The Maw - 7th-10th May 2024
This week's most scintillating game releases, plus our weekly newsblog
It's a short week 'cos we all had a Bank Holiday yesterday, and Edwin isn't here today, which means I have donned some thick leather gloves and am standing well back to throw some sticky gobbets at The Maw. The gobbets in question? Some tasty game releases this week! Plus whatever else we think might be interesting enough in PC gaming news to appease it - and you.
This week in game release news pertinent to me, specifically, is Nancy Drew: Mystery Of The Seven Keys (7th May), although you won't see me playing it for a while. In more universally interesting news is the 1.0 launch of vamp-'em-up survival crafting game V Rising (and in more Universalisly interesting news, Europa Universalis IV is getting an expansion pack called Winds Of Change) (both 8th May). Crow Country and Cryptmaster bring different but somehow similar spooky puzzle midweek, along with the next Vampire Survivors update Operation Guns, followed by the presumably much more cute than all of those Little Kitty Big City (all 9th May). Busy few days, eh? I'm sure there was something else that came out over the last few days, what was it now? Oh! Hades 2!
We needs must feed The Maw, an unknowable beast that must have stowed away in Edwin's bindle, and hopefully the releases above will be enough. But usually it isn't, which is why you can follow along as we desperately chuck more newskibble into this liveblog. If you want to help you can comment with nutritious news yourself!
Our live coverage of this event has finished.
MY DUDES, IT IS TUESDAY
Try to hold on to that knowledge. The Maw is known to trip up confused feet. FEED THE MAW.After all the kerfuffle over the weekend, Arrowhead's head arrow Johan Pilestedt has joked about making a new in-game cloak based on the reviewbombing Helldivers 2 got. Except maybe it's not a joke...?
The Bathrooms, a sort-of-pisstake of The Backrooms horror copypasta concept, in which you are trapped in a giant and endless school toilet, does actually look cool. I'm into the endless tiles, unironically. Public toilets have big liminal space energy. On the other hand, The Bathrooms is internet-poisoned and mentions "copium" and you have to save a Shiba Inu. This is, of course, anti-cool.
Microsoft are shutting down multiple studios including Redfall developers Arkane Austin and the creators of Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks, as reported by IGN. Other studios hit are Mighty Dog Studios (makers of cutesy mobile game Mighty Doom) and Roundhouse Games, which will have its workforce transferred to Zenimax Online Studios, the Elder Scrolls Online developers. "A small number of roles across select Bethesda publishing and corporate teams will also be eliminated," said Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios.
The Witcher 3's REDkit modding tools will launch on May 21st. They've been available in beta for a little while, and they're a successor to the modkit launched back in 2015 - one that will allow for far more ambitious mods to the nearly ten-year-old RPG.
Remedy and Tencent have called it a day on their project codenamed Kestrel, which was due to be a premium co-operative multiplayer game. The project began life as a free-to-play co-op game under the codename Vanguard, before being re-tooled after a proof-of-concept late last year. Now Remedy say they're ditching the project entirely and re-deploying the developers to work on existing franchises - presumably the previously announced Control 2 and co-op Control spin-off.
Heading Out is out. Out-out? I'm not sure, but it's a narrative driving game in which your choices of route, your police chases, the characters you meet along the way, all define the road trip story you're playing.
WEDNESDAY IT IS, MY DUDES
I'm back! And now mostly devoid of disease.Sin Vega says: wildermyth dlc announced and it's a rather interesting one, even though I think one of its two prongs (prongggg) is about by far the least interesting part of the game. But it looks also like it could be a way to experiment and practice with designs a bit for perhaps a sequel or other game one day? who know
From the Steam page: "For the fighters, we have a roguelike tactical challenge mode with progression across runs. And for the lovers, we have A Walk in the Unlight, a new story campaign that uses the Omenroad format to take your heroes past the edge of the Yondering Lands and into worlds beyond." No release date yet.
Bungie and Sony are giving players free access to three Destiny 2 expansions ahead of The Final Shape's release in June.
Via surreal_pistachio (whose hidden comment I can't approve for some reason), sokoban-meets-Zelda game Isles of Sea and Sky is out May 22nd.
A mighty update for Dome Keeper, designed "to increase replayability and run variety way beyond what you’ve seen so far."
Launch timings for Homeworld 3, which is out in a matter of days. Days!
Redfall had a platter of updates and DLC in the works including the long-awaited offline mode, IGN reports, before Microsoft shut down Arkane Austin.
Dishonored co-director Harvey Smith has continued his thread about Arkane Austin's closure with some lengthy reflections about his time at the studio over the years.
CampFire Studio and Qooland's survival game Soulmask - in which you can possess your tribespeople to make use of their skills - will release on June 18th.
Amusingly, the Sharpshooters added to Shadows of Doubt by the latest Sharpshooter Assassin update aren't as sharp as they could be. They keep missing and leaving massive piles of shell casings everywhere. The devs are working on a fix, but I for one cherish the idea of a city's worth of inept snipers.
I’m fascinated by this open-world delivery game that sounds like Death Stranding on a horse in 13th-century Mongolia, boasting “unparalleled equine realism”. Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori gallops onto early access in September!
In perhaps the most Fortnite story yet, the battle royale game has temporarily banned its new Yoda backpack for opening game-crashing wormholes while doing Futurama’s Zoidberg Scuttle.
As Edwin shared earlier, the next Battlefield game will have “connected” multiplayer and single-player offerings, made by the series’ biggest team yet, according to EA's human-shaped corpobot Andrew Wilson.
Darkest Dungeon 2 should start rolling out its long-awaited mod support soon, with custom items by the end of June and whole new characters later on.
IT IS THURSDAY, MY RELIABLE DUDES HAVE INFORMED ME
The Maw does not recognise the petty human concept of days, only news!Arrowhead's CEO has suggested that the developers have "gone too far" with certain Helldivers 2 balancing patches and need a new approach. They've been "removing the fun", the dogs!
Nightingale has a new updates roadmap. An offline mode is "incoming" alongside new quests and NPCs and "tree-felling improvements". I was killed by a tree falling on me in Nightingale once. I hope that's still possible - it was rather fun.
A fair few james gournalists are claiming that Microsoft's Perfect Dark reboot is a bit of a disaster - the project is said to have floundered since last year, when it was reported to have made "little meaningful progress" since the 2020 announcement. Eurogamer has rounded up some of the gossip for consideration.
As reported by Eurogamer, there's trouble a-brewing down Elite Dangerous way with regard to a currently paywalled new ship that's a bit too handy in combat.
According to Xbox honcho Matt Booty via The Verge, Microsoft "need smaller games that give us prestige and awards". This certainly describes Hi-Fi Rush, created by Tango Gameworks, which Microsoft shuttered this week.
I’m still getting around to Total War: Pharaoh, because there is too much Warhammer to warhammer through, and here’s Creative Assembly talking about almost doubling the size of the game’s world map in the next update.
THE DUDES HAVE ONCE AGAIN CONSULTED THE ORACLE AND DECIDED THAT IT IS FRIDAY
MEED THE FAW.Here's a new Harmony update for A Highland Song. It adds five new musical tracks, "story surprises" and a Landmark feature "which lets you see the peaks and paths you've discovered on your runs so far when scanning the landscape - and with a quick button press, lets you jump to the associated map".
Role-playing musical Stray Gods is getting some DLC featuring the quite-dead bard Orpheus, developers Summerfall Studios have announced. You briefly meet Orpheus in the base game, but this new story will see you embody the bard for "hours of interactive music".
Possibly incomparable time travel story 1000xResist is out now.
Former Microsoft senior PR Brad Hilderbrand (who was laid off by the company this May) has blogged on LinkedIn about plateauing Game Pass growth and Microsoft closing Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Studios. A little excerpt: "The biggest paradox with Game Pass is that basically every game that launches on the service badly misses its sales goals."
Venerable zombie survival game DayZ is getting a Frostline expansion with the opportunity to "discover an untouched archipelago where time stands still." The new Sakhal map is 83km square, and is said to be a lot tougher on the player than the existing areas. Here's a trailer.
Here's Xbox president Sarah Bond non-responding to a Bloomberg question about why they canned Tango, given the success of Hi-Fi Rush.
In Emberstorm's Reka you are a forest witch who lives in a chicken-legged house. Sound bewitching? You might want to try the Steam demo then.
Nomad city-builder Dream Engines has hit the big 1.0 and people seem to like it.
Summerfall founder and former Dragon Age scribe David Gaider takes a dim view of an EA executive's enthusiasm for generative AI tools.
Fallout 4 is getting a new graphics and performance update next week, Bethesda have announced. No details as yet on what exactly it does, but it's worrying news for any modders still scrambling to update their mods following the last big patch a couple of weeks ago.
Stellaris' director has insisted “ethical use of AI is very important to us” after generating two voices for latest DLC expansion The Machine Age, as well as using AI artwork and text prompts for "inspiration" during its development.
Dead by Daylight appears to be teasing a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster as its next killer, ahead of an eight-year (!) anniversary stream laying out its upcoming chapter on May 14th.
The Rogue Prince of Persia, the series' colourful roguelite 2D platformer from the current devs behind Dead Cells, has dodged out of the way of Hades 2 by pushing its early access launch - originally due next week - later into the month. Expect news of a revised release date on Monday.
As Edwin mentioned earlier, Fallout 4 is already getting another patch next week after waiting years for the last "next-gen update". Good luck to those modders out there already reeling with the most recent changes.
Warner Bros. have seemingly about-faced when it comes to delisting all Adult Swim Games from Steam. Instead, they've contacted a handful of developers about transferring control of Steam pages to them.
Ghosts Of Tsushima Director's Cut is no longer available for sale on Steam in nearly 180 countries, due to it requiring players to have a PSN account to access certain online features. PSN accounts are not accessible in these countries. Players who pre-ordered the game on Steam in these regions have reported that they have been auto-refunded. The samurai action-adventure is due to release this coming Thursday, May 16th.
Instruments Of Destruction has hit 1.0 and left Early Access. It's a physics sandbox demolition sim and developed in part by one of the tech designers on Red Faction Guerilla, a classic of knocking down buildings.
Game Developer report that Steam has been banned in Vietnam.