When we talk about videogames taking cues from Hollywood, it’s normally a reference to bombastic cinematics or a stacked cameo cast, not really behind the scenes staff. That’s the case for Baldur’s Gate 3 though, which used intimacy coordinators—professional advocates for actors appearing in explicit scenes—to help manage production of its romances between characters.

As we’ve already seen, Baldur’s Gate 3 romances can get quite spicy, and Larian used motion capture with actors to create its cinematics, as seen in a cinematics explainer video from a couple years ago. There was lots of combat and conversation to capture, but also sex. Thus the professionals that Larian called in.

According to SAG-AFTRA, “an intimacy coordinator is an advocate, a liaison between actors and production, and a movement coach and/or choreographer in regards to nudity and simulated sex and other intimate and hyper-exposed scenes.”

Unlike movies and TV, moc…

At a games conference in Sofia, Bulgaria earlier this year, Larian gameplay scripter Mihail Kostov gave a presentation outlining the philosophies and strategies the studio employs to ensure games like Baldur’s Gate 3 stay playable even as players are actively tearing them apart. Recently made public on YouTube (via GamesRadar), Kostov’s talk explains how Larian addresses “edge cases”—times when “player action may push a system to the extreme”—with solutions that reward, rather than stifle, creativity.

We’ve written about the near-absurd depth of contingencies Baldur’s Gate 3 has in place to account for player chaos, like its roster of purpose-built backup NPCs who stand ready to replace any plot-relevant characters you might murder (and replacements for those replacements). While every developer designs with edge cases in mind, Kostov says Larian likes to “draw the line further out.”

Larian goes to such lengths to accommodate edge cases because,…

Bryan Fury is coming to Tekken 8, Bandai Namco has revealed. Twice.

Everyone’s favourite deranged zombie cyborg was confirmed for Tekken 8’s character roster at this year’s Combo Breaker fighting tournament, held over the weekend. The announcement came in the form of a trailer, viewable above, with the tagline “A wildcard for violence and destruction”.

The announcement didn’t go entirely smoothly, however. As reported by VGC, the trailer was apparently posted to an official Instagram account earlier than intended, left up long enough to start circulating among YouTube channels before being pulled offline.

Tekken producer Michael Murray issued an apology for the premature reveal on Twitter, stating “I apologise to fans who saw that particular thing in not the way @Harada_Tekken and I had wanted it to happen,” Murray added. “I feel bad for all you guys.”

According to VGC, Tekken 8’s director Katsuhiro Harada also commented on the leak in a subsequently deleted …

Larian is following up Baldur’s Gate 3 with not one but two new RPGs. And, unsurprisingly, they’ll likely be big ‘uns. That’s just Larian’s style, but it does come with some problems, especially when they’re following a game as massive and elaborate as Baldur’s Gate 3. 

One of the challenges inherent in following up a massive RPG with more beefy RPGs is finding original ideas to fill them with. Chatting with writing director Adam Smith for Baldur’s Gate 3’s first anniversary (check out the full interview on Larian’s past, present and future), he tells me that this is an issue Larian’s currently bumping up against. 

“One of the biggest problems we have now is that whenever we’re talking about things, we say we did that in BG3,” says Smith. “And it turns out, we did a lot of things in BG3 when we think back to it.” It’s the classic ‘Simpsons did it’ problem. 

This isn’t a new concern for Larian, though. The first Divinity: Original Sin was also pretty …

Baldur’s Gate 3 has choices—oodles of ’em. Choices that Larian’s accounted for, for the most part. In my recent playthrough, instead of taking a certain character to a certain body for a story quest, I picked up the corpse and dumped it back in camp like a cat bringing their owner a dead bird. The dialogue still worked (though I had to have them in my party) besides one or two out-of-context lines. 

However, one player has found an edge-case scenario that the game doesn’t account for at all, and it’s honestly pretty reasonable when you break it down. Spoilers for Act 1 and Gale’s storyline to follow, as well as a minor Act 3 spoiler. 

As outlined by ThePawn08 on the game’s subreddit, reverse-pickpocketing a dead wizard onto the devil incarnate isn’t on the list of things Larian thought to program. For context: Gale of Waterdeep (ponderer of orbs and all-around dweeb) has a sphere of Netherese mag…

It’s been a rough time for Paradox. Bloodlines 2 has been a (wrong kind of) nightmare, it cut ties with Harebrained Schemes after Lamplighters League underperformed, Cities: Skylines 2 came out with a raft of tech bugs, Millennia disappointed, and, of course, the company totally canned its Sims competitor Life by You and shuttered the studio making it.

So it’s not surprising that the company’s Interim Report, released today, contains the kind of news that will make you suck air through your teeth. The good news? The company was still operating at a profit in its second quarter, which lasted from April 1 to June 30 this year. The bad news? It was only by the skin of its teeth, and only really thanks to its homegrown stalwarts—CK3, Victoria 3, Hearts of Iron 4—rather than any of the risks it’s taken in the last few years. Though Age of Wonders 4, from Triumph Studios, has also done well for Paradox.

The headline number is a decrease in operating profit of 90%…

Just when I thought I couldn’t get more invested in the adorably bloody roguelike world of Cult of the Lamb, developer Devolver Digital teamed up with comic book publisher Oni Press to launch a new comic series, Cult of the Lamb: The First Verse, written by Alex Paknadel and drawn by Troy Little. 

As someone who has only just begun their descent into a cult (thanks to some very enthusiastic pestering from a friend), this comic series looks like a brilliant way to get to know all the creatures that I’ll eventually encounter in Cult of the Lamb. The series will also follow the star of the show, The Lamb, as they forge ahead on their path of recruiting new followers and expanding their religious cult. 

It’s clear that I’m not the only one excited by this prospect. With 30 days to go until the all-or-nothing deadline of April 12, Cult of the Lamb: The First Verse reached its goal of £7,800 in just six minutes—now the pledges are sitting at $89,500/&poun…

I’ve recently started running a Pathfinder 2e edition game for my formerly 5e friend group—and while I’m not abandoning D&D in its entirety, I’ve been super impressed with the system so far.

One blessing to my wallet is how much of it you get for basically free—Archives of Nethys is an officially-supported hub that has all of the player content, creatures, and so on from all sources. It feels like piracy from a sketchy wiki—but it’s not, Paizo’s 100% okay with it.

It’s not in lockstep with official content, but it’s bountiful enough that I’ve not minded one bit. Conversely, its Foundry Virtual Tabletop (VTT) integration just… gives you everything bar the adventures themselves.

Basically, Paizo makes most of its money through official adventure paths, which, as a DM who runs exclusively homebrew, makes me feel like I’ve been robbing Paizo, somehow. Well, great news: There’s now a way for me to feel like even more of a cheapskate, as th…

AMD is finally committing to rounding out its RDNA 3 GPU stack, with Dr. Lisa Su promising it is going to be launching new “enthusiast-class” graphics cards before the end of October. We’ve already had sources suggesting an August reveal for new cards, and a September launch is looking pretty good right now.

It’s promising that Dr. Su is stating publicly that AMD is going to be releasing multiple cards, which implies that we will see both the RX 7800 and RX 7700 GPUs dropping in the next few months. After it dropped a solo Radeon RX 7600 at the end of May, there was maybe some concern that it would continue to drip-feed us RDNA 3 cards.

The announcement came in the recent AMD Q2 financials call, where some more green shoots of the PC industry revival have been noted. Those shoots are still pretty fragile, though, as AMD’s gaming segment is still suffering from lower GPU sales, down both year-on-year and compared to the previous three months. Thankfully, it’s semi-custom&…

Last year, Aaron A. Reed published 50 Years of Text Games, a fascinating history of the kind of games where you have to “get lamp” or “float down the Columbia river”. It covered ancient classics like Hunt the Wumpus and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy through to more modern games doing fascinating things with letters on a screen like Dwarf Fortress and 80 Days. Now he’s published a companion volume called Further Explorations, which covers stuff that had to be left out of the original—which focused on one exemplary game from each year from 1971 to 2020—but is no less interesting.

That includes games you may have heard of like Lovecraftian horror adventure Anchorhead, as well as more obscure games, like one with a simulated model of every Manhattan block south of 110th. Reed’s just as good at retelling the story of famous Infocom classics as he is at unearthing things you’ve never heard of like Silverwolf, which was one of eight well-reviewed but now forgotten …

AMD has finally launched two new processors in its 8000-series of APUs, except these ones strictly aren’t APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) as the large integrated GPU is completely disabled. That might not seem like they’re worth considering but AMD has sweetened the deal by making them its cheapest AM5 socket chips to date.

We first heard tell of these new models, based on the non-chiplet Phoenix 2 architecture, back in March and now we’ve got a full global launch on our hands. The silicon was originally used for laptops and some handheld PCs, before making an appearance in the desktop PC market in the form of the 8000G series. The best one of those, the Ryzen 7 8700G, is a great way to start the basis of a cheap 1080p gaming PC, although it’s a little on the pricey side with a SEP of $329.

That’s the same price as the Ryzen 7 7700, which only has a very basic GPU, though its higher boost clock speed and larger L3 cache make it a better CPU than the 8700G. The new Ry…

Johan Pilestedt, the CEO of Arrowhead Games, made a visit to the Helldivers 2’s Discord recently. He answered a deluge of questions before needing to “do [his] part as a husband and watch ‘The Boys'”, though one answer in particular leapt out at me—turns out, helmets were originally meant to actually do something.

As you might be aware, helmets in Helldivers 2 are purely cosmetic. However, they have their own section in the Armoury with stat readouts and a window dedicated to showing off their bonuses—of which there are none. 

It always struck me as particularly strange. That’s a lot of UI elements dedicated to conveying the same information—every helmet is “Standard Issue” and provides 100 armour rating, speed, and stamina regen. So why make a note of it at all?

As Pilestedt reveals, Arrowhead actually had designs on making helmets a key part of your loadout: “I know there’s a convo on helmets … Originally, each helmet was go…

I love every single one of Dead Cells’ animated trailers—they’re funny, well-produced, and hit me right in my weakness for chunky and expressive linework. I’m not, however, entirely sure how the writers and animators are going to dig up a compelling narrative from Dead Cell’s bloated, five-year-long story.

Dead Cells – The Animated Series will be made by Bobbypills—the same team responsible for their trailers—and co-produced by the French Animation Digital Network. It’s set to span 10 seven-minute episodes and will “initially be exclusive to France before being made available worldwide” in 2024.

While I’m confident the series will be good fun, ‘good fun’ doesn’t carry a good story. They’ve added plenty of lore and worldbuilding to the 2018 roguelike since my initial excursions as the Beheaded, but the act of tying those threads together into a single narrative is a huge task. I can only imagine that Motion Twin’s narrative …

Seeing Obsidian’s developers make the same public statement for the third time in a year that the studio’s upcoming RPG Avowed isn’t like Skyrim reminds me of nothing so much as a prank interview with Elijah Wood—in which the Lord of the Rings co-star Dominic Monaghan torments poor Frodo with repeat enquiries into whether he wears wigs.

Well, it’s happened again. This comes after a statement made in June last year, wherein Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart told us that Avowed was no longer like Skyrim. Then an interview with PCGamesN in January, wherein Patel told them that the game was not like Skyrim. This latest assurance comes from GameInformer, who were once more told that Avowed is not (you might want to sit down) like Skyrim.

When asked about the comparison, game director Carrie Patel replies: “I think the best comparison is The Outer Worlds. I think that gives a much clearer idea of the scope of the game and also the design and layout.”

While thi…

Motherboard BIOS updates are rarely newsworthy but the latest ones from Asus and ASRock, for some of their AM5 X670 models, contain an Agesa update that provides more evidence AMD is definitely going to release a Ryzen 7000G desktop APU, using its laptop Phoenix architecture. 

Just don’t ask when.

As reported by Hardwareluxx, the fresh BIOS files contain the 1.1.0.0 version of AMD’s Agesa software. This is essentially a checklist for PCs to follow when they first boot up, to ensure that the CPU, RAM, and motherboard chipset all correctly initialise. Any new processors have to be included in the lists, otherwise, the BIOS won’t function properly.

In this latest revision, there are clear entries for Phoenix 7xxx APUs. At present, desktop PCs sporting Ryzen 7000-series CPUs are host to Raphael processors, which use one or two 5nm chiplets for the Zen 4 cores and a single 6nm IO chip, that also houses two RDNA 2 compute units for very basic graphics outpu…

If we keep bugging Todd Howard about Fallout: New Vegas, I wonder if he’ll get so irritated that he eventually turns against the game for real? For now, at least, the Bethesda Game Studios director has reiterated that he likes New Vegas, the 2010 Fallout spin-off developed by Obsidian, and also likes Obsidian, and also respects New Vegas’ lore, and also isn’t trying to erase it from history.

The question posed was a benign one, actually: On a Kinda Funny Games stream, a fan asked whether Bethesda and Obsidian now both being owned by Microsoft opens up the possibility of another collaboration. To that, Howard said that he can’t say: “I can’t speak to things that we’re doing with the franchise in the future, obviously.”

While posing the question, host Greg Miller joked that Howard didn’t have to answer at all given his rumored disdain for New Vegas. Taking the cue, Howard once again put it on record that he is not and has never been an Obsidian hater.

“First I’ll say…

It’s Lightfall day, and players are already finding new details in Destiny 2’s latest expansion. Those who visit the Tower before jetting off to Neomuna will notice some redecorating that has occurred in the time since the game went offline for maintenance. Near Zavala you’ll find the new Monument to Fellowship, and with it a memorial to a long-departed NPC.

Cayde-6 was the Nathan Fillion-voiced joker of the Vanguard—the de facto leaders of the Guardians. His death was the inciting incident of Destiny 2’s first expansion, Forsaken, and was teased heavily in the run-up to its release back in September 2018. It was a dramatic moment for fans: the first major on-screen character to die his final death in the fight against the Darkness.

The new memorial is a simple bust with a plaque showing his gun, the Ace of Spades. And when you approach, you can hear a selection of messages from characters in the game.

I’m particularly amused by Crow’s message, which you can …

In a blog post that studio manager Gary McKay said was “deeply painful and humbling to write,” BioWare announced that it is laying off roughly 50 employees in order to “preserve the health of the studio and better enable us to do what we do best: create exceptional story-driven single-player experiences filled with vast worlds and rich characters.”

“In order to meet the needs of our upcoming projects, continue to hold ourselves to the highest standard of quality, and ensure BioWare can continue to thrive in an industry that’s rapidly evolving, we must shift towards a more agile and more focused studio,” McKay wrote. “It will allow our developers to iterate quickly, unlock more creativity, and form a clear vision of what we’re building before development ramps up.

“To achieve this, we find ourselves in a position where change is not only necessary, but unavoidable. As difficult as this is to say, rethinking our approach to development inevitably means reorgani…

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has returned to the dual protagonist system that we last saw in Syndicate, letting us play as two characters—rather than having us just pick either a male or female protagonist as in Odyssey and Valhalla—with different playstyles. This immediately prompted a backlash, not because people don’t want to have two protagonists, but because one of them happened to be a Black man. 

Yasuke is an enigmatic historical figure who lived in Japan in the 16th century and is the first African to be officially recorded in the country. He arrived in Japan with Christian missionaries, after which he became an attendant of Oda Nobunaga. We don’t know a lot about Yasuke, but as an outsider who went on to serve one of the most powerful men in Japan, his story is naturally intriguing, and perfect for Assassin’s Creed, which uses history as a springboard to tell its own stories. 

When Ubisoft was researching its latest game, “Yasuke kept surfacing…

Nikolai Katselapov, the chief business development officer at World of Tanks studio Wargaming, appears to have been added to a list “of organisations and individuals involved in terrorist activities” by Belarus’ Committee for State Security (or KGB, yes, as in that KGB). In a move which was likely sparked by Wargaming pulling out of Belarus following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he is accused under article 290-1—”Financing of terrorist activities”—of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus.

Katselapov was actually added to the list all the way back on December 30, but it was only when independent Belarusian newspaper Nasha Niva (via Game World Observer) reported on the story that it came to wider public knowledge. Nasha Niva believes that Katselapov is still free, which would make sense given that Wargaming hasn’t been present in Belarus for nearly a year now, but hasn’t been able to obtain comment from the company thus far.

I’ve also reached o…

Good news for those of still fighting the good fight, still holding aloft the proud banner of truth and justice, still committed to struggle for what’s right instead of what’s simply popular. Five years after it was unceremoniously yanked from sale, Alpha Protocol is back via GOG.

If you’re of stout heart and righteous spirit, you’ll already know that Alpha Protocol is a straight-up banger, an Obsidian RPG set in the high-stakes world of modern international espionage rather than a more familiar fantasy or sci-fi setting. Yes, okay, it was deeply flawed—the game was either a cakewalk or surreally difficult depending on which skills you chose to specialise in—but it made up for it with a robust system of choice and consequence: How you chose to behave really mattered in a way few games have managed since.

But thrilled as I am that Alpha Protocol is finally back in stores (or one store, anyway), it’s not all that’s going on here. In a chat with GOG’s Z…

If I got to redesign Baldur’s Gate 3 to fit my specific preferences, the first thing I’d do is get rid of the party system. My posse of Shadowheart, Astarion, and Karlach is great, but my favorite character to roleplay is the wandering ronin—the problem solver with an air of mystery who can take care of himself (Geralt of Rivia, essentially). But alas, BG3 is built with a full party of four in mind. You could try to fly solo, but difficulty doesn’t scale to smaller parties, so fights would inevitably become impossibly punishing. Unless mods can save the day.

A new mod from Nexus user Mordread256 aims to make solo play viable with buffs inspired by a perk from Larian’s previous RPG, Divinity: Original Sin 2. “Lone Wolf” attempts to even the odds in fights by giving the player character extra opportunities to attack and a quicker leveling curve.

Here’s the full list of changes:

• Double main actions, bonus actions, spell slots, and so…
  

People did a lot of things to pass time during the early pandemic lockdowns: learn to play the guitar, make sourdough starter, spray their groceries with disinfectant. Among those popular pandemic activities was identifying murderous space goons in Among Us, and if you’ve set the social deduction game aside since then, you might be interested to know that there’s still lots of activity around it—most recently, a collaboration with a bunch of big indie games.

Announced this week, Innersloth is doing a new Cosmicube that features cosmetics from Celeste, Undertale, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Untitled Goose Game, A Hat in Time, Castle Crashers, and Alien Hominid.

A Cosmicube, for the uninitiated, is Among Us’s version of a battle pass. Once you purchase the cube with Beans, a free currency earned in-game, you can unlock the cosmetics by spending another currency you earn by playing the game. (It’s all explained here.) 

The Indie Cosmicube can be purchased wit…

In a setting as self-consciously dark as Warhammer 40,000 you really have to go out of your way to seem like “a bit much”, but the black-clad killers of the Officio Assassinorum pull it off. They look like something a teenager who read too many Wolverine comics would come up with, and I love them. After going under-represented in 40K videogames they’ll be joining the ranks of Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters in the Execution Force expansion.

A previous teaser video made the fact the assassins were coming pretty obvious, but who bothers with subtlety when you’ve got power claws and skull masks? Your squad of Grey Knights will be able to recruit four assassins, one from each of the four temples: Callidus, Vindicare, Culexus, and Eversor. Callidus are specialists in disguise and stealth, Vindicare are long-range snipers, Culexus are psychically null and therefore experts at shutting down psykers (and are also invisible to daemons), while Eversor are berserkers who just take lots …

With Diablo 4 now less than a month away—June 6 is the big day—Blizzard has unveiled the details on its post-launch plans, including its seasonal structure, cosmetic microtransactions, and the “completely optional” battle pass.

Diablo 4 will have four seasons per year, each running roughly three months and featuring its own unique “season journey.” Seasons will not expand upon the story of the campaign—that will happen in future expansions, so I guess you can consider Diablo 4 expansion plans confirmed—but will instead offer standalone seasonal questlines with their own “self-contained stories” featuring new characters and narratives.

“Ideas around the seasons are not bound by the campaign,” Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson said during today’s developer stream.

Along with the new story content, seasons will also feature “fresh gameplay,” associate game director Joe Piepiora said. 

“We want to introduce new mechanics and gamepl…

Just over a week ago, I talked about how Starfield was getting a beating on Steam. From where I’m sitting, it’s just a result of hype not meeting expectations. It’s a decent game, it’s just that ‘decent’ is a huge problem when we were all strapped in for the next big Bethesda RPG.

One thing that genuinely bothered me, however, was seeing a Bethesda developer responding to some of those negative reviews in a half-hearted attempt at damage control. It’s not inherently bad for a developer to respond to criticism—maybe not advisable, but not unheard of, especially if it’s taking fair critiques into account. That’s not what’s happening here.

As pointed out by Twitter user Juicehead (thanks, TheGamer), Bethesda is entrenched in a long spree of ‘nuh-uhs’ on Steam, for… some reason. The latest bout of developer replies having taken place yesterday, November 27. None of these recent replies, which I counted at least 10 of, even come close to…

AMD’s upcoming Strix Halo APU is one of the more exciting chips on the horizon, what with its console-like specs and the promise of a more efficient and just maybe more affordable portable gaming. Now a new rumour has emerged indicating it could be a chiplet design using the very same eight-core CPU CCDs as AMD’s next-gen Zen 5 desktop processors.

This particular info dump comes courtesy of some slides posted on the Chiphell forum.  The slides purportedly show the AMD Strix Halo APU, also occasionally referred to as Sarlak, composed of a pair of eight-core Zen 5 CCDs or Core Chiplet Dies plus a monster SoC tile containing various I/O functionality, the memory controller plus Strix Halo’s defining feature, namely its honking great iGPU.

Hold that thought, we’ll come back to the iGPU. The very notion of Strix Halo as a chiplet design is new, but does make sense. Cramming in 16 Zen 5 cores, plus a big iGPU would make for a huge monolithic chip. So, splitting it all up,…

Mundfish, the studio behind Atomic Heart, has apologised for the inclusion of a short, racially-insensitive clip in the cartoons that play in the game’s save rooms, and promised to edit out the offending parts in a future update to the game. Last week, we reported that Atomic Heart had drawn criticism online for featuring a 1978 episode of the classic Soviet cartoon Nu, Pogodi! in which a brief, racist depiction of an African tribesman can be seen.

“The Mundfish team thanks the PCGamer contributor for bringing this lack of sensitivity to our attention,” the studio said in a statement released, oddly enough, to IGN, and added that it “[apologised] if using the vintage cartoon or music has caused hurt or insult”. Mundfish concluded its statement with a pledge to “edit the parts in question”.

I’m curious to know what form that editing will take. The clip in question was incredibly short—perhaps less than a second long—meaning it would be very easy to snip out. B…

Space is big and, for the most part, kind of dull. The heady thrill of setting foot on planets no human has ever seen aside, most of the celestial bodies in our universe are just big, complicated rocks when you get right down to it. For better or worse, that’s a part of reality that Starfield deliberately tries to capture, according to a recent NYT interview (via VG247) with Ashley Cheng, Bethesda’s managing director, and Todd Howard, who is Todd Howard.

“The point of the vastness of space is you should feel small,” Cheng told the NYT, “It should feel overwhelming.” Addressing fans’ worries that Starfield’s 1000 planets “are going to be boring,” Cheng pointed out that not every planet “is supposed to be Disney World… When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.”

So Starfield’s many globes are meant to be sparse because, hey, the vast majority of planets out there are sparse too. But the sparsity is c…