It's dangerous to get too excited about a new RTS. Just look at what happened to Stormgate. So I've been cautious with ZeroSpace. It's an RTS built in the classic mould—think StarCraft 2—featuring proper basebuilding and potent hero units. So far, pretty familiar. But there's more.

ZeroSpace also boasts an RPG campaign with dialogue trees and loyalty missions, evoking the likes of Mass Effect—albeit without those enviable production values. And then there's the Galactic War, inspired by Helldivers 2's dynamic conflict. My interest was piqued. Cautiously.

Let's start with the good stuff. The campaign is shaping up nicely, though the early access build is limited to a handful of missions that form the first act. While the setup is a generic 'humanity needs this rare resource that's protected by horrible aliens', ZeroSpace quickly establishes plenty of friction between your crew and sets up a complex political situation where it definitely seems like you shouldn't trust your superiors.

The writing and performances are workmanlike, but my feelings towards the cast so far are at best neutral. Still, there's definitely something here, and with a bit of polish the more cinematic, RPG-inspired side of ZeroSpace could really shine. At the moment, though, it's a bit underbaked.

Between missions you can take a break and enjoy a blether with your crew and level up some of your colleagues, who back you up during missions. It's obviously channelling Mass Effect, right down to the alien designs, but I never really felt like I was playing an RPG. That said, we're playing an alpha build, and it's a solid foundation.

This is also where you can spend resources on upgrading troops and buildings, and there's a lot of potential here and some fun synergies—like expanding the range of your basic troops' jetpacks, while also buffing their damage once they land, effectively letting you build Warhammer 40k-style assault marines.

The campaign missions call to mind StarCraft 2 in terms of the variety of objectives and integration of story beats, but it's significantly more streamlined. The micromanagement of troops and your economy is pretty effortless, letting you get into the action rapidly, and then stay there. I dig it, though the reduction in complexity might not sit well with everyone.

One thing I'm a really big fan of is the ability to draw a battle line when you've selected some units—it's a quick, straightforward way to get your troops in an effective position or formation, and a smart evolution of the cover system pioneered by Relic all those years ago.

Unfortunately, the UI is ugly and at best functional, and it can be tricky to get a read on a given battle. When you've got units that are twice the size of your buildings, tiny soldiers running between them, and swarms of alien enemies filling the screen, you need a lot more clarity than what ZeroSpace offers.

And while Homeworld artist and Relic co-founder Aaron Kambeitz has been spearheading an art overhaul, I don't think it's quite there yet. Aesthetically, it's a mix of Mass Effect and StarCraft 2, but on a budget, with only the ship and vehicle design approaching anything noteworthy.

Alongside the start of the campaign, ZeroSpace's early access build offers quite a few ways to get your kicks: comp-stomps, co-op survival matches, 1v1 and 2v2 PvP brawls, and the option to create custom games. While ZeroSpace often feels very early access, the variety of modes is commendable, and that's before we even get to the Galactic War.

The Galactic War is ZeroSpace's big multiplayer hook, taking Helldivers 2's dynamic campaigns and making them competitive. It's an extremely cool concept, especially if you don't care about competitive ladders but still want something to fight for. Each season will see you hop between worlds and battles as you try to swallow up the galaxy for your chosen faction, earning rewards along the way.

Unfortunately these rewards are just titles and portraits, which I doubt most people will really get excited about. Helldivers 2-style cosmetics would make me much more eager to die for the cause. Yes, I'm a very mercenary lad. Rewards aside, though, I think the system has a lot to offer an RTS and I'm looking forward to watching it evolve.

There's just one problem: streamers.

What you might not realise when you pick your faction in the Galactic War is that you're actually picking a streamer. Winter, Neo and uThermal each lead a faction, which might mean more to you than it does me—a man who has never watched a stream the whole way through and who refuses to watch YouTube videos unless they feature cute dogs.

We, the unwashed masses, are merely cannon fodder, fighting to earn our "chosen" streamer the title of Galactic Emperor. What are their policies? Where do they stand on devolution, nationalisation and renewable energy? Will they fix the NHS? Who knows?

Look, I get it, streamers can be a potent arm of a videogame's marketing department, potentially bringing their audience to whatever game they're advertising. But what am I getting out of it? Exclusive portraits and titles feel like a lacklustre reward compared to being crowned the ruler of the galaxy. Even if it's a ceremonial role, I'd like a crown too.

Then there's the ZeroSpace: First Contact Invitational, a tournament that will see 12 streamers and RTS pros duking it out over a $13,000 prize pool. An RTS kicking off with an invitational is not unusual, but it's a massive turn off when a game begins its life by trying to enrich streamers instead of normal players.

The real issue with all this is that it speaks to the misapprehension that a surprising number of RTS developers labour under—that competitive multiplayer is king. In reality, most RTS players stick to the campaigns and comp-stomp skirmishes.

Competitive multiplayer can give an RTS an incredibly long tail, as we've seen with StarCraft and its sequel, but this early elevation of streamers that most of ZeroSpace's potential audience will have never heard of kinda bums me out.

I've just been burned too many times by the assumption that streamers and competitive multiplayer are the most crucial components of an RTS, when that's just not the case.

To be fair to ZeroSpace, it's clearly giving a lot of love to its singleplayer elements, as well as co-op and comp stomps: This doesn't actually feel like a game that's prioritising competitive multiplayer over the campaign. Still, it's unfortunate that developers Starlance Studios and Ironward are dedicating time and effort to getting the streamers on their side, when there are so many better things it could be doing.

I hope these will end up just being minor niggles once it hits 1.0, dwarfed by the quality of its campaign and the liveliness of the Galactic War. At the time of writing it's just managed to pull itself out of a Mixed rating on Steam, and the bulk of complaints seem to be that this early access game is still a work in progress. That said, I still recommend waiting for this one. It's got a lot of promise, but there's plenty of work to be done.

Amid the rubble of the layoffs across Xbox, which included numerous positions at Bethesda and ZeniMax, the remaining developers on The Elder Scrolls Online are starting to struggle. The MMO is one of numerous projects impacted by Microsoft's restructuring of its games division, with only a fraction of the staff attached now as opposed to prior.

To mitigate their own workload, devs on The Elder Scrolls Online are making changes to what features are available to players. As of today, July 22, that includes in-game purchases, since the ability to do so through the official site has been removed.

"To help manage workload, we have decided to remove the Web Crown Store from the official elderscrollsonline.com website," reads a message from Kevin Gbolie, community manager on ESO, on the official forum.

"The ability to acquire crowns via the website will remain," he says, "and, of course, this does not affect the items that will be offered on the Crown Store in The Elder Scrolls Online, you will just need to login into the game to view and purchase the latest offerings."

It's noted that the blog for showing off what's in the Crown Store will change as well, due to "team bandwidth." In response to comments on these changes, Gbolie mentions that while the new version of the blog is still being sorted out, it'll definitely come with a bullet list of new items.

This is unfortunate because the high-res screenshots accompanying the items were used by the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, and Gbolie even mentions the team is aware of that symbiosis. But alas, the time and energy just aren't there any more.

"The team responsible for the blog and those screenshots doesn't have the capacity to provide those at the scale we could before," he writes in another post. "But we will provide what we can for now and adjust from there."

It is a sad time for Bethesda, ZeniMax, this game, and the legacy behind it. These devs deserve better, but at least the game is still going – for now.

Bethesda reportedly canceled an unannounced PvP shooter, likely from Wolfenstein dev MachineGames.

With Star Wars Zero Company, developer Bit Reactor aims to create a tactics RPG with characters and narrative at the forefront. It's got proper, big-budget cutscenes, you can talk to your buddies, and you can customise and upgrade your squad. However, the developers have gone on record in a new Discord Q&A to say, no, don't expect to have control over how the story unfolds.

Earlier this year, our own Ted Litchfield spoke to narrative director Aaron Contreras, who explained that while Bit Reactor wants its cast to have real friction, Star Wars Zero Company is "not a personal fantasy game." Those "player-centric romance" options that seem to pop up in so many games today won't appear in Zero Company.

This was reaffirmed in today's Q&A, where the developer plainly states, "No, there aren’t any romance systems or branching paths" in Zero Company. "While we are excited about pushing the genre forward with a more cinematic approach, this is still a turn-based tactics game at its heart where adept skill and strategy are needed to overcome tense combat challenges."

"That said, there are story moments that can alter based on who you have in your squad, but the overall story is a linear one from beginning to end."

Likewise, speaking on the game's ending specifically, the "story’s conclusion will be largely the same for everyone."

You can have four operators in your Star Wars Zero Company squad at any given time, from cyborg boxer Kabb Uppercut and Mandalorian merc Cly Kullervo to Jedi padawan Tel-Rea Vokoss. With the developer's insistence that the main story is set in stone, I assume any narrative differences come in the form of simple dialogue changes accounting for who's in your crew, as well as their bonds. Plus, the game has permadeath (you can switch it off if you want), so you could lose a few teammates too.

Taking advantage of a Disney budget, Zero Company's focus on storytelling is very promising, despite the lack of branching paths. And if it pans out well, I don't think players will be too bothered by it being linear. Personally, I'm just hoping the plot can fully account for and play around with permadeath mechanics to up the stakes.

The lead designer behind pioneering MMO Ultima Online says the genre has finally broken free from the shackles of World of Warcraft.

Speaking to 80LV, Raph Koster, whose MMO resumé also includes a suite of early 2000s titles including EverQuest and its sequel, as well as Star Wars: Galaxies, says that he is finally returning to the genre after several decades, in part because it no longer has to chase World of Warcraft.

After Blizzard began what has proven to be an almost uninterrupted stint at the top in 2004, there was a rush to create 'the WoW killer' - a feat Koster suggests was a fool's errand.

In returning to MMOs with Stars Reach, Koster says he was encouraged by the feeling that "MMOs were finally free of the fever dream of imitating World of Warcraft." That's partly because of "the rise of sandboxy gameplay in multiple genres at once." Citing the broader multiplayer options of games like Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Valheim, and No Man's Sky, Koster says that "it's clear that there's interest and demand for more than killing orcs over and over."

Whether that's a fair criticism of World of Warcraft in 2026 is a debate I'm not qualified to have, but it's undeniable that multiplayer gaming has gained a lot of depth in the last decade. Fortnite and Roblox are other key examples, showing off a world in which the desire to simply spend time together is just as important as having a dedicated goal. The rise of 'friendslop' titles like Peak are other examples, even if they're not 'massively' multiplayer sandboxes.

For Koster, "the unique thing" that MMOs offer is a persistent world and large numbers of players. Most of those games listed above offer that persistence, albeit with smaller populations, and their popularity meant Koster thought "the time was ripe" to make his return to the genre.