Star Wars Battlefront 2 post-launch maps, modes, and characters will be free

Oh thank goodness, EA might be learning. After years of DLC packs and season passes which empty pockets and split playerbases, they are slowly (or partially, at least) turning away from that. Following the example of Titanfall 2, Star Wars Battlefront II [official site] will release new maps, modes, heroes, weapons, and vehicles free for all players. EA announced that during their E3 presentation-o-rama today, also showing off some swish action spanning all the Wars in a new trailer as well as hosting a lengthy live demo of actual gameplay. First, the fancy E3 2017 trailer: Read the rest of this entry »

A Way Out is a co-op prison break game from Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons dev

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is one of the best co-op games I’ve ever played, which is remarkable because it’s a singleplayer game. One of its creators, film-maker Josef Fares, has announced a new game as part of Electronic Arts’ EA Originals indie label. A Way Out [official site] is a split-screen two-player prison break game, so naturally I’m calling it Brothers: A Tale of Two Cons. Take a look.

Read the rest of this entry »

BioWare tease new sci-fi IP Anthem – full reveal tomorrow

BioWare have teased their new IP, Anthem [official site], at EA’s E3 press conference. We know very little about it, but it’ll use the Frostbite engine, it’s sci-fi and it involves POWER ARMOUR. Here’s the plot, based on what I know from the teaser trailer: Humanity lives behind a great big wall, hiding from MONSTERS, and occasionally nipping out in their supersuits to biff those monsters.

Let’s call it Attack On Titanfall then, eh?

Read the rest of this entry »

Need for Speed Payback shows cars punching cars

EA have blasted the first “gameplay trailer” for Need For Speed Payback [official site] during their E3 announce-o-rama, showing a cut-down mission of cars battering cars so they can beat up a truck and steal another car from its belly. It’s fast and furious but, sadly, has no Jason Statham. Have a peek: Read the rest of this entry »

Battlefield trailer shows the Eastern Front

In The Name of the Tsar is the title of September’s Battlefield 1 [official site] expansion, which producer Andrew Gulotta says will bring “a revolution” to the game. It’s bringing eight new maps, the Hussar cavalry, the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, and new forms of player progression to help with specialisation. It’s coming September and you can see a little glimpse below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Star Wars and sports stars: EA’s E3 press conference live

Electronic Arts are kicking off E3 this year with their own press conference, which starts at 12pm local time here in Los Angeles. That’s 3PM Eastern, 8PM in the UK…around fifteen minutes from now. You can watch the conference live in the stream below, and I’ll be covering the main stories as soon as they happen.

Highlights will include more details on Star Wars: Battlefront II, hopefully letting us know what to expect from the singleplayer campaign, and a closer look at the just-announced Need For Speed Payback. Also sports. Lots of sports, including the two most popular varieties of football in the form of FIFA and Madden. The latter almost certainly won’t be announced for PC, which is a shame because American Football is a turn-based strategy game, so PC should be its natural home.

Edit: there’s a strong suggestion that we’ll get at least a teaser trailer for BioWare’s mysterious Project Dylan, which probably has nothing to do with either the Nobel Prize winning electric Judas or The Magic Roundabout.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cryptic are making a Magic: The Gathering MMORPG

Cryptic Studios, the creators of superhero MMORPG City of Heroes, are making a free-to-play “action MMORPG” [official site] based on Wizards of the Coasts’ mega-hit collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. Publishers Perfect World Entertainment, who announced the game this week, don’t have a name for it yet, they don’t have anything to show of it (all the artwork in this post is from cards), and they can’t tell us anything about it, but… huh!

Update: Oh for… I’d missed Cryptic’s follow-up information that yep, it is an MMORPG, what a silly sausage I am. Read the rest of this entry »

Dirt 4 screeches out

Parp parp! Codemasters released Dirt 4 [official site] on Friday night, continuing the adventures of those naughty cars who like driving in the mud. If you’ve not played the series before, I’ll explain that it’s basically the teen companion to Pixar’s Cars. Can Dirty Denise, Big Barry, Mudflap Mahendra, Tailpipe Tam, and Pete the Puddles win the race, save the day, and discover the true meaning of teamwork – and friendship? Watch the launch trailer for a few hints (note: no spoilers, though plenty of spoilers): Read the rest of this entry »

What are we all playing this weekend

An illustration from 'Sing-Song. A nursery rhyme book. ... With ... illustrations by A. Hughes, etc.'

E3 is upon us! The huge trade show doesn’t officially begin until Tuesday but a lot of the big and exciting stuff will happen this weekend in livestreamed pre-show presentation. It’s a game-o-rama. Our Adam is out there in Los Angeles and we’ll be covering things from afar too.

But first, what are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on. Read the rest of this entry »

Outer Orbit Sushi has such charming alien gifs!

Outer Orbit Sushi

Look! Look at this cute sushi game! It’s called Outer Orbit Sushi and it’s one of those projects with a little devlog over on the TIGSource forums. The developer, Mike Davenport, only just started posting about the game so I assume it’s super early days but it’s billed as a strategic match-line puzzle where you feed little alien customers by navigating the plates in front of you. Read the rest of this entry »

RPS Feature Press 'x' to hear poem

Saved Games: Interstate ‘76 is the game worth saving from 1997

Every game released before 2015 is being destroyed. We only have time to rescue one game from each year. Not those you’ve played to death, or the classics that the industry has already learned from. We’re going to select the games that still have more to give. These are the Saved Games.

There’s a moment just seconds into Interstate ‘76’s intro cinematic that I think neatly captures its spirit: two American hot rods are racing along a desert highway, one firing its roof-mounted machine guns perfectly in sync with the wacka-wacka funk guitar underpinning the scene, while the other weaves from side to side in front of it, also in time with the music. There are probably a total of seventy polygons onscreen, and yet the game’s stylistic vision and world of bizarre menace are communicated instantly.

Set in an alt-history southwestern USA in which the 1973 oil crisis provoked the rise of criminal gangs and a resultant vigilante uprising, Interstate ‘76 is a vehicular combat game as concerned with nailing an aesthetic as it is with the mechanics of cars shooting at one another. It’s a game that achieves remarkable harmony between its visual style, narrative and what you do as the player, and it does so in a world that’s not quite seventies pastiche or fantasy dystopia. Instead, it’s something strange and distinct in between the two. It is the game release of 1997 that should be preserved forevermore. Read the rest of this entry »

RPS Feature Four players, one manager

Football Manager 2017 pass-and-save diary, part one: A game of four halves

Two of us know far too much about football. Two of us know far too little. Together, we will create chaos for once-proud Premiership club Leicester City.

Here’s the deal. In Football Manager Touch 2017 (chosen over the full-fat version as it’ll move quicker), we take control of Leicester for the 2016-2017 season, which is effectively working just a few months behind what’s actually happening now. That being that Leicester won the title last year, but are having a hard time this year. You ain’t seen nothing yet, lads. Every quarter of a season, whoever’s in charge passes their savegame onto the next player. As we’re alternating between people who know what they’re doing and people who don’t, this is going to involve quite some degree of calamity and, hopefully, salvation.

It starts with me. Graham, Pip and Adam will follow. Adam has observed that if the club is not in the relegation zone when the save reaches him, he will consider it a great victory. Oh dear. Read the rest of this entry »

Dauntless offers new footage, new monster deets!

Dauntless

The owl bear monster at the start of the new Dauntless [official site] trailer reminds other people of Trico from The Last Guardian right? It’s not just me? Also when they talk about Ramsgate they mean like a mythical place on the Shattered Isles rather than the place just along the coast from Margate in Kent, yeah? Let’s catch up with the alpha gameplay trailer as I try to figure this nonsense out. Read the rest of this entry »

Play The Division, Steep and Trials Fusion for free this weekend

The Division outside banner

There’s a platter of free stuff going at Ubisoft this weekend. Post-apocalyptic online shooter The Division [official site], winter sports sim Steep [official site] and two-wheeling platformer Trials Fusion [official site] all available to play for diddly squat until 8pm on Sunday (UK time) through Ubisoft’s Uplay client.

Now, I know some of these games are getting long in the tooth but there are probably some of you out there that, like me, have been meaning to play at least one of them but have never got round to it.

Read the rest of this entry »

RPS Feature I really really really wanna Syzygyrior

Have You Played… Caves Of Qud?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Look, the way this normally works is that I ask “have you played [name of game]?” and then I sort of assume that you haven’t and tell you why you should. It’s a little different this time though because even though I have played Caves of Qud [official site], I’m hoping you lot can tell me why I should go back and play it again, because I’ve barely managed to scratch the surface. Read the rest of this entry »

« Older Entries