireframe labyrinth in first person, always on the lookout for secret doors, traps, and challenging enemies. At the bottom of the dungeon, players would find the titular “Mad Overlord” Werdna⁠—Andrew spelled backwards. Greenberg seems to have carried the playful moniker with him long after leaving the games industry, using it …

After being delayed twice in the last year, the upcoming management game Prison Architect 2 has hit another bump. The original developer, Double Eleven, is leaving the project after failing to reach a commercial agreement with publisher Paradox Interactive. 

“After nine years together, Double Eleven is leaving Prison Architect. Double Eleven has been with us since the console port, led the development of the game on all platforms, and has been working on Prison Architect 2 over the last few years. With the sequel passing certification on all platforms, the contract was fulfilled. However, we could not find a commercial agreement that worked for both parties moving forward and mutually agreed to part ways,” the current Prison Architect 2 team at Paradox Interactive said in a statement on the Steam page.

The new developer working on Prison Architect 2 is Kokku, a Brazilian co-development company that has previously done 3D artwork on Horizon Forbidden West’s weapons and robots as well as porting Golf Club Wasteland to PS4, PC, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. 

“After talking to multiple studios, Kokku was found to be the best fit for the game going forward, a…

Being a lone gunman is harder than it looks, and no one knows that better than the luckless snipers of Shadows of Doubt. Turns out the game’s sharpshooter assassins—added last month—aren’t so sharp after all. They’re trapped in a loop of missing their targets, leaving behind literal mountains of spent bullet casings as they try and fail to pull off headshots (via RPS).

The problem was pointed out by the devs in a recent update on Steam. “Reports of Sharpshooter Assassins missing their intended targets have been circulating around the city,” goes the post, “leaving piles of shell casings everywhere. The department is currently seeking a fix for these less than accurate shooters.”

Which is almost a shame, honestly. One of the beautiful things about Shadows of Doubt’s infini-immersive sim nature is that all its procgen murders actually have to happen. The game doesn’t just magic up a corpse and a body of evidence out of nowhere. The crimes need to take place, meaning your wannabe Lyudmila Pavlichenkos have to set up in a suitable location, aim, and fire. Then aim, then fire again. And again, and again, and again, until their target is down and they’…

Space travel in Starfield is pretty easy. Remarkably easy, actually. You just bring up the map, click a dot and go. Sure, some things might be out of immediate jump range, but if all the yawning void of the cosmos has to threaten me with is “mild inconvenience,” then I’m gonna complain that documentaries like Event Horizon really overhyped the horrors that lie in the great beyond.

Things weren’t always that way. For one thing, Todd Howard himself has spoken about versions of the game where it was possible to run out of fuel and find yourself stranded among the stars, a feature which ended up getting yanked out because it was a “fun killer”. But now a player on Reddit (spotted by GamesRadar) has found evidence lurking in Starfield’s files of a much crunchier, and riskier, kind of space travel. 

Early concept/iteration of the starmap found tucked away in data files from r/NoSodiumStarfield

I’ve spoken with the thread’s creator—Reddit user Redsaltyborger—myself, and verified the existence of the starmap texture in Starfield’s game files. I’ll paste it below in convenient and parseable .jpg form. Yep, it sure d…

For someone like me who is desperate to get stuck into any whimsical life sim, Tales of the Shire sounds like a perfect match. On paper, it promises a cosy life in Middle-earth, filled with farming, decorating, cooking, and fishing. But the demo exhibits a desperate attempt to make a cosy game while the subgenre is so popular rather than focusing on building a game that welcomes new Lord of the Rings fans while letting long-time ones live out the dream of living as a hobbit. As a result you’re currently met with something that lacks an identity and is frankly just disappointing.

To start, a lot of it is boring. There’s no better way to put it. And that’s coming from someone who has put thousands of hours into plenty of life and farming simulators which revolve around a very simple task. Farming feels pretty pointless, aside from getting ingredients to cook, and there’s a lot you can cook without having to farm, which quickly stripped my willingness to do it in the first place. In the demo, you’re limited to only having five planters as well, rather than being able to customise and streamline your own farming space.

On the other hand, you have the option to go out a…

The wintry solo survival game The Long Dark has been around a long time—it launched into early access in 2014 and updates have been rolling ever since—but it looks like developer Hinterland Games is preparing to move on to something new. Studio founder and creative director Raphael van Lierop made a return to Twitter last night to drop a brief teaser for an unannounced project.

“Some good things happening in the Unannounced Survival Games space…” Van Lierop tweeted above a 22-second video clip hinting at a vague yet unmistakable sort of unpleasantness.

“Unannounced Hinterland Survival Game,” the caption says. “In-engine Pre-Alpha. Unreal 5.”

That’s not much to go on, but there are at least a few things worth noting. For one, that’s a hell of a wind blowing outside, and the windows don’t seem to be doing the best possible job of keeping it out.

Rugs on the walls may provide an extra layer of insulation from the chill, or maybe they’re to cover up a mess left behind from some early incident of more pointed unpleasantness—either way, there’s also a map to be seen, with a few sticky notes presumably denoting points of interest. And on the …

After months of build-up and increasingly exhausting fake-outs, Elon Musk’s Twitter has finally flicked the little blue checks off of many of the accounts that had them. The checks previously indicated that an account had been “verified” to belong to the person it claimed to represent, and wasn’t an imposter. 

Starting today, blue checks primarily mean that a person has paid for Twitter Blue, an $8 per month subscription.

Some Twitter accounts that represent organizations, such as PC Gamer’s account, now have a gold check to indicate that they’re affiliated with a paid “Twitter Verified Organizations” business account. It’s also possible for individuals on Twitter to receive a blue checkmark through association with a paid, verified organization. The account of Xbox head Phil Spencer, for instance, still has a blue check because “it’s an affiliate of @Xbox on Twitter.”

Otherwise, blue checks indicate that a user has paid for Twitter Blue and verified their phone number, and that their account is more than 30 days old and in good standing. The complete “verification” guidelines can be read here.

As a result of today’s purge of “legacy” blue checkmarks…

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the gift that keeps on giving. Even aside from already-released and upcoming patches that are doing things like giving Karlach a new epilogue and restoring 1,500 lines of missing Minthara dialogue, there are plenty of little secrets, references and easter eggs tucked away that people are still uncovering. The latest? The tattoos you can select as body art during character creation.

One set of tattoos that you can slap on your BG3 character is actually in a script called Barazhad, which is used by D&D’s primordial and abyssal creatures. But, as spotted by TikToker thewingedbaron, Larian didn’t just whack a bunch of cool-looking sigils in and call it a day: Barazhad characters all have English equivalents, so the studio took the opportunity to weave a few hidden messages in there.

What do they say? Well, it’s almost like poor Tav has been stencilling the names of body parts onto themselves in case they forget which one’s which, Nameless One-style. The row of Barazhad characters across their head reads, uh, “FOREHEAD,” the ones on their chin? “CHIN”. Their cheeks? “LEFT CHEEK” and “RIGHT CHEEK”. You get the idea, but there is one …

The latest trailer for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader emphasizes choice and consequence, highlighting its equivalent of alignment—the conviction system. “While exploring you will be met with a great number of hard decisions,” the trailer says. “Do you try to save the population of a dying world? Or burn it all with the intent of containing heresy?”

Owlcat’s CRPG tracks your response to dilemmas like this on three axes, with five ranks to measure how far you go along each. The Imperialis conviction measures your fire-and-brimstone dedication to the God-Emperor, while Hereticus goes up when you prioritize power over morality and give in to the temptations of Chaos. Benevolentia increases if you act like individual human lives actually mean something—a controversial belief in the Imperium of Man. Ranking up convictions can unlock dialogue options, events, and abilities, as well as affecting how NPCs relate to you.

The trailer goes on to introduce Inquisitor Xavier Calcazar, who seems to be consequence personified. “All these decisions will affect the whole subsector, attracting the uncomfortable attention of Inquisitor Calcazar,” the trailer’s gruff narrator…

Both Corsair and Hyte are all about slapping “brains” on everything right now when it comes to PC building. Both companies are soon to launch new, smart control systems for PC builders, which will help us keep tabs on everything that’s going on in your system. That’s alongside full cooling and lighting ecosystems, fans, AIO cooling solutions, and RGB lighting strips to match.

At Computex today, Corsair announced its upcoming iCue link hub and cooling ecosystem that it says is set to “change the way PC building works forever.” Maybe that’s a little dramatic, but essentially we’re getting a bunch of modular case fans, and the Hydro X cooling system, that all feed into the System Hub—a dinky little “brain” that controls everything—with just one wire.

“A built-in microcontroller in every individual iCUE LINK component acts as a “brain” that communicates with the System Hub,” says Corsair, “enabling a generational leap in system intelligence.”

The upcoming QX fans come in 120mm and 140mm, with each one having its own “brain”… or, y’know a sensor. Yeah, it’s called a sensor guys, not a “brain”. 

But what that means is that you’ll be able…

It’s been nearly four years since Larian Studios announced Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s an awfully long time in PC gaming terms, and it’s come an awfully long way since then. So it shouldn’t be entirely surprising that your rig is going to be a little beefier than developers originally thought in order to run the game comfortably.

“Baldur’s Gate 3’s graphical fidelity and complexity has improved quite a bit as it’s grown throughout Early Access,” Larian said at the tail-end of yesterday’s launch date announcement. 

“We’ve been keeping an eye on its minimum system requirements, and as the game nears release we’ve raised the minimum system requirements listed on Steam to better reflect the realities of the launch version.”

The change to the minimum requirement is relatively slight, but the recommended specification has gone up too, and more comprehensively. Here’s how both have changed:

Minimum:

• Processor: Intel i5-4690 / AMD FX 4350 -> Intel I5 4690 / AMD FX 8350
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780 / AMD Radeon R9 280X -> Nvidia GTX 970 / RX…
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