There is a significant danger that this article will have aged terribly. You see, I asked everyone what they were playing this weekend on Thursday, rather than the usual post-lunch scramble on a Friday. You see, I took Friday off to travel to Wales to spend a long weekend with my family. Who knows what happened between my polling of the team on Thursday and Friday? Perhaps Valve surprise released Half-Life 3 and everyone is playing that instead. Maybe they all went off videogames in the interim.
I can only hope they thought to go into the CMS and update the article accordingly. Otherwise, I'll look like a right plonker.
It would be a reasonable assumption to make that there are only so many variations on football games you can make. Ultimately, no matter how many bells, whistles, or rocket powered cars you throw at it, it always comes down to getting a ball in a net and shouting SCOOOOOORE. Except in the case of Nutmeg!, a "nostalgic deckbuilding football manager" which looks like it features more faxing than any sort of kicking, but I mean that in an endearing way, promise.
Perhaps sensing competition in the field of Japan-flavoured arcade racing games, Forza Horizon 6 devs Playground Games have revealed the open-world vroomer’s system requirements. Agreeably, they’re a sensible balance of attainable low-end fare – at 1080p, a GTX 1650 and 16GB of RAM are apparently all that’s needed for 60fps – and the kind of hulking graphics bricks that you’d expect for 4K ray tracing. Only the most baby-oiled of hypercars for the RX 9070 XT owners, you understand, though support for lil’ handhelds like the Steam Deck is confirmed as well.
Epic Games have announced that they're laying off over 1000 staff today, March 24th. In the wake of that news, the publishers have announced that three Fortnite modes are being permanently sunsetted. Meanwhile, one of the studios Epic own - Horizon Chase developers Aquiris - have announced plans to pull downloads for the first two games in their arcade racing series offline later this year.
How about we move over to the other desert that Pearl Abyss makes for a little while, shall we? You know, the MMORPG one? We’re talking Black Desert on PC, obviously, which is in the headlines for some PvE-centric updates available in its Global Lab public test server. As is very often the case for Global […]
This week, the first season pass arrived for the recently-reborn Skate in an update that—as a quick glance at the Skate subreddit will tell you—isn't being received very well, with players complaining that a spattering of superficial challenge additions are being used to justify a pile of new microtransactions.
The most reviled among Skate's new monetization vectors is the Isaac Clarke bundle, which offers players the opportunity to roll around San Vansterdam as a cardboard-and-duct-tape knockoff of the Dead Space protagonist for the price of 3350 San Van Bucks, which shakes out to around $35 USD.
(Image credit: EA)
If that price alone didn't feel contemptuous enough for you, the bundle's got all the usual grimy monetization trappings: It's a limited time offering. It's got stickers and emotes crammed in to rationalize the price. And it costs just enough SVB to force you to buy more premium currency than you need if the bundle's all you're interested in.
That all felt grimy enough to me already, especially when players have noted that Skate 3 had an Isaac Clarke skin that only cost the amount of time it took to enter a cheat code—and that one wasn't cardboard. But it became particularly egregious when I fired up Skate myself and ran into repeated crashes for 40 minutes before I could check the in-game store.
After making my character—I was starting a new account—the initial load into the tutorial took an unsettling amount of time. After a solid two minutes of watching the kickflipping load screen graphic, I was finally dropped into the world, where I proved myself worthy of an initial skateboard with some basic movement and climbing.
I approached the glowing purple circle to trigger the cutscene where I'd be granted my fated implement for inevitable grinds and flips… and then the game locked up for forty seconds and crashed out with a memory error.
I relaunched. Another lengthy tutorial load. Another run through the basic movement lesson. Another attempt to claim my god-given right to skate, and another crash for my efforts. I tried validating installed files through Steam; crashed. I tried deleting EA anti-cheat files so they could be redownloaded on game startup, a fix I'd used elsewhere; still crashed.
The solution I found after browsing the many threads from users experiencing similar issues was—inexplicably—disabling crossplay. If you're wondering why that would produce memory errors during cutscene transitions, your guess is as good as mine.
Monetization is the devil's bargain we suffer in exchange for free-to-play games; all of us understand that. But I think we can all agree that if you're going to use your game as a trough for cosmetic slurry, you should at least wait until it's deep enough into early access that its default settings don't leave the game unplayable.
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