Embark are continuing their meteorological experiments in extraction shooter Arc Raiders with a rousing injection of wind. There’s a hurricane coming to the game on February 24th, a new map condition that limits visibility, degrades shields, impedes movement, and makes you suck even more at shooting things. Still, this stormcloud has a few silver linings. With the gale at your back, you’ll naturally move a lot faster. Also, you may find it easier to avoid detection in the open if you disable your shield.

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Another intriguing Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod has emerged to confront your party of quirky RPG adventurers. This one's a short story which lets you take a break from BG3's main story to attend a dinner party at the house of a not-at-all creepy rich bloke, who happens to be very good at jamming out on the organ via illusions.

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There's now a mod for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties which swaps out the likeness of actor Teruyuki Kagawa. Kagawa's casting in the remake, which saw him lend both his voice and likeness to secondary villain Goh Hamazaki, caused fan backlash due to a 2022 report from Shukan Shincho detailing sexual assault allegations against the actor.

Kagawa apologised at the time, but didn't specify what he was apologising for or confirm the events reported in the article. Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties director Ryosuke Horii recently said Kagawa's casting was the result of developers RGG Studio having "tried to think of someone who makes you go, 'This guy's a creep'".

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"Since the last round of EMTERR ‘stabilisation’, they’ve been trying to force us lifers out," the phantom line engineer tells Zero Parades protagonist Hershel Wilk. "We can’t be fired, not easily, but they can take away the work that made us stay in the first place,” he continues. “I have two options. I could falsify my reports and declare line 9 safe for construction anyway, or I could quit. Either way, the company can’t lose."

Approximately 15 minutes later, I’m talking to a monkey sat atop a pile of goods in a random abandoned house. "YOUR PRESENCE IS WEAK. FATE DELIVERS ME AN UNWORTHY ADVERSARY," it says, before declaring its name to be the KING OF TRADE. Immediately, one of the voices in Herschel’s inner chorus, dubbed Statehood, starts shouting back about needing to defeat the forces of capitalism.

Both of these are scenarios I ran into while playing the Next Fest demo of the spy CRPG finally emerging from ZA/UM, following years of reported bad times and discord at and around the Disco Elysium studio. Both of them feel simultaneously like encounters you could plausibly have run into in the original Disco, and like they could just as easily be pale imitations dressed up to resemble that first game’s much quoted trenchcoat of surrealist detecting.

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The next big update to Destiny 2, Shadow and Order, has been delayed as it undergoes a substantial round of tweakage and expansion. Such a substantial round of tweakage and expansion, in fact, that it'll no longer be called Shadow and Order when it returns.

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Former staff of Enotria: The Last Song developers Jyamma Games have revealed to RPS that they’re owed months of unpaid salary, following layoffs at the company last year. They've shared an inside look at a troubled independent studio dealing with payment delays, multiple changes of direction, and general confusion that stretches back to spring 2025.

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Ironically, considering the rampant dysentery moving through my campground in brown, sputtering waves, the problem I'm facing in Transport Fever 3 is a blockage. The trucks I've loaded with antibiotics are stuck in a traffic jam that stretches all the way to the pharmacy in the next city over. If I'm to save the inaugural Woodstock festival, I must find a way to get traffic flowing again before the timer runs out.

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Replaced, the long-in-development dystopian platformer from Sad Cat Studios, has had its release pushed back a little further. The studio have taken on feedback from the demo they recently released on Steam - that's the one which kept surnaming me - and reckon a few more weeks of acting on it are in order to get the game ready to go.

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Battlefield 6’s Season 2 thunders onto PC today, a three-month festival of Battlefoolery that begins with a new map, Contaminated, new modes for the Redsec battle royale component, a dinky yet deadly helicopter, and some new guns and gadgets. The EA shooter’s Steam playerbase has slumped following its chart-topping release last year, but don’t worry, ye Battlefaithful, because Season 2 has officially recaptured my interest by filling my lungs with psychoactive vapours.

In new limited-time mode VL-7 Strike, available in regular multiplayer and Redsec, you must wear a gas mask and replenish its filters to avoid falling victim to clouds of funky fumes. Idiot! Why would you want to avoid falling victim to clouds of funky fumes. It’s got to be more intriguing than flipping the objective yet again.

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Avowed now has a bunch more possibilities when it comes to one of the most important fantasy RPG build archetypes, thanks to the deployment of its anniversary update. Three new character races are on offer alongside the established humans and elves, and you can arm them with a quarterstaff which caters to mages who think puny wands and books aren't quite showy enough.

As you might recall, some of the stuff included in this anniversary update was orignally supposed to arrive in Avowed late last year, but ended up being delayed by Obsidian.

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Back when Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown was announced, we knocked it for offering zappy muzak in place of the TV show’s official theme. Gamexcite and Daedalic have added the theme, now, and I sort of wish they hadn’t. “Help!” I screeched to my bedroom walls, as the rousingly sorrowful opening bars wafted from the speakers like nitrous oxide. “A videogame is making me feel something! It is making me feel like 31 years have passed, and I can still remember Neelix getting drunk on water. I still remember the Doctor’s first words. I still remember blowing up the Caretaker Array rather than using it to insta-warp home.”

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I think that with a game like Crimson Desert, you'd be well within your right to have an eyebrow pre-raised considering its online, sort of free-to-play (depending on where you live) predecessor Black Desert Online regarding the like of microtransactions. I know I certainly have! At a glance Crimson Desert certainly looks like it could fall into similar pitfalls if only based on vibes alone. However! Developer Pearl Abyss would quite like you to know that, in that regard at least, you have nothing to worry about.

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Video game updates are an incredibly funny thing, mostly because I come from a time where they weren't a thing at all, apart from the odd second printing that patched some things here and there. Which is why my humerus has been particularly tickled by the news that a new Assassin's Creed Shadows has arrived today that, amongst a couple of other things, add in the ability to simply let you jump.

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“Get me somebody who’s played The Chinese Room's Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 STAT,” I yelled, barging through the double doors of our seedy news saloon. “I need 300 or more tasty words on these leaked videos of the older, unreleased Hardsuit Labs version.” A grim silence fell across the chamber. Mark furtively donned a pod-racing helmet. James hid himself behind his latest tower of graphics cards, with an apologetic murmur that while he had played a few hours of Bloodlines 2, he was very busy right now building towers of graphics cards.

“If you want something done, do it yourself, STAT,” I bellowed, swivelling on my heel while looking up the origins of the term “stat” on my phone. It turns out it’s something medical doctors say to convey urgency, and comes from the Latin “statim”, meaning “immediately”. “What a perfect way to introduce this video showing a hospital level from the aforesaid leaked Hardsuit Labs version of Bloodlines 2,” I roared to myself. “Why, I’ve accidentally written 177 words of the news post already.”

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Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight has become the latest game to have its initially listed recommended RAM requirement yanked down by a substantial amount, following in the footsteps of fellow 2026 release 007: First Light.

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There is certainly something to be admired in Peter Molyneux's commitment to infinitely overpromising right through to what is meant to be his final game, Masters of Albion. I'm not saying I admire it, but someone might. And while I truly have no horse in the race regarding the quality, or potential lack thereof, in Masters of Albion, its latest gameplay trailer certainly does at least suggest it'll be a true as it can be Molyneux game.

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This is probably a sentence that could be said literally any day of the week, but a new cosy farming sim is on the block, this time taking the form of Starsand Island. The flavour on this occasion is of the anime variety, with some slightly goofier farming mechanics (i.e. turning your watermelon patch into one singular, 10 foot tall watermelon), some very Pokemon Legends: Arceus looking combat, and some appropriately cute animals to hang out with. And there's skateboarding! But never do launches go all that smoothly, as developer Seed Sparkle Lab have had to do a dash of damage control regarding some concerns over the game.

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WARNING: Major story spoliers for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, as well as the original Yakuza 3, lie ahead.

It’s natural to spend a lot of time thinking about what games could have been, had different decisions been made. Whether the change is preferable to the reality often doesn’t come into it, the fantasy of another possible world is the draw.

Despite that, few studios choose to make major shifts - at least as far as the main stories of those games go - when they remake their previous games. This won't necessarily be a philosophical decision: the remaster or remake has to sell. Games which get revisited are ones players deeply love, and the suits will inevitably see tweaks to their fundamentals as an unnecessary risk. Old Oblivion is loved, so Bethesda adopted a rubber glove approach to the Oblivion remaster. They limited changes to modernising visuals and snipping away some annoying features. It's akin to polishing up a holy relic, rather than replacing the gemstones or changing the engravings.

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I hope you like warlocks. Well, if you're someone who regularly delves into Diablo, I hope you at the very least don't detest warlocks with all of your hellish heart. Because yesterday evening's Diablo 30th anniversary shindig was rather heavy on warlocks, with the class coming to not just Diablo 4's next expansion, but also Diablo 2 and Diablo Immortal. Meanwhile, Diablo 2: Resurrected has moseyed on over to Steam.

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Warren! Warren! Warren!

ARRGGHHH! WHAAAA! HUHHHH! Replaced, the long-in-development dystopian platformer from Sad Cat Studios, keeps shouting my last name at me. It might because the game's main character, a jacketed gap jumper and baddie shooter, is called Warren. It might also because I did plenty of falling and accidentally got shot by a robo-sniper in Replaced's demo, which is now live ahead of the full thing's release next month.

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