After two attempts to mollify fan outrage over a new $250 version of Escape From Tarkov with an exclusive PvE mode, developer Battlestate has finally relented, promising PvE access to players who previously bought the $150 Edge of Darkness edition of the game that promised access to "all future DLC."

In a statement on the Tarkov subreddit early this morning, Battlestate COO Nikita Buyanov said he was "very sorry that fans and the game community in general are experiencing these feelings," and that this negative response would factor into his future decision making. In terms of the company's response, Buyanov offered the following concessions and assurances:

• $150 Edge of Darkness purchasers would get access to the PvE mode with no further payment or time limit during early access. They will still be allowed access "in waves" due to server capacity concerns.
• The PvE mode will get mod support on Tarkov's 1.0 release.
• Battlestate will continue to sell the $250 Unheard Edition and upgrades to it from other packages.
• Battlestate will iron out a new list of additional benefits for $150 EoD players, while removing the controversial "preferred matchmaking" proposal
• "We will continue to work on patches, new content, events and the game release itself no matter what."

These changes more or less address Tarkov players' primary complaints, but it might be too little, too late: it took six days of much publicized discontent and disruption of the game's official Discord to get here, and many commenters take umbrage with the wording of Buyanov's apology: "I'm sorry you felt this way" as opposed to "I'm sorry we did this bad thing."

Most posts on the Tarkov subreddit right now are expressing dissatisfaction with Buyanov's statement, with some wondering if Battlestate will pull a move like this in the future. Many are suggesting Battlestate turn to cosmetic monetization instead of ever more stratified bundles of the game with mechanical advantages and exclusive modes.

This may still be enough of a concession by Battlestate to release tension and get things back to "normal" in the Tarkov community, but the company has invited severe reputational damage over this boondoggle⁠—how many Unheard Edition customers will Battlestate even manage to snag? A $250 early access videogame purchase is a gesture of trust after all, and after this week, I don't think many Tarkov players are keen to trust the studio.

I stopped playing Dragon's Dogma 2 because it was too janky for me, and I'm saying that as someone who plays Bethesda RPGs. If you're still into Capcom's camp-em-up, you might be interested in this mod, which enables a path-tracing setting normally hidden from players.

The effect is startling as it doesn't just make the shadows and reflections look a bit nicer, though it does that as well. Those flickering shadows you get whenever a light source moves—like, you know, the sun—are rendered steady and solid, which is a definite improvement. But it also improves characters' skin, hair, and eyes, as well as materials like metal and glass. Iron armor suddenly looks shiny rather than dull, and glass bottles look reflective rather than flat.

Of course, there's a downside. It's clear this setting wasn't intended to be public-facing because there's no denoising filter on it, and in motion things sometimes look like they're being viewed from beneath a thin hessian sack, or as if you're at that stage of an LSD trip where everything is moving and the whole world's alive. It's a bit off-putting is what I'm saying. Occasionally indoor areas will be pitch black, and a handful of objects that normally have shadows lose them.

As Digital Foundry suggest in an excellent video on the mod, it's probably a setting that existed for the sake of reference rather than something that was ever intended to be playable. The performance hit alone, in a game with performance that was already sub-par, will probably put you off playing the whole game with path-tracing enabled. As something you can toggle for your photo-mode character showcase, however, it's pretty neat.

You can download the Graphics Suite Alpha from Nexus Mods, and you'll need to install RE Framework first. I consider the mod that lets you stop pawns repeating dialogue over and over basically essential too.

So what if you took the single-leader, many soldiers third person real-time strategyy concept of a game like Pikmin, added a dash of the crafting genre, and then spiced it up with a bunch of path-based automation and cooperative play?

That'd give you the recently-released Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure, a delightful and whimsical little game from Massive Miniteam and HandyGames. In it, you gather up a whole posse of whimsical little wooden golems and put them to work both fighting bad guys and building up automated infrastructure to produce not just things you and your village of friends need, but a ton of copies of themselves to boot. Self-replicating machines being of course something which has never, ever gone wrong in the history of fiction.

It's got all the little tricky battles and funny controls of Pikmin, but it's really delightful because of the approachable, fun logistics puzzles of its automation. Rather than conveyor belts or grabby arms to transport stuff, your little Oddsparks have to be traffic controlled as they follow paths with signs, instructions, and smarly-constructed branches and mergers.

I first heard of and played some of Oddsparks back during this year's Steam Next Fest, when I played 50-something demos and subsequently lost my mind. Forget that last part, though, the takeaway is that Oddsparks is something surprisingly fresh and complete given that it's made of two things you've seen before. It was definitely my surprise favorite of the whole event.

"I found the loop really great: Grab a mission, explore the wilderness for resources, then fulfill the mission by automating a product or two… which rewards a new blueprint that you'll need to go find some resources for and get to automating," I said at the time.

Oddsparks is pretty well-received so far, if a little underplayed: It's sitting at 91% positive of 239 reviews on Steam as of press time.

You can find Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure on Steam. It's developed by Massive Miniteam and published by HandyGames.