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It's been ten long years since Dragon Age: Inquisition, which means the next game in the series - Dragon Age: The Veilguard - likely has some modern design trends to catch up on. Here's one: The Veilguard will be the first game in the series to include a photo mode when it arrives in October.

Earlier today, Nic did me a great injustice by waving aside my suggestion that he write about Shroom And Gloom, because "I want to read you describing mushrooms in interesting ways". Nic, I have no interesting ways to describe mushrooms right now. I used up all the mushroom lore I've ever gleaned from real-life foraging when I wrote about Morels 2, and I spent most of that article whining about unicorns. The best I can do as regards Shroom And Gloom is to say that these Shrooms do indeed look very Gloomy, possibly because some mad human has wandered into their warren and is now stabbing and eating them.

Gold Gold Adventure Gold is a game that relies on raw enthusiasm and moxie to power you through a blizzard of confusing references. It boldly describes itself as a "Cult-of-the-Lamb-lite, Rimworld-lite, Majesty-like mixed with Black & White with a pinch of Against the Storm". Whoa there, pardner, save a few subgenres for the rest of us! I think that's half the New & Trending keywords on Steam in one sentence. If you're mystified, best watch the announcement trailer - it paints a clearer picture, though it does involve a startling amount of cartoon decapitation and dismemberment.

Today’s big news from the other side is that a tuned-up PS5 Pro is on the way, and a base spec, Blu-ray-driveless model will set you back £700. Or $700, in Ameridollars.

That’s a lot of cheddar for a living room games box, and while us Windows lot can’t quite claim pointing and laughing privileges – speccing a 4K-capable, DIY build desktop for seven hundred quid is certainly beyond me – the fact is that if you can get some pretty nifty PC kit for less. While still, let’s not forget, being able to play most of the PS5’s best games. It would not surprise me if someone from Sony’s PC division is already trying to entice Astro Bot underneath a cardboard box held up by a stick.

If there's one thing I've heard from Minecraft modders when I've asked for their thoughts on the future of Minecraft, it's some variation on "fewer updates, please". This might seem unreasonable if you're not into modding, but the price of updating a game is often that you break any mods designed for it. Hence, the parts of Minecraft's history many seasoned Minecraft modders - together with server owners and pro mapmakers - remember most fondly are the longer lulls between updates.

Sometimes, FromSoft craft the most masterfully tense boss duels you’ve ever seen, and sometimes, they aim laser pointers at both your eyes, cut off your feet, and expect you to dodge invisible leopards spitting lighting from the cockpit of a fighter jet made of other, more invisible leopards - as was the case with Shadow Of The Erdtree’s final boss’s final phase. If you had absolutely no trouble with this boss, I’m happy for you, as long as you go sit in the corner and keep it to yourself. For everyone else, you’ll be happy to learn the RPG's latest patch has “Improved the visibility of some attack effects” for the boss, alongside some other tweaks.

Patch 1.14, the full notes of which you can find hereabouts, comes bearing the following tweaks for Erdtree’s final boss:

Commence Star Wars rolling prologue screen: A minority Ubisoft investor has written an open letter to Ubisoft's board outlining their "deep dissatisfaction with the current performance and strategic direction of the company" and threatening a full-blown coup against the Guillemot brothers, Ubisoft's founders, and their backers at Chinese juggernaut Tencent.

If you partake of some virtual rubber-burning, you might remember Ubisoft shuttered its open world racing game The Crew in March by turning off its servers. Given that The Crew is an online-only game, that signalled its death knell… or death horn, more accurately. Then in April, they tow-trucked the game out of people's libraries and revoked their purchases. This led to a backlash, as you'd expect, and Ubisoft are accordingly taking a different approach with The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest. They're giving both an offline mode to "ensure long term access to both titles".

Abandon all hope, ye who are shackled to your workmates in Chained Together. The "co-op" game about escaping hell now has a map editor that'll let you make your own infuriating obstacle courses for condemned souls to throw themselves upon. Finally, you can make the endless mountain of perdition you have dreamed about since being emotionally scarred by Getting Over It.

Time apparently moves fast in the world of the best Steam Deck microSD cards. Mere weeks ago, the first widely-available 1.5TB models were launching, and now some of these little slivers of storage are becoming even more SSD-like by offering 2TB versions as well. Is that too nerdy a development to find interesting, worded slightly Alan Partridgeishly? Not when you’ve got a Steam Deck stuffed to the fan vents and an urgent need of more game space, it ain’t.

There's something about mostly empty urban centers in the US that depresses me and disturbs my soul. Whenever I visit family in the States and find myself in a derelict shopping plaza or some other place affected by America's depressing sense of architectural planning and overreliance on cars, I can't help but feel a sense of dread.

Devil's Hideout, a point and click horror game made by indie dev Cosmic Void, takes place in one such abandoned American city, and manages to deliver on this sense of dread even if its eerie hellscape is rough around the edges.

Grand duchess of first-person factory sims Satisfactory has finally hit 1.0 on PC after five years in early access, introducing a "full narrative overhaul" together with some new alien technology which you can witness and boggle at via the 1.0 launch trailer, below. They've also announced a console version, but we don't care for such things. The only Satisfactory console I care about is the one that lets you deactivate the fog so you can obtain an unmurky view of your glittering conveyor belt empire.

Death and taxes remain constant, the sun rises and sets each day, and I must write about every bit of Total War: Warhammer 3 news until the end of time. No-one is making me, I must add. I simply cannot help myself. Every addition is one step closer to us getting an official Clan Skurvy. Creative Assembly just put out a new video going into more details about what to expect from the strategy game’s next DLC. Here’s a roundup of the last one to get you up to speed before I start frothing like a pint of Bugman’s. That was a Warhammer reference! From Warhammer!

According to Ukrainian government-run website United24 Media, Ukraine's armed forces are using Steam Decks to remote-control gun turrets in the course of the on-going war with Russia. The site has shared a video of a new turret system, ShaBlya, which was apparently developed by Ukrainian engineers and approved for mass production earlier this year.

I’ve been looking forward to playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 for yonks, but had convinced myself that performance-testing it would have some of my lesser graphics cards quivering in their PCIe slots. All those onscreen 'Nids, yeah? And the stutterfest that was the recent preview build? Surely enough to make a Tech-Priest shed at least one oily tear.

But nah, turns out it’s fine. Pretty good, actually – perhaps not to the extent that you should tackle Space Marine 2 on a crusty notebook (or, for the record, a Steam Deck), but it runs decently on minimum specs and is noticeably more stable than in that preview. The only thing that might offend your PC’s machine spirit is some quality setting weirdness, where dropping or raising the graphics options can produce inconsistent results.

In March, the CEO of Embracer announced that the company's widespread removal of workers across their many owned studios was over. That has turned out to be false, as the megacorp continues to enforce layoffs and close down studios. Now, a support studio for Diablo IV and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands has suffered further layoffs, with over half the employees at the studio losing their jobs.

Following major layoffs and project cancellations at Bungie, the company has since announced their plans for Destiny 2, a game whose future was very much unclear. In their latest blog post, they've announced that they're taking "Destiny to places it has never been before". This means it'll get two expansions per year, alongside four free major updates. As for what's in these updates, they want to make the game more approachable, give you better loot, and are even toying with the idea of roguelikes or survival shooters for future updates.

Frontiers Of The Mind is cursed, by which I mean that 7-Zip turned red while I was extracting the file. What unsightly encounter deep within the bowels of my download file caused this temporary anomaly? No time to think about that. After playing this horror game, I’ve now got too many other questions.

I recently moved to a suburban neighbourhood where there is lots of relatively "wild" parkland and a few raggedy patches of woodland. I like to walk in the woods around evening time, after a hard day of writing stupid listicles about Call Of Duty. Forests are a critical preoccupation of mine, actually - check this lumpen thinkypiece I wrote about Alan Wake 2 - but they're also spaces for retreat and reflection, where I can shrug off the angst and lose myself in the spectacle of sycamores and silverbirch, arching over the path. Except. Except that sooner or later I start thinking about the roots.

Monica Harrington isn't one of Valve's official co-founders, but she was heavily involved in its formation and initial success - working by day as a marketing manager at Microsoft with responsibility for the games division, while helping her partner, Mike Harrington, and Gabe Newell get the Half-Life studio off the ground. In a lengthy post on Medium - which Nic has already covered in the most recent Sunday Papers, but which I think deserves a piece of its own - Harrington takes us through those heady early days.

When Warner Bros released a fairly abysmal trailer for the Minecraft Movie last week, there could be only one possible result: the game's legions of fan filmmakers, modders, texture pack creators, and garden-variety players would attempt to upstage it. That process begins with the speedy release of several fan reworkings of the trailer that use something like vanilla Minecraft graphics, rather than the original, unholy fusion of LB Photo Realism and Jack Black. This'll teach Johnny Hollywood to run his grubby hands all over our beloved Creepers, eh.

Hack the planet, wizard fans. A modder has cracked open some previously disabled abilities in the official modding toolkit for Baldur's Gate 3, making it possible for folks to create their own levels or alter the game's existing environments. The toolkit (which was only made available last week) previously wouldn't let you do any of that, due to "technical constraints and platform-specific guidelines," according to developers Larian. But modders neither care nor sleep. It took them just two days to worm their way into the devkit's innards and make the impossible possible.

Autumn is upon us, or "fall" if you're from the other side of the pond. The leaves flake from the boughs like the dandruff of Pan, god of the wild - pandruff, perhaps? The waters of the rivers thicken, rejecting the fading sunlight, and the big coffee chains start doing monstrous things with hazelnut syrup. The Maw is ascendant during the darker months, its constellations growing visible to the naked eye. We will need a steady dosage of new PC games to keep it quiescent. Fortunately, this week is looking quite bountiful.

Well, if this isn’t a vastly impressive little gem I’m not sure what is. Qanga is a space exploration game set in a loading screen-less solar system. It features ship travel, combat, trade, and base building, and you can do all of it alone or with space mates. It’s got a demo, but it’s also on the cheaper end if you fancy buying into early access. Considering the pricing, I’d say it’s a real looker, too.

Star Wars Outlaws' next patch aims to tone down some of the action game’s “incredibly punishing” insta-fail stealth sections, alongside adding tweaks for “narrative context” at other points in the story. That’s according to creative director Julian Gerighty, who recently spoke to GamesRadar+ about what players should expect in the next update, coming “maybe in 10 days.”

Any ambitions you may have had to relive that scene from Trainspotting in the nightclubs of open world game GTA 6 have been cruelly dashed. Martyn Ware - of 80's synthpop band Heaven 17 - took to Xitter over the weekend to share his experience of Rockstar games attempting to licence his song Temptation. The offer, which Ware describes as for “a buyout of any future royalties from the game”, was allegedly for $7500.

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I am ill, so no guest this week. To tide you over, here is a short excerpt from a story I started once about the redemptive power of forgiveness:

Sundays are for holding talks with the Squirmles to try and talk them down from a diplomatic incident after my cat’s various war crimes. Before that, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

Industrial Annihilation is a mashup Planetary Annihilation (big robot armies do battle on a planet) with factory management such as Factorio (conveyor belts conveyor belts conveyor belts). When we last checked in with it back in January, it was funding via StartEngine with an ambitious eye towards a spring Early Access release.

Now it's September and it's just got done being successfully funded via Kickstarter, with a probably-still-ambitious eye towards an Early Access release before the end of 2024.

Godus developer Peter Molyneux thinks that generative AI is going to be a "real game changer" in video games, and that everyone will be able to "create a game from one single prompt such as 'Make a battle royale set on a pirate ship.'" These were among Molyneux's predictions for where video games would be in 25 years.