Sony is pulling Horizon Forbidden West from its PS Plus subscription service in the coming weeks.

The first-party Sony game is now listed under the 'Last Chance to Play' section on PS Plus, along with the likes of NieR Replicant, Marvel's Midnight Suns and Alien Isolation.

This upcoming removal of Forbidden West comes just a few months after Horizon Zero Dawn was also removed from the service, which as Tom wrote at the time seemed a surprising move by Sony.

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Oh, hey, would you look at that? Total War: Warhammer 3's patch 5.2.0 (arriving later today) has some new orcs and goblins in it.

Look at 'em! They've got swords and shields now!

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Any gags I could make about an update that lets Total War: Warhammer 3’s dawi play tall are far too obvious for the discerning comedic palette that brought you such bangers as that time I just wrote “(penis)” a bunch so the Overkill’s Walking Dead page wouldn’t quote me out of context, so let’s just dive right in to the details. The strategy game’s 5.2 update is on the horizon, and tagging along with it are the first of the “extra bits” the team teased in June. I’m very excited about them. They sit somewhere between the usual patch fare of stat tweaks and errata, and the weightier faction facelifts that come alongside paid DLC. They’re also focused right where Immortal Empires needs them the most: depth, rather than width. In the dawi’s case, quite literally.

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Among the many, Gigery beauties of 2014's Alien: Isolation is that you save using an in-game, wall-mounted Emergency Phone - a maddeningly analog process of slotting a keycard into the machine and waiting for three beeps. Doing this requires you to stand upright in full view, with your back turned upon an entire space station's worth of shiny domed technology and guttural industrial noises. Delightful!

Amongst the players harrowed and compelled by this fixture is Fede Álvarez, director of the 2013 Evil Dead remake, 2016's Don't Breathe and, most recently Alien: Romulus - the seventh and avowedly "back to basics" Alien movie. Isolation is the Alien experience that convinced Álvarez the Alien could still be scary, after decades of milking the creature's dugs for spin-off movies and making it share a screen with the Predator, the Pepsi Max to Alien's Dom Pérignon 1921. In possibly self-defeating homage to Creative Assembly's work, he's filled the movie with Emergency Telephones, turning them into a straightforward-sounding form of foreshadowing.

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Oh, hey, would you look at that? Total War: Warhammer 3's patch 5.2.0 (arriving later today) has some new orcs and goblins in it.

Look at 'em! They've got swords and shields now!

Read more

Any gags I could make about an update that lets Total War: Warhammer 3’s dawi play tall are far too obvious for the discerning comedic palette that brought you such bangers as that time I just wrote “(penis)” a bunch so the Overkill’s Walking Dead page wouldn’t quote me out of context, so let’s just dive right in to the details. The strategy game’s 5.2 update is on the horizon, and tagging along with it are the first of the “extra bits” the team teased in June. I’m very excited about them. They sit somewhere between the usual patch fare of stat tweaks and errata, and the weightier faction facelifts that come alongside paid DLC. They’re also focused right where Immortal Empires needs them the most: depth, rather than width. In the dawi’s case, quite literally.

Read more

Among the many, Gigery beauties of 2014's Alien: Isolation is that you save using an in-game, wall-mounted Emergency Phone - a maddeningly analog process of slotting a keycard into the machine and waiting for three beeps. Doing this requires you to stand upright in full view, with your back turned upon an entire space station's worth of shiny domed technology and guttural industrial noises. Delightful!

Amongst the players harrowed and compelled by this fixture is Fede Álvarez, director of the 2013 Evil Dead remake, 2016's Don't Breathe and, most recently Alien: Romulus - the seventh and avowedly "back to basics" Alien movie. Isolation is the Alien experience that convinced Álvarez the Alien could still be scary, after decades of milking the creature's dugs for spin-off movies and making it share a screen with the Predator, the Pepsi Max to Alien's Dom Pérignon 1921. In possibly self-defeating homage to Creative Assembly's work, he's filled the movie with Emergency Telephones, turning them into a straightforward-sounding form of foreshadowing.

Read more

A former developer at Total War studio Creative Assembly has written a lengthy personal account of his time at the studio, in which he details development troubles on strategy game Total War: Rome 2 and Total War: Attila, and alleges that these issues were exacerbated by an inflexible and counterproductive leadership structure and “chronic mismanagement,” sometimes resulting in what he calls a “toxic work environment.”

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The orcs and goblins of the Greenskins, the sizeable gourmands of the Ogre Kingdoms, and the angry Christmas ornaments of Khorne are the next three factions to get new units, lords, and campaigns as part of strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3’s next DLC. The news comes via official posts by developer Creative Assembly on both Reddit and X.

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A former developer at Total War studio Creative Assembly has written a lengthy personal account of his time at the studio, in which he details development troubles on strategy game Total War: Rome 2 and Total War: Attila, and alleges that these issues were exacerbated by an inflexible and counterproductive leadership structure and “chronic mismanagement,” sometimes resulting in what he calls a “toxic work environment.”

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The orcs and goblins of the Greenskins, the sizeable gourmands of the Ogre Kingdoms, and the angry Christmas ornaments of Khorne are the next three factions to get new units, lords, and campaigns as part of strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3’s next DLC. The news comes via official posts by developer Creative Assembly on both Reddit and X.

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Skulls! You’ve got one. I’ve got one. Everybody has a lovely skull keeping their lovely face right where it should be. Warhammer is big, so it needs must have multiple of them, hence their yearly event Skulls, which collates a bunch of Games Workshop related announcements into a sort of bizzaro world Nintendo Direct if Yoshi was actually a parasitic corpse emperor. There’s usually at least a few game announcements in there, and this year was a bumper. The headline announcement being an upcoming sequel to well-loved space-pope turn-based strategy Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus. Yes, yes. I’m getting to the dog.

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Creative Assembly, the studio best known for their strategy Total War series, are rumoured to be working on a licensed Star Wars title. ‘Rumoured’ is the key word here, mind. Dualshockers credit “a reliable source” with the information that “three new Total War games are currently in development,” and that “one of the three new projects is expected to be a Star Wars-themed Total War game.” There’s currently no further information beyond that, I’m afraid, although I’ve reached out to Creative Assembly for comment.

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Thrones of Decay - the expansion for strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 that finally made it viable to steamroll the old world with a doomstack of 20 tanks, just as Franz intended - just released around three weeks ago, but developers Creative Assembly are already on their third hotfix. This one is mainly aimed at re-balancing an overly demanding new grudge system for the Dwarfs that punished players for stopping to enjoy a swift pint of Bugman’s instead of constantly being on the offensive, but also includes so many other fixes it’s veering into larger patch territory.

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Well, swaggle me horns and fasten me timbers so they stop shivering like that, because the noise is quite irritating. Welcome back to another edition of Plundertales - my quest to conquer strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 without ever stepping foot on dry land. If you don’t know the other rules by now, I can only assume you’ve been living under an extremely specific type of rock that changes nothing about your life except preventing you from reading the previous two editions of this column. Who would carve such a rock? How would it even work? These are lubber-tier queries and shall remain unanswered, because it’s plundering time. Avast!

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For someone who’s spent an embarrassing amount of my life staring at virtual maps, I am a downright directionless dunce when it comes to geography. Not ‘the country of Africa’ bad, but certainly not good enough that you’d want me on your pub quiz team. Also, I still do the Shredded Wheat rhyme internally when I have to follow directions. However, I do enjoy making maps turn a different colour in strategy games, Total War chiefly among them. Well, one such map is expanding before my confused idiot eyes, that being Total War: Pharaoh’s. It’s getting a new, distinctly Mesopotamia and Aegea-shaped bit. I believe that’s just south of Eastopotamia and Wegea.

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Yesterday, coinciding with the release of the Thrones of Decay DLC, Total War: Warhammer 3 jumped 90 places in the Steam charts, trailed closely by the three lord packs that make up the strategy game's latest expansion. Those lord packs are now the three top rated expansions in the series’ history, and the base game itself saw a huge uptick in positive reviews. The last day also saw a peak player count of around 66,000, putting it ahead of giants like Palworld, Rimworld, and Fallout 76. None of this would be especially notable, however, if this wasn’t a complete turnaround from how things have been for the best part of a year now.

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Well, this was unexpected. Malakai Makaisson is the single best campaign experience I’ve had since strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 launched, and might just be up there with some of the best in the series’ history. That’s over ninety lords he’s given both barrels to getting here and, honestly, I wasn't sure Creative Assembly still had it in them. Not the talent, mind, just the passion. And nothing says passion like the amber mohawk of a furious dwarf quivering in the wake of a shakily-built zeppelin's explosive payload. Warhammer!

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Avast, me hearty bowls of soup! Welcome back to Plundertales, a chronicling of my journey to best strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 as vampire pirate Count Noctilus without ever touching grass. When we last saw Noctilus, he’d just received a challenge from his ancient rival Gentlemen Jenkins, crudely scrawled on the rear of a carrier pigeon (I had to google ‘do birds have buttocks?’ to write that.) I say ancient rival, it’s been about 15 turns, but Horace said the column needed more drama and that Noctilus’ ongoing battle with the weevils to reclaim his biscuit tin ‘wasn’t testing well’ with the Treehouse’ preview audience. Avast, Jenkins! (I really should find out what avast actually means.)

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