That co-op farming game with mechs has been delayed

Generally speaking, when you’re talking about “mechs,” you’re talking about massive machines of war in games like Battletech (opens in new tab) or Iron Harvest (opens in new tab). Lightyear Frontier (opens in new tab) is an unusual but fun-looking twist on that formula: It’s a farming sim, and your mechs are farm machines—the fusion-powered, bipedal tractors of the future. Autocannons are out, irrigation hoses are in.

The gameplay reveal (opens in new tab) at the 2022 Future Games Show looked promising, but today developer Frame Break announced that it has decided to delay the early access launch (opens in new tab) that was planned for this spring. A new release target has not been set.

“With Lightyear Frontier, we want to make sure that you feel powerful and engaged in the mech while starting your own homestead, constructing a variety of structures, farming exotic alien crops, and exploring on a vibrant and unfamiliar world,” the studio said.

“Not only do we want to design the game to be fun, but also well-balanced with each aspect of the game intertwining with one another, and we remain committed to building a thoughtfully-designed experience and continuing the conversation with your community in the process.”

The Lightyear Frontier Steam page (opens in new tab) had previously indicated that an early access release was planned for 2023, but it now states simply “coming soon.” Developer Frame Break said that it “can’t commit to a launch window right now,” but will announce one as soon as possible.

Despite that open-ended delay, the reaction to the delay announcement was widely upbeat: Steam user Manji (opens in new tab) may have captured the mood most aptly, writing, “Better a late start than a bad start.”


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WoW ‘hardcore’ players currently use an addon to prove their runs are legit, but may be getting official servers soon

World of Warcraft Classic is already a harder, more punishing version of modern WoW, but a whole community of players like making it worse.

WoW Classic hardcore players try to reach max level without dying, an outstanding feat for an MMO originally released in 2004. Normal enemies hit like trucks, resources are scarce, and quests are a pain to finish. One misclick on an ability or a misstep off a cliff and you’re dead. That’s it. “Death = delete,” as they say.

Right now, there’s no built-in WoW Classic hardcore mode: players just commit to deleting their characters if they die on their own. However, after many, many requests from the Classic hardcore community for official hardcore realms, or servers, Blizzard might finally do it. Twitter user Meorawr (opens in new tab) (tweeted by Solanya (opens in new tab)) found code in the WoW patch 10.1 PTR (public test realm) that looks like a warning message for someone about to make a character on a hardcore realm.

WoW Dragonflight and WoW Classic share a lot of behind-the-scenes infrastructure, so the code showing up on the modern version of the MMO doesn’t rule it out for the retro one. WoW Classic is considerably more difficult than modern WoW, which is why most people would prefer hardcore servers for the old MMO.

The hardcore Classic community generally plays on the Bloodsail Buccaneers and Hydraxian Waterlords servers, and use an addon that tracks their run’s legitimacy. Runners can earn custom achievements and grab a place on the Classic hardcore leaderboards (opens in new tab). The rules are broadly simple: don’t die and don’t get help from other normal players.

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You can, however, group up with hardcore players to complete single runs of pre-approved dungeons. With official hardcore servers, finding other hardcore players would be much easier to do, and it would cut down on normal players messing with their runs.

Some Classic hardcore players have concerns over how much Blizzard would control over the runs. “I’m glad that we might get official HC servers but at the same time I feel like I can’t trust Blizzard to do ’em right,” Reddit user Yejmo (opens in new tab) said. “If I died at [level] 40+ to a flight path disconnect and had to reroll or wait 2 months for a ticket to be answered I’d be big sad lol, but I’ll be playing ‘em regardless.”

Unintended deaths from things like disconnects and glitches are a real issue, and the Classic hardcore community will let you continue your run as long as you have proof that you died for technical reasons.

Nobody knows how Blizzard will handle hardcore servers if they end up being real. It’s possible that, by making them official, it will lead to more players making characters purely to end other people’s runs. Every player on these servers would theoretically be at the risk of dying and losing access to their character, but that probably won’t stop the most devoted griefers. It could be chaos or it could be a reasonable alternative to doing it all with a mod and the honor system.

Blizzard hasn’t made an official comment on hardcore servers, but PTR code usually becomes legitimate not long after it’s been datamined. Dataminers also uncovered a possible third specialization (opens in new tab) for the Dracthyr Evokers on the patch 10.1 PTR, too.



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Marvel’s Midnight Suns Is Less Than $30 Right Now

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is now available at its lowest price yet on all platforms. The PC version is the cheapest at just $26.10 over at Green Man Gaming. If you purchase from GMG, you’ll receive a Steam key that can be redeemed instantly. Xbox and PlayStation versions of the tactical-RPG are discounted to $40 at Best Buy. Amazon also has the $40 deal, but it’s only available for PS5.

The $100 Legendary edition of Midnight Suns has also received a steep discount. The PC version is available for just $43.50, while physical editions for Xbox Series X and PS5 are $60 at Best Buy.

Unlike Firaxis’ XCOM games, the tactical side of Midnight Suns combines deckbuilding with more flexible strategies, allowing for fights to flip between exciting power fantasies and tense showdowns with some of the nastiest supervillains in the Marvel universe.

“A story about the power of friendship between a bunch of misfits, which is forged and strengthened through battle as much as traditional social scenarios,” Jordan Ramée wrote in GameSpot’s Marvel’s Midnight Suns review. “Midnight Suns aims to combine relationship-building with memorable role-playing moments, and the result is a stellar turn-based tactical combat title driven by interesting characters.”

Midnight Suns earned plenty of critical acclaim from outlets, and was one of the best RPGs of the year according to GameSpot’s sister site Metacritic. Midnight Suns has received some post-launch content already, including two new heroes: Deadpool and Venom. Morbius and Storm will be added to the game this year, too. The add-on content is included with the aforementioned Legendary edition.

The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors. GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.


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Hitman is ‘a little bit on hiatus’ as IO Interactive focuses on James Bond and its new fantasy RPG

Hitman has been around for more than 20 years now, during which time some entries have been markedly better than others. But it’s arguable that the series truly hit its stride with the 2016 reboot, which culminated in a brilliantly good trilogy and eventually into an all-encompassing package called Hitman: World of Assassination (opens in new tab). Unfortunately for fans, we now know there won’t be any new adventures for Agent 47 for a good while to come. 

You may have forgotten (I did) but Hitman developer IO Interactive is currently working on a James Bond game (opens in new tab). That’s a pretty big license, and IO’s success with Hitman over the past half-decade has expectations high—and so understandably, that’s where the studio’s attention is focused.

“Right now a major, major new Hitman game: that’s a little bit on hiatus, as we’re building another agent fantasy that’s also taking up a lot of our time.” IO Interactive chief creative officer Christian Elverdam said in an interview with Eurogamer (opens in new tab), making an obvious reference to James Bond. “But obviously we’ll come back to beloved Agent 47. He’s still very much in the heart of this company.”

The good news for fans is that World of Assassination, which was recently upgraded with the roguelike Freelancer game mode, will continue to be expanded.

“I hope we can have our cake and eat it too, in the sense that we have such a wonderful platform where we can keep experimenting with what the formula can do and what people expect of it,” Elverdam said. “And then at some point, obviously, as any creative, it would be nice to then go in and say, ‘Okay, well, with everything we’ve learned, what would that be if we had to re-articulate a sandbox—what would that look like?'”

We still don’t know anything of substance about IO Interactive’s 007 games, except that it will be a “wholly original (opens in new tab)” story detailing James Bond’s origin—maybe (and this is purely speculation) it’ll explore the story behind the British assassin’s first kill (opens in new tab). And that’s not the only thing IO has cooking: The studio announced in February that it’s also working on an “online fantasy RPG (opens in new tab),” too. (Hopefully they’ll both be better than IO’s last non-Hitman outing, the fun-but-not-good Kane and Lynch (opens in new tab) games.) Successful videogame series never really die, but given how full IO’s hands are right now, it’s understandable that Agent 47 is being given a little time off.


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Sons of the Forest patch fixes NPC’s chaotic behavior, but it turns out a lot of players liked him that way: ‘I hate Kelvin now’

Learning things and getting smarter is normally a cause for celebration, but in the case of Kelvin, everyone’s favorite Sons of the Forest (opens in new tab) flunkie, it’s having the opposite effect: A recent patch gave him a bigger brain, and some players do not like it.

Lauren Morton recently declared Kelvin “the new best boy of videogames (opens in new tab)” thanks to his adorable blend of energetic industriousness, childlike friendliness, and, well, let’s call it not-fully-developed problem-solving skills.

“Kelvin is not a dog. He is not a toddler,” Lauren wrote about her best digital pal. “But my friends and I have been cheering on every one of his little feats as if he were. He runs with small, fast-paced little steps. He tosses items you request exactly where he’s told (what a smart boy). He smiles in a dazed, happy-to-be-here way, and look at how good he is at fishing.”

But the first patch for Sons of the Forest smoothed out some of those charmingly rough edges. From the patch notes (opens in new tab):

  • Kelvin catch fish order will end after a time
  • Fixed Kelvin cutting down trees with player structures attached
  • Fixed Kelvin dropping radios destroying the radio

Individually, these are relatively minor points, and even obvious improvements. I mean, if you tell Kelvin you need some logs, and he runs off and chops down a tree you just built a treehouse into, well… What the hell, Kelvin?

But as GamesRadar (opens in new tab) noticed, quite a few Sons of the Forest players on Reddit (opens in new tab) aren’t happy about the upgrade. They liked slightly-gormless-but-deeply-devoted Kelvin, the boy who really tried his best at everything, and now that he’s better at things… he’s just not so good anymore.

(Image credit: SB10K (Reddit))

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Others shared similar thoughts in the replies (opens in new tab):

  • “Kelvin isn’t Kelvin anymore” – art_syber
  • “This is going to get a whole lot of kelvins killed” – ChalupaPickle
  • “He was sooo good at getting logs” – Eisenfuss19
  • “I hate Kelvin now” – Financial-Look-1155
  • “Ok that’s it im replacing kelvin, next cannibal that walks in the gate is my new companion” – Potato_Dealership
  • “I mean, I always found his clumsy AI to be immersive because you know he’s got brain damage” – Various_Ask_8727
  • “They need a toggle option. Like ‘Clumsy Kelvin’ vs. ‘Clever Kelvin’ that people can switch between” – PurdyDeadly

I can understand the response. In some ways, Kelvin reminds me of my dog (opens in new tab): Full of loyalty and love, and somewhat less blessed with brains. Would I make her “smarter” if I could? Sometimes I wish she was a little brighter, sure, but there’s something undeniably endearing about a big girl who does her goddamn level best even when she has no idea what’s going on around her. (Which is most of the time.) Kelvin isn’t a dog, as Lauren said, but he definitely has a similar kind of chaotic energy.

(Image credit: Endnight Games (via SauceMansBack on Reddit))

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Sons of the Forest developer Endnight Games hasn’t yet responded to the disappointed Kelvin fans, or indicated that it might do a Flowers for Algernon on him to put him back to his original state. I’ve reached out to the studio to ask (I am nothing if not thorough) and will update if I receive a reply.


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Battlefield 2042 is free-to-play on Steam this week

Battlefield 2042 has been on the up-and-up the past few weeks. Last month, classes made their long-awaited return, cosmically balancing what has become the most-yelled-about Battlefield in the history of the series. More recently, Season 4 added a new map, four guns, a new light tank, and a recon specialist with powerful jamming tech. If you ask me, there’s a growing list of reasons to give Battlefield 2042 another shot (opens in new tab).

Now, add to that list the fact that Battlefield 2042 (opens in new tab) is free-to-play on Steam from March 13-16. The free period coincides with the final days of a massive sale for the game, a whopping 70% discount at $17.99.

Three days is a weirdly short free period for Steam (the time-honored custom is to open your doors to guests for the whole week), but it is more than enough time to know if this is gonna be your thing. I had fun with 2042 at launch, but bugs and performance issues led me to putting it down for over a year. I picked it back up last week and now have sunk at least a dozen new hours in since then. It runs a lot better for me now, which goes a long way, but I’m loving the four maps added since launch, the reworks for old maps that were too big or empty, and trying out all the post-launch specialists.

That new class system is a big deal, too. Restricting gadget access to specific roles means squads once again have to work in tandem to get things done—engineers can no longer SOFLAM helicopters with one hand and bazooka them with the other, lone wolf assaults can’t indefinitely heal themselves with medical crates, and recons are now your best bet for spotting enemy players.

It’s still far from a perfect game. It still takes too many clicks to arrange your attachments for quick swapping, spawns can be wonky, helicopters can feel overly oppressive—stuff that’s slightly annoying but would probably bother me more if it were a more serious shooter.

While DICE has spent much of the last year and change making 2042 more like the older games, it’s still definitely it’s own thing. If you’re a Battlefield purist, you probably still won’t like 2042’s emphasis on specialists: those are still intact, with bespoke personal gadgets and passive perks. It’s now a slurry of new and old ideas in one live-service-shaped scramble. All the more reason to check in on Battlefield 2042 yourself while it’s free.


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Kerbal Space Program 2’s negative reception could start to turn around this week, if the first big patch isn’t delayed

Despite taking nearly three years longer than expected to arrive, Kerbal Space Program 2 (opens in new tab) was in pretty rough shape when it debuted in early access in February. Performance was rough and bugs were plentiful: “Too early access for early access” is how one Steam user put it.

That situation will hopefully improve later this week. Developer Intercept Games says it is making “good headway on performance improvements and bug squashing” in the first patch for Kerbal Space Program 2, which it hopes to have out on March 16—although that date isn’t carved in stone.

“Provided QA does not uncover any show-stopping bugs over the next few days, that date should hold,” creative director Nate Simpson wrote in a Steam update (opens in new tab). “If they do run into something unexpected that needs to be fixed, that date will slip. We have done a fair amount of hand-wringing around whether we should announce the target date for this patch when there is a non-zero chance of a delay, but we know this topic is very important to you all, so we’re doing our best to keep you all in the loop.”

One of the big issues addressed by the patch is a fix for a bug that creates huge amounts of reverse thrust when the Kraken engine’s nozzles are obstructed: “If you’re working on a Kraken ship, the ‘unique’ physics on which it depends are about to go away forever,” Simpson warned. Intercept has also apparently completed some fixes for the second KSP2 patch, but won’t get into talking about those until after the first patch is launched.

For players who want to go deep on how all this stuff works, graphics programmer Mortoc put up a lengthy blog post (opens in new tab) diving into KSP2’s graphics and performance, and how developers are going about fixing and testing the game’s issues. It’s a little on the dense side, but the important point (to my eye, anyway) is that the early access release is enabling developers to see where the game is working, and where it isn’t—which is basically what early access is all about.

“In a game as complex as KSP2, there are a dizzying number of areas that we could spend our efforts on and the feedback we’re receiving is invaluable for us to focus our time on the issues that affect the players the most,” Mortoc wrote.

Kerbal Space Program 2 has a “mixed” rating on Steam (opens in new tab), where positive and negative user reviews are, for the moment at least, split literally 50/50—quite a contrast to the “very positive (opens in new tab)” rating enjoyed by the original across nearly 92,000 user reviews. But the reactions to Mortoc’s update, and to Simpson’s patch announcement, are generally positive, or at least hopeful: As a user named Cyberfips wrote in the Steam discussion thread (opens in new tab), “Please keep up the effort, and (most important), keep communicating the problems to the crowd. If you stumble upon a problem, maybe one of the crowd has a good idea.”


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This new Cyberpunk 2077 texture mod makes Night City more eye-popping than ever

Cyberpunk 2077 has been criticised for a lot of things in its time, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone accusing it of not being pretty enough (if anything, the reverse might be true (opens in new tab)). But that hasn’t stopped a modder from putting together the Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project (opens in new tab), which aims to thoroughly de-blurify Night City’s many surfaces, giving you the pin-sharp dystopia you deserve.

It comes from an author named Halk Hogan, the same person who made the excellent Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project (opens in new tab), and it affects “many various environment textures occurring through whole Night City and Badlands,” including “roads, walls, terrain, dirt, graffiti, vegetation, objects and more”. You can see it in action in the video above, in which trees miraculously transform into higher-resolution trees while the soundtrack goes ham in the background.

The mod has two versions: Ultra Quality and Balanced. Ultra Quality, as you might have surmised, gives your GPU no quarter whatsoever, with textures so sharp they’ll have your eyes out. It’s “highly recommended” for anyone playing at 1440p or 4K, but “can use up to max 800MB more VRAM” than the base game. Then again, if you’re the kind of person hunting around for mods to make Cyberpunk more visually demanding, your machine can probably handle it.

The Balanced version is a little more reasonable, losing some of the extra in order to achieve a mod payload that will only need an extra 400MB VRAM from your graphics card.

Both versions are downloadable over at the Nexus Mods page linked above, and installing them could hardly be easier. All you need to do is download your mod version of choice, unpack it, and move its contents over to the main game folder for Cyberpunk. Then, voila, the most beautiful dirt you’ve ever seen. 

Whether or not Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked ends up on our list of the best Cyberpunk mods (opens in new tab) remains to be seen, but I’m always equal parts dazzled and mystified by the modders who create projects like these. No one’s ever made a game that modders haven’t tried to make more eye-searingly detailed, and to their credit, the results can sometimes be very impressive.


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Barotrauma, the sci-fi submarine sim inspired by Dwarf Fortress and fever dreams, gets a full release

Quick question: what’s scarier than the incomprehensible depths of our oceans, where totally undocumented sea life roams in a life of perpetual darkness and where human life is simply impossible? That, but on an alien planet’s frozen moon, whose topside we also haven’t documented and is ram-packed with unspeakable, harmful things. And what’s scarier than both of those things? Being stuck in a submarine with other people. 

That’s the setup, more or less, to hardcore multiplayer sci-fi submarine survival sim Barotrauma (opens in new tab). You and a team of 15 other players – or AI, since there is a singleplayer mode too – descend the depths of Jupiter’s moon Europa, keep the sub operational, moving between underwater biomes to complete missions and fend of the aforementioned unspeakable, harmful things. You communicate. You delegate. You each work diligently in your assigned roles, and you complete the missions as a team. 

I mean, presumably that’s happened at least once since Bartrauma released in Early Access in 2019. I don’t have the figures in front of me, but even though it’s got over 2.5 million players, I think it’s safe to say that 99.99991% of play sessions have not turned out that way. In reality, Barotrauma is a game about the most outlandish, chaotic and hilarious sabotage, subterfuge and skullduggery ever committed below sea level. It’s got a little bit of Among Us about it in that way, if Among Us was a grindhouse horror where crewmates injected each other with deadly parasitic viruses that paralysed and muted them. 

Now that the full release has arrived, players have the chance to check out new tutorials and and a totally overhauled campaign, replete with a scripted event system. Like there wasn’t already enough to worry about down here with some guy singing to you while simultaneously holding a shotgun to your face, and giant shrimp-like creatures destroying the deck below you.

(Image credit: Daedalic)

Graphics and environments have also been polished considerably over the course of Barotraum’s Early Access phase, leading to a V1.0 that looks genuinely unsettling, moody, and distinct from just about anything else out there. Light and darkness are the key theme here, visually: light is a rare commodity down in the waters of a frozen moon, and awful, awful things happen outside it. 

Barotrauma’s community is closely involved in the game’s development, all the way along. Lead developer Joonas Rikkonen had been toying with the idea of making a totally unscripted, sandbox-style experience in the vein of Dwarf Fortress, and first put a playable public build live way back in 2016. It was the encouraging player response to that build that led to Rikkonen taking a job at Finnish studio Fakefish to continue its development. 

Barotrauma’s Discord community is now more than 30,000 members strong. Their feedback has shaped the game over the last four years, and they’ve been active in expanding on the game’s framework, too. Fakefish made the source code and all the dev tools used to create the game available to that community, which has spawned quite the modding community. Its Steam Workshop has 60,000+ different entries. I’ve yet to find one that stops me being terribly frightened. Fakefish have included one of those player-made ships in this 1.0 release of the base game, as part of a community competition. 

Also new to players who haven’t submerged since v1.0 arrived are explorable outposts, wrecks of other submarines and improved alien ruins. There are more monsters and missions out there, and character progression goes deeper thanks to a talent system. Barotrauma’s full 1.0 release is available now on Steam (opens in new tab).


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This management sim is basically Theme Hospital in space

 2018’s Two Point Hospital (opens in new tab) was a worthy spiritual successor to management sim classic Theme Hospital (opens in new tab), but I’ll tell you something it didn’t have: aliens. Thankfully, Galacticare is here to fix that tragic and obvious misstep.

The game charges you with running a medical space station, caring for a broad and bizarre array of species. “From tiny, biomechanical lemurs, to starship-sized spacefarers, to entire planets, take on patients of all shapes and sizes,” says the Steam page. 

The basic building and management of your facilities looks very similar to Theme Hospital, but with a colourful sci-fi aesthetic reminiscent of another management sim classic: Startopia. It’s a clever mix—freaky aliens and a sci-fi setting are the perfect justification for taking Theme Hospital’s weird and comical diseases and treatments to new levels of absurdity.

(Image credit: Brightrock Games)

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There’s more to it than just a shiny new skin over an old favourite, though. Developer Brightrock Games previously made War for the Overworld, which recreated the Dungeon Keeper formula but added in whole new layers of play to expand the experience. Galacticare looks to have similar ambitions. For example, your crew of doctors and surgeons are named characters that you recruit and take with you from mission to mission—including a DJ and a “fungus-addled monk”. Each has its own mechanics, and you can choose how they level up over the course of a campaign, and even uncover their backstories.

Similarly, as you treat patients of different species, you’ll build reputation with their kind, unlocking new rewards to add to those revealed through your research labs. 

The vibrant vibes and cheerful humour of the trailer (opens in new tab) have definitely captured my attention. There’s no release date yet—just a vague aim for 2023—but it looks like one for any management sim fan to keep their telescope trained on this year. 


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