Prison Architect 2 will support mods with a built-in editor on PC Mod support on console, too Image credit:Paradox/Double Eleven Prison Architect 2 was announced earlier this evening and will switch the carceral management sim to 3D when it releases on March 26th. It’ll also have robust mod support, with “a mod editor built-in for PC players”, according to game director Gaz Wright. “[Mod support will be] built into the game for the first time,” Wright told Katharine at Gamescom last year....

Protecting art from generative AI is vital, now and for the future Part 2 of our series on generative AI delves into the issues around how it’s currently trained Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun In Part 1, Our Generation , we looked at what we mean when they use the term ‘generative AI’. Today in Part 2, The Art Of The Steal, we look at why people say generative AI is stealing art....

Rally Point: Oh phew, Songs of Silence is only pretending to be a card game No big deal Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Chimera Entertainment/H2 Interactive Clambering deep out of the Contemplation Pit, where reading reviews or opinions or, god help you, Takes, is forbidden, I am curious to learn how people have been categorising Songs of Silence . Its structure most resembles Songs of Conquest or Heroes of Might and/or Magic, but with little RPG emphasis or base building, and minimal tactical fighting....

Sea of Thieves is getting paid custom servers next year, and Rare are switching up their approach to seasons As outlined in a first-ever community direct that’s come not long after Microsoft’s layoffs Image credit:Rare Big piratey thing Sea of Thieves will be getting custom servers as part of a paid subscription service in “early 2026”, developers Rare have announced during a first-ever community direct for the game. That’s far from all of the studio’s plans, with wider shakeups also in the pipeline....

Soaring city builder Laysara: Summit Kingdom is now a full-blown trading empire game Thanks to the new Sandbox update Image credit:Future Friends Games / Quite OK Games Mountainous town- builder Laysara: Summit Kingdom has received a Sandbox update that, essentially, turns a game about settling the slopes of precisely one mountain into a lightweight trading empire simulator. Where the early access game’s existing modes have you doing up one Bonsai Everest at a time, Sandbox lets you switch between several and export goods for other alpine mayors to buy....

Spelunky creator’s mega-collection of fictional retro games UFO 50 will finally be out this September First revealed back in 2017 Image credit:Mossmouth UFO 50 is a collection of fictional retro games designed as if they were made for a non-existent games console 40 years ago, but in reality have been developed as brand new titles for an upcoming collection from indie devs including Spelunky creator Derek Yu. With the ambitious project nearing a decade in its own development, though, those games have now taken on their own real history in addition to their made-up one....

Squint, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 looks like a fitting Steam Deck game Surprisingly robust performance makes up for tiny text and battery burn Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun Steam Deck Academy brings together all our guides and explainers on getting the most out of your Steam Deck, no student loans or sweaty dormitories required. Hark, or whatever that is in Czech. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has earned Playable status on the Steam Deck , and it’s a shrewd assessment on Valve’s part: there are some shortcomings that keep the coveted Verified badge out of Deliverance 2’s reach, most notably its cramped UI, but I’ve been bumbling around the medieval RPG for hours now and it is indeed plenty functional in handheld mode....

Steam’s new Game Recording beta lets you instant-replay all those Elden Ring deaths Watch and learn Image credit:Valve From ShadowPlay to OBS, there’s no shortage of tools and apps that can record and share your finest gaming moments and/or hilarious failures. No matter to Valve, who’ve updated the Steam beta client with a replay system of their own. As explained in this handy Steam Game Recording guide , you can either start and cease recording clips at your command, or keep it continuously capturing up to 120 minutes of video for later snipping....

Team Cherry working on “quality issues” with Hollow Knight: Silksong’s Simplified Chinese translation, following mixed Steam reviews Improvements will be in the works “over the coming weeks” Image credit:Team Cherry Hollow Knight: Silksong developers Team Cherry are “working to improve” the game’s Simplified Chinese translation, following “quality issues” which have seen its Steam user reviews from those speaking the language drop to “mixed”. As you can easily see thanks to Steam’s recent introduction of language-specific review splits , the mixed reviews are unique to the 6,382 people who’ve left verdicts in Simplified Chinese so far....

Tell game-install-size inflation to sod off with the 1TB WD Blue SN850 SSD, now £47 / $55 for Black Friday That’s the cheapest this fast PCIe 4.0 drive has been in ages Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun Recently, PC games have been gorging themselves silly on our storage space. 160GB for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 ? 190GB for God of War Ragnarok ? If these games were people they’d stand waiting at the Pizza Hut buffet and nab ten of the twelve slices of Pepperoni Feast as soon as they’re slid under the heatlamps....

The Alienware Aurora 16X with an NVIDIA RTX 5070 is down to its lowest price since launch The same price as its less impressive sibling. Image credit:Dell Alienware’s laptop range this year includes the Alienware Aurora 16 and its more impressive Aurora 16X . Both are great laptops, but as you may have guessed from the ‘X’ in the title, the latter is the more impressive version. It has double the refresh rate (up to 240Hz), an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, better performance, a Thunderbolt 4....

The best quest in Dragons Dogma 2 turns my weird hobby of NPC stalking into an actual objective What is my crime?! Enjoying a succulent day night cycle?! Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Capcom If you’ve read my duology on spending far too long queuing in Hitman, you’ll know I’ve a predilection for the virtual people watching of NPCs in games that have some sort of schedule system. “It’s a wholesome pursuit of game design knowledge!...

The Blasphemous dev’s new Goya-fuelled stealth tactics monastery sim is basically Umberto Eco’s The Great Escape The Stone Of Madness gets new story trailer Image credit:Tripwire Earlier today, old man James wagged a finger at us all sternly for not writing about Atomfall before . My turn to puff out my cheeks and look not angry, just disappointed: why haven’t we covered The Stone Of Madness prior to the below Gamescom 2024 story trailer?...

The devs of surreal escape sim Militsioner explain how they’ve shrunk their giant ambition TallBoys cut their voice recognition feature and added a tutorial Image credit:TallBoys Could there be a more than universally relatable quote shared by indie developers than: “We really just wanted to make a small game”? Of course, there’s little to complain about when games like Cuphead or Owlboy finally see the light of the day, demonstrating what wonders growing ambition can often bring....

The Electronic Wireless Show podcast S3 episode 10: making fun of that Ready Player One metaverse game Plus, the games we weren’t allowed to play as little’uns Image credit:Warner Bros You wouldn’t know because she hardly ever mentions it, but Alice Bee is not a Ready Player One fan. In fairness, the newly revealed Open (or Opthreen), an RPO-themed metaverse battle royale thing , does look, sound, feel, and smell horrible, so a solid chunk of this week’s Electronic Wireless Show podcast is just us despairing over it....

The First Descendant is playable on Steam Deck, despite some temporary compatibility confusion Dude, where’s my Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable? Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun Steam Deck Academy brings together all our guides and explainers on getting the most out of your Steam Deck, no student loans or sweaty dormitories required. Besides giving The First Descendant the ol’ benchy marks on desktop, I was curious to see how this gleaming looter shooter would run on the less flexing hardware of the Steam Deck ....

The first look at Enshrouded’s next update promises a “rebirth” of that titular shroud It’s due out in May Image credit:Keen Games Right, anyone fancy a small look at the next update for Enshrouded ? Today’s Triple-I showcase delivered exactly that, though I have to admit it’s pretty brief, and doesn’t show all that much. The game’s sixth update, Thralls of Twilight, is due out sometime in May, and seems to come with some big additions....

The Maw - 18th-23rd March 2024 Our weekly news liveblog, and the week’s most appetising game releases Image credit:John Hamilton Mortimer/Wikimedia Commons It’s GDC week over in San Francisco at the moment, and such a high concentration of video game developers in one place can only mean one thing: The Maw has turned its ever-dribbling gaze to America’s west coast, and is preparing to bask in all the fresh learnings being shared about how last year’s best video games were made and created....

The Maw 22nd-27th January 2024 Our weekly news liveblog, with this week’s top videogame releases Image credit:Athanasius Kircher/Wikipedia As W.H. Auden once wrote: “our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that Videogame News Writers may still appear to blithe it.” Welcome one and all to another week of addled product journalism care of your ever-salivating host, the Maw, ravenous hype god and certainly not a silly metaphor I’ve come up with to make my job sound grander than it should be....

The Maw: what’s new in PC games this week? Space Marine 2, Reka, Deathsprint 66, Wild Bastards and many more Image credit:Joannes Jonstonus / fromoldbooks.org Autumn is upon us, or “fall” if you’re from the other side of the pond. The leaves flake from the boughs like the dandruff of Pan, god of the wild - pandruff, perhaps? The waters of the rivers thicken, rejecting the fading sunlight, and the big coffee chains start doing monstrous things with hazelnut syrup....