DSOGaming reports that Beyond a Steel Sky will release sometime in 2019. The game is a sequel to adventure classic Beneath a Steel Sky.

Revolution Software has announced it has reunited with legendary comic book artist Dave Gibbons to create Beyond a Steel Sky – the long-awaited follow-up to classic 90’s dystopian cyberpunk adventure Beneath a Steel Sky.

According to the press release, the game will tell is a thrilling story of loyalty and redemption set in an eery and terrifying world of AI-driven social controls. As can be expected of a Revolution adventure, the tale is woven with the studio’s signature humor, supported by Gibbons’ acclaimed artistic style.

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OnlySP talk to the developers of Ashen about the games reception and future.

Three months after release, A44 is “deep in postmortem for the project,” but how does one measure success of a project more hyped than the sum of its parts? OnlySP sat down with creative director Derek Bradley to discuss all things Ashen and how the months post-release have been treating the New Zealand-based team.

“It has been surreal seeing how well received Ashen has been from a critical and consumer point of view,” Bradley begins. “Watching streams, reading reviews and player’s stories all over the internet, it has been something we could have only hoped for.” The game, which sits at a very respectable 82/100 on Metacritic, did manage to meet the expectations of most of its players. Ashen is very much an indie success story, which is reflected by the team’s unwavering passion post-release:

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The Elder Scrolls Online has a new trailer for Elsweyr.

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The Khajiiti homeland is under attack and it's up to you to defend it from dragons, undead, Imperial Necromancers, and more. Overcome new and exciting challenges as you venture into Elsweyr.

Explore fertile grasslands with stalking predators, winding canyons whose shadows hide bandits and worse, and wild borderlands where the Khajiit grow their famous moon-sugar crops.

Experience all of this and more in The Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr. Pre-purchase The Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr now to gain immediate access to the otherworldly Rahd-m'Athra Mount, the base Elder Scrolls Online game, the Morrowind and Summerset Chapters, plus get the Noble Clan-Chief costume, Blue Dragon Imp pet, Baandari Peddler Crate, and more when Elsweyr launches.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr will be available on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on June 4, 2019, with PC/Mac early access starting May 20.

Gematsu reports that the launch trailer for Generation Zero has released.

PCGamesN writes about how Larian went about crafting the story for Divinity: Original Sin II.

When work began on the story script, Larian relied on shared Google docs that gave everyone access to the text and the ability to make notes. Vincke said this, perhaps predictably, resulted in total chaos.

Not only that, he said, but most of the nine writers who were actually hired to create the story – while accomplished in fields like TV and traditional narrative – didn’t have experience in interactive dialogue writing. They wound up needing training in order to adapt to games writing.

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Some more screenshots for Outward and an interesting info-graphic found by porcozaur.

Hello fans of beautiful views,

Have we got something for you! If you enjoy looking at scenic 4K screenshots, make sure to check out the Outward collection here[imgur.com]. More images will be added throughout the week!

Who else is putting one of these as their background image?

Thanks Farflame!

Operencia: The Stolen Sun has been previewed by Xbox Wire.

These encounters can be a mix of turned-based or real-time strategy; Operencia leans into the more turn-based approach, giving you time to plan your moves and anticipate attacks. You manage your hero abilities along the right side of the screen while seeing the order of attack along the left side. In front of you will be your enemies, each at one of three range distances – you can cycle through each range to determine which enemy you’d like to strike first. Whittle down the weaker enemies and save the stronger ones for later, or focus your attacks on the heavy hitter? From my brief hands-on time, it appears you will have a lot of freedom in how you want to plan and then execute your attacks.

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PCGamesN reports that the DLC for Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden will arrive later this year.

Information on the DLC is pretty sparse at the moment, but we do at least have a release date – you can expect to head back down the Road to Eden this summer, on June 25. Presumably, the DLC will be an extension of the story from the base game, but how exactly that’ll be approached isn’t clear just yet.

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Thanks Farflame!

An announcement trailer for Overland which is a tactical strategy game set in the post-apocalypse.

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Overland is squad-based survival strategy game with procedurally generated levels set in post-apocalyptic North America. Every random level is full of close calls and hard choices, even though the interface is approachable and easy to learn. Manage fuel supplies, weapons, and other items by making the right choices on the procedural roadmaps. A road trip straight into the heart of the cataclysmic event that changed the Earth forever.

Some reviews for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice:

• Attack of the Fanboy – 4.5/5
• COGconnected – 88/100
• Destructoid – 9/10
• Game Informer – 9
• Gamespot – 9 (review in progress)
• GamingTrend – 95/100
• Hardcore Gamer – 4/5
• IGN – 9.5
• Polygon – No score
• The VG247 review – No score

GameRant reported on developer comments about Cyberpunk 2077 quest complexity.

According to Weber, he has to consider the “different new opportunities” the game offers in the way of Cyberpunk 2077‘s character classes, citing Netrunning Skills as an example, and how utilizing their abilities can provide a variety of options to “solve a quest or challenges within a quest”. The Quest Designer even went so far to say that some quests could have “3 to 5” different ways in which they can be solved, which makes designing the quests themselves “more complex in some areas”.

Weber’s rundown of how the forthcoming first-person RPG’s quests operate are somewhat commensurate with past statements made by Quest Designer Patrick Mills, who said that Cyberpunk 2077‘s quest complexity can be compared to The Witcher 3‘s in some instances. As explained by Mills, Cyberpunk 2077‘s quest design philosophy came from methods developed through The Witcher 3‘s expansions.

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PC Gamer reports that Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 will have the composer for the original game.

Among them was game developer and streamer Outstar, who contacted Schaffer to ask if he was contributing to Bloodlines 2. He replied, "I contributed an hour of music to the OST and am the main composer. Been working on it for over a year."

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Low Magic Age is now available on GOG as part of its in-development program. In addition the game is currently 50% off until March 28th.

In development: Low Magic Age

Low Magic Age is now available DRM-free. Get it 50% off until March 28th, 11pm UTC. Adventure and fight in a medieval fantasy open world! Build heroic characters with various abilities, travel through villages, cities, or perilous dungeons. Strategic turn-based combat system and advanced character building - Fog of war, charging and flanking, and more in the fast-paced Arena mode. Note: This game is currently in development. See the FAQ to learn more about games in development, and check out the forums to find more information and to stay in touch with the community.

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A new dev blog for Battle Brothers introduces 'Tunes from the North.'

Dev Blog #119: Tunes from the North

23 Mar @ 2:52am - rapsdjff

Before venturing further into the northlands, let’s set the mood this week by taking a closer look at fresh music accompanying the new faction of northern barbarians coming with the “Warriors of the North” DLC. Yup, Breakdown Epiphanies[soundcloud.com] are on board again to add to the game’s music. Let’s see what they have to say in this week’s dev blog!

Tunes from the North

As those of you who have been following Battle Brothers since they days of Early Access know, as composers we ourselves took an RPG approach when it comes to orchestrating soundtracks for the various factions in the game. The undead are accompanied by an orchestra solely comprised of dark string instruments and percussion that is supposed to resemble the rattling of bones, the orc music is dominated by dark and menacing brass as well as sounds of metal, for the brigands our theme was „instruments you can carry around with you“, and so on. The signature sound of each faction in the game grew from imposing limitations upon ourselves, which in turn lead to a very distinguishable tonal landscape that could even give away what the player is fighting the first time they do so.

You may be happy to hear that for the upcoming “Warriors of the North” DLC we got on board again to expand the soundtrack with new music accompanying the player’s battles against their new adversary, the northern barbarians.

Adding new factions to the soundtrack gets more tricky as time goes on: While from a gameplay standpoint, fighting the barbarians will play out differently than fighting orcs, there are certain aesthetic similarities (brute force, heavily armored higher tier units, show up in clans) that would also favour a similar approach to the music (which in case of the orcs translated to throwing all the brass instruments and war drums that we could find into the mix). Luckily, though, the barbarians also lend themselves well to going a different route, which is mostly inspired by their nordic and rus themed lore and background.

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Avoiding brass (and the resulting overlap with the orc faction) completely, we decided to use vocals as the tonal backbone of this faction of northmen. Aside from more common singing styles, we incorporated mouth percussion, overtone and throat singing, which is a vocal style found in Norwegian folklore, Mongolian music and shamanist rituals leading back to the stone ages. As, from a gameplay perspective, the barbarians are a variant of the brigands, we also fell back on the brigands’ „instruments you can carry around with you“ philosophy. Only a single violin, a Swedish nyckelharpa (a medieval string instrument), a couple of drums and a choir of hardened nordmen come together to add new signature battle tracks to the Battle Brothers soundtrack. While production is still ongoing, we are happy to give you this sneak peek today.

DSOGaming reports that Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 will support real-time ray tracing, DLSS and mods.

Paradox Interactive has revealed, via a press release, that Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 will support both real-time ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). Furthermore, and like its predecessor, Bloodlines 2 will officially support mods.

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The reveal trailer for turn-based roguelike RPG Eidolons.

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On wings of darkness, through mist and snow, an indie turn-based roguelike RPG is coming to PC this year. Yet journey to Light is made through twilight. Support Eidolons in our crowdfunding campaign this April!

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/eidolons-nethergate/coming_soon

Kenshi 2 is currently in development a forum post reveals.

Future Plans...

Now, our original plan was to keep the new project quiet so we could work on it without public pressure and then do a big press release when we had something to show. However it seems lots of people are getting confused or angry about us not still tinkering with Kenshi or leaving the world of Kenshi behind, so I'm going to go ahead and announce early what we are working on now, as I think it will put most people at ease.

We are starting work now on Kenshi 2!

• It will be set 1000 years in the past, during the time of the "Old Empire" and reveal more of the world's lore and history.
• It will be based on the same code-base and engine.
• The engine will be upgraded to the latest version of Ogre, which should drastically improve performance.
• Why keep the same engine? Because a completely new engine would break everything and take another million years to finish. By sticking with the same code we are making the descision to prioritise gameplay instead of graphics. (Not to mention a much faster release date)
• The work we do on the engine upgrade will also be applied to Kenshi 1 as a free update.
• Other core improvements or small features achieved in Kenshi 2 could also potentially be applied to Kenshi 1 as free updates.

Immanuel Can - Thoughtful Gaming shared his first impressions on how Guilds of Delenar plays so far. Guilds of Delenar will be released onto Early Access today on Steam.

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Be the Guildmaster you were meant to be and lead your guild from a failing group of has-beens into an unstoppable force of powerful heroes that are praised by thy friends and feared by thy enemies. Govern everything from guild contracts, hero wounds, resource management, guild rivalries, and guild member satisfaction. Not to forget, Guild realm politics between nobles and the crown itself!

Features:

• Grow your guild from a rag tag group of low level weaklings into a regional powerhouse.
• Hire and manage a variety of heroes.
• Compete with the existing guilds in each town for superiority.
• Fight off marauding parties that plague each town.
• Send parties of your guildies to complete quests for the townsfolk.
• Gear out your guild with Epic Loots from the procedually generated gear system.
• Customize each hero through multiple talent trees.
• Combo your heroes into up to 5 man parties.
• Battle through dungeons full of baddies in order to protect the towns from their menacing evil.
• Fight in a diverse set of tactical battlefields in a variety of tilesets.

Play at your skill level in one of our many difficulty levels.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has been released on Steam.

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In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice you are the "one-armed wolf", a disgraced and disfigured warrior rescued from the brink of death. Bound to protect a young lord who is the descendant of an ancient bloodline, you become the target of many vicious enemies, including the dangerous Ashina clan. When the young lord is captured, nothing will stop you on a perilous quest to regain your honor, not even death itself.

Explore late 1500s Sengoku Japan, a brutal period of constant life and death conflict, as you come face to face with larger than life foes in a dark and twisted world. Unleash an arsenal of deadly prosthetic tools and powerful ninja abilities while you blend stealth, vertical traversal, and visceral head to head combat in a bloody confrontation.

Take Revenge. Restore your honor. Kill Ingeniously.

GameWatcher reports that CD Projekt RED is working on another AAA game apart from Cyberpunk 2077.

Unannounced AAA CDPR game was mentioned off-handedly by Benchmark.pl, a Polish gaming-related website, who quoted CDPR saying that "plans for the release of the second AAA game until 2021 remain unchanged. We are currently focusing on the production and promotion of Cyberpunk, so we do not want to comment on further projects."

Furthermore, according to that very same source, both the unannounced AAA RPG and Cyberpunk 2077 are set to come out sometime before 2021, which is quite curious indeed.

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DSOGaming reports that Steam will be getting a new look library.

At GDC 2019, Valve announced that Steam’s library will get re-designed. Moreover, Valve aims to add advanced tag searches, as well as a new Steam Events page.

Some of the key features for the re-designed library are listed below.

• The friends list is now integrated into a right-hand column 
• The top module shows recent games you’ve been playing with a library view reminiscent of Plex or the Apple TV
• The rest of your collection is shown with nice vertical thumbnails that can be scaled to show larger icons or more games
• The left-hand games list has a new look but is fairly similar to the existing design

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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been announced and will be developed by Hardsuit Labs with story by Brian Mitsoda. The game is targeting a Q1 2020 release on PC and Consoles.

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Sired in an act of vampire insurrection, your existence ignites the war for Seattle's blood trade. Enter uneasy alliances with the creatures who control the city and uncover the sprawling conspiracy which plunged Seattle into a bloody civil war between powerful vampire factions.

♞Become the Ultimate Vampire Immerse yourself in the World of Darkness and live out your vampire fantasy in a city filled with intriguing characters that react to your choices. You and your unique disciplines are a weapon in our forward-driving, fast-moving, melee-focussed combat system. Your power will grow as you advance, but remember to uphold the Masquerade and guard your humanity... or face the consequences.

♝Descend into Seattle’s Dark Heart and Survive the Vampire Elite Seattle has always been run by vampires. Hunt your prey across Seattle locations faithfully reimagined in the World of Darkness. Meet the old blood founders present since the city’s birth and the new blood steering the tech money redefining the city. Everyone has hidden agendas - so choose your allies wisely.

♚Enter into Uneasy Alliances Choose a side among competing factions, each with their own unique traits and stories, in the war for Seattle’s blood trade. The world will judge you by the company you keep, but remember no one’s hands stay clean forever.

♛Experience the Story Written by the creative mind behind the original Bloodlines, Vampire: The Masquerade® - Bloodlines™ 2 brings the ambitions of the first game to life and sees the return of a few fan favorite characters.

Thanks Gabriel!

IGN has the first gameplay preview for Shenmue 3.

Suzuki tells me that he sees player freedom and everyday life as the two most important features of Shenmue, and everything he showed and explained to me about the game could be connected back to those two main themes.

“I haven’t done proper research, so maybe I shouldn’t say this, but Shenmue III might just have more voiced dialogue than any other game to date,” he said. “When we brought the script to the translation agency, they were astonished by its volume.”

"Shenmue III might just have more voiced dialogue than any other game to date” - Yu Suzuki

Anyone who has played the original games knows the incredible amount of dialogue they contained, but Suzuki believes there’s even more of it this time. That makes the fact that Ryo will no longer be able to talk to every character feel like a positive thing rather than something to worry about. By giving up on the ability to interact with characters who won’t do much more than show you the way to your next destination anyhow, Shenmue III should be able to add additional depth to the characters who really matter.

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Chernobylite is a survival horror game about Chernobyl.

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Developers diary about making of post-apo sci-fi action game Chernobylite (with english subtitles).

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GamesRadar talked with Dying Light 2 producer Kornel Jaskula; who expanded on the game's open world design philosophy.

To make this dream a reality, Techland has poured resources into constructing new proprietary technology, a necessary expense (and headache) to engineer something as ambitious as Dying Light 2. “You could say that it has been quite the challenge,” Jaskula laughs. “All of this has forced us to change the technology behind our games. We created a brand new engine – the C-Engine – to support the focus on choice and consequence that runs through the story and the gameplay.”

But all of this will be for nought if Techland can’t sell the concept of its ‘narrative sandbox’ to prospective players. The truth is, it’s incredibly difficult to demonstrate something so inherently systemic. The entire game is layered in such a way that even the smallest interactions, decisions and actions can feed back into the simulated world at large. If every one of your actions feeds into the wider scope of the story, as well as the gameplay opportunities that pervade the experience, simultaneously, how do you possibly convey that idea to the players?

The best way to think about the structure, Jaskula suggests, is if you cast it in the context of going rogue with a LEGO set. “The player does have an overall goal in Dying Light 2, but it’s up to you to decide how you get to it,” he tells me of the overarching narrative, one which sees you charged with trying to locate an object that can potentially turn the tide of the zombie apocalypse in your favour. “It’s like having LEGO bricks and being given the goal of building a house. We give you the bricks but not the original set – you don’t have the instructions that can take you through it step-by-step. You only have the goal and it’s up to you to decide how that house will look by the very end – but it is going to be a house. It’s up to the player to figure out how the bricks can connect, how they influence one another, and how the building and its interior takes shape…”

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A new trailer for The Forgotten City shows off a change in art direction.

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The Forgotten City is a time loop murder mystery set in a mythological city.

Deep underground in an ancient Roman city, twenty-six trapped explorers lay dead because one of them broke a mysterious law. Reliving that fateful day over and over again, you'll need to cleverly exploit the time loop, Groundhog Day-style, to avert disaster! Face tough moral choices while interrogating diverse characters, gathering their secrets, and putting together the pieces of a giant interpersonal puzzle.

The Forgotten City offers incredible freedom and respects players' time and intelligence, rewarding lateral thinking with the best of all possible endings.

The Forgotten City is a re-imagining of the critically acclaimed mod with more than 2 million downloads, and the first mod in history to win a national Writers' Guild award.

Key features:

• Investigate a dark, gripping mystery full of twists and intrigue

• Solve problems your own way, with reason, charm, bribery, stealth, threats, violence - or cleverly exploit the time-loop

• Explore a stunning and intricate city rendered with Unreal Engine

• Interrogate richly detailed characters with interwoven lives

• Grapple with moral dilemmas which have life-and-death consequences

• Choose your own gender, race, and backstory

• Listen to an achingly beautiful orchestral score and first class voice acting

Enjoyed the mod?

The Forgotten City retains all the elements you know and love while improving every aspect and adding plenty of surprises. Walk the streets of a brand new city. Get to know re-imagined characters. Sink into original lore with fresh twists and endings. Enjoy added combat mechanics, an all-new orchestral score, professional voice acting, and motion capture animations.

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@Worthplaying Pathfinder: Kingmaker is set to get new free DLC called 'Arcane Unleashed'.

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Because there is no such thing as Too Much Magic, Owlcat Games and Deep Silver today released its latest free DLC “Arcane Unleashed” for their critically acclaimed RPG  Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Wrapped up within this free DLC is something for everyone!

Explorers of The Stolen Lands can ramp-up their magical arsenal with the following new spells:

1. Create Pit
2. Spiked Pit
3. Acid Pit
4. Hungry Pit
5. Rift of Ruin
6. Battering Blast

An arcane scroll merchant will appear in your capital. The quantity and caster level of available scrolls depends on how high your "Arcane" kingdom stat is.

But wait, that’s not all! If you like turning into giant dragons as much as we believe, you'll definitely enjoy the fresh, improved models for chromatic and metallic types of these formidable creatures.

Finally, the last part of this DLC is a new pet. Oleg Shpilchevsky, Head Of Owlcat Games says “One of our players, long term community contributor,  and our friend lost his beloved cat “Tiger” just weeks before the launch of our game. As a token of our eternal gratitude for everything he contributed to the creation of Pathfinder: Kingmaker, we've recreated. "Tiger" in the game so that he may roam with his human friend(s) once more – if only in the Stolen Lands,” he added.

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RockPaperShotgun reports that The Outer Worlds will be exclusive to Epic Games Store, as well as The Sinking City, Control and others.

Epic Games are getting serious about going head-to-head with Valve with their store, and have the war-chest to prove it. They’ve just announced a slew of exclusives, including Obsidian’s highly anticipated The Outer Worlds, and Remedy’s upcoming horror shooter Control. Frogwares’s cthulhoid detective mystery The Sinking City will be making its debut on the upstart storefront too. This is on top of Epic’s surprise announcement that Quantic Dream’s formerly PlayStation-exclusive library is coming to PC via their store. See the list of announced exclusives below.

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Thanks Farflame and porcozaur!