Another intriguing Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod has emerged to confront your party of quirky RPG adventurers. This one's a short story which lets you take a break from BG3's main story to attend a dinner party at the house of a not-at-all creepy rich bloke, who happens to be very good at jamming out on the organ via illusions.
There's now a mod for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties which swaps out the likeness of actor Teruyuki Kagawa. Kagawa's casting in the remake, which saw him lend both his voice and likeness to secondary villain Goh Hamazaki, caused fan backlash due to a 2022 report from Shukan Shincho detailing sexual assault allegations against the actor.
Kagawa apologised at the time, but didn't specify what he was apologising for or confirm the events reported in the article. Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties director Ryosuke Horii recently said Kagawa's casting was the result of developers RGG Studio having "tried to think of someone who makes you go, 'This guy's a creep'".
Rubbing shoulders with factions is a big part of the Fallout: New Vegas charm, even if it often devolves into you doing a bunch of favours if you don't want to risk ending up on the vilified naughty list for one too many accidental grenade pickpocktings. You do get some nice perks for keeping the likes of the NCR or Legion on side, but a new mod aims to take that to a new level, letting you send faction cronies out on handy odd jobs while you kick your feet up.
"You will get anywhere between a fairly surgical battle with the more simple moves and synergies, to a downright-drunken-disaster run. [They] act with basically zero understanding of enemy mechanics, no regard for their ability order, and they couldn't give less of a damn about tile hazards." This is a section taken from the description of a mod which turns Mewgenics into an auto-battler, but turning the controls over to an AI chessmaster. That AI chessmaster just happens to play almost exactly like I have in my seven hours with it thus far.
The regular modpocalypses which tend to erupt when a fresh update for a game comes down the pipeline - an especially terrifying prospect if it's an older game and the tweaks/additions aren't something you're happy to temporarily switch back to vanilladom in order to enjoy - may now be less of a ballache. Well, at least when it comes to the Steam Workshop, which has just had new version control pipes welded to its pulsating metal frame.
Fallout 3's at its best during your first trip into the war-torn ruins of downtown DC. Rather than an open and desolate expanse, you're navigating tight underground passageways by Pip-Boy light, occasionally emerging into the daylight to fight through patches of ruined city often littered with battered landmarks. Bethesda had initially envisioned this urban jungle to be even more of an expansive labyrinth, and a group of modders have now had a crack at resurrecting the cut areas to create their own version of that more expansive DC.
Ah, hello, Prince Arthur. This is King Dutch. Long time no see. We thought today would be a good day for rolling. The katamari. The gunslinger suffering from tuberculosis. Where the first rolls the second follows. Roll, roll, roll.
That, essentially, is the ethos behind a Red Dead Redemption 2 mod which streamer Blurbs created late last year, and has since shown off in a video that's heavy on large masses of horses and pardners being rolled into rootin' tootin' chaos balls.
No, I'm not busy. Ignore the very famous actor acting moody in the corner, he'll be quiet if you pay him no mind. Also, do like I am and just pretend my holo-phone doesn't have a million urgent messages about some relic sitting in its inbox. Just sit here on the sofa, in this Cyberpunk 2077 flat, and watch as the big flying thing with Dogtown's military dictator's face on it floats between my futuristic kitchen and lounge, thanks to a new mod.
If you're a fan of both the colour grey being draped all over designs that could be accurately described as both angular and slabby, you're in luck. A third brutalist map jam has hit Quake, with this one being less of a fan-made map pack and more of a huge overhaul mod - the concrete cavernousness of which dwarfs the original game.
It's a new year, and Fallout: London developers Team FOLON have kicked it off by revealing that the massive Fallout 4 mod's second DLC is currently planned to rock up in the irradiated tube station of our lives pretty soon. This add-on's dubbed Last Orders and looks to have at least something to do with a trip to the pub.
To be fair, that makes perfect sense. Fallout: London's first DLC was dubbed Rabbit and Pork, so following up last year's meal of new quests with a drink is only human.
An online co-op mod for very French and very puppety soulslike Lies of P has been released in alpha form. As of writing, it'll let you take on boss battles with a friend and its creators are hoping to offer full multplayer playthroughs similar to Elden Ring's brilliant seamless co-op mod further down the line.
Right, so. There's Oblivion Remastered, the official Oblivion remaster which released earlier this year. There's Skyblivion, the fan-made Oblivion remake mod which still currently looks due out relatively soonish, despite its release window having been a source of drama a few months ago. There's also Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil, another massive Skyrim modding project, but this time seeking to re-create the province in which Oblivion's set as it might be at the time The Elder Scrolls five takes place. Simple. The last one of those has just released a fresh teaser.
So, an ambitious Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer mod called CyberMP has been in development for a little while now, and the folks behind it have just concluded its "most stable and successful" closed beta test yet. Tweaks to key elements like vehicle and player synchronisation, as well as a new interface and custom lobbies went down well with testers, while technical gremlins were minimal.
If this is your first time hearing about CyberMP, it's a project that's currently being worked on by a team of 10, having first come to prominence last summer. Its goal is to offer multi-person deathmatches and races to Cyberpunkers, rather than full GTA Online-style co-op missioning or gigging.
Pre-release builds of Fallout: New Vegas recently unearthed at a shop in Utah contain rare files which could be "incredibly useful" to expanding what modders can do with the RPG. Well, at least they doe in the estimation of the folks who claim to have found them, a group of preservationists whose current online presence only looks to have popped up last month.
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Earlier this year, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord's War Sails naval expansion had its release pushed back from June 17th to November 26th. You can give it a go right now if you fancy, so it obviously made that second date. Prior to the DLC dropping, I chatted with Bannerlord senior producer Falk Engel about what went into the decision to ditch the initial summer date, and why custom naval battles were only confirmed to be arriving with its launch quite late in the day.
It's fair to say Fallout 4's anniversary update's earned some stick due to effect it had on PC mods, just like the RPG's next-gen update did before it. Lots of works needed updating, and while that happened pretty quickly in a number of cases, there was still disruption for some additions that generally feel a lot more necessary over on console.
Enter modding platform Nexus Mods, who've decided to follow-up the update by putting together their own "anniversary collection" of Fallout 4 mods from the works they host, with hopes it'll serve as a free alternative aimed at celebrating ten years of the RPG being modded.
With season two of the Fallout TV Show and a Fallout 76 expansion going all-in on Goggins, December's not short of Fallout things. Yet, on the day that sees Fallout 4 be re-released in proabable mod-messing up fashion, I'm sitting here looking at a different Fallout thing and thinkling it might be the one of the four I'm most interested in checking out. It's a beefy New Vegas expansion mod called Fallout: Long 15 and it's set to release on December 12th.