Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[JEMC]

And today there's a third, but short, part of the gaming news:

2023's true GOTY has had its name and assets jacked by 'some kind of crypto scam,' while bootlickers assure the dev it's actually great publicity
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/2023s-true-goty-has-had-its-entire-style-jacked-by-some-kind-of-crypto-scam-while-bootlickers-assure-the-dev-its-actually-great-publicity/
Chances are that, unless you happened to read my personal GOTY pick from 2023 or just have generally excellent taste in videogames, you're not too familiar with Stonks-9800 (which you can find on Steam). That's a shame, because the early access stock-trading sim set in the salad days of '80s Japan is an absolute banger—oozing style and with a delicious platter of gameplay loops that will keep your eyes fixed on its line graphs for days, weeks, months at a time.
Stonks-9800 is excellent, relatively obscure, and comes from a solo dev who doesn't have the legal resources of a major publisher, which might go some way to explaining why its assets, characters, and name have been purloined by crypto bros claiming affiliation with the SPX6900 coin. Their website plasters itself in art and assets taken from the game and even the Stonks-9800 name itself: "Stonks‑9800 Gave Birth to SPX6900," claims the site, falsely.

Elden Ring Nightreign's Sentient Pest is the second Everdark boss to fall short of expectations set by Gaping Jaw: 'There's almost no challenge'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/elden-ring-nightreigns-sentient-pest-is-the-second-everdark-boss-to-fall-short-of-expectations-set-by-gaping-jaw-theres-almost-no-challenge/
As part of FromSoftware's ongoing post-launch support for Elden Ring Nightreign a new Everdark boss has been tagged into the fight. Everdark bosses are a souped-up version of an existing Nightlord, there's been one for Gapping Jaw and Fulghor, and now the latest one to grace us is the bug buddies, Sentient Pest.

As fans lose it over sanitised nudity and violence, Ready or Not devs promise they haven't changed their 'creative vision': 'We’ve only made changes where absolutely required'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/as-fans-lose-it-over-sanitised-nudity-and-violence-ready-or-not-devs-promise-they-havent-changed-their-creative-vision-weve-only-made-changes-where-absolutely-required/
SWAT sim Ready or Not's recent Steam reviews cratered to Mostly Negative recently, in the wake of changes to the game's content to meet console standards that were—if not widely, then vocally—perceived to be censorship by a number of fans.
(...)
That set fans off to the extent that the devs at VOID Interactive have come out with a statement to try to mollify them. In a post on Steam, VOID said that "misconceptions and misinformation" have been circulating about just how far-ranging the changes are, and explicitly listed—with before-and-after shots—the changes that have been made to the game's PC version. It then went on to reassure fans that "Missions such as Elephant, Neon Tomb, and the infamous Valley of the Dolls," a level which sees you storm the home of a child pornographer, "remain unchanged."

Peak devs accidentally released a patch that 'made a number of players totally unable to play' so now there's a new public beta Steam branch for everyone to mess around in safely
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/peak-devs-accidentally-released-a-patch-that-made-a-number-of-players-totally-unable-to-play-so-now-theres-a-new-public-beta-steam-branch-for-everyone-to-mess-around-in-safely/
Peak rose to fame almost overnight with this indie co-op climbing game selling two million copies in just nine days. But with this success came a little chaos. Developers Aggro Crab and Landfall came together to make this game for a game jam and as a way to decompress from making bigger games, it was never meant for hundreds of thousands of players to enjoy all at once.
"So, let's talk about stability," Landcrab says in a blog post. "The sheer number of people playing this game means that we're often hearing about hardware or network-specific issues that our internal testers have a lot of trouble catching because, well, there aren't 100,000 of them. Recently this resulted in a patch going live that made a number of players totally unable to play the game, and we had to roll it back immediately. That's bad."
The patch in question was 1.6.a which has now "been reverted due to a variety of bug reports that were missed in testing". The patch was meant to "dramatically improve the stability" allowing players to reconnect to lost games and just a plethora of bug fixes. But while this may not be in effect any more the devs are still looking for ways to improve stability and dish out more bug fixes.
"To help with the stability of future major patches, we're going to be opening up a public beta Steam branch," the post continues. "This will allow anyone who wants to play with new, possibly unstable features to do so safely and report issues to us before they go live to the greater community."