The latest trailer for Wasteland 3 titled 1987.

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Wasteland 3 launches May 19!

Debuted at X019 in London, the new "1987" trailer introduces players to more of the post-apocalyptic Colorado setting, and the lives at stake in the deeply reactive and highly tactical roleplaying game.

Gamasutra reports that the publisher for Rune 2 was caught in the dark about Human Head Studios closure.

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"[Rune II] developer Human Head Studios announced that they closed their doors and will be starting a new studio. This is shocking news to us, as there are several entities working on Rune II -- we found out about this news when you did," wrote the publisher in a statement. 

"Human Head had a longstanding agreement with Rune's publisher, Ragnarok Game, LLC, to provide ongoing support for the game. We are working quickly to resolve any current technical issues while we build the team that will execute the exciting planned future of Rune II's post-launch content strategy."

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@Gamasutra Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky talk about what they learned from making The Outer Worlds.

Making RPGs in 2019

When Cain and Boyarsky first began working on The Outer Worlds, it occurred to them that the world of game design had dramatically changed since they last worked together on the Vampire: The Masquerade series at Troika Entertainment. 

Boyarsky noted that while the RPG genre has gotten more financially viable, it's also twisted and morphed into other genres as well. "There’s always the people who loved RPGs but the mainstream of games seemed to move away from that."

"I thought what they did with Mass Effect was really cool, I think The Witcher is really cool, but we just felt there was a lack of games where you have a blank slate character that was really generated by scratch from the player." 

Cain jumped in to point out that when he and Boyarsky first got started in the genre, most RPG designers were working off systems inspired by tabletop design, for taletop players. "I think too is that RPGs used to be heavily influenced by tabletop, and I think computer RPGs are finally becoming their own thing. You don’t have to be a D&D RPG to get a lot of people interested in your game."

With that in mind, Cain said that one of the goals for The Outer Worlds was to design it to be more accessible than some of Obsidian's previous titles. "One of our early pillars that we decided on was that we wanted this game to be easy to get into," he explained. "A lot of RPGs—and a lot of our RPGs had this. The very first thing you were hit with were a ton of numbers, a ton of stuff you had to read in order to get into the game, and for this one said ‘let’s try to move as much character creation out of character creation.’" 

"Let them spend skill points later. Let perks come later, let the flaws and stuff come later. Just do some quick character creation."

[...]

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A new trailer for the RPG Call of Saregnar has been released:

Call of Saregnar SGC 2019 Trailer

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Call of Saregnar RPG trailer for the 2019 Slovenian Games Conference.

Thanks Rhuantavan!

The first dev blog for Broken Roads looks closer at The Moral Compass.

IGN interviewed Larian Studios about its new Malaysian Studio and asked about Baldur's Gate 3.

Have you asked the previous developers BioWare and Interplay about making Baldur's Gate 3?

Swen: Well, the team who made previous Baldur's Gate games have spread around but we talked to a whole lot of them. We chatted with them about how to do it. We also talked to the people of Wizards of the Coast obviously since they're the owner of Dungeons & Dragons. So we came up with something that I think it's good. We'll see.

I'm fascinated by how you're able to translate tabletop gameplay to video games. Tabletop games are quite complex already. Will Baldur's Gate 3 has the gameplay mechanics similar to Divinity: Original Sin?

Swen: No, it's not the same as Divinity: Original Sin. It's very different at its core. For me, the biggest difference is probably the class-based gameplay. The similarity, however, is that both Divinity: Original Sin and Baldur's Gate 3 will try to give you a lot of player agency. You decide to do something. The Dungeon Master thinks and says, "Sure, roll D20". They just check and we'll see if it goes or not. That's the fun of it.

We're trying to do the same but in a video game, the game itself becomes the Dungeon Master. So we have to figure out upfront on what you're going to be doing, for example, in terms of stupidity and have the game world reacts to you. That's what we want to try. I think we have cool stuff in there.

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@GamesIdealist A new book about the making of the Witcher games will be coming to Amazon.

Amazon has put up a listing for The Rise of The Witcher: A New RPG King, revealing a few details. The upcoming book provides a behind the scenes look at the development of The Witcher, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. If you are interested, you can pre-order the hardcover with this link from the online retailer; furthermore, you can also check out an image of the front cover directly below this paragraph.

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Thanks Farflame!

Wccftech interviewed the developers of BattleTech about their new expansion Heavy Metal.

Was it a difficult decision to add in an Area of Effect attack into the game?

Absolutely not, no. First of all, it exists in BATTLETECH lore already, we didn’t create the Thumper Cannon. So no worries there. But also, when you think about what happens in the game, you’ve got four mechs taking on sometimes up to 12 at the same time, you can see the utility of this thing. It's not like rock, paper, scissors, dynamite or something. It helps to level the playing field but it is not a win button or anything like that. Plus it's only got two shots so we can fit it in.

Also, every game out there that’s a modernish tactical game has a hand grenade which is an AoE attack, so there’s no design risk there for me at all.

You’ve also introduced unique abilities, integrated equipment, into the new mechs, will they be coming to the old mechs as well?

Yes so all ten of the new mechs are coming with these unique bonuses, the eight in Heavy Metal and the two free ones in 1.8, they’ll all have unique pieces of equipment. But again with the modding, we figure that everyone will go back and add what they think is best for the previous mods.

This is the wrong word for it, but we hope we inspire people to do that so that every mech gets a unique battlefield role based on its lore that works for everyone. That was a big part of what it was about for us. If you read the novels it sounds really cool but mechanically it's not there, so that’s what we wanted to reinforce. 

There’s over two hundred novels, plus technical readouts and sourcebooks and that’s one of the coolest things about BATTLETECH, it's got this thirty-five-year history and this massive shared universe. Many many many people have contributed to it and this is just our contribution. And we want to pay homage to them, the people and work that came before. 

[...]

Thanks Farflame!

Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York has a new gameplay trailer.

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Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York presents the conflict between two vampiric factions: the traditionalist Camarilla and the fiercely independent Anarchs. It's a unique, atmospheric, single-player narrative experience, set in a rich, fully licensed, globally recognized universe of Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition.
Coming December 4th 2019 to PC and Q1 2020 to Nintendo Switch.

Thanks Farflame!

OnlySP reports on the new Kraken DLC for The Surge 2. Also presented is the season pass roadmap.

Focus Home Interactive and Deck 13 have announced a new story DLC, Season Pass, and a road map for future content for The Surge 2.

The announcement came via the game’s Steam page and details that next month, Season Pass holders will receive 13 new weapons added to the game. Additionally, December will bring new gear sets for players’ exo-rigs, and a new story DLC titled ‘The Kraken’ will be available in January 2020.

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Thanks Farflame!

@Bluesnews Rune 2 has been released and Human Head Studios is closing its doors.

Rune II is now available on the Epic Games Store, offering Human Head's sequel to their Viking adventure from the last millennium. Unfortunately, it will be their swan song, as Human Head has closed its doors, reports VGC (thanks DoomWiki via Frans). Human Head's credits include Rune and Prey (2006), and they also worked on Batman: Arkham Origins, BioShock Infinite, and Brink. The good news is that everyone who worked for the company was offered a new position of Bethesda, where they are staffing up an internal developer called Roundhouse Studios, perhaps an homage to the offices Human Head one occupied at a former railroad roundhous.

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The November update for the System Shock remake shows a lot of visuals and little text about the in-game levels, the Virus Mutant enemy, The Cyborg Assassin and some concept art.

OnceLost Games answered some community questions and talked about the sort of RPGs they want to make.

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DISCORD ➤ https://discord.io/CouncilOfWisdom

TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/OnceLostGames

REDDIT ➤ https://www.reddit.com/r/CouncilOfWisdom/

WEBSITE ➤ http://www.oncelostgames.com/

So we asked you all to post your answers to 10 questions we posed in our subreddit, and here is our response to a select number of them! Join Ted , Julian, Vijay and Ian on our very first video appearance on the OnceLost Games YouTube channel!

We have a huge journey ahead of us, but we really want your input and feedback on how to make the best game we possibly can.

Stay tuned for more videos, including Spotlight videos on worldbuilding, quest systems and art direction.

Urtuk: The Desolation now has a Steam page.

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Urtuk is an open-world RPG with tactical turn-based battles in a dark, low fantasy world.

Journey with a band of adventurers across an old, destroyed world. Fight your way through harsh environments. Recruit new followers, loot gear. Try to survive.

Features

• Survival RPG with focus on combat and world exploration in a dark fantasy world
• Tactical turn-based combat with large maps, and environmental tactical options and carefully throughout class/skill system
• Procedurally generated survival campaign
• Upgrade your characters with extracts from fallen enemies
• Hand-drawn graphical assets, from the world-map to battlefield, along with all characters and map objects

Story

The world in the game is a place of pain, suffering and darkness, set with (light) fantasy features. Urtuk is the name of main character. His story begins when he escaped from the Senatorium, a place where medical experiments take place on common people.

Urtuk has suffered a mortal disease, a mutation in the Senatorium. With every day, his health condition worsenes.. Now he searches for a cure in the world. It's only a matter of time, when his mutation evolves to a level, when he finally dies.

The world is set into dark, grimy theme. There are no classic fantasy beings like elfs, dwarfs or dragons, nor powerful magic, although there are some light magical features involved.

Many centuries ago, there were powerful Giants roaming the world. They lived peacefully with humans until a war between Man and Giant began.

Now the Giants are extinct. Some years ago, few librarians studied the bones and remains of ancient Giants. They did experiments and found out, they can extract a mystical fluid from their remains - Life Essense. With this, they could add many beneficial elements into human body. Not yet known, what exact impact this fluid on a human has, the experiments continue.. Very often, instead of improving the health condition of the targe, an opposite effect would take place, inflicting a mutation or lethal disease. This was the case of Urtuk.

If you like a more direct communication with us, please join our Discord server.

Brian Fargo shared a new screenshot of Wasteland 3 on Twitter.

A little sneak peek of an area from Wasteland 3.

The October update for The Iron Oath talks about the new direction for combat environments.

Time for a belated October update! The last month has been a hectic time for us as we were crunching to meet certain deadlines, and thus didn't have the time to put together a proper update. Not going to share just yet what the crunch-time was for...we'll see in a month or two how things pan out and hopefully we'll have some good news to share :)

In this month's update we wanted to talk about our new direction for combat environments, and illustrating the point with a brand new tileset that we've created and implemented this past month. In the environments you've seen so far, a typical combat area has rarely been much larger than 5-6 rows high, as shown below:

 While the narrower corridors allowed for more streamlined exploration, they made combat encounters a bit too cramped, and didn't allow us much room to place terrain obstacles and hazards without suffocating the playfield. This resulted in combat areas not having much variety to them, which is not ideal!

With this new tileset we've greatly increased the size of the playfield(up to 10 rows high at points). The base tiles are completely empty aside from the ground and back wall, as seen below:

 With this much space, we now have a lot of room to work with for creating many different and tactically interesting layouts, populated by the terrain and hazards that are attached to this tileset. This includes a variety of rock formations, holes, falling rock obstacles, dangerous spikes and more. Here's some of the terrain objects for this tile, still need to complete a few more:

 Each "layout" will be hand made, as we think it's preferable to randomly generating them. We're not quite sure how far we'll go with the quantity, but we'll be shooting for at least 100 unique terrain layouts per environment. Here's a look at one section's layout in-game:

For the existing tilesets, we'll be going back and revising them a bit as well in order to add more space. Though in some cases, certain environments will be less open than others when it makes sense. 

Another thing we wanted to show off was the in-dungeon dialogue system which has received some work lately with additions such as portraits, text fade-in and auto scrolling. Of course you can skip through this all by left-clicking as well if you're a quick reader or just want to breeze through it! We're still not 100% done with it, but we're pretty happy with the current state for now.  The example below is from the opening mission/introduction to the game :)

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And a small bonus gif of something that occurred while I was recording some footage. I didn't think this action through very well :( lol

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The aerial combat RPG The Falconeer, is scheduled to be released somewhere in 2020, for PC and Xbox One.

Wired Productions and Tomas Sala have announced that they’re releasing The Falconeer on PC and Xbox One in 2020 and between November 14th and the 16th you can play it at X019. A trailer features below.

Players will get to explore the upcoming game world called The Great Ursee which is a mystical place that drowns in the corruption of swollen oceans. Players must depart on their armed aerial mounts as a Falconeer and make there own path in this dark and hauntingly beautiful world.

“We’re excited for fans to experience The Falconeer, a true gem that will set the bar for what indie developers can offer games,” said Leo Zullo. “From the beginning, we’ve been enamoured with this breath-taking aerial combat RPG, and are proud to be able to work collaboratively with Tomas, whose passion and talents can be seen in this beautiful and mesmerizing game.”

If you’re a fan of aerial combat The Falconeer gives you a fluid and open-world to explore gracefully with free flight mechanics. This will immerse you within the The Great Ursee to discover its deep and dark secrets.

If you are watching or attending X019 you’ll see a live demo of The Falconeer and Wired Productions will announce more upcoming news as-well. 

Secret Code checked out an early demo of the open world RPG Isles of Adalar:

Isles of Adalar DEMO - Elder scrolls inspired RPG

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Isles of Adalar is an open world single player/co-op fantasy RPG that can be played in first or third person. The game is one part RPG one part RPG maker as it ships with an integrated level editor and Steam Workshop support. Users can mod the existing content or create their own.

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If you love Role Playing Games (RPGs), watch this more some upcoming entires for 2020 & beyond in the indie game space!

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GameInformer interviewed Swen Vincke about the long road of Larian Studios.

How were you even surviving at this point?

Work-for-hire allowed us to survive to the point to look for a publishing deal, but we hated it. We really didn’t like it because we were making really stupid things. Such as these things go, it’s a vicious spiral. We started doing work-for-hire again, and we were lucky. We convinced a major broadcaster in Belgium to give us a lot of money for what the broadcaster thought was going to be a website, but was actually going to be an online game for kids. It had a unique format, sort of like an American Idol for kids. Kids could make movies, animations, cartoons, and dances in the 3D world, send it to the broadcaster, and then the broadcaster showed it on TV. It was innovative back in the day, and we won awards for it, sold it to the BBC, and sold it to several other broadcasters.

We said, “Why don’t we do a big RPG, but this time we fund it ourselves or as much as we can so that we retain control of the IP?” We didn’t have enough money to do all of it. We needed a publisher. We entered into what is known as a cool publishing deal, except I was still naïve back then. We tried to make a game about a dragon that could fly anywhere and land anywhere. We struggled through that and we found another publisher to help us publish this game. We signed it in 2007. It was supposed to come out in 2008. And then the [financial] crisis hits. This publisher suddenly found itself in incredible financial stress, because they had to make all of their money with games like My Little Pony. All that stuff didn’t sell so they were taking tremendous financial hits. They did what a publisher does in those circumstances; they release a game too early. When [Divinity II: Ego Draconis] came to market it wasn’t ready. It got s--- reviews. Almost killed us. Really dark period for the studio.

[...]

Diablo 4 has been doing the rounds recently with a number of outlets covering it to some degree.

The Blizzcon 2019 Demo

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DSOGaming shared some hi-def screenshots.

Still, I’m certain that most Diablo fans will find these screenshots interesting. After all, these screenshots are artifact-free (something from which all YouTube videos/trailers suffer). So yeah, they can better showcase the game’s graphics. Furthermore, some screenshots are in a 21:9 ratio. As such, we can safely assume that the game will support ultra widescreen monitors at launch.

JustPushStart had some small details on Diablo 4s loot system.

During the Diablo IV revealed panel, a number of details were shared about the system. The most notable is that loot is based on a number of elements from Diablo II and III. These include, but are not limited to a wide variety of armor, weapons, jewelry, and potions, along with boasting the most legendary items in the franchise and new set items to collect.

Wccftech reports on the 100+ towns you will visit.

We want to bring back this very very specific vibe that makes Diablo unique and it's not only about darkness, so this is very, very important for us because it impacts almost every layer of the game, every aspect. The first thing is the story. We want to make a much more grounded story [in Diablo IV] than in Diablo III. And we think that the best way to deliver this story is to give you a possibility to discover stories of simple folks and that's why you are watching this movie right now. So imagine this kind of village, this is just an example. It's not about this specific village, we have like over 100 villages or places like this.

OnlySP focused on Diablo 4s monsters and classes.

Diablo IV will launch with five playable classes, with the first three revealed as the Barbarian, Sorceress, and Druid. The Barbarian utilises an arsenal system that allows them to switch between four different weapon types on the fly.

The Sorceress is described as “fragile but destructive,” and can harness fire, cold, and lightning magic. Cold damage will also build up over time, which increases damage and affects more targets.

Thanks Farflame!

USGamer believes that The Outer Worlds represents RPG's of the past while Disco Elysium represents its future.

Disco Elysium covers more than a single block, but it feels dense, with every interaction impacting the story in some manner, even if that's not entirely apparent in a single run. It's a vast Jenga tower, and every piece is important. That smug, clearly-high child you meet in the early hours may be the lynchpin to the case, or a punk you had to shut up with your fist. You determine the direction you go, and the game is very responsive to even your smallest actions.

It's this depth that makes Disco Elysium such a revelation, and it's changing the conversation around another recent RPG: Obsidian Entertainment's The Outer Worlds. Like a few other reviewers, I played Disco Elysium and The Outer Worlds back-to-back. The Outer World is a throwback to Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas, which itself was a throwback to the original Fallout. The quests offer a number of choices, but the outcome is fairly localized. Skills allow you to navigate through conversations, but it's a rigid binary: either you have the skill level to pass a persuasion or intimidation check, or you don't. If you do, it works every time. The Outer Worlds is an older, standard style of RPG, executed to a high degree. 

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Thanks Farflame!

Eurogamer reports that Josh Sawyer will re-examine Deadfire before starting a new game in the series:

Low Deadfire sales means Obsidian would have to "re-examine the entire format of the game" before committing to Pillars of Eternity 3

Will there be a Pillars of Eternity 3? It sounds like the series' design chief wants to work out what went wrong with the last game before taking on another sequel.

Old-school role-playing game Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire was critically acclaimed but sold poorly compared to its predecessor and other, similar games. Obsidian's Josh Sawyer has said he wants to work out why before committing to making Pillars of Eternity 3.

"That is not something that I get to decide, but I do think that the relatively low sales of Deadfire mean that if we consider making another Pillars game in this style, we're going to have to re-examine the entire format of the game," Sawyer wrote on his Tumblr.

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VGU checked out The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III - which is still NOT available for PCs:

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III Review

Following the release of the PS4 remasters of Trails of Cold Steel I and II earlier this year, the long awaited third instalment of the long running saga has arrived in English. On a side note, fans of the series will be pleased to know that Trails of Cold Steel IV is already out in Japan, so the wait for an English translation will hopefully be significantly shorter than with the previous instalments. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III has once again been developed by series creators Nihon Falcom, with NIS America to perform translation and publishing duties instead of XSeed Games. The third game in the Trails of Cold Steel series promises to be a strong JRPG like its predecessors, but does it live up to the legacy that it hopes to continue?

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Overall, The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III is the strongest entry in the series to date. This third entry refines the various gameplay mechanics such as the Fast Travel and Bonding Events, whilst incorporating new elements such as the teammate involvement during the mech battle sections to make the game more enticing for returning players. If you have been looking for an RPG to fill your time until the arrival of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Persona 5 Royal next year, Trails of Cold Steel III could be exactly the experience that you have been waiting for.

Score: 8/10

ObSobe Gaming has reviewed The Outer Worlds:

The Outer Worlds Review, Game of The Year?, Rpg of The Year!

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Save or Quit checked out Encased:

REVIEW: Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG

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The latest update for ATOM RPG offers a sneak peak at the Trudograd expansion.

The latest Soldak blog talks about the possibility of a Drox Operative 2.

Drox Operative 2?

For those of you that follow us on social media or our forums this isn't a surprise, but I've started working on the design of what will probably end up being Drox Operative 2. I say probably because to me design is kind of an exploration and you aren't completely sure where you will end up. I'm pretty sure it will end up being Drox Operative 2, but Din's Legacy was originally going to be a mutating, permadeath, generational character type of game. The mutations is the only part that stuck (the rest just didn't work well enough with the mutation system).

Currently, and this all could easily change, I have 3 focuses to make this game better than the first Drox Operative.

1) Combat/action: I'm looking to make the moment to moment side of things a bit more fun. This will probably mean things like faster acceleration, faster turning, and maybe even strafing to make movement and dodging a bit more fun and important. Weapons might be more powerful, but rely less on auto-aiming. I'll probably also try to see how real momentum makes things feel.

2) Graphics: I'll at least be getting it up to Din's Legacy tech wise: VBOs, normal mapping, better shadows, and better lighting. Just doing this would make the game look a good bit better than the first game. It might even go faster and Drox was our most CPU friendly game.

3) More detailed systems to add more depth to the exploration, gameplay, and interactions between everything. By this I mean things like a planet could be rich in minerals. After discovering this planet, selling this information to a race might be very profitable, it could greatly help that race build fleets of ships once colonized, and it could also be a weak point for sneaky Operatives to disrupt or even destroy.

Again these are things that I'm thinking about now, but could easily change. Also these are just a small glimpse of the ideas I'm already thinking about. Finally I would like to stress this part, comments and suggestions are always welcome!

Thanks Couchpotato!

@VentureBeat According to publisher Take-Two The Outer Worlds is 'outperforming expectations'. Additionally Gamespot interviewed narrative designer Nitai Poddar and co-game director Leonard Boyarsky about making interesting NPCs.

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It was the No. 3 most downloaded PlayStation Network game in October, according to Sony. It’s also a huge part of Xbox Game Pass for both Xbox One and PC. So anyone who has a subscription to those services can play the new game at no additional charge.

Finally, Take-Two said The Outer Worlds is coming to Switch before March 31, 2020.

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Are there any traits or tropes that are off-limits?

Boyarsky: Stuff that feels overdone, but sometimes taking something that's overdone and doing it in a new way can be more interesting. You know, subverting player expectations. We always like to do things that feel a little different, that feel off-center, that you're not going to see anywhere else. I would think anyone trying to tell good stories or create good characters would avoid flat characters--characters that just exist to get you to the next plot point.

Poddar: Yah if there is, I haven't found it yet. The sign of a successful character is that people tend to like it or see the value in that character. Like you said, the characters we try to avoid are just RPG characters that have nothing to say and no real investment outside of their quest. I don't really think we tend to think of our characters as tropes. We are more interested in motivation and what they have to say, their dialogue, and their personality.

[...]

Thanks Couchpotato!