Month: September 2024

The steady drip-drip-drip of Stardew Valley 1.6 patch notes continued apace today as creator Eric Barone revealed yet another change coming to the game. This one is all about wedded bliss, which will now have a “honeymoon period” that will keep everyone happy about their nuptials—for a while, anyway.

Marriage in Stardew Valley brings practical benefits, as spouses can help with chores like watering crops, feeding livestock, and cooking meals. But things can go south if you let the spark of romance grow cold: As the unofficial Stardew Valley wiki puts it, “Spouses can become unhappy if not treated well, which will result in undesirable actions, such as laying in bed all day and saying irritating things.”

Fair is far: If you’re being a jerk then maybe you deserve some crappy attitude and dirty dishes in return. Ideally, though, that shouldn’t be happening within the first week of marriage, and thus this fix:

Spouses now have a seven-day ‘honeymoon’ period after marriage which prevents them from laying in bed all day due to being upset.

I feel compelled to point out that no one should take this as a license to be a dinkus to their new spouse i…

“I’m going to do something ridiculous every day until [x videogame thing happens]” might be a little pat now⁠—hell, there’s probably a sociological paper to be written about gamers performing devotion for companies as if they were implacable deities⁠.

But JPNB on YouTube was a pioneer of the form, fighting secret Elden Ring megaboss Malenia every week (initially every day) over a span of months until we finally got that Shadow of the Erdtree announcement last February. He hung up his spurs after that, but now he’s back once more to tango with the Blade of Miquella.

Watch On

During his original run, JPNB started out trying to fight Malenia every day until we got news of an Elden Ring expansion. As the wait dragged on, that quickly became “every few days” before he settled into a sustainable pace of fighting her once a week with a new, fun, themed build each time. With 11 days to go until the release of Shadow of the Erdtree, JPNB committed to a Malenia sprint as one last hurrah: beating her each day without getting hit and using a fresh idiosyncratic build each time.

I think my favorite so far was his “Arcane Archer,” a riff on one of …

Helldivers 2 is going to make you link your PlayStation Network account—and boy, are liberty’s finest upset about it. If you dare to venture into the game’s Discord server at the time of writing, you’ll find the place is thoroughly on fire, with timeouts being issued left and right. 

As a recap in case you didn’t see the news earlier: Helldivers 2 will require you to link your Steam account to PlayStation Network starting May 6, though said requirement will roll out piecemeal. By May 30 Steam users will be confronted with a login screen, and by June 4 they’ll absolutely, 100% need to register.

This move, Sony claims, is to “protect players from griefing” among other ‘benefits’—and was only ever delayed thanks to the state of Helldivers 2’s servers at launch. Here’s the proper rundown of the change—or, more accurately, reinstatement—in policy. For now though, let’s turn our gaze towards the community.

First up, people are—understandably—worried about region locks. PSN serves around 69 countries at the moment which, as you might have put together, is not all of them. From where I’m sitting this whole debacle is mostly just…

Warner Bros. Discovery says sales of the superhero looter-shooter Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League did not meet the company’s expectations, a shortfall that’s put the company’s game division on track for a “tough” first quarter in its 2024 fiscal year.

“We are lapping the release of Hogwarts Legacy in February last year, which saw the largest portion of its very positive financial impact in the first quarter,” Warner Bros. Discover chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said during the company’s earnings call (via Seeking Alpha). 

“This year, Suicide Squad, one of our key videogame releases in 2024, has fallen short of our expectations since its release earlier in the quarter, setting our games business up for a tough year-over-year comp in Q1.”

Warner hasn’t released sales figures for Suicide Squad, but the game hasn’t performed especially well on Steam. The overall user rating is actually “very positive,” but after hitting a peak concurrent player count of 13,459 immediately after launch, the numbers quickly tailed off: Currently just 704 people are playing the game, which is not a good place to be for a live-service co-op shooter. The peak conc…