Vintage Story, the wilderness survival sandbox inspired by lovecraftian horror themes with some impressive depth to it has a huge new stable release up.

A survival game that just continues to impress me. Slow and difficult to get into but very rewarding once you learn the mechanics which have a surprising amount of depth. That depth gets deeper with the Seasons Update, which I don't think I need to explain too much with the big highlight being a full season system which includes: snow accumulation, there's season-specific foliage and temperature dependent plant growth.

Not only seasons though, graphically it got another bump. There's now SSAO (screen space ambient occlusion), specular sunlight reflections on water surfaces and more foamy water. Also added: persistent world map, lots of new flora for hot and wet climates like Fern trees, crotons and rafflesias, in-game help improvements and tons more. Have a look at the new trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Not only did they focus on some massive feature additions, they also detailed a bunch of performance improvements that made it into this release so you might find it running a bit smoother in places.

In a previous article here, a user mentioned that they thought it had "constant-online DRM" but the developer cleared up that misconception in a comment to mentioned that it does a single authorisation check when starting up. You can even block it after the first time and it will keep on working. So DRM-free it's technically not but it's reasonably sane.

You can buy it from Humble Store , itch.io and the official site .

You don't always have to give up classics, thanks to open source. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 continues living on with a fresh update of the re-implementation OpenRCT2. It attempts to provide everything from RCT2 as well as many improvements and additional features, along with cross-platform support.

Release v0.3.0 "Every Script is Sacred" is out now, which continues to improve the foundation enabling you to enjoy the game even more. Like a lot of open source game engines, it's never really done . OpenRCT2 is very playable though, even with online multiplayer.

Some highlights include: support for custom JavaScript plugins, .sea (RCT Classic) scenario files can now be imported, ride list sort mode is now remembered for the duration of the game, Path additions are now kept when replacing the path, a new version notification system, Guest entry points can now be removed by clicking them again, a Cheat to allow building at invalid heights was added, you can now open doors with the tile inspector and more. Multiplayer got a small tweak to allow a Custom IP address to be advertised to the master server to work around IPv6 issues. This release will also warn users running it in Wine instead of the proper build, as it leads to issues.

There's also numerous bug fixes and other improvements like allowing water and land height changes on park borders, build hash written into screenshot metadata, handymen are less likely to get stuck in ride queues, guests should no longer scream constantly on smaller rides, some RCT1-specific fixes and so on. Lots of important fixes to improve the flow of the game.

You can find OpenRCT2 here , plus grab the required data files from RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 on GOG .

Veloren is an in-development open-world and open source voxel RPG, it shows a massive amount of promise and a brand new release is out for you to try. If you missed it, we did an interview with one of the developers back in June which is a good read if you want a little more background info.

Inspired by the likes of Cube World, Dwarf Fortress, and Breath of the Wild it could be something special and this brand new 0.7 release is showing more of what it's capable of.

Release Highlights:

• Progression: crafting system, stats system for items, and improved character saving
• Exploration: dungeons, new world generation, and castles
• Combat: new weapons, pets, particle system, skills, groups, improved AI, and new SFX

That's really just the tip of the code, there's so much that's improved it's crazy. NPCs call for help if attacked, there's speech bubbles for nearby players when talking, a new context-sensitive crosshair was added, there's a Lottery system for loot, a server whitelist system, better pathfinding and the list just goes on. Amazing work by all the contributors.

They're also having a release party today at 18:00 GMT/11:00 PST/14:00 EST/20:00 CET. All you need to do is make sure you're up to date and logged into the main server.

Grab it free from the official site , using the launcher is the easiest way.

The International 10, Dota 2's upcoming major tournament is getting close to breaking another record for the prize pool. Plus there's a new Collector's Cache up.

Mostly funded by the Battle Pass , where 25% of it goes into the prize pool and the rest to Valve, making it a tidy earner for Valve even with their costs. For the 2019 tournament, the total managed to hit $34,330,068 which was a world record for the biggest prize pool in a single e-sport event. It's looking this the next tournament is going to be even bigger with it currently sitting at $32,655,676. There's still quite a long while to go too, as the current Battle Pass isn't ending until September 19 . Looks like we might have another world record on our hands here soon! A lot can happen though, as the actual tournament is no longer happening as planned. Valve delayed The International 10 until 2021 , due to all the issues with COVID19 making travel a bad idea.

Helping with that Valve also released The International 10 Collector’s Cache Volume II on August 14, containing a set of items from the Dota 2 Steam Workshop with a full set for multiple hero favourites. 25% of each sale also goes into the overall prize pool and it's only available for 30 days. I have to admit, the Tidehunter skin turning them into something Cthulhu-like is pretty awesome:

You can play Dota 2 on Linux free on Steam .

Wildermyth, a tactical turn-based RPG with a Papercraft styled design that's like a tabletop RPG mixed with XCOM has recently had some pretty huge tech upgrades.

It's already winning me over as a game, with some fantastic campaigns to play through and a style that is just amazing. However, it has struggled with a few major technical issues across both Linux and Windows. In particular, the mouse was unusable in fullscreen which has now been fully solved. The developer has recently upgraded their use of the cross-platform tech: libGDX, LWJGL and GLFW to new major versions which has made the entire experience drastically better.

Feature Highlight:

• Extreme Character Depth: Reminiscent of tabletop roleplaying, unique heroes are born in unique settings every game. They age, transform, fall in love, disagree, and make harrowing sacrifices.
• Each hero brings their own organic history and personality with them, but your choices and combat skills are what decide their paths and outcomes.
• All heroes die someday… but you get to hold on to your favorites. Reintroduce them in the next adventure, and over many lifetimes the myths you make will form your own legendary pantheon.
• An Imaginative Papercraft World

Unlike certain other turn-based tactical battlers, it's not overly punishing either. It takes a different approach to death too. You could have a character go out in a blaze of glory, or let them retreat with an injury that will change their character and how you use/interact with them. Each play-through can be wildly different too thanks to the event system, all the different character builds you can do and how there's multiple types of stories to go through. The developer, Worldwalker Games, continue expanding all the content available too and it's already got a lot of replay value to it.

If you're after a new game that mixes RPG mechanics with tactical combat, I can now happily suggest you go and take a good long look at Wildermyth. After burning out on XCOM 2 from playing far too much (great game), Wildermyth is a nice breath of fresh air. You might end up falling in love like I did.

You can pick up Wildermyth on Steam and itch.io .

Another two weeks and another development release of Wine has been let out to breathe, here's the highlights of Wine 5.15 that will eventually become Wine 6.0.

Release highlights:

• Initial implementation of the XACT Engine libraries.
• Beginnings of a math library in MSVCRT based on Musl.
• Still more restructuration of the console support.
• Direct Input performance improvements.
• Exception handling fixes on x86-64.

This release also saw 27 mentioned bug fixes, some being older bugs that were found to be working now. Fixes include: Red Dead Redemption 2, Grim Dawn, Call of Duty: WWII, FrostyModManager, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, Bully Scholarship Edition and more.

You can see the release announcement here .

Need to know what Wine is? It's the constantly improving compatibility layer that allows the running of Windows-only applications and games on Linux and other operating systems. It's one of the driving forces behind Steam Play Proton . Helping you to get whatever you need done on Linux, or perhaps so you don't have to give up that favourite game.

If you want help managing different installs of Wine, you can try Lutris .

Indie game dev Wessel Stoop has announced their evolution sim, The Sapling, will be getting a first proper major update since entering Early Access in 2019.

With an aim for The Flower Update to land on September 10, Stoop mentioned over email that they spent three months completely rewriting and optimizing the underlying engine. As a result, they mentioned it's become possible to make scenarios 100 times larger. This was needed due to some of the new features coming which will include:

• Pollination & flowers, allowing the plants you designed to mix their genes. One way to spread pollen is by attracting animals with colorful flowers.
• A new sandbox level, completely redone and 100x larger! Besides random mutations and timejumps, it now also allows you to change the overall temperature and see what that means for evolution.
• A new scenario, teaching you how to set up an ecosystem with flowers.
• Extensions to the procedural music system. It now adds rhythm in if you speed up time, making it even more responsive to your actions.
• Bioluminescence. So you can now add it to your plants and animals as well, to attract other creatures.

Watch video on YouTube.com

To go along with the announcement, they released a new teaser site for the update. They also mentioned that it will get continually updated as the update comes closer with a little roadmap:

• August 17: more details on the pollination & flower mechanics
• August 20: more details on the new sandbox
• August 24: more details on how bioluminescence works
• August 27: more details on the UI overhaul that is also part of this update
• September 3-10: Twitch livestream where viewers can vote for the temperature to go up or down... will the ecosystem be able to adapt in time?

Sounds like it's about to become a much bigger and more interesting sim.

You can pick it up on itch.io and Steam .

After a few months since 1.7 went out, DXVK 1.7.1 is now live to further improve Direct3D to Vulkan translation. This is the project that helps to power Proton, the compatibility layer for Steam Play .

This release adds support for newer Vulkan extensions, fixes bugs and has new GPU driver requirements. On the driver side, the VK_EXT_transform_feedback extension is now required which has been supported in drivers on Linux since late 2018 / early 2019.It also pulls in support for both VK_EXT_4444_formats to help Intel and VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state to  "implement out-of-bounds vertex buffer access behaviour correctly" where drivers support them. Neither is a hard-requirement like VK_EXT_transform_feedback is.

As for game improvements, plenty more Windows games should see improvements including Anarchy Online, Metro Exodus, Observation, Resident Evil 7, Serious Sam 2, SpellForce 2, Timeshift, Trackmania, Borderlands 3, Halo, Mafia III: Definitive Edition and more. For D3D9 specifically, they also implemented some missing shader bits to fix shadow rendering "in a number of games".

You should also find that GeForce Now works when used with DXVK, although from what I've seen there's plenty of other issues elsewhere with running GFN in Wine. You can find the full release notes here .

As a reminder: it's possible to update your Steam Play Proton install with this newer DXVK release, without waiting on a new Proton build. To do so you can just overwrite the existing DXVK files with the release download of DXVK 1.7.1. You can find your Proton install somewhere like this (depending on your Steam Library drives):

path-to-your/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton x.x/dist

Where x.x is whatever Proton version installed you wish to give a new DXVK.

Inside there you will see "lib" and "lib64", for 32bit and 64bit. Inside each of those, there's a "wine" folder and inside there is a "dxvk" folder and that's where you replace the files with new versions. Do so at your own risk but it's usually harmless. If you mess anything up, to refresh it you can usually just re-install Proton from the Tools menu in Steam.

A chiptune/8-bit version of the Dead Cells soundtrack? Absolutely sign me up. Oh, there's also a brand new free content update out now which is nice too.

What they're calling the "Barrels o' Fun" update is out now, with an entirely new level/biome to play through which provides you with an alternative path to High Peak Castle which should spice-up the late game. This of course comes with new weapons, enemies, explosions and probably many player deaths. The new biome is called The Derelict Distillery, which comes with its own distinct style full of "old broken barrels and bottles, pipes venting steam, cool looking metal containers in the background - that kind of thing". That's great and all but it's the enemies that are important here, there's a new angry fella who throws big explosive barrels at you.

Have a look at the new trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Additionally they launched the Demake Soundtrack, which is a retro remake of the existing tracks. They stated that it's a "work in progress" with 35 tracks right now, and more will be added as they add more levels to the game and so this soundtrack will continue to expand for free (after you buy it, that is). They're providing the tracks in both MP3 and FLAC. The Demake Soundtrack is currently only on Steam .

You can pick up Dead Cells from Humble Store , GOG and Steam .