Embark Studios has announced the Hurricane map condition for ARC Raiders, releasing February 24, 2026, along with the rest of Shrouded Sky.

The new weather system introduces wind mechanics, debris hazards, reduced visibility, and First Wave Caches as environmental challenges that will fundamentally change how players navigate the game’s topside areas.

If you played the Cold Snap update, you’ll be pretty familiar with the playstyle changes the weather effects have on maps.

Hurricane map condition transforms ARC Raiders gameplay

The Hurricane map condition adds four major gameplay elements that force players to adapt their strategies:

• Wind dynamics will affect movement speed, stamina consumption, and throwable trajectories
• Airborne debris damages shields and increases player visibility
• Low cloud cover limits sight lines across the map
• Newly unearthed First Wave Caches offer high-value loot for players willing to brave the storm

Wind direction plays a critical role during Hurricane conditions. Players moving with a tailwind gain increased speed and agility, while fighting against gale-force winds reduces movement speed and rapidly drains stamina. The wind also alters the trajectory of thrown items like grenades, requiring players to recalculate their aim.

Other gameplay elements, including smoke, gas, and jumping mechanics, are also affected by the Hurricane’s power.

The Hurricane kicks up dirt and debris across the surface, creating a constant hazard for shielded players. Shields were not designed to withstand this onslaught and will glitch and spark when struck by airborne objects. Extended exposure in open areas degrades shield integrity and makes players more visible to opponents, forcing tactical decisions about when to wear shields and when they become a liability.

You may want to start inventory juggling, or bring some Shield you’re not too fussed about losing in your next raids.

Heavy cloud cover obscures the skies, making the topside areas nearly unrecognizable. Limited vision ranges mean ARC enemies can appear without warning, requiring players to rely on audio cues through the wind’s howls to detect threats. However, shieldless players can use the reduced visibility to their advantage, blending into the storm’s chaos to avoid detection by rival Raiders.

The Hurricane’s ferocious winds have unearthed valuable First Wave Caches across the map. These relics contain premium loot for players who can navigate the environmental hazards, evade ARC threats, and outmaneuver competing Raiders. Embark Studios suggests the true masters of the Hurricane will be those who work with the conditions rather than against them.

While the gaming community previously criticized ARC Raiders for not having meaningful content updates that shake up gameplay enough, the Hurricane weather condition appears to do more than players initially realized. It will change how players traverse the map and even what they bring to the surface.

But only time will tell if these kinds of updates will keep players hooked.

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Surpise: Focus Entertainment and Saber just dropped a demo for John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando demo launching on February 19 at 10:00 AM UTC on Steam and runs through March 3 at 10:00 AM UTC.

Players can access the game’s HUB area and first Act, including the tutorial and opening mission, with unlimited playtime and infinite mission replays in solo or co-op modes.

What’s in the Toxic Commando’s demo?

The demo features three playable areas: The Drop tutorial mission, The Drop main mission, and Church of the Damned. After completing the tutorial, players unlock Leon’s Base, the HUB area where they can customize characters, adjust loadouts, test weapons at the shooting range, and invite other players to their session.

You can also play all four difficulty levels, which are Story, Normal, Hard, and Very Hard. Players may unlock Very Hard by completing Hard difficulty first.

All four playable classes are locked at Level 5 in the demo, limiting access to the full skill trees and abilities available in the final game. However, all weapons included in the demo content are fully accessible with no level restrictions. Demo save files will not carry over to the full release, meaning any progression earned during the two-week window will not transfer when the game launches.

To play with friends, open the Social menu or click the plus icon in the top-right corner of the pause menu. Players can share their invite code (press V by default) with friends, who can join by entering the code in the same menu (press J). Steam friends can be invited directly without codes. Friends can join ongoing missions mid-game to jump directly into action, and incomplete parties can enable Private Game mode to fill remaining slots with bots instead of random players.

Solo players can find random teammates by visiting Leon in the HUB or accessing the Play tab. Select the desired mission, difficulty, and class to search for matches, or choose Quick Game for rapid matchmaking with randomized settings.

The devs were also kind enough to throw a bone at the Toxic Commando system requirements too

Component	Minimum Spec	Recommended Spec
OS	Windows 10/11 64bit	Windows 10/11 64bit
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 1500X / Intel Core i5-8400	AMD Ryzen 5 5600X / Intel Core i5-11600K
RAM	16GB	16GB
GPU	AMD Radeon RX 580 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070	AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
VRAM	8GB	8GB
Storage	58GB SSD	58GB SSD
Preset	Low	Ultra
Expected FPS	30 FPS	60 FPS
Resolution	1920 X 1080	1920 X 1080

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Todd Howard has appeared on the Kinda Funny Games podcast, discussing all things Bethesda. For the most part, it was about major industry talking points, ranging from AI to The Elder Scrolls 6 news. But there was also some talk about Starfield updates coming soon.

Todd Howard confirms Starfield updates aren’t a 2.0 overhaul

During the show, around the four-minute mark, the Kinda Funny Games host mentioned he visited the Creator Roundup for Starfield sometime in December and addressed that “you can say you went to something, but not say what.” It led to speculation around the internet that there’s something massive on the horizon. However, it’s not the 2.0 overhaul many expect, Howard explained.

“We’ve been working on a lot of Starfield content, we just haven’t managed to talk about it yet,” Howard said. “We are going to be talking about it really soon. We are moving into a phase where we are ready to be talking about Starfield, and really show that the right way and what is coming to the game.”

Todd referred to the preamble marketing around December in anticipation of Fallout Season 2. That’s when Todd last did media appearances promoting the new show. It’s also where fans got teases of future shadow drops following Oblivion remasters successful launch.

Starfield updates will refine existing features, not reinvent the game

“We’ve been doing a lot of work that we like a lot. It is not Starfield 2.0,” Howard said. “I’ve seen some of that (online), and it’s about expectation setting. If you love Starfield – we think you’re going to love this. It is updates and changes to the game that don’t change things in an isolated way, but it’s more meta in using outer space and things in ways we haven’t.”

Based on Howard’s comments, the updates seem to improve the core features that make Starfield what it is. It sounds like improvements to the outer space gameplay, a specifically mentioned by Todd. We reckon there’s probably refinements to systems like settlements and colonies, or maybe world generation if they are talking about underutilised parts of the game. It’s why the initial reception suggested this could be Starfield 2.0.

However, if you didn’t like Starfield originally, don’t get excited. “If Starfield didn’t connect with you or you bounced off it, I don’t think this is going to change that fundamentally,” Howard said.

This clarifies why Bethesda doesn’t want to call it 2.0. It’s not a complete renovation of the game, just adding and refining what’s already there. If you hated Starfield for various reasons, you’ll probably still dislike these updates. But if you were at least lukewarm or positive about Starfield, this might be worth checking out when Bethesda officially reveals it soon.

If you’re gagging for content, why not try the Star Wars Genesis mod for Starfield?

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The Elder Scrolls 6 has reached a major internal development milestone and will be Bethesda’s first game built on Creation Engine 3, studio director Todd Howard revealed during a Kinda Funny Games podcast interview. Over 250 developers are now working on the project, with most of Bethesda Game Studios’ internal team focused on returning to the “classic style” that defined Skyrim.

Bethesda returns to classic Elder Scrolls formula with Creation Engine 3

“We do have a certain style that we like and our fans like that we want to get better at,” Howard said. “In many ways, Starfield and Fallout 76 are a creative detour from that classic Elder Scrolls and Fallout (style), where you’re exploring a world in a certain way. As we come back to Elder Scrolls 6, which we are working on now, we are coming back to that classic style that we’ve missed and know really well.”

Howard emphasized that Creation Engine 3 represents years of technical evolution. “We spent the last, you know, several years bringing Creation Engine 2, which powers Starfield, up to Creation Engine 3, that’s going to power Elder Scrolls 6 and beyond,” he explained. Not much is known about the transition from Engine 2 to 3, but hopefully it addresses the age and wear and tear of the now ancient engine.

Elder Scrolls 6 development ramping up after Starfield launch

The extended development timeline between The Elder Scrolls 6’s 2018 announcement and 2026 can be partly explained by the engine overhaul. Creation Engine 2 was designed specifically to power Starfield, which took roughly seven years to develop and release. The Elder Scrolls 6 has now progressed through two iterations of the Creation Engine while maintaining Bethesda’s distinctive design philosophy.

While Howard confirmed the game recently passed a major internal milestone, he did not share a release date. Most of Bethesda’s internal team now works on The Elder Scrolls 6 alongside third-party studios, while smaller teams handle Fallout 76 updates and Starfield post-launch support. The development team includes many veterans from Skyrim alongside new talent.

Howard appeared on the Kinda Funny Games podcast on February 18th, his first major interview since the Fallout Season 2 premiere in December 2025 where he last spike about ES6. The wide-ranging discussion covered Starfield’s reception, AI in game development, and Howard’s career at Bethesda.

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With Season 16 live in League of Legends, there seems to be an early meta forming.

Thanks to the changes, Junglers are wanting to clear their camps to progress their quest faster. The natural result is that AP Junglers tend to be easier to clear the jungle with, causing them to be stronger. Throw on top how strong the new LoL item, Dusk and Dawn is, and we are starting to see a pattern forming.

Dusk and Dawn item benefits, synergies, strategies

The Dusk and Dawn item in LoL is positioned to be a more bruiser-like AP Sheen item. It gives players the following benefits:

• +70 ability power
• +20 ability haste
• +25% attack speed
• +300 health
• Unique – Spellblade: After using an ability, your next basic attack within 10 seconds deals 100% base AD (+ 10% AP) bonus magic damage on-hit and applies on-hit effects twice (1.5 second cooldown, starts after using the empowered attack)

The important part is the Unique Spellblade effect. It is not just a Spellblade, it also reapplies the on-hit effects twice. This is pretty important for a lot of champions. It’s partially why we are starting to see Diana peak as an early jungle meta pick, alongside Gwen, and even Fizz in some instances.

These champions all benefit from the on-hit, with Diana getting her crescent cleave passive when she presses an ability, alongside an attack speed steroid. Gwen, on the other hand, gets to trigger her passive’s central max health shred twice too.

Evelynn also gets some mighty burst thanks to her empowered Whiplash also proccing the on-hit effect, meaning this item performs well. Elise is another option, but much less valuable since it only heals her slightly.

In the top lane, we are also seeing some unlikely interactions. Tahm Kench can take it, and the item gives him two stacks of his passive. With three stacks, he gets to bite, essentially skipping an attack and being able to ult them much sooner.

Yeah the new Dusk and Dawn interaction on Tahm Kench is COMPLETELY FINE and not broken at all!

Nothing to see here Riot! pic.twitter.com/zsor6LUBTD

— No Arm Whatley (@WhatleyLeague) January 9, 2026

There are some other items proving quite strong. Bandlepipe is 2k gold and does some insane attack speed steroid, too. It’s proving usable by almost any support for its utility. Some toplaners can even rush it for its inflated stats and the immobilize into AS steroid too. It’s something Darius players are starting to use, for example, in some rare cases.

Another standout meta item appears to be Umbral Glaive, which is a solid second item option for assassin junglers, as they can get a lot of value out of the unseen passive damage proc on it, alongside clearing jungle vision.

The League of Legends Season 16 meta is still developing, but, as it stands, Dusk and Dawn seems to be at the front and center of it.

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With the run up to the weekend here, it seems like gamers are having some trouble on Steam.

The issues with Steam servers are affecting matchmaking and some level of server authentication. Games like Terraria, Project Zomboid, Icarus, and Elden Ring: Nightreign seem to be having the most trouble from our quick lookups.

現在、Steam版の一部タイトルにおいてオンラインプレイがしづらい状況が発生しています。ユーザーの皆さまにはご迷惑をおかけしますが、状況の改善まで今しばらくお待ちください。

— FROMSOFTWARE PLAYER SUPPORT (@fromsoftware_sp) January 9, 2026

What’s going on with the Steam servers?

The good news is this is not entirely a Steam issue. Cloudflare is back at it again, taking part of the internet offline with it. The host of over 20% of the world’s internet traffic is experiencing some hiccups, and this appears to be affecting Steam’s server authentication and matchmaking specifically.

Everything else on Steam seems to be fine, including the store, downloads, and community features.

Cloudflare appears to have been experiencing issues all day through January 9th. The latest update comes at 15:20 UTC, where the company updated its service status page:

“Update – The issue is still being actively addressed, and a solution is in development. Our team is committed to resolving this as soon as possible. Jan 09, 2026 – 15:20 UTC”

The timing couldn’t be worse, with Europe heading off for the weekend. Moreover, the US is partway through the working day, so peak traffic has only just begun in terms of the gaming world. This means more players will be affected as North American gamers log on after work and school.

How to fix Steam server issues

As it stands, there seems to be little workaround for multiplayer games. If you can play the game in offline mode or a single-player version, these seem to be your best options right now.

Otherwise, you’ll need to hang tight while Cloudflare addresses its issues. Check the Cloudflare status page linked above for real-time updates on when services might be restored.

It’s not the first time Cloudflare has taken gaming out. This previously happened late in 2025, another devastating day for gamers everywhere. The widespread nature of Cloudflare’s infrastructure means that when it has problems, a significant portion of online gaming services feel the impact simultaneously. Either that or AWS nukes gaming servers too.

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League of Legends 14.24 is live, and with it, the longly anticipated WASD mode has arrived. The new feature enables players to control their characters using classic WASD movement keys, giving players a new way to move their characters rather than relying on attack moving, orb walking or mouse flicking as many have done over the years.

How to Enable WASD Movement in LoL

To enable WASD movement in LoL, you may need to wait slightly. It is beginning to scale out over the course of the patch going live. It has started rolling out in OCE, and will gradually come to other regions like NA and EUW over time. Though this seems to be a gradual step for players in general.

You can find out if you have it by going into the game itself. From there, open the options and check the settings menu. You should find a Hotkeys menu when in-game, with an option that says Point and Click or WASD Movement. Both are separate keybinding menus and save independently of one another. It should allow you to swap between each mode at will if you’d like, without losing any old keybindings or other settings.

We recommend loading into a custom lobby privately by yourself and getting into the game to check from time to time. If it is live, you should see the button appear on that menu. From there, you can test it out and adjust your new keybindings and ability keybinds as needed. If you’ve played something like Supervive, you might have an idea of roughly how this is going to work.

When the setting does appear in your client, it will be restricted partially to the following modes:

Normals:

• Customs
• Swiftplay
• ARAM

Game Modes:

• Arena
• ARAM: Mayhem
• ARURF

As it stands, the movement is yet indeterminate to have an effect on the skill of matches in different ELOs. So, it will be disabled for Normal Draft play and Ranked play, since they are the more competitive modes. The rest are more casual and crazy, so it’s a perfect testing ground for players to try the WASD versus Point and Click mode in lobbies.

Riot Games still consider it as beta for the mode, hence why it launching with the far end o the season and not affecting ranked play. It’s worth the feedback before Season 16 goes live.

When you get it, it seems like something that will be great on characters that really need to attack move. ADCs spring to mind, while some mages can certainly use it for getting that perfect position.

Some other characters, like Briar and Taliyah, have the WASD movement completely disabled, as it will mess with their interactions too much. Taliyah can easily come off her wall, while Bard gets fixated with some of his movement, so WASD will get a bit messy. We also don’t recommend running it on Malzahar, either, since he’s another champion who is prone to cancelling his own ultimate with a miss-click.

This is not the only content to test, either. Season 16 is getting some new LoL items, and some are looking crax. How ADC with their new role, WASD movement, and a returning 200% base crit damage will work, we don’t know. This might be one of the craziest seasons of League to date.

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Player Housing might very well be the biggest feature to ever drop in a patch in World of Warcraft’s history. The devs originally put this off as the technical implications that came with were astronomical. And, with its early access launch on live servers with 11.2.7, we are starting to see some of the evidence of that. It seems like on the most used features for players finding real estate, the house finder UI is causing some heavy issues to several game clients. For many, the house finder feature is simply not working.

If you’re not already aware, the House Finder is important for two reasons. 

1. Finding where your friends plot is so you can visit their housing plot
2. Finding a spare housing plot for where you want to actually buy a house.

The latter is a fairly big reason at the moment. Many players are looking to get their first house. And so, this feature for refreshing the housing plots is very important. However, refreshing the instances for different neighborhood instances seems to cause a stack overflow crash.

For those unaware, coding languages have this silo for memory known as the callstack, which normally clears to a degree when a coding function no longer needs to retain variables and other data. It’s there to help performance costs for software granting to memory on scripts that need it, and clearing the junk when it’s no longer needed in the scope of the code base. When you imagine that overflows its memory capacity, things go south very fast to not harm hardware. The result is rather efficient crash dumps of whatever is running that code.

Chances are the refresh is recursively checking for instances of neighborhoods, annihilating available memory for the housing call stack and sending your client to the shadow realm.

Some of the workarounds to avoid this happening seem to be to live inside a neighborhood that is starting to get full. A neighborhood typically needs around 50 plots reserved before a new instance can be created. When you have your house, you can move it to a new neighborhood that spawns in. It helps to get around the house finder at the moment, though patience and timing is required to get it done properly if your insurance is not filling up as well as you thought it would.

There’s currently no mention of this issue on the WoW forums, where CM Kaivax is talking about the currently known issues they intend to address Though this seems like a new phenomenon with EU reset going live. Chances are we will see this be addressed when the California based team turns up to work and check more related issues with the patch too.

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Battlefield 6 devs recently announced that BF6 is getting a Free Trial Mode, giving players who don’t already own the game a chance to get some permanent progression and try the game out for free. Well, that day is almost here, with the Battlefield 6 free trial starting on November 25th and lasting till December 2nd. However, it turns out, the free trial has some limitations we were not aware of previously.

Those of you partaking in the Battlefield 6 Free Trial period will only have three maps and four modes to play on.

Available Maps:

• Blackwell Fields (Season 1)
• Eastwood (Season 1)
• Siege of Cairo (Launch classic)

Available Game Modes:

• Conquest – Your classic multi-objective mode
• Breakthrough – A rush-like mode where you progress through a level after a point falls to the attacker, often with three different stages on each map
• Sabotage – A new mode that launched alongside Eastwood, featuring two halves of attack and defend, where attackers blow up objectives as many times as they can before side switching. The team that blows the most up wins
• Team Deathmatch – The classic mode that needs no introduction

It’s fairly interesting that they are letting players onto Eastwood and the new season 1 map, with the map getting somewhat decent praise for its map size, while the mode has mixed feelings. Meanwhile, Blackwell Fields was largely seen as negative for its bad open vehicle combat maps, while Siege of Cairo is intense, but conveys Battlefield 6’s destruction the best.

If you’re hopping in, we highly recommend Breakthrough on Cairo, where possible, and trying Conquest on Eastwood. They are the better Battlefield 6 experiences, at least from our eye,s if you want some intense yet somewhat classic Battlefield experience at the same time.

It’s a good time to try the main game out if you’ve only played Redsec, or so you know to ask Santa for BF6 for Christmas – presuming you like what you experience from the Free Trial.

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Tower of Fantasy is one of several gacha MMOs to enter the space a few years ago. It offers players a Genshin-like experience, but a more focused experience on MMO-like instanced and world boss events. And while it did okay as a traditional gacha, the ever-changing landscape over in the far east is making developers reconsider the traditional gacha model. As a result, Hotta Studios, the devs behind Tower of Fantasy, is launching a new Warp Server, removing the character/weapon gacha entirely, as first announced back in the summer. The good news is that the Warp server release date is on November 25th, tying in with the live server update too.

The new Warp server, instead, will offer players a more standardized way of acquiring weapons, with the devs saying you can have all weapons unlocked by the first month of the server being live. It’s quite nice, considering you had to gacha the weapons and then gacha them again to upgrade them. The weapons were known as Simulacrums, with the weapons having a character theme to them if you wanted to enable them. Instead, you can get the weapons like a traditional MMO through in-game events, rather than gachaponing them. If you want to know more, there’s a whole lot of general gameplay changes coming to the new Warp server, giving it a major overhaul for its 2022 launch.

It should make it easier to actually progress, get on the leaderboard, and clear the content using skill rather than luck and your wallet. However, Hotta still needs to make money, and so, they are changing their business model to add more cosmetics to the store. There’s the new Trade System, along with the new currency Dark Crystals, which will allow players to freely trade appearance items and resources.

Of course, the gacha character weapon feature is not entirely going away. Live servers will remain as they were, getting new banners and pulls for new Simulacrums as normal. The new servers are intended to give players that fresh MMO launch feel once again. It should also be more welcoming to new players, too, as it’s easier to get into.

On top of this, Hotta is adding a new seasonal mechanic too. Seasons will refresh periodically, bringing new progression styles and play modes. Players will be able to earn exclusive rewards, such as unique appearances and titles, with each new season. No more damage types and less stress over stats. Equipment stats are kept throughout the season with better balance, so that should give you more reason to log in and unlock those new rewards.

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