The latestSteam Next Festis upon us, bringing with it a freshly packed week of new, free demos to try until Monday October 16th. There are literally hundreds you could try installing if you were that way inclined - you canview the full listright here if you’d rather browse through it at your own leisure - but we’ve been playing some of these demos in advance to help make wading through its torrent of shiny new games a little bit easier....
“Become a part of an industry-wide support network” There’s a side mission inCyberpunk 2077that involves abducting a notorious union-breaker. One wonders if any of the people who worked on that have joined the union founded by CD Projekt RED employees this month. The union is part of the larger Polish worker’s organisation OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, and comes in response toCD Projekt’s firing around 100 employees in July due to “overstaffing”. Its membership is anonymous and open to people in the industry who aren’t employed by theWitcherand Cyberpunk studio, but are thinking about forming a union in their own workplace....
How do ranks differ from CS:GO (and between Premier and Competitive)? Wondering how ranks in Counter-Strike 2 work?Counter-Strike 2brings quite a few changes toCounter-Strike: Global Offensive’s ranking system, with different methods of rankings being used between modes. Luckily, we’ve got your back with this quick explanation of rankings in both main modes of CS2. Here’s everything you’ll need to know about ranks inCounter-Strike 2, including how they work in both Premier and Competitive and how they’ve changed from CS:GO....
“People look at the numbers and say, oh that’s bad.” In the nicest possible way, and with the greatest of respect, Remedy’s comms director Thomas Puha would like people to stop fixating on frame-rate and resolution and get on with their bloody lives. Or at least, that’s my summary of his thoughts following the recent announcement on Xitter thatAlan Wake 2will have aperformance modeon PS5 and Xbox Series X, allowing consoleers for whom responsiveness is a priority to eke a higher frame-rate out of a game “built from the beginning as a 30fps experience focusing on visuals and ambiance....
Kick back and relax with some fungi Some games just give you that lovely warm feeling inside when you see them for the first time. For me, that wasShroomchitect, a very gentlesim gamewhere you care for a bunch of sentient mushrooms. Mmmmm. Shroomchitect’s sim-ness comes through as a very, very light take on the likes of the micromanagement inThe Simsor evenDwarf Fortress. Here, your mushrooms have just four status bars you’ll need to keep balanced: Hunger, Energy, Social and Purpose, which presumably triggers an existential crisis upon hitting zero....
Razer’s Heroic Bundle V2 includes $200+ of stuff. Razer make some of the best gaming peripherals in the business across a wide range of categories, and now you can take home a whole set of them for 90 bucks over at Woot. The “Heroic Bundle V2” includes a mechanical keyboard, mouse, grip tape for the mouse and mousepad, offering a 40% reduction on buying these items separately. That’s an awesome deal and well worth considering - the only peripheral you’d really need to add is a headset!...
Reworked Battle Pass halves the number of levels you’ll have to unlock for new items Halo Infinite’s Season 5 lands next week with a reimagined game mode returning fromHalo 4, a bunch of new cosmetics - including some inspired by the goopy Flood aliens - and two new maps for its Arena mode, while reworking the game’s Battle Pass to make it less of a chore. Season 5: Reckoning’s headline mode will be Extraction mode, a “reimagined” version of the five-vs-five objective-based mode in Halo 4 where two teams must race to extract crates faster than their opponents by planting a beacon and defending it until the crate is whisked away....
The hugely influential design director talks Baldur’s Gate, his next RPG, and the abandonment of the BioWare model. “Baldur’s Gate IIset the model, and I obviously loved that model,” says James Ohlen. “But there were a ton of people at BioWare who didn’t like it.” During leadership meetings over the course of the Canadian designer’s 22 years at theRPGstudio, he’d sometimes feel totally outnumbered when talking about the importance of story....
There are far more than Todd Howard said, too Starfieldhas only been out a month, and someone has already been to every planet in its universe. While Todd Howard saidwe’d be able to visit over 1,000 planets, the Bethesda dev actually undersold the sheer scale of Starfield’s galaxy - there are actually close to 1,700 planets, and now someone’s seen them all just weeks after launch. That person is Reddit user DoomZero, who revealed their achievement by posting a screenshot of Starfield’s menu showing 1,694 planets fully surveyed, with 1,695 scanned - some planets were apparently impossible to survey due to bugs....
Freshly promoted to the official role of Reviews Edders Good news, folks. Today, I’m very pleased to announce our new Reviews Editor, and it’s our very own Ed Thorn! After spending two and a bit years flexing his typing arms as our senior staff writer, Ed will now be stepping up to wrangle our reviews section into bigger and better shape than ever before - or rather, he already has, as he officially took over the role at the start of October....
Admiring indie games from Twitter’s screenshot-o-rama Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s#screenshotsaturdaytag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by a retro-styled infinite city, a dramatic spellcasting, dinosaurs, and heaps more. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games! I’m not sure what this is beyond an “infinite, procedurally generated PSX-styled city”, but that’s plenty for me:...
Here’s what happens when you come face-to-face with The Hunter and The Emissary during In Their Footsteps How can you finally uncover the truth from the Starborns during the In Their Footsteps mission?Starfieldfinally puts players face-to-face with their adversaries, the Starborn, in the 13th main quest. It marks a pivotal point in the storyline which will reveal some important answers to questions that players have been accumulating since the very beginning....
Here’s how to gain a new artifact, fight the Starborn, and make a big decision Looking for a walkthrough of the Unearthed mission in Starfield?Embarking on theStarfieldUnearthed mission, you’ll explore Earth’s moon, Luna, enter NASA, uncover experiments, gather an artifact, all before making a pivotal decision. There’s a lot to the Unearthed mission that will test your combat, investigative skills, and problem-solving. It’d be advised then to make sure you’re clued up on thebest weaponsas well as ensuring you’ve worked hard on your XP andleveling up....
