Arcane Fortune is a game we briefly highlighted at the start of August as one that is inspired by the likes of Civilization, SimCity and Dwarf Fortress and it's getting bigger again.

Quite an interesting experience already, with a lot of features and gameplay already there. You can even play it directly in your terminal - if you wish. However, it does also have a "proper" version that uses SDL2 with mouse support. With a new release that went up on September 27, not only has it pulled in new features, it's also now properly open source. The original release was under a creative commons license but now they've moved the code over to the AGPL.

Here's some release highlights of Cults of Rebellion Edition (v0.2.0):

• Population happiness -- there are many ways to anger (and please) your residents, including obvious ones like over-taxing, being generally incompetent with running the economy, and not so obvious ones like ruling inconsistently with regards to things like war, technological development, and your empire's prevailing doctrine, if any.
• Doctrines -- this is the lens through which your citizen's view your rule. While you cannot choose which doctrines your citizens follow, you can heavily influence it by the buildings you build and the doctrines you dedicate them to.
• Crime -- a factor in angering your citizens.
• Health/sickness -- similar to the above.
• Color configuration
• Public polling and civic advisors -- they can help you navigate the nuanced beliefs your residents may develop and be key to making sure they do not grow increasingly unhappy. However, take their advice with a hint of skepticism -- you are the leader of your empire, after all.
• Rioting -- if your residents grow too unhappy, they will take matters into their own hands.
• Linux - support for more terminals with the fallback version including: xterm-256color, xterm, xterm-kitty, xfce, xterm-x11mouse, xterm-xfree86, gnome, gnome-256color, konsole, konsole-256color, putty-256color, putty, xterm-utf8

You can follow it on the official site and GitHub .

The latest grand strategy game from Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studios with Crusader Kings III seems to have been a big success and a new rather large patch is out.

In case you missed it: do check out BTRE's full thoughts on Crusader Kings III who said it was "the best entry in the series so far".

Crusader Kings III is currently the most popular Paradox game on Steam, regularly seeing around 40-50 thousand players online. Paradox also amusingly shared some player stats with us today, which showed that over the last month since release on September 1 that over 18 million murders have been successful. Oh my.

• 40,591,268 children born
• 18,212,157 successful murder schemes executed
• 4,364,279 betrothals
• 1,543,790 prisoners cannibalized
  • Including at least one Pope...
• 1,451,427 holy wars started
• 716,369 stress breaks
• 370,305 pets petted
• 141,597 universities founded
• 122,364 escapes from prison
• 29,454 Roman Empires restored

Thanks to all the above, they said players have already put an incredible combined 25 million hours play it.

I'm still getting to grips with it myself and I'll have some of my own beginner thoughts up on it next month based on "an idiot plays Crusader Kings III". So keep an eye out for that too.

With games as big as this, there is of course going to be issues that come with it. Paradox support their games well and Crusader Kings III is no different. The first major post-release patch is out which has:

• A host of bug fixes, including changes to character interactions and succession rules.
• Corrections to the historical setup in many regions.
• Key balance changes to many parts of the game, including succession rules, nation formation, and military management.
• User interface tweaks including new siege views, a bookmark screen, and a general makeover.
• Tougher Mongol invasions.
• Improved AI decision making.
• New abilities for modders.

Full details here , warning though it really is a massive list of stuff sorted. I tried reading the individual changes and it all started blurring into one.

You can pick up a copy of Crusader Kings III on Humble Store or Steam .

Watch video on YouTube.com

The latest and greatest in open source graphics drivers has released with Mesa 20.2.0, although you should wait on it if you're after a stable experience.

As always, the Mesa team suggest waiting on at least the first bug fix release with Mesa 20.2.1 which is usually out within a few weeks. Developer Dylan Baker who announced the new release mentioned to expect some more regular releases for the 20.2 series, as they're back from a long vacation.

What's new? Lots, as always. Support for new Vulkan extensions, added support for new GPUs including initial work done for AMD's upcoming RDNA 2 noted as "gfx10.3", expanded GLES 3.2 and OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, lots of work on the Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs. You can find some release notes for Mesa 20.2.0 here .

One of the big items this release is for AMD, as the ACO shader compiler announced by Valve has now been switched on as the default for the RADV Vulkan driver although you can still set a debug option to go back to LLVM. This means that you should see smoother gameplay overall with modern AMD GPUs when using Vulkan, and perhaps better overall framerates too. If you want a little more info about ACO, you can see this previous article with the highlights and video from the recent XDC 2020 conference.

Need to learn more about Mesa drivers? See the official site .

OpenRCT2 is the free and open source game engine reimplementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, adding in many advanced featured and cross-platform support.

Another new update is out now with the v0.3.1 "Self Defence Against Fresh Fruit" release that went up on Septembet 27, 2020. Quite a wonderful sounding set of new features too like 2x and 4x zoom level options (which require the use of the OpenGL renderer), there's a new API for listening and communicating over TCP which they mentioned could be used towards things like Twitch integration, their API expanded to expose more for people to hook into like scenery placement / removal and there's even new snowy weather types like a blizzard.

More bugs were also squashed with this release, some of them sounding pretty funny. One particular bug had entertainers making themselves happy, instead of guests. Imagine that, a person with a bunch of balloons round the back of a building just making shapes for themselves and telling everyone to go away - how rude.

The team behind OpenRCT2 are a dedicated bunch and it's quickly become the ultimate way to play RollerCoaster Tycoon. You can find OpenRCT2 here , plus grab the required data files from RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 on GOG .

ScummVM, the awesome all-in-one solution for playing tons of classic adventure and RPGs has a brand new release available which expands the games supported.

Release 2.2.0 "Interactive Fantasy" is out and it's quite the history lesson. One of the noteworthy titles they mention that's newly supported is Colossal Cave Adventure, which originally released in 1976 and is known as the first work of interactive fiction in gaming.

Their support of other interactive fiction games expanded dramatically too as they pulled in support for more game engines like ADRIFT, AdvSys, AGT, Level 9, ZCode and more. They said this has given ScummVM support for around 1,600 more titles.

Other newly added games include:

• Blazing Dragons
• Eye of the Beholder - Sega CD version
• Griffon Legend
• Interactive Fiction games
• Operation Stealth
• Police Quest: SWAT
• Prince and the Coward, English translation
• Ultima IV - Quest of the Avatar
• Ultima VI - The False Prophet
• Ultima VIII - Pagan

As a reminder: since some games need the data files of games still sold, you can find a few classics on GOG.com .

On top of that they added autosave support for all the game engines, improvements to the keymapper, on Linux you can now flick an option to use the native file browser instead of their own, errors are now more likely to throw up a debugger so you can report issues better rather than just crash and more smaller fixes everywhere. See the release notes here .

The free and open source RTS Warzone 2100 continues advancing, with a big graphics rendering overhaul recently merged in ready for the next release.

Originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive, released as open source in 2004 and the legacy of it continues on as a completely free game. Quite an innovative RTS at the time too, very different to anything else that was out. One I remember spending a great many hours on!

Since 2019 they've had a ticket up on their GitHub tracking a number of rendering changes in a merge request which as of September 26, 2020 - was merged into the main codebase ready for whenever the next release arrives. Now that it's in, the next release will have support for:

• OpenGL 3.0+ Core Profile (default), OpenGL 2.1 Compatibility Profile
• OpenGL ES 3.0 / 2.0
• Vulkan 1.0+ (this backend can be selected with the command-line option --gfxbackend=vulkan)
• DirectX (via LibANGLE) on Windows

If you want to try pre-made builds, they have links for Ubuntu in this GitHub comment . They mentioned Vulkan support in the Snap package will come later too. It's not entirely clear when Warzone 2100 version 3.5 will arrive with this, as there's still a bunch of open issues in progress for it.

Warzone 2100 is another wonderful example of game preservation in action thanks to open source.

See more on the official site .

The team hacking away on the Wine compatibility layer have put out another development build with Wine 5.18 now being made available. Wine 5.18 comes not long after the Wine team also released vkd3d 1.2 , their Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation layer and it seems part of the work was on integrations here.

Here's the highlights:

• Vulkan shader compilation using the new vkd3d-shader library.
• USER32 library converted to PE.
• Console no longer requires the curses library.
• Support for display modes with various orientations.
• A number of syntax fixes in the WIDL compiler.
• Non-recursive makefiles.

Along with this release they noted a further 42 bugs being fixed. Our usual disclaimer applies: some are old bugs solved in earlier releases, some only recently. Titles improved include: No One Lives Forever, a number of GOG installers should no longer crash, Neverwinter Online: Launcher crash fix, League of Legends, The Witcher 3, there's fixes that affect multiple Chromium-based browser engines and Blizzard games and so on.

Full release notes can be found here .

If you need help running multiple Wine versions, Lutris is good for that. You can also get help in our Forum any time.

Possibly one of the most stylish turn-based strategy games around and one that's also rather difficult, Overland just had a big 1.2 update released with some funny new additions.

A post-apocalyptic road-trip game all about making tough decisions. You thought XCOM 2 was difficult? Overland can be quite on the brutal side. Small maps that don't give you a lot of wiggle room, with one misstep it might all be over. Every noise you make only brings weird creatures closer and you've got to get moving across the United States.

Not seen it? Check out the original trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Here's some highlights of what's new in Overland 1.2:

• Pugs! They're very cute I promise
• Rest stops! Take a breather halfway through each biome (if you need one).
• New introduction and prologue! Includes spooky lore :O
• 3 new difficulty settings! Includes a new normal mode for players new to the adventure.
• 7 new gameplay modifiers including all-dogs mode, tourist mode, and expert settings
• Updated badges and stats display
• Browse records of past trips!
• Dialog, item, and environment updates

Released back in September 2019, it's wonderful to see it expand. The developer Finji mentioned game development "during a plague year is never really exactly how you want things to go, but we've been creating and testing these changes since about January, and are so happy with how they've turned out" when talking about the 1.2 update.

I have to admit, the inclusion of a dog only mode seems pretty hilarious and it might be my new favourite thing.

Must save the Pug!

Finding another dog and inviting them into my crew might be the sweetest thing I've seen in a turn-based strategy game, as they both give a little "woof" and wag their tails and suddenly I've got a two-dog crew driving across the USA during the end of the world. It's weirdly wholesome, until one of them dies that is — so sad.

You can pick up Overland from GOG , itch.io and Steam .

Klei continue going through all the characters in Don't Starve Together to bring them up to date with all the new content and game mechanics with a fresh upgrade out now.

As expected of Klei, it also came with one of their brilliant animated shorts that I love so much:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Highlights of the character refresh:

• When in combat Wigfrid now gains Inspiration, which, as it fills her meter, allows players to use the new craftable songs.
• Fighting stronger foes will provide more Inspiration.
• Disengaging combat will cause the inspiration to diminish.
• Wigfrid has a new Stagecraft crafting tab from which she can make her new songs.
• Singing adds a buff to all players in an area around Wigfrid, which remains active as long as she keeps her inspiration level up.
• As Wigfrid's inspiration raises, she can preform up to three abilities at a time.
• Some abilities have an instant effect, at the cost of reducing Wigfrid's inspiration

Klei also put up a fresh set of skin packs to further support the game:

• Wigfrid Deluxe Wardrobe ($10.99): This Deluxe Wardrobe contains Wigfrid's complete set of Guest of Honor, Roseate, Survivor, Triumphant, and Winged Victory skin items.
• Wigfrid Winged Victory Chest ($2.99): This Chest contains Wigfrid's complete set of Winged Victory skin items.
• Winged Victory Chest ($3.99) : This Winged Victory Chest contains the following skin items: Winged Spear, Winged Helm, and Marble Victory Armor.
• For a limited time Wigfrid's past skins are 50% off . After that her Guest of Honor, Roseate Chest, Triumphant, Survivor Chests will be available for $2.99.
• Starter Pack 2020 ($7.99): This Chest contains the playable character, Wortox: The Soul Starved, Wilson's Victorian skin set, Willow's Guest of Honor skin set, Wigfrid's Verdant skin set, Webber's Contenders skin set, the Weathered Spear, the Mini Beefalo Carryall, and the Sleepytime Ensemble.

A few assorted bugs were also fixed during this update. As for what's next, they mentioned the Hallowed Nights event is coming up next month. Don't expect a lot of changes though, although there's a few new bits, as they were focused on an upcoming major content update.

The next big update is called "Forgotten Knowledge" and it's going to be released in October. No details on what's in it yet but they did drop a teaser:

What do you think that is?

Whatever Forgotten Knowledge turns out to be, I've no doubt it will be fun. Klei have repeatedly expanded Don't Starve Together into such a massive exploration survival game, it's absolutely brilliant. The Troubled Waters update back in July was pretty great! It might actually be one of my favourite survival games, it easily has the best style.

You can buy Don't Starve Together on Steam .