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Some time into figuring out Fantastic Haven's UI and menu options, I received a notification that a gryphon—who I'd so nicely made a little patch of grassland for—had gone rogue. Tabbing back to my settlement, I watched the little rascal sprint for my quarantine building and smack it before my helpful golems came along to calm the poor blighter down.

These charming little vignettes give the creatures of Fantastic Haven a whole lot of personality, even if they're only in your enclosures for a short period of time. Fantastic Haven is a Fantasy Management builder—meaning you'll be making adjustments to your clinic for wondrous beasts from a top-down view, plonking down buildings, assigning your wizards to tasks, navigating a research tree, that sort of thing.

YouTube Trailer
Steam Page

Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a mammoth-sized update, titled Update 2.0, tomorrow, September 21, and it promises to be a bit of a game changer. A police revamp, a progression overhaul, a new cybernetics system, vehicular combat, DLSS 3.5—it's vast, and thankfully separate from the Phantom Liberty expansion due next week, so you'll get all of this for free. With so many changes, the developer is naturally recommending that you experience it all on a fresh save, starting a new game rather than continuing an existing one.

It's entirely possible to just carry on with an old save, but making a new character will ease you into all of the big changes, most notably the skill system, which might be a bit jarring if you have to rebuild an existing character. "Due to the number of changes, starting fresh will enhance your overall gameplay experience," reads the tweet from CD Projekt Red.

Hey, chooms! While you'll be able to continue the game with your current character on an existing save, we recommend starting a new game after @CyberpunkGame
Update 2.0. Due to the number of changes, starting fresh will enhance your overall gameplay experience!

After a draining day's reportage upon the thoroughly alien doings of vast corporate publishers, I like nothing better than to flee, blabbing and weeping, into the arms of a micro-RPG. Scumhead's Franzen - released a few days ago on Steam and Itch - has a couple of big draws, straight off the bat. Firstly and least importantly, it's free, which it really shouldn't be. Secondly and more significantly, it's one of those rare RPG miniatures that is both richly imagined and snappy, with a busy and befuddling world in which you have immediate clear motivations that escalate rapidly and breed Dire Implications. It also looks like a 16-bit Pathologic, so consider me firmly on board.

YouTube Trailer
Steam Page
Itch Page

Since its release in 2020, the Xbox Series S has been the subject of debate over its value within the current hardware generation lineup due to being less powerful than the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. It turns out, Microsoft's $300 Series S is more popular than the Series X.

The revelation was spotted in the big Xbox court document leak that has taken the internet by storm this week. One of these documents focuses on Xbox's April 2022 gaming results. While the document is heavily redacted, one slide shows the "Console Sell-In Mix". As you can see in the screenshot below, the document reveals that 74.8% of Xbox Series owners own the Series S, with the Series X on 25.1%. As mentioned, these numbers are from early 2022, so may have changed since then.

While this split seems surprising at first glance given the lower power of the Xbox Series S (it's designed to normally render games at 1440p resolution and 60 frames per second, with a lack of 4K gaming and no disc drive), it should not be entirely surprising from a consumer perspective.

The Xbox Series S is the most affordable console out of the three home systems available in the ninth generation of gaming. Costing $299 (or $349.99 if you buy the 1TB model), the S is a console capable of playing next-gen games like Starfield, even if not at the highest graphical settings. It's an appealing pitch to most people who care more about the games and less about peak performance.

The First Descendant, whose open cross-play beta is currently enjoying a healthy spot on Steam's most played games list. At the time of this writing, The First Descendant has over 77,591 concurrent players, and that figure continues to rise. It's easy to imagine it landing into the top 10 by the end of the day.

So what is it? Well, The First Descendant is a free-to-play, sci-fi, third-person, co-op shooter that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. But instead of one where rogue machines destroyed human civilization, you fight off monsters to ensure the survival of humanity's remains following an alien attack.

The First Descendant is developed by Nexon (Korea's Tencent, basically). The beta is live until September 25, but the full game doesn't have a release date. Even in these busy weeks for major video game releases, the game already has a sizeable audience. Obviously, it remains to be seen whether it can bring all those players back at launch.

Steam Page

It's honestly a little endearing how hard Call of Duty's various studios continue to try and make its lore and characters matter. After the big reveal that Modern Warfare 3 would be bringing back classic villain Makarov - despite him not being anywhere in the story of the reboots, all bets were off.

The next classic villain to return to fulfil a role in Modern Warfare 3 is Viktor Zakhaev, who's the big baddie in the game's definitely very serious Zombies story, which is going to be part of the package for the first time in a Modern Warfare game.

Zakhaev wasn't much of a player in any of the rebooted Modern Warfare series, but Call of Duty's... story council decided to bring him back for a one-off Warzone-ending cutscene, which was meant to lead into Modern Warfare 2 (but didn't). At the end of it, Zakhaev is thrown into a nice deep shaft, and you can hear him screaming all the way down. Even Captain Price was counting on the fall to kill him.

SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet constellation has lost more than two hundred satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) since July, according to data from a satellite tracking website. This is the first time that Starlink has lost a significant number of satellites in a short time period, and these losses are typically influenced by solar flares that cause changes in orbit and damage or destroy the spacecraft. The nature of the satellites, i.e. their model, is unclear, and if they are the newer Starlink satellites that SpaceX regularly launches, then the firm will have to conduct at least nine Falcon 9 launches to make up for the satellites lost.

Since it is a SpaceX subsidiary, Starlink has rapidly built the world's largest LEO satellite internet constellation and the world's largest satellite constellation by rapidly launching them through the Falcon 9 rocket. However, upgrades to the spacecraft and constraints with the Falcon 9 have reduced the number of satellites that the firm can launch, with its latest launches seeing roughly 22 satellites per launch for a nearly one-third reduction over the 60 satellites that SpaceX launched during the early days of the Starlink buildout.

The newer satellites are second-generation spacecraft that SpaceX received the launch authorization from the FCC less than a year back. They are more powerful and are thus larger and heavier than the earlier satellites, which limits the Falcon 9 ability to squeeze large numbers inside a single payload fairing.

Satellites in orbit or space have to face off against various hazards that can damage or put them out of commission. SpaceX faced one such event in February 2022, when a solar flare damaged at least 40 of the recently launched satellites. SpaceX confirmed this and shared that the heat from the solar flare increased atmospheric density and made it impossible for the satellites to maintain their trajectory.

Microsoft says it is currently debating using ARM64 or AMD Zen 6 architecture for the CPU. Note that the Xbox Series X uses a custom Zen 2 CPU, while Zen 4 is used in present-day laptops and desktops. Microsoft appears to be leaning towards an AMD Navi 5x (RDNA 5) GPU compared to RDNA 3 for the current-generation Radeon RX 7000 Series (and a custom RDNA 2 GPU for Xbox Series X).

However, we must take these leaked documents with a grain of salt. Nothing is set in stone, especially for hardware not scheduled to ship to customers for another five years. These are Microsoft's alleged aspirational goals for the future of Xbox, and plans can and likely will change.

Saber Interactive has announced it's ending development of last year's Evil Dead: The Game - meaning no new content will be produced and the planned Switch version is now cancelled.

Evil Dead: The Game - which launched onto Xbox, PlayStation, and PC last May - is another entry in the asymmetrical multiplayer horror genre that's already bought us the likes of Dead by Daylight and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, this one pitting a cast of familiar faces from the Evil Dead movies, including Bruce Campbell's Ash Williams, against the Deadite hordes.

Since its release, sporadic post-launch support has introduced a castle map inspired by Army of Darkness, new outfits, a number of characters, the new Plaguebringer class, and a new Splatter Royale mode. April saw the previously Epic Games Store-exclusive title make the jump to Steam on PC, but content updates fizzled out after that - and now Saber Interactive has confirmed development has reached its end.

Bluey, the Australian cartoon sensation (seriously, it's great and you should give it a watch even if you're not actually five years old), is being turned into a video game that's coming to Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and PC on 17th November this year.

Bluey the cartoon follows the adventures of the eponymous Blue Heeler dog, her sister Bingo, mum Chilli, and dad Bandit. All are along for the ride in Bluey: The Videogame, which promises an "interactive sandbox adventure" for up to four players, featuring fully explorable recreations of some of the show's most recognisable locations.

There's talk of "story-driven episodic gameplay", split into four parts, that'll include activities and mini-games inspired by the cartoon - Keepy Uppy and Magic Xylophone are mentioned - with players able to unlock new costumes, stickers, episodes, and locations as they go.

Embracer has made a new round of layoffs, this time at Mythforce developer Beamdog less than 18 months after its acquisition.

Beamdog was acquired by Aspyr in April last year, whose parent company is Embracer.

Now 26 employees have been laid off, according to multiple LinkedIn posts and reported by GameDeveloper.

Criterion, the British studio behind recent Need for Speed titles and the classic Burnout series, will now focus the majority of its efforts on EA's Battlefield shooter franchise.

A smaller "core group" within Criterion will continue on with Need for Speed, meanwhile.

Criterion has of course worked on Battlefield before, and contributed bits to DICE's Battlefield V and Battlefield 2042 (it also helped out on Star Wars Battlefront 2). The talented team will now turn its efforts back to improving 2042, and to the future of the Battlefield franchise overall.