Fortnite’s Most Wanted patch teaches you that sometimes it’s good to be bad, if only for the sleek “Heisted” line of new Exotic weapons. We’ve got you covered on a breakdown of how to unlock Cold Blooded Vaults and retrieve these rebellious guns so you can clutch a sweet and simple W.
Battle Royale V23.40 introduces five new Exotic weapons:
Heisted Breacher Shotgun: a terrain-melting close quarters gun
Heisted Explosive Assault Rifle: an action movie-esque option
Heisted Accelerant Shotgun: Damage and speed scaling shotgun
Heisted Run ‘N’ Gun SMG: a supersonic fast gun
Heisted Blink Mag SMG: a handy gap-closing gun
The Heisted set is powerful, but to acquire that power you’ll first have to jump through some crime-themed hoops.
(Image credit: Epic Games)
How to unlock cold blooded vaults in Fortnite
Immediately, you’ll want to drop in Faulty Splits, Shattered Slabs, or Brutal Bastion. These locations all hold a not-so-secret Cold Blooded Vault, easily identified by a small safe icon on the map. Loot weapons, ammo, and equipment—hold onto a shotgun and grenades for the quickest victory—and then walk up to the Cold Blooded base, which will be guarded by armed agents in white suits.
Take them out, and then head for their boss, who will have a layered shield and a lot of health. Use your pre-planning prowess to K.O. the big bad, and shut down this operation for good. The boss may drop a Heisted weapon right then and there, but even if they don’t, swipe the shining Vault keycard and dive into all the Heisted riches.
Repeat this process at each Cold Blooded Vault location and you’ll be swimming in the new Heisted exotic weapons until they don’t even feel exotic to you anymore. They’ll be like your regular weapons. Actually, that’d be tragic. Maybe the real pro tip here is to avoid overindulging to the point where the magic fades away like a seasoned criminal in the night.
As a part of Activision’s apparent mission to turn Warzone 2 back into Warzone 1 (opens in new tab), today’s season 2 update brings back a fan-favorite mode, Resurgence, on a brand new Japan-themed small map: Ashika Island. There are also a few new weapons in the mix, simplified loot, and new points of interest in Al Mazrah.
The patch is around a 30GB download on all platforms, leaving Warzone 2’s current digital footprint at about 60GB (or up to 100GB if you have the rest of Modern Warfare 2 installed as well).
The extra space is worth it: players have been asking for an alternative to Warzone 2’s gigantic 150-player Al Mazrah map since its launch in November. In the days of Warzone 1, the experimental Rebirth Island map and Resurgence mode proved so popular that developer Raven Software kept it on as a semi-permanent mode, a rarity for Warzone as modes typically cycle in and out weekly. The language around today’s Season 2 update suggests Ashika Island isn’t a time-limited event, so small map enjoyers should now have a permanent home.
Ashika Island is also a boon for DMZ, Warzone 2’s surprisingly good extraction-lite sandbox mode. The new map is playable in DMZ and heralds the arrival of a new NPC boss: the Bombmaker, who protects a new weapon case presumably containing an unlockable blueprint. There’s also the Rusher, a new NPC grunt type infiltrating all maps and modes. The Rusher is a close-range enemy packing a pistol and shortsword who moves quickly, uses “mini smoke bombs” to reposition, and has a small health pool.
(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)
There is, of course, a new battle pass to tear through as well. That’s currently the only path to unlocking the new Hemlock assault rifle and KV Broadside shotgun. On the Modern Warfare 2 side of things, Activision has carved out a few more pieces of Al Mazrah into standalone maps and added the 6v6 Valderas Museum that hasn’t been seen since the beta last year.
There’s still some unrest among subsets of CoD players, some of whom think regular Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer is being underserved, others who remain put off by Warzone 2.0. In response, Infinity Ward announced that another new 6v6 map will release in the Season 2 midseason update.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676490296_Rejoice-Warzone-2-Resurgence-is-back-with-a-new-small.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-15 19:33:172023-02-17 22:53:19Rejoice: Warzone 2 Resurgence is back with a new small map
The Dragon Age fandom is notoriously full of armchair psychologists. We love to shamelessly pick apart and project onto our faves—admittedly with mixed accuracy. But listening to Dragon Age: Origins get dissected by an actual practicing therapist makes even conversations with the most capricious party members sound like they finally have the subtitles for human interaction turned on.
I first caught wind of Dr. Mick in a TikTok clip of a notorious conversation with Origins party member Sten. Your Qunari warrior companion approaches you at camp in what feels like an aggressive confrontation, quickfiring back-to-back questions about your plan for stopping the Archdemon and the blight of zombified darkspawn. “Guess who’s anxious?” Dr. Mick declares, before going on to explain how Sten is expressing his anxieties by looking to his de facto leader for clarity. Instead of going on the defensive, Dr. Mick chooses what had always seemed to me a way-too-blunt response: “I’m not here to impress you.” He’s rewarded with an unimaginable +6 approval from Sten.
What the hell? That is the best possible result of that conversation. I checked.
Context is king
Human development PhD and licensed marriage & family therapist Dr. Ryan Earl goes by Dr. Mick on Twitch (opens in new tab). He started out livestreaming Destiny 2 hoping to be a resource for other streamers who often accidentally wind up playing amateur therapists to their viewers. When the Mass Effect Legendary Edition launched in 2021, Dr. Mick planned to livestream what would be his 10th playthrough. “And I was like ‘you know what? I’ll try to analyze it,” he tells me. He set out to make realistic decisions, not as a typical RPG player, but based on his years of clinical and life experience.
(Image credit: BioWare)
And boy did BioWare fans enjoy seeing a professional dissect their favorite characters. “Mass Effect was where my TikTok really blew up,” Dr. Mick says. He’s since analyzed his playthroughs of Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us, and more, eventually returning to BioWare to try Dragon Age: Origins, which he remembered so little of from his single 2009 playthrough that he was able to have unprepared reactions, unlike with Mass Effect.
People who are quiet and give one word answers tend to make us anxious… Sten is one of the better characters to allow those things to be talked about. He represents a threat for a lot of people.
Dr. Mick
“Dragon Age probably has the best content for me to dissect of all the games I’ve played so far,” he says, noting that its genuine reactions to your decisions force a player to pay attention to context rather than leaning on morality or tone indicators.
There’s comfort in the way that BioWare’s later games, and other RPGs, allow you to consistently come off as kind or sarcastic in an à la carte menu of conversational intent. But Origins’ dialogue choices are fully written out in text with only context as your guide. It can be nearly as inscrutable as managing actual human relationships. Seriously, what the hell does Sten want me to say?
“People who are quiet and give one word answers tend to make us anxious and the reason for that is because they open themselves up for us to project onto them,” Dr. Mick tells me, a person who struggled enough with Sten that I looked up approval guides for his conversations. Faced with all those sudden questions as a teenager first playing Origins, I immediately got defensive because meeting Sten’s very direct style with more of the same felt way too much like confrontation. But a Grey Warden who deflects only frustrates Sten more and that’s when conflict happens.
“What’s going to bring more intimacy with Sten is for you to understand the template that he’s working off of interactionally. And those are things that you only learn through observation and listening as opposed to focusing too much on your own needs in the interaction,” Dr. Mick explains. “Sten is one of the better characters to allow those things to be talked about. He represents a threat for a lot of people.” It’s me. I’m people.
Sten isn’t the only teachable moment by far. Dr. Mick has been churning out clip-sized lessons on communication and relationships with Origins’ full cast of characters as lecture props.
He used the story of an apprentice hunter (opens in new tab) who was rejected by a woman as a lesson to the Good Guys of the world that even genuine affection and earnest intentions do not entitle you to have your feelings reciprocated by a romantic interest. He paused at Morrigan needling Alistair (opens in new tab) over ceding leadership to the player character to reassure people that there’s a strength in recognizing that you prefer being a follower and team contributor to taking positions of leadership (It’s me. I’m still people). And he uses Morrigan’s preemptive belittling (opens in new tab) of her own opinions to explain the concepts of projection and how not to assume that others share an equally dismal opinion of you as your own self-esteem.
The analysis even turns inward when Dr. Mick catches himself boosting his own ego (opens in new tab) early in the game by informing a templar that he is in fact a Grey Warden, despite knowing that the order have been falsely declared traitors complicit in the king’s death.
“Holy shit, that was a huge misfire on my part. I let my ego get the best of me there. This guy is in a position of power. I wanted to legitimize myself in front of him and I put myself at risk in doing so,” Dr. Mick laments, punctuated with a very self-aware “Ooof!” Fortunately it’s a misstep without serious consequences, but he takes the lesson to navigate his friendships with party members while never losing sight of the greater context.
It’s all intensely reflective and personal while still being a fun playthrough to watch. While he’s making decisions you already agree with, that is.
Consequences are also king
“My theme is: The run is the run. I always accept the consequences of the decisions I make in the game because that’s how real life works,” Dr. Mick says. “There are hundreds of playthroughs on YouTube where people choose the right path at every possible thing and do every quest. I’m not interested in doing that.”
That comes to a head particularly in critical plot moments, because it turns out that being a well-adjusted Grey Warden with boundaries and patience will actually net you quite a body count.
When exploring the mage tower overrun with maleficarum and demons, Dr. Mick spent a solid 15 minutes (opens in new tab) talking through the psychology of a conversation with (then) Templar Cullen who’d been trapped after witnessing a hell of a lot of blood magic mindfuckery. It’s a classic Dragon Age mages-versus-templars moment.
After what he’s seen, Cullen isn’t willing to hear you consider half measures at the mage tower. (Image credit: BioWare)
“If you want to be a better communicator and decision-maker in interpersonal relationships, you need to make sure you connect with the context of the person you’re talking to,” Dr. Mick said during that livestream, explaining his choice to validate Cullen’s concern that there may yet be blood mages at large in the tower. He admitted to Cullen that he might have to kill everyone in the harrowing chamber above, not knowing that his mage party member Wynne would not appreciate the nuance of that statement.
“And then Wynne’s like ‘oh hell no I’m gonna attack you’ and I had to kill her in self defense! I love how it was not clear that was going to happen,” said Dr. Mick, “and then you literally lose a companion with a whole bunch of quests and story in that one moment.”
Videogames in some ways teach bad boundaries. They teach people to triangulate themselves in issues and get involved in stuff they shouldn’t get involved in.
Dr. Mick
“I had people get pissed… in my YouTube comments and say ‘I’m out. I’m done watching this because of that,'” he says. But Dr. Mick is committed to the life lesson that you can only make decisions with the information you’ve got. On that basis he also killed Arl Eamon’s definitely possessed son Connor instead of running to the mage tower seeking unclear solutions. At the end of the game, he didn’t accept Morrigan’s dark ritual or twist Alistair’s arm into it either, and allowed then-king Alistair to sacrifice himself by killing the Archdemon.
“What drives me crazy about videogames is… people use hindsight to make ‘better’ decisions,” said Dr. Mick.
I know I’m not the only one out here guilty of save-scumming bad choices or making hasty promises to Wynne because I’m sure a BioWare RPG is going to give me a good guy escape hatch at some point. Dr. Mick says that using hindsight or making decisions at that meta level would take away from the analysis and the conversations he’s able to offer his viewers.
This is Alistair’s emotionally evasive face. He wears it often. (Image credit: BioWare)
“Videogames in some ways teach bad boundaries. They teach people to triangulate themselves in issues and get involved in stuff they shouldn’t get involved in,” he says, explaining the concept of triangulation as two individuals experiencing anxiety or emotional intensity bringing in a third party to disperse that tension. “The entire basis of a roleplaying game is that you get triangulated into everybody’s business. You would never do quest lines if you de-triangulated yourself all the time. I think it’s important to know that’s happening in videogames because that’s not really how you should operate in real life.”
I asked Dr. Mick for his professional opinion on which Origins character has their shit most together. “Who ever has all of their shit together, really?” he laughs. “I mean all of us are a mess in some way or another.” This is a surprisingly reassuring thing to hear a therapist say. He mentions Shale initially, a slightly niche DLC party member choice, but also brings up Leliana’s growth and willingness to confront her religious beliefs as an individual in contrast with the Chantry as an organization.
By the time the credits roll, Dr. Mick has a world state not far off from what I once labeled “everything is awful” in my Dragon Age Keep (opens in new tab). Not the ending I’d ever have angled for intentionally, but a more genuine one, probably, and that was the whole point.
Dr. Mick has since played the Dragon Age: Awakening expansion and intends to play through the rest of the series. And I really need you all to be on your best spoiler-free behavior, because damn do I want to see what he makes of the emotional disaster cast of Dragon Age 2.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676523252_Meet-the-actual-therapist-using-Dragon-Age-to-teach-relationship.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-15 18:23:282023-02-17 22:53:49Meet the actual therapist using Dragon Age to teach relationship skills
The first proper hands-on review of AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics has emerged. Notebookcheck has done the deed (opens in new tab) on the Asus TUF Gaming A16 equipped with the AMD Radeon RX 7600S GPU and found it performs pretty much on a par with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 mobile chip.
As we detailed when RDNA 3 headed to gaming laptops (opens in new tab) back in January, the RX 7600S is the entry level variant of the new RDNA 3 line. In fact, all four RDNA 3 mobile GPUs are based on the same Navi 33 silicon.
The 7600S gets 1,792 shaders and clocks in at 1,865MHz. Other variants offer up to 2,048 shaders and 2,300MHz clocks.
As for exactly how the 7600S performs, in 3DMark Firestrike it tops out at 25,900 points, a decent notch above the RTX 3060 with 22,915. For the record, AMD’s previous generation mobile GPU from one tier above, the RX 6700S, is quoted at 24,315 points in the same test.
As for, ya know, actual games, the RX 7600S notches up 85.5fps in GTA V at 1080p maximum settings, while the RTX 3060 delivers 103 fps. In Dota 2 Reborn, it’s 110 fps plays 148 fps, so the RTX 3060 has a bigger advantage there.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
AMD RX 7000 Series mobile GPU specs
Header Cell – Column 0
Compute Units
Stream processors
Game Frequency
Infinity Cache
Memory
GPU power
AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT
32
2,048
2,300MHz
32MB
8GB GDDR6
120W
AMD Radeon RX 7600M
28
1,792
2,070MHz
32MB
8GB GDDR6
90W
AMD Radeon RX 7700S
32
2,048
2,200MHz
32MB
8GB GDDR6
100W
AMD Radeon RX 7600S
28
1,792
1,865MHz
32MB
8GB GDDR6
75W
On the other hand, in Strange Brigade (opens in new tab), the 7600S clocks up 163 fps to the RTX 3060’s 160 fps. The in Witcher 3, the 7600 has a very healthy circa 105 fps to 85 fps advantage over the RTX 3060 mobile.
Exactly which of the GPUs is fastest will therefore depend on your choice of game. But the new RX 7600S is certainly in the same ballpark as the RTX 3060. Which is welcome on the proviso that laptops with the new GPU are priced at something vaguely resembling sensible money.
Your next machine
(Image credit: Future)
Best gaming PC (opens in new tab): The top pre-built machines from the pros Best gaming laptop (opens in new tab): Perfect notebooks for mobile gaming
The RX 7600S Asus TUF Gaming A16 is already available on UK Amazon for just under £1,200. Not a bad pricing, but not especially appealing when you consider that RTX 3060 laptops can be had for around £1,000.
The TUF laptop doesn’t appear to have popped up with pricing in the US yet, but if it’s much more expensive than RTX 3060 laptops, then it won’t make much sense.
Of course, the RTX 3060 is about to be replaced with Nvidia’s new 40-series RTX 4060 chip. Thus far, all 40 series laptops have been horrifically expensive. So, the AMD 7600S will likely have an important role in keeping laptop prices in check.
But, sadly, all the indications are that the new AMD RDNA 3-based mobile graphics won’t do all that much to change the generally very poor performance per dollar ratio of the latest generation of PC graphics.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676486627_AMDs-RX-7600S-mobile-GPU-matches-RTX-3060-in-first.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-15 16:14:372023-02-17 22:55:41AMD’s RX 7600S mobile GPU matches RTX 3060 in first review
Last week Valve spread some joy in the world. After years of the Team Fortress 2 community pining for new stuff and begging Mr. Newell for scraps like Dickensian urchins, Valve published no less than a blog post to the official Team Fortress 2 site announcing “an update-sized update.” Content’s back on the menu, boys!
The Team Fortress 2 community’s reaction to this was about as sane and measured as a Demoman after a three-week bender: Valve was listening all along, this is what we’ve been waiting for, the good times are a-coming once more. The only problem was that the announcement didn’t quite seem like that to other eyes. In our report Ted Litchfield wrote (opens in new tab) that ‘the only catch is that it will all have to be provided by the community: Valve has put out a call for Steam Workshop submissions to be made by May 1 for this “as-yet unnamed, un-themed, but still very exciting summer-situated (but not summer-themed) (unless you want to develop summer-themed stuff) update.'”
That is, it seemed clear Valve was not announcing that it would be making an original new update, but that it was announcing it would pick-and-choose community created content and package it up in an official update. That distinction matters an enormous amount to the TF2 community.
The expectations reached a burning pitch any Pyro would be proud of, to the extent the TF2 dev team has now gone back to the original blogpost and silently edited it to make things crystal clear. It now uses the wording “holiday-sized update” instead of “update-sized update” and has removed the phrase “who knows what else” in its entirety.
Which has all gone down like a cup of cold sick. Perhaps ninja-editing the blogpost wasn’t the way to do it, but I do have some sympathy for Valve here, inasmuch as the TF2 community huffs the copium like no other while seeming oblivious to the fact it’s playing a game released in 2007 that received major updates from Valve itself until 2017. The studio has maintained this game for 16 years now, free of charge, as well as releasing the tools to really open up it for community creators (opens in new tab).
To put things in perspective, Team Fortress 2’s last major update was October 2022’s Scream Fortress 14, though that makes the situation sound better than it is: The last non-Scream Fortress update was 2017’s Jungle Inferno. The bigger updates since the latter have all been assembled by Valve from Steam Workshop content rather than developed in-house, so it’s both unclear why anyone expected different, and also semi-understandable that the tiniest glimmer of hope inspired extreme excitement.
I should also say that, while there are reactions to this news that seem unhinged (opens in new tab), the vast majority of the TF2 community has been there, done that, and got the vintage hats to prove it. The message is despair, in other words, but the tone is humorous and resigned acceptance.
“They are gaslighting us,” said DehydratedEpic (opens in new tab). “We’ve been bamboozled,” said problem_bro (opens in new tab). “Remember Heavy vs Pyro [an infamous occasion where Valve promised two class updates but only made one] they will keep doing it until we have lost the basic will to exist,” said ThatSandvichIsaSpy01 (opens in new tab) (great name). “They won’t stop, they will continue to take and take from us, there is no end, there is no end, there is no end, there is no end…”
Schmootyf’s reaction to the news (opens in new tab) perhaps put it best, the words of a TF2 warrior who’s been down this road too many times before: “Every god damn time.”
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676526891_Valve-backtracks-on-Team-Fortress-2-update-wording-after-people.jpeg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-15 16:10:342023-02-17 22:55:51Valve backtracks on Team Fortress 2 update wording after people got way too excited: ‘We’ve been bamboozled’
In 1996, Housemarque released Super Stardust (opens in new tab), and for two decades it honed the top down arcade shooter. In 2017, it declared “ARCADE IS DEAD” (opens in new tab)—there was no money left in it, and the developer would be “moving on to new genres”. Returnal is the result, a big budget roguelike that kicks off a new era for the studio. The twist? It’s… basically an arcade shooter.
Okay, that’s a little unfair. Strictly speaking, it’s a third-person roguelike shooter—the camera tight over your shoulder, not high above, with runs progressing you through a shifting alien world, rather than being an opportunity to chase high scores. But the more you play, the more it feels like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, using some of the trappings of a popular modern genre to smuggle in the gameplay Housemarque is more known for. It’s a game with one foot in the studio’s past and another in its future—and, despite the game’s strengths, that’s not always a comfortable position to stand in.
(Image credit: Housemarque)
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Things kick off with an astronaut—Selene—crash-landing on the alien planet of Atropos. After some fraught encounters with the hostile wildlife, she discovers she’s trapped in a time loop—if she dies, she simply wakes up again at the crash site. And not only that, but she’s been trapped for a lot longer than she remembers, a fact chillingly proved by the frequent discoveries of her own past corpses, complete with audio logs full of the crazed ramblings of her past lives. It’s a perfect narrative set-up for a roguelike, contextualising your repeated runs through Atropos’ dangerous levels as part of a continuous story—similar to Deathloop (opens in new tab) or particularly Hades (opens in new tab).
Each run consists of a series of rooms—some containing loot, secrets and traps, but most bursting with furious enemies. Combat is fast, frantic and deadly, a furious, leaping dance of aliens and projectiles. Survival means always being on the move, sprinting and dashing as you get your shots in while you can, and avoiding getting hit at all costs so you can maintain your vital Adrenaline—a stacking buff that vanishes if you lose any health.
It’s exhilarating stuff, chaotic enough to always keep your blood pumping, but precise enough to demand mastery. And more than just showing Housemarque’s strengths as a studio with a long history of skill-based games, it specifically evokes arcade shooters. Projectiles are big and slow-moving, but frequently fill the screen—it very much feels like a third-person take on bullet hell as you weave between shots. Alt-fire modes on your guns feel like arcade power-ups, launching waves of shots or blazing beams.
Even the visuals evoke a meeting of two worlds. The alien landscape is beautifully bleak and weird, a foreboding realm whose techno-organic creatures and machines take clear inspiration from the Alien films and the art of HR Giger. But against that quiet, creepy backdrop, combat is an explosion of noise and light, a barrage of neon bullets and blasts straight out of Super Stardust. Even two years on from Returnal’s original launch on PS5, the combination is visually stunning, and, importantly, runs smooth as butter. No matter how busy things got on screen—and trust me, they got extremely busy—I was always hitting a consistent 60FPS even at max settings. Just what you want for a game this focused on fast, precise action.
(Image credit: Housemarque)
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Elsewhere, unfortunately, the game struggles to find a similar balance. Despite the roguelike structure, there’s a clear reluctance to let the RPG elements traditional for the genre have too much effect on the very skill-based combat. There’s almost no persistent progression, and even within a run, boons that you earn frequently feel minor. Combined with the long length of runs, the result is that it’s very possible to die after 40 minutes of play having made no progress at all in your overall goal. It often feels like the best strategy is to simply rush to your goal as fast as possible, rather than taking time to explore and search for loot.
Runs are full of risk/reward decisions—should you open this chest, knowing it might give you a debuff? Should you enter this challenge room, attempting a tough fight for extra rewards? Should you brave that dangerous trap to get the health pick-up inside? The problem is, because of that focus on skill over RPG progression, the rewards are usually meagre, and the risk is often too harsh. Combat is so difficult and punishing that the wrong debuff or too much damage taken ahead of an encounter can easily tank a run no matter how far in you are. It’s simply not worth rolling the dice on that for the sake of a slight increase to your health (in a game that demands you simply never get hit anyway), one of many incrementally better guns, or one of the artifact buffs that, due to their specificity, I found often never came into play at all.
(Image credit: Housemarque)
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It’s particularly grating once you reach one of the game’s bosses. Each one is a glorious bullet hell fever dream, and beating them necessitates learning their attacks and practicing the appropriate dodges and counters, often with lots of trial and error. During an attempt it’s a blast, but the roguelike structure means it can take hours between each go, as you fight your way to their room, try to keep yourself at high enough health to have a chance, stock up on consumables you’ll need, search for a decent weapon… After all that, you could still die in a few hits, and be right back at square one.
I have to stress—in the moment, when you’re bouncing between platforms, blasting aliens and dashing through their attacks, it looks and feels excellent. It’s some of the best and most engaging action you’ll find on PC. But it feels like that need to present it as something other than a pure test of twitch reflexes has led to it being housed in totally the wrong structure. There’s a real sense that, though the developer perfectly understands how to stage a fight, it really doesn’t get what makes people love roguelikes—and certainly never figured out how to make that gel with what people love about arcade shooters.
(Image credit: Housemarque)
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The result is a game that, though frequently fun and hugely satisfying to conquer, also demands far more patience than is really fair to ask. Even the story, despite that promising start and some wonderfully thick horror atmosphere, ends up being a frustratingly vague tapestry that feels more aimed at the creators of 20 minute YouTube explainers than the average player. A certain breed of dedicated gaming masochist will revel in Returnal’s lengthy and unwavering challenge, but I suspect most will either wish there was more meaningful RPG progression, or that it was simply a series of score-attack levels without all that roguelike padding in between.
The irony is that the game’s post-release DLC, bundled in free with the PC port, offers a glimpse at what could have been. The Tower of Sisyphus is an endless survival challenge that simply warps you from room to room for brief but frantic fights. Rewards come thick and fast, a high score system gives you a new reason to hone your skills, and runs are quick and satisfying. It gets right to the meat of what the game is good at, and I found myself wishing it had been the template for the whole game, instead of just a sideshow.
(Image credit: Housemarque)
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For better and worse, this is a game defined by Housemarque’s struggle with its own identity. On the one hand, it’s a frenzied shooter that brings to bear decades of arcade experience into a supremely satisfying and frequently beautiful experience. On the other, it’s a half-hearted grab at a more popular genre that fails to understand what makes its fellow roguelikes work so well. If this truly is a new era for Housemarque, I can only hope its next project has a clearer vision of that future.
I guess this is really two news pieces in one. The first bit of news is that apparently Natural Selection 2 (opens in new tab) has been getting updates for the last 11 years, ever since it was released at the tail-end of 2012. The second bit is about how that’s all over now: Unknown Worlds Entertainment has “ceased active development” on the game as of yesterday.
Well, kind of, anyway. The truth is that Unknown Worlds handed over development (opens in new tab) to the Natural Selection 2 community as long ago as 2014, and—as far as I know—most if not all of the patches since have been created by dedicated players rather than Unknown Worlds staff. I’m not sure if the end of active development on the game comes at the behest of Unknown Worlds or the community dev team, but I’ve reached out to the studio to find out and will update if I hear back.
The statement announcing the end of development makes it sound like this is a move by Unknown Worlds, though. “10 years since its official release and over 117 updates later,” the studio says it’s sending Natural Selection 2 into retirement so that it can focus attention on other projects. With games like Subnautica and Moonbreaker (opens in new tab) to take care of, it makes sense that the company wouldn’t want to dedicate work hours to tending a decade-old, team-based FPS, even if most of the work was being done by fans.
The community reaction to the announcement has actually been mostly positive, with several fans expressing astonishment at the game lasting this long and thanking the studio for keeping it going. The top-rated comment on the announcement on the NS2 subreddit, from a user called totalnewbie (opens in new tab), just says “The fact that they kept working on it for this long, and still support it […] after all these years for what is a very small community, has been amazing”. Another, from askLing (opens in new tab), says “Huge props [to] the NS2 team for keeping it going for so long! Dozens of AAA multiplayer shooters have come and gone in NS2’s lifetime.”
We had a great time with the game back in the ancient days of 2012. Craig Pearson scored it a resounding 90% in his Natural Selection 2 review (opens in new tab), praising it as a “wonderful one-off” whose RTS elements served to tie the thing together into an excellent and cohesive whole.
So it seems that Natural Selection is coming to a natural end, and everyone seems pretty ready to live with that. But if the news has you hankering for one more session, Unknown Worlds says it “will still continue to host matched play servers so that community members will be able to play games on-demand with other players or bots”. I’d get in there fast, if I were you.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676475671_11-years-on-Natural-Selection-2s-going-to-that-great.jpg298530Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-15 15:26:192023-02-17 22:56:3311 years on, Natural Selection 2’s going to that great alien-infested spaceship in the sky
The South Korean game ratings board’s worst-kept secret has finally gotten an official announcement. The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story promises to be a “gritty indie 2D hi-bit pixel action RPG that lets players raise a rogue mage army and lead a revolution,” and it’s set for release in Spring this year.
Mageseeker is being developed by Digital Sun, who also made the roguelite dungeon crawler/shop sim Moonlighter (opens in new tab), and will tell the story of Sylas (opens in new tab), an escaped mage in the Runeterran kingdom of Demacia, who was introduced to League of Legends itself all the way back in 2019. Demacia’s rulers repress magic they deem forbidden while wielding it themselves to entrench their power, an arrangement that I suspect won’t survive through the game’s ending.
This is Mageseeker’s first official announcement, but it’s not the first we’ve heard of it. Last month, South Korea’s Game Rating and Administration Committee leaked its existence in a now-deleted listing on its website (opens in new tab), so we already kinda knew that the game would focus on Sylas as he struggled to liberate Demacia.
We didn’t know who was developing it, though, nor did we learn exactly what kind of game it would be, except that it features “continuous battle scenes against humans/non-humans,” like almost any videogame that ever existed. So it’s nice to get official confirmation and a little bit of extra information.
But confirmation that Mageseeker wasn’t the product of a shared fever at a Korean ratings board isn’t the only news that publisher Riot Forge is dropping today. We also got release windows for Convergence: A League of Legends Story and Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story, both of which were announced in 2019 and planned for 2022 (opens in new tab), originally. With that window now passed, both games are set to come out in Summer this year, just after Mageseeker.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676541523_League-of-Legends-is-getting-a-2D-hi-bit-pixel-action.png6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-15 14:01:302023-02-17 23:04:35League of Legends is getting a ‘2D hi-bit pixel action RPG’ where you lead a magic revolution
Of all the VR painting apps around, Vermillion (opens in new tab) is the one we’ve got our eye on right now. It brings the joy of painting with realistic, analog colour mixing into VR games, and one artist has been taking full advantage of its features in Half-Life: Alyx.
Liz Edwards is a Senior Character Artist working on Apex Legends. Just recently, she’s been diving into City 17 to create gorgeous oil paintings of the characters (opens in new tab) (via Mixed (opens in new tab)), and her surroundings. When used as an application overlay in VR games, this comprehensive oil painting sim is giving artists the tools to capture gorgeous gamescapes that are far beyond what a simple screenshot can accomplish.
Designed on a whim by Thomas van den Berge (support the creator (opens in new tab)) in under a week, Vermillion’s beta overlay mode allows artists to whip out their easel in any Steam VR game they see fit, to have a go at painting in portrait or landscape, small-scale or humungous.
Not only does Vermillion simulate wet-on-wet paint techniques, it even includes an integrated web browser so you can look up the odd tutorial from the man, the meme, Mr. Bob Ross himself when you get stuck. Imagine, taking a break from the post-apocalyptic hellscape around you to paint some happy little clouds in a moment of pure, expressionist serenity.
As our Jeremy says, “It looks like a welcome break from guns, guns, guns.” Though Liz’s previous painterly exploits involved cracking out a Photoshop overlay in Fallout 4 and attempting to use a Wacom tablet in-game, while being constantly assaulted (opens in new tab). That went probably about as well as you’d think.
The base Vermillion application itself was released last year and allows you to paint happily in a variety of environments, and even in multiplayer. Yes, you can have your own wee virtual artists studio.
And now that studio can be in City 17 with Alyx, the cockpit of an X-Wing in Star Wars: Squadrons, or even in Rick Sanchez’s garage… if that’s somewhere you want to be. Don’t forget there’s always the VR version of Skyrim to dip into if you want to draw some potato-faces.
The beta overlay can be accessed through the launch options for the main Vermillion application (opens in new tab). Though as Tom notes, while the HTC Vive and Valve Index seem to run pretty smoothly, he’s still looking into “how to keep the overlay from juddering on Quest”.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676545154_Watching-this-artist-drag-an-easel-into-Half-Life-Alyx-makes.gif281500Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-15 13:41:512023-02-17 23:04:57Watching this artist drag an easel into Half-Life: Alyx makes me want to be a VR painter too
One of the year’s most unusual stories thus far has been the Witcher 3’s spiffy next-generation update not only polishing the game to a mirror sheen, but adding detailed vagina models to a select group of monsters. Four characters suddenly found themselves in possession of anatomically accurate nether regions (The Crones of Crookback Bog, who look more like Victoria’s Secret models than crones, and the vampire-like bruxae) and the weirder element was that, initially at least, the game’s developer CD Projket Red didn’t seem to know why.
When first reporting on this, PCG’s Josh Wolens speculated on a likely cause (opens in new tab): The various community made mods that CDPR integrated into the new version of the game. Looks like that was on the money, because CDPR has now confirmed in a statement to Kotaku (opens in new tab) that the rogue vaginas originate in a mod called HD Monsters Reworked (HDMR), which was ostensibly about adding more realistic textures to in-game characters, but it turns out also incorporates parts of another mod called, straightforwardly enough, Vaginas for Everyone.
“In 2021, at the time of signing the copyright transfer agreement, the HDMR mod author confirmed to CDPR that they were the sole author of the mod in question,” said CDPR in an emailed statement. “The HDMR mod author granted CDPR rights to use the mod and was credited & compensated for their work. We have contacted the HDMR mod author with questions for clarification.”
Things get even murkier, because it turns out the creator of Vaginas for Everyone was asked for permission to incorporate it into HDMR back in 2019, but never responded. “The author [of HDMR] apparently nevertheless used my mod textures for his/her own mod, [and] also never mentioned it nor gave credits to me on the HDMR mod description page.”
Which… actually explains a lot. The author of the HDMR mod goes by Denroth and if you look at the HDMR page over at NexusMods, there’s no mention of it incorporating Vaginas for Everyone in the description (it is standard practice for mods that incorporate other mods to explicitly credit them, not just because it’s right but also for compatibility). So it looks like this may have been a case of one modder being a little unscrupulous and hoping no-one would notice.
Well that didn’t work out, did it. Despite the creator of Vaginas for Everyone not being compensated for their work’s inclusion in the new version of The Witcher 3 they rather bluntly say they “don’t care.” Well, arguably the mod did its job. CDPR has announced that it intends to pull all of the content in question from the game (opens in new tab).
“We want to also add that the removal of these elements is not intended as a statement against nudity or mature themes,” said CDPR, “but rather an attempt to maintain visual coherence across all character models—including these textures in the game was not something we planned from the start.”
What was always a little queasy about this is how localised it was to a select few female characters, rather than being a more far-reaching change to the game’s cast. It’s one thing if your shiny new update gives all the male and female characters in the world new and furry genitals, but it lands a lot differently when it’s just four attractive female character models getting very detailed vaginas.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1676468358_The-Witcher-3-unwittingly-added-a-mod-called-Vaginas-for.png539960Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-15 13:21:492023-02-17 23:05:13The Witcher 3 unwittingly added a mod called ‘Vaginas for Everyone’ after another chaotic modder snuck it in
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