When Digmbot played Forza Horizons 3 on stream, he immediately noticed that there were some… issues with the game’s running on PC. To put it mildly. Seems like more people have had similar issues, because an incoming patch will hopefully improve stability across a number of PC setups.

The October 14 patch will go live at 7pm PT (3am BST) and Turn 10 say that the update will include “numerous stability and performance improvements for the game across a variety of Windows 10 PC hardware configurations, as well as fixing numerous gameplay issues to improve game stability on PC.” They also say that performance and stability will be a top priority for them and Playground Games going forward, being the focus of future updates too. So hopefully fewer crashes for PC players from now on.

Of course, other things are included in the patch and that includes your standard bug fixes, some rebalancing of certain factors and the introduction of new cars to the Tombola level-up spins.

For the full list of fixes and changes, check out the post on Forza’s site here.

So far the Halloween event that Blizzard brought into Overwatch a few days ago has been pretty well received overall, with a number of new lines, victory poses, skins and more being added into game for players to receive and play. The main part has to be the new brawl, Dr. Junkenstein’s revenge.

With four heroes on each side, the brawl has drawn some slight complaints over the restriction of which heroes can be used in game, but it’s not the first time the special event’s been limited to only certain heroes (remember Lucioball?). Otherwise it’s been pretty popular. One of the involved heroes on the attacking side is Mercy as ‘The Witch’, with a special ult war cry for the brawl: “my servants never die” which replaces the well-known “heroes never die” cry. It’s proven so popular that now a number of fans are asking for that to be Mercy’s ult war cry when the character is dressed in her Halloween skin which is The Witch.

Blizzard for their part finally weighed in on a long topic of players asking with Jeff Kaplan answering “Ok, ETA mid-Nov.”

So, if you were one of the players asking or just loved that line make sure you have Mercy’s Halloween skin before the event is over and you can hear it whenever you want. Who says big game companies don’t listen to their fans’ feedback?

Welcome back to another round up for some of the most interesting new Kickstarter campaigns to go up recently.

First as always, we will take a look back on campaigns previously covered to see how they’re doing. Firstly, the comic special for Afterlife 4: Man Made God reached its target hitting £6,930 in pledges, meaning that the graphic novel will see publication. Code: HARDCORE has also reached and bypassed its target, and still has two more weeks to run before its crowdfunding time period closes. Thornwatch and The Rabbit and the Owl have also closed their campaigns having met their targets, as previously said in other earlier Round-Ups.

Unfortunately many other campaigns have either come to an end without meeting target or have had their campaigns cancelled. Those who finished without meeting target are Dimension Door, Cat Story and ZOMBIEQUEST looks to be about to follow them with little time remaining and little of the target met. However, of those the developer behind Cat Story has expressed that they are going to continue working on the game having “learned a lot” through the campaign.

Cancelled were Arc Continuum, having lost steam after a good start, and Escape the Game. Arc Continuum is another one that will continue on regardless though, which is good and I hope to hear of it again later on. Kickstarter’s not the only way a game can get to publication after all.

Dracula’s Feast

First up is a hidden roles card game that takes the form of a party held by the world’s most famous vampire Dracula.

Everyone playing takes the role of a monster, or Van Helsing and games are said to take around 10 minutes, with 4-8 players being supported with up to 10 being available if the expansion is added in too. This game has no ‘night’ phases, no generic ‘villager’ positions, and minimal elimination options to allow all players to get to play properly. Each unique character you can be also has different abilities and win conditions too.

Dracula’s Feast has already bypassed its $8,000 goal, with 32 more days to go.

Goblins of Elderstone

This one is a city builder/tribe simulator game. Just the sort of genre I go for.

Goblins of Elderstone charges you with building up and maintaining a goblin village, protecting it from attacks from other enemy races and raiding dungeons and villages to keep your ever-growing tribe fed and healthy. The developers have admitted to enjoying this sort of game themselves and wanted to make a game that used one of the ‘villain’ depicted races. Best part is, you can choose if you wish to subvert that stereotype or not!

Goblins of Elderstone has a $40,000 NZD goal, and has made $22,708 of that already with 32 days to go.

Creekside Creep Invasion

Next up is a “Halloween themed, action Rogue-Lite” from a husband and wife team.

With the typical features for a game of this type, you can expect the game to contain upgradable and randomised items, upgradable stats and procedurely generated levels too. The game will have both controller & mouse and keyboard controls as well. The story takes place on Halloween night, in which your character wakes to find themselves in the middle of an evil ‘take over the world’ plot with the streets crawling with ‘creeps’. You need to take on the enemies to try and save Halloween and restore it back to a night of fun and candy sweetness!

With a $10,000 target, Creekside Creep Invasion has 24 days to go and has made $121 of its goal.

Queer Quest

To end with, this little gem that popped up in Recommended as I went to look up what was new. It’s a game about ordinary, strange people, and two lesbians in particular.

Lupe is one half of a relationship with girlfriend Alexis, until Alexis is suddenly kidnapped! Lupe must now go on a quest to find and rescue Alexis, while dealing with the fairly ordinary to life obstacles and puzzles thrown in her way. Described as a “queer-as-fuck point-and-clit adventure game”, the game takes cues from games such as Monkey Island and the titles for all the pledges levels are puns. What could be better?

With 23 more days to go, Queer Quest has made $6,139 of its $50,000 goal.

The end of this month will see the release of the remaster of one of Bethesda’s most-loved games, with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition finally releasing on October 28th. Now the system requirements are out, and like the game, they’ve been upgraded significantly from the game’s original release.

Skyrim was released in the second half of the year of 2011, and its minimum specs included a 2.0 GHz dual core, 2GB of RAM and at least a DX9.0c-compliant video card with 512MB of RAM. Amazing to think that about 5 years ago, the requirements were that low. Of course, time and technology moves on and so we can expect Special Edition to require a lot more.

Here are the requirements, both minimum and recommended in case you want to compare your machine to them:

Minimum:

• Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit Version)
• Intel i5-750/AMD Phenom II X4-945
• 8GB RAM
• 12 GB free HDD space
• Nvidia GTX 470 1GB /AMD HD 7870 2GB

Recommended:

• Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit Version)
• Intel i5-2400/AMD FX-8320
• 8GB RAM
• 12 GB free HDD space
• Nvidia GTX 780 3GB /AMD R9 290 4GB

Bethesda have already announced that people who already own all of the Skyrim parts (that is the base game and all 3 DLC packs) will be getting Special Edition free. That includes everyone who bought the base game and DLC separately and the people who (like me) purchased the Legendary Edition which is a bundle of all four parts.

Special Edition will retail for around $60, while Legendary is around $40 right now. If you want to save money, you’ve still some time before the release date.

One of the things that bugged people about Mafia III upon release is one of the most talked about topics in recent years concerning gaming – its framerate. Upon release it was discovered that Mafia III had been locked to just 30 frames per second, which caused more than a couple of people to ask why.

Well, the developers seem to have listened, as a new incoming patch (1.0.1) will give players the ability to uncap those framerates if they feel like they wish to. However, they’ve already warned that you might need some fairly hefty hardware to pull of 60 frames. Mafia III is an open-world game by its nature and already the game has been known to have the odd performance issue pre-patch. Hopefully some optimisation will also come with this patch, as well as future ones. The official line for the moment is “make sure to tailor the framerate settings to the power of your machine”. The patch also includes some changes to keyboard remapping, and will unfortunately reset any mapped keys you changed back to default so just be aware of that before you next turn the game on.

Future patches will begin to address fixing some of the bugs that people have been reporting around New Bordeaux, as well as adding in new features such as clothing and racing.