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152 articles

Reported lead of Obsidian's new Fallout game wants you to feel a "sense of agony" when playing an RPG, rather than being an all-powerful god-splatterer

Look at the nice fellow in the featured image of this article. Look into his eyes. Look at the slightly awkward grin plastered across his face at the moment in a YouTube video on his channel that I've chosen to pause and take a screenshot. This is a man who wants you to feel "a sense of agony". To be frustrated and perplexed as to which outcome to choose. This is a man who knows you can't feed the world with a set of laser eyeballs. This is Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer, who recently made some points about RPG building that are worth dissecting in light of his reported new gig as head of Obsidian's upcoming Fallout game. Read more

Jul 21, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Mark Warren•

Out today, Dive or Die is a promising roguelite scuba sim that basically turns Darkest Dungeon into Ecco the Dolphin

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A day will dawn when the premise "what if Darkest Dungeon but also XYZ" will lose its crablike stranglehold on my fancy, but that day is not this day, for today we Dive or Die. Not that the two activities are mutually exclusive. In this 2D roguelite scuba sim from Drop Rate Studio and publishers Dear Villagers, the world has succumbed to a "black rain" that inflicts mutations and nightmares. It's been chucking it down for five solid years, in fact, with human civilisation reduced to scraping a living on mountaintops that are now islands. There isn't much of a living to scrape on mountaintops, so off you go into the "abyssal pool" to dredge up some canned food and building materials. Read more

Jul 21, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Edwin Evans-Thirlwell•

Building on Burnout and an underwhelming predecessor are Wreckreation 2’s missions, and so far it’s a promising patch of Paradise

"Wreckreation wasn’t actually an attempt to recreate Burnout," former Criterion Games studio head Fiona Sperry says as she and her team reveal their latest arcade racer, Wreckreation 2. "I think some people thought it was. But it was actually an exploration of freedom and creativity in racing games, and that was really a continuation of unfinished work at the end of [Burnout] Paradise and also the game we were making before we left EA. It was really about asking the question, ‘What if we gave players an enormous amount of freedom?’" Read more

Jul 21, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Mark Warren•

"Enjoy your last day in a future that works for everyone but you": I adore the demo for Future? No Thanks, an open world comedy about a boomer trapped in leftwing paradise

Future? No Thanks! is a jolly and acerbic open world city game from seasoned satirist Paulo "Molleindustria" Perdicini. It's about a bitter old boomer trying to enjoy his final day in an ecosocialist paradise. There's a demo on Steam that gives you 30 minutes access to a realm of sentient toilets, cricket burgers, ornamental park guillotines, and cannabis vending machines. Speaking as a bitter old millennial, I found my 30 minutes delightful. Read more

Jul 21, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Edwin Evans-Thirlwell•

"The concept of [Xbox] Game Pass was good" despite its eventual faceplant now contributing to mass job losses, reckons Forza Horizon 5 director

Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, who's currently working on open-world racer Clutch after departing Microsoft-owned Playground Games in 2023, has offered his perspective on Xbox's current layoff-heavy pivot in direction. Despite the Xbox Game Pass push of former Xbox boss Phil Spencer and co being blamed by new boss Asha Sharma as she's ditched studios and given devs their walking papers , Brown still believes Game Pass was a "good" concept, if clearly not one successful enough to avoid this outcome. Read more

Jul 21, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Mark Warren•

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's open beta is set for next month, and will offer a chance to take on the fearsome new slaying slab mode

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, this year's Activision shooter about military markspeople (who occasionally look like Beavis and Butt-Head ) sliding around with SMGs and shouting 10-4 after checking their corners, is set for pre-release beta testing in August. There are two playtests currently on the calendar, though the first's exclusive to those who pre-order the game. Read more

Jul 21, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Mark Warren•

"Built for that world doesn't mean built to require it": Unity reveal their next game engine while walking a careful line around generative AI

Unity have announced Unity 7, the latest incarnation of their game creation platform. In a pleasant shock for people who've been keeping up with Unity's doings these past couple of years, it doesn't appear to ruin anything. Aside from more routine promises of "speedier workflows" and tastier graffix, the company are promising a more "open" approach whereby collaborators using third-party tools can contribute more easily to Unity projects, without using the full Unity editor. This being the year 2026, there are of course some new features for genAI fans, though Unity appear interestingly guarded on this front, stressing that these can be ignored. Read more

Jul 21, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Edwin Evans-Thirlwell•

"LawBreakers tripped so Concord could faceplant": Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski looks back on his career so far and struggle with alcoholism

Former Gears of War and Unreal Tournament designer Cliff Bleszinski has opened up about his struggle with alcoholism and how it's impacted his life and career in game development to this point, as he eyes a possible return to making games. Bleszinski's currently four months sober after suffering a drinking-related seizure in March this year. Read more

Jul 20, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Mark Warren•

FBI accuse Steam user of stealing over $220,000 via malware-infected games like BlockBlasters, Lunara and Dashverse

A Florida-based student has been arrested by the FBI after allegedly stealing over $220,000 in cryptocurrency by means of malware-packed free games on Steam. Read more

Jul 20, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Edwin Evans-Thirlwell•

Samsung 990 review: a lower-spec SSD that’s weirdly great for games

Launching a new SSD in the current hardware climate , even a simple, DRAMless, QLC-packing SSD like the Samsung 990, may seem like starting up a roof thatching business during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: innocuous idea, apocalyptically bad timing. Read more

Jul 20, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•James Archer•

First-person explorer Sketchy Fables is a twitchy, teeming feast of hand-drawn art with acting from Hades 2's Sarah Grayson

Sketchy Fables is a first-person explorathon in which, if you kill things with homing butterflies, the world will grow more beautiful, whereas if you kill things with shotguns, the world will slowly succumb to "dark layers filled with loss, decay, and the end of lives". Sure beats Paragon/Renegade. In a pinch, you can also batter creatures with the stickerbook housing all the bizarre artefacts you've discovered. I'm not sure how weaponising the very inventory contributes to the landscape's transformations, but I do know that I'd like to see this kind of diegetic design in, say, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 , which has menus made of solid wood. Read more

Jul 20, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Edwin Evans-Thirlwell•

Valve see the great RAM shortage "getting worse," just in case you were clinging to hopes of a cheaper Steam Machine

As Oisin reported over the weekend , Steam Machine engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais gave a big Valve thumbs-down to the practice of platform exclusives – a hot topic in the context of Xbox owners Microsoft retreating back into whatever kind of shrivelled, joyless husk Xbox is nowadays. The same interview, with Bloomberg scoopsmith Jason Schreier, also touched on the acutely PC-spoiling subject of RAMnarök and its subsequent, en-masse embiggening of hardware prices. Good news? No! Obviously it’s all terrible! Read more

Jul 20, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•James Archer•

Bethesda's Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters won't stop the modders who've already spent years recreating the RPGs in Fallout 4

With Bethesda having begun to dip their fingers into the remaster bucket in recent years, some modders who'd decided long before that to get the ball rolling on such things themselves have had to reckon with the idea that official siblings of their passion projects could be in the works. It happened last year with Skyblivion and Oblivion Remastered, now it's happened for the crew behind The Capital Wasteland Project, an effort to recreate Fallout 3 in Fallout 4 , and Fallout 4: New Vegas . Thankfully, both teams of modders have made clear they plan to keep on trucking with their efforts following the confirmation of the official remasters. Read more

Jul 20, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Mark Warren•

This week in PC games: a Mass Effect-style RTS, a gamebook RPG for back-stabbing nobles, and a civilisation builder that offers to teach you kanji

Hello all! This week, there are a lot of new cat-themed games for some reason. One suspects that some dire cat anniversary is underway. Maybe week of 20th July 2026 marks 30 million years since the invention of cats? Or since cats invented us? In any case, there is already far too much cat discourse round these parts, so I've only allowed one of those sinister feline diversions into the Maw. Without further ado, the list. Read more

Jul 20, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Edwin Evans-Thirlwell•

Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros delayed to 2027, as PlaySide take more time before playing their turn to ensure the RTS hits a "high level of quality"

Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros , the Age of Empiresy RTS teeming with Targaryens and laced with Lannisters, has been delayed to 2027. Developers PlaySide have decided that while development's "progressing well", they need a bit more time to nail their strategical rendition of the Seven Kingdoms. Read more

Jul 20, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Mark Warren•

The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for realising that there's a car in Japan's Super GT racing series this year which is sponsored by horse girl game Umamusume Pretty Derby. Here it is . It's been racing in the GT300 category against, among other cars, a Mercedes sponsored by Hatsune Miku . I'm not sure I like them as much as my all-time favourite GT300 car, the Mooncraft Shiden (I mostly just dig its name), but hey, they exist. I often wonder if their small crews of drivers - Super GT has pilots swap over after a set time behind the wheel - gather at the back of the garages and think about some bloke in the UK writing for a games website. They probably don't. Read more

Jul 19, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Mark Warren•

"During the training sequence, we make a false promise": IO Interactive on the ensemble James Bond game that 007 First Light never was

It sounds like IO Interactive's take on the world of James Bond in 007 First Light was going to be quite different at first. Where the game as it currently is focuses on just Mr. Bond, once upon a time there was an idea for it to be something of an ensemble cast, where he would have been working with a number of double-O agents across his missions. Spoilers ahead ! Read more

Jul 18, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Oisin Kuhnke•

You're probably not going to see everything your friend does in The Blood of Dawnwalker, and its director is just fine with that

The Blood of Dawnwalker is, if done well, a game that might not land with everybody. For one, there's the lack of a traditional main story quest , and then there's the fact that you only have 30 in-game days and nights to beat it . Neither are necessarily massively novel, the brilliant Unsighted , for example, also forces a timer upon you, but this is still a notable AAA game taking a risk. This thing likely won't have been cheap to make, and crafting a scenario where not everyone is going to experience the entirety of what it offers, on purpose, is certainly a touch bold at the very least. So it's a good thing its director is happy with people missing things. Read more

Jul 18, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Oisin Kuhnke•

Valve aren't putting any exclusives on the Steam Machine because they see "the whole PC catalog as our 'launch exclusive'"

The Steam Machine is going to sit in an odd place when it arrives. It's technically a PC, but shaped and presented like a console, which is obviously the whole point. But it differs from most traditional consoles in that it won't be coming with any games exclusive to the hardware. That's because for Valve, they want the Steam Machine to be as open as possible. Read more

Jul 18, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Oisin Kuhnke•

A month after mass layoffs at Bungie, Marathon game director Joe Ziegler is leaving the studio

Another regular day in Marathon Land. Following on from mass layoffs at Bungie after the final major update for Destiny 2 , and ahead of next week's mid-season 2 Marathon patch, the extraction shooter's game director Joe Ziegler has announced that he's left the studio, with Del Chafe III taking over his role. Chafe, up until this point, has served as Marathon's assistant game director. Read more

Jul 18, 2026•Rockpapershotgun•Oisin Kuhnke•