Well, hello there everyone. It's WRUP time. Gather 'round and hear, rather, read a tale or two (or three) of events in gaming. To quote U2, "It's a beautiful day".
Pacific Drive is up and running and I'm excited to finally get to drive around the Olympic Exclusion Zone in my old station wagon that may or may not have some level of sentience? Not sure. The demo gave me some vibes. It's a survival game, but it's been streamlined a bit and that's great because I don't really enjoy survival games. The exclusion zone aforementioned is in the Pacific northwest and you're there for reasons unexplained even though it happens during the tutorial. The objective is to find your way out while upgrading your car and driving around dodging anomalies that would make the Philadelphia Experiment look tame. The survival aspect isn't about being hungry or tired or making a house etc. What it does entail is finding fuel and scavenging materials to keep your car up and driving. Pick it up on Steam for it's still discounted price of $26.99.
Elden Ring DLC is coming soon. Shadow Of The Erdtree is finally on the way, you can watch the teaser here on the YouTubes. Fromsoft would love for you to stop referring to these titles as "Soulsborne" or "Souls series", and the like. Why? Don't really know. It kind of seems like they just don't call it that themselves. GamesRadar has a little blurb on this.
Arrowhead Studios, behind Helldivers 2, has increased server capacity to 700,000 just in time for the weekend gamer crush. Sweet Liberty, this is excellent news as the game has been so popular you literally couldn't get a spot on a server to play unless you logged in early in the morning and just stayed there all day. Speaking of which, people were doing just that in order to guarantee a space so they could play later. Surely unrelated, Arrowhead has added an idle player timeout so there'll be no more hanging out in your super destroyer just taking up space while you go to work not administering freedom. Why this wasn't a feature from the beginning is a little confusing, but thankfully it's here now. After 15 minutes of no activity you'll be kicked to the title screen. Hopefully anti-cheat can keep up with botters set to move their Helldiver a step every few minutes now. IGN has info on both of these topics here and here. Props to Arrowhead for handling this server crowding in a relatively quick fashion. I have no doubt they've been working very hard to get this and many other issues fixed as they've released quite a few patches already. Hopefully they'll fix the armor values, the occasional player stuck problems and the much more rare but decidedly worse difficulty progression bug that doesn't allow people to get beyond a current challenge level soon as well. For Democracy!
What are we playing? Well, I'll tell ya.
Scrooloose: Pacific Drive is installed and ready to play, but I have to be honest, I am probably going to be spending my time in Helldivers 2 spreading democracy for Super Earth.
AJ: I recently picked up Under Night In-Birth II and Jagged Alliance 3 for the PS5 so I may check out one or both of those.
Greywolfe: this is late and i'm sorry, but my four in february is done! i beat guild of dungeoneering. now trying mainframe defenders, but i'm not sure i'm going to have the stamina for that. i'm not very good at tactics games at all.