Codeorkney

Arkane revealed in February that its upcoming vampire shooter Redfall will require a “a persistent online connection,” even if you’re playing by yourself. The reaction to the news wasn’t great, both as a matter of principle and practicality. Believe it or not, there are still people who live in areas with wonky internet connections, and why should we have to be connected to the internet to play a singleplayer game anyway?

In an interview with Eurogamer, director Harvey Smith said Arkane has “a lot of empathy” for people who can’t reliably play online, and is looking at making changes to the game so it can be played without a connection.

“We listen. And we have already started work to address this in the future,” Smith said. “We have to do some things like encrypt your save games and do a bunch of UI work to support it. And so we are looking into—I’m not supposed to promise anything—but we’re looking into and working actively toward fixing that in the future.”

It doesn’t sound like Redfall really needs to be online at all, at least for gameplay purposes. Smith said there are no microtransactions or in-game store, and DLC is planned “but it’ll just be…

Grand Theft Auto 6 remains both confirmed and unannounced, a Schrödinger-like state of affairs that has some fans so wound up they’re seeing signs and portents just about everywhere they look. The latest harbinger from on high? A tweet about a new outfit being added to Red Dead Online.

This is the tweet. What do you see?

Okay. Now, what do other people see? 

Some see this:

It has to be on purpose from r/GTA6

It’s pretty wild: Somehow, GTA fans have discovered a sign from the powers that be that’s even more tenuous than the moon tease from earlier this month. At least that one had the Roman numeral VI clearly visible, right? This, on the other hand, is just—well, it’s pretty funny, really.

The amusement comes not from the likelihood (or lack thereof) of a new GTA reveal, but from the fact that at this stage I don’t think anyone is entirely sure who’s taking it seriously and who’s just stirring the pot. There are no doubt true believers—there are always true believers—but I get the distinct impression that an awful lot of the windup is coming from people having an ironic laug…

Ned Luke, the actor whose roles include GTA 5’s Michael De Santa, has gone off on an AI company that released an unlicensed voice chatbot based on the character, and succeeded in having the offending bot nuked from the internet (first spotted by PCGamesN).

AI company WAME had tweeted a link to its Michael chatbot on January 14 along with the text: “Any GTA fans around here? Now take your gaming experience to another level. Try having a realistic voice conversation with Michael De Santa, the protagonist of GTA 5, right now!”

Unfortunately for WAME, it quickly attracted the attention of Luke, who does not seem like the type of man to hold back. “This is fucking bullshit WAME,” says Luke (though I am definitely hearing all this in Michael’s voice). “Absolutely nothing cool about ripping people off with some lame computer estimation of my voice. Don’t waste your time on this garbage.”

Luke also tagged Rockstar Games and the SAG-AFTRA union, since when the chatbot and tweets promoting it have been deleted. Fellow actors including Roger Clark weighed in with sympathy about how much this kind of stuff sucks, and our boy wasn’t done by a long …

The first balance patch of Helldivers 2 went down a touch poorly with players, which kicked off some prickly arguments on the official Discord between players and devs. As my fellow staff writer Morgan Park rightfully pointed out yesterday, I do think everyone needs to chill out a bit—even if there are some wrinkles to iron.

In case you’re new to the hell(dive) of difficulties seven to nine, let me lay out the issue: Higher-difficulty missions against bugs set you against two major headaches, the bile titan and the charger—both of which have heavy armour which cause most conventional weapons to simply bounce off their exoskeletons. 

The Railgun, a stupendously effective anti-armour weapon, received some heavy nerfs. This has quickly led to players (who had previously been managing the local bug population just fine) suddenly getting curb stomped and slathered in acid by the hive’s finest. Naturally, the Automatons have their fair share of hard-to-deal-with tanks, too.

As for the precise issue, the debuffed Railgun no longer has those armour-piercing qualities, and its damage to limbs has been reduced. It regains its armour-piercing if you use i…

Helldivers 2 appears to be finding its stride after a launch that I hesitate to describe as a rocky one, only because it was more of a rollercoaster—incredible popularity in its opening months that tanked servers for weeks, a huge, stonking controversy that saw it glassed with a review bombing, and what overall seems like a wild scramble to meet the demands of its sudden spotlight.

The solution, sensibly, involves slower but more comprehensive updates, such as The Escalation of Freedom, which is coming next week. It seems like Arrowhead’s strung its bow on making sure the next few updates add to the game’s core systems, too, as outright stated by the company’s fairly-fresh CEO asking Reddit for help.

Help brainstorm ideas for resource use for progression from r/Helldivers

Shams Jorjani, who stepped into the role back in May, promises that he’s received blessings from the game’s designers and that he’s not “on a wild business suit venture here.” He then goes on to admit that, once you’ve bought all of the game’s upgrades, there’s really not much to spend anything on—leading to most dedicated patriots sitting on m…

Castlevania is in a very weird place right now. There hasn’t been a proper new entry since 2014’s highly questionable Lords of Shadow 2, developed by Mercury Steam, while quite incredibly Konami has not developed a mainline entry in-house since 2010’s Harmony of Despair (excluding a mobile title, Grimoire of Souls). Despite this drought, Castlevania is arguably more popular and beloved than ever, largely thanks to an excellent Netflix animated series and the determination of various indie developers that it shall not go gently into that good night.

There are games like Vampire Survivors that wear their love for Castlevania on both sleeves, where the lineage is clear even if it’s not an official product, and then there’s what’s happening with the superb Dead Cells. Motion Twin’s action-roguelike was similarly inspired by Castlevania in its elements, and such has been its success that (as first announced late last year) it’s getting a major piece of DLC called Return to Castlevania.

The developers have now released a new trailer showcasing the DLC, and announced it will release March 6. If you’ve any love for Castlevania then this is going to hit all the right n…

The back-and-forth between Microsoft and Sony over the former’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard continues. This time, Microsoft chief communications officer Frank Shaw has taken to Twitter to accuse Sony of misleading EU regulators over Microsoft’s plans for the Call of Duty franchise in the event the acquisition goes through.

“I hear Sony is briefing people in Brussels claiming Microsoft is unwilling to offer them parity for Call of Duty if we acquire Activision,” wrote Shaw (via VGC), before claiming that “Nothing could be further from the truth”. He goes on to reference Microsoft’s much-ballyhooed “10 year deal to give [Sony] parity on timing, content, features, quality, playability, and any other aspect of the game”.

That’s an offer that Microsoft’s been dangling in Sony’s face since at least November, but it hasn’t been taken up yet. Well, not by Sony, anyway. Nintendo inked a basically identical parity deal with Microsoft in December, despite CoD’s total lack of presence on Switch.

Shaw goes on to say, well, a lot of things Microsoft has said before across countless tweets, press releases, competition authority filings, and op-eds in the Wa…

Kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it. Sure, the planet’s on fire and they’ll spend most of their future looking after me in a retirement home as I ramble about how good I used to be at Balatro, but have you seen the games they’ve been getting lately? Back in my day, children’s games were dismal 3D platformer movie tie-ins—not magical storybook adventures made with real love and care that ingeniously riff on 2D Zelda, yet also have tons of personality all of their own. Bah!

You play Jot, the titular squire and star of a series of children’s books in which you foil the dastardly plans of a right git of a wizard called Humgrump. At first, the game is a wonderfully animated 2D storybook. You’ve got an upgradable sword that delightfully makes words like POW and WHAM appear when you hit enemies with it—it’s that sort of vibe.

After a brief spot of monster-bashing, you soon meet Jot’s adorable friends Violet and Thrash and the scene-stealing Moonbeard, a music-loving mentor figure who helps himself to some of the game’s best lines. Traditional light combat, puzzling, and pla…

Manor Lords’ sole developer, Greg “Slavic Magic” Styczeń, has made a plea to everyone with a review copy of the soon-to-be-released city builder: please stop messing around with the castle planner and breaking the game. 

In response to the recent issue, he tweeted, “I just saw one press review try to cheese their way and build town walls with the castle planner tool, please restrain yourself from doing so. I’ll add a *proper* town wall tool in one of the updates and the castle planner is meant for manors/castles. Should’ve locked it for now.” 

One instance of these irregular town walls, perhaps the first, seems to come from gaming YouTuber One Proud Bavarian, who is currently trying to “build historically accurate and authentic designs in Manor Lords” according to the video’s description. 

So far you can already build wooden fences which can work like scaled down town walls—it’s good for making everything look a bit more uniform. But that’s not enough for some, especially if, like One Proud Bavarian, you’ve got your heart set on building something that’s more historically accurate. It seems that there’s no stopping people once they’ve …

Lasers—pretty cool, eh? NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had previously figured out to use lasers to beam a video of Taters the cat through space to the Psyche spacecraft, which at the time was around 30 million kilometres away. For Americans and Brits, that’s really far away in miles. Today, however, JPL has figured out it can use lasers to communicate with that same craft now that it’s over seven times further away and still score a 25 Mbps connection.

The Pysche craft is around 226 million kilometres (140 million miles) away from Earth. It’s somewhere just outside of the orbit of Mars, on its way to visit an asteroid of the same name in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Despite being so bloody far away, data streaming is working a-okay.

The Psyche craft was able to send and receive information from NASA JPL’s high-power uplink laser facility in Wrightwood, California at around 25 Mbps in a test on April 8. That means, even at this mind-boggling distance, it remains comparable to domestic broadband. 

Though at that sort of distance, using a light-based comms system, you’re looking at something like a 750 second ping, or 12.5…