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With Baldur's Gate 3 finally out of early access, I'm sure many of you will be busy creating your own custom characters right now as you begin your journey through Larian's RPG epic. But I implore you to take a moment to remember the great Losiir, a Githyanki soldier who most of you will probably never meet. That's because he only shows up if you pick Lae'zel as your origin character, because who else would be there to do her fancy sword lunge from above if not a gender-swapped version of basically herself? But he's a good egg, Losiir, even if his run-time as an official Baldur's Gate companion is, err, somewhat short-lived.

Two Point Campus’ second major expansion pack is throwing things back to the first daft management game in the series, Two Point Hospital. Publishers Sega have announced that Two Point Campus: Medical School is coming on August 17th and it's shipping our students off to learn how to cure diseases, inject butts, and replace heads with lightbulbs. Seriously, check it out below.

The Seagate FireCuda 530 is one of the best NVMe SSDs for PC and PS5, and today you can pick up the 2TB heatsink model for just £126. That's an awesome price for one of the very fastest SSDs on the market, one that's on par with our favourite favourite PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming, the Samsung 980 Pro and WD SN850. Normally we'd expect to pay closer to £160 for this model, making it a solid £30+ savings.

Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator and grand-daddy of the famed Final Fantasy series, previously expressed the desire to bring his newest RPG Fantasian over to PC. The game has been locked on subscription service Apple Arcade since 2021, but that might change soon. Maybe. Hopefully. That's according to an apparent listing for the game on SteamDB, suggesting that a PC port could be on the table.

Hello folks. It sure has been a while, hasn't it? Huge apologies for that. I would say it's been an unusually busy year, but then again, it's always a busy year, so I really have no excuse. Sorry about that. But! After some much appreciated feedback on how I can improve these Letters From The Editor, I return to you today with some notes and thoughts about how we're going to cover Baldur's Gate 3. I'll tell you now, it's going to be a while before you see our review, as review code only arrived a couple of days ago.

In the run-up to Baldur's Gate 3 leaving early access, developers Larian Studios have understandably put a lot of emphasis on the game's custom character creation, what with it being much more firmly ingrained in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing more generally than, say, their previous Divinity games. But before you jump into creating your favourite D&D build, do take a moment to watch the Introductions for each of its fixed origin characters, too. They're great fun, well-written and have some good jokes in them, but they also reveal some important details about your companions-to-be that you might not have gleaned otherwise. They're also very easy to miss if you're not careful.

Guess what? James and I, and a lot of other folk at RPS, are all learning the importance of rolling for initiative this week, because we're playing Baldur's Gate 3! Larian's take on what is essentially the official cRPG version of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is out of early access today and boy, is it a doozy. So we answer your questions and Nates, and talk about animal forms and rolling for initiative and why the DM is a git. Plus, James has been struggling to get the game working on Steam Deck. Sometimes it does!

If you’ve been resisting Baldur’s Gate 3’s early access run to save yourself for the full release, there’s good news for both of us: you can fill your knowledge boots with this guide to the launch build’s PC performance and best settings, and I get to avoid feeling like I’m just giving advice to people who’ve been playing this gigantic RPG for two years longer than me. Hell yeah.

The distance from the roof of the Counting House to the nearest building in Baldur’s Gate is vast, by design. The waterfront bank where the city’s great, good and gangster store their gold stands with its back to the sea, while a long and well-guarded bridge extends from its maw, like a money-hungry tongue. Legend says its top two floors are entirely without windows, the House an eyeless god to the citizens who reside on the hillside that slopes down toward the docks. So how was Gale, the wizard prodigy, able to bound from a faraway balcony to the brim of the bank, as if stepping lazily out onto his porch with a mug of coffee? Some say strange sorcery was afoot, but I’ve seen his character sheet, and so can be more specific.

Upon levelling up, Gale multiclassed as a sorcerer - an odd choice, but one that allowed him to unlock the ability to throw magic from a great range. Suddenly, while casting a teleport spell, this hybrid mage was able to reach across the wide moat of the Counting House and land safely on a high ledge. It’s one of many obscure class synergies via which, Larian imagines, you’ll be able to break their level design in unexpected and entertaining ways.

Portal 2 is obviously brilliant, in part because each of its chapters possesses a distinct charm. GLaDOS’ return, for instance, is a stretch of pure puzzling with just a dash of dread, while your first steps into the abandoned 1960s Aperture facility interrupt a fairly hopeless tone with an upbeat sense of discovery. For me, though, Portal 2 peaks late. So late that by the time it begins, your journey through the 'true' puzzle chambers are essentially over, leaving you as little more than a loose end in the big glowing eye of a former buddy. It’s Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You! Mmm, love that part.

Diablo 4 is walking back several changes from its big Season 1 patch which had made the game an even bigger slog and proved to be overwhelmingly controversial with fans. Blizzard had previously spoken about the upcoming 1.1.1 plaster update during a developer livestream, but the new patch notes detail everything we can expect, including crucial fixes, tweaks to mounts, and big buffs for the Sorcerer and Barbarian classes. The patch drops on August 8th.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve recommended people play Return Of The Obra Dinn. It's the one game I'm confident recommending to anyone to folks who play games frequently, but also to those who don't. My biggest triumph was recommending it to my dad, a 62-year-old retired manufacturing manager from Wales, who loved it so much he not only recommended it to a friend (who also loved it) but also said my mum should try it too - and I agree! It’s all subjective of course, but for me, its banger of a story, accessible it is, and how you can practically run it on a potato make it a wonderful gateway into gaming in general.

Logitech makes a ton of good PC stuff, but their HD webcams have been a cheap-and-cheerful go-to for years. One older model that sits on top of a bunch of monitors is the C720, an HD webcam that normally retails for $25. Today though, a $5 coupon on Amazon brings this webcam down to $13 and change, making it a sensible pickup for anyone that needs a webcam for streaming or video calls.

Striking Distance, the studio behind last year’s alien horror stomp ‘em up The Callisto Protocol, have suffered layoffs affecting 32 employees in what their publisher calls an effort to “realign the studio’s priorities to better position its current and future projects.”

Return Of The Obra Dinn is, quite rightly, one of the greatest video games of all time. It's certainly one of my personal favourites, and as this year's RPS 100 has proven, it's also greatly beloved by the rest of the RPS Treehouse. A brilliantly conceived murder mystery puzzle box (boat?) that not only has you working out whodunnit, but howdunnit, Obra Dinn is one of those detective games that really thrusts you into the thick of its deduction process. As you set about working out the identities and causes of death for each of the 60 souls onboard, it places you firmly in front of the ship's wheel before giving you free rein to steer its hull of supernatural horrors into whatever port of judgment you deem fit.

There are no truly wrong answers in Obra Dinn, but due to the nature of how you go about solving it, it's also one of those games I can't play too often without feeling like I know all the answers already. It's only now, five years later, that I feel like I could probably go back to Lucas Pope's nautical masterpiece and marvel at it afresh on a second playthrough, but there's one particular set of crew unmaskings that even its time-travelling stopwatch can't erase from my memory banks. Spoilers to follow obviously, but if you know, you know. I'm talking about the shoe and hammock revelation.

Vampire Survivors' snazzy new engine upgrade is coming this month, but developers Poncle seem to be cooking up something even more exciting for their dopamine-fuel bullet heaven shooter. Vampire Survivors: Directer’s Cut is supposedly a major overhaul to the smash hit roguelike, although it unfortunately “may or may not” ever be released.

Update: Larian Studios have now posted a detailed guide on how to prepare for Baldur's Gate 3's launch. The Steam blog says that early access saves and profiles "aren't compatible with the release version... and leaving them in your save folders may in some fringe cases cause issues."

Original Story: Baldur's Gate 3 is mere days away, and you may be wondering if you can prep in some way for the epic RPG's release. You can, it turns out: not by pre-loading its 122GB download size on Steam, no, but by deleting your Early Access saves and uninstalling the game entirely.

Last time, you overwhelmingly decided that going on the roof is better than one in the chamber, you little rapscallions. You're going to get in so much trouble when someone finds out! This week, I have death on my mind ahead of the much-belated scattering of my dad's ashes, so let's talk about death. 'The long sleep,' some say. 'Making the little flowers grow,' Lee Hazelwood will tell you. 'Big D,' I think is what several anonymous e-mails I've received were referring to. Let's compare several very different afterdeaths. What's better: in-game memorials to players, or Dark Souls bonewheels?

Acer's Nitro lineup of monitors have proven reliable in my estimation, with a unit I bought in 2019 still being used daily in 2023. There's another Nitro model discounted on Amazon US today, the XV271U. This newer Nitro model comes with a 27-inch span, 2560x1440 resolution and 180Hz refresh rate. That, combined with G-Sync/FreeSync support and a solid Fast IPS panel, make for an awesome monitor - especially at $200, following a $100 discount.

I feel a little bad for the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D. This 12-core 3D V-Cache processor sits in the middle of the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D (that ranks as the fastest gaming processor) and the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D (that combines excellent gaming and content creation performance).

However, being overshadowed by your siblings is no bad thing, as the 7900X3D has fallen significantly further in price, bringing it back into contention for users that want a lot of cores for content creation tasks and excellent gaming performance. It launched at $600 and now retails for $510, but today on Ebay you can get this processor for just $439 - an amazing price. You even get a free copy of Starfield in the bargain.

"We don't go to Ravenholm…" Half-Life 2's sixth chapter heading warns, and when you arrive at the outskirts of this abandoned mining town, you immediately see why. This headcrab and zombie-infested cess pit is an absolute horror show right from the off. Moans and screeches assault your ears from every nook and cranny of this dark murder hole, and if the hoarse crow calls and suspiciously high number of propane barrels weren't enough to put you off, the bloodied torsos lodged against its log cabin walls by deep set saw blades certainly will. Every fibre of your being is telling you to get the hell out of this place, and that surely, the Combine forces chasing you down here can't be worse than what's in front of you.

But I'd also add an addendum to that heading that goes something like this: "We don't go to Ravenholm, and definitely not with just a gravity gun." This is a place that demands you to have as much firepower as you can possibly muster, such are the monstrosities that lie in wait here. But what did baby Katharine decide to do when she was playing it alone on her terrible university laptop in the dead of night back in 2010? She decided to have a go at that old Zombie Chopper achievement for no good reason whatsoever. And what followed was even more horrifying than Ravenholm had any right to be.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is right around the corner - comes out tomorrow, August 3rd - and everything we’ve learned about the mammoth RPG makes it sounds like an awfully horny romp. Of course, there’s the recently revealed hot villainess that had an entire corner of the internet making the same joke: “I can fix her.” There’s the fact that you can seduce a druid who’s in bear form - as in an actual bear, not the gay slang version of the word. And now, the voice actor behind Baldur’s Gate 3’s narrator has posted several outtakes, giving us gems such as “I’m a bard, I can fuck my way through any problem.” Have a listen here.

I don't know about you, but I've been immensely enjoying the seeming renaissance of tower defence citybuilding games recently. The grimdark horrors of Age Of Darkness: Final Stand might be a bit too hard as nails for my personal liking, but there's something about the act of building up my little settlements and defending them against ever-larger nightly hordes that just unlocks something in my brain that says, 'Yes, more of this, please'. It's the same feeling I got from the blocky delights of Diplomacy Is Not An Option and the deckbuilding, comic-book stylings of ORX, too, but now there's a new kid that's ridden into town who I think might be the king of the lot.

Thronefall is a more minimalist take on the citybuilder tower defender, but while its bright colours might look like the distant cousin of a Townscaper toybox (it is, after all, made by the same dev wot did the equally charming Islanders), this deadly little thing is absolutely genius. It's only just come out in early access today, but I've been having a great time with a pre-release build of it, and can feel it sinking its claws into me with every attempt at its final level.

Multiplayer peekaboo game Dead By Daylight has added countless horror movie icons to its roster of playable villains and survivors in recent months. Behaviour Interactive have already steamrolled through recognisable faces such as Ghostface, Freddy Kreuger, Leatherface, Micheal Myers, and, err, Nic Cage. But the next collaboration takes the scares to outer space since the Xenomorph (the Alien from Alien) is coming to the game. Here’s a brief teaser.

Upcoming tactical CRPG Dark Envoy caught my attention when it was announced last year, mainly because it has the undeniably cool combo of high fantasy magic and steampunk firearms. Casting you as a refugee adventurer, you’ll be shooting and/or spell-flinging across the war-ravaged world of Jäan, and you can even bring a friend along for the ride in co-op. We already knew all that good stuff, but the developers have now released a new video that delves deeper into the game’s classes and specialisations. Take a look below.

Civil Protection officers are shorter than I thought they’d be. Don’t get me wrong, I'm very much a Short King myself, but I assumed the gas mask-wearing enforcers of City 17 would be more vertically intimidating. As I defiantly refuse to pick up litter in Half-Life 2’s opening sequence, I find the approaching officer and his raised electric baton to be weirdly adorable. Until he hits me, of course. The resulting crack gives me such a fright that I fling my arms out and smack my hand against the corner of a bookcase.

This has been my experience of playing the first few hours of Half-Life 2’s excellent fan-made VR mod, a completely free add-on that transforms Valve’s 2004 masterpiece into a full virtual reality experience. Under my direct control, Gordon Freeman is less a time-displaced MIT graduate with a penchant for murder and instead a gawking tourist who’s more interested in staring at canal architecture than liberating humanity. I spend the majority of my time leaning in really close to walls and muttering, “That’s interesting,” before a leaping headcrab shocks me so severely that I damage some more furniture and scare the cat.

If you own Half-Life 2 but never bothered with its freebie tech demo, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, do give it a whirl. Its showcase of HDR lighting might have lost the "Huh, nice" factor it had in 2005, but it’s still a satisfying slice of punchy HL2 combat, with a nod to the original Half-Life that Valve regretted not making in the main game. I know this because Valve told me, via Lost Coast's other innovation: its developer commentary.

I love these things, these spinning speech bubbles inflated with knowledge straight from the FPS coalface. So do Valve, judging by how dev commentary has appeared (in identical, node-activatable form) in most of their games since. They’re interesting and illuminating, don’t interfere with the game unless the player wants them to, and help build design literacy. Why, then, don’t more games offer commentary as well?

Developers Alkemi Games made quite the impression with their lush card-battler Foretales, but they’re now pivoting into the roguelike action realm with An Ankou. The game’s explore-a-craft-y-slasher mix gives it some flavour from Hades and V Rising, only this time with a shadowy French-folklore skin attached. An Ankou hits early access on August 17th, and I’m very excited to juggle it alongside the zillion other games dropping this month.

With the month of Unpacking concluded and its rude boyfriend symbolically vanquished, I’ve been put in charge of choosing the next RPS Game Club game. And seeing how about 40% of what I write about is related to the Steam Deck, I thought it’d be nice if we took a break from that and chatted about something completely - ahaha no, just kidding it’s totally gonna be Aperture Desk Job.

The Saints Row reboot received quite a cold reception when it came out last year, with our Alice Bee calling it fun but ultimately confused in her review. Now, developers Volition are closing out their post-launch plans for the game with an extensive update, a third paid expansion, and a Steam release. All coming this month.