Vercomicsporno

In some circles of videogameland it’s common wisdom that more is better⁠—I remember a quaint time when 30 hours was a “long” game, but today’s big budget releases have been pushing that boundary well into the triple digits. In a recent interview with IGN, though, two Star Wars Outlaws devs promise to buck that trend with a “dense” and “rich” game that doesn’t wear out its welcome.

Julian Gerighty and Navid Khaveri, the game’s creative and narrative director respectively, told IGN that they don’t want Outlaws to be “too big,” with Gerighty clarifying that the kind of game he’s referring to is one that “people don’t manage to play, enjoy, and finish.”

Gerighty went on to describe Outlaws as “a very dense, rich, open world adventure that [players] can explore at their own rhythm,” and asserted that the game “is absolutely not a 200 or 300 hour epic unfinishable RPG.” So it’s pretty clear that Ubisoft’s argument is that less can still very much be more.

Long games can be great, offering worlds that enrapture you for weeks or months and stick with you for long after. Done poorly, however, they can be a slog of endless grinding and to-do lists, lea…

Wizard with a Gun is a top-down co-op roguelite about wizards who, as the title makes clear, are packing heat. It’s really good—”a lean roguelite that never feels like it’s wasting your time, even if it’s got some rough edges,” we said in our 80% review—but will be the last game from developer Galvanic Games, which announced today that it is closing.

“Despite the promising start of Wizard with a Gun, sales are not strong enough to sustain our studio,” Galvanic Games founder and president Patrick Morgan wrote on LinkedIn. “This last year has been particularly tough for games. While we had numerous encouraging conversations at DICE and GDC, the process of signing new projects, even in a good year, takes longer than the runway we had left.”

Morgan said he’s “incredibly proud” of Wizard with a Gun, and that working with publisher Devolver Digital was “a dream come true.” But he added that “knowing that we accomplished all the things we set out to do when we founded Galvanic” is bittersweet because despite so much that went right, the studio is gone anyway.

“I may never get over the irony of spending a decade building my ideal team, only for it to end af…

Keep your Wordle win streak going straight through the weekend—today’s Wordle answer is waiting for you on this very page. Like to clear the daily puzzle in your own time? Then take a minute to browse our helpful tips and guides, or use the clue for the February 4 (595) Wordle below to nudge you in the right direction without giving the game away.

I turned up yellow after yellow until… ah, not quite. Luckily I had one last guess available, and that was just enough to see me through to a satisfying victory.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, February 4

The answer today refers to any room or area lacking light. This can either be because a light source is present but has been switched off or because there was never any light at all. You’ll need to uncover two vowels today. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If there’s one thing better than playing Wordle, it’s playing Wordle well, which is why I’m going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the…

This weekend a tweet from the Super Pod Saga podcast went viral, asking simply: “What is the most useless piece of video game knowledge you know?”

It turns out that people have remembered a lot of bizarre, funny and in some cases amazing pieces of trivia, the kind of knowledge that you’re very unlikely to stumble across outside of a thread like this. We open with this absolute stunner from Jan Bart van Beek, the studio director and art director at Guerrilla Games.

This does need one caveat. Tiger Woods’ last game as the face of EA’s PGA Tour was in 2013, after which the series would take a year’s hiatus before returning with the first entry on the Frostbite Engine: Rory McIlroy’s PGA Tour (in 2015), which doesn’t feature Woods as his ranking had plummeted so badly. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Woods avatar wouldn’t have been used in development.

The tweet really took off and has replies and quote tweets in the tens of thousands. I didn’t read through everything but, of what I did, here are some of the text highlights, with the video ones to follow.

Furry_Wall: “Runescape cows cannot be poisoned because their ‘moo’ prioritizes on the in-game timer over…

Persona 3 is a strange beast. All its best parts are scattered across a bunch of different versions: the epilogue is only available on the PS2 FES version, while the alternate female protagonist (FeMC) and all her new social links were restricted to the PSP-only Portable version of the game (so too were party members you could directly control in battle; the AI-only party members of the PS2 games were a constant headache). 

All those scattered pieces made the game seem ideal for a remake that brought all its distinct parts into one cohesive package, and then Persona 3 Reload just… didn’t? It didn’t do that. Instead, we got controllable party members and modern graphics in what was otherwise a remake of original, non-FES Persona 3. No epilogue and no FeMC. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great game, but it feels like there are still pieces missing. That’s probably why modders have decided to stop waiting for Atlus and just build those parts themselves.

Spotted by GamesRadar, an enterprising group of Persona modders on GitHub have kicked off the FeMC Reloaded Project, aimed at restoring P3P’s female protag—real name Kotone Shiomi—back to her ri…

Helldivers 2 has reached unexpected heights of success in the past week, with a trajectory of players that mimics previous post-launch successes like Valheim. With over 330,000 concurrent players on Steam as of this afternoon, that concurrent players line is only going up from launch weekend’s 150K peak, signaling a game that’s pulling in real viral numbers.

As of press time the peak concurrent player count was 333,827 at about 8:10 PM UTC, 3:10 PM ET. That number comes from tracker SteamDB—which can only give us half the story, as the PlayStation-published Helldivers 2 is crossplay between PC and PS5. Last week, on February 11, there were at least a million total players, per developer Arrowhead Games’ CEO.

A common meme among the community, however, is that Helldivers 2 is suffering from success. The sheer number of players has caused severe server issues for developers who were expecting peak player counts less than a quarter of the current numbers.

Players have occasionally been forced to wait in a queue to play, while the server databases are struggling to keep up with the sheer number of statistics being recorded—a common issue is that mission…