It’s been great fun revisiting the lush mountains of Death Stranding’s definitely not Icelandic version of post-apocalyptic America. If anything, the weirdest thing is seeing that same world I know and love on a fresh server, bereft of all the distracting neon signs, yelps of “Keep on keeping on!” and one-upmanship bridge-building that made up the bulk of the original’s asymmetric online multiplayer component. It’s actually quite refreshing to see these virgin, unspoiled landscapes again, although I imagine this won’t last long once returning players flock back to their well-worn delivery routes....

Season Of The Chosen has arrived, and runs until May 11th. Caital, the Empress of the Cabal (and daughter of our doomdad, Calus), has arrived on Earth seeking forces to beat the Hive then the Darkness - but she demands our fealty. No ta! So we’re now out there shouting “1v1 me bro!!!” at every powerful Cabal who’d support her, until we’ve crushed them all in ritual combat and her support collapses....

Destiny 2’s seasonal model was a great way to make things feel more alive. Time was, you’d beat the main story or expansion, and the world would sit static - forcing you to mill around until the next big update. But while meant to create a sense of the world evolving over time, Bungie’s Luke Smith admitted that Destiny 2’s seasons had started creating too much FOMO - widespread disappointment from players who felt cheated out of “ephemeral private activities and rewards that go away”....

Luke Smith’s latest Director’s Cut post is 4134 words long and a touch rambling, so let’s look at the big parts. First, the current model of seasons, started alongside the launch of Shadowkeep, isn’t working. When Smith talked about Destiny’s new season model in August 2019’s wordblast, he said they wanted to build an “evolving world” and that “the best Destiny stories are the ones where ‘you had to be there when…’....

“The performance strives to faithfully preserve the character of JC,” the creators say. “Every single line was performed directly after listening to the original Male JC’s read. While not blatantly copying every single line, the original performance was used as the primary anchor point for the line reads. Variations were only made after careful consideration.” Along with JC Denton’s spoken script fully redone by voice actor Karen Rohan, the mod edits many NPC lines to refer to her correctly, recasts some NPCs, adds a few characters whose function is primarily to acknowledge that JC is a lady (weird?...

First, a quick explanation of how these zones have been selected. Zones in Diablo 2, like in most ARPGs, have an area level. Most monsters in that area will be at the area level, while Champion and Boss monster packs will be one and two levels higher, respectfully. The highest area level in Diablo 2 is 85. Monsters in level 85 areas have a chance to drop any item in the game....

He revealed some details about the multiplayer, what to expect from next week’s beta, and let us know a bit of the background on developing Disintegration’s new style of combat. To catch you up on what we know so far about the game - it’s set in a dystopian North America after the world has faced a global pandemic, and scientists start putting people’s brains into robot bodies to save what’s left of humanity....

Unfortunately, I ended up playing it a little too long, and now I’ve left myself no time at all to write about why it was so great. Argh. Let me try anyway. Dome Keeper began life as Dome Romantik, a Ludum Dare 48 invention that turned a lot of heads last year. The game starts you off housed inside your squat little dome, wondering what you’re meant to be doing....

The program simply runs in the background, using spare CPU to run simulations of coronavirus proteins. Folding@home Director Greg Bowman, who’s also a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, gives a rough explanation of how it works in this blog post. Viruses use proteins, “molecular machines”, to suppress our immune systems and reproduce. Bowman explains that other approaches to modelling these proteins “only reveal a single snapshot of a protein’s usual shape”, whereas simulations can give you a moving picture....

“We heard you loud and clear,” they tweeted. “After Dark Alliance launches, our main priority is supporting two-player split-screen couch co-op for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.” When I first learned about the new Dark Alliance game, I was heartbroken that it wouldn’t have local co-op. Part of the joy of playing the old Dark Alliance games was dragging people around those dungeons with you - I can’t count the number of times I roped my sister into starting a character....

If you pick up Dying Light Enhanced Edition from its new home on Epic before March 7th, you’ll get it for 60% off, which is £8.39. The Enhanced Edition also includes The Following, the game’s DLC which adds a vehicle and trades the claustrophobic city for the great outdoors. “Dying Light is the Frankenstein’s monster of AAA games, an undead craft project made up of scavenged parts,” wrote Adam (RPS in peace) in his Dying Light 2 review back when....

Emily Is Away <3 tosses you into a browser window that’s likely familiar to my fellow 2008 teens. You’ll start out with a friend request from your friend Mat who chats with you over Facenook Messenger while you make your first status, learn how to wall post, and get tagged in photos. In between choosing responses to Mat’s questions via Messenger, you can click around and investigate the profiles of your other friends Evelyn and Emily and so on....

She posted a statement on Twitter last night to assure fans that patches are coming. She revealed a couple of expansions that are planned for the future, too. In his Empire Of Sin review, Tom Senior says he experienced a few bugs, most notably his mouse and keyboard controls outright refused to cooperate at some points: “It’s a shame,” he says, “because it’s a wonderfully ambitious mashup of systems wrapped around a lovely, if extremely cliched, caricature of the golden age of gangster fiction....

Rogue Legacy is a platformer where, upon each death, you resume play as your predecessor’s heir but with a new genetic trait. One character might be colourblind while the next is bald and the one after that has vertigo. Some of these traits are helpful, some not, but they add variety to what’s already a strong roguelike platformer. You can grab it for free here. The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, meanwhile, is a first-person mystery about solving puzzles and exploring a beautiful, bucolic environment for clues....

There it is. Gaming the way the universe intended. The new “UI-only” setting is currently being tested in Eve Online’s public test server. “The ability to toggle off the 3D scene will allow quick access to a high-performance, low-GPU-usage mode when viewing the 3D scene is not necessary,” CCP Games say in their forum post. “We’re hoping this will be useful both for players who want to lower GPU load on very low-end machines and for those who are engaged in fleet fights with thousands of players on grid that might be very taxing for their systems to render....

The original Everspace went through early access as well, so this is a familiar flight plan for the developers. Now that they’re shooting for a bigger game with more complexity, Rockfish say they’re once again looking forward to getting fan feedback as development continues on the sequel. “The initial version is good for at least 25 hours of gameplay, while introducing pilots to Everspace 2’s core gameplay mechanics of space combat, exploration, mining, puzzle-solving, traveling, trading, itemization, crafting, ship customization, player and companion perks as well as five different player ship subclasses,” they say....

The first-person explore-o-adventure-a-horror launched last Christmas Eve, so we missed it at the time because we were all comatose on cocoa. And then… ? I don’t know. Sorry, reader dear. I’ll make up for it now. Mothered puts us in the little body of Liani, a girl who comes home after serious surgery and, the blurb says, “is met with a strange mannequin claiming to be her mother.” Across snippets of days joined up with timeskips, Liana explores the family home, spends time with Mother, tries to remember who she was, and tries to figure out what’s going on....

Fall Guys? Shoulda called it Winter Guys, eh lads! That’s a fun little joke for the Americans in the audience. Fittingly, Fall Guys’ first winter brings in a whole load of frozen new challenges. There are seven new minigames entering the rotation, ranging from the simple downhill racing of Ski Fall to Pegwin Pursuit, which sees you chasing down those delightfully cute animatronic flappers. There’s no official word on our old friend Ringus Dingus, mind, but I’m sure he’ll show his cruel face sooner or later....

Mediatonic showed off the Sonic costume in a livestream today and boy oh boy it is the glossiest, plastic-iest Sonic I’ve ever seen. Does it make your Fall Guy go faster? Nope, no such luck. Sonic will be added to Fall Guys’ in-game store this Wednesday, October 14th for a total of 10 crowns. Good news then that Fall Guys failures like me can earn a whopping 21 crowns in season 2 just by progressing through the reward track....

Well, turns out that was just warming us up. Meet Rivals, broadly the same thing but longer, tougher, and about tracing 20 years in the careers of two school friends who formed a high school band and then almost immediately broke it up to do their own separate bands. Once again the brainchild of Tim Sheinman (including musical tracks from fictional albums), in Rivals you’re placing the chapter titles of a biography of Luke and Josh in the correct order....