So far, we know at least a little bit about all of Rook's companions in The Veilguard from its trailers. For those of you who've done your homework by reading Tevinter Nights more recently than me there are also short stories involving several companion characters to glean more info from. But we'll be hearing a lot more about all of them during the "companions week" that BioWare has scheduled to start on August 26. Until then, this is everything we know about how romance works and who you can pursue.

How does romance work in The Veilguard?

Romancing companions in The Veilguard will work pretty similarly to Dragon Age: Inquisition, from what we know so far. You'll take on quests relevant to your companions' backstories and, if you want to be more than friends, choose flirtatious dialogue lines at opportune moments.

This time (as in Dragon Age 2) all seven of your companions are pansexual and are open to a relationship with Rook regardless of race or gender. Importantly, those you don't choose to have a relationship with might wind up dating each other—like how Dorian and The Iron Bull had an alluded-to relationship in Inquisition if neither were with the Inquisitor.

As is the usual for Dragon Age, romance with different companions will involve sex scenes later in the game as things get more serious. Though just how far the nudity in those scenes extends is something BioWare said it wants players to discover for themselves, apparently.

Bellara

Bellara Lutare

• Class: Mage
• Faction: Veil Jumpers
• Written by: John Epler
• Voice: Jee Young Han

Bellara is an elf and member of the Veil Jumpers who explore ancient elven ruins. BioWare has explained that the gauntlet she wears was created to make manipulating magic easier when working with artifacts and constructs found in those ruins. Based on all that, I'm assuming she's a mage, though we have seen her gauntlet turn into a bow and arrow as well. While there hasn't been much of Bellara's personality revealed yet, she seems inquisitive and upbeat in the brief lines she's spoken in trailers.

Davrin

Davrin

• Class: Warrior
• Faction: Grey Wardens
• Written by: John Dombrow
• Voice: Ike Amadi

Davrin is an elf and Grey Warden with a griffon companion called Assan who everyone is understandably already in love with. The blight-battling Wardens were the focus of Dragon Age: Origins and have made appearances in other parts of the series as well, so there's plenty of established lore about his affiliation, at least. His personality isn't too obvious yet, but based on all most of the Wardens in the series he's likely to be a very earnest, knight-in-shining-armor-type guy.

Emmrich

Emmrich Volkarin

• Class: Mage (Necromancer)
• Faction: Mourn Watch
• Written by: Sylvia Feketekuty
• Voice: Nick Boraine

Emmrich is a human necromancer and a member of the Mourn Watch, one of the guardians of the Grand Necropolis in Nevarra. He's also got a skeleton familiar called Manfred who's being voiced by Matthew Mercer.

He turned up briefly in the Tevinter Nights set of short stories, though I admit I read them a while ago and don't recall his personality. One thing we do know, specific to his romance, is that he's "a gentleman necromancer," BioWare told IGN, who "is more intimate and sensual." Based on how I've seen a lot of you acting on social media, that description is really resonating.

Harding

Lace Harding

• Class: Rogue
• Faction: Formerly the Inquisition
• Written by: Sheryl Chee
• Voice: Ali Hillis

Lace Harding, formerly Scout Harding of the Inquisition, is a dwarf and a rogue with a slightly dry sense of humor but a positive outlook and a lot of empathy. She definitely has the most established background and personality prior to The Veilguard. Harding grew up in The Hinterlands, the first major explorable area of Dragon Age: Inquisition, and joined up with the movement as a scout.

She didn't actually have that much screen time in Inquisition but she made a big impression on fans by always turning up to introduce the Inquisitor to a new explorable area with a kind word. There were a couple opportunities for the Inquisitor to flirt with Harding but it didn't turn into a full romance like with other companions.

Harding has been seen a lot in Veilguard so far in various trailers and the gameplay reveal, making it clear she'll meet Rook very early in the plot and help introduce them to Minrathous and other companions.

Lucanis

Lucanis Dellamorte

• Class: Rogue
• Faction: Antivan Crows
• Written by: Mary Kirby
• Voice: Zach Mendez

Lucanis is a human rogue and a member of the Antivan Crows who also appeared in the Tevinter Nights short stories. I'm assuming he's a rogue given that he's a Crow and he's got several daggers but he does have some kind of magic adjacent thing going on based on those giant purple wings you can see in the release date trailer.

Everything we've seen of him suggests he's going to be standoffish and mysterious, but maybe he's not quite as tight-laced as he seems. "He is the sole dumpster fire of the crew," Mary Kirby posted in June. "I wrote him specifically to be a bisexual disaster of a human." There you have it. Zevran enjoyers, please come collect your man.

Neve

Neve Gallus

• Class: Mage (Ice)
• Faction: Shadow Dragons
• Written by: Brianne Battye
• Voice: Jessica Clark

Neve is a human mage, a private investigator, and a member of the underground Shadow Dragon faction in Tevinter. So far we've seen a decent bit of dialogue with her in the gameplay reveal suggesting she's clever, witty, and maybe a little flirtatious. She's also the only one whose romance scenes we've actually seen hinted at. "You and me, Rook. Maybe that's what scares me." She says, a little coyly, in the release date trailer.

Not for nothing but I'm also taking a little bet that she might be the mage who betrays me this time around. Having one pulled over on you by a magical lover is something of a series tradition at this point—please accept my condolences, Solasmancers.

Taash

Taash

• Class: Warrior
• Faction: Lords of Fortune
• Written by: Trick Weekes
• Voice: Jin Maley

Tash is a qunari warrior and member of the Lords of Fortune, a guild of treasure hunters based out of Rivain. That explains all the gold jewelry and the emerald horn. Tash is also referred to as a "dragon hunter," which totals up to a lot of similarities to The Iron Bull, a romanceable companion from Inquisition also written by Weekes. That's not to say we can expect exactly the same kind of romance—Bull's was pretty dang memorable—but I'm betting a known treasure hunter warrior has a similar level of swagger.

Alas, Meta did not show any more of it after that announcement, nor would it even say anything about the state of the game's development: When asked about it by UploadVR in 2023, for instance, Meta simply refused to comment. Now, finally, it has revealed what's happening with the game, and the news is not good.

"GTA: San Andreas is on hold indefinitely while we both focus on other projects," the official MetaQuestVR account said in response to an inquiry posted on YouTube. "We look forward to working with our friends at Rockstar in the future." Meta later confirmed that statement with IGN.

"On hold indefinitely" is not the same as being cancelled, but it's not a good place to be either. The KOTOR remake we still don't have was "delayed indefinitely" in 2022, for instance, while Life By You suffered the same fate just two weeks ahead of its planned early access release, before being axed outright not long after. In the case of San Andreas VR, Meta's statement that it looks forward to working with Rockstar "in the future"—but not necessarily on this game—does not grant added confidence.

The "not dead but sleeping" status of San Andreas VR could be seen as a reflection of the broader state of VR gaming. Adoption rates remain stubbornly low (the latest Steam Hardware and Software Survey indicates that well under 2% of Steam users are rocking VR headsets, a figure that hasn't moved meaningfully in years), there still hasn't been a killer game for VR platforms, and of course there's the whole upchuck thing that still hasn't been overcome—and even if you're not a puker, VR hardware is typically bulky, uncomfortable, and a headache to set up.

In spite of those challenges, though, VR development overall doesn't appear to be slowing down. IO Interactive announced Hitman 3 Reloaded VR earlier this year, and a new Batman: Arkham VR game is in the works too; the recent VR Games Showcase revealed numerous others in the works including VR takes on Flatout, Trombone Champ, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, and a pile of others.

But on the Meta front specifically, the situation is not great. Its Reality Labs VR division is burning through mountains of money at an astounding rate, and there's no realistic hope of a turnaround anytime soon; earlier this month, Meta shuttered Lone Echo studio Ready at Dawn as part of its effort to meet new budgetary reductions.

Take-Two may have also lost interest in the project. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has previously expressed doubts about the VR market, and while that particular comment predates the announcement of San Andreas VR, not a whole lot has changed since then. It's also fair to say the company is probably focused right now on the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.

Whatever the reason for the indefinite hold, it's still possible that we'll see Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on VR platforms someday, but is it likely? At this point, I'm not overly optimistic. I've reached out to Take-Two for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

It's a great twist for a game that at first just seems like a cute little adventure in the style of the old top-down Legend of Zelda games. Initially charged just with finding some beeswax for a wizard, Jot merrily journeys through the pages of his book with his friends, all brought to life with gorgeous 2D animations. But when the evil sorcerer Humgrump unmoors him from the constraints of the story, things get a lot more interesting.

My hands-on only features the first four chapters of the game, but I'm impressed how much creativity developer All Possible Futures has crammed into that roughly two hour introduction. As my party and I continue to travel the land—now searching for a way to stop Humgrump—my fourth wall-breaking abilities let me overcome traditional obstacles in fun new ways.

Jot can now monkey about with the very sentences of his story, for example, swapping a word from one line to another. Changing a word will change whatever it describes, making a "big" enemy "small", turning "night" to "day", or making a "locked" door suddenly "open". There's not as much room to experiment as I'd like—only certain words are allowed in each sentence—and the puzzles are more charming than they are brain-teasing, but I'm hopeful more depth may develop as the game goes on from here.

You can also, as I mentioned before, simply jump out of the book entirely, and either run over to another portal to jump back in at a different point, or explore the cluttered and oddly sprawling desk the book rests on to find new abilities. Thanks to your powers, you're free to jump in and out of any artwork you find out there, flitting between 2D and 3D to get across gaps and avoid patrolling beetles (apparently they love eating fictional characters?).

My favourite moment in the preview build comes when I discover an abandoned game card—think Magic: The Gathering—depicting a classic fantasy elven archer. Leaping in, I'm able to battle with and then befriend her. She likes me enough to lend me her bow, which I can take with me back into my own story and use for a shooting minigame against swarms of flying insects. It makes me really excited to see what further surprises are in store deeper into this adventure. Does Jot ever get to explore a comic book, or perhaps the art on the front of a videogame case?

But even within the confines of the original book, there's such a sense of imagination to The Plucky Squire. Minigames like that bow-based encounter abound—within four chapters I've boxed a honey badger Punch Out-style, done Mario-style 2D platforming, had to time my grab perfectly to snatch a fish out of mid air, and more. None of these diversions has great depth or strategy, but that's not really the point—the joy is just in seeing what fun little scene has been prepared for you next, and how it'll be rendered in the game's adorable art style.

The combination of gentle charm with real creativity really elevates The Plucky Squire into something more interesting than just another cosy little adventure. If it can maintain that sense of novelty and fun in the chapters that follow—and maybe get a little more elaborate with its puzzles—it could be 2024's next great success story when it launches on 17 September.

Well, spoiler—turns out she is. However, as posted to her Twitter, Black swears up and down that she didn't know: "Tee hee. It sucks keeping secrets. Though I wasn't lying. I honestly thought they were done with my fave mage."

Which is, in all fairness, completely reasonable. Game development takes a long time. What is interesting, however, is that Veilguard—the game formerly known as Dreadwolf—was playable from "start to finish" back in October 2022, less than a month before Black made her initial tweet, implying that its story was at least in its first draft state before she knew she was going to be making a return.

This is less evidence of some grand conspiracy, and more a fun 'how the sausage gets made' moment. BioWare seemingly hammers everything into rough shape before getting its major voice actors on board or, at the very least, saves shorter roles for later on in the development cycle.

"On my life I didn't know," Black insists in a separate reply. As for what it's like to step into the shoes of Morrigan once more, she adds: "it's great to be asked back because she's such a beloved character—by us all. It also brought back memories because my actual son voiced Kieran and I was a very proud mama."

It's great to have her back, honestly. Dragon Age: Origins was a pretty formative game for me growing up—I had both Alistair and Morrigan in my party because their completely incompatible brands of snark gave me endless joy, helped tremendously by some excellently smarmy performances from both Black and Alistair's Steve Valentine.

As for Veilguard, I'm not completely sold just yet—but I'm hopeful that its most recent trailer is a sign of things to come. Besides, even if it's not my cup of tea, I'm sure Morrigan will be a highlight. She's the OG Witch of the Wilds, after all.

Dark Souls never let me stick my tongue out as a giant frog and slap my enemies around with it. It never let me create a posse of clones to punch an evil pile of rocks back into the ground either. If Dark Souls is a trial, Wukong is an adventure. Or if you want to be accurate about it, it's a Journey to the West, but the animals have health bars. Wukong imagines a version of the classic Chinese story where a fox upgrades your healing potion. If anything about it is truly like FromSoftware's games, it's how much it lets its rich world speak for itself.

Wukong doesn't waste time trying to establish why there's a forest of wolf men or why you're serenaded by a man without a head. It opens with hero Sun Wukong laughing in the face of a council of gods who immediately punish him so hard it takes hundreds of years for him to be reincarnated as a level 1 monkey. Journey to the West isn't required reading before playing Wukong, but doing so might make its world considerably less opaque. Even so, I had no troubles appreciating its eccentric cast of talking animals who are either so amusingly pathetic you pity them or so self-serious it's like you barged in on their third act.

Surprises like a gigantic frog leaping out of tall grass and a serpentine dragon clutching me in its teeth far above a frozen lake lured me forward—every level is a series of bizarre vignettes crash landing into a seemingly straightforward quest. Wukong is overflowing with boss fights, which isn't actually as intimidating as it sounds. The difficulty of these encounters is so uneven that you never know what to expect. You might stumble into an oversized rat and come out unscathed, but need to fully lock-in to defeat a raging bear. Many of the bosses celebrate the spectacle rather than demanding your sharpest reflexes.

A similar ethos applies to the sections between those big fights. Wukong's level design begins extremely linear, almost to the point of constricting its combat into one big highway of enemies, but it gradually opens up after the first few hours. You go from bonking wolves in a forest to tiptoeing past skeletal snake men. In its second chapter, every kind of rat shows up to snipe you from rooftops or set you on fire with clouds of gunpowder. Wukong gently pressures you to take side paths that lead to treasure or sidequests that will beef you up for what's ahead.

In a desert area, I cleared out some shield-bearing hedgehogs and jumped down a bridge to find a man who had been turned into a rock begging for help. When I returned with an item he asked for he laughed at me for being gullible enough to fall for his trick—a classic 16th century joke! Suddenly I could lock onto him, so I smacked him a few times and he gave up a spell that let me parry attacks by turning to stone.

Instead of dropping you into a meat grinder of tricky enemy placements between each boss like so many soulslikes, Wukong lets these open sections breathe so you can soak up its world before moving into the next big battle.

When the fights do get tough—and some of them definitely do—Wukong's flexible skill tree and upgrade systems keep most of them from feeling like brick walls. At any shrine, Wukong's version of Dark Souls' bonfire checkpoints that respawn nearby enemies, you can move your skill points around to invest in a number of powerful magical abilities. Investing in Immobilize gave me a tool to freeze enemies just before they landed a hit so I could heal or retaliate. Maxing out the duration of a spell that transformed me into a wolf with a flaming polearm was like having a second life for multi-phase bosses. While I wouldn't quite call them builds, Wukong has plenty of ways for you to almost nullify the nastiest parts of a fight so you can survive it. Its spells are so strong that I suspect some players will opt to fight without them, like all the Reddit ascetics who proudly refuse to use the mimic tear in Elden Ring.

But doing so will rob you of the most satisfying elements of Wukong's combat. Aside from some minor damage upgrades to your staff, you don't have an inventory of weapons to choose from. You do, however, have an inventory of creatures to choose from. Special enemies found throughout the levels drop their spirits which can be equipped for a passive buff and a devastating signature attack, like morphing your head into a giant hammer or turning into a swordsman for one clean slash attack. Combat is largely about creating openings in an enemy's attack patterns with your spells and buying time with dodges until they're back online.

Most fights are a dance of cartwheels, somersaults, and puffs of smoke as your monkey man assumes the form of various beasts that you collect like Pokémon. Once you find the rhythm, you go from playing as a warrior to a magician.

A rough start

Nothing is more frustrating when that flow is broken by something you can't improve with a little better timing or prediction. In the review build of the game, a stuttery frame rate and the occasional crash ended a few early battles prematurely for me. Wukong is yet another game plagued by the curse of graphics shaders tanking performance so badly that instead of swapping your skill points, you're swapping video settings to find a combination that'll get you through the next section, and no amount of raw GPU grunt can power through it.

Although Wukong has fairly linear environments, they're dense with beautiful detail, like a sunbaked desert with gnarled trees or a forest of glowing leaves. It's a shame that I had to muddy any of it by knocking down my settings to medium on a Nvidia RTX 4090. It fixed my issues without tarnishing too much of the gorgeous views, but there's a chance the experience could be even worse on launch day for people with way less extravagant graphics cards.

The handful of deaths from the game's poor performance couldn't sour how impressive Wukong is as an action game that isn't content with living in FromSoftware's shadow. It may have a lot of the signifiers of a soulslike, but it wields its difficulty in a more playful, approachable way. Wukong shirks a lot of the punishing difficulty synonymous with the soulslike genre, positioning it as one of the best games to recommend to anyone who has avoided them or for those who aren't fond of how grim they tend to be. Bosses that bookend each chapter are the closest mirrors to ones you'd find in Elden Ring, but you can skip usual moveset memorization and trial-and-error with patience, dodging around until you're comfortable with going in. Checkpoints are never more than 30 seconds away from the bosses too. The rewards at the end of each chapter are striking little animations—one of which is a stop-motion parable about a man who saves an injured wolf—that make your effort worth it.

Those scenes reinforce the exuberance with which the game's developers drew from such an iconic work of folklore. GameScience has imbued Wukong with a staggering amount of creativity. Aside from the performance issues, the biggest disappointment comes from outside the game itself: Last year, an IGN report described in detail a history of sexist remarks from GameScience's leaders. The studio has declined to acknowledge the allegations in recent interviews, and while I didn't find anything within the game that reflects an extremely regressive view of women (although there just aren't many in the game), the behavior tarnishes what would otherwise be an effortless recommendation..

Wukong is one of the most joyful action RPGs I've played simply for how lovingly it treats its world and characters and, by extension, how much it clearly wants me to love them too. It worked: Punchy combat aside, I wanted to keep working through each area to meet another weird little creature with a mysterious quest or to get jumped by another animal who learned MMA. In a pool of games about fallen kings and sad dragons, it's delightful to play an action game that isn't obsessed with being dour and where the best solution to the most grueling fights is to use as many fun abilities as you can. In a year with the tremendous Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, I never thought I'd play a game that veers in such a wildly different direction but manages to reach similar highs, even if it lacks the sheer scale and build complexity as FromSoftware's masterpiece.

Wukong is its own beast and if it has to be labeled a soulslike, then I think we're going to have to come up with a new definition. There's nothing else quite like it.

Trombone Champ, 2022's funniest PC gaming phenomenon, is getting a snazzy VR version that aims to fully immerse you in fudging your way through Ode to Joy with the world's most inherently comical musical instrument.

Titled Trombone Champ: Unflattened, this VR version will put players on a virtual stage in front of a "live" audience, letting you slide that trombone with your own two hands as you attempt to play a variety of classic musical pieces. Judging by the announcement trailer (viewable above) the VR version will feature the original's surrealist humour and card-collecting system, letting you exchange cards for novelty trombones you can use to wow/further irritate your audience.

Unflattened isn't developed by Holy Wow Studios, creators of the magnificently daft original. Instead, design duties are being handled by Flat2VRStudios, which is also working on a VR version of destruction racer Flatout, and assisting with an upcoming VR port for retro shooter Wrath: Aeon of Ruin.

The original Trombone Champ became an overnight sensation following Chris Livingston's delightfully dreadful rendition of Beethoven's 5th, selling an estimated 265,000 copies on Steam. "If Beethoven wasn't rolling over in his grave it was only because he'd already burst out of it, staggered around shrieking, and then vomited," Chris wrote of his own performance in 2022. "In Trombone Champ, playing the trombone badly is just as much fun as playing it well, which is just one reason why I love it."

I was likewise given abdominal cramp by Trombone Champ when it released, and I can certainly see the appeal of a VR version. The trombone is arguably the ideal VR instrument, pleasingly physical yet functionally simple enough to adapt well to VR controls (unlike, say, the piano or the guitar). That said, I do wonder whether the VR version risks exhausting the joke. Part of Trombone Champ's charm is how rough and ready it is, with your tooted tunes played to garish backgrounds that often resemble a lost ytmnd page. I worry putting on a VR headset to poorly play a fake trombone in a simulated theatre is all too much effort for something so inherently throwaway.

But perhaps I'm just being a curmudgeon. The world certainly won't be lesser for the existence of Unflattened. We'll find out how well Trombone Champ adapts to three dimensions soon, as the game is due to launch on Quest and Steam this autumn.

A rocket launcher, for example, will turn them into a Boomer, a tough-as-nails explosives expert, while a bot with a handgun becomes an Engineer, a master of support that can deploy their own cover and heal the team.

But just because they're good at taking on new roles, doesn't mean they forget what they've learned in previous ones. They're able to carry forward their accumulated knowledge. Every time a bot completes a mission, they gain experience in their current job, unlocking new abilities, with their progress in each tracked separately. All abilities for your current job are automatically active, but they can also use a limited number of "cogs" to activate those previously learned abilities from other jobs.

This is where the strategising gets really juicy—it means you can effectively build your own classes, and because weapons and cogs can be moved around freely between missions, you can keep remixing them for whatever challenge is in front of you. That gives you brilliant freedom in your quest across Caribbea and beyond.

Things start small, when you only have a handful of cogs on each character. Perhaps getting two levels of Brawler for your Boomer so they can use the Brawler's Blast Shield ability, which reduces the damage of explosions, to protect themselves from their own splash damage. Or perhaps one level of Engineer on your shotgun-toting, up-close-and-personal Flanker, so they can lead the charge with Greased Up (bonus movement speed whenever you open a door) and keep themselves safe on the front line with Build Cover. Or one level of Sniper on your SMG-wielding Reaper to get them an aim bonus from Reticle Eyes.

But as the game goes on, you get more and more cogs to play with, through level ups, ship upgrades, and progressing through the story. Of course by then you've also got even more job levels. The result is you can start putting together some seriously wild builds in the later stages, taking advantage of synergies between the jobs that may not be obvious at first glance.

Say you want the deadliest Sniper on the steamy seas. First you get them to put in their time wielding an SMG, a handgun, and then a shotgun, to level them up as a Reaper, an Engineer, and a Flanker. Then it's time to build your arsenal. From Reaper, we can pick up Warcry (activate to gain bonus damage for a turn); from Engineer we take Amped up, which grants yet more bonus damage as long they have another bot nearby; and from Flanker we can take Backbiter (bonus damage when hitting enemies in the back) and Penetrator (activate to make shots pierce through enemies).

The result? Shots that will make the Dieselbot navy quiver in their jackboots. When the time is right, we can use the Sniper ability Power Shot and stack up its bonus damage with all the other sources we've already got. Then, use Perfect Aim to give us a full aimline for the shot, letting us put the bullet exactly where we want it. From half a map away, this eagle-eyed bot can bounce a bullet off a wall into the back of an enemy's metal cranium (for that Backbiter bonus, just in case we didn't have enough overkill already) and then, with Penetrator active, it'll just keep going, plowing through any allies queued up in front of them like a steam train. Forget one shot, one kill—that's one shot, everyone scrapped, clearing a room for their allies to charge in and grab any loot not nailed down.

And that's not even getting to my whirlwind-of-destruction Reaper, who uses Shifty from the Brawler job to gain a move after every enemy downed, combined with Harvest that grants a bonus attack each time too, allowing them to bounce around a room like John Wick taking out everyone in sight. Or my unstoppable Brawler, who combines healing every time they scrap an enemy with the Flanker's bonus speed and Boomer's health and armour bonuses to allow them to soak up round after round of enemy fire before casually waltzing up and smashing someone to bits with their hammer.

It's a blast gaining more and more freedom to experiment with the system as the game progresses—and using the results to keep up with the escalating challenge of the firm-but-fair missions. The only problem is, how am I supposed to go back to normal class systems in other strategy games and RPGs now? What do you mean, my rogue can't just switch to wizard whenever he wants and start doing sneak attack fireballs?!

You will if you pick up the ongoing Beamdog and Owlcat: RPG Masters Bundle over at Humble, anyway. For $35 (£27), you can pick up eight meaty RPGs and a bunch of DLC in a bundle consisting of:

• Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (plus its season passes)
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker Enhanced Plus edition (plus its season pass)
• Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition: Complete Adventures
• Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced Edition
• Baldur's Gate 1 Enhanced Edition
• Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition
• Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

For $15 (£11.60), you can get all that without Rogue Trader, which might be the move. The game has its defenders, but our own Jody Macgregor scored it 59% in his Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader review, critiquing its bugginess and messy rules. Still, it's had a fair few patches since then and currently sits at a 77% "Mostly positive" rating on Steam, so it's up to you whether to give it a chance.

Per How Long To Beat, a "Main story + extras" playthrough of those games—sans DLC—comes in at about 650 hours of your time, or 27 days. And what a 27 days it would be, folks. Three of those games—Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 plus Planescape—are bonafide, all-timer classics, and if you're one of the many, many people who have recently gotten into the series via BG3, you owe it to yourself to go back and experience the original games. 

They're different, yes, and old, but they're still some of my favourite games ever made: A single, epic RPG story spanning two games (and two expansions), where you go from a puny level 1 runt fleeing packs of gibberlings to a plane-striding titan doing battle with gods and devils.

Planescape, meanwhile, is Disco Elysium before Disco Elysium: A profoundly weird journey to the centre of the self where you play a man with no memory cursed to a life of undeath. It's a game that's often copied but rarely surpassed, and it still tells one of the best stories in the medium 25 years after its release.

The rest aren't quite pantheon-level classics, but they all have their stalwart fans. PCG's Ted Litchfield might report me to HR if I didn't mention how important Neverwinter Nights is to his own RPG-loving life journey, while I still need to get round to playing Wrath of the Righteous like I've been promising him for actual years at this point.

It's continuing in that mixed-feeling fashion by offering a $150 edition that doesn't include the actual game—as well as an art book (with three separate sub-editions) that doesn't include the actual game, plus a seemingly unpriced "Vyrantium Pack" which—you guessed it, doesn't include the actual game. It's got a case for it, though.

As outlined in this blog on the EA website, there is, currently, an absolute downpour of packs and bundles for The Veilguard—two of which actually give you the key to play it. There's the standard and deluxe editions ($60 and $80 respectively) which both get you keys, but everything else detailed here has to, repeatedly, stress to buyers that they're just cosmetic supplements.

First up is Rook's Coffer, or, as the copy confusingly calls it, the "'Rook's Coffer' Edition (Does NOT include Game)" which gives you a 22-inch glowing dagger, a map, a deck of cards, a potion flask, and a die for $150.

Then there's the currently unpriced Vyrantium Pack, which has—hilariously—a steelbook case for Dragon Age: The Veilguard that specifically doesn't have the game inside it, a metallic print, a notebook, and a "collector's rigid outerbox" There's also an art book that has its own standard ($50), Deluxe ($100), and Bioware ($55) editions, the most expensive of which gives you some extra prints, an exclusive slipcase, and a different cover.

Meaning it's possible to spend—taking the most expensive version of the art book into account—$250 on Dragon Age: The Veilguard before actually buying the dang thing. And that's without taking into account the mystery Vyrantium Pack, which will (for an undisclosed amount) let you feel like someone who has purchased Dragon Age: The Veilguard, staring lovingly at the shiny yet empty case of a game you don't own.

This whole thing is just sort of baffling, though I don't know if it's scummier than usual—I mean, look. EA is, just inherently, trying to sell you on a glut of fantasy tat that's targeted at players with disposable income and space on their shelves. In terms of decoupling the game from these editions, though, I'm not actually sure I care too much.

Slam the digital deluxe edition and the Rook's Coffer together and you get $230 and, yeah, that's absurdly expensive, but that's mostly the point of collector's editions. For a point of comparison, the collector's edition for World of Warcraft: The War Within costs about $180 and gives you the expansion, some digital goodies, a statue, a pin, a neat box, and an art book.

All this to say, this is mostly business as usual—with the only eye roll-worthy note being the deluxe edition and its cash-gated cosmetic guff. It's just divided up in a novel, kinda-confusing way that makes me wonder if EA would've been better off selling all this stuff separately in a merch store.

Chill yet challenging mountain biking game Lonely Mountains: Downhill is getting a skiing themed sequel, and it's set to release later this year.

Titled Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, it'll see players navigating a range of chilly mountain descents, performing tricks and seeking out shortcuts as they compete for the best times on each course.

The original game was praised for its blend of relaxing outdoorsy vibes and deceptively authentic mountain-biking simulation. Despite the extreme sports theme, it was very much a game about taking its challenges at your own pace, enjoying the atmosphere of your surroundings as much as posting the sickest times.

The reveal trailer above shows the sequel in action, and at the very least, it looks like Snow Riders will capture the same engrossing sense of place that the original did. It'll be interesting to see how developer Megagon transfers its knack for physics simulation to skiing, and how the addition of snow and ice alters the challenges players face on the game's precipitous courses.

Alongside the change of scenery/sport, Snow Riders also introduces online multiplayer to the series. Supporting 2-8 players on a single hillside, the game's Steam page says players can "work your way down the mountain as a team in co-op, adding save points as you go" or "compete in a breakneck race to the base in versus mode". It seems like a natural evolution for the series, although the addition of multiplayer does somewhat contradict the 'Lonely' part of the title.

This is, weirdly, the second downhill winter sports game to be announced this month, following the reveal of Descenders Next last week. More curiously still, both games are sequels to well-received, downhill mountain-biking games, which both released in 2019. Descenders Next is about snowboarding rather than skiing, however, so the two studios aren't on the exact same wavelength.

While there's no fixed release date yet, the announcement trailer states Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders will arrive at some point in 2024. Expect more information soon.