The Maw - 11th-16th March 2024
Our weekly news liveblog, and the week's most appetising game releases
A new week has slouched into view, and with it a slight shift in The Maw's terrifying visage. A new presence can be seen through the mist, perched on its shoulder, whispering tendrils of video game news nuggets into its greedy, hungry ear. The Maw appears sated, but will the distraction hold while we await the return of our news editor Edwin, whose long weekend sojourns won't conclude until tomorrow? We pray and hope it will be satisfied in this relatively quiet week of game releases and newsy happenings, lest it turn its awful gaze upon us with a wrathful vengeance. FEED THE MAW.
Here are the games we've got our beady eyes on this week, at time of writing: brutal, but extremely stylish action RPG Death Of A Wish (11th March); the Metroid-inspired Rebel Transmute (11th March); turn-based fantasy roguelike Goblin Stone (12th March); WayForward's new Contra run 'n' gunner Contra: Operation Galuga (12th March); the early access launch of beloved team-based FPS Tribes 3: Rivals (12th March); retro love letter and archive project Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story (13th March); I'm not sure it needs to exist, but here it is anyway Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection (14th March); Outcast: A New Beginning (15th March).
As always, if there's something we've overlooked in our weekly scouring, please do pop your suggestions and recommendations in the comments. The Maw is hungry, and welcomes all titbits of news and shiny new video game releases. Have a good week!
Our live coverage of this event has finished.
MONDAY HAS ARISEN
FEED THE MAW.The Overwatch 2 x Cowboy Beebop skins that Graham posted about last week got a second trailer, where you can see them in more detail.
Someone let Ernest Cline attempt a metaverse, starting with some sort of multi-IP Fortnite clone called Open, and I am heated. They allege it is coming to early access as part of the Readyverse, which was previously announced as launching this year.
Final Fantasy 16’s PC release sounds pretty close, with a demo first so you can test its “somewhat high” specs.
The Finals’ Season 2 brings hacker powers, a 5v5 mode, a new map and more to the multiplayer shooter later this week.
PUBG is taking the fight to Fortnite with destructible environments and more transportation items in 2024, along with plans for more frequent gun balancing and a move to Unreal Engine 5.
Destiny 2 is crossing over with Ghostbusters next week, complete with a Slimer Ghost and Echo-1 (and a horny Sparrow).
WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE TUESDAY
Beat to quarters! FEED THE MAW.Forza's big progression system overhaul goes live today.
Also out today: Death Trick: Double Blind, a lavish-looking visual novel in which you are a magician who is also a private eye, investigating a murder in a travelling circus.
A new extended trailer for space strategy sim Falling Frontier, which I continue to think looks very swish.
We've also been emailed about this cute little puzzle game, originally on Switch, that's coming to PC on the 24th of April. Tents And Trees is sort of a twist on picross featuring little tents. And little trees. I played the demo and enjoyed it - it's clean and extremely easy to play.
A long, interesting Youtuber chat featuring Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt in which we learn about how exactly Helldivers 2 handles stealth - which is to say, it technically doesn't. Rather, stealth exists simply because "everything has to make sense".
The new edition of Monster Hunter Stories hits Steam on 14th June.
A Helldivers 2 patch appears! Better shoot it.
Botanica is a 2D platformer from a young indie team with visuals reminscent of LocoRoco.
Settlers-alike Pioneers Of Pagonia has received its first major patch, which adds a fisher hut, warehouse, unit and production statistics, and much more besides.
Tribes 3: Rivals entered Steam Early Access today, with a roadmap of updates for the next several months which includes new maps and weapons. Is it really Tribes if you can't fly a Shrike, though?
Starbreeze have parted ways with their CEO, six months after the disastrous launch of Payday 3. The board say they felt new leadership was required, and have appointed the former CEO of Focus Home Interactive as interim CEO.
TopSpin 2K25 has an April 26th release date and will feature all four grand slams, famous tennis arenas, and pros past and present including Serena Williams, Roger Federer and Andre Agassi.
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom launches on April 9th and looks utterly delightful. It's a Nintendo 64 throwback platformer-collectathon, but there's no jump button, because you're a car. You can play a demo now.
WEDNESDAY IT IS
Radiation levels are off the charts this morning as the Maw is swarmed by AI spambots, triggering a Gastric Singularity. FEED IT.A trailer for Battlefield 2042's seventh season, which includes new maps and guns.
Magic stealth sim Ereban: Shadow Legacy has a Steam and Epic Games Store release date - 10th April. I've not come across this one before and the trailer seems a bit good.
In a truly horrendous assault on the nerves of videogames news editors worldwide, ConcernedApe is tweeting one line from the Stardew Valley update 1.6 patch notes a day.
As passed on by Gamesradar, Ghost Ship Games would like to collaborate with Arrowhead on some kind of Helldivers X Deep Rock Galactic crossover. Dwarves know a thing or two about clearing out bugholes.
Emptyvessel are a new team "who specialize in the immersive shooter space". Staff credits include Doom, Borderlands and Call Of Duty.
You'll soon be able to make games that can be played directly on Discord as embedded apps. Here's the official blog with more.
Nobody Wants To Die is my kind of high-end cyber-bullshit.
In Nif Nif you are a piglet who uses cards and... soup to... clean... animals in... turn-based battles and - yep, there goes the last of today's functioning neurones. It's for the Young People and seems sweet. Here's the announcement trailer.
Vindictus: Defying Fate's public pre-alpha test goes live on Steam today - find out more on the game's Discord server.
Here's the full early access roadmap for fantasy survival game Enshrouded, via Steam.
As Edwin shared earlier, one of 2023’s best single-player games looks set to become one of 2024’s top multiplayer offerings, as Sea of Stars devs Sabotage reveal they're working on adding local co-op to the dazzling Chrono Trigger-inspired RPG.
Need to catch up with Final Fantasy 14 before Dawntrail? Best start now: there won’t be a free way to skip its story anytime soon, according to producer-director Yoshi-P.
Vampire survival game V Rising sinks its teeth into a full-blooded 1.0 release this May, exiting early access after two years.
You can check out Celtic-fantasy action RPG Vindictus: Defying Fate - set in the world of the 2010 MMO - in its free pre-alpha test, running until next Monday.
THURSDAY AGAIN
I have a headache. FEED THE MAW.MiniMatt says: a morsel (sorry, mawsel) of news: Steam spring sale starts this evening 6pm UK time. DFS have a sale on too.
The Maw appreciates your offerings! Here's a trailer for the Steam sale.
Fresh nooze about Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown's DLC! The first of three free updates arrives next week, and there's story DLC in the works too.
PCG has a piece on the Steam revival of Fancy Pants Adventures, a Flash game I wrote up for an AOL gaming blog many moons ago. Long live Flash!
The Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection is available now on Steam. It gives you the first two Pandemic games and whoops, it's got a Mostly Negative user review consensus, with criticism centring on a shortage of servers.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink has a big new update which adds a new quest, amongst other things.
Read Only Memories: Neurodiver, the sequel to 2064: Read Only Memories, finally has a definitely for real release date: it will be arriving on Steam on May 16th, and here's a new trailer to celebrate:
The latest GameDiscover newsletter sheds some light on a lawsuit for pricefixing brought against Valve, and surfaces a catty 2017 email exchange between Valve boss Gabe Newell and Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney about Valve's 30% cut of Steam game sales. An excerpt: "Generally, the economics of these 30% platform fees are no longer justifiable. There was a good case for them in the early days, but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or UA value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee. If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made."
Arrowhead have added bug-gassing missions to Helldivers 2.
A new trailer for revived MOBA Gigantic covers some of the upcoming maps you'll be playing when it comes to Steam on April 9th:
A new trailer for insectile RTS Empire Of The Ants. Explore, strategize, confront and... engage in diplomacy? How does ant diplomacy work, then?
A surprise helping of Frictional, passed onto me by Katharine earlier! In this 40 minute video, Thomas Grip breaks down the difficult development of the well-good, ocean horror Soma.
As mentioned earlier today, the Steam spring sale is now underway. Is that exciting?
Epic's spring sale is also underway, running from today until March 28th. More interestingly, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is free to keep if you grab it before the 21st.
RimWorld is getting a new expansion and its first major update in a year. The DLC, Anomaly, will add horror-inspired scenarios featuring parasites and fleshbeasts and is due out in one month. The patch, 1.5, is available via an unstable beta branch now.
Final Factory, which transposes Factorio's moreish efficiency-chasing construction sim to the far reaches of deep space, will launch in Early Access on April 9th.
Not to be outdone by Namco employing Brian Cox to explain Tekken, Capcom have tapped Ian McShane to explain Dragon's Dogma 2. The video should go live in about 20 minutes below:
FRIDAY FINALLY
FEED THE MAW.
Arctic Eggs is a downbeat frying pan simulator - been a while since we played one of those! Thanks to Quintin Smith (RPS in peace) for mentioning it on the Twits.
Saber have confirmed that Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, John Carpenter's Toxic Commando and Jurassic Park: Survival are still in the works, following Embracer's sale of the company to Beacon Interactive.
Brighter Shores is a new free-to-play fantasy MMORPG from Fen Research, a studio founded by original RuneScape designer Andrew Gower. It's out Q3 2024. I quite like the chunky terrain fixtures and colour scheme.
Here's a trailer for Palworld's first raid boss, Bellanoir.
Aspyr have apologised for yesterday's rocky Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection release. "At launch, we experienced critical errors with our network infrastructure," reads a statement. "The result was incredibly high ping, matchmaking errors, crashes, and servers not appearing in the browser."
Some bouncy new footage of Exo One developer Jay Weston's vehicular follow-up, Exo Rally.
A new trailer for Commandos: Origins, Kalypso's remake of the squad tactics classic.
Somebody's just mailed me about South Pole Bebop, which is Into The Breach with penguins, zombies and cards - the classic combo. Here's a trailer.
Here's some more details on Brighter Shores, the new free-to-play fantasy MMO from RuneScape creator Andrew Gower, as Edwin mentioned earlier. It's due out later in 2024 after a decade in the works, and looks to balance a nostalgic look and feel with less grind than the genre's classics.
Trying to emulate Hollywood movie soundtracks is holding video game music back, says Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu (and surprise, surprise, he doesn't think soulless AI can write a decent score, either).
Fry bacon, sausages and cigarettes to escape an Antarctica where eggs are illegal in surreal sci-fi cook-’em-up Arctic Eggs, as shared by Edwin earlier today.
Stardew Valley's creator Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone has confirmed the long-held rumour that harvesting in a certain direction is faster - but the almost decade-old bug won't remain for long, as a fix is finally due in next week's 1.6 update.