September 2021

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an old-fashioned CRPG based on a tabletop ruleset so complex, even fans call it “Mathfinder.” It’s a long and complicated game, but apparently not long and complicated enough for Owlcat Games, who hid a secret ending deep within it. Finding out how to unlock that ending took datamining, machine translation, and the cooperation of multiple determined fan communities. Players first stumbled across the existence of the secret ending while grappling with Kingmaker’s many other issues at launch. “I kind of vacuumed up all the scuttlebutt I could from various sources, because this game wasn’t taking any prisoners,”…

Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG Starfield promises to be a big, sprawling sci-fi romp—”like Skyrim in space,” creative director Todd Howard said earlier this year. But it definitely won’t be all action. Howard told an audience at the Tokyo Game Show earlier today (via Nibellion on Twitter) that the game will contain more than 150,000 lines of dialog. By way of comparison, that’s more lines of chit-chat than Fallout 4, and more than double the verbosity of Skyrim: Todd Howards appeared on stream to announce that Starfield will have a complete Japanese localization (just like Redfall) and mentioned that the game has…

Amazon Game Studios’ New World has managed to launch successfully, though not without a few issues, but a perennial theme with New World even before release has been the absence of mounts. ‘No mounts for you, off you go walkies,’ says the developer. ‘You’re just pulling a Guild Wars 2,’ respond the playerbase (a game which launched without mounts before, eventually, adding them). So the game addresses this through some lore: a note you find called ‘The Animals Revolt’ that’s headlined ‘A Notice of Concern to Carters and Porters’ written by ‘your friendly local doctor.’ It has to be the…

It’s long been rumoured that Rockstar was beavering away on remastering the PS2-era Grand Theft Auto games: Grand Theft Auto 3, GTA: Vice City, and GTA: San Andreas. The existence of these remasters has now been confirmed thanks to the South Korean games rating board, which has classified Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy—The Definitive Edition. Per a machine translation, the collection is rated “youth not allowed”. The remasters had reportedly been planned for an earlier release but have suffered various internal delays, and their existence was all-but-confirmed thanks to Take-Two’s statement to investors that it’s working on three unannounced “iterations of…

Graphics card maker Asus and cooling specialist Noctua have held up their side of the bargain with their previously rumoured GeForce RTX 3070 collaboration. According to new photos from an Asus representative in Vietnam, the Asus X Noctua GeForce RTX 3070 is all kinds of beige and brown—like, so brown. The card was first spotted over on the EEC as “RTX3070-8G-NOCTUA”, but even before that time rumours were bubbling to the surface about a collaboration between the two. What can I say, the people want brown graphics cards—that includes me. And, boy, are there shades of it here. Images of…