The Maw - 19th-24th February 2024

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Xbox have announced a second set of games coming to Game Pass in the second half of February. Popular JRPG Tales Of Arise arrives today, with Bluey: The Videogame, Indivisible, Space Engineers, and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun all joining between now and March 5th.

As MiniMatt mentioned in the comments, Kingmakers is a mashup of many things. Mainly: medieval-era battlefields with modern weaponry, and command-level strategy and citybuilding with on-the-ground third-person shooting. Its trailer has become a senseation in the past 12 hours and you should go watch it immediately.

Need For Speed: Unbound is getting a second year of live service updates, including a cops vs. racers mode "inspired by NFS: Hot Pursuit".

Here's an expanded breakdown of what Gigantic: Rampage Edition is, and how it came to be.

Temtem: Swarm is a Vampire Survivors-like spin-off of the Pokémon-like Temtem, mixing topdown bullet heaven with character evolutions and three-player co-op. It's aiming to release this year and there's an announcement trailer now.

People have a couple of first photos of Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart in the coming Borderlands movie. Wild that this could be the nadir of Blanchett's entire career at the same time as being the zenith of Hart's.

There's a new seven-minute video breaking down the concepts behind Kemuri, the first game from Ikumi Nakamura's studio Unseen. It talks setting, art and character but also gives glimpses of prototype parkour and grapple-hooking:

What is KEMURI? UNSEEN artwork, animation, game prototypes and behind the scenes with Ikumi Nakamura

Huh! Gigantic, the free-to-play team brawler which launched (fully) in 2017 and closed in 2018, is returning as Gigantic: Rampage Edition. It's being published by Gearbox and developed by frequent co-development studio Abstraction. Original developers Motiga closed down with the game.

Rampage Edition won't be free-to-play, but a "premium and definitive release" of the original, and it's due on April 9th. Here's a trailer:

GIGANTIC: RAMPAGE EDITION | Announcement Trailer

Balatro, the Poker roguelike Katharine awarded a Bestest Best in her review yesterday, is actually out now. You'll find it on Steam.

Everywhere developer Build A Rocket Boy have now confirmed the studio is going through a round of layoffs, first reported yesterday, confirming "the removal of a number of roles globally" in a statement to Eurogamer.

"While we have made great progress developing our products, we are now in a position where we need to make changes to the way we work across our business in order to become a more agile studio and to meet the requirements that our projects demand," said a spokesperson.

Build A Rocket Boy is the new studio from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies.

More than 500 games on Steam generated over $3 million in gross revenue in 2023, according to Steam's annual summary. That's a lot of money, and a lot of games, if you were wondering.

Xbox have announced the next batch of games coming to Game Pass in late February - very pleased to see Indivisible on there, and Tales Of Arise and Boltgun!

The Loadout, meanwhile, speculate very plausibly that Arrowhead will one day add the first game's high tech Illuminate faction to Helldivers 2.

People are still having a devil of a time finding a sessino in Helldivers 2. As reported by PCGamesN, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt has said it's not as simple as buying more servers. "We need to optimise the backend code," he said. "We are hitting some real limits."

Here's a new trailer for Sand Land, Bandai Namco's Dragon Ball-flavoured vehicular RPG.

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Assassin's Creed: Mirage has a new update that adds permadeath to the game.

As reported by The Scotsman, GTA devs Rockstar North have claimed over a third of a billion pounds in UK tax relief over the past decade.

Here are the full 1.0 patch notes for action-RPG Last Epoch, which releases tomorrow 21st Feb. As detailed in the notes, the devs are taking the early access servers online for 24 hours later today to make the necessary changes.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader has received a major patch. According to Owlcat, it spans "over 1800 changes, including brand new voiceover and narrative content, QoL improvements, balance updates, numerous bug fixes and hundreds of fixes for optimization, performance and co-op stability."

A quote from Digital Eclipse editorial director Chris Kohler about restoring old games to our screens, taken from Khee Hoon Chan's interview feature over at Techradar about game preservation: "The game actually doesn't need to be fun because, if we're setting the player's expectations correctly, we're not asking you to go in and play this and derive simple enjoyment from it; we're putting this in as a museum exhibit to help you understand the path that a certain company took, or game designer might have taken to get to the final goal, or simply to show you something that's historically fascinating."

PCGamesN reports that Everywhere and Mindseye studio Build a Rocket Boy are laying people off. This is the studio founded by former GTA developer Leslie Benzies. Apparently, the publishing department, QA and art teams have gotten the worst of it.

According to PCGamer (specifically, freelance RPS contributor Rick Lane- hello Rick!) there's an open world Terminator survival game set for full reveal at Nacon's Connect event later this month. It's set after Judgement Day, which is certainly a good timeframe for a survival experience. Will we get to infiltrate human enclaves as closet cyborgs? Here's Nacon's teaser trailer from a year back.

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Via Eurogamer, there's a Nintendo third party direct showcase happening tomorrow, 21st February at 2pm UK time and 6am PT. Given that it's a third party dealio, it's likely many of the Switch games shown will also be on PC.

Last night developer Sirrah messaged me about their story-driven colony builder Trappist, in which you control a movable base exploring a single solar system. I get an ever-so-gentle Outer Wilds vibe from it.

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TUESDAY DAWNS

Cry havoc, and let slip the blogs of war! FEED THE MAW.

Capcom have apologised for 'not meeting expectations' with Street Fighter V, saying that their “self-reflection” on its messy launch - lambasted for a small roster of characters, thin single-player content and server issues - helped make this year's Street Fighter 6 that much better.

Huge Elden Ring mod The Convergence is basically a whole new game, with almost triple the number of playable classes (each with unique starting locations), dozens of new weapons, hundreds of extra spells, overhauled crafting and fast-travel systems, and more. The ideal way to pass time while you're waiting for official expansion Shadow of the Erdtree to arrive!

That Crazy Taxi reboot will apparently be a “triple-A” game, according to the head of Sega's Sapporo studio, who are working on the return of the arcade classic teased at the end of last year. But what does "triple-A" mean? An open-world multiplayer affair? Collectibles galore? Towers to climb in your cab? Your guess is as good as mine.

Helldivers 2 has made its three “hardest” difficulties harder and its actual hardest mission easier in its latest patch, so you might be able to actually beat that Defend event now. The patch doesn't address the ongoing buckling of its multiplayer servers under the game's popularity, which led concurrent players to be capped over the weekend, so you might struggle to log in to begin with, mind.

Fachewachewa says: Happy Balatro week everyone

And merry Balatro week to you as well!

Writing these updates from a preview event in which I'm sitting next to possibly the largest quantity of Mini Cheddars I have seen in my life.

I've been talking to Aaryn Flynn about the possibility of Nightingale's Realm card system becoming a fully-fledged cardgame of some kind.

Former Halo designer Kevin Schmitt has been discussing rejected Halo pitches on Xitter.

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Well, here's something a bit different. A long-lost Fallout: New Vegas mod that adds Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst to the game has been found and resurrected.

Attention, Soulslikers. The recently announced Enotria: The Last Song is inspired by Italian folklore, and looks really quite lovely. Certainly worth keeping an eye on ahead of its release this June.

Another one to add to the insane list of games coming out this week, but at least this one is a) free, and b) lasts a mere hour. It's the very lovely, Please, Touch The Artwork 2. Here are two of my favourite screenshots from it:

Midday music: quite a downbeat choice, but I've been enjoying Metric's Nothing Is Perfect.

PCG have dug up an Elden Ring mod that turns the whole game upside down. Different starting locations! New classes! One to occupy you while you wait for the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, perhaps.

Xbox big cheese Phil Spencer has generously told the Verge that Microsoft don't want everybody to become a Game Pass subscriber. "I tell you honestly, running the business, having a diversity of business models that are working is pretty critical," he said. "The one thing I will say about the Game Pass subscriber revenue is that it’s consistent."

Eleventh Hour Games have been detailing what they're adding to budding Diablo-killer Last Epoch for this week's 1.0 launch. The changelog is so massive they've broken it into chapters. Here's part 1, which covers a couple of new classes, and part 2, in which there is much talk of new items and gear. Do the words "Spine of Malatros" mean anything to you?

A surprise gift from our tech team - we can now give posts titles without automatically bumping the liveblog to the top of the site (as we generally do when covering major events, such as game conferences). This means we can now do a little clickable "contents page" for days of the week up the top of the feed, there. Bless the techies!

ZA/UM have formally acknowledged layoffs and a project cancellation reported last week by GHLF. "As with all studios, we adapt the size of our team to the work underway, growing when we start a new project and shrinking if one is cancelled," a spokesperson told VG247. "It is always hard to lose talented colleagues, and we thank those leaving for their many contributions to ZA/UM."

Arrowhead are currently capping Helldivers 2's concurrent players at 450,000 players to stop the servers exploding, as reported by PCG.

Via PCGamesN, the Satisfactory devs still have "a huge backlog of ideas", even as their long-in-early-access factory sim rumbles towards 1.0 release.

IT IS MONDAY

Set up a cordon around the emergence site! Salt the entrances and exfoliate the wallpaper! FEED THE MAW.