One green, two greens, three greens, win. It's not often I get to see fresh correct letters lined up as neatly as that, so it felt a little like I was literally chipping away at today's answer as I travelled down the board. That was a satisfying game, I hope you enjoy it too.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, June 19

Brief. To the point. Text or speech that conveys the bare minimum. Sometimes today's clipped answer seems—or can be—rude. There's only a single vowel today.   

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Playing Wordle well is like achieving a small victory every day—who doesn't like a well-earned winning streak in a game you enjoy? If you're new to the daily word game, or just want a refresher, I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success: 

• You want a balanced mix of unique consonants and vowels in your opening word. 
• A solid second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• The answer could contain letters more than once.

There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by the end of the day. If you're struggling to find the answer or a tactical word for your next guess, there's no harm in coming back to it later on. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

 You've got this. The answer to the June 19 (1096) Wordle is TERSE.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Knowing previous Wordle solutions can be helpful in eliminating current possibilities. It's unlikely a word will be repeated and you can find inspiration for guesses or starting words that may be eluding you. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• June 18: COVER
• June 17: PRIOR
• June 16: GRIND
• June 15: PROUD
• June 14: VAULT
• June 13: ANGST
• June 12: DETER
• June 11: SWUNG
• June 10: MANGA
• June 9: KAPPA

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's your job to work out which five-letter word is hiding by eliminating or confirming the letters it contains.

Starting with a strong word like LEASH—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good place to start. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second go should compliment the starting word, using another "good" guess to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.  After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS). 

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

The Call of Duty collaboration with Fallout that leaked in May is now official, as Activision has announced that four gun-toting escapees of Vault 141 are coming to Call of Duty: Warzone, Modern Warfare 3, and Warzone Mobile on June 20.

The Fallout Vault Dweller Bundle includes a pair of themed weapon blueprints, one for a "Vault-Tech Approved" M16, the other for an "Atomic Disintegrator” HRM-9—which, despite the name, is a relatively conventional SMG. Each weapon includes two aftermarket parts that make them even more useful in the heat of combat.

In practical terms the guns are the centerpiece of the bundle, but for my money the real highlight has to be the new Vault 141 skins for Price, Ghost, Soap, and Gaz—because this is where I think it misses the mark. Yes, the vault dweller skins are "authentic," but they also look, well, really silly. Skin-tight sky blue leotards with gold lamé trim isn't a good look for anyone outside the inherently ridiculous Fallout universe, and throwing them slapdash on the Call of Duty lads just looks wrong. Why not give Ghost a ghoul mask instead of his usual skull, or turn Price's chops into the classic OG Overseer goatee? Okay, that might go over a lot of heads, but they didn't even tart up Gaz's hat. Put an NCR flag on it, for heaven's sake!

A number of players have also taken note of the complete lack of power armor in the new pack. I get that to an extent: Animating power armor within the context of Warzone would surely be a headache, not to mention coming up with an explanation for why it doesn't offer any better protection from gunfire than some stretchy jammies. Hitboxes might also be a concern for the gargantuan armor set, but then again, they made Gundum work.

I feel like if you're a gaming colossus on the scale of Microsoft and you've decided to mash together two of your biggest entertainment properties, you figure out some way to get that sweet T-51b in there. More than anything, that is the iconic image of Fallout, and a Call of Duty crossover without it feels incomplete—like it's less a creative exercise and more the vaguely sad but inevitable outcome of relentless, grinding media consolidation.

Am I reading too much into it? Maybe so. An awful lot of reactions to the announcement on Twitter are clearly enthusiastic for it. But just as when the crossover leaked in May, it's not universal, which is a little unexpected given that these are two of the biggest names in gaming.

As noted by a few players, it probably wouldn't have been too much trouble to at least get some Ranger armor from Fallout: New Vegas in there, but even that's nowhere to be seen. (Let's hope that doesn't fire up the conspiracy theories again.)

Yeah, that probably would've done it.

Here's everything in the bundle:

• Four “Vault 141” Operator Skins
• “Atomic Disintegrator” HRM-9 Weapon Blueprin
• “Vault-Tec Approved” M16 Weapon Blueprint
• “Let’s Do This!” and “Fatman” Charms
• “Wasteland Workshop” Calling Card
• “You’re Special” Large Decal
• “Vault-Tec Engineer” Emblem
• “Nuka-Cola Spacer” Sticker
• Six Loading Screens including “Nuka-Cola,” “Please Stand By,” “Survivors’ Journey,” “Sanctuary Hills,” “Vault 141,” and “Restoring Democracy”

Pricing on the Fallout Vault Dweller Bundle hasn't been announced, but it's set to go live on June 20. That will also mark the start of the Fallout: Vault Dwellers event in Warzone, Zombies, and Call of Duty multiplayer, which will grant an XP boost to players using the Vault Dweller skins and also offer the opportunity for players to earn other Fallout-themed cosmetics. The event is set to run until 8 am PT/11 am ET on June 26—full details are up at callofduty.com.

There are a lot of perfect and near-perfect scores in the mix, and we've added our own mark to the tally. PC Gamer's Shadow of the Erdtree review is already up, and our Tyler Colp had plenty of praise to share for Elden Ring's last hurrah, ensuring its place as "one of the most creative and satisfying action RPGs ever made." Here's a roundup of reviews from critics elsewhere.

"Variety is the spice of life, and Erdtree is one hot dish."

IGN: 10/10

For Mitchell Saltzman at IGN, Shadow of the Erdtree basically manages to deliver all the hard-won satisfaction of an entire Elden Ring playthrough in a convenient, fun-sized DLC form factor—if a few dozen hours can qualify as fun-sized. "Shadow of the Erdtree may not do anything radically different from the base game," Saltzman writes, but its array of new bosses, new equipment, and new areas to explore "somehow feels like a scaled-down version of that same experience that recaptures all of the magic of playing Elden Ring for the first time."

"Shadow of the Erdtree has stuck the landing."

GamesRadar+: 5/5

Over at our sister site GamesRadar+, Joel Franey found a lot to love in Shadow of the Erdtree, which shares the base game's ability to deliver beautiful landscapes, stunning bosses and encounters, and interesting gear to work into your builds. "At this point," Franey writes, "it's almost getting boring praising FromSoftware every time."

"A point at which this becomes one-dimensional."

Eurogamer: 3/5

Amidst the sea of unhesitating praise for Erdtree, it's encouraging to see a critic voice their criticisms about the current object of industry-wide hype. Alexis Ong at Eurogamer still has plenty of good to say about the DLC, particularly in an excellent art history-informed survey of the expansion's visuals. "Everything is still exquisitely beautiful," Ong writes, later saying that "Shadow still has its share of Elden Ring's brilliance—weird little dudes and obscure secrets and goofy cheesing and all."

Where Shadow of the Erdtree stumbles for Ong is its departure from the base game's mostly-implied storytelling and instruction. To Ong, Elden Ring was "a living text to be read and learned, and ambiently, lovingly communicated," while the DLC "undermines the hallmarks of its own genre through unnecessary signposting."

"Shadow of the Erdtree doesn't outclass the primary campaign but expands it."

Game Informer: 9.75/10

Game Informer's Marcus Stewart declares Shadow of the Erdtree the best thing it can possibly be: more Elden Ring. It's difficult, of course, often painfully so, but Stewart writes that while some new bosses "may rival Malenia in difficulty," any post-death woes "can often be remedied by simply moving on to someplace else." The DLC, Stewart says, "maintains a sky-high status quo" as a fitting punctuation for the era of Elden Ring.

"A staggering achievement."

GameSpot: 10/10

Tamoor Hussain at GameSpot sees Shadow of the Erdtree as a final, crowning piece to FromSoft's dark fantasy: a summative final chapter that puts Elden Ring in a league with Kentaro Miura's Berserk. With Shadow of the Erdtree, Hussain says FromSoft again proves its "peerless" reputation for "creating worlds that feel as dangerous and unnerving to be in as they are satisfying to conquer."

"Some of the most rewarding game content in all of Elden Ring."

Polygon: Unscored

At Polygon, Michael McWhertor finds Shadow of the Erdtree a celebration of player perseverance. If your main draw for Souls games is challenge, it sounds like you'll find plenty: "Everything in the expansion," McWhertor writes, "is stronger and more deadly than anything you've met in Elden Ring." But thanks to a healthy supply of new tools, weapons, and fighting styles, McWhertor says it's rewarding enough that he's "looking forward to going back and starting it all over at some point."

"Though my expectations were high, Shadow of the Erdtree still managed to exceed them."

Destructoid: 9.5/10

While Destructoid's summary for its Shadow of the Erdtree review says "there may be flaws" responsible for its not-quite-perfect score, those flaws aren't presented for us to see. Chris Carter and Steven Mills deliver a duo review for Shadow of the Erdtree, and they offer their enthusiasm without restraint. Calling Erdtree "a gigantic single sandbox to play around in," Carter says it's one of his "single favorite areas in From Software history." It's a sentiment Mills shares, saying that FromSoft is once again "exceeding my expectations in pretty much every way imaginable."

Riot's head of League Studio Andrei van Roon said in a recent Q&A session that while the studio might be interested in pursuing UGC in other projects, League of Legends itself isn't really built for that sort of thing.

"We feel a lot of what we've built on League, where we have strengths, what players are looking for, for us are are less about sort of building a UGC platform and more about building particular types of experience using these characters in a competitive or semi-competitive setting—playing to the strengths of MOBA, that action-strategy mix," van Roon said.

League of Legends game director Pu Liu echoed that sentiment, saying that user-generated content "is primarily a platform and technology play" that's already dominated by a small handful of games—Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft—in what he described as "a fairly winner-take-all market."

"I think if I look at what Riot's strengths are and our competitive advantages, I'm not gonna go pick that fight with Epic," Liu said. "Maybe Andre, my boss, would tell me we should but I think it's a technology platform play and not one that we're likely to win."

Riot may be feeling a little pressure to "do something" with League of Legends. As Liu and van Roon noted in the same Q&A, League's core player base is getting older and fewer newcomers are joining up. That's in part because League is facing competition from games like Fortnite and Roblox that simply didn't exist when League hit its peak, a problem compounded by accessibility challenges inherent in being a 15-year-old game: It's a dense, heavy experience that tends to be dominated by people who have literally grown up with it, and putting it gently, that can be discouraging for newbies.

One thing Riot has in mind to help broaden its audience is ensuring it's as easy as possible to be aware of, and move between, its games. In late 2023, for instance, the studio added a Legends of Runeterra button to the League of Legends client, which van Roon said "felt like a good way—especially because we know that the MOBA and the strategy audiences overlap a lot—to serve both the existing League players who might want to play LoR and the LoR community looking for more players to come in."

It won't be a universal thing—van Roon said 2XKO, Riot's upcoming fighting game, "may not have that same sort of degree of audience overlap"—but the overarching goal is to "make sure we've got that really easy ecosystem flow going on."

"It's going to depend on the game" van Roon said. "But we certainly don't want to go and feel quite as 'off on a little island by itself' as Legends of Runeterra used to."

Jailbreak! During Tuesday's Nintendo Direct presentation, a trailer for Japanese RPG Fantasian: Neo Dimension revealed that the 2021 Apple Arcade exclusive is finally coming to PC. Its creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, best known for helming the Final Fantasy series from 1987 until his departure from Squaresoft in 2003, had some surprise help in freeing Fantasian from its mobile exclusivity: Final Fantasy 14 producer Yoshi-P.

If you follow Sakaguchi on Twitter, you'll immediately realize this is a match made in heaven. Sakaguchi loves Final Fantasy 14, playing the MMO to the near exclusion of all other games. He "basically lived in Final Fantasy 14" back in 2022, playing it 12 hours a day, but has never collaborated on it, saying then he wouldn't be able to enjoy playing it as much. While Sakaguchi seems to be on good terms with his former Square Enix colleagues these days, he hasn't worked on anything with the studio in more than 20 years. Until Fantasian.

"I'm working on this together with Yoshi-P. While talking about FF14 lol," Sakaguchi tweeted (via translation) on Tuesday, announcing that the new port to PC and consoles was being published by Square Enix. Either time really does heal all wounds, or Sakaguchi just couldn't pass up the chance to talk raid strategies while at work. The Final Fantasy 14 producer's team, which is also hard at work on a PC port of Final Fantasy 16, must be overseeing the new version of Fantasian.

"I developed Fantasian thinking that it could become my final work before retiring, so it has a special place in my heart," Sakaguchi shared in another message posted on Twitter. "Having the opportunity to rebuild it at Square Enix this way and making it widely known is truly a blessing. This title is an amalgamation of the souls of the diorama craftsmen, Uematsu compositions, and of course, the game developers. If you'd like, please do give it a try!"

The craftsmen Sakaguchi's referencing there are the members of his studio, Mistwalker, who built dozens and dozens of intricate dioramas that were then digitally scanned and turned into models to serve as the RPG's backdrops. While the 3D graphics and Fantasian's turn-based battles are otherwise fairly conventional, the dioramas are drop-dead gorgeous and unlike anything else out there (except maybe Harold Halibut). Hopefully they hold up well on larger displays—my guess is they will, since the iPhone 13 Pro Max, released the same year as Fantasian, already had a very dense 2778x1284 pixel screen.

A rundown of the new additions, courtesy of Square Enix:

• English and Japanese voiceovers
• 4K visuals
• Normal difficulty mode - "Fantasian was a very difficult game upon release, with many bosses pounding players before they worked out the optimal strategies to defeat them. FANTASIAN Neo Dimension adds a new ‘Normal’ difficulty, to make the game a little more approachable. Of course, if you crave the challenge of the original game, that’s still there too!"

There's no Steam page for Fantasian yet, but it appeared on SteamDB some months ago, and is listed on the official site, so we know it's coming. It's out in late 2024.

Keener's role in Avowed first came to light last week thanks to @PoweredbyidTech on Twitter, which naturally provoked some excitement: Garrus is everyone's favorite stoic sexy bird man, after all. Obsidian essentially confirmed the casting (or at least hinted at it pretty unmistakably) a few days later:

Now it's really official: Obsidian confirmed with PC Gamer that Keener will in fact portray Kai in Avowed, and also shared the rest of the talent behind the game's main cast of companions. Here's who you'll be meeting on your travels through the Living Lands:

• Brandon Keener, who we've already talked about, will give life to Kai, a coastal aumaua soldier
• Mara Junot, best known as the voice of Ikora Rey in Destiny 2, will portray Giatta, one of the ocean folk from the Vailian settlement of Fior mes Ivèrno
• Anjali Bhimani, who portrayed Medusa in Stray Gods and Commander Natara in Starfield, is Yatzli, a hearth orlan wizard
• Scott Whyte, whose many roles include Rathma in Diablo 4, will give voice to the boreal dwarf Marius

Kai narrated the Avowed gameplay trailer that dropped in 2023 and when word of Keener's appearance in the game first came to light, I gave it a close listen to see if I could pick out his voice. I had an unexpectedly immediate and visceral reaction when I heard him in a guest role on some US police procedural many years ago ("That's Garrus!" I shouted, literally reenacting the Pointing Rick Dalton meme, while my partner gave me The Look) and I figured I'd be able to pick him out quite easily in the Avowed video.

I did not—because, as it turns out, that wasn't Keener: Obsidian said the voice was "scratch VO," and confirmed that "Brandon is For Reals Kai."

Keener's voice as Kai can be heard in the much newer Avowed deep dive that aired after the recent Xbox Games Showcase, and yeah, there's no missing it:

(Some of you may now be wondering, "How do I get Kai to climb me?" but I'm afraid that's not going to be on the table.)

For the record, I haven't played Avowed yet, or even watched all the pre-release stuff, but I'm going to say that yes, this is the correct casting. I mean, come on: 

One final note: The unofficial Pillars of Eternity wiki describes aumaua as "semiaquatic humanoids," so Kai isn't really a fish man in the strictest sense, but neither is Garrus really a bird. Sometimes you just have to roll with these things.

Avowed is set to come out later in 2024.

So it's with no small excitement that I tell you that the original 1996 Resident Evil just got a mysterious new PC PEGI rating (via Gematsu), suggesting something is going on with the game, and it seems likely to me that something is a release of some kind. You can find it yourself by searching 'Resident Evil' on PEGI's website, where the listing still seems to be live at time of writing. There's violence in it, apparently. News to me. 

Now, you might be wondering what the big deal is. After all, Resident Evil 1 has been available on Steam for years. Thing is, that's a touched-up remaster of the Gamecube remake, not the original 1996 version of the game. That PlayStation version did get a Windows release in the same year, but it's never made its way to digital storefronts. A random pop-up on the PEGI website doesn't necessarily mean anything, of course, but it strikes me that it could well indicate the older version of the game is due for a re-release.

There were actually two versions of OG RE: The one that came out first and its Director's Cut version, which mixes up stuff like item and enemy placement across the Spencer Mansion. The PEGI rating doesn't give much indication as to which version it refers to. Given that the version you can get on PS4 and PS5 is the Director's Cut, though, I'd be surprised if it wasn't that one.

It's pure speculation on my part, but I wouldn't hold out much hope for modernisation if this is a digital release of the original RE. I suspect it just means someone at Capcom realised the company had a PC game in its back-catalogue that it might as well release on Steam, rather than any kind of whizzbang remaster. Still, I'd be very happy to see the classic get preserved (legally) on PC, and if it means we might see RE2 and RE3 digital releases sometime down the line? Even better.

To be clear, I haven't read the full books yet—WOTC's presentation only offered a top-level view of what's to be found within, with key examples. But the parts the designers were keen to highlight felt, to me, hugely revealing of what they see as important, and though I did like some of what I saw, Wizards of the Coast doesn't seem to be addressing any of the game's core problems, or ensuring its game feels modern and relevant through these partial updates. 

You'd be forgiven for still not fully understanding why there's a new set of D&D books to buy. WOTC has been clear that this isn't a new edition of the game. What it's been rather less clear on is what the new core rule books actually are. So, to put it in plain terms: this is an update for 5th edition, like a big patch or a new season in a videogame, based on a brand new Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual that replace the existing tomes. The core system isn't changing, but it is being tweaked, added to, and reformatted. All this new material will, however, still be compatible with old books and adventures. 

The idea is that this will be the model going forward—incremental updates, instead of major shifts, with core books referred to by the year of their release rather than an edition number. We've played D&D 5e with the 2014 books, now we'll be playing with the 2024 books, and eventually we'll be playing with the 2034 books (or earlier, if this works out). 

New content

From what I'm shown, these books have been really substantially reimagined—don't fear that these are just minor updates to get you to buy the same things again. The new Player's Handbook offers an easier ramp into the game, with more comprehensive examples and explanations of the rules, plus reworked backgrounds and classes with a huge selection of subclasses and spells to choose from. The Monster Manual rebalances existing monsters and adds plenty of new ones, including apex monsters for each creature type that serve as epic bosses (as soon as I hear the name "Blob of Annihilation", I want to fight one).

Most changed is the Dungeon Master's Guide. The DMG has been an odd book in each edition, often feeling like the most inessential of the three and containing a muddle of different additions that don't really cohere into a useful resource. This new version, however, is actually designed to be a useful guide for Dungeon Masters—what a novel thought! It contains advice on the DM's role in the game and a step-by-step process for writing adventures along with some example ones to use. There's a section on creating your own campaign and world, and for the first time ever (somehow), the DMG includes an example campaign setting.

There's a lot of interesting steps forward here. The book's artwork is cleverly evocative, for example—the PHB depicts lots of adventurers, with an illustration for every subclass, while the DMG focuses on inspiring depictions of locations and villains Meanwhile, the MM shows monsters in the middle of combat, or exhibiting key behaviours. That's characteristic of what seems to be a much more practical approach to these books than we've often seen before. They're designed to facilitate play above all, a simple but admirable focus for the hobby's leading TTRPG. 

But, to be frank, a lot of this feels to me like D&D catching up to ideas other TTRPG designers cracked years ago—and, worse, it comes with a lot of elements that still seem miles behind. 

Old ideas

The DMG including a sample campaign setting is great, but that sort of thing has been standard in other big TTRPGs for a very long time already, and the setting they've chosen is a fairly rough sketch of Greyhawk. If you're not familiar, that's literally the first official D&D setting ever, from all the way back in Gygax's day. It's a really important part of the game's history, no doubt about that, but in a modern context it's a well-worn and generic fantasy world—it feels difficult to get excited about in 2024, and I'm not sure it's helpful inspiration to get a modern DM's mind racing.

Elsewhere, there's a focus on scale that seems counterproductive. The PHB includes an unprecedented 48 subclasses—more character options is cool, but this seems like bloat to paper over the fact that 5e's classes offer very little true customisation. Magic has a similar issue—there will now be close to 400 to choose from, but this is a game that already struggles to balance its arcane options and make them all feel meaningful against each other. Experienced players will simply drill down to a shortlist of the best and ignore the rest, as they always have, while new players will be overwhelmed by an artificially wide array of choices. 

The Monster Manual is the biggest the game's ever seen, with more than 500 monsters, including over 75 new ones, but it seems to be offering scale over innovation. One of the new creatures showcased is just a skeletal fire mage to add to an already long list of skeleton foes—another forgettable mook to churn through. Other additions seem even more niche, such as extra groups of NPC stat blocks (including "performers, pirates, and more"), and new kinds of merfolk said to be ideal allies for seafaring campaigns. 

It harks back to the 3.5 days, when everything had to have a detailed statblock regardless of whether it was relevant to actual play, with books enormously bloated as a result. Far more useful would be better guidance on creating those yourself, or advice on when numbers aren't needed at all. Just the suggestion that you might need to know the AC and HP of a "performer", or know exactly what differentiates a pirate from a land-dwelling bandit, is a throwback to an unhelpfully outdated mode of game design.

The future is the past 

Overall, there's a real lack of genuinely new ideas. There's plenty of added and reimagined content to justify buying three new books, but no sense of the game moving forward from 5th edition's launch in 2014, which was itself in large part a throwback to how the game felt in the early 2000s. 

So much innovation has happened since in the world of tabletop gaming—but none of it's happened here, bar a brief jog to catch up to other systems that have already moved the hobby forwards. We already saw during the bloated and unbalanced 3.5 era that bigger is not simply better—quality is more important than quantity. It's disappointing given that this is supposed to be a vision of D&D's future. 

I can certainly understand how the negative reception to the sweeping changes D&D 4e made to the game has left the company frightened of major change—that's clearly why this is being presented so vaguely, rather than being officially a new edition or even a D&D 5.5. But that doesn't make it any less unexciting to see D&D set out its stall for the future as "more of the same, but bigger, forevermore". 

The new Player's Handbook releases September 17, the Dungeon Master's Guide on November 11, and the Monster Manual on Feb 18 2025. All three are available to preorder now—you can get them separately, or all together, and there are preorder bonuses for jumping in early. 

It also didn't make an appearance during Summer Game Fest, so for the last skongers still holding out hope, the Nintendo Direct stood as a final bastion of news. I say that—the pre-show atmosphere was a little grim, with Silksong subreddit user E1331 being publicly sacrificed via hanging for taking a bite out of the Team Cherry logo by the mods. Other memes were less corporal punishment, but similarly pessimistic.

WE ARE GETTING NEWS THIS TIME (cope) from r/Silksong

As you've surmised by the headline, the Direct came, went, and vanished into the night and—sadly—there was no news, despite one determined viewer threatening to "give birth if they don't announce it". I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate YouTube commenter Cody & Zach Antz on their new blessed child, who will presumably graduate before Silksong comes out.

In another era, I would characterise the community as a group of scrappy, die-hard underdogs with their fists raised and a 'that all you got?' spluttering from their split, bloody lips. The feeling I get right now, however, is like watching a very sad clown standing knee-deep in a puddle, while the same truck does laps around the block to further douse them in rainwater. Speaking of clowns, that's the prevailing theme.

Why are we all here just to suffer? from r/Silksong

"Dudes the insanity is funny and all but I can't even lie to you man, the sheer disappointment in getting no news in ANY showcases this year, zero communication from Team Cherry and their very vague hints are release (or not) is starting to make this stuff feel really unfunny and just straight up disappointing," writes one player in a thread explaining why the subreddit's mods, who I imagine are currently under siege, have been manually approving all text posts.

"We got Metroid Prime 4 before Silksong," writes another numb player. For context, Metroid Prime 4 was announced in 2017, reportedly restarted development in 2019, and has barely had a whisper until now and, yeah, that's gotta sting.

Listen. Silksong's probably coming out, (maybe, probably). What we saw back in 2022 seemed like it was coming along well—but there was such a small, tiny, optimistic sliver of my heart that hoped beyond hope we'd get some news today. Maybe it really is releasing in 9998, after all.

No one's saves should be broken, but that won't stop the upcoming Economy 2.0 patch from messing with your files: "Any saves that you have built and played on before the patch will be affected by the changes brought by the patch," a Paradox Interactive blog post says. "We wanted to share a list of things you might encounter while loading up your save after the Economy 2.0 patch." 

Essentially, the first few in-game months after the patch may be a little strange as the game tries to catch up or counterbalance all the changes that the new patch brings. One of the most terrifying bits of collateral damage that players will have to deal with is an oncoming "death wave" that'll take out most, if not all, your city's elderly population. "The older your citizens are, the more severe it will be," the blog post says. "This is because we want to vary the age when citizens can die much more to avoid future death waves—but this can only happen once the Grim Reaper has finished with the city." 

I don't like how quickly the blog post just glosses over the idea of a 'death wave' or that if I finally decide to launch Cities: Skylines 2 again, I may have to witness a mass of deaths that I haven't seen since I accidentally messed up my water and sewage pipes in the first game, giving half my population cholera. But at least this should mark the last major visit from the Grim Reaper, so it's swings and roundabouts, I guess. 

There'll also be plenty of changes to the economy. "Expect a negative money trend initially, but tax income may offset new costs after recalculations," the blog post says. "If your city is struggling financially, consider increasing taxes, reducing service budgets, or temporarily turning off buildings to save costs." 

Companies will also need time to readjust to employee numbers and production, which could mean you'll see an increase in unemployment. Plus, the new residential density demand may also cause citizens to relocate or seek different housing. Long story short, your game isn't broken just because your city may be doing weird things, bear with and it should even out.

The Economy 2.0 patch will also likely mess up all your mods, as Paradox even admits that there aren't any "guarantees for modded saves—check for updates or instructions for modders." This will especially be the case for any mods that affect the economy, as that's what the upcoming patch reworks the most.

"Please be patient with the modders that make the mods you love, and while some mod creators have been given Early Access to the patch to be able to update their mods, they might be unable to update them immediately." Paradox also suggests that if you don't want to wait for mods to be updated, then there's always the option to "use a new playset empty of mods or temporarily add disableModding to the game's Steam launch options to disable all mods."