Everyone loves doing challenge runs of FromSoftware games, and none is more repeatable than an Elden Ring randomizer that switches up the locations of every item and boss in the game.Streamer Bushy decided to do a deathless, randomized run of Elden Ring where he could only progress to the next region of the map once he’d fully cleared out the one preceding it. That’s 207 bosses with just a single life, and if he dies the randomizer gets reset. This effectively turns Elden Ring into a roguelike – it’s Nightreign before Nightreign has come out.His five-hour-long YouTube video properly starts with attempt nine, where Bushy gets the dragon katana early. It’s a solid weapon that comes with a lightning buff, and his strategy is to loot graveyards and find merchants, as that’s how he can sort through the most items in as short a time as possible.The first boss he fights is right outside castle Stormveil, Watchdog the Fell Omen. It’s a nice touch that the randomizer keeps part of the nam…

Standing the test of time as one of the best RPGs ever created, Planescape: Torment was a hit for various rsports bettingeasons – but surprisingly, much of Black Isle Studios was entirely unfamiliar with the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting that started it all.Speaking to PC Gamer in a recent edition of the magazine, lead artist Tim Donley reveals the reaction he had to Black Isle Studios founder Feargus Urquhart’s announcement that the next game the developers would be working on was a Planescape title. The head apparently “just came one day and said ‘we’re going to do a Planescape game'” to the rest of the team, and it took many of the devs by surprise – because they didn’t know what Planescape was.”In my head,” explains Donley, “I’m going ‘what the fuck is that?’ At the time it seemed so different, I was like ‘Is this like steampunk or space, or science fiction?'” Donley wasn’t alone in his thoughts on the ever-mysteriou…

Diablo 4’s new Spiritborn class is a tad broken. Not just in the sense that it’s rather good, unfortunately, but in the sense that one popular build is mega-bugged, so it’s getting fixed by Blizzard.Over on Twitter, global director of community for all things Diablo, Adam Fletcher, says the team is lining up some patches and hotfixes to tackle several crash-related items and “hot button” items from Diablo 4 DLC’s first week. First, though, we’ve got to talk about the Spiritborn class.”We also looked at the Spiritborn’s Evade cast animations that some are employing in specific builds,” he says. “This is a bug as the Spiritborn is able to break animation frames during Evade immediately. We will be fixing this so you won’t be able to Evade instantly during another one, and instead it will be normalized to the standard Evade cast rate in all situations.”Fletcher goes on to say that Blizzard isn’t hitting the Spiritborn’s Evade cast animations to nerf the fun but because it’s impacting othe…

There’s one demo trending on Steam Next Fest that’s a magical combination of several things you’d never predict. But it’s not “eye of newt and toe of frog,” the way Shakespeare imagines in Macbeth. It’s PS1 Harry Potter graphics and a ton of bombs. Co-op multiplayer Secret Agent Wizard Boy and the International Crime Syndicate is the first game from all three Szymanski brothers — that’s David, who made first-person shooter Dusk, and his brothers John and Evan, who both worked on the survival horror game My Friendly Neighborhood. “Secret Agent Wizard Boy must go undercover to topple Grumblemort’s evil crime syndicate, hidden beneath his wizarding school,” says the game’s Steam description. “Learn spells, engage in espionage, and spread utter lore-unfriendly chaos.” Though Secret Agent Wizard Boy is an obvious parody of early 2000’s Harry Potter action games, like the Philosopher’s Stone, which makes Ron look like he eats twigs, the Szymanskis are clearly in love wit…

SAND. It gets everywhere. And so does its demo, which is climbing up the most-played charts ahead of Steam Next Fest’s official start date.Steam Next Fest properly begins on October 14, bringing literally thousands of demos along with it, but a bunch of indie teams have cheekily uploaded their demo a few days early to get a little head start on the digital festivities. Developers Hologryph and TowerHaus had the same idea, too, as the demo for the coolest multiplayer game I’ve seen in ages is playable right now and is already charting on Steam’s demo charts based on active daily players.Set in the remains of an Austro-Hungarian empire on a planet called Sophie, SAND might look pretty familiar at first glance. It’s an open-world shooter where you (and maybe some friends) explore a sandy wasteland, dig for better equipment, ambush strangers for their shiny stuff, and maybe get griefed along the way. The twist is that you can also build your own base, which happens to be a towering steely …

Any fan of tabletop gaming knows the struggle of getting new people to sit down around a table and listen while you tell them about the complex, arcane rules that take almost as long to explain as it takes to play the actual game. It’s tons of fun once you’re all caught up and playing, deep into the weeds of a game like Gloomhaven, but the barrier for entry is high.Developed by Secret Door (a Dreamhaven studio), Sunderfolk aims to bring more people to the (virtual) tabletop, using a unique control interface, easy-to-pick-up gameplay that gradually grows in difficulty, and weapon-wielding animals. These well-armed critters are the players, Sunderfolk seeing two to four setting out on their fantasy adventure at a time. While plenty of the hexagonal, grid-based action takes place on the big screen – be that TV or monitor – players use their phones to direct their characters, animal versions of classic fantasy archetypes like a rogue, bard, or wizard, in turn-based …

It’s not often that you get to see video games when they’re so early in development that they more closely resemble messy amalgamations of cubes and shapes than anything you’d actually expect to grace your screen, but thanks to this yearly trend, we can all be given a glimpse into the unknown.The trend in question is Blocktober, which opens the door for developers and designers to show how their games looked before all the shiny textures and trimmings were put on top. Started in 2017, it encourages creators to share old blockmesh designs used while their games were still coming together – doing so really helps highlight the hard work that goes into bringing projects to life. This year, we’ve seen submissions from the devs behind Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Apex Legends, God of War: Ragnarok, and many more. Santa Monica Studio senior level designer Jon Hickenbottom has shared an early behind-the-scenes look at Svartalfheim’s Nidavellir Port in God of War: Ragnarok, and t…

Metaphor: ReFantazio has a mix of real-time and turn-based combat because director Katsura Hashino wanted it to have battles reminiscent of movies and manga.Hashino explained the reason for Metaphor: ReFantazio’s hybrid combat system in a new interview on the Official Xbox Podcast (timestamped here). In it, he said there are “remnants” of Shin Megami Tensei 3’s ‘press turn’ battle system in Metaphor: ReFantazio, but ultimately the latter’s evolved into something that lets you blitz through weaker enemies without expending time and resources on them, and still slow down for big, epic faceoffs with more important enemies.”If you’re fighting a really weak enemy, you have this option to use a completely action-based system where you can just knock them out of the park and then move on,” Hashino said via a translator. “But if you face off against a more powerful foe, you enter the command battle system. This is going back to the idea of manga and movie-style combat, where you see the main c…

I’ve been sitting with the news that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will only carry over three decisions from Dragon Age: Inquisition for a few weeks now. The more I think about it, the more curious I am to discover Veilguard’s direction and what those choices will mean for the upcoming RPG. Right off the bat, it has to be said that carrying on a series like Dragon Age is far from simple. Not only is it home to rich lore, history, and a myriad of choices across a trio of distinctly different games, but it’s also been 10 years since the last entry came our way. In many ways, the next installment is a juggling act for BioWare, acting as an entry point for newcomers, a re-entry point for lapsed players who have been away from Thedas for a decade, and a continuation for long-time fans who have been eagerly waiting to return. As someone who’s been longing for answers to a lot of questions that past Dragon Age games left hanging in the air, I definitely fall into the latter category. A part …

That famous Halo 2 demo from E3 2003 is finally going to be playable later this year.More than a year before Halo 2 hit store shelves, publisher Microsoft debuted a full-fat nine-minute demo of the game at E3 2003 that made the already hyped shooter an even bigger event. But the entire demo’s mission and ideas like the winding city highways never saw the light of day and were scrapped as Bungie made last minute changes to the game.

Halo 2 – E3 2003 Gameplay Demo Trailer [HD] – YouTube

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There was never any reason to think the scrapped ‘Earth City’ mission would rear its head again – that is, until 343 Industries and Digsite, a team focused on restoring content from the fabled FPS series, announced that the demo’s contents would be making a free comeback in Halo: The Master Chief Collection via Steam workshop.At this weekend’s Halo World Championship Series 2024, 343i revealed the demo would be revived for Halo 2’s 20th anniversary on November 9, alongside a first look at …