Danish developer Invisible Walls, the team behind First Class Trouble and Aporia: Beyond the Valley, has announced its next project, a slapstick competitive multiplayer game called Neighbors: Suburban Warfare. The PvP title fulfills a dark fantasy we’ve all had at one point or another – the desire to tear up our neighbor’s stuff. Set in the town of Heartsville, Neighbors: Suburban Warfare lets you choose one of eight characters – each with unique abilities – to wreck other players’ houses using household items and traps. Grab a frying pan, golf club, or the vacuum cleaner and get to wrecking, or perhaps set a trap with a baseball pitching machine to keep those pesky neighbors off your lawn. As you level up, you will unlock perks and hobbies for each character, introducing new options for home defense (offense?).

This looks like a total blast, and if I can muster my neighbors here at Gaming Nexus, this will be an episode of “Gaming Nexus Plays” in the future. Check out the announcement teaser below:

A new management sim is headed to PC in 2025, but it’s likely not quite what you’d expect from the genre. War Mechanic is a first-person base-building sim set in an alt-history dieselpunk universe where World War II never ended. Instead, the USSR assassinated the American president, vice president, and all the cabinet members, leading to General Patton becoming president, and the eventual privatization of the US war machine. That's one heck of a twist.

That’s where you come in, with players taking over a rundown military base, tasked with rebuilding it from ruins to help lead the US military to victory. To do so, you will explore the land around your base, survive enemy attacks, conquer other bases, complete military contracts, automate repair work with robots, manage base resources, and customize your own vehicle.

Check out the new teaser trailer below:

New developer Notorious Studios has revealed PvEvP fantasy action RPG, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, for PC. The studio is comprised of industry veterans who have worked on World of Warcraft and they're looking to bring a twist to traditional RPGs, according to founder and CEO, Chris Kaleiki:

“Our goal was to build upon the foundations of RPG and MMO PvP into its own title, something we haven't quite seen before. We incorporated many of the lessons and learnings from building one of the biggest MMOs of all time (World of Warcraft) into Legacy. Based on feedback we've had from players already, I think we have something special here and we can't wait to share it with more and more players.”

In Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, you will choose from a range of character classes, from tanks with maces to mages that cast spells, as you battle hordes of not just AI monsters, but other human players as well. It sounds like the game has some extraction shooter vibes, with players gathering what resources they can, fighting their way to a safehouse, and buying upgrades or just relaxing before heading out on another adventure.

There’s no release date yet for Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, but you can check out a free demo as part of Steam Next Fest October 14^th – 21^st.

The Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is giving us the biggest crafting project possible with Bastions. We'll be building castles and towers from 5th through 20th level. That lends some perspective to new crafting rules, which have been too long and arduous to pull off during normal D&D 5e gameplay. Also, this latest video from Wizards of the Coast is talking about new magic items, and not just the potion and scroll crafting introduced in the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook.

The new DM's Guide expands upon that tiny taste of crafting and lets you craft...everything else.

Crafting every other magic item works the way those basic crafting items work. You have the Arcana skill to make magic items, you grab the relevant toolkit, and the relevant spell your imbuing the crafted item with.

The example they use is crafting a magic item infused with Magic Missile. You look at your Arcana skill, you acquire a Woodcarver's Kit, you cast the Magic Missile spell into the item. The only other thing it requires is time and money. But in the world of D&D—at least in the world of fast-paced published adventures—time is your most precious resource. It's a resource you always have less of than you think.

Kenreck gets around to asking: Why is crafting such an aspiration for some players? Does everyone want to be Sauron?

You see, that's funny because Sauron may not have handcrafted all the Rings of Power in The Lord of the Rings, but he was certainly the mastermind behind their crafting. And if you haven't sifted through the internet dreck telling you to not watch The Rings of Power on Amazon, then you're missing out on a Tolkien-length epic crafting job.

They take a few moments to encourage players—not just Dungeon Masters—to purchase a Dungeon Master's Guide. This is unexpected. But they want to encourage players to craft. Since all the high-level cool stuff to craft is in the DM's Guide, that's why they'd want players to buy the book and look through it and come to their DM with crafting requests.

One category of items you won't be able to craft are Artifacts. Those are S-tier magic items whose crafting recipes are lost in the ether of time and space. 

Artwork-wise, plenty of very good artwork is being pulled forward from the 2014 5e DM's Guide. Sure, across-the-board new artwork would be great. They did that in the new Player's Guide. But money is slipping and time is ticking for getting these new 2024 Core Rulebooks crafted. We already went over how time is your most precious commodity in D&D. There's still a lot of new art too, though.

They also give you a few words' worth of advice on naming magic items and perhaps giving them a little backstory of their own. That's not just a +1 sword. It's Bob the Elf's +1 sword passed down through the ages. Boom. Your +1 sword isn't so forgettable now, is it? Or perhaps it's a sinister whispering dagger that says, "[expletive] you," when you stab someone with it.

Hey, that was Chris Perkins's example, not mine.

Sentient magic items (ones that can speak) will have an Alignment, as well as Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma ability scores. That's cool. That may bring up roleplaying opportunities—and conflicts—between player characters and their magic items. I certainly had fun with that during our Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus campaign. The Shield of the Hidden Lord was sentient and such a drag on the whole party that they chucked it into the River Styx running through the Nine Hells where it would lay at the bottom of the bloody water for the next 99 years.

And the DM's Guide is finally going to give you cold, hard prices on a lot of these magic items. In the past, you had to divine them for yourself, with a huge range of prices to grab from. Now, thankfully, we can know the prices. And the DM can go up or down from there as they see fit. That's a million times easier than having to invent prices for everything all the time. 

Also, every single magic item has been revised in some way. Either making it easier to understand, more fun to use, or some combination of the two. The folks at D&D Beyond, which is Wizards of the Coast's online platform for Dungeons & Dragons, went through some growing pains when implementing multiple editions of the Player's Handbook recently. Hopefully the hundreds of tiny revisions make to the magic items will integrate smoothly into their operations. 

Also, any named magical item, e.g., an Arrow of Slaying, may now have the _____ of Slaying applied to any other magical weapon that is more pertinent to your players. Perhaps you'll have a Bullet of Slaying, or a Glaive of Slaying, so your players won't just ignore magic items because that player character isn't proficient in their use. 

I had already started doing this, simply because I'd grown tired of that exact scenario. "Check it out! It's the legendary Blood Spear!" "Meh, I use swords. Leave it."

Monsters' treasure will also be given different themes. The loot popping out of a creature marked "Arcana" will list different categories of items such as gems and magic items. Whereas something marked "Relics" will perhaps drop a different set of magic items and art objects for their monetary value. This sounds great to me as a DM always grasping at different themes. But my players rarely have the patience to record anything more than an object's gold value, so, your mileage may vary. 

The new D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is a month away, launching on November 12. I can't wait to get my filthy DM paws all over it.

It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from Surfpunk, but it’s back today with a bang. The co-op extraction ARPG has a new gameplay overview trailer that does an excellent job of showing us what the core gameplay loop is, with a healthy dash of the moment-to-moment action.

In Surfpunk you can surf solo, or with up to three friends in procedurally generated runs as you scavenge for loot and resources across an archipelago. The core gameplay blends fast-paced hack ‘n slash mechanics with loot extraction, with multiple classes and loadouts to create your personal playstyle. Gather loot on your raft and surf between islands in search of Evress, a valuable resource needed for upgrades at your base, also known as the Beastship.

Of what we’ve seen so far, Surfpunk is checking a lot of boxes for me. No release date has been announced, but we do know it is coming to Steam at launch.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is just around the corner now, launching October 25^th for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. As we creep closer to its release, the countdown has begun for the COD marketing cycle, which today brings us a brand-new gameplay trailer. It clocks in at around one minute and shows glimpses of what appears to be a proper globe-trotting, blockbuster single-player campaign. And let’s be honest, after last year’s campaign, we kind of need one of those classic romps the franchise is known for. Check out the new trailer below:

New exotics weapons and armors, new abilities, a new season is upon us in Destiny 2. Except they aren't calling them seasons, they are Episodes now, even though they basically act like season with basically the same structure, embedded activities, power leveling and a bit a tired content loop. This Episode we're even bringing back small incremental increases to max power level, bumping the ceiling from 2000 to 2010. This is walking back comments made by the game's creators from a little more than a year ago that claimed to have stopped the practice due to player feedback. You see, no one likes hopping on the hamster wheel of RNG to hope for get a pinnacle engram to decode into just the right armor or weapon slot to make the number go up from 2000 to 2010; but I guess as players numbers dwindle Bungie is desperate to enforce as much of the grind as possible in the name of artificial player engagement.  

But it's not all bad news, first off Bungie Twitter (https://x.com/destiny2team/status/1843323581356179495) has hinted the long-awaited Exotic Class Item focusing, which was intended to release "sometime" during this season Episode appears to be ahead of schedule. Also, the trailer for the new season looks pretty cool with the spooktacular Halloween theme. 

Destiny is down but not out and I still enjoy it. Hopefully, it can reclaim some of its lost magic as the studio refocuses on their only real IP. 

The Halo series has been using the Slipstream engine for a while now and we've heard that Halo Infinite had some issues that reared its head due to said engine. Today at the 2024 Halo World Championship, Halo Studios, formerly 343 Industries, has announced they are going to be using the Unreal Engine for future video games.

One of the main benefits of moving to a new engine is that a lot of developers have experience with it. When it's time to ramp up, they can find people easier and have them be more familiar with the tools rather than train them in the tools for Slipstream. As a former contractor myself, I know how much easier and faster it is to get myself being productive at a company when the technology they use is something I'm familiar with.

Switching to a new engine is a little surprising and if you're going to do it, Unreal Engine seems to be the best choice right now. With multiple Halo games in the pipeline, Halo Studios has a lot of work cut out for them so using a tried and true engine should help with reducing the time and complexity on some aspects of the projects.

A new chapter of Halo is heading our way and what a way to kick it off with a new studio name and a new engine.

If you were one of the people to hold out from the Playstation version of Splatoon, good news comes to you in the form of free to play. As of right now, Square Enix's Foamstars has gone free to play for everyone for the PS4 and PS5. They are now in their 8th season, and Square Enix shows no signs of abandoning the game, and taking it offline. 

The new season, Diamond Jam, will run until November, and promises new gameplay enhancements. You can now get Diamond Chips to use in a certain shop, Diamond Trade, to get new cosmetics. They've also added FIVE new maps to the Smash The Star Mode, some of them coming from other modes. Private Party mode also gets four extra maps. 

Even more so, Wave boss battles have been added for Squad Missions. I have no idea what any of this means, but maybe it's enticing enough for me to go back. I haven't played since launch, and here's video of that. All that to say, 8 seasons since February looks promising, but I hope those who purchased the game, or got it during that Playstation Plus promo gets something. 

The D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has got me. One thing I've always wanted to do in Dungeons & Dragons is build a castle. Yes, attack the darkness, plunder the dungeon, slay the dragon, and gear up to do it all again. But I'm using that cold, hard coinage to build a bastion.

Bastions are a new addition to 5th Edition and/or 2024 D&D. The care and feeding of your castle, tower, or perhaps druidic hanging gardens (?) gets its own chapter in the new DM's Guide. I'm with Todd Kenreck, the interviewer in the video below. Turning a fort or a spire into an extension of ourselves was one of our greatest ambitions. It didn't matter if I was playing in Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Spelljammer, or Planescape. The moment I was done rolling ability scores, I was grabbing a sheet of graph paper and sketching out my humble abode.

The intent of bastions, per lead designer Chris Perkins, is to invest players further into the setting. To leave their mark. To build something that will outlast themselves. 

D&D understands that bastions take time. Far more time than crafting takes, and crafting already interrupts gameplay too much to implement easily. So that's why bastions are meant to operate off-stage. You, the player, should be off on continent-spanning, world-hopping adventures—and have a headquarters to come home to and hang your hat.

Aside from the obvious, however, there are reasons why you'd want to, perhaps, build a theater or a pub, even if everyone was expecting your sorcerer to build a stony cylinder into the sky. 

A "bastion turn" happens roughly every seven days, though there's wiggle room between the Dungeon Master and player. If a player is in their bastion, they will issue an order to each of their bastion's facilities: 

• Craft
• Empower
• Harvest
• Maintain
• Recruit
• Research
• Trade

If a player is not in their bastion and can't communicate with hirelings, the whole bastion takes the Maintain order. A roll is made to see if an event happens. An event gives the player a chance to tell a story about their bastion. Even if all is well, there are still opportunities for storytelling. Bastion turns can happen at the table, or they can be homework for players, who will return the next session able to update everyone on what happened during their bastion turn. 

And bastions don't have to be a solo endeavor. If you never want to split the party, you can build a compound together. Each player would have control over their specific facilities and sections, but not necessarily have to head off to separate corners of the kingdom when visiting their bastion.

Bastions are one answer to players wondering "What am I supposed to do with my money?" Although their are also special facilities that you acquire as you level up, at no added cost to you. It's these special facilities that are giving players in-game benefits.

There are 29 special facilities. At level 5 you can start work on a bastion. You are given two special facilities right off the bat. It goes up to four special facilities at level 9. Five at level 13. And six at level 17. So, from that list of 29 special facilities, no one bastion will have more than six. (Unless you build that multiplayer compound, I suppose.) All 29 are:

• Arcane Study
• Armory
• Barrack
• Garden
• Library
• Sanctuary
• Smithy
• Storehouse
• Workshop
• Game Hall
• Greenhouse
• Laboratory
• Sacristy
• Scriptorium
• Stable
• Teleportation Circle
• Theater
• Training Room
• Trophy
• Archive
• Meditation Chamber
• Menagerie
• Observatory
• Pub
• Reliquary
• Demiplane (Demiplane?!)
• Guild Hall
• Sanctum
• War Room

There's artwork of all these special facilities. There are level prerequisites too, of course, since I'm going to safely assume that your Baby's First Bastion won't be getting a demiplane right at level 5.

You can even start guilds. Thieves guilds, bakers guilds, shipbuilders guilds. 

My favorite DLC in Skyrim is Hearthfire—the one that lets you build a bastion right there on Skyrim's map. A place to come home to. A little piece of Skyrim that I permanently changed and made my own. I'm happy that I can start building that in D&D.

Or have my bastion fall by "mucking around with the Deck of Many Things," as Chris Perkins states. If you draw the Ruin card? Bye bye bastion. But that's another story.