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Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption - Reawakened, the mod project to rebuild the first VtM videogame in Skyrim, has shown off new gameplay of its Prague early game. The original game, which follows the story of a crusader knight from the Middle Ages all the way to the modern day, is one of those hyper-ambitious, turn of the millennium RPGs that just doesn't come all the way together, and is a prime candidate for a fan revival.

We last checked in on Redemption - Reawakened a year ago. The mod team had shown off some of its later hub areas and more dungeony levels, but project lead Galejro's latest videos show off a significant portion of the early game in Prague.

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YouTube - Daytime & Silver Mines
YouTube - Nighttime

There's a long tradition of connections between Dungeons & Dragons and the videogames based on it. Pool of Radiance, the 1998 videogame that kicked off the Gold Box series, was also released as a pen-and-paper adventure called Ruins of Adventure in the same year. More recently, Baldur's Gate 3 incorporated parts of the adventure Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus—if you want to know more about why there are so many tiefling refugees fleeing Elturel, that book has your answer. (Wyll's dad shows up in it too.)

The next D&D supplement is Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse, and it includes at least a few things players of 1999's Planescape: Torment will recognize. For starters, one piece of official artwork shows the Smoldering Corpse Bar, which either still has Ignus the burning wizard on display or has found a replacement for him.

What's more, the supplement's adventure book, Turn of Fortune's Wheel, opens with a familiar scene. "You wake up in the mortuary," senior game designer F. Wesley Schneider said in a first look video. "I'm sorry to say that you've died. Morte, the snarky floating skull, greets you and you realize that there's a mystery. Your memories are fractured and every time that you come back from the dead, you come back a little different."

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is a preem spy thriller adventure. However, if your V really isn't that interested in working with government types, you can choose not to sign on to a life of martinis shaken, not stirred.

Only issue is, choosing to do so locks you out of the questline—and from what I've tested, it's permanent. At minimum it'll delay your progression through the DLC's story substantially, but I don't get the sense Reed's gonna call me back.

Here's the mostly spoiler-free rundown: at the end of a mission called Lucretia My Reflection, you'll be given a choice to stay or go. If you go, you really do go—you fail the mission, and are roadblocked from proceeding.

You can still run around Dogtown, but there'll be no suit and tie galas with Mr. Elba, which is a crime in itself. Just make sure to play ball with your new friends, and you'll be golden. If you're really worried about accidentally dropping the new DLC, here's the specifics.

Capcom would "gracefully decline" any acquisition offer from Microsoft, according to the company's chief operating officer.

The company also has no intention of acquiring companies itself, exec Haruhiro Tsujimoto has said.

Tsujimoto was asked by Bloomberg how Capcom would respond to an acquisition offer from Microsoft. "I believe it would be better if we were equal partners," he replied.

Video game creation platform Roblox has laid off 30 staff in the company's talent acquisition team, as hiring slows.

The layoffs come following a period of dramatic growth for the game, which now commands 250 million monthly active users - more than Fortnite and Minecraft combined.

Reporting on the layoffs, Techcrunch said it believed the changes reflected a greater push within Roblox - which operates at a net loss - to focus in on its bottom line, which is heavily affected the growing sums it pays developers on its platform.

“Nobody uses water,” one man in a Dodgers cap said in Spanish when Maria Cabrera approached, holding flyers about silicosis, an incurable and suffocating disease that has devastated dozens of workers across the state and killed men who have barely reached middle age.

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The disease dates back centuries, but researchers say the booming popularity of countertops made of engineered stone, which has much higher concentrations of silica than many kinds of natural stone, has driven a new epidemic of an accelerated form of the suffocating illness. As the dangerous dust builds up and scars the lungs, the disease can leave workers short of breath, weakened and ultimately suffering from lung failure.

“You can get a transplant,” Cabrera told the man in Spanish, “but it won’t last.”

In California, it has begun to debilitate young workers, largely Latino immigrants who cut and polish slabs of engineered stone. Instead of cropping up in people in their 60s or 70s after decades of exposure, it is now afflicting men in their 20s, 30s or 40s, said Dr. Jane Fazio, a pulmonary critical care physician who became alarmed by cases she saw at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center. Some California patients have died in their 30s.

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According to the voice of Astarion himself, there's a whole two hour section of Baldur's Gate 3 no one has played yet.

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"There's even something I know about that you can't get to unless you do something that I don't think anyone's going to work out," Newborn said in the livestream, which you can see him talk about in a clip above. "I was told this in confidence and I think I'm one of the few people who knows about it as well." In the stream Newborn was even asked if he could tell the person he was talking to what it is, but noted "it's one of those few things I cannot friend-DA." Just to clarify, Newborn will have signed an NDA to work on this project, unsurprisingly, but people are people and they do tell their friends things, but this seems like something so secretive he can't even do that.

Update: Sounds like this article is old and it has been found

Upcoming augmented reality horror, Scrylight, will be a "fully immersive, 360 degree ghost hunting experience" that will not just turn your own home into a haunted house, but also interact with your real-life smart lights and doorbells, too.

With ghosts able to "haunt players in real world scenarios, activating real world devices", developer Spectropia Studios utilises Niantic's genre-defining AR technology to "blur the boundaries of what's real and what isn't".

Features of the upcoming horror game include "full 360 interaction between ghosts and players via your smart devices, camera and microphone for realistic entity interactions", infinite, "geographical-specific", procedural entities, integrated machine learning agents and "computer vision for real time interaction with your environment", and full smart device integration "allowing for real world hauntings".

You can already guess the third sentence: the servers have been a disaster at launch, with players forced to queue for long periods just to play alone, if they can manage to play at all. It currently sits "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam - that's 31% positive after almost 19,000 reviews.

"Online only was a huge mistake," says one review. "Imagine waiting for an hour and ten minutes and still not being able to get into a private game," says the one underneath. "this game makes me feel the developers made this game just so they could pull off the biggest heist of all time. robbing us of an offline mode," says another. There are hundreds more like this.

The official Payday X (formerly Twitter) account has been tracking the issues, noting "slow matchmaking" on September 21st, and an outright "matchmaking outage" yesterday on September 22nd. As of twelve hours ago, the account posted that they're "seeing players being able to create lobbies again," but that there "still might have a few issues" that they're working on. Throughout it all, the account has been getting roasted by players who can't play, or who simply want an offline mode.

In a recent interview, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth leads Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase shared their feelings on the term JRPG, both having different perspectives on it.

Earlier this year, Final Fantasy 14 and 16 producer Naoki Yoshida spoke about the term JRPG, and how he doesn't like it as when it first started to be used it felt like it was "a discriminatory term." It's an understandable point of contention, as while the genre is quite popular now, go back a couple of decades you'd find plenty of people being rude about the games just because they were Japanese. Now, in a new interview with The Guardian, Nomura, creative director of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and Kitase, producer on the game, have shared their thoughts on the term.

Quite notably, Nomura expressed distaste for the term, whereas Kitase wasn't as put off by it. "I'm not too keen on it," Nomura said. "Certainly, when we started doing interviews for the games that I started making, no one used that term – they just called them RPGs. And then at some point – I can’t remember exactly when – people started referring to them as JRPGs. And I’m not really sure what the intent behind that is. It just always felt a bit off to me, and a bit weird. I never really understood it – or why it’s needed."

According to the voice of Astarion himself, there's a whole two hour section of Baldur's Gate 3 no one has played yet.

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"There's even something I know about that you can't get to unless you do something that I don't think anyone's going to work out," Newborn said in the livestream, which you can see him talk about in a clip above. "I was told this in confidence and I think I'm one of the few people who knows about it as well." In the stream Newborn was even asked if he could tell the person he was talking to what it is, but noted "it's one of those few things I cannot friend-DA." Just to clarify, Newborn will have signed an NDA to work on this project, unsurprisingly, but people are people and they do tell their friends things, but this seems like something so secretive he can't even do that.

Update: See below, it has been found.

One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising. Certainly helps that Godot ended up launching their new funding platform on the same day Unity announced their hated Runtime Fee system.

Initially when the Godot developers announced their new funding platform they only had around €25K per month from 438 members. This has now exploded up to €50,323 per month from 1,458 members. A much better and more sustainable amount considering they're building an entire game engine.