Vince Zampella, known for co-creating the Call of Duty series, among many other roles, has died. Zampella, 55, died in a car crash in Los Angeles on Sunday. The fatal crash killed him, along with the occupant of his car.
Hello and Happy New Year - is it okay to say that now? I'm not sure where the cut-off point is. Some people still have their Christmas trees up. We had ours out before New Year. Welcome back to What We've Been Playing! Or as I like to call this particular edition of it: What We Played Over Christmas, because it's been a couple of weeks since we've talked.
The top five games played on the PlayStation in 2025 by US players were exactly the same as in 2024, according to Circana's Player Engagement Tracker.
Former Rockstar technical director, Obbe Vermeij, has commended Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios for walking away from the hugely successful Dungeons & Dragons series, calling it a "bold move".
We love a biome in video games. Even the word is one I inherently associate with video games, in spite of its origins as a piece of proper grown-up geographical terminology. Within that gloriously over-the-top thematic pantheon… is there anything better than a good old fashioned Christmas level?
Following the parliamentary debate of the Stop Killing Games campaign's petition to the UK government last year, a group of Green Party members have announced plans to propose an amendment to the party's policy which would "compel" its MPs to support the campaign.
You know what South Park feels like to me? It feels like randomly waking up in the middle of the night, looking around your bedroom as you think "cripes, it's still not morning yet?" A feeling of waiting for the inevitable, the end, or the beginning. Not so much the contents of the show, none of that needs all that much thought, more so its very existence, which is now apparently transplanting itself into Fortnite.
If there were ever a dead horse that didn't need so much flogging, it might be the Life is Strange series. Undeniably beloved by many, it has fallen victim to that whole franchising thing, having received an entry only in 2024 via Life is Strange: Double Exposure, a sequel game that was perhaps a little bit too messy. And here we are, in 2026, with PEGI potentially spoiling the reveal of a new entry in the series subtitled Reunion. Spoilers ahead for the game!
Fallout 3's at its best during your first trip into the war-torn ruins of downtown DC. Rather than an open and desolate expanse, you're navigating tight underground passageways by Pip-Boy light, occasionally emerging into the daylight to fight through patches of ruined city often littered with battered landmarks. Bethesda had initially envisioned this urban jungle to be even more of an expansive labyrinth, and a group of modders have now had a crack at resurrecting the cut areas to create their own version of that more expansive DC.
While it hasn't taken as commanding a stranglehold over the world's collective consciousness as its debut series did, the second helping of Amazon's Fallout TV show is succeeding in helping drive a number of extra Steam players back to the wasteland. That said, a number of said wastelands being heavily discounted as part of the platform's recently concluded winter sale likely hasn't hindered those efforts.
GTA 5 voice actor Ned Luke - aka Michael de Santa - got swatted for the eighth time over Xmas. I don’t mean that somebody belted him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. I mean that somebody put in a hoax call to emergency services in a bid to have armed police sent to his house. The latest incident happened this December while Luke was streaming GTA Online with Rob Wiethoff, the voice of John Marston in Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2. YouTuber IceBladeNinja has the whole clip for you to watch below.
Vince Zampella, the co-creator of Call of Duty, founder of Respawn Entertainment, and head of EA's Battlefield franchise died in a car crash on December 22nd. He was 55 years old.
"We're heartbroken by the passing of our founder and dear friend Vince Zampella," Respawn Entertainment said in a statement on Twitter. "Our hearts are with his family, friends, and all who love him."
Skyblivion, the massive mod remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine, won't be making its previously announced 2025 release goal, the team behind it have confirmed. Instead, the mod'll be coming out at some point in 2026, giving the team behind it extra time to overcome the final few hurdles and get it polished up.
This news comes a few months after ex-Skyblivion level and world designer Dee Keyes called the 2025 release goal the mod's team set in 2023 "pointless and unachievable". Keyes also accused Skyblivion project lead Kyle 'Rebelzize' Rebel and implementation lead Heavy Burns of rushing the project out the door and mismanaging communication within the team, subsequently sharing more of his perspective on the project in a video interview with RPS sister site Eurogamer. In a response to Keyes' original claims, Heavy Burns asserted that "many of the statements in his post are either misrepresented or just untrue".
Right, so. There's Oblivion Remastered, the official Oblivion remaster which released earlier this year. There's Skyblivion, the fan-made Oblivion remake mod which still currently looks due out relatively soonish, despite its release window having been a source of drama a few months ago. There's also Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil, another massive Skyrim modding project, but this time seeking to re-create the province in which Oblivion's set as it might be at the time The Elder Scrolls five takes place. Simple. The last one of those has just released a fresh teaser.
All that trouble going on with Monster Hunter Wilds aside, for a good long while now Capcom has been doing quite well for itself. Multiple quite well liked Resident Evil games, fresh new bits like Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess and the upcoming Pragmata, and even a few remasters, namely for the Ace Attorney games (throw a dog a bone and give us a new one of those, though Capcom), but also for series like Dead Rising that also haven't had a new entry in a while. Well, for now at least, as a new report suggests a new Dead Rising might be in our future.
Prime Video's Fallout TV series has been followed around by a buzzing swarm of canon chatter hornets since the moment its first series emerged from the vault. Such a thing's natural and healthy - people care enough about the games to have thoughts about how this adaptation portrays the world in which they take place. It goes double when when you head to locations which have played host to entries especially beloved for how much say they let the player have in how their stories play out.
Enter Fallout season two, debuting next month and set in (clears throat) NEW VEGAS. Will it set one of Fallout: NEW VEGAS's endings in stone as the canon option?
Pre-release builds of Fallout: New Vegas recently unearthed at a shop in Utah contain rare files which could be "incredibly useful" to expanding what modders can do with the RPG. Well, at least they doe in the estimation of the folks who claim to have found them, a group of preservationists whose current online presence only looks to have popped up last month.
