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Have fun existing at the fringes of interstellar society in Citizen Sleeper! Rachel: It looks like 2023 will be a fantastic year for sci-fi. There’s the Dead Space remake, Telltale’s The Expanse, Deliver Us Mars, Atomic Heart, Kerbal 2, Aliens: The Dark Descent, not to mention Starfield leading this ever-increasing fleet. But I don’t think any of these grand sci-fi stories - including Bethesda’s expansive, all-encompassing RPG - will feel like the gritty, scrappy sci-fi of Citizen Sleeper....

Thankfully, this may change. With the advent of the Shadowlands expansion, Blizzard has introduced a series of huge changes to how the game functions not only for existing players, but for people who have never touched the game, or even any MMORPG, ever before. Firstly, there’s the “level squish” - 120 becomes 60, and the original 1-60 becomes an accelerated 1-10 - with a brand new levelling region intended for players new to the series and even the genre....

Be aware, though, that this will just be the base game. I’ve got it on good authority that it’s perfectly playable, but there’s so many expansion pack shenanigans for The Sims 4 – ranging from werewolves to high school drama just this year alone – that you could end up down a very deep rabbithole indeed. If you want to navigate all the extraneous Sims add-ons then you couldn’t go wrong by checking out our resident expert Rebecca’s guide to the best The Sims 4 expansion packs....

They add ’90s athleisure, country-style kitchen cabinets, and dust, respectively, and each will set you back $5/£5/€5. There’s a trailer below. It’s always dangerous to refer to a game’s “community”, as if the players of a game are a monolithic group. The Sims 4 is a strong example. The series has a reputation among some for nickel-and-diming players with dozens of paid expansions, and if that’s you, Kits aren’t going to change your mind....

The Sinking City developers Frogwares have accused publisher Nacon of pirating the game and allegedly uploading an illegal copy on Steam. Nacon published a version of the Lovecraftian RPG on Valve’s storefront on Friday, which was quickly followed by Frogwares urging fans not to buy it. The two have been embroiled in a messy legal dispute over the game since last year. Now, the developers believe Nacon “cracked, hacked, changed the game’s code and content” in order to put it on Steam and allegedly prevent Frogwares from earning money from a game they claim they own....

Get the Ryzen 5 5600X for £170 Let’s start with the basics. The 5600X is a six-core, twelve-thread processor, so you’re getting enough threads to take advantage of modern games and do light content creation without running into trouble. Eight core, 12 core and 16 core CPUs are better at the latter, but not so much at the former - so staying at six cores makes sense from a value perspective if gaming is the focus....

This is one of the very fastest SSDs you can buy, with great sequential and random speeds, so it’s a great choice for running your OS and loading games faster than ever before. It’s also fully compatible with the PS5 thanks to its high speeds and integrated heatsink, making it a great plug-and-play solution for exanding your game storage on the Sony console. Either way, you should expect bleeding-edge performance thanks to high-end components and that extra cooling potential....

Many horror games either try to establish a sense of mundane familiarity in a recognisable, contemporary world before shattering that familiarity, or else rely on the dusty, done-to-death setting of haunted manors. In most cases, neither approach does much to surprise. Horror often relies on the grotesque, but Mundaun’s weirdness is different. It is an earthy kind of weirdness, a strangeness with roots so deep that it might be confused with familiarity....

In this guide, we’ll list all hairstyles and beards in The Witcher 3, with a handy image so that you know what it looks like. The Witcher 3 hairstyles You can see every hairstyle available in The Witcher 3 below: Default cut Shaved with ponytail Long and loose Short and loose Mohawk and ponytail Elven rebel While writing this piece, we also happened across one other Geralt hairstyle, although it seems less official....

Neither do I feel like I am a protector helping Geralt along, because he is clearly much better at his job without me, given all his expertise in monsters and the seven different types of weeds that’ll kill them and such. I ran into trouble playing it last night, for example, because I could not figure out how to brew more of the Swallow potion. The Witcher 3 would go more smoothly without me, the equivalent of an unqualified middle-manager, forcing my involvement on Geralt....

Anyone with any version of The Witcher 3 should be able to download the next-gen 4.0 update from today, but we’d recommend sticking with the Classic version until it’s been patched. To do this, you’ll need to swap over to the Classic branch available in Steam and GOG. On GOG, head to Settings and select Manage Installation. Then choose Configure, and select the Classic version to roll back to from the beta branches dropdown....

While the mods only change the aesthetics and not the function of how Skyrim’s lock picking minigame works, the awkward uniformity of Skyrim’s lock looks has always been quite odd. Modders under the usernames “Kreis”, “wSkeever”, and “powerofthree” must have thought the same. Why would a chest you found underwater look the same as one created by the insect-obsessed Falmer? It’s preposterous! But now it no longer needs to be....

Get the Logitech G435 for $30 (was $80, $50 off) The Logitech G435 does a lot right, despite its now bargain basement price. The key for me is the physical design - the use of athletic fabrics and lightweight plastics makes for a light and comfortable headset, with the headset weighing just 160 grams - which is reportedly 5.8oz in American measurements. The ski goggle style fabric headband is easily adjustable and stays comfortable for a long time, and is even reversible to show different accent colours....

Here’s what I’ve learned about the card, and why I reckon it’s worth picking up if you’re in need for a memory card for your Steam Deck, Switch or whatever. The card has received an A2 rating for its speed, indicating that you could run games or apps off of the card directly and get acceptable performance. The A2 rating specifically requires 4K IOPS random reads, 2K IOPS random writes and a sustained sequential write of 10MB/s....

Horror games have long traded on nightmare logic, confined and dingy spaces, and pursuing monsters, many of which feature on our list of best horror games. Refund Me If You Can has all of these things, along with the only slightly concerning advice not to stay in the same spot for more than 45 seconds. Devs Sungame Studio don’t elaborate on why, but Liam reckons it’s most likely because the great big horrible monster with the long claws stalking you through your nightmare maze will spawn if you do....

Brought to my attention by former staff bud Sin Vega (RPS in peace), you can take an extremely thorough tour of SCReconcile’s “Traction Park” (available on the Steam Workshop) by way of this 50-minute vid from Planet Coaster ’tubers Channel5. I’m not sure what my young mind’s eye painted when I read Phillip Reeve’s young-adult novels back in the day. Hell, it’s been long enough that I don’t even remember if they were that good....

There we are, William, a teenager who looks like a blend of Evan Peters, Tom Holland, and Michael Cera, and who supposedly has trouble expressing emotions. He has to intentionally form expressions, and on this day we take over doing that for him. In conversation, what he says and does is dictated by the mood his expression conveys, and we have to drag his mouth, eyes, brows, and cheeks around to set that (a “specifically trained face-recognizing neural network” inteprets our arrangement, the blurb claims) while a timer ticks down....

If you didn’t have an eye on Tribes Of Midgard, it’s a co-op action game with some light survival bits to it. It all centers around matches for up to ten players in which you’ll build and defend your town from baddies and giants. The RPS crew had been rather looking forward to Tribes Of Midgard, bestowing it a place on our list of best games of E3 2021. Plenty of other folks were too, it seems....

If Guillemot’s apology video was planned to clear the air so today can just be feel-good marketing, it’s unfortunate that only seven hours prior, a new report came out with allegations of abusive behaviour at Nadeo, the Ubisoft studio who make Trackmania. “This summer, we learned that certain Ubisoft employees did not uphold our company’s values, and that our systems failed to protect the victims of their behaviour,” Guillemot said in the video statement....

Project Q will presumably be given a better name before release, like NotFite or something. Ubisoft have so far only described Project Q as “FUN!” and say that it’s a team battle arena containing “a variety of PvP modes”. Oh, and that there’s no plan to implement NFTs. Ghost Recon Breakpoint players weren’t too keen on Ubisoft Quartz, Ubisoft’s first attempt at introducing NFTs into their games. Apparently, Ubisoft think people “don’t get” the appeal of blockchain....