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It’s Saturday morning and that can only mean one thing – yep, it’s time for another of our Weekly News Roundups, where we bring you all the news from the last week and pop into one handy article. And by some massive coincidence, here it is:

George R. R. Martin and From Software have collaborated on a new game

While many of us are sad to see the end of Game of Thrones, we may be getting our next fix sooner than we thought. A Song of Ice and Fire author, George R. R. Martin celebrated the TV series’ season finale this week with a new blog post – and casually dropped the line that he’s “consulted on a video game out of Japan.”

Earlier rumours suggested that GRRM was working as a lead writer on a new IP from Dark Souls developers, From Software. Gematsu has since reported that the author is indeed working with Hidetaka Miyazaki on an open-world RPG known currently as ‘GR’ and the new game will be announced at this year’s Microsoft E3 conference.

While it’s highly unlikely to be set in Westeros, a collaboration between Martin and Miyazaki sounds almost too good to be true. Roll on E3!

Playdate is a new handheld console arriving next year

Playdate is a new handheld console from Firewatch creators, Panic. It will come complete with 12 games as well as an actual working crank and is set for release in 2020.

Panic is taking a unique approach to how the games will be delivered; rather than giving you all 12 games at once, the releases will be staggered, giving you one new game to play every week. The games will vary in length and complexity and some will make use of the crank as part of the gameplay.

“What are these games? Here’s the thing: we’d like to keep them a secret until they appear on your Playdate. We want to surprise you. Some are short, some long, some are experimental, some traditional. All are fun.”

The first 12 games have been labelled as ‘Season One’ so it seems a fair bet that there will be more to follow.

World of Warcraft Classic beta is well underway

If you’re anything like me, checking your Battle.net app to see if you’ve been given access to the World of Warcraft Classic beta has become a (several times a) daily occurrence since it launched on May 15.

And it seems that there are good things to report for those lucky enough to get in. Well, I say good things, but bad things have been reported too, such as the amusing list that Blizzard compiled of bugs that aren’t actually bugs and were replicated to stay true to the original version of WoW. And it hasn’t stopped there, with Blizzard bringing back the playfulness of the old GMs, according to this tweet:

This week also saw the first stress test for the WoW Classic servers as more players were invited to put on the pressure in the starting zone of one server. During the stress test, players could only level characters up to level 5 and couldn’t leave the starting zones but that didn’t stop Blizzard from having some fun with players. Ragnaros, the final boss for the 40-man raid, Molten Core got a breath of fresh air as he was spawned into Elwyn Forest, along with other raid bosses, The Eye of C’Thun and Onyxia.

Further stress tests are planned and the next one is scheduled for May 29 from 2 – 4pm PDT.



Elsewhere on GGS Gamer this week:

  • John got to grips with Grip Combat Racing’s DLC Airblades.
  • After a small breather, John then let us know what he thought of Figment in his review of the puzzler.
  • Jay lay out his thoughts on Giga Wrecker Alt here.
  • And finally, I reviewed Pagan Online – you can read my thoughts on it here.