Just when Geoff Keighley had started to fade from your memory, he comes rubber-banding back with a vengeance - snap! It's Gamescom week and it kicks off with Opening Night Live this evening from 7pm UK time (other Opening Night Live timings here). A pre-show with additional announcements will begin at 6.30pm UK. We'll be watching and reporting on it live, as always, right here, so you can either keep abreast of announcements while you do something else, or you can join in with your thoughtful and amusing comments. Please keep us company. Please.

What do we expect to see today? Well, probably Geoff Keighley, but also the new Indiana Jones game, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Dune Awakening. We're also expecting Little Nightmares creator Tarsier to unveil its new project, which could be exciting. On top of that: Diablo 4 expansion Vessel of Hatred, Civilization 7, hero shooter Marvel Rivals, Lost Records (the project made by the creators of Life is Strange), Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (which was recently delayed), and Black Ops 6. Keighley's best pal Hideo Kojima has also been tweeting enigmatic silhouetted pictures of actors who are presumably playing roles in Death Stranding 2.

And before you ask, "Yes, there will be new game announcements," Keighley said on X.

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During Lockdown, the only thing more scarce than flour was Switch fitness game Ring Fit Adventure. It was the perfect thing at the perfect time: a game that provided a home workout in a period when you had to stay home. Strap the controller to you, grab the oversized resistance wheel thing, and get moving. Everyone wanted one, and the desire for it lingered long after Lockdown. Today, Ring Fit has sold more than 15m units - it's one of the most successful games on Switch. Nintendo sensed there was a market and Ring Fit proved it. And it's not just Nintendo: companies like Peloton, with its uber-expensive exercise bike and integrated workout platform, have shown people will pay significant amounts of money to gamify their fitness needs, and it's into this exact space a new challenger has arrived.

It's called Quell and it's currently £190, and I tried it this week and I really liked it. The topline thing you need to know is that it delivers a punishing workout. It's more intense than Ring Fit; after a short demo plus a 20-minute regular session, I was dripping sweat freely on the rug in Quell's smallish London office. There was no air conditioning - enough said. That's not to say Ring Fit can't be intense but it's generally a calmer experience. Quell is designed to push it up a notch.

The second thing to know is that Quell feels more actively gamey than Ring Fit, which I was quite surprised about. It's built with roguelike principles in mind, so you try to see how far you can get in the game but also build and customise a loadout as you go. Do you want this power or that one? That kind of thing. And then between runs, you equip the items you earned, affecting your power and statistics, adding a layer of role-playing game progression to the mix. "Real fitness. Real gaming," is the company's motto, so you get a sense of the areas it's trying to push on.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we get sweaty in a new fitness game called Quell; we mull the ways in which Dungeons & Dragons combat is exciting but also frustrating; and Ian goes digging through the crates and revisits a classic.

What have you been playing?

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we push through to get to better times in a game, which we hope are coming; we change our perception of a game after talking to the people who made it; and we find the familiar in a game that also manages to feel completely new.

What have you been playing?

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we push through to get to better times in a game, which we hope are coming; we change our perception of a game after talking to the people who made it; and we find the familiar in a game that also manages to feel completely new.

What have you been playing?

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.

Read more

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we enjoy poking around spooky oil rigs, we object in dramatic court cases, and we discover what we love about a game series through a TV adaptation of it.

What have you been playing?

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.

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Dark and Darker is a game about escaping dungeons. And there's a problem with that - or there should be. Dungeons are so common in fantasy games that it's hard to pay too much attention to them. We've seen them all before, we know what they do. But when was the last time we really re-examined what being in one would actually be like? Dark and Darker does this, and it does it brilliantly well.

Technically it's a PvPvE extraction game, which means you go into a dungeon with - and against - other people, as well as monsters, and you have to find a way out. If you die, you leave with nothing but the experience points you earned. If you take too long, you'll be hurried and eventually killed by an earthquake, or by a deadly blizzard blowing in. The point is pressure. You know, even before you begin, you're never going to be safe. You will need to move, but where?

It's dark. So dark you won't even see the chests next to you unless you light a torch. You won't see platforms or the missing parts of platforms either. You won't see traps on the floor or the piles of bones that form into skeletons when you're nearby. In terms of setting, Dark and Darker lives up to its name. Light in the game, therefore, is valuable. But torches also mark you out to anyone nearby, and they occupy the sword arm you hold them with. They're a risk.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we drift off reading the world's largest set of patch notes, we drift off flipping through a book of late-night urban pictures, and we drift off as we drop down a well.

What have you been playing?

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

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You thought the summer showcase festivities were over but - wahoo! - there's still one more to come: Nintendo Direct. The showcase will begin today (18th June) at 3pm UK time, and run for around 40 minutes.

I'll be covering all of the announcements from the show live, right here, keeping you up to date in case you can't watch it. But you can also watch the stream here and chat with us, of course. These things are much more fun with friends.

So, what are we going to see? Let's get the big one out of the way first: Nintendo Switch 2? No, unfortunately. Nintendo has already ruled that out. "There will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during this presentation," said Nintendo, yesterday, while announcing the broadcast. This show will focus on the games coming to Switch in the second half of 2024 instead.

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We've had a weekend of Summer Game Fest coverage and we're still not done. This evening, it's Ubisoft's turn. The Ubisoft Forward main show begins at 8pm UK time, with a 30-minute pre-show beforehand, and we'll be covering both live, right here, so you don't miss a thing.

What to expect? Big showings for two major new games: Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin's Creed Shadows. They're both nearly upon us. Star Wars Outlaws arrives at the end of August, and AC Shadows in the autumn, so I'd expect extended gameplay showings tonight. We've seen montages of action from the games but what are they like in moment-to-moment play?

Beyond that, we'll likely see more of the free-to-play Tom Clancy shooter xDefiant, which has only just been released, and probably something of Just Dance, because Just Dance is always there. But will we see anything of the elusive Beyond Good & Evil 2, or the troubled Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake? We can always hope.

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The Summer Game Fest stampede continues today with a big one: the Xbox Game Showcase. The show starts at 6pm UK time and we'll be covering all the major talking points right here, in a blow-by-blow account. As ever, you can watch the stream right here and chat about everything in the comments with us below.

What do we expect to see? Indiana Jones and the Great Circle from Wolfenstein developer MachineGames, the Shattered Space expansion for Starfield, and possibly Flight Simulator 2024. I'm also holding out hope for a proper look at the Fable reboot, and there's a chance we may see the new Gears of War game that The Coalition has been working on. That's a pretty solid line-up, if it all comes to pass.

However, it's against the backdrop of studio closures and redundancies that Microsoft takes to the stage, so it'll be interesting to see if there's any reaction or reference to that. Microsoft has also made some bold moves in recent months to make previously Xbox-exclusive games available on PlayStation, so I wonder whether that initiative will continue with other games. It's an important moment for Microsoft; let's see what it's got.

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Don't they roll around quickly? It's Summer Games Fest time again! Yes that's right: 10 hours of Geoff Keighley showing us every gaming trailer he can get his hands on. It takes place tonight, 7th June, at 10pm UK time, and you can both watch it and read our blow-by-blow account live, right here on this page.

Clarification: I was being silly when I said it would last 10 hours. It will last two.

As for what to expect, Keighley has tempered expectations by saying this year's show will focus more on updates to existing games rather than new releases, which isn't terribly exciting. But Capcom will be there to show Monster Hunter Wilds, we'll probably get a look at Star Wars Outlaws, and Remedy's Sam Lake seems to be there so there's a suggestion of something for Alan Wake 2. Five Nights at Freddie's company Blumhouse has got something new to show, Bandai Namco's action game Unknown 9 looks like it's going to be there, and the creator of Gravity Rush and Silent Hill is going to premiere his new game Slitterhead. I'm not sure about that name, Toyama-san.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we play probably the closest thing we're ever likely to get to Bloodborne on PC; we jump back in time in a retro-inspired RPG; and we enjoy the easy delights of this year's Clash Mini.

What have you been playing?

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

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I liked Fights in Tight Spaces. It mashed together two things I'm fond of: Roguelike deck-builders and badass secret agents. FITS gave me a turn-based experience that made me feel like Jason Bourne, punching and kicking and weaving my way around enemies on cramped battlefields. I stepped around their punches and redirected them back at them. I slammed their heads into walls and tables. I dodged bullets - whoa. I even booted people off the wings of aeroplanes. I survived insurmountable odds. FITS did what it promised and fulfilled my hand-to-hand spy-fight fantasy. But where does the series go from here? Well, the answer is hundreds of years back in time, to medieval times, to Knights in Tight Spaces.

KITS swaps suits for suits of armour, guns for bows and arrows, and stark primary colours for a more wood-carved, tavern-table look. Underneath, though, the core is more or less the same. It's still turn-based, still grid-based, and you're still fighting in tight spaces and building a deck with card-based abilities. And it's not just a reskin. KITS has changed the formula in ways that make a surprising difference.

The biggest difference is the game no longer revolves around one character - you are no longer the lone spy infiltrating an enemy base. Instead, and as in the grand tradition of fantasy role-playing games, you now do it with a party, which makes for a fundamental shift in gameplay. There are a few elements to this.

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It's a dangerous thing, toying with people's gaming memories, because they've often welded to our sense of self and who we are. They're not impartial any more, if they ever were. These memories are a powerful thing to appeal to, and a smart way for a game to get attention, but it's also dangerous ground to tread. Because what if in aping the past, you undermine it? What if in the harsh light of reality, you expose old games for what they were - limited in comparison to what we have now?

I've been thinking about this because of two games: Skald, the Commodore 64-styled role-playing game, and Crow Country, the PlayStation 1-styled survival horror. Skald came out this week and we have a review in the works, and Crow Country came earlier in the month and our review aired this week. That's partially the reason I'm making Crow Country our game of this week.

It's a gorgeous thing. It's got that muddy colour palette PS1 games used to have, and that sense of claustrophobia caused by a low screen resolution. The camera angle is fixed, the characters are chunky, and you can almost count the number of polygons on them. It really does look like a PS1 game, and people have been giddy about it on social media for weeks. But is that all games like this are - superficial nostalgia plays?

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we return to an old series to see how it's evolved, we go to the underworld and play with the gods, and we go back to the Arkham game that started it all.

What have you been playing?

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

Read more

Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters of Eurogamer. It's a series that highlights some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also about having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and if you want to read more, you can - you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

Which was the first game to have a dash move in it? The earliest I can think of is the Mega Man series. But was that a slide or a dash? Because although they serve similar functions, I think they're distinct things. It's tricky! Today of course, dashes are synonymous with action games, and even other kinds of games, and it's probably more common to play games with them than without them. Dashes have become a fundamental part of our gaming lexicon. But the question is, which dashes have been the most memorable - which dashes are the best?

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Welcome back! Let's Get Evil is a monthly series for Eurogamer Supporters in which Bertie rampages through games being as evil as he can. It sounds easy, but is it? And how much freedom to be horrible does each game afford? There's only one way to find out.

Note, spoilers will naturally occur as Bertie gets further and further through Baldur's Gate 3. Currently, he's dealing with events in Act 3, especially those revolving around the Dark Urge. If you're joining us for the free trial this month, make sure you catch up on the earlier instalments - then you'll know the true power of the Dark Side.

This month, I have mostly been helping others reach their horrid potential. Think of me as an enabler, if you like - a demonic enabler bent on bringing out the very worst in people. Today's enable-ee: Astarion. But first a quick catch-up. I left you last time after the seismic reveal that Bhaal, the god of murder, was my father. Not only that, I discovered I had instigated this whole sorry Elder Brain plot to take over the world to begin with. Gortash, Ketheric Thorm and I started it, and then Orin came along and turfed me out. I remember now, more or less. Gortash is up for rekindling our old alliance and conquering the world together, which I'm all for. Now all I have to do is kill Orin. It will be my pleasure.

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I've had a week of vampires. I finally managed to get my thoughts together in a V Rising review after being quite frustrated with the game, then quite smitten by it, and then I wrote about vampires for Five of the Best, and I'll be writing about vampires again for Bertie's Evil Adventures. Blimey - let's hope I still have something incisor to say after all of that! I promise you that introduction wasn't just an elaborate set-up for a terrible pun. But as much as I want to write about vampires again for Game of the Week, there's another game I simply can't ignore (even though Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is trying its best to vye for my attention) and it's Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2.

You'll be forgiven for not even noticing it's come out. Microsoft hasn't particularly advertised it, which I find strange, given the lack of high profile exclusives Xbox currently has to crow about. Perhaps you were also somewhat distracted, like we were, by the news Eurogamer has a new owner in IGN. That's a development I'm sure you're keen to understand the finer points of - I'm planning to record an episode of Inside Eurogamer in a week's time to explore it more, once we have a bit more to say there. But: back to Hellblade 2.

Hellblade 2 reminds me of an old kind of game, which isn't supposed to sound in any way shady - it's actually complimentary. What I mean by it is Hellblade 2 is not surrounded by modern business model trappings, like live service elements and microtransactions. It's a one-and-done story-led, cinematic adventure, produced in a way that screams "that's enough", but still given room to be experimental with the form. I feel strange saying it but it's unusual. It's special.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we lean on sailor superstition to scare a boat full of pirates, we voyage across space in vast gothic monasteries, and we learn a hard lesson about communication in an outrageous kitchen.

What have you been playing?

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we look up at the sky, with our eyes and through our phones; we live out our fantasies as a tiny fire trying to find their way home; and we find the best cat game you have probably never heard of.

What have you been playing?

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

Read more

Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters of Eurogamer. It's a series that highlights some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also about having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and if you want to read more, you can - you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

We're well aware of our human capabilities, so games often deliver fantasies about going beyond them. We play characters with extraordinary acrobatic abilities, or with incredible strength or martial prowess, and sometimes, we play as characters who have powers we could never have. Mixed within this is the fantasy of becoming something completely different and changing entirely from a human into something else, and that's what I want to get at here. Ever since Altered Beast, and probably for far longer, we've had games that allowed us to change shapes and access new abilities as we play. We've even had games take us to inorganic places, with mech suits and more. Shape changes can be the ultimate power-up. The question is, which are the best?

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In conjunction with what appears to be warm weather in the UK, we've decided to do another free trial month on Eurogamer. This means you can try a month of being a Supporter for free, and make use of things like no adverts on the site and access to our exclusive Supporter content, which includes Five of the Best, Game of the Week, my Let's Get Evil series, and the Inside Eurogamer podcast. I just recorded an Inside Eurogamer episode with Ian and Ed all about streaming, which I found very illuminating.

There's plenty more coming through May and into early June. My next instalment in the Let's Get Evil series will likely bring my Dark Urge playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 to an end. It's been a deliciously horrid ride but will I hold my nerve and remain monstrous or succumb to nagging morals? We'll see. Also, once it finishes, there's the question of which game to terrorise next. I have a Dragon Age: Inquisition rampage to return to, which would be very well timed with a new Dragon Age game maybe dropping later this year, but what about something else? I'd love to hear your suggestions.

Five of the Best and Game of the Week will continue on their weekly schedules, and there should be time before the trial is over to squeak another episode of Inside Eurogamer in. And remember: it's on that podcast we answer your questions. I'll make sure you have a day or two's notice before we record so you can ask them. I'm also working on a key giveaway for a game that we loved last year, and that should land later in May or early June. But remember, key giveaways are for yearly Supporters so people don't sub for a month (for £3/€3/$3) and run. I have some other Supporters bits and pieces in the works, too, which I hope I can tell you about soon.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we celebrate one of the best characters in the Uncharted series, and perhaps in games; we live out our Star Wars fantasies; and we try a new Metroidvania in a well regarded series.

What have you been playing?

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

Read more

When Minecraft smashed down like a meteor all those years ago, the idea of chopping down trees in games - to make wood to make shelter - felt excitingly new. Before then, games weren't particularly concerned with the mundanities of survival, presumably in the name of what they thought was fun. Games were for extraordinary adventures, not ordinary ones. But Minecraft changed that. It made a feature of finding food and keeping yourself fed, and not thirsty, and it introduced us to a gameplay loop revolving around it. Make a shelter to survive the night, make a set of equipment, and then when you've got a stable footing in the world, you can find myriad ways to upgrade every part of that.

To say that the idea caught on would be an enormous understatement. Minecraft was an era-defining moment. It propelled the whole gaming movement on YouTube, and YouTube with it, and helped launch the careers of so many gaming influencers there. It showed that there was a massive, captive audience for this kind of open-ended, multiplayer, crafting survival thing, and a stampede of other game-making companies rushed to follow it. Years later, there are many really successful games in this area: Ark, Rust, Terraria, Valheim, Palworld, Grounded, The Forest, Enshrouded, Don't Starve, to name a few. The genre has become so influential it's spread to brands like Fallout, and elements of it can be found in huge games like Fortnite. The concept is now so familiar it's understood implicitly wherever it's used. We know the loop, we know what to do. But why have I never questioned it?

This rushed to mind while playing V Rising, which just fully launched in version 1.0. You might remember it having a moment a couple of years ago in early access. Time has passed but even now, it's got a really compelling pitch. You are a newly arisen vampire who must build a castle and make your Castlevania-inspired mark on an unsuspecting world. A world in which you'll worry about the daytime rather than nighttime and where you'll suck blood to absorb powers and wield powerful magic. A land filled with bosses to beat and where a PvP endgame awaits, based around territorial dominance, should you want it - there are private servers and PvE servers if you don't. V Rising has bulked out in early access and is a full package now. The problem is, it locks its really good stuff away.

Read more

Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters of Eurogamer. It's a series that highlights some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also about having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and if you want to read more, you can - you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

The more I've tried to pin down the definition of a god in a game, the harder time I'm having with it. I began by thinking 'out-and-out gods only', the kind that represent the dominant powers in the games we play, whether we fight against them or with them. But the more I thought about it, the more that definition broadened, because aren't we always a kind of god when we play a game - don't we always have a kind of godlike power? We are able to die and keep trying until we've - usually - defeated a godlike boss or bosses, depending on what the game is. What does that make us if not a god? I am open to any and all arguments here, so have at it. Which gods in games do you think are the best?

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It's just occurred to me that Baldur's Gate 3 is shy of being a year old, and I'm struggling to come to terms with that because it feels like the game just came out. I know in my rational mind it didn't, but where did those months go? Why didn't I feel them in the way I normally would? I think I have an inkling why.

I felt it while watching an orchestral performance of Baldur's Gate 3 at the weekend. It was part of the Game Music Festival and featured a special concert arrangement of the game's score, and it was sublimely done. There was a large choir and full orchestra and it gave oomph to the dramatic music from the game. Even the vocalists were there to reprise their iconic "down, down, down by the river" motif. Not that any of this is unique; we've had orchestral video game concerts before - Ed was just at one for Elden Ring - and earlier in the day at the Southbank Centre, there was a recital for The Last of Us. I saw people milling around in The Last of Us T-shirts when I arrived. So I expected much of this. What I didn't expect, however, or what I wasn't prepared for, was the Baldur's Gate 3 effect.

Remember what the event itself was: an orchestral performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra. It's not where you would expect to see cosplay, as you would a games convention, but as the afternoon unfolded, that's what it resembled. Shadowhearts and Astarions gathered, as did copies of other characters from the game, and a palpable feeling of excitement crackled around. This quietened for the start of the performance, as people sat sensibly and clapped in the correct places, but the further it went on, the less it could be contained.

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"Role-playing games are only 50 years old. We're still inventing them every day. That's what's really exciting about it. We haven't found the boundaries of it yet, if there are any. We're still pushing out. That's what keeps me doing this stuff, years after most of my peers have retired or passed on."

Do you believe in fate, that there's an invisible force steering us through our lives and that we end up in certain places for certain reasons? Perhaps after hearing Lawrence Schick's story, you will.

It's not a name I expect you'll recognise, but you'll know some of the things he's responsible for. Take the term XP, for example. It's ubiquitous in gaming and possibly beyond it, and Lawrence Schick created it. It's primarily the reason I set out to track him down, to hear how that came to be, because it fascinates me to think of a gaming landscape where there's no established term for experience points, and possibly no such thing as experience points at all. I find it really hard to even conceive of that, given where we are now.

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In conjunction with what appears to be warm weather in the UK, we've decided to do another free trial month on Eurogamer. This means you can try a month of being a Supporter for free, and make use of things like no adverts on the site and access to our exclusive Supporter content, which includes Five of the Best, Game of the Week, my Let's Get Evil series, and the Inside Eurogamer podcast. I just recorded an Inside Eurogamer episode with Ian and Ed all about streaming, which I found very illuminating.

There's plenty more coming through May and into early June. My next instalment in the Let's Get Evil series will likely bring my Dark Urge playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 to an end. It's been a deliciously horrid ride but will I hold my nerve and remain monstrous or succumb to nagging morals? We'll see. Also, once it finishes, there's the question of which game to terrorise next. I have a Dragon Age: Inquisition rampage to return to, which would be very well timed with a new Dragon Age game maybe dropping later this year, but what about something else? I'd love to hear your suggestions.

Five of the Best and Game of the Week will continue on their weekly schedules, and there should be time before the trial is over to squeak another episode of Inside Eurogamer in. And remember: it's on that podcast we answer your questions. I'll make sure you have a day or two's notice before we record so you can ask them. I'm also working on a key giveaway for a game that we loved last year, and that should land later in May or early June. But remember, key giveaways are for yearly Supporters so people don't sub for a month (for £3/€3/$3) and run. I have some other Supporters bits and pieces in the works, too, which I hope I can tell you about soon.

Read more

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we celebrate one of the best characters in the Uncharted series, and perhaps in games; we live out our Star Wars fantasies; and we try a new Metroidvania in a well regarded series.

What have you been playing?

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

Read more

When Minecraft smashed down like a meteor all those years ago, the idea of chopping down trees in games - to make wood to make shelter - felt excitingly new. Before then, games weren't particularly concerned with the mundanities of survival, presumably in the name of what they thought was fun. Games were for extraordinary adventures, not ordinary ones. But Minecraft changed that. It made a feature of finding food and keeping yourself fed, and not thirsty, and it introduced us to a gameplay loop revolving around it. Make a shelter to survive the night, make a set of equipment, and then when you've got a stable footing in the world, you can find myriad ways to upgrade every part of that.

To say that the idea caught on would be an enormous understatement. Minecraft was an era-defining moment. It propelled the whole gaming movement on YouTube, and YouTube with it, and helped launch the careers of so many gaming influencers there. It showed that there was a massive, captive audience for this kind of open-ended, multiplayer, crafting survival thing, and a stampede of other game-making companies rushed to follow it. Years later, there are many really successful games in this area: Ark, Rust, Terraria, Valheim, Palworld, Grounded, The Forest, Enshrouded, Don't Starve, to name a few. The genre has become so influential it's spread to brands like Fallout, and elements of it can be found in huge games like Fortnite. The concept is now so familiar it's understood implicitly wherever it's used. We know the loop, we know what to do. But why have I never questioned it?

This rushed to mind while playing V Rising, which just fully launched in version 1.0. You might remember it having a moment a couple of years ago in early access. Time has passed but even now, it's got a really compelling pitch. You are a newly arisen vampire who must build a castle and make your Castlevania-inspired mark on an unsuspecting world. A world in which you'll worry about the daytime rather than nighttime and where you'll suck blood to absorb powers and wield powerful magic. A land filled with bosses to beat and where a PvP endgame awaits, based around territorial dominance, should you want it - there are private servers and PvE servers if you don't. V Rising has bulked out in early access and is a full package now. The problem is, it locks its really good stuff away.

Read more

Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters of Eurogamer. It's a series that highlights some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also about having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and if you want to read more, you can - you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

The more I've tried to pin down the definition of a god in a game, the harder time I'm having with it. I began by thinking 'out-and-out gods only', the kind that represent the dominant powers in the games we play, whether we fight against them or with them. But the more I thought about it, the more that definition broadened, because aren't we always a kind of god when we play a game - don't we always have a kind of godlike power? We are able to die and keep trying until we've - usually - defeated a godlike boss or bosses, depending on what the game is. What does that make us if not a god? I am open to any and all arguments here, so have at it. Which gods in games do you think are the best?

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It's just occurred to me that Baldur's Gate 3 is shy of being a year old, and I'm struggling to come to terms with that because it feels like the game just came out. I know in my rational mind it didn't, but where did those months go? Why didn't I feel them in the way I normally would? I think I have an inkling why.

I felt it while watching an orchestral performance of Baldur's Gate 3 at the weekend. It was part of the Game Music Festival and featured a special concert arrangement of the game's score, and it was sublimely done. There was a large choir and full orchestra and it gave oomph to the dramatic music from the game. Even the vocalists were there to reprise their iconic "down, down, down by the river" motif. Not that any of this is unique; we've had orchestral video game concerts before - Ed was just at one for Elden Ring - and earlier in the day at the Southbank Centre, there was a recital for The Last of Us. I saw people milling around in The Last of Us T-shirts when I arrived. So I expected much of this. What I didn't expect, however, or what I wasn't prepared for, was the Baldur's Gate 3 effect.

Remember what the event itself was: an orchestral performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra. It's not where you would expect to see cosplay, as you would a games convention, but as the afternoon unfolded, that's what it resembled. Shadowhearts and Astarions gathered, as did copies of other characters from the game, and a palpable feeling of excitement crackled around. This quietened for the start of the performance, as people sat sensibly and clapped in the correct places, but the further it went on, the less it could be contained.

Read more

"Role-playing games are only 50 years old. We're still inventing them every day. That's what's really exciting about it. We haven't found the boundaries of it yet, if there are any. We're still pushing out. That's what keeps me doing this stuff, years after most of my peers have retired or passed on."

Do you believe in fate, that there's an invisible force steering us through our lives and that we end up in certain places for certain reasons? Perhaps after hearing Lawrence Schick's story, you will.

It's not a name I expect you'll recognise, but you'll know some of the things he's responsible for. Take the term XP, for example. It's ubiquitous in gaming and possibly beyond it, and Lawrence Schick created it. It's primarily the reason I set out to track him down, to hear how that came to be, because it fascinates me to think of a gaming landscape where there's no established term for experience points, and possibly no such thing as experience points at all. I find it really hard to even conceive of that, given where we are now.

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It's time for another episode of Inside Eurogamer, the podcast that's exclusively for Supporters and which takes you behind the curtains here to understand why we do the work we do, and some of the things we've learnt about doing it. Today we're on trend talking about streaming. I say on trend but I don't think I've been on trend about anything, ever. Fortunately for me, other people have been.

Remember - advert voice - supporting Eurogamer is super easy and not that expensive. For £3/€3/$3 a month (or £30/€30/$30 a year), you get an ad-free website, exclusive articles, this podcast - in which we also answer your questions - and if you're a yearly subscriber, some key giveaways. I'm working on a new one of those right now. End advert.

Today I have Ian Higton and Ed Nightingale with me. Ian's expertise in the area of streaming needs little explanation. He's been one of the faces of Eurogamer video for many years now; he's actually the longest serving member by a couple of years - he ran the channel alone for a while. And as we find out in this podcast, he was right there at the start of streaming on YouTube. Incidentally, if you're interested in Ian's fuller life story, as I like to think of it, check out the dedicated interview podcast he and I recorded as he reached his 10-year anniversary here.

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In conjunction with what appears to be warm weather in the UK, we've decided to do another free trial month on Eurogamer. This means you can try a month of being a Supporter for free, and make use of things like no adverts on the site and access to our exclusive Supporter content, which includes Five of the Best, Game of the Week, my Let's Get Evil series, and the Inside Eurogamer podcast. I just recorded an Inside Eurogamer episode with Ian and Ed all about streaming, which I found very illuminating.

There's plenty more coming through May and into early June. My next instalment in the Let's Get Evil series will likely bring my Dark Urge playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 to an end. It's been a deliciously horrid ride but will I hold my nerve and remain monstrous or succumb to nagging morals? We'll see. Also, once it finishes, there's the question of which game to terrorise next. I have a Dragon Age: Inquisition rampage to return to, which would be very well timed with a new Dragon Age game maybe dropping later this year, but what about something else? I'd love to hear your suggestions.

Five of the Best and Game of the Week will continue on their weekly schedules, and there should be time before the trial is over to squeak another episode of Inside Eurogamer in. And remember: it's on that podcast we answer your questions. I'll make sure you have a day or two's notice before we record so you can ask them. I'm also working on a key giveaway for a game that we loved last year, and that should land later in May or early June. But remember, key giveaways are for yearly Supporters so people don't sub for a month (for £3/€3/$3) and run. I have some other Supporters bits and pieces in the works, too, which I hope I can tell you about soon.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we celebrate one of the best characters in the Uncharted series, and perhaps in games; we live out our Star Wars fantasies; and we try a new Metroidvania in a well regarded series.

What have you been playing?

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

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When Minecraft smashed down like a meteor all those years ago, the idea of chopping down trees in games - to make wood to make shelter - felt excitingly new. Before then, games weren't particularly concerned with the mundanities of survival, presumably in the name of what they thought was fun. Games were for extraordinary adventures, not ordinary ones. But Minecraft changed that. It made a feature of finding food and keeping yourself fed, and not thirsty, and it introduced us to a gameplay loop revolving around it. Make a shelter to survive the night, make a set of equipment, and then when you've got a stable footing in the world, you can find myriad ways to upgrade every part of that.

To say that the idea caught on would be an enormous understatement. Minecraft was an era-defining moment. It propelled the whole gaming movement on YouTube, and YouTube with it, and helped launch the careers of so many gaming influencers there. It showed that there was a massive, captive audience for this kind of open-ended, multiplayer, crafting survival thing, and a stampede of other game-making companies rushed to follow it. Years later, there are many really successful games in this area: Ark, Rust, Terraria, Valheim, Palworld, Grounded, The Forest, Enshrouded, Don't Starve, to name a few. The genre has become so influential it's spread to brands like Fallout, and elements of it can be found in huge games like Fortnite. The concept is now so familiar it's understood implicitly wherever it's used. We know the loop, we know what to do. But why have I never questioned it?

This rushed to mind while playing V Rising, which just fully launched in version 1.0. You might remember it having a moment a couple of years ago in early access. Time has passed but even now, it's got a really compelling pitch. You are a newly arisen vampire who must build a castle and make your Castlevania-inspired mark on an unsuspecting world. A world in which you'll worry about the daytime rather than nighttime and where you'll suck blood to absorb powers and wield powerful magic. A land filled with bosses to beat and where a PvP endgame awaits, based around territorial dominance, should you want it - there are private servers and PvE servers if you don't. V Rising has bulked out in early access and is a full package now. The problem is, it locks its really good stuff away.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters of Eurogamer. It's a series that highlights some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also about having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and if you want to read more, you can - you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

The more I've tried to pin down the definition of a god in a game, the harder time I'm having with it. I began by thinking 'out-and-out gods only', the kind that represent the dominant powers in the games we play, whether we fight against them or with them. But the more I thought about it, the more that definition broadened, because aren't we always a kind of god when we play a game - don't we always have a kind of godlike power? We are able to die and keep trying until we've - usually - defeated a godlike boss or bosses, depending on what the game is. What does that make us if not a god? I am open to any and all arguments here, so have at it. Which gods in games do you think are the best?

Read more

It's just occurred to me that Baldur's Gate 3 is shy of being a year old, and I'm struggling to come to terms with that because it feels like the game just came out. I know in my rational mind it didn't, but where did those months go? Why didn't I feel them in the way I normally would? I think I have an inkling why.

I felt it while watching an orchestral performance of Baldur's Gate 3 at the weekend. It was part of the Game Music Festival and featured a special concert arrangement of the game's score, and it was sublimely done. There was a large choir and full orchestra and it gave oomph to the dramatic music from the game. Even the vocalists were there to reprise their iconic "down, down, down by the river" motif. Not that any of this is unique; we've had orchestral video game concerts before - Ed was just at one for Elden Ring - and earlier in the day at the Southbank Centre, there was a recital for The Last of Us. I saw people milling around in The Last of Us T-shirts when I arrived. So I expected much of this. What I didn't expect, however, or what I wasn't prepared for, was the Baldur's Gate 3 effect.

Remember what the event itself was: an orchestral performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra. It's not where you would expect to see cosplay, as you would a games convention, but as the afternoon unfolded, that's what it resembled. Shadowhearts and Astarions gathered, as did copies of other characters from the game, and a palpable feeling of excitement crackled around. This quietened for the start of the performance, as people sat sensibly and clapped in the correct places, but the further it went on, the less it could be contained.

Read more

"Role-playing games are only 50 years old. We're still inventing them every day. That's what's really exciting about it. We haven't found the boundaries of it yet, if there are any. We're still pushing out. That's what keeps me doing this stuff, years after most of my peers have retired or passed on."

Do you believe in fate, that there's an invisible force steering us through our lives and that we end up in certain places for certain reasons? Perhaps after hearing Lawrence Schick's story, you will.

It's not a name I expect you'll recognise, but you'll know some of the things he's responsible for. Take the term XP, for example. It's ubiquitous in gaming and possibly beyond it, and Lawrence Schick created it. It's primarily the reason I set out to track him down, to hear how that came to be, because it fascinates me to think of a gaming landscape where there's no established term for experience points, and possibly no such thing as experience points at all. I find it really hard to even conceive of that, given where we are now.

Read more

It's time for another episode of Inside Eurogamer, the podcast that's exclusively for Supporters and which takes you behind the curtains here to understand why we do the work we do, and some of the things we've learnt about doing it. Today we're on trend talking about streaming. I say on trend but I don't think I've been on trend about anything, ever. Fortunately for me, other people have been.

Remember - advert voice - supporting Eurogamer is super easy and not that expensive. For £3/€3/$3 a month (or £30/€30/$30 a year), you get an ad-free website, exclusive articles, this podcast - in which we also answer your questions - and if you're a yearly subscriber, some key giveaways. I'm working on a new one of those right now. End advert.

Today I have Ian Higton and Ed Nightingale with me. Ian's expertise in the area of streaming needs little explanation. He's been one of the faces of Eurogamer video for many years now; he's actually the longest serving member by a couple of years - he ran the channel alone for a while. And as we find out in this podcast, he was right there at the start of streaming on YouTube. Incidentally, if you're interested in Ian's fuller life story, as I like to think of it, check out the dedicated interview podcast he and I recorded as he reached his 10-year anniversary here.

Read more

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we've gone with a bit of a theme: matchmaking. We've pulled on some of our most memorable matchmaking experiences from games we loved. Can you remember any of yours?

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

RuneScape is a game with a lot of grinding and, in many cases, this means a lot of standing around. Be it Woodcutting or Fishing, you'll find yourself fixed to one location where the only movement is between skill-spots or when it's time for a bank run to deposit your goods. (Unless you're a litterbug who just dumps everything on the ground.) Due to this I, and many other RuneScape players, have partaken in the long standing tradition of chatting away as your XP slowly climbs to the next level.

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I was stunned this morning to read about the sudden closure of award-winning British studio Roll7 by parent company Take-Two, as I'm sure so many of you were. It hasn't been officially confirmed by either company yet but there are reports out there and people talking in all-but-confirmation tones on social media. It seems beyond doubt.

But it was barely a blink of an eye ago - November 2023 - when I was sitting with studio co-founder John Ribbins, and creative director Andreas Yiannikaris, to talk about 15 years of Roll7 and what was coming next. They were each excited about new games they were directing there, with Ribbins hopeful we'd learn more about his one this year. But those games, I expect, are now cancelled. To me at the time they looked as comfortable and content as anyone in game development could be. Belonging to a big company like Take-Two, via its publishing label Private Division, looked good on them.

It makes me cringe to think we even talked about the layoffs ravaging the games industry, which have evidently continued well into this year. I didn't put this quote in my piece but it's pertinent now: when asked about layoffs and whether they'd affected Roll7, Ribbins said, "I don't think anyone feels safe, but I feel very fortunate that we became part of the Take-Two family when we did, and also very fortunate that they still back what we want to do. Obviously there's stuff we're doing we can't really talk about at the moment, because it's early, but to be in a position where that is happening when lots of places around us are struggling - in a position to keep doing what we're doing with the people that were doing it with: we're really lucky to be in that position."

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Supporters, we'll be recording a new episode of your exclusive Inside Eurogamer podcast tomorrow, and I want to know whether you have any questions for us. I've asked this before; you probably know the drill.

Brief aside: if you're not a Supporter and this podcast - and the chance to ask us questions - sounds like something you'd be interested in, then allow me to point you to our subs hub. Supporting us costs £3/€3/$3 a month or £30/€30/$30 a year, and for that you get an ad-free Eurogamer as well as exclusive articles and things like this podcast. Aside over.

In this episode, I'll have video producer extraordinaire Zoe Delahunty-Light with me, and deputy news editor Ed Nightingale too, and we'll be talking, primarily, about streaming. Zoe is obviously an old-hand at it, having done it for a number of years on the Eurogamer YouTube channel, but Ed's no stranger to it either. If you follow him on socials, you'll know that he streams regularly on Twitch, and that he's one half of the Swapping Joysticks gaming and streaming podcast. I'm personally keen to hear their advice for stream etiquette and how to make streams stand out, or just how to get started, because it's a topic close to my interests at the moment. But what would you like to know? If you have a question, pop them in the comments below.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters of Eurogamer. It's a series that highlights some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also about having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and if you want to read more, you can - you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

Every year, there are awards given to the best lead and supporting characters in games or movies, or TV shows or whatever else. They are, after all, the characters that the stories usually revolve around. But what about all of the other characters in those fictional (and sometimes factual) worlds? They might be less integral to the overarching story but I don't know if they're any less important to the feel and impact of the world. Some, of course, can go on to be so memorable they actually replace some of the main characters in our memories of the game, and that's who I want to highlight here. The question is, which minor character do you most remember from a game, and why?

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This week, everyone's been talking about early access releases again. Why? The headline moment was No Rest for the Wicked developer Moon Studios defending a bumpy early access release by saying, "It's already pretty clear that going with EA is one of the best decisions we could've made." And then unexpectedly it added: Dark Souls 1 could have been better had it had an early access release too - an odd addendum and I'm not sure I agree with it, but OK. The other thing this week was mega-Wishlisted game Manor Lords arriving in early access in, again, an unfinished state. Neither of these things is remarkable. We know how early access releases go by now - we've had them for the past 10 years (god is it really that long?). We know games aren't finished when they arrive, though there's still a part of us that sees a game being sold for full-price-like money and expects a full-price-like experience from it. So around Manor Lords and No Rest for the Wicked, a familiar discussion has resurfaced, of when are - and when aren't - early access releases a good thing?

There are some well-worn arguments here you will have heard before, and undeniably the open development model - which came in at around the same time as the 'take back control from the publishers' crowdfunding movement in 2012-ish - has notable benefits. It's hard to argue against the added income a game makes by launching into early access, with which a developer can finish making a game, without cutting corners. And it's hard to argue against having a huge and readily available QA team to playtest a game and new features, and offer feedback on them. You no longer need to guess what your audience likes: you simply can let them play it and see what they think. A lot of games that go through early access come out better on the other end, and some have been enormous successes, like Baldur's Gate 3 and Hades and Slay the Spire. It's no wonder each of the companies behind those particular games are set on using early access again.

Indeed, when I think about what I played of Manor Lords, early access seems like a great place for it. To my mind, it has some pacing issues and tuning kinks, and bugs - all of which I expected. It's also still without some of the important pieces it needs to be a full experience, and all of that, early access can help with. I actually hope that with the money it earns, a few more developers will join the Manor Lords team. It's been a solo project for several years but some extra people now will help push it down that final stretch. Who knows? Maybe the game will make so much money - there are 3m people with it on their Steam Wishlist after all - Manor Lords will be able to achieve things previously thought out of reach. That's what happened with Baldur's Gate 3, remember - the scope of the game increased because of its early access success.

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There's something quietly quite exciting happening, and I wonder where it's going to lead. Earlier this week, Grounded - the Honey I Shrunk the Kids backyard survival game - arrived on PlayStation, and at the end of the month (30th April) pirating game Sea of Thieves arrives on PlayStation too. It's a momentous occasion, even though it might not sound it, because we've never had games conceived as Xbox exclusives arrive on PlayStation before. It's an unprecedented new approach by Microsoft and, should it work, it could open a whole Mary Poppins bag of possibility.

I don't want to talk about the colder business case for it, because that's not what excites me. What excites me is what it means for players and, I suppose, for the games themselves. How wonderful it feels to be excited about these games again, which are now a number of years old. We first played Sea of Thieves in early 2018, and Grounded in mid-2020, and they were terrifically exciting then, but now they're not. They've been with us so long they've become familiar. No one's pulling you aside and asking you, raw enthusiasm in their eyes, if you've played them yet.

Well, not yet.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week: twin-stick shooters, caving, and ink.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

On a whim I did the Daily Challenge in Spelunky the other day. It has been years since this was a regular feature of my life. I had lots of Spelunky nerves, a reminder I hadn't played in a while: the toothy plants made me shiver, and a door in Jungle with spike traps on either side was enough to make me doubt my abilities.

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This year, World of Warcraft will get its 10th expansion, the War Within, which as an occurrence is nothing particularly remarkable - there have, after all, been nine of them before. This time though, things seem slightly different. There's an air of change around Blizzard, at least as far as World of Warcraft operations go. It's personified by executive producer and vice president for World of Warcraft, Holly Longdale, who joined the WoW team in 2020 (from EverQuest) and stepped into the EP role about two years ago. She talks - in a presentation at a WoW War Within event in London - about the team trying, for about a year-and-a-half, to be more transparent and share development more openly with the community, then elicit feedback more readily from them. And though team-leaders tend to say things like this, there does seem to be some evidence to back it up. Look on the World of Warcraft website: there's a string of in-development posts about War Within that reveal considerable information about it - there don't seem to be cards held close to chests. There are also posts detailing recent experimental ideas like battle royale mode Plunderstorm, which came out of nowhere, and the equally unexpected new Remix idea, which supercharges an entire previous expansion's content - in this case Mists of Pandaria's - for a speedy recap levelling experience. It sounds like a great idea.

Things have needed to change. World of Warcraft has never faced more competition - not only from other MMOs like Final Fantasy 14, but also from games that might as well be labelled MMOs, such as Fortnite. Whether or not World of Warcraft still rules the roost, I don't know, because Blizzard won't talk numbers, which in itself is probably telling. More importantly, Blizzard has had to weather some ferocious storms. There was the lawsuit that alleged sexual discrimination at the company, which although it was settled last year for multiple-millions, has caused considerable harm. There was also, at the same time, the whole will-they won't-they saga of the Microsoft Activision Blizzard buyout, which has now finally gone through and will bring changes of its own, such as Microsoft-enforced layoffs announced earlier this year.

It's against that backdrop Blizzard tries to answer the not inconsiderable question of how to make a 20-year-old game still feel relevant today. It's a remarkable innings, and it staggers me to think of how many millions of people and lives World of Warcraft has touched during it, but how do you bring those people back? Partially, some of the answer seems to be to go big. The War Within, unlike any previous WoW expansion, will belong to a trilogy - the Worldsoul Saga - which will build and build in scope until we're facing those legendary titans we always hear so much about from the game's foundational lore. Expansions two and three - Midnight, and The Last Titan, respectively - are already in development, and should combine to deliver the most ambitious connected storyline the game has ever seen.

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