The big Elden Ring patch that dropped today ahead of the Shadow of the Erdtree launch does a lot of good things—you can finally change the map key!—but it’s causing some headaches for Steam Deck users.
“A Steam Deck related issue has been identified and a hotfix is being worked on,” FromSoft said. “Leaving your Steam Deck inactive for more than five minutes may stop the game from accepting inputs.”
Elden Ring is Steam Deck Verified, meaning it’s been tested and confirmed to be fully functional on Valve’s handheld device. It’s pretty great on it, too: There were some initial technical hiccups, but updates took care of that, leading us to include it in our list of the best Steam Deck games as “one of those games that really hits the ‘I can’t believe this runs on the Steam Deck’ pleasure center.”
This new bug is a headache, but one that’s seemingly easy to avoid: If you need to step away, get yourself to a site of grace and then exit the game. Some Elden R…
The latest step in Elon Musk’s scheme to convert X—the worsening service you and I still call Twitter—into “the everything app”? Turn it into Twitch. The flighty billionaire wants the site to operate as a livestreaming service (as well as a bank, a “global town square,” and presumably a microblogging platform) and in the last couple of days has even helmed a few game streams himself to test X’s capacity to handle them.
The game in question is Diablo 4, which Musk has streamed himself playing twice over the last few days, once on an alt account and once on his main, which has 158.7 million followers at time of writing.
Musk was actually meant to stream Diablo a few days before. The X owner had originally said he would stream “some silly stuff” like Diablo 4 on September 27, but eventually had to call it off because he was “still working”.
Instead, the first game stream occurred last Sunday on an account named cyb3rgam3r420, and consisted of Musk ru…
Originally released in 2017, the Fallout Tactics mod, The Sum / Nous Aurons has found newfound attention with Kotaku’s reporting that the anarchist art project received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
The Sum / Nous Aurons has been on my radar for a while now—Felipe Pepe, creator of the great videogame history resource, The CRPG Book, singled out The Sum as one of the best games he played in 2022. It takes the familiar presentation of classic 2D Fallout and turns it on its head, showcasing an entirely alien setting with this familiar engine and assets. It’s a future wracked by the ecological and technological devastation we now face, as opposed to the alternate history, retro-futuristic nuclear apocalypse of the mainline Fallouts.
The Sum further contrasts Fallout’s competing imitations of old world societies like Caesar’s Legion or the NCR with an optimistic, almost utopian view …
Friends, we finally live in a world where Final Fantasy 7 has voice acting. No, I don’t mean Final Fantasy 7 Remake—that rank pretender—I mean the clamour of polygons that is the original, PS1-era classic. Thanks to the dedicated work of a modding community called Tsunamods, Final Fantasy 7’s very, very long script can now be enjoyed with your ears as well as your eyes using the Echo-S 7 mod.
The voice work was done by a global team of volunteers from the Tsunamods community, who came together to voice “Every main, minor, and NPC” in the game. If, like me, you have more than a few scarring memories of ‘community voice acting’ packs from ages past, you can rest assured: Tsunamods promises that “The main and minor cast are all well-trained actors with fantastic vocal and tech quality”.
The trailer does feature some jarring cursing, but the creators explain that they never really expected the mod to garner attention outside their community, and the areas they wa…
Last week EA finally set the record straight on The Sims 5: There is no Sims 5. There’s just The Sims 4—forever. EA plans for The Sims 4 to be the “foundation of our future growth strategy,” but this game needs a serious overhaul before it can be the foundation for anything.
The multiplayer Sims game currently in development under the name Project Rene is still in the works, and EA plans for it to live beside The Sims 4. They’ll share creator tools, a gallery, a marketplace, and some kind of social network. Instead of winding down The Sims 4 and rolling out The Sims 5, EA says it’s “disrupting the sequel model” by continuing to invest in the current game with years of more DLCs and updates.
The sentiment in The Sims fan spaces so far is mixed, as ever. Some are disappointed that we’re not getting a built-from-scratch Sims sequel, but there’s also a contingent of folks who share my feelings that actually maybe it is nice that they aren’t goi…
Synced, the free-to-play co-op shooter released by Tencent’s Level Infinite publishing brand, is closing in September, just a year after its launch in September 2023.
An open beta for Synced ran from December 2022 into January 2023, after which it effectively went away until the 1.0 release in September of last year. Two seasons followed, but the launch of the second season in March—entitled Cyber Safari—was the last update on Steam prior to the closure announcement. The Synced Twitter feed has been silent since then as well.
“Thanks so much for playing Synced and being a valued member of its community, but we regret to inform you that the game will be retired this September,” Level Infinite said in the legally-precise shutdown update. “Synced will be terminated with effect from 11:00 on September 9, 2024 (GMT+8) (“Termination Date”). Please note the actual date and time of termination may differ by region.”
Here’s the regional schedule, if …