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Hello! Bertie's on holibobs this week, so a warm welcome from me to What We've Been Playing, Eurogamer's regular feature where we share some of the intriguing - but not necessarily brand new - games on our screens over the past few days. Hot off the Gamescom 2024 showfloor, there's a cosy crafting survival game you can also try at home, plus the end of a lengthy role-playing saga, and an epic Viking tale with a Greek twist.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
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There's a new Mass Effect game due to launch in October 2024 - but no, this isn't Mass Effect 5.


Instead, Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz is a board game for one to four players with a branching narrative, set during the events of Mass Effect 3.


As Shepard, Liara, Tali, Garrus and Wrex, you must secure vital information for the Reaper War effort from a crashed Cerberus cruiser, via missions that unlock new story oppurtunities and earn further loyalty from your squadmates.

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Ouka Studios, the developer of the Square Enix published action-RPG Visions of Mana, is reportedly set to close as its parent company NetEase has cut "all but a handful of jobs".


The news comes as part of a report from Bloomberg on Tencent and NetEase, two of China's biggest game publishers, both of which are scaling back investment in Japanese studios.


Ouka Studios opened in 2020 and hired staff from the likes of Capcom and Bandai Namco, but with the majority of staff laid off, those who remain will oversee the release of the studio's final games before it shuts.

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How far is too far for a remake - and how safe is too safe? For Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, a sumptuous Unreal Engine 5 remake of a 2004 classic, finding a winning answer to this question has led to a great many careful choices at Konami. The combat and camera are updated, the visuals are starkly improved, and yet the original's DNA still courses through the experience. Perhaps even more-so than another ongoing remake effort - Silent Hill 2, as handled by Bloober team - this project rather prefers a more literal approach. In playing its opening 90 minutes, covering the Virtuous Mission prologue, it's also clear that a deep respect for Hideo Kojima's 2004 original steers Delta towards a stricter 1:1 recreation than you might expect.
Let's start with the cut-scenes. Every shot during Delta's opening sequence is a perfect match for the PlayStation 2 original's, right down to the timing of each camera cut. It makes a clear statement of intent early on: a military plane courses through the night sky as the words "based on Metal Gear Solid 3" flash across - which rings as an understatement in this case. The entire original team is credited en route, and everything is exactly as a long-term fan might remember. Between Snake lifting his cigar as he broods in the plane's hangar, to the way a bullet shell - stylishly - rolls past the foreground during a later showdown with Revolver Ocelot, it all translates exactly.
UE5 does the heavy lifting now, of course, where Konami takes point in updating its character models and environments - lighting and shading them within a new renderer. Still, all of this wraps around an existing framework of crash zooms and whip-pans set in place by Kojima's team 20 years ago. The game's producer, Noriaki Okamura, explains his team's approach:
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Against the Storm - the critically acclaimed city building roguelike from Eremite Games - is set to get its first major expansion, titled Keepers of the Stone, on 26th September this year.


Against the Storm, if you're unfamiliar, challenges players to survive the apocalyptic Blightstorm ravaging the kingdom by gradually upgrading the Smoldering City at its heart. That requires setting out across multiple biomes and establishing a series of settlements, success in each location only coming if players can meet the Scorched Queen's endless demands.


Which brings us to the newly announced Keepers of the Stone expansion. This promises to build on the base game's already superb action by introducing, firstly, the Coastal Groves biome, where settlements start along the water. Here, players can build the Strider Port, enabling them to launch expeditions for treasures lost in the surrounding depths.

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Remedy Entertainment has announced a new partnership that'll see Annapurna Pictures financing half of Control 2 in exchange for the film and TV rights to Control and Alan Wake.


Control 2 - the sequel to Remedy's acclaimed 2019 paranormal shooter - was officially announced back in 2022. Earlier this month, the studio revealed the project had now entered full production, and that the Control 2 team was currently "working towards developing the game to an early functional state from beginning to end."


Remedy announced its new partnership in a statement shared on its website, confirming Annapurna will finance 50 percent of Control 2's development budget and gain the rights to "expand the award-winning Control and Alan Wake franchises into film and television".

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Jackbox has confirmed its forthcoming Naughty Pack is suitable for Twitch streaming, though it's up to streamers to moderate content for their audience using in-game options.


Speaking to Eurogamer at Gamescom, Jackbox stated Twitch representatives have played the game and nothing in it is inherently against Twitch guidelines.


The Jackbox Party Packs contain multiple party games that are all innocent enough, though it can all descend into filth depending on who's playing. That's why Jackbox is now releasing a Naughty Pack, with games focused on adult themes.

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Square Enix has announced its free-to-play mobile game Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius will end global service on 30th October.


The game was released worldwide in 2016, following its Japanese launch in 2015. The Japanese version will remain in service.


Brave Exvius included cute pixel art and gacha mechanics along with turn-based battles, though was perhaps best known for including Ariana Grande as her third album's Dangerous Woman alter-ego.

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Impossible ports. That phrase is our shorthand for the conversion of console and PC titles to the Switch that seem almost inconceivable, pushing the aging Tegra X1 hardware in the seven-year-old Nintendo handheld to its absolute limits. That's what we're focusing on today as we round up the best-looking and most technically accomplished third-party releases on Switch, following on from our retrospective of the best-looking first-party Nintendo releases last month.
As well as the impossible ports, we've rounded up a surfeit of other games that impressed on launch - or have been substantially improved by later upgrades - to become some of the most incredible-looking games on the platform. We're talking Doom, we're talking Crysis, and plenty more too. There are even some great Switch releases that go beyond their home console equivalents, adding more modern TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) and other features to make Switch the premiere place to experience some titles. There are a huge variety of genres and game engines represented on the list, and it's fascinating to see what techniques developers used to make the most of the Switch platform.
We'll start with the meatiest category: the impossible ports, the graphically intense or wide-ranging games that we couldn't quite believe would make the transition to Switch intact - but did. The archetypal example here is undoubtedly The Witcher 3, as its graphical fidelity and huge open world meant that even the home console versions on PS4 and Xbox One were pushed extremely hard - often well below 30fps. With the Switch operating on a meagre power budget thanks to its portable nature, realising that vision on the Switch seemed a daunting prospect - but original developers CDPR and porting studio Saber Interactive somehow made it work.
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Doom has been ported to dozens of devices, but it's never been playable quite like this.


Google researchers have now generated an AI version of the retro first-person shooter classic entirely via neural network, based on ingested video clips of gameplay.


It's a milestone, if a grim one, recorded in a paper published this week entitled "Diffusion models are real-time game engines" (thanks, VentureBeat). This documents how a small team from Google were able to "interactively simulate" a version of Doom, with only a "slightly better than random chance" of humans being able to tell the difference.

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Those looking forward to popping off a few unsuspecting targets as Agent 47 in Hitman 3 VR: Reloaded don't have too much longer to wait.
Today, virtual reality game development studio XR games announced the game is set to make its debut on Meta Quest 3 on 5th September. That's just one week from today!
"It's finally time for players to play an untethered Hitman experience," said Bobby Thandi, founder and CEO of XR Games. "Not long to wait now!"
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Stardew Valley creator Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone has been so "committed to finalising Stardew 1.6 first", he hasn't actually touched Haunted Chocolatier "in a long time".
Barone shared a post on social media platform X earlier today addressing the highly-anticipated console and mobile ports of the Stardew Valley 1.6 update. The developer assured his followers that these ports are still in the works, but things are taking a while.
"They have been our primary focus since 1.6 came out for PC," Barone wrote. "It would be a huge relief to me if they were ready today, but they aren't, so all we can do is continue working on them until they are ready."
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I'm standing in the dark streets of Gotham, as I have done countless times over the years, but now I'm physically craning my neck up to look at its street signs, the names of boarded up shops, the police helicopters buzzing overhead. I'm near the end of an hour-long look at the upcoming Meta Quest 3 exclusive Batman Arkham Shadow, and have finally emerged above ground. It's my first proper view of the city, and goodness it feels familiar. And yet, deliberately I think, the action is being kept at street level for now, next to burning braziers and amongst swirling fog, rather than among the rooftops above.
There are moments in this opening hour of Arkham Shadow where you do find yourself up relatively high. But this street level introduction to Batman's stomping grounds makes sense here, both to highlight how you can naturally gaze around its world - and also likely to avoid too much early vertigo from wobbling atop a skyscraper.
Developed by Camouflaj, the talented team behind Iron Man VR, Arkham Shadow is a canon entry to the Arkhamverse sandwiched between Origins and Asylum. Batman is still relatively young here, and guided by the voice of Alfred in his ear as I pick up the ropes of the game's controls. You can walk normally or zip about areas by grappling, quickly changing your view orientation 90-degrees via the thumbstick and then zooming over to the nearest area you're looking at. Batarangs are stored on your chest for you to fling. Smoke bombs are on your arm for you to pick up and lob. If you hold your hands by your sides and then raise them together, you can extend your cape to glide.
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Konami has finally acknowledged the possibility of Metal Gear Solid 4 being part of an expected Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2.


Last year, the company released Master Collection Vol. 1, which includes the first three Metal Gear Solid games plus some extra classics.


However, a second volume is widely expected to continue the story with Metal Gear Solid 4, 5, and Peace Walker, with fans digging around on the Konami website and the first volume's game files for details.



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The classic Verdansk map will return to Call of Duty Warzone next year.


Verdansk is the battle royale's original map that's no longer playable. But, following in the footsteps of Fortnite's own OG map return, it will be back in spring 2025.


The return of the map has been rumoured for some time, but Activision officially confirmed the news in last night's Call of Duty: Next livestream.

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