Over on YouTube, publisher Raw Fury has released "90 Minutes of Esoteric Ebb Music | A Lazy Day in Norvik," a chill arrangement of the upcoming fantasy RPG's soundtrack. The kicker is that it's kinda spectacular, and very distinct from Esoteric Ebb's primary inspiration, Disco Elysium.

With Disco, we got the dreamy indie rock of Sea Power, while Esoteric Ebb has some of what you might expect from a fantasy game⁠—lotta wistful strings and the like up in here⁠—paired with some truly surprising, memorable synths. The closest sound that springs to mind for me is the music of 2022's superb Tunic⁠—that crazy good Zelda-like where you play an adorable little fox.

It comes with that classic, long YouTube music video accompaniment of a subject-appropriate character in the lo fi hip hop girl setup. In this case, it's Esoteric Ebb's permanently behelmeted cleric main character doing some light reading as the city beyond goes through a full day-night cycle.

The video's been on my work music rotation for the past few days, and it's just the thing to get in the mood for Esoteric Ebb's (presumably) close launch: The RPG is currently slated to release in the first quarter of this year (that just leaves until the end of March).

As for the game itself, Esoteric Ebb has seriously impressed us with its demos. You've got the Disco Elysium skills that talk to you and urban exploration, but Esoteric Ebb also does this cool thing where it folds some classic D&D stuff back into the mix (spellcasting, combat), but it's practically approaching them from first principles to make them work in a Disco-style walk n' talk RPG.

The lone fight in the demo, for example, is entirely dialogue based, with various ability checks you can make to fight or "charm" a hapless zombie. It's reminiscent of Disco Elysium's climactic Tribunal battle, but seems set to be a far more common occurrence throughout the game.

Esoteric Ebb is shaping up to be the best Disco Elysium-style RPG since Disco Elysium itself. In addition to jamming with the OST on YouTube, you can try out Esoteric Ebb's demo for yourself and wishlist it over on Steam.

Indie duo Talha & Jack Co are working on a disturbing, transgressive horror game in Abide, and they are keenly aware of the risks involved with such a project in today's climate. "Horror seems to be under pressure from censorship, some subtle and some blatant," The duo wrote on Abide's Kickstarter page.

"Sites are delisting mature rated games and recently a horror game was taken off some of the biggest marketplaces." The game in question was Horses, a thematically challenging, gruesome game taken off both Steam and Epic.

When I spoke to Talha Kaya and Jack King-Spooner about Abide, I wanted to hear more of their thoughts on the state of gaming censorship as they work on a game that could prove particularly vulnerable to the delisting actions we've been seeing from major storefronts.

"I bought, played, and liked Horses. I think it’s a good game," said Kaya. "I also met with the developer and the publisher at an event during development and didn’t sense any ill-intent in their making of the game. They struck me as people who just want to make something a bit different.

"I understand some of the themes and imagery were too much for some people. But I think it’s clear no portion of the game is pornographic in nature. I believe it deserved shelf space on the most popular digital stores. It’s okay to not like it, or even find it problematic, that shouldn’t stop it from being available."

King-Spooner similarly enjoyed the game and thought it should be more widely available, but even argued that its developers could have gone further with the game's disturbing scenes. "I liked Horses but it pulled a lot of punches in my unhinged opinion: Genitals censored, cut away for the genital mutilation," he said.

King-Spooner lamented that "it's pretty sad and pathetic that a game with difficult content can’t get on the larger marketplaces," attributing it to people believing "you should disengage your brain when playing a game" or even "the hang up of games being a modern kid’s toy."

It was a nice change of pace to hear serious talk of Horses beyond what it means for gaming industry censorship, something PCG contributor Maddi Chilton advocated for in her critical appraisal from late last year. In contrast with King-Spooner, though, Maddi felt Horses' greatest failing was one of pacing: It didn't allow for enough tension, silence, or even boredom between its most harrowing scenes.

Talha & Jack Co's Abide is currently fundraising on Kickstarter with less than a week left to make its initial funding goal. I've already been hooked by its gruesome evolution on the duo's claymation presentation, as well as their intriguing pivot from surreal fables to psychological horror.

New Blood has revealed that Ultrakill's next major addition, Hell's eighth layer of Fraud, will be added to the early access FPS next week. Fraud was initially set to release at the end of 2025, but suffered a minor last minute delay.

We don't know the exact day the update will drop, but New Blood advises fans to "Skip school. Call out sick from work," because "It's finally happening. And we're not lying."

One of the coolest things about Ultrakill is that each layer of Hell pretty much has its own art style: Lust is a dreamy metropolis, Gluttony is a Jabu Jabu's Belly-style situation, Greed is a freaky golden desert filled with the monuments of humanity, it's rad as hell.

Fraud looks like a real heater, with the unifying theme seeming to be illusion, funhouse tricks, and the sort of physics-defying spaces you can only explore in a videogame.

New Blood's early access projects⁠—Gloomwood, Fallen Aces, and Ultrakill⁠—continue to simmer like a fine gumbo. The long waits will be well-worth it in the end, I think: All three have been surprising me with their scale and ambition.

Each new update unveils new layers (figuratively, in addition to Ultrakill's literal layers of hell) of depth and complexity that genuinely excite me⁠. Gloomwood's monster transformation serum system is a great example. The feeling kinda reminds me of that point we all reached in Elden Ring in 2022 where it was like "Oh, the map keeps going? What is this game?"

Ultrakill seems the closest to a full 1.0 release, with just one more layer to go after Fraud: Treachery. On the smaller side, New Blood is also set to launch a grid-based, Grimrock-style spinoff of Dusk sometime this year, Dungeons of Dusk. Ultrakill is already a great value at $25, but you should wait to buy it if you haven't already: Fraud's launch will coincide with New Blood's customary anniversary sale from February 23 through March 2.

Pepperidge Farm remembers: It usually takes about five years for everyone to decide an Obsidian Entertainment game was actually really good. In a pleasantly surprising turn of events, it seems to have only required exactly 12 months for Avowed, last year's action-RPG spinoff to Pillars of Eternity, to get such a reappraisal.

It's still the same, great game. I loaded into Avowed to check out its big anniversary update, and found the changes closer to Cyberpunk 2077 1.5 than Cyberpunk 2077 2.0: A lot of little niceties, extras, and quality of life changes, but nothing transformative. That's okay in my book⁠—Avowed didn't need to be transformed⁠—but this game has had a bizarre, uneven reception.

A Bloomberg interview with director Carrie Patel shortly after launch implied that it was hitting sales targets, while a more recent Bloomberg piece on Obsidian characterized it as a slight underperformer. Avowed reviewed well: PCG Australian editor Shaun Prescott gave it an 82%, and Metacritic has it at a flat 80. But Avowed was the victim of one of those weird, ambient hate cycles we see now⁠—more halfhearted than with Star Wars: Outlaws or Assassin's Creed Shadows, but there.

A quick YouTube search pulls up hour-long, well-watched videos from close to launch with titles like "Avowed - Obsidian's Broken Promise" or "The Deserved Disaster of Avowed." Things were rough on X, "The Everything App," in the lead up to and immediate aftermath of release.

I have a crystalized memory looking at the comments on Avowed's character creator reveal (never look at the comments) and seeing users freaking out that it had a "body type" selection instead of "gender," then saying some pretty nasty stuff about trans people.

As far as I can tell, there were three main types of aggrieved commenter: The aforementioned gender warriors, people who didn't understand you needed to upgrade your weapons, and people who wanted it to be Obsidian's Skyrim instead of a more Mass Effect or Witcher 2-adjacent RPG, just in first person.

But that seems to have all died down, and the people who got the most mad about it have probably moved on to Highguard or something. I've even seen a few "I hated this game in 2025, it's fine now" vids and comments, even though nothing substantive has changed.

You're just allowed to like Avowed now, similar to how the narrative around Cyberpunk 2077 changed in 2022 with its first major content updates and the Edgerunners anime, even though it was fundamentally the same game as at launch.

If you haven't tried Avowed, the real game changer is that it's 50 bucks now, not $70. $50 should be the normal price for a new, big game⁠—I'm drawing on the gut here, not the fake science of economics; see also how a graphics card should cost $300. My conspiracy brain would like to blame Game Pass for why Avowed had to launch at $70 and The Outer Worlds 2 was almost sent out to die with an $80 price tag.

I'm committed to a full replay at this point, I think, and it really is the perfect time to buy Avowed if it passed you by last February: It costs what it should, and nobody's posting about it being part of a war on the family or white race anymore.

As reported by Eurogamer, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took to X (formerly Twitter) to criticize an attempt by US lawmakers to ban the social media app and its accompanying generative AI tool, Grok. The move came after users discovered that Elon Musk's Grok has the ability to take photos of real people, including minors, and produce images of them undressed or in otherwise sexually compromising positions, flooding the site with such content.

"Reason #42 for open platforms: to shut down every politician’s incessant demands to all gatekeepers to censor all of their political opponents," Sweeney wrote in a first tweet responding to MacRumors' report of US politicians requesting that Apple and Google remove X and Grok from their app stores.

"All major AIs have documented instances of going off the rails," Sweeney continued in a follow up tweet. "All major AI companies make their best efforts to combat this; none are perfect. Politicians demanding gatekeepers selectively crush the one that's their political opponent's company is basic crony capitalism."

"AI going off 'guardrails' is not the same as actively excusing content for pedophiles," wrote Remap and former Waypoint editor, Patrick Klepek, in response. "Your priorities as someone in charge of a company that makes a video game catering to young people are completely off."

404 Media's report from January 5 at the beginning of this saga offers illustrative examples of Grok's newly-discovered capabilities, like influencers undressed, made to appear pregnant, or shown breastfeeding a child. There are also extensive reports of users generating such material from images of minors.

The Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN) defines child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as "evidence of child sexual abuse" that "includes both real and synthetic content, such as images created with artificial intelligence tools." One of RAINN's examples of CSAM is "any content that sexualizes or exploits a child for the viewer's benefit."

Since the controversy came to light, the only change X has made has been moving Grok's ability to generate images in tweet replies behind a paywall⁠—X now appears to be more directly profiting off of Grok's ability to generate CSAM than it was in the first place.

This is all particularly galling in the face of the actual politically-motivated censorship Sweeney has overseen on the platform that helps make him a billionaire. Back in December, the Epic Games Store followed Steam's lead in banning the art game, Horses, for hazy reasons, an outgrowth of the pressure placed on payment processing companies by conservative activist groups to censor transgressive art and legal pornography on the internet.

Given the opportunity, Sweeney appears eager to defend an unprecedented online sexual humiliation machine, calling for open platforms and free speech while presiding over censorship on his own, closed platform. Sweeney's follow-up may have the beginnings of a solution, though: "All major AIs have documented instances of going off the rails." If this is what we can expect from such tools, maybe they should all be banned.

I'm mourning a friend today, and what's more, my friend's memory is being slandered. Not only will Divinity not carry forward the unique armor system Larian crafted for Divinity: Original Sin 2, my coworkers keep bashing it. PCG guides writer Rory Norris called it "broken" in giant letters on our front page.

I forget what PCG news writer Morgan Park said to me exactly during our Friday meeting, but it was something like D:OS2's armor system sucks, I'm stupid for liking it, and I'm a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt, and my butt smells and I like to kiss my own butt.

There is nothing out there like D:OS2's armor system. It lends the game a combat rhythm that is completely unique among CRPGs, and I was thrilled at the prospect of Larian returning to it with fresh eyes and a Baldur's Gate 3's worth of design experience. The saving grace here is the possibility of something new and even better, but I can't let the moment pass without sticking up for my fav.

Far out, man

Crowd control⁠—stuns, knockdowns, anything that hampers an enemy or player instead of directly damaging them⁠—is a key part of RPG combat, but it's almost always based on a certain amount of random chance, like Dungeons & Dragons' D20 saving throws. It works well enough as a genre default, but D:OS2 is the only CRPG I've played that went back to the drawing board to replace this core assumption with something else entirely.

In D:OS2, every character and enemy has physical and magic armor bars over their health bars. The physical is reduced by weapon damage and abilities centered on those weapons, like the warrior skill tree. The magic armor protects against spell and elemental effects.

Once an armor bar is depleted, the corresponding attacks then affect the base health bar. The curve ball is that crowd control effects do not work until the relevant armor has been depleted, but once a character's armor is gone, those crowd control abilities have a 100% success rate. Take the warrior charge attack Battering Ram: When an enemy's physical armor is up, it's just a way to deal damage and reposition your character, but when that armor is gone, Battering Ram will knock over an enemy every time you use it.

This means that every character, even ones you don't usually associate with battlefield control like rogues and warriors, is an important vector for both damage and crowd control. You have to leave certain assumptions at the door when playing: There's no need for a traditional tank or healer, because enemies can just ignore your tank (especially with all the mobility powers like teleportation), and health just isn't as important as armor. The few armor restoration abilities in the game are part of skill trees with ample offensive options.

Every character has to pull triple duty as a tank, DPS, and controller, with build differences coming in the form of which weapons, armor, and skill trees a given character takes advantage of⁠—you don't want two archers squabbling over the best bows, for example. It all results in a highly aggressive form of turn based tactics where you're racing to strip enemy defenses and lock down priority targets before they can do the same to you.

Bigger and better

Original Sin 2's system has weaknesses, but no more than the genre-standard, random chance-based alternative. I've always felt that D:OS2's few missteps lie elsewhere, like its randomly generated, leveled loot or dearth of non-combat questing. One of Rory's main complaints that I do get regards party composition: You're incentivized to go all elemental or all physical, and the mixed-damage party from my first playthrough struggled in the endgame.

But even this, I'd argue, is less of a weakness and more of a difference. There's a ton of character build variety even within the elemental/physical silos, and D:OS2 is no more restrictive with what constitutes a well-built, viable character than any other RPG, particularly as you go lower in difficulty. On my last playthrough, I ran with an all-physical party consisting of a dual daggers rogue, two hand warrior, archer, and summoner.

When I return to the game for yet another cheeky replay, I was eyeing an elemental party⁠—I'm particularly excited by some builds I've seen for a melee-focused battlemage who pairs elemental staves with warrior abilities. It's a great system, but I'm more broken up by my colleagues' slander than Larian not revisiting it for Divinity. This is a studio I trust to come up with something equally inventive.

In its big Divinity AMA yesterday, Larian clarified its use of generative AI tools in development: No AI art or concept art, but the studio is leaving the door open for other applications like using machine learning⁠—and potentially generative AI, it's unclear where it draws the line in some of its communication⁠—to help clean up and resize motion captured animation.

One other use that was shot down definitively, however, is AI-generated text, placeholder or final. User AmihanTheStoic asked about AI text in the context of the no AI art promise. Specifically, how generated placeholder text helps development, and whether "good enough" AI placeholder text might make it to the final game, voiding Larian's promise to keep generated assets out of Divinity.

Comment from r/Games

"The stance applies to writing as well. We don't have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries or other writing in Divinity," said writing director Adam Smith. "To answer your second question, 'how does generated placeholder text benefit development over simple stub text'—it doesn't.

"We had a limited group experimenting with tools to generate text, but the results hit a 3/10 at best and those tools are for research purposes, not for use in Divinity. Even my worst first drafts⁠—and there are a LOT of them⁠—are at least a 4/10 (although Swen might disagree :p), and the amount of iteration required to get even individual lines to the quality we want is enormous. From the initial stub to the line we record and ship, there are a great many eyes and hands involved in getting a dialogue right."

That lines up with the AI-generated text I've seen out in the wild: Whether it's Grok, Claude, or ChatGPT, people can never seem to get the genAI stink off, a by turns smarmy and sycophantic tone that I find utterly repulsive. At a certain point, editing bad writing is just more work than starting from scratch.

I am curious now, though, whether Smith was intimating that company boss Swen Vincke is a gentler critic of his worst work, or even harsher. Regardless, we also learned from the AMA that Original Sin 2's broken flawless armor system won't be making a return in Divinity, as well as how the dev team is thinking about save scumming while designing the game.

We all save scummed in Baldur's Gate 3⁠—except, apparently, for my friend Jack and coworker Morgan Park. They both accidentally killed everyone at the Last Light Inn and just kept trucking. As part of Larian's big Divinity AMA on Reddit, the game's writing director, Adam Smith, revealed how the studio is factoring players' save scumming tendencies into its next game's design.

For a quick definition, I think "save scumming" is best understood as using a game's save/load feature for anything other than quitting the game and coming back later, or continuing from a game over⁠—no moral judgement here, mind you, just an observation of our tendencies. The incentive to save scum could be argued to be a design failure, or merely a natural function of games as wish fulfillment. We already have to live with our mistakes in real life, why do so in our fantasies?

Comment from r/Games

The big Baldur's Gate 3 example has to be quickloading every time you fail a skill check until the 20-sided dice finally lands your way. But for RPGs that are all about choice and consequence, this ever present temptation to never have to live with failure can adulterate some of a game's chew, removing stakes from the story and preventing you from seeing interesting plot developments from failure states.

"Are there any plans to try to make failing these dialogue/non-combat checks more interesting, a la Disco Elysium," asked user Nidies in the AMA, "to try to encourage players to accept 'bad' [random number generation]?"

"Our ambition is certainly to make failure more interesting," replied Smith. "There are already a couple of situations in the game where I think the most exciting⁠—and extensive⁠—outcome comes from 'failure', but you'll be the judge of how well we do."

Early in 2024, I corresponded with Baldur's Gate 3 lead systems designer Nick Pechenin about this topic for a story in PC Gamer's print magazine⁠—Pechinin is also working on Divinity, and answered questions elsewhere in the AMA. He was of the opinion that save scumming is a perfectly reasonable player behavior, and bristled against the tendency among some RPG fans to disparage it.

If a designer wants players to accept failure states, Pechenin argued, those failure states need to be interesting and worthwhile, which lines up with Smith's statement in the AMA. For an example of a game nailing this, Pechenin cited a long Crusader Kings 3 run that fell apart over a small miscalculation⁠—it was such an interesting and surprising development, he found it a fitting climax to the game.

Pechenin also pointed to quick rewind features like you see in racing games, Prince of Persia, or the more recent Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew as a way to better integrate the quicksave-quickload impulse into a game. That's far from a guarantee that Pechenin or anyone else at Larian will act on this admiration in Divinity, but a one turn mulligan button strikes me as a potentially strong and versatile addition to Larian's house style of combat.

In a similar vein, Pechenin seemed open to "static checks" as a way to avoid save scumming to redo dice rolls. Rather than augmenting a random chance with your investment in a skill, a static check simply requires a minimum investment to pass, and if you don't have enough points, too bad. Fallout: New Vegas is a notable RPG built on these sorts of skill checks, and this is even how Divinity: Original Sin 2 handled persuasion, though its non-combat options were far more limited than Baldur's Gate 3's.

"We had long internal discussions and even prototypes for making some of the checks [in BG3] more static," Pechenin revealed. "This is usually relevant to physical checks that thematically can be attempted again and again⁠—pushing a stuck door open for example.

"In the end we did not have enough relevant cases to introduce yet another system to this chonker of a game, so we went all in on the big shiny D20 and made sure that it feels as good as it can."

Elsewhere in the AMA, Larian further elaborated on its AI use in Divinity, committing to not using it in concept art, but retaining the option to use it elsewhere in development. The studio will also not be reprising Divinity: Original Sin 2's armor system (but I strongly disagree with Rory about it having been "broken"—it was good!). Also? No WASD controls for you.

In Larian's big AMA for its next RPG, Divinity, there were aspects of the game the studio wasn't ready to share, but we got a definitive answer to a surprisingly granular aspect of its controls: No WASD movement, everything will still be mouse-driven on PC.

User Plastic-Guarantee976 posed the question about keyboard controls⁠—similar to the ones in Dragon Age or Knights of the Old Republic⁠—in the AMA, pointing out that "the WASD movement mod was one of the most downloaded and beloved mods for Baldur's Gate 3." Divinity gameplay lead Artem Titov did not leave any room for doubt, replying with a simple "No."

Comment from r/Games

Presumably, Divinity's M&K control scheme will closely hew to Baldur's Gate 3's then, though hopefully with a similar jump in quality as the one between Original Sin 2 and BG3. On the one hand, it's surprising to see Larian shoot down such a popular feature so far in advance of release, especially since such driving controls will be built into the game anyway for controller support on both PC and console.

The PC is all about choice and flexibility, after all, so why am I not bothered? Perhaps it's easy for me to say, having never touched the WASD mod, but these days I appreciate when a developer of any size sticks to its guns on questions of design or preference, even if it means refusing to give players what they say they want. It's the FromSoftware special, a certain "I know better" imperious remove that refuses to cater to the tastes of a fleeting moment, which I find can result in something more timeless.

Of course, when Nintendo does the same thing it just pisses me off, so I'm clearly biased and you should take my assessment with a grain of salt. If you're one of those annoyed by this, then rest easy anyway: WASD movement support will undoubtedly be among the first mods for Divinity. And I am glad that Larian is responding to one vector of popular pressure and taking its criticism for AI use⁠ seriously.