It's been 15 days since the Wii U and 3DS servers were supposed to shut down, but a few courageous players have somehow managed to cling onto whatever bits of life are left in a handful of games for those systems. The last remaining Splatoon player is holding fast even as the servers have started to crumble around them.

"Hold on to your tentacles… for some bad news," Lcd101 writes on Twitter. "As of the (delayed) 2:00 A.M. EST rotation, matchmaking (lobby) has officially gone down in Splatoon. Other online services, including the news and shops, are still functional and I still remain online. I repeat, I am STILL online." Matchmaking, of course, doesn't have much point right now, given that Lcd101 is the only player who's still connected to the Splatoon servers. 

Lcd101 notes that the game is displaying the same error code that happened when it was temporarily shut down back in 2023, so I guess we're not in fully uncharted territory here. Either way, Lcd101 says "I intend to stay online in this state for as long as possible."

As of just a few days ago, it was believed that six players were hanging on in the 3DS and Wii U servers. Incredibly, it seems that another holdout has been discovered. As GaffsNotLaffs notes on Twitter, there's one player hanging on in online lobbies for Wii Sports Club, joining the other proud few remaining players in Mario Kart 8, Mario Kart 7, Splatoon, Super Mario Maker, and Pokemon XY.

The best Wii U games are still great even without their online features.

In a strange and unfortunate turn, indie developer Flaming Fowl Studios, known for past games including Fable Fortune and Gloomhaven, has released a demo for a new game on Steam while simultaneously laying off more than half its employees.

"Today we are releasing a demo of Ironmarked, a new game we have been working on recently," Flaming Fowl said. "Unfortunately, due to the current lack of funding in the games industry, we are putting production on hold and have had to downsize the studio, letting go of some amazing people. 

"Although this is a difficult and sad time for everyone involved, we are very proud of what we were creating and want to share that with all of you. We also hope that by releasing this demo, we can help those people leaving us to secure new roles elsewhere, by demonstrating their outstanding work on the project."

Flaming Fowl was founded in 2016 by former Lionhead employees, with the goal of finishing and releasing Fable Fortune, a free-to-play CCG that had been in development for more than a year at Lionhead prior to its closure. Fable Fortune was taken offline in 2020; in 2021, Flaming Fowl followed up with Gloomhaven, an outstanding turn-based dungeon crawler (and adaptation of a beloved tabletop game). 

Craig Oman, the CEO of Flaming Fowl, told VGC that Ironmarked was dropped by its publisher in the summer of 2023. The studio continued to fund development itself, but more than 30 other publishers have since declined to pick up the game, which ultimately forced the project to be put on hold.

Oman said part of the problem is that publishers aren't interested in mid-tier games—"people were either looking to sign stuff for a few hundred grand, or up to the £20-40 million range," he said—and of course the current state of the industry, which has been wracked by deep layoffs since the start of 2023, is a major factor.

"As soon as we finished Gloomhaven, we signed Ironmarked," Oman said. "We had multiple offers. But then a year and half later, we’ve gone back to a lot of the same publishers and they say they’re no longer looking for projects like this."

The layoffs reduced Flaming Fowl's employee count from around 30 to just nine people, Oman said. The remaining developers are taking until the end of 2024 to make a smaller, self-funded strategy game. As for Ironmarked, he hopes that releasing the demo on Steam will help it attract enough wishlists to convince a publisher to get behind it in the future.

"Wishlists are a hugely important thing for anyone trying to launch a game on Steam," Oman said. "It’s a metric you can go to publishers with that gives them a clear indication of the market you can tap into… they’re just so risk averse."

Ironmarked is a co-op RPG with turn-based combat, set in a fantasy world inspired by medieval Italy. Players hire mercenaries to undertake various quests, each of them with unique gameplay abilities and personalities that can provide powerful synchronicities or equally challenging debuffs that persist from one scenario to the next. You can check out some gameplay courtesy of YouTuber TheTouryst in the video below.

Like so many of us, I bounced off Fallout 76 back in 2018. Bethesda's micro MMO wasn't very good back then—an opinion that even Todd Howard shares these days—but the studio stuck with it, reverse engineering its Appalachian aberration into an engrossing multiplayer wasteland complete with NPCs, settlements, factions, and years' worth of quality-of-life updates.

Yet in all those years of updates, somehow Bethesda still hasn't improved one of the biggest roadblocks to getting into Fallout 76 on PC: its locked framerate. By default, Fallout 76 stubbornly refuses to climb past 60 fps. That's because Fallout 76 has forced Vsync that can't be turned off in its video settings. The limitation makes an already stiff shooter feel sluggish and imprecise, and until I learned how to get around it, I got pretty close to giving up on an otherwise fun shared-world RPG.

Bethesda made the call on Vsync originally because, in several modern Creation Engine RPGs, messing with the framerate also screws with speed and physics. Thankfully, Bethesda fixed this issue early on in Fallout 76, so there's no downside to blowing past the 60 fps limit now (at least, not one I'm aware of).

Unlocking Fallout 76's framerate is easy, but you'll have to make a quick change to a config file outside the game. You should absolutely try this no matter how powerful your PC is. Make sure Fallout 76 is closed, then follow these steps:

1. Open Documents > My Games > Fallout 76
2. Open Fallout76Prefs in Notepad
3. Hit Ctrl+F and search for iPresentInterval
4. Change iPresentInterval=1 to iPresentInterval=0
5. Save the document, and close

This will disable forced Vsync, freeing up your PC to run Fallout 76 past 60 fps well into the hundreds, if hardware permits. An unlocked framerate was an instant salve for my eyeballs, and did a lot of favors for Fallout 76's combat, too. Bethesda's lethargic gunplay is nothing worth celebrating, but at least it doesn't get in the way of 76's better qualities when the game's running well and tracking targets is fluid.

For the best experience, you'll also want to limit the game's framerate to your monitor's refresh rate. This is another setting that Fallout 76 doesn't support in-game, but you can set a max fps in the Nivida Control Panel (or the AMD equivalent). Select Manage 3D Settings from the left nav menu, hit the Program Settings tab, find Fallout 76 in the dropdown, and scroll down to Max Frame Rate to set it.

Now for those graphics settings…

If these framerate tweaks satisfy your Fallout 76 performance experience, feel free to stop there, but if you'd like to squeeze more frames out of this questionably optimized beast then it's time to tinker with 76's modest Display settings.

You'll find similar tips all over the internet, but our Fallout 76 benchmarking guide from 2018 still has some good pointers. I also found this 2021 post from Reddit user joshg125 helpful, the main points of which I've outlined below:

1. Set the overall preset to Medium
2. Manually set Textures, Lighting, and Water to high or medium (depending on your graphics card's VRAM)
3. Set Shadow Quality to high, but Shadow Distance to low (distance shadows are one of the more demanding elements of the game)
4. Max out the Actor Fade slider so that enemies and other NPCs can be seen from far away
5. Keep other render distance sliders, like Objects Fade, Grass Fade, and Item Fade low, and only raise them if it doesn't affect your PC can handle the extra load

I've only played a few hours since making these changes, but on my rig (RTX 2080 Super, i9-9900KS CPU, 32GB RAM), I can't tell the difference between maxed-out Fallout 76 and this custom config at 1080p. The game looks nice enough, and most importantly for a shooter, it runs great.