There’s been a lot of anticipation for Battlefield 6’s version 1.1.3.0 patch. The patch kicks off the third and final phase of the game’s first season, adding some new holiday-themed content. More the new content itself, the update’s biggest additions are almost entirely gameplay-related.
Battlefield 6 is about to receive a new update. Version 1.1.3.0 is set to arrive tomorrow, December 9 to kick off the third and final phase of the game’s first season. Winter Offensive brings some holiday-themed new content to the game, but it’s not the most interesting part of the patch.
Hear ye, hear ye, another extraction shooter is almost upon us, this time the smaller but still quite bold in scope Sand: Raiders of Sophie. Last time I personally heard of this game it was just called Sand, which doesn't sound great for that whole search engine thing, though I'm not entirely convinced by the subtitle. Anyway, this extraction shooter is set in an alternate 1910 where you get to roam the desert in a steampunky fortress with legs, and it's got a release month!
The world could certainly do with another game about slapping up Swastika-wearers right now. Thankfully, having finished off Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Machine Games are reportedly working on the previously teased Wolfenstein 3.
I'm a bit tantalised by FPS Quest, but I do worry that it has already defanged its most interesting ideas. Developed by Farlight Games Industry, it's a dungeon crawler in which your frame-rate "is your health", with mistakes and damage causing slowness and stuttering.
To regain health/frame-rate, you must do what you do when running any game on a potato PC - fiddle with the settings like you're bargaining with an especially recalcitrant devil. This extends from lowering the quality of wall textures and characters, to plucking out whole pieces of environment. The more you do this, of course, the stranger the world becomes and the harder it is to navigate. The killer line from the Steam page: "optimizing is risky". You'll also have to keep a lid on a simulation of your PC's temperature, and there are faux-prototype off-map areas to explore via noclip-style abilities.
As the Bob Dylan song goes, how many lush alien planets must a Man presumptuously land on and turn into poorly optimised Toyota plants before he finally decides he’s sick of being an extractivist piece of shit? Dylan was being rhetorical, but I studied at the school of Homer Simpson, and want you to give me an actual figure. I’m going to say: four and a half. If you’ve yet to hit your personal quota, well, here’s StarRupture out now in early access.
Most anticipated? Oh reader, you gentle, innocent child. Hark at you, ambling in here with supple joints, eyes clear as springwater, and the scent of hope in your hair. I have grown old, dear reader. I no longer feel this emotion called "anticipation", anymore than I remember the taste of strawberries in the Shire. Years of waiting for another Legacy of Kain game have broken my spirit. My heart is a sponge of sorrow. My beard coils round my ankles like a listless cat. All has become grey.
A recap: of the seven hopefuls I slipped into our bulk 2025 list of "Oh, that looks alright" games, only three actually released in 2025, and one of them wasn’t very good. If it’s the hope that kills you, I am therefore dead four, arguably five times over. Real Necron shit, honestly.
RPS Advent Calendar voting remains an esoteric and mercurial process, even to those of us who practice in it. If two games get the same amount of votes, which goes higher in the list? Did Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor technically release in 2025 or 2024? These are questions most of us dare not ask, and those that do often vanish mysteriously overnight. Until January 3rd or so, when they come back from holiday.
One thing’s for sure: I had a bunch of games that no-one else voted for. Don’t be sad, games. I still like you.
To say Splitgate 2 hasn't had an easy go of it would perhaps be a mild understatement, though that's not to say it's entirely undeserved. There was that absolutely silly hat malarky for one, creating a not particularly welcoming vibe, and there was of course some controversy involving the pricing for some of its in-game items. All of that unfortunately led to two rounds of layoffs, and a switch back to a beta version of the game. Now, it looks like it'll be back in action next month.
Battlefield Studios is seemingly trying something different with Battlefield 6’s next patch, which everyone assumed would be a standard, mid-season update not intended to change the game significantly.
Krafton have revealed PUBG spin-off Black Budget, just in time for alpha testing of the extraction shooter to kick off next month. As you might expect given the genre, this latest work from PUBG Studios is all about getting out of the bad vibe zone in good time, after shooting some baddies in said zone. Oh, sorry, tactically shooting some baddies in the bad vibe zone.
I do have to admit that bringing up Concord feels like digging up a dead dog that perished in a horrendous, preventable accident, but it feels important given how quickly it died and what the means for how we engage with it. You see, it seems that this week the largely panned hero shooter was revived through community-run custom servers. Except it seems like this may be over before it truly begins.
Cicadamata" - yes the rogue apostrophes are part of the official title, yes I will exclude them in future because they make my thalamus itch - is one of those games that makes me incandescently sorry I didn't spend the past 20 years studying graphics design so that I could, for example, tell you what exactly is going on with that icecream bar HUD, those landscapes of bright diodes and cubes sliding through checkerboard obelisks, those twirling android digits, that wrist-rolling Muji paperweight of a shotgun.
"Season...6..." I gasp through a parched throat and unwashed beard. "Need...season 6...of popular subterranean co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic, developed by Ghost Ship Games..."
Mr. Ghost Ship himself stands over my skeletal body, knees and elbows shredded to the sinew from nearly a year and a half of crawling through the update desert. "How about Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor’s recent 1.0 release, or our upcoming, if sadly delayed, roguelike spin-off Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core?"
"I mean...they’re alright," I croak. "But season...siiiiiiiiiix..."
"Okay, okay," he concedes. "It’s called Relics of Hoxxes and it’s out in Q1 2026, which in English is between January and March."
"Ah...nice."
You’d be forgiven for not remembering PUBG: Black Budget, the extraction off-shoot of the original battle royale shooter, PUBG. Black Budget has been sort of floating around the internet for months, but Krafton never really committed to revealing core details about the game, or when players will actually get to play it.
Presumably as a way of marching ever forward towards its (alleged) 100 million player goal for Battlefield 6, EA has announced that the multiplayer shooter will be getting its first free trial later this month.
Battlefield 6’s first season has entered its second phase. The game received a major update earlier today, version 1.1.2.0, which delivers a host of changes to the game, many of which have been expected.
I don't particularly like trends in genres all that much. They're much too relied upon, and don't really tell me much about a game outright. Even still, I do like to think about why a particular genre might be trending. More than that, I love a twist on a trending genre that actually seeks to reckon with said genre. Like, say, Ambrosia Sky, one of those cleaning sorts of games except instead of muck or leaves, you're cleaning up a cosmic contamination on a dead asteroid colony. And its first act is out today!
