Cue catastrophic predictions about GTA 6 monetisation The update in question is the Bottom Dollar Bounties update, which adds a Vinewood Club app to your character’s mobile, providing you’re a GTA+ subscriber. AsGamesradarpoints out, putting what is being called a “basic quality-of-life feature” behind a paywall has caused something of a scrum on the reddits, and has led to dire predictions about the monetisation ofGTA 6, to say nothing of much wailing and gnashing of teeth from poor PC players who are still waiting for Rockstar to add currently PS5/Xbox Series-exclusive features such as animals to GTA Online....

The first in a new interview series about a sprawling, exhausting genre There’s no genre like the open world for inducing choice paralysis, so it’s fitting that I’ve been agonising over how to begin this irregular article series onopen worldgames for months. I have a lot of material, oodles of interviews with developers of all shapes and sizes - big shops like Remedy and CD Projekt, smaller studios like Ace Team and Awaceb, all holding forth on such topics as whetherElden Ringor Zelda did bandit camps better, and how you make a forest feel endless....

Rolling out in October Transformers: Galactic Trialssomehow marks the first time the vehicular bots have featured in a racing game, though as you might expect from a franchise known for switching between forms it’s not quite a pure driving experience, either. Instead, developers 3DClouds are billing the game as a mixture of traditional racing game and action-RPG as the vehicular robots speed around tracks before shifting into their bot forms to fight through groups of enemies standing in the way of the finish line....

And a round of Kyper Shards for all my friends! Nexon’s free-to-play looter-shooterThe First Descendant- “Nexon’sWarframe”, as the wags are calling it on Steam - launched this week and hasencountered a few snags and snaffaroos, including beta rewards not showing up, Easy Anti-Cheat not running correctly, frame-rate drops for people who downloaded in advance of release, and players finding their merry way to servers where no other players exist. Nexon are even now patching the game, and have plied players with in-game bonuses and cosmetics as an apology for the inconvenience....

Need a hint for today’s Connections? Read our guide for help with Connections #389 This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theConnections hint and answers for Thursday 12th December! Want a hint for Connections today?Piggybacking off the monumental success of daily puzzle gameWordle, the New York Times has another fantastically popular word game out now. It’s calledConnections, and if you haven’t played it before, now’s the time to start....

UK tribunal finds that company “treated the claimant unfavourably” due to disability Ah-Thion, however, had found that working from home allowed him to avoid what he describes as the exhaustion and distress of working on Cloud Imperium’s premises. The article doesn’t go into detail about this, but it’s worth noting here that many autistic people havegreat difficultywith the sensory environment and social expectations of in-office work, unless proper accommodations are made....

Itching to spend You might have seen that£10 will go a long way in the Steam summer sale, but let me do you one better. Indie game store Itch.io has begunits own summer sale, and for those willing to delve into its rainbow-coloured heap of throwaway toys and fun experiments, plenty of deals await. The sale starts today and ends July 12th. There are quite a few tasty nuggets deep in the creases of this bargainous sofa....

Platformer melding African Bantu cultures with personal experiences of grief hit PC in late April Surgent Studios, developers of this year’s fetching AfrofuturistplatformerTales of Kenzera: Zau, have laid off more than a dozen staff. The cuts come just over two months on from the release of the debut video game release from the multimedia studio founded by Assassin’s Creed Origins star Abubakar Salim. News of layoffs first broke via posts from former employees on LinkedIn (thanks,Game Developer), including a level designer and technical artist....

Sow your crops and turn the clamshell’s handle to make them grow Tiny Gardenis bringing back the spirit of Polly Pocket with a cutesy farming sim game set inside a virtual plastic clamshell inspired by the nineties toy phenomenon. Spanish developers Ao Norte’s adorable game imagines a world in which the iconic hinged mini-dioramas are ecosystems of their own able to grow crops, as players sow seeds before turning the handle on the side of the clasped toy to help carrots, lettuces and all other manner of plants and vegetables spring up....

Sequel N1RVAnn-A development is on pause for the moment, say Sukeban Games The developers behindcyberpunk bartending gemVA-11 Hall-Ahave revealed their next game, and it looks a doozy..45 Parabellum Bloodhounddraws its inspiration from PlayStation masterpiece Parasite Eve in offering a mix of real-time and turn-based combat dubbed as “active time action”. Sukeban Games acknowledge the influence of Parasite Eve - which emerged from a collaboration betweenFinal Fantasy seriescreator Hironobu Sakaguchi andChrono Triggerdirector Takashi Tokita, among other JRPG veterans - as a key foundation for the upcoming game, but insist “that’s about where comparisons end” without giving any further details for now....

Stuck on today’s Wordle word for July 3? Read our hint or find the answer below! This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theWordle hint and answer for Thursday 12th December! Need a hint for today’s Wordle answer?Wordleis an addicting but challenging test of word acumen. Luckily, you’re in the right place for some assistance. Every day, Wordle presents its legions of players with a deviously simple quandary: can you guess the right five-letter word within just six guesses?...

Updates giveth, updates taketh away Wuthering Waves, that recent gachaRPGof anime styling andimpenetrable jargonblasting, justdidn’t work on the Steam Deckwhen it launched in May. It also doesn’t work right now. But for one brief, debatably glorious day on June 29th, it did. And thus, Deck owners who’d persevered through a slightly fiddly installation process (explainedhereby YouTubesmith Deck Wizard) could finally take their first joyous steps into Wuthering Waves like aDavid Hasselhoff-buoyedEast German in 1989....

When sheet hits the fan The tabletop equivalent of “buying books and reading them are two different hobbies” is surely the difference between buying sexy tabletopRPGmanuals and actually dragging your mates on to Discord for a few hours to stumble your way through a module. It’s the dogeared Fighting Fantasy from a carboot sale kid in me, I think. Something about reading worldbuilding snippets organised into numbered tables just hits in a way a novel doesn’t....