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JEMC on 28 August 2025
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The Thursday gaming news, all in one long post:

SALES/PLAYER COUNTS & DEALS

This week, the Epic Store gives away these two games:

Next week, the free games will be The Battle of Polytopia and Monument Valley.

Steam has these deals:

There’s a new Humble Bundle: the Capcom Due of Justice: Ace Attorney and Mega Man Bundle, with up to 11 items to get (9 games and 2 coupons) during 26 days: https://www.humblebundle.com/games/duo-justice-ace-attorney-and-mega-man.

Fanatical has the new BYO Pedal to the Metal Bundle - Full Throttle, with 20 games to choose from for your 3+, 5+ or 7+ game bundles during 34 days: https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-pedal-to-the-metal-bundle.

SOFTWARE & DRIVERS

Epic's CEO Tim Sweeney wades in on the UE performance debate: 'The primary reason Unreal Engine 5-based games don't run smoothly on certain PCs or GPUs is the development process'
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/epics-ceo-tim-sweeney-wades-in-on-the-ue-performance-debate-the-primary-reason-unreal-engine-5-based-games-dont-run-smoothly-on-certain-pcs-or-gpus-is-the-development-process/
In the world of PCs and PC gaming, debates are usually quite evenly distributed. AMD vs Intel. AMD vs Nvidia. WASD vs arrow keys. Cats vs dogs. You'll find arguments for either side most of the time. However, when it comes to Unreal Engine 5, comments from PC gamers are mostly on the side of "it just runs really badly." Epic Games has tried to counter such claims many times before, but with the debate still running, CEO Tim Sweeney has stepped in to say that the main reason why UE5 games don't run well is how they're developed in the first place.
He said this at the recent Unreal Fest event in Seoul, as reported by Korean site This is Game (via RedGamingTech). Press members asked about what Epic Games was doing to address optimisation issues for games developed on UE5. "The primary reason Unreal Engine 5-based games don't run smoothly on certain PCs or GPUs is the development process," replied Sweeney (alas, my grasp of Korean is non-existent, so hopefully the machine translation has got it spot on).
More specifically, he suggested that one particular problem is the choice of PC platform used in the formative stages of a game's creation. "Many developers begin by developing games for high-end hardware, then optimize and test on lower-spec devices in the final stages."
>> That doesn’t explain why users with the highest-end systems available also have those problems, or why they happen with console ports.

MODS, EMULATORS & FAN PROJECTS

In the wake of shutting down a highly popular mod, Final Fantasy 14 director Yoshi-P shares deeply earnest blog about 'mods, their use, and the culture surrounding them'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/final-fantasy/in-the-wake-of-shutting-down-a-highly-popular-mod-final-fantasy-14-director-yoshi-p-shares-deeply-earnest-blog-about-mods-their-use-and-the-culture-surrounding-them/
In case you're unfamiliar with the Final Fantasy 14 community, recently, a mod named Mare Lamentorium—which had many thousands of users at its peak—was sent a cease & desist order. The mod in question allowed players to share their modded appearances with each other, either via an individual code, or by allowing players to join 'syncshells'.
From a community standpoint, Mare was used in two ways—either for innocuous roleplayers or outfit enthusiasts to customise their character, say, by giving a human model pointy ears—or, and I say this without judgement, smut. There is an enormous underground modding scene in Final Fantasy 14, covering both adult and non-adult content.
The biggest issue being that addons are against the terms of service of Final Fantasy 14—however, Square Enix will only take action if a player is obviously cheating, or if they are reported for mod use. In other words, players don't get banned for having a DPS meter, they get banned for using that DPS meter to chew out their party members in-game.
Community uproar around Mare Lamentorium's been loud, however—loud enough that game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) has felt the need to create an extensive blog post on the subject.
At the start of this blog post, Yoshi-P asks media outlets (hey, that's me!) to "Please do not summarize or provide only excerpts." This obviously puts me in a tough spot, given it's my job to add context to videogame news—especially as someone with thousands of hours in this game, and a foot in its roleplay community.
>> While the article continues and does exactly what Yoshi-P asked them not to, I’ll leave it there.

GAMING NEWS

Riot leaked its next 2XKO fighter in the silliest way possible before throwing its hands up and saying 'oopsy daisy' with an announcement post
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fighting/riot-leaked-its-next-2xko-fighter-in-the-silliest-way-possible-before-throwing-its-hands-up-and-saying-oopsy-daisy-with-an-announcement-post/
Leaks are part and parcel of a videogame's development at this point. Do I agree with that? Of course not, but you'd be hard pressed to find a big game that hasn't sprung a little leak here and there at some point. Sometimes it's dataminers getting their hands on a beta, or in more unfortunate cases (like GTA 6), it's a big ol' hack job.
Sometimes, though, the call comes from inside the house. That's exactly what happened in the case of 2XKO—Riot's upcoming League of Legends tag fighter—when an unannounced character showed up on the developer's goddamn support page of all places.

Hinako Shimizu's arc in Silent Hill f is shaped by the Japanese women's rights movement of the 1960s and depicts 'how she musters the courage to combat' repression she encounters
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/hinako-shimizus-arc-in-silent-hill-f-is-shaped-by-the-japanese-womens-rights-movement-of-the-1960s-and-depicts-how-she-musters-the-courage-to-combat-repression-she-encounters/
Hinako Shimizu is shaping up to be one of the more intriguing protagonists I've encountered in a Silent Hill game. Even after three hours of playing through the beginning of Silent Hill f I still can't quite figure out whether she's as innocent and selfless as she appears. But what is clear is that, like many characters present in Silent Hill games, she's been through a hell of a lot of trauma.

Hideo Kojima questionably visits Saudi Arabia to drop the news that he knows just what Death Stranding 3 should be but he wants someone else to make it
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/hideo-kojima-questionably-visits-saudi-arabia-to-drop-the-news-that-he-knows-just-what-death-stranding-3-should-be-but-he-wants-someone-else-to-make-it/
Great news: Hideo Kojima already knows just what he wants Death Stranding 3 to be. Bad news: some other poor sod is gonna have to make it, because Kojima's very busy converting Willem Dafoe into an Ogg Vorbis file or whatever it is he does these days.

Here's every game that Silksong's surprise release has delayed as indies scramble to escape its powerful aura
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/heres-every-game-that-silksongs-surprise-release-has-delayed-as-indies-scramble-to-escape-its-powerful-aura/
"From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, with a sawed-off .410 on my lap," Bruce Springsteen crooned in his magnificent 1982 ballad Nebraska. "Through to the badlands of Wyoming, I killed everything in my path." The Boss was of course relating the tale of infamous mass murderer Charles Starkweather, but he might as well have been talking about Hollow Knight: Silksong, the upcoming metroidvania that has now claimed at least eight victims since its surprise release date announcement earlier this month.
Nobody's actually getting murdered here, to be clear: When I say "victims" I mean "other videogames," and by "claimed" I mean that Silksong's looming launch has led those games to adjust their own release plans so as not to be caught in the blast radius. It's been quite a show, and while this sort of release date scramble isn't unprecedented—Starfield made something of a mini-splash a couple years ago—I haven't seen this kind of fracas since Cyberpunk 2077 started throwing elbows back in 2020.

Blizzard promises to add 'speed, power, and fun' back to WoW Legion Remix after disappointing players with a time-gated grind
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/world-of-warcraft/blizzard-promises-to-add-speed-power-and-fun-back-to-wow-legion-remix-after-disappointing-players-with-a-time-gated-grind/
No one is safe from the ire of players who feel like their toys were ripped away from them. Not even Blizzard when it tried to balance World of Warcraft's next Remix event after players overwhelmingly loved how unbalanced the last one was.

Judas must be getting closer, because Ken Levine just rolled out its first-ever dev log and some new art
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/judas-must-be-getting-closer-because-ken-levine-just-rolled-out-its-first-ever-dev-log-and-some-new-art/
Three years after Shock recidivist Ken Levine formally unveiled his next game as Judas, we still don't know much about it, except that it sure looks like a new BioShock. But that situation will hopefully be changing soon: Levine posted the very first Judas dev log today, and said he hopes "to communicate more frequently to update you with new details of what we are working on."

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 director adds another DLC teaser to the pile: 'We may be cooking'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/clair-obscur-expedition-33-director-adds-another-dlc-teaser-to-the-pile-we-may-be-cooking/
I don't blame any of the developers behind Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for not immediately thinking about DLC plans just as their game exploded in popularity and hit sales numbers in the millions earlier this year. But in the last few months they've acknowledged the hunger for DLC in every way but a direct confirmation and at this point I'd just like to know if those plans are real.
(...)
That brings us to a comment from director Guillaume Broche this week in an interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays. When asked about plans to release DLC, Broche said, "There may be," and that it's "a bit too early to say."

Final Fantasy 14's incoming choose-your-own difficulty will be 'the general direction' going forward, but Yoshi-P suggests they might need to trim future patches to compensate
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/final-fantasy/final-fantasy-14s-incoming-choose-your-own-difficulty-will-be-the-general-direction-going-forward-but-yoshi-p-suggests-they-might-need-to-trim-future-patches-to-compensate/
Final Fantasy 14's gonna be shaking up how it handles difficulty come patch 7.35, after a mini-disaster with patch 7.25's Occult Crescent back in May. To put a long story short, Creative Studio 3's somewhat fumbled approach to content difficulty came to a head; the Forked Tower somehow managed to thread the needle, becoming a raid made for no-one.
(...)
That's changing with 7.35's Pilgrim's Traverse, which'll have all sorts of variable difficulty content—you'll be able to tackle all 100 floors of the deep dungeon with a matchmade group, but you'll then be able to challenge a "quantum" difficulty boss via offerings. Give more offerings, get a harder butt-kicking.
>> He also said that we won’t have to wait long for the next expansion.

Kevin Spacey got 'a little weird' on the set of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare: 'We all had to fake laugh'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/call-of-duty/kevin-spacey-got-a-little-weird-on-the-set-of-call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-we-all-had-to-fake-laugh/
2014's Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will always be the game that made us "Press F to pay respects", a weird moment of interactivity that undercut what was meant to be an emotional scene. Even when we're all gone, the meme will live on.
If there's one other thing that you'll probably remember about Sledgehammer's foray into future warfare, it's that it starred Kevin Spacey. (...)

The MMO granddaddy you've never heard of is celebrating its 35th anniversary, and it still pulls in 'a few thousand active players' and needs a staff of 40 to run: 'We want to be able to survive for another 35 years'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/the-mmo-granddaddy-youve-never-heard-of-is-celebrating-its-35th-anniversary-and-it-still-pulls-in-a-few-thousand-active-players-and-needs-a-staff-of-40-to-run-we-want-to-be-able-to-survive-for-another-35-years/
If any one thing can claim responsibility for sending me down the dark, dark path of writing for a living, it's probably MUDs—text-based MMOs from an era before 3D graphics that somehow still endure today. It wasn't school, it wasn't uni, it wasn't a mentor's encouragement or some precocious childhood proclivity. I just spent most of my adolescence typing a lot and it just kind of kept happening as I approached adulthood.
And one of the granddaddies of MUDs as a genre is GemStone IV, currently marking its 35th anniversary. It's bigger than you might think: after starting "on the early ISPs—Genie, Prodigy, AOL" all the way back in 1990 and finally moving to the web proper in 1997, it still manages to pull in "a few thousand active players" in the modern era, per product manager Wyrom.

Bethesda remembers it made Starfield, promises new 'space gameplay' in back half of random video that doesn't even mention Starfield in the title
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/bethesda-remembers-it-made-starfield-promises-new-space-gameplay-in-back-half-of-random-video-that-doesnt-even-mention-starfield-in-the-title/
Oh, Starfield. Since the release of—and lukewarm response to—the Shattered Space expansion almost a full year ago, Bethesda's been very quiet about what it's got planned for the game that was once anticipated enough to send Baldur's Gate 3 scurrying for cover. In fairness, the studio's had other irons in the fire, most notably the much-better-received Oblivion remaster that hit earlier this year.
(...)
Well take heart, true believers, because someone has remembered the game exists. In a recent chat with dev Tim Lamb on Bethesda's own YouTube channel, it was confirmed that, yep, there is something cooking for Starfield in the relatively near future. "I'm really excited for players to see what the team's been working on," said Lamb. "We have some cool stuff coming, including free updates and features that players have been asking for, as well as a new DLC story."
>> Kind of harsh headline given that this cool stuff may be linked to the interstellar travel PCGamer posted about earlier this month.

'We have become experts at putting Poland into games': Cronos: The New Dawn is set in a district of Kraków simply because Bloober wanted to 'show our crib to the audience'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/we-have-become-experts-at-putting-poland-into-games-cronos-the-new-dawn-is-set-in-a-district-of-krakow-simply-because-bloober-wanted-to-show-our-crib-to-the-audience/
Cronos: The New Dawn takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of the Kraków district of Nowa Huta during the 1980s. It seems like an oddly specific location, that is, until you actually ask the devs over at Bloober Team why they decided to set their upcoming survival horror game here.



Please excuse my bad English.

Former gaming PC: i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Current gaming PC: R5-7600, 32GB RAM 6000MT/s (CL30) and a RX 9060XT 16GB

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.