Modder Rukongai over on the Baldur’s Gate 3 Nexus seems to have cracked the code on Drow Paladin Minthara, with a pair of mods making the Grumpy Gus companion recruitable without committing a war crime in the game’s first act⁠. One version makes her normal Act 2 storyline play out in a more heroic playthrough, while another makes her summonable as early as Act 1.

Minthara placed dead last in our ranking of BG3 companions, but I’m pretty sure it’s because none of us actually recruited her. Befriending Minthara instead of just killing her for her Spidersilk armor and nifty pajamas requires aligning yourself with some pretty heinous little goblin sickos, and this choice also locks you out of other companions like Karlach and Wyll.

That’s tough to swallow, but also part of what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 so special: that two playthroughs can look so completely different from one another. Still, Rukongai’s mods can be a valuable introduction to Minthara for queasy-stomached …

In a trailer shown during The Game Awards, Daniel Mullins Games revealed a sequel to well-liked 2016 indie game Pony Island. It’s called Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, and is apparently “a phantasmagorical voyage through time, myth, divinity, and video games” that is “not a game about ponies.”

Where the original Pony Island combined a parody of autorunners with a puzzle game about hacking Satan’s computer to escape an afterlife where you were forced to play Pony Island forever, Pony Island 2 seems to be leaning more into the “every game idea all at once” aesthetic of the developers’ other games, The Hex and Inscryption.

The trailer suggests a combination of pixel-art JRPG, 2D mounted archery, croquet minigolf, twin-stick action, and clown-based conveyor puzzling, as well as more demon-related computer hacking. There are also live-action segments in which SungWon Cho plays some kind of antagonistic overlord named “King Yan”, and then someone plugs a USB stick into a bow.&nb…

Have you ever thought to yourself, boy, I sure do wish the Starfield HUD displayed interstellar distances in light years instead of astronomical units? If your answer to this question is “yes,” then it might be time to take a break and go outside for a while. Or, instead, you could download this extremely purpose-specific Starfield mod called, quite simply, See Distances in Light Years.

“Does what it says on the tin,” the mod description states. “Makes your ship’s HUD display interstellar distances in light years (LY) instead of astronomical units (AU). Also increases the maximum light second (LS) value from 50,000 to 500,000. If anything is further than that, distance will start being measured at 0.02 LY.”

Developer Deebz96 said they created the mod because they “found AU illegible for these sort of distances,” and that the light year measure “is much easier to interpret at a glance, especially if you are used to other space games.” I found that complaint a little odd a…

The boomer shooter genre grew a little bit larger today with the early access release of Supplice, a game that began life as a total conversion for Doom before evolving into a standalone shooter built in the GZDoom engine by members of the Doom modding community.

The story in Supplice is very Doom-like: Humanity develops technology that enables it to travel to the stars, but unfortunately the galaxy is not an overly welcoming place. The exocolony Methuselah has been overrun by terrifying alien creatures, and it falls to you to either chase them away or wipe them out.

“The first FPS games had simple but genius premises and the Supplice team is following in those perfect footsteps,” said Mateusz Filipek, marketing manager at Supplice publisher Hyperstrange. “Our story sets the stage for everything else in this game to shine. Polished retro-stylized graphics, classic level design full of environmental story-telling, and references to other fan-favorite shooters are just a f…

As Steward of New London in Frostpunk 2, I’m a bundle of nerves. Maintaining balance in the frozen city is impossible by design: half the citizens hate me because of the law I just passed and the other half is about to hate me for the law I’m planning to pass next. Diverting resources to solve one problem means two new problems pop up in its place, and even success, like when I finally have a big enough food industry to support my population, is quickly countered by failure: while I was building that new food district, 177 people froze to death.

Apart from the angry icons at the top of the screen warning of the plunging temperature and rising crime and spread of disease in my city, there are other angry icons popping up to point out other problems, like which districts have been shut down by riots and which have been shut down because they fell into disrepair. But notifications aren’t always about a major area of my city failing—sometimes they’re about a single citizen…

I’ve heard of opening a can of whup-ass, but 2024 has opened up a can of survival-ass. Does that even make sense? Sorry, I’ve been up late every night this week playing a survival game and I can’t really tell.

We’re only in February and it’s already been a massive year for survival, first with record-setting critter-catcher Palworld and then with smash-hit open world RPG Enshrouded barely a week later. Now we’re looking down the barrel at three more survival games all arriving next week: co-op Victorian gaslamp fantasy Nightingale, singleplayer driving survival game Pacific Drive, and the 1.0 launch of last year’s tremendous survival hit Sons of the Forest. Yep. All next week.

Here’s the Sons of the Forest 1.0 trailer courtesy of IGN:

What’s new? Well, raccoons for one, which you can see scurrying in the titular forest and scampering up trees. It also looks like there are several new spooky areas to explore, what appears to be at least one new multi…

As the games industry becomes ever-larger, and players become more connected, the problem of toxic behaviour has moved from a background concern to a major issue for developers, publishers and, in extreme cases, the authorities. Now, in a move that will be welcomed by many, publisher Ubisoft has announced it’s signed an agreement with the UK police (thanks, BBC) that will see the worst cases of online harassment and threats fast-tracked to the force.

It’s the first such arrangement of its kind and based around Ubisoft’s Newcastle-based customer relationship centre, one of five that the publisher operates globally. These places engage with the positive side of gaming communities, handle customer issues like refunds, and also deal with the toxic stuff. 

The agreement is with Northumbria Police Force and will see specialist officers training Ubisoft staff about negative online behaviour, as well as Ubisoft having the fast track option for extreme cases where it’…

Golden age pirates: murderous villains or freedom fighters? It’s the latter view that French studio Savage Level hopes to express with its first game, a tactical RPG that stars Captain Flint, the fictional pirate whose buried treasure is sought after in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

“This game gives us the possibility of informing the general public about what piracy really was, often portrayed in a caricatured and wrong way,” says the studio, which itself was inspired by pirates according to co-founder Maxime Josse, who created the company with brother Aurélien. 

Well, aspects of pirates, at least. “Real pirates”—not corsairs, or Hollywood’s vision of them—were “freedom seekers” who took care of their crewmates, Maxime told me in a conversation at GDC a couple weeks ago. He wants Savage Level to be an inclusive studio where everyone feels ownership of the work they’re doing, and where game development newcomers can gain experience und…

Boy, that sure didn’t take long. Blizzard announced today that Diablo 4, the latest iteration of its demon-clobbering action-RPG, will be coming to Steam on October 17, and is available for wishlisting now.

Diablo 4 on Steam will support cross-platform play with other versions of the game—Battle.net, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5—and will offer unique Steam-specific features including Steam achievements and integration with the Steam friends list. It will also be playable on the Steam Deck.

The launch of Diablo 4 on Steam will coincide with the start of the Season of Blood, the game’s second season and Blizzard’s hoped-for bounceback from the mess of season one. The Season of the Malignant, as it’s known, did not go over well with fans, thanks to a mix of nerfs, loot, and balance issues that were almost universally negatively received. The reaction was bad enough that Blizzard held an emergency livestream in which community manag…

The Augmentation Evoker came to World of Warcraft with patch 10.1.5 last week, bringing a whole new type of DPS to the game. For the uninitiated, this new spec works by buffing party members to bump their damage numbers rather than melting faces itself. It’s comparable to the Dancer from Final Fantasy 14 or the Bard from Dungeons & Dragons—basically, when an Augmentation Evoker’s in the group, everyone does better.

So obviously they’ve been getting kicked out of groups for no reason. A reddit thread on the World of Warcraft subreddit emerged with a compilation of screenshots from the Wyrmrest Temple discord, community server for Evokers. Typing “!augdps” in the augmentation channel will have Carlygos, the server’s friendly bot, drop an ever-evolving montage of people missing the point:

WoWhead confirms that as it stands, popular damage meter addons aren’t properly tracking the Evoker’s contributions to their group. Despite Blizzard’s mission statement that they…