Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

Epic Games not coming up with their own dance moves continues to cause trouble for mega-popular shooter Fortnite Battle Royale. As reported by TMZ, actor Alfonso Ribeiro (Carlton Banks in The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air) is suing Epic for cribbing his famously daft dance for use in the game as a premium emote sold in-game.

Ribeiro is in the process of copyrighting the dance, and while I think the concept of short, comedic dances being intellectual property is a bit mad, this isn't unprecedented.  Rapper 2 Milly is is already looking to take the studio to court, and others have complained before. Plus, as you'll see below, this isn't the first game to use the Carlton Dance.

Tomorrow is unpatch day for Battlefield V, after a messy storm of backlash last week from players over tweaks to its time-to-kill. In an attempt to make the game more accessible to newcomers who might have been dying too quickly, Dice tweaked damage figures - detailed here - to make bullets just plain less deadly than before. Unfortunately, this went down about as well with existing fans of the game's balance as you'd expect. In an apologetic statement on Reddit, the developers have announced that tomorrow the game will be reverting back to its original deadliness.

Make love, not war, or at least repurpose the wreckage of failed mech-war into a charmingly smoochable partner for a lonely rampaging monster. Kaiju Super Datetech is a cute little free game from Powerhoof (makers of Regular Human Basketball and arcade hack n' slasher Crawl) for up to four local players plus party pals, working together or in teams to build NotGodzilla a date. Players control little office workers, hopping around, carrying bits of robot and scaffolding and bolting new gubbins on as you race across the scrap-heap wastelands to to meet your tall, dark and scaly partner.

It's no surprise that Capcom's support for Street Fighter V isn't over, but I am a bit shocked that its fourth season of new characters has already begun with new fighter Kage. Available now, this angry lad (his name literally translating to "Shadow") is pretty much a beefed up version of old palette-swap villain Evil Ryu. Now apparently cosplaying as a secondary character from Homestuck, or - more likely - some kind of Oni, Kage is a teleporting, air-dashing, punchier and generally meaner take on Ryu's familiar style. Give him a peek in the debut trailer and breakdown vid below.

We've got our fist look at Pagan Online in action, Wargaming and Mad Head Games's MOBA-inspired action RPG. Far from the over-the-top heavy metal fantasy excess of its debut trailer, I feel that Pagan Online looks rather restrained compared to Diablo 3, and definitely less wild than Path Of Exile's massive monster-swarms. Mad Head Games also talk of players building up a stable of unique characters (another MOBA-like element), instead of spending ages tweaking character builds on a single hero. Take a peek at a bit of hacking, slashing and avoiding AoE markers below.

While I was being dragged down to the depths of England last week (business reasons), Forza Horizon 4 was pushing higher into Scotland with the launch of its first expansion, Fortune Island. The fictional new hunk of rock has sprouted off Scotland, seemingly drawing inspiration for roads and landmarks from a number of places around the highlands and islands, including Skye. It's a wild and rugged landscape which needs to make no concessions to reality, basically (though some real Scottish landscapes seem to consider reality optional, in my experience). Also, it has hidden treasure. And a Morris Minor with wooden trim.

Just Cause 4 stuck its landing about as elegantly as a Victorian flying machine made from long-johns, strawberry shoelaces and seagull wings - here's John howling about its numerous misfires in our Just Cause 4 review - but developers Avalanche aren't giving up on it yet. Steam reviews currently average out to the dreaded Mostly Negative, with the vast majority of thumbs-downery prompted by the presence of more bugs than the family movie box office in 1998.*

Undeterred (well, probably quite a lot deterred, let's be honest), Avalanche recently pushed out the first big JC4 patch, which attempts to wrestle the most overt boo-boos to the ground - including fixing texture pop-in, making keys remappable and menus less miserable, and overall 'stability fixes'. They also promise that this is "just the start of the work we are carrying out," with more patches planned next year. They're also "very sorry to hear" that so many people have had a rubbo time with JC4, if that helps any.

Much as every Christmas cracker must contain a paper hat and every Christmas stocking must give a satsuma, every Christmas's gaming must include Skeal. No one knows when this tradition started but it's tradition, and so we must play Skeal. I'm sure many of you already celebrate the season by playing Skeal with your family round the hearth, laughing and singing together, but for the uninitiated I'll explain: Skeal is a free slalom skiing game which teaches us the true meaning of Christmas - power, pleasure, and pain.

There's a reason you don't hear much about witches, which is that they're not real. There's a separate reason why you haven't heard much about Witchfire's witches since The Astronauts announced their first-person occultist bosher last year - the devs are only eight in number, and they have all been very busy.

In a recent blogpost, The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter devs announced they're about to get a bit more chatty. Weekly dev updates are due to start this Wednesday, while the announcement itself gives an overview of progress so far. It's looking very pretty, quite swish, and rather creepy.

Epic Games have melted down Infinity Blade twice in one week. First they scrapped Infinity Blade, their mobile action-RPG series, and now they've removed the Infinity Blade they added to Fortnite Battle Royale in homage to it. As I explained after Epic added it, Fortnite's Infinity Blade was overpowered to the point of ruining the game at all levels from pubs to Epic's $1 million Winter Royale tournament. They had planned balance tweaks to tone down the murdersword but nah, they've conceded that they straight "messed up" and should think harder before adding any more of these 'Mythic' items.

The creator of Stardew Valley has temporarily set aside working on his next game in favour of making adding more free content to the much-beloved farm-o-craft-a-fight-y life sim RPG. Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has been mighty secretive about his next game, not saying what it even is let alone when we might get to play it, so it remains in the nebulous future. Before he gets back to work in this mystery game, he plans to form a development team to keep Stardew updates rolling while he's occupied.

Excellent stealthy-stabby sequel Dishonored 2 and its also-excellent standalone expansion Death Of The Outsider have followed in the steps of other games late in their lives and removed Denuvo DRM. Arkane and Bethesda likely figure that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar - those who buy the game and provide a Bethesda store or launcher login will get a pair of new (if minor) perks. You get a Disho-noired black, white & red graphics mode and the option to replay any mission with your choice of powers, plus the pre-order bonus items for Dishonored 2.

Subnautica - Unknown Worlds Entertainment's excellent aquatic survival adventure - is currently free to grab and keep forever on the Epic store, making it probably the most tempting reason to look at the shop after exclusives like Hades and Ashen. Released less than a year ago after a lengthy ride through early access, Subnautica is a gem. As someone who doesn't ordinarily like survival craft 'em ups, I still got into it, exploring its thoughtfully designed cavern networks and alien ruins as I delved deeper underwater. The game is free for the next two weeks, so swoop on down and grab it for free before it goes back up to £19.49/€20.99/$24.99.

Seemingly in response to Epic's grand announcement of their own games store and subsequent PR barrage at The Game Awards, Discord have announced they're going to be offering a better cut on games distribution too. As of next year, the recently-launched Discord game store will be open for self-publishing, with the company taking 10% (less than Valve's 30% and Epic's 12%, more than Itch's split-how-you-want), leaving developers with 90%. In their announcement, Discord state that "it does not cost 30% to distribute games in 2018", and I've doubts it ever did once we went digital.

Videogames are awesome (and also one word), but the industry making them has some undeniable problems. The newly-established Game Workers Unite UK, now an official branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) hopes to make things a little better for folks in the business, reduce worker exploitation and improve diversity. We've all heard tales of soul-shattering crunch, unpaid overtime and people axed from jobs with little warning and even less severance pay, so as far as I'm concerned, this is a good, sure step in the right direction.