ARC Raiders - the free-to-play PvPvE extraction shooter from The Finals developer Embark Studios - has resurfaced following an extended period of retooling, and is now launching as a premium title for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5 next year.

If you're struggling to remember much about ARC Raiders, that might be because few details have been shared since its announcement back in 2021. It was originally set to release in 2022, but its launch has continued to slip since then - first into 2023 so Embark could focus on The Finals, and latterly while the studio continued to tinker with the title following a genre change.

But it turns out its switch from co-operative third-person shooter to PvPvE extraction shooter (its original form "wasn't really fun", Embark admitted during a recent press event) wasn't to be ARC Raiders' only notable change. It's now been re-announced as a $40 USD premium title, jettisoning its previous free-to-play form, albeit while still remaining a live-service game.

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Those Xbox players among us who have been waiting to get their hands on open-world adventure RPG Genshin Impact, I have good news.

At this evening's Gamescom Opening Night Live, the team revealed Genshin Impact will be making its way to Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass on 20th November. It is available to wishlist now on the Microsoft Store.

The news was shared along with a new Natlan gameplay trailer (below). Earlier this year, Genshin Impact was once again accused of cultural appropriation from fans and voice actors in response to the reveal of its new cast of Natlan characters.

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Dying Light developer Techland has shown off a new game in its zombie series that began life as a DLC for Dying Light 2 Stay Human.

Announced during Gamescom Opening Night Live, Dying Light: The Beast is a solo or four-player co-op experience pitched as a "tight" 18-hour ride through a fresh area of the franchise's world.

Dying Light protagonist Kyle Crane, once again voiced by Roger Craig Smith, returns here, a decade on. In-game, Crane has been in captivity, and experimented on. The upside? You have zombie DNA powers to unleash that beast on enemies.

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We already knew it was coming, thanks to a post-credits teaser at the end of 2022's The Devil in Me, but developer Supermassive has now confirmed its sci-fi horror outing Directive 8020 will launch for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC next year.

Directive 8020 essentially takes one fist of Alien and another of The Thing then smushes them together, placing players aboard the colony ship Cassiopeia, where its crew must escape an alien organism capable of mimicking its prey.

"Earth is dying and humanity is running out of time," teases Supermassive. "12 light years from home, Tau Ceti f offers a small sliver of hope. When the colony ship Cassiopeia crash lands on the planet, its crew soon realise they are far from being alone... As they battle to survive, they are confronted with the hardest choice of all: to save themselves, they must risk the lives of everyone on Earth."

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Microsoft has confirmed the next batch of titles headed to Xbox Game Pass for the latter half of August: Atlas Fallen, Core Keeper, and Star Trucker.

Then there's that little known game called Call of Duty Black Ops 6. You'll be able to participate in the early access open beta when it kicks off for Xbox Game Pass subscribers on 30th August, 2024, with pre-downloading available from 28th August.

"Sure, it takes itself way too seriously and the loot chase can get monotonous, but everything outside of the monster-slaying is just an excuse to get right back to the monster-slaying. Or make the monster-slaying cooler with upgrades," we said in our Atlas Fallen review.

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Hunt: Showdown 1896 - the huge new update that necessitated an engine upgrade and introduced all new UI - has just hit an all-new concurrent player peak of over 60,000.

Up until the 1896 update dropped on 15th August, the extraction shooter's simultaneous player record - set back in October 2023 - sat at a modest 42,000ish players.

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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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Netflix has given us our best look yet at its upcoming animated series, Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft.

The show is scheduled to make its debut on the streaming service this autumn, and features the vocal talents of the MCU's Hayley Atwell as Lara Croft. It's all set to take place after the events of the Tomb Raider Survivor trilogy, which comprised Tomb Raider (2013), Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

"Following the events of the Survivor Trilogy, Lara Croft (voiced by Hayley Atwell) has abandoned her friends to embark on increasingly more perilous solo adventures," reads the official blurb. "But she must return home when a dangerous and powerful Chinese artefact is stolen from Croft Manor by a thief with an uncanny personal connection."

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The Borderlands film adaptation will seemingly be available to watch digitally from the comfort of your home very soon.

While nothing has been officially announced by Lionsgate itself, multiple sources such The Hollywood Handle, DVD Release Dates, ScreenTime and When to Stream all have the Cate Blanchett-fronted film listed as being made available digitally from as soon as 30th August.

That's less than a month after its cinematic release, with the film only debuting on 9th August.

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A flurry of Pokémon news has confirmed a launch date for the long-awaited Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, and a look ahead at what's next for Pokémon Go.

Pokémon TCG Pocket, a digital version of the phenomenally-popular trading card game, will go live via the iPhone App Store and Google Play for Android worldwide on 30th October.

As previously announced, you can open two packs of Pokémon cards for free per day - just enough to get you hooked - and it's interesting to see the pack-opening mechanic front and centre in the game's trailer below.

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Destiny developer Bungie says it has addressed an issue where players have had their usernames changed by its "name moderation tool".

After "actively investigating" the issue for 24 hours, Bungie advised that while it had "identified the issue that was forcing a high number of Bungie name changes", it was "continuing to investigate" what happened and how "to address player accounts that were impacted".

Although Bungie acknowledged that a "high number of account names have been changed", the studio stopped short of confirming exactly how many players were affected.

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If you cast your minds back to October 2021, you may recall the news that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was set to make its way to the VR headset, Oculus Quest 2. While details on the project were thin on the ground at this time, it was said to have been "many years in the making".

However, not quite three years since that initial announcement, Meta has now said work on the VR port is "on hold indefinitely".

In response to a YouTube commenter inquiring as to the whereabouts of GTA: San Andreas VR, the official Meta Quest Vr account replied: "GTA: San Andreas is on hold indefinitely while we both focus on other projects."

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Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney has said he has "no regrets" over his company's decision to break Apple and Google's terms of service back in August 2020 - something that saw the hugely-popular Fortnite booted off both iPhone and Android storefronts.

The carefully choreographed stunt sparked four years of legal wrangling over Apple and Google's app store policies - and has ultimately led to Epic Games launching its own mobile store today on Android worldwide and on iPhone in mainland Europe, thanks to policy changes demanded of Apple by the EU.

"We've probably lost a billion dollars not having Fortnite on iOS the past four years," Sweeney said, in a briefing to press ahead of the Epic Games Store on mobile going live. "But what's the price of freedom?"

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Call of Duty has become an absolute hard drive hog in recent years, with 2023's entry managing to consume over 200GB of storage in some cases. That all might be about to change, however, as Activision has announced major changes to the way it'll be handing installs with this year's Black Ops 6, promising "smaller and more customised downloads" as a result.

Activision shared the news in a post on its Call of Duty blog, explaining its optimisation work will begin with a revamp of "the experience formerly known as Call of Duty HQ". This revamp is set to roll out over the course of several updates ahead of Black Ops 6's October launch, and will promises to introduce a streamlined interface, direct access to games, more control over downloads, and expanded texture streaming technology to reduce file sizes.

A first update to reorganise game content arrives on 21st August. Then, following Black Ops 6's open beta on 30th August, a new user interface and other "remaining updates" are scheduled for mid-October. After these "larger initial updates", Activision says future Call of Duty downloads will decrease in size and existing files will take up less space on players' device.

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New World: Aeternum, the latest expansion/do-over for Amazon's middling MMO New World, is having an open beta on 13th September ahead of its full PC and console release in October.

Aeternum, if you're unfamiliar, emerged back in June, amid some confused messaging that didn't entirely make it clear exactly what it was. And, truthfully, Amazon's marketing remains as baffling as ever. The gist, though, is that this is the same MMORPG released back in 2021, albeit with new features and a bit of finessing ahead of its debut on Xbox Series X/S and PS5.

It's got a pacier story (told through in-game cinematics and pre-rendered cut-scenes), combat improvements, cross-platform play, enhanced controller support, and more - while still retaining its other MMO bits like classes, crafting, and questing. Then there's New World's first-ever large-scale PvP zone, a new 10-player raid, end-game solo trials, and other additions.

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For many, scaling Mount Everest has stood as the ultimate challenge of one's strength and endurance. An achievement of a lifetime. For long-time Doom players, however, there is an equivalent: NUTS.WAD. Legend has it that NUTS.WAD descended upon Doom players in the year 2001: a map from the future in which players are dropped into a single map with more than 10,000 enemies and a handful of power-ups. And now - for the first time ever - it's playable on a games console.

I'm half-joking, of course, but the ability to load in any Doom mod is just one great feature found in the latest version of Doom and Doom 2. Helmed by Nightdive in cooperation with id Software and Machine Games, this new version is worth looking at as it is the most feature rich, best-performing version of Doom on consoles. It's available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series consoles, Switch and even last-gen PS4 and Xbox hardware. The game was transitioned over to Nightdive's KEX engine and brings with it a vast array of enhancements - 120fps support on consoles, 16-player multiplayer including co-op, and a new soundtrack from the legendary Andrew Hulshult.

But it was the mod support that was my first destination and with it, the chance to see how Nightdive's work would cope with the NUTS.WAD challenge. This pushes beyond the limits of what Doom engine was intended to handle and now we can test it on console and the results are interesting. Before we go on, it's worth stressing that all current-gen machines can handle 4K gaming at 120fps - and yes, that includes Series S. The engine is optimised and fast - all the included content and every map I tested runs like greased lightning. I wanted to raise this caveat because the challenge of NUTS.WAD is so extreme and cruel that I don't want people to get the wrong idea. The fact that you can run NUTS.WAD at all is cause for celebration!

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UPDATE 20/8/24: Well, there you go. Following last week's Deadline report, Amazon has officially unveiled Secret Level, a new "adult-animated anthology series featuring original stories set within the worlds of some of the most beloved video games".

It's a 15-episode series from the creators of Love, Death & Robots, and it'll feature stories inspired by Armored Core, Concord, Crossfire, Dungeons & Dragons, Exodus, Honor of Kings, Mega Man, New World: Aeternum, PAC-MAN, Sifu, Spelunky, The Outer Worlds, Unreal Tournament, Warhammer 40,000, and a variety of PlayStation Studios games.

And if that takes your fancy, you'll be wanting to circle 10th December on your calendar - which is when the series arrives on Prime Video - then check out its teaser trailer below.

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Activision sure is dragging out its reveal of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's Zombies mode. But if you're sucker for the undead stuff, there's more where last week's trailer and gameplay reveal came from, with developer Treyarch having now offered a tour of Zombies' Terminus map.

Terminus Island is one of two maps that'll be available at launch (the other being the West Virginian town of Liberty Falls), and Treyarch calls it "one of the largest round-based Zombies maps ever created". Black Ops 6's Zombies mode takes place in the early 90s - five years after the events of Black Ops Cold War's Zombies mode - and Terminus Island serves as a prison for some familiar Requiem faces. After their liberation early at the start of the story, players can explore the prison itself before moving out to investigate its tropical island surroundings.

There's a secret research facility specialising in "weird science" (in case you were wondering where the zombies might spring up from this time), as well as the ocean, and assorted smaller islands - all of which players will visit as part of Terminus' main quest. It's described as a "living world" full of scripted encounters, ranging from zombies smashing out of vats and prison guards still trying to control the undead threat, to less fortunate souls being chomped on.

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Eli Roth's recent Borderlands film adaptation hasn't exactly had the best debut. Ahead of release, critics far and wide shared disparaging reviews of the adaptation, with phrases such as "disaster" and "lifeless, unfunny, and visually repulsive dud" being bandied about.

And then the film was released and, well, things didn't really get much better. The Cate Blanchette-fronted adaptation generated just $4m on its opening day, a disappointing result that looks set to result in the film becoming a commercial flop.

In fact, Borderlands has been such a misfire that now even filmmaker Uwe Boll - who previously directed that Alone in the Dark adaptation, which saw him nominated for not one but two 'Worst Director' awards (one of which he won) - is taking a swipe at it.

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Among Us developer InnerSloth has announced a collaboration with Dungeons and Dragons web series Critical Role.

This collaboration means players can now bedeck their little space beans with a number of items worn by those intrepid members from Vox Machina, Mighty Nein, or Bells Hells. I am talking about Artagan's Incredible Brows Visor or the Dust of Deliciousness Nameplate, to name but two.

"Getting to work alongside the wonderful crew of the hit TTRPG show Critical Role to bring some of their magic to Among Us for Gilmore's Curious Cosmicube has been mind blowing," InnerSloth said. "Be sure to go to our in-game store and spend some Stars before the Cosmicube is gone."

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Arc Raiders was announced back in 2021 as a free-to-play co-op third-person shooter, and has been delayed several times since. That's partly because Embark Studios' other in-development game, The Finals, progressed faster than planned and stole its momentum. It's also because it was re-tooled at some point as a PvPvE extraction shooter.

Now it's back again, aiming for release next year, and it's been re-tooled a little more: it's no longer free-to-play.

Read more

ARPG (not to be confused with action RPG, the comments inform me) Path Of Exile 2 will release in early access November 15th, 2024.

Grinding Gear Games have been set on a November window for a while now, but this is the first time they’ve nailed down a date, and possibly clicked on it a bunch of times to show how serious they are. Do a game related verb I can’t accurately name because I never played past that beach at the beginning of the first game, and do it in the general direction of the trailer below. Watch it. Just watch it.

Read more

There's a new instalment of Supermassive's Dark Pictures anthology series on the way, and it's set in Outer Space, wherein you'll find the Darkest Pictures of all. Out in 2025, Directive 8020 is the story of the good ship Cassiopeia, a human colony vessel that is infiltrated by Something Icky. The Something Icky is capable of mimicking humans. So that'd be a bit like Alien and a bit like The Thing, then. Sorry, human colonists!

Directive 8020 was teased at the end of the last Dark Pictures instalment, 2022's The Devil in Me. A trailer also leaked back in November 2022. Now, we have an official announcement video.

Read more

Activision have just screened an abbreviated video of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign level “Most Wanted”, in which you and a buddy infiltrate a US fundraiser to save returning character Adler from Bad Dudes. Good news, people who like Call Of Duty: this looks like Call Of Duty. It’s got a homing knife, an exploding remote-controlled car and a big chap in full face armour with an overcompensatory minigun. Catch the full video below.

Read more

Oh, hey, would you look at that? Total War: Warhammer 3's patch 5.2.0 (arriving later today) has some new orcs and goblins in it.

Look at 'em! They've got swords and shields now!

Read more

Last week, the Xitter account for H2M - a mod aiming to recreate the heyday of classic Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer inside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered - announced that they had received a cease and desist from Activision Blizzard, and would shut down the project. The 2022 version of Modern Warfare 2 lacked the original’s multiplayer, and H2M was so highly-anticipated that Steam sales of the 2016 FPS balooned in the lead-up to the mod’s planned release date. It didn't hurt that Activision had it on sale, of course, but the timing lined up so well that some fans speculated the discount was a deliberate bait-and-switch on the publisher’s part to profit from excitement over a mod they were already planning to shut down.

Read more

Minecraft's Realms servers have been down for most of the past four days. Mojang's official account for reporting service status updates noted that "intermittent failures or slowdowns" began on August 13th, and despite similarly intermittent reports of uptime in the days since, the servers remain inaccessible to most players today.

Read more

There you are, rambling through the woods of Interactive Entertainment with an empty pack and a spring in your step. Here I am, lying in wait behind a tree. Wham! Bam! You reel back in consternation as I bounce into the path and clobber you with a sack containing no less than eight venerable RPGs, from Baldur's Gate to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue's Trader - well over a thousand hours worth of dungeons, dragons, dicerolls, dwarven shopkeepers and many other things I refuse to spend time alliterating, all of which will (currently) set you back just £32.07.

Were you planning to spend this weekend playing some cute two-hour artgame sideshow, without any levelling at all? Shut up, you DOLT. You will play what the nice journalist tells you to play! Best lay in extra caffeine tablets, because it's going to take you till Monday just to get through the character creators alone.

Read more

Crytek's sweaty and superlative survival boss-rush shooter Hunt: Showdown has been relaunched as Hunt: Showdown 1896, introducing a comprehensive technological update alongside a chronological leap forward to a new map in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As is tradition for big 2.0-style updates, some players absolutely loathe it, with recent Steam user reviews dragging the consensus underwater.

Read more

Any gags I could make about an update that lets Total War: Warhammer 3’s dawi play tall are far too obvious for the discerning comedic palette that brought you such bangers as that time I just wrote “(penis)” a bunch so the Overkill’s Walking Dead page wouldn’t quote me out of context, so let’s just dive right in to the details. The strategy game’s 5.2 update is on the horizon, and tagging along with it are the first of the “extra bits” the team teased in June. I’m very excited about them. They sit somewhere between the usual patch fare of stat tweaks and errata, and the weightier faction facelifts that come alongside paid DLC. They’re also focused right where Immortal Empires needs them the most: depth, rather than width. In the dawi’s case, quite literally.

Read more

For years, our PC storage has wobbled and buckled beneath the tyranny of gigantic Call Of Duty installs. Like 13th century peasants straining to convey huge, teetering loads of freshly quarried LMGs, our SSDs cry out for justice. Perhaps scenting imminent rebellion and a mass audience desertion to low-poly shooters with more civilised file sizes, Activision have relented. Future installations of the much-padded FPS will be "smaller and more customised", though in a last cruel stroke of villainy, they want you to download a large update to prepare the ground.

Read more

Vroom vroom. That is the sound of 11 rivals revving their engines as they blink the sweat out of their eyes and exhale years of self-doubt from their lungs. Today is their day. We have lined up these racing games on a starting grid and are interested to see how things shake out. Will the realism-obsessed driving sims take the lead with their sublime physics engines? Might the futuristic combat racers simply destroy the opposition with explosive rockets? Or perhaps a nippy arcade crowd-pleaser will soar to the finish line, propelled by the sound of roaring cheers. It's all to play for here at our incredibly messed-up grand prix with a worrying lack of rules or regulation. Start your engines, everyone, these are the 11 best racing games on PC. 3! 2! 1! ...

Read more

It’s been looking grim for Super Earth recently. I mean, not really. Multiplayer shooty Helldivers 2 is still sitting around 35,000 concurrent players, which is perfectly respectable, if only around 10% of its peak back in April. Still, a clutch of disgruntled ‘divers have recently found a novel way to protest an increasingly unpopular series of nerfs: laying down their guns and letting the bots take the damn planet.

“If Super Earth wanted to remain safe, they would stop nerfing our guns," reads one comment on the subreddit, in response to a post titled “Let the bots advance. Let the Super Earth burn.” It seems to have picked up some steam inside the actual game, too. As of earlier this week, there’s only around a thousand players actively trying to stop the bots advancing perilously close to the home planet, via Gamesradar.

Whether this is all massively overblown for the sake of a dramatic yarn or not, Arrowhead themselves have taken note of player concerns over nerfs. Yesterday, game director Mikael Eriksson unveiled a plan for the next 60 days, directly addressing player feedback over the controversial ‘Escalation of Freedom’ update.

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Everyone loved Half-Life yet no one in 1998 was brave enough to say: "Okay, but what if this was an early access crafting survival game voiced by a bunch of New Zealanders?" Those 90s cowards. Abiotic Factor is the courageous game that has been correcting this historic oversight. It's fun, and the fun just got funnerer. The "Crush Depth" update, released yesterday, adds a heap of new areas to the game's messed-up scientific facility, including a dangerous Security Sector and a vast reservoir zone called the Hydroplant. On top of that there are new weapons, tools, workbenches, drivable vehicles, fishing rods, and quite a bit more. It's all shown off in the trailer below.

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Last week, Bethesda released a remastered edition of Doom and Doom II on Steam, with lots of extra episodes and improvements. One of these new features is a built-in browser for mods, and support for many existing mods that previously required a different version of the game. Basically, lots of good fan-made mods are now playable on the Steam version of ye olde Doom. That's neat! Ah, but there is some demon excrement on the health pack, so to speak. The mod browser lacks moderation and lets people upload the work of others with their own name pinned as the author. That's prompted one level designer to call it "a massive breach of trust and violation of norms the Doom community has done its best to hold to for those 30 years."

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! This week, I’ve been half reading in the garden and half staring in awe at my Kindle’s paperwhite doohickey and it’s ability to stay readable in searing sunbeams. I’m tempted to look up how it works but I don’t want to find out it’s made from the luminous, genetically-engineered husks of the workers that drop dead from dehydration at the fulfilment centers or something. To help distract me with yet more books, it’s Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider writer and Destiny 2 senior narrative designer, Dr. Hazel Monforton! Cheers Hazel! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Arc Raiders was announced back in 2021 as a free-to-play co-op third-person shooter, and has been delayed several times since. That's partly because Embark Studios' other in-development game, The Finals, progressed faster than planned and stole its momentum. It's also because it was re-tooled at some point as a PvPvE extraction shooter.

Now it's back again, aiming for release next year, and it's been re-tooled a little more: it's no longer free-to-play.

Read more

ARPG (not to be confused with action RPG, the comments inform me) Path Of Exile 2 will release in early access November 15th, 2024.

Grinding Gear Games have been set on a November window for a while now, but this is the first time they’ve nailed down a date, and possibly clicked on it a bunch of times to show how serious they are. Do a game related verb I can’t accurately name because I never played past that beach at the beginning of the first game, and do it in the general direction of the trailer below. Watch it. Just watch it.

Read more

There's a new instalment of Supermassive's Dark Pictures anthology series on the way, and it's set in Outer Space, wherein you'll find the Darkest Pictures of all. Out in 2025, Directive 8020 is the story of the good ship Cassiopeia, a human colony vessel that is infiltrated by Something Icky. The Something Icky is capable of mimicking humans. So that'd be a bit like Alien and a bit like The Thing, then. Sorry, human colonists!

Directive 8020 was teased at the end of the last Dark Pictures instalment, 2022's The Devil in Me. A trailer also leaked back in November 2022. Now, we have an official announcement video.

Read more

Activision have just screened an abbreviated video of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign level “Most Wanted”, in which you and a buddy infiltrate a US fundraiser to save returning character Adler from Bad Dudes. Good news, people who like Call Of Duty: this looks like Call Of Duty. It’s got a homing knife, an exploding remote-controlled car and a big chap in full face armour with an overcompensatory minigun. Catch the full video below.

Read more

Oh, hey, would you look at that? Total War: Warhammer 3's patch 5.2.0 (arriving later today) has some new orcs and goblins in it.

Look at 'em! They've got swords and shields now!

Read more

Last week, the Xitter account for H2M - a mod aiming to recreate the heyday of classic Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer inside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered - announced that they had received a cease and desist from Activision Blizzard, and would shut down the project. The 2022 version of Modern Warfare 2 lacked the original’s multiplayer, and H2M was so highly-anticipated that Steam sales of the 2016 FPS balooned in the lead-up to the mod’s planned release date. It didn't hurt that Activision had it on sale, of course, but the timing lined up so well that some fans speculated the discount was a deliberate bait-and-switch on the publisher’s part to profit from excitement over a mod they were already planning to shut down.

Read more

Minecraft's Realms servers have been down for most of the past four days. Mojang's official account for reporting service status updates noted that "intermittent failures or slowdowns" began on August 13th, and despite similarly intermittent reports of uptime in the days since, the servers remain inaccessible to most players today.

Read more

There you are, rambling through the woods of Interactive Entertainment with an empty pack and a spring in your step. Here I am, lying in wait behind a tree. Wham! Bam! You reel back in consternation as I bounce into the path and clobber you with a sack containing no less than eight venerable RPGs, from Baldur's Gate to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue's Trader - well over a thousand hours worth of dungeons, dragons, dicerolls, dwarven shopkeepers and many other things I refuse to spend time alliterating, all of which will (currently) set you back just £32.07.

Were you planning to spend this weekend playing some cute two-hour artgame sideshow, without any levelling at all? Shut up, you DOLT. You will play what the nice journalist tells you to play! Best lay in extra caffeine tablets, because it's going to take you till Monday just to get through the character creators alone.

Read more

Crytek's sweaty and superlative survival boss-rush shooter Hunt: Showdown has been relaunched as Hunt: Showdown 1896, introducing a comprehensive technological update alongside a chronological leap forward to a new map in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As is tradition for big 2.0-style updates, some players absolutely loathe it, with recent Steam user reviews dragging the consensus underwater.

Read more

Any gags I could make about an update that lets Total War: Warhammer 3’s dawi play tall are far too obvious for the discerning comedic palette that brought you such bangers as that time I just wrote “(penis)” a bunch so the Overkill’s Walking Dead page wouldn’t quote me out of context, so let’s just dive right in to the details. The strategy game’s 5.2 update is on the horizon, and tagging along with it are the first of the “extra bits” the team teased in June. I’m very excited about them. They sit somewhere between the usual patch fare of stat tweaks and errata, and the weightier faction facelifts that come alongside paid DLC. They’re also focused right where Immortal Empires needs them the most: depth, rather than width. In the dawi’s case, quite literally.

Read more

For years, our PC storage has wobbled and buckled beneath the tyranny of gigantic Call Of Duty installs. Like 13th century peasants straining to convey huge, teetering loads of freshly quarried LMGs, our SSDs cry out for justice. Perhaps scenting imminent rebellion and a mass audience desertion to low-poly shooters with more civilised file sizes, Activision have relented. Future installations of the much-padded FPS will be "smaller and more customised", though in a last cruel stroke of villainy, they want you to download a large update to prepare the ground.

Read more

Vroom vroom. That is the sound of 11 rivals revving their engines as they blink the sweat out of their eyes and exhale years of self-doubt from their lungs. Today is their day. We have lined up these racing games on a starting grid and are interested to see how things shake out. Will the realism-obsessed driving sims take the lead with their sublime physics engines? Might the futuristic combat racers simply destroy the opposition with explosive rockets? Or perhaps a nippy arcade crowd-pleaser will soar to the finish line, propelled by the sound of roaring cheers. It's all to play for here at our incredibly messed-up grand prix with a worrying lack of rules or regulation. Start your engines, everyone, these are the 11 best racing games on PC. 3! 2! 1! ...

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It’s been looking grim for Super Earth recently. I mean, not really. Multiplayer shooty Helldivers 2 is still sitting around 35,000 concurrent players, which is perfectly respectable, if only around 10% of its peak back in April. Still, a clutch of disgruntled ‘divers have recently found a novel way to protest an increasingly unpopular series of nerfs: laying down their guns and letting the bots take the damn planet.

“If Super Earth wanted to remain safe, they would stop nerfing our guns," reads one comment on the subreddit, in response to a post titled “Let the bots advance. Let the Super Earth burn.” It seems to have picked up some steam inside the actual game, too. As of earlier this week, there’s only around a thousand players actively trying to stop the bots advancing perilously close to the home planet, via Gamesradar.

Whether this is all massively overblown for the sake of a dramatic yarn or not, Arrowhead themselves have taken note of player concerns over nerfs. Yesterday, game director Mikael Eriksson unveiled a plan for the next 60 days, directly addressing player feedback over the controversial ‘Escalation of Freedom’ update.

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Everyone loved Half-Life yet no one in 1998 was brave enough to say: "Okay, but what if this was an early access crafting survival game voiced by a bunch of New Zealanders?" Those 90s cowards. Abiotic Factor is the courageous game that has been correcting this historic oversight. It's fun, and the fun just got funnerer. The "Crush Depth" update, released yesterday, adds a heap of new areas to the game's messed-up scientific facility, including a dangerous Security Sector and a vast reservoir zone called the Hydroplant. On top of that there are new weapons, tools, workbenches, drivable vehicles, fishing rods, and quite a bit more. It's all shown off in the trailer below.

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