Gaming News

I didn’t mean to take the boat all by myself and leave my friends for dead. I really didn’t. I thought I was just getting in the boat, and then starting it up. I thought we would all leave together. Oh, no. No, no, no. I was signing death warrants, damning them to the Klownpocalypse. Oops. But as I sped away on my little outboard, I couldn’t help but laugh. They couldn’t either. And moments like that, where you’ve accidentally just left your teammates to die and everyone is laughing about it while trying to escape a group of demented space Klowns, are how you know you’re having a good time. They made it out anyway. Well, most of them.Killer Klowns from Outer Space is the latest in the asymmetrical horror multiplayer survival genre...

Microsoft has ended development of Redfall and shut down its studio, Arkane Austin, as part of devastating cuts at Bethesda.First reported by IGN, Microsoft has closed down the aforementioned Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks, and Alpha Dog Studios, maker of mobile game Mighty Doom. Roundhouse Games will be absorbed by The Elder Scrolls Online developer ZeniMax Online Studios. IGN has asked both Microsoft and Bethesda for comment.In an email to staff sent by Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, Microsoft blamed the cuts on a “reprioritization of titles and resources." The email, verified by IGN, also mentioned the end of development on Redfall. “Redfall’s previous update will be its last as we end all...

The perfect power bank to use with your Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch is back on sale in the UK right now. We are, of course, talking about the INIU 65W 20000mAh Fast Charging Portable Charger, available on Amazon for just £19.99 right now.Being able to take your Steam Deck or Switch anywhere with you is undoubtedly great. We all know that terrible feeling. We've left the house in a hurry, grabbed our phone or Nintendo Switch in the rush, and we when we go to boot it up...nothing. Dead. Oh if only we had a power bank!This power bank is perfect for portable gaming systems like the Steam Deck or the Switch with its super-fast charging abilities, healthy battery capacity, and sleek design. If you need a cable to charge your console...

Microsoft has closed a number of Bethesda studios, including Redfall maker Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush and The Evil Within developer Tango Gameworks, and more in devastating cuts at Bethesda, IGN can confirm.Alpha Dog Studios, maker of mobile game Mighty Doom, will also close. Roundhouse Games will be absorbed by The Elder Scrolls Online developer ZeniMax Online Studios. Microsoft did not say how many staff will lose their jobs, but significant layoffs are inevitable. IGN has asked Bethesda and Microsoft for comment.On Redfall, the disastrous vampire co-op game will now not receive promised updates as Microsoft has ended all development on the game. Microsoft said Redfall will remain online to play, and it will provide a "make-good"...

Hades 2 is now available through Steam Early Access and in just a single day it's more than doubled the original game's lifetime concurrent player count.As reported by VGC, the May 6 Early Access launch of Hades 2 reached a peak of 79,276 concurrent players within 24 hours, according to tracking website SteamDB. The original Hades reached a lifetime peak of 37,749 concurrent players, meaning the sequel has already crushed its popularity on the platform.Hades 2, which arrives as a sequel to the critically acclaimed Greek mythology themed roguelite, returns players to the world as they meet legendary figures like Odysseus, Nemesis, and Dora through a blend of storytelling, action gameplay, and dungeon crawling.Its Early Access...

The true test of a vampire game isn't so much in the ways it lets you do the cool things vampires do – it's in how it portrays the classic vampire weaknesses, forcing you to live a vampire lifestyle. V Rising does a pretty good job of this, with banes from sunlight to garlic represented, while also featuring a striking and memorable art style alongside exciting and tough ARPG combat. Many of the gripes I had in my Early Access review have been addressed without changing the heart-pounding identity of the experience, especially when playing in a customized single-player world.As a newly-resurrected vampire in a world where humans have mostly chased your kind into the shadows, this mashup of Diablo and the survival crafting genre...

Following Sony’s U-turn on Helldivers 2 PC account linking with PSN, the developer of Ghost of Tsushima has clarified how the upcoming PC version will work with Sony’s systems.Amid the backlash to Sony’s announcement that Helldivers 2 on PC would force Steam players to link their account to a PlayStation Network account to continue playing, Ghost of Tsushima developer Sucker Punch has told players that parts of the game on PC will require a PSN to play, while other parts won’t.In a series of tweets, Sucker Punch made it clear that a PSN account is required for Legends online multiplayer mode and to use the PlayStation overlay. It is not required to play the single-player portion of Ghost of Tsushima.The PC version of Ghost of...

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PC will receive the official REDkit mod support on May 21, 2024, CD Projekt Red has announced.Revealed in a post on X/Twitter, below, the "extensive mod editor" will make it much easier for players to create custom content for The Witcher 3 by granting access to its official assets. REDkit was already available in early access but the full release will allow everyone to create custom quests, locations, and more and likely breathe even more life into the nine year-old game.It will be available for free on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and GOG to anyone who owns the game, but will stay as a PC exclusive despite the likes of fellow role-playing game maker Bethesda bringing mod support to console through the...

After Sony U-turned on its controversial decision to force Helldivers 2 PC gamers to account link to PlayStation Network, the game’s community has launched an initiative to drag Steam user reviews out from under rock bottom.The backlash to Helldivers 2’s PSN account linking mandate saw the game’s Steam user reviews collapse from ‘overwhelmingly positive’ to ‘mostly negative’ after over 200,000 negative reviews flooded the game’s page on Valve’s platform.The sheer volume of negative reviews left in such a short space of time caused Johan Pilestedt, boss of developer Arrowhead, to tweet: “Ouch, right in the review score.”But following Sony’s dramatic reversal, the Helldivers 2 community has formed a Major Order of its own, dubbed...

Helldivers 2’s first patch since the PSN login debacle is out now, making some much-needed fixes to the game.Highlights here include a fix for Helldivers 2’s troublesome damage over time (DOT) problem, a fix for misaligned scopes, and a fix for the R-9 Eruptor to combat a shrapnel problem that was killing players.Patch 1.000.302, out now across PC and PlayStation 5, is the first to launch following Sony’s dramatic U-turn on the Helldivers 2 PSN login requirement that had sparked a backlash within the game’s PC community. Developer Arrowhead will be keen to put the events of last week behind it now Sony has buckled to PC gamer demand, although CEO Johan Pilestedt has admitted the studio has work to do rebuilding player trust.To...

As the winds of autumn gather to whip us, like some sort of FromSoftware boss inspired by Devo, games shall emerge as your perfect reason to stay indoors. Admittedly, we're in the dead period of the year, so that means looking back to recent releases and classics of yore. If you do want to keep things seasonal, it's the perfect time to play the discounted Resi 4 Remake and Far Cry 5 below—both of which take place in autumn. Otherwise, just binge a ton of Yakuza games (purely because they're cheap and awesome).In retro news, I'm celebrating the 21st birthday of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a GameCube gem worth every rupee. I have vivid launch memories of being blown away by the (fandangle and fairly groundbreaking) cel-shaded...

Manor Lords launched for PC players late last month, and it only took about a week for modders to add Shrek as a playable character.The animated ogre icon can now be used to terrorize innocent medieval citizens thanks to developer NorskPL on Nexus Mods. It’s a simple mod that allows players to control Shrek as part of Manor Lords’ third-person Visit mode. Parading around town as the green menace might be a bit immersion-breaking, but there is no denying that the character fits into the setting extremely well.Manor Lords was one of Steam’s most Wishlisted titles for quite some time, so while developer Slavic Magic hasn’t officially added mod support, it isn’t much of a surprise to see players creating new content on their own. Of...

With the PSN account linking fiasco now in the rearview mirror, what was nearly a disaster moment for Helldivers 2 is now becoming a part of community lore. Fans have been busy working on cape designs since Sony reversed course, at least some of which have seemingly caught the eye of the development team.The movement began after Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt noted an "accidental cape design" from a member on Discord — four red lines denoting Helldivers 2's plummeting reviews over the weekend.Another community member soon responded to Pilestedt's post with a more refined design, leading to other fans coming forward with ideas of their own.Since then, designs have rapidly proliferated. Over on Reddit, one Helldivers 2 fan made a...

Final Fantasy 14’s servers are currently under a worldwide DDoS attack that’s preventing players from logging into Square Enix’s MMORPG.In a blog post, Square Enix informed players that Final Fantasy 14’s technical issues began around 6 a.m. on March 6. As of right now, the DDoS attack may cause players to experience difficulty logging in, accessing/sending data, and disconnecting from Japanese, North American, European, and Oceania data centers.While Square Enix has yet to pinpoint the cause of the technical difficulties, the developer has promised players that an investigation into the attack, as well as countermeasures is underway.Today’s DDoS attack comes weeks after director Naoki Yoshida announced a graphical update was in...

It is shocking to see that Hades 2 is only in early access, and that Supergiant Games plans to let it spend at least the rest of 2024 there before it’s ready to call it version 1.0. Shocking, because it already has just about everything I want from a sequel to one of the best roguelite action games of all time. Hades 2 manages to keep everything that made the original such a masterclass of design, but it does so in a way that changes up how each of the pieces fits together and gives it its own unique identity rather than feeling like a glorified expansion. The result is a familiar, but fresh follow up that challenged, surprised, and delighted me with every triumph and failure in equal measure. There are a few things missing, with an...

A few years ago, NVIDIA introduced NVIDIA Reflex, a revolutionary suite of technologies that gave PC gamers better responsiveness and lower latency. For competitive games, that resulted in faster target acquisition, quicker reaction time, and superior aim precision. It did this by measuring and optimizing system latency.For the uninitiated, latency is essentially the time between an action and its result. There are several different forms, though. For example, network latency happens in online play and is the delay between the game client and multiplayer server. You probably know this as “ping.” PC latency, on the other hand, is the time it takes your input to make its way through your PC. Basically, this is a combo of how long it...

Yesterday, NetherRealm released the first gameplay trailer for The Boys' Homelander in Mortal Kombat 1.The trailer, which you can check out above, is a quick look at gameplay for the upcoming DLC character. Those who have watched The Boys will quickly notice that Homelander's super strength and heat vision are present despite the trailer being less than a minute long. NetherRealm even went the extra mile to open the trailer with a bit of The Boys comedy, showing a scene of Homelander slurping milk from a baby bottle, much like was depicted in The Boys Priem Video series.Although Anthony Starr, the actor who portrays Homelander in the Prime Video series The Boys, confirmed he would not be voicing the character in Mortal Kombat 1...

Meta is axing Quest 1 support for Beat Saber, a popular rhythm game where players use glowing sabers to slice musical blocks.Announced in an FAQ on the official Beat Saber website, the Beat Saber developers Beat Games revealed that it will axe support for Quest 1 on November 2, 2024. The FAQ page notes that Quest 1 owners can still play Beat Saber, but the Multiplayer and Leaderboard functionality "might be phased out in the future." It will also stop releasing updates and provide customer support for Quest 1 devices."As we continue developing Beat Saber, our goal is to raise the bar of what's possible," FAQ reads. "To focus our efforts in the right direction, we will no longer support Meta Quest 1 devices as of November 2, 2024."...

The creative director of Helldivers 2 has said he's impressed by the "willpower" of fans after their feedback caused Sony to reverse its decision regarding PlayStation Network accounts being required by all players.In a post on X/Twitter, Helldivers 2 creative director and CEO of developer Arrowhead Game Studios Johan Pilestedt thanked Sony for "quickly and effectively" addressing the community's concern and suggested this sort of feedback loop should be the "new standard" for live service games."Firstly, I am impressed by the willpower of the Helldivers 2 community and your ability to collaborate," Pilestedt said."Secondly I want to thank our partners and friends at PlayStation for quickly and effectively making the decision to...

PlayStation has reversed course on the Helldivers 2 PSN account requirement, walking back the unpopular policy after a weekend long backlash that included tens of thousands of negative reviews, some of which spread to Sony's other Steam games."Helldivers fans — we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward," PlayStation wrote on its official account."We’re still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we’ll keep you updated on future plans."...

As Helldiver 2's reviews continue to collapse on Steam, Arrowhead's best-selling action game has been pulled from around 177 countries in the wake of the new PSN account linking requirement that has turned its fanbase upside down.Egypt, Georgia, Jamaica, and Morocco are some of the notable countries where Helldivers 2 can no longer be purchased due PSN not being available, sparking confusion among fans. Japan is also among the countries listed, but according to SteamDB it has a separate package and is still available, though users can't buy the "global version."In the meantime, Helldivers 2's recent reviews on Steam are now "Overwhelmingly Negative" amid continued review bombing by fans. On Friday, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilstedt...

After a successful Star Wars Day, Sunday is here, and we've got all kinds of deals for you to explore! From games to technology, there are all kinds of gift ideas if you're still in search of a last-minute Mother's Day gift. The best deals for Sunday, May 5, include the CRKD Nitro Deck, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Nintendo Switch OLED, Tekken 8, and more.CRKD Nitro Deck for $44.98The CRKD Nitro Deck is the ultimate Nintendo Switch accessory. You simply slide the console into the Nitro Deck, which then offers an ergonomic grip and feel around the system. By far, the best feature of this accessory is the Hall Effect Thumbsticks, which guarantee zero stick drift. This is easily one of the best Nintendo Switch accessories you can buy...

Bernard Hill, who found fame as King Théoden in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and as Captain Smith in Titanic, has died. He was 79.Hill died early Sunday morning, his agent told the BBC. His representative did not share the cause of death.A long-time Hollywood veteran, Hill's most recent role was in BAFTA-winning drama The Reponder alongside Martin Freeman. Over the years he's appeared in a variety of movies including Gandhi and The Scorpion King, as well as Fable III.But he remains best-known for his memorable turn as King Théoden in Two Towers and Return of the King. The role forever associated him with Lord of the Rings, though he admitted that he was "not interested" in Rings of Power, calling it a "money-making...

May 4th is here, which means it is officially Star Wars Day! To celebrate, all kinds of Star Wars games, toys, and products are available on sale today! The best deals for Saturday, May 4, include Star Wars Outlaws, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Nintendo Switch OLED, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, and more.Get a $15 Gift Card with a Star Wars Outlaws Pre-OrderTo celebrate Star Wars Day, Best Buy is offering a $15 gift card with the pre-order of Star Wars Outlaws. This applies to all versions of the game across platforms. The game is set to release on August 30, so be sure to get your pre-order in now for a free gift card!Star Wars Jedi: Survivor for $25What better way to celebrate Star Wars Day than to pick up Star Wars Jedi...

Forgotten Gems is a regular column about notable games that have moved out of the public eye and may not be easily accessible anymore. To see all the other games I've covered so far, be sure to check out the 11 previous issues of Forgotten Gems in our Columns section.I can’t look at the box art for Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen without “hearing” Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. From its iconic main theme to the cheers and jeers sounds when liberating towns, and the muffled “fight it out” and “thank you!” voice samples – it all comes right back. I haven’t played this – now sadly obscure – SNES strategy RPG in three decades, but booting up the dusty Japanese cartridge on my Super Nt instantly reminds me why I...

Although Star Wars has become a fixture of movie culture over the generations, it's also left a signature stamp on the world of video games. From LEGO spin-offs and NES movie adaptations to pod-racing simulators, it's hard to talk to someone about games they loved as a kid without the words Star Wars cropping up in there somewhere.And as the series has grown into a powerhouse in the gaming world, so too have video games become a key part of the Star Wars universe as a whole. In recent years, we've seen more and more video games become official parts of the franchise's canon timeline, whether that's Cal Kestis' adventures through a post-Order-66 world in the Star Wars Jedi series or Iden Versio's transformation from Empire trooper to...

Wizards of the Coast has released a new FAQ addressing the use of generative AI (GenAI)in Dungeons & Dragons and admitting it "made mistakes" in its lack of transparency regarding this use in its art.The official D&D Beyond X/Twitter account made a post with a link to a new FAQ that aimed to "address how [Wizards of the Coast] assess and respond to generative AI concerns" regarding art commissions for both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering."Recently, we've had a few occasions where art used in marketing and game pieces has been publicly scrutinized, including for the possible inclusion of generative AI," the opening paragraph of the FAQ reads. " During this time, we've made mistakes while at the same time have also seen...

Yesterday, Viz Media announced the English release of a Magic the Gathering manga series called "Destroy All Humans. They Can't Be Regenerated." The manga’s physical release, due later this fall, will also come with an exclusive Magic card.Destroy All Humans. They Can’t Be Regenerated, written by Katsura Ise and drawn by Takuma Yakota, is an ongoing manga series that was first published in 2018, according to MyAnimeList. The series, which takes place in 1998, follows a junior high school student named Hajime Kanou who goofs off with his friends by playing Magic: The Gathering. This garners negative attention from the school’s top student and Hajime’s academic rival, Emi Sawatari, who scolds him for bringing Magic to school.Their...

Arrowhead CEO Johaan Pilstedt has released a statement apologizing to disgruntled Helldivers 2 fans in the wake of Sony forcing Steam players to link their accounts to a PlayStation Network Account in order to continue playing the wildly popular third-person shooter.Earlier today, Sony released a statement announcing that new Helldivers 2 PC players will be asked to link their Steam accounts to a PlayStation Network account on May 6 in order to continue playing the game. This, in turn, sparked outrage from players on social media, with fans threatening to quit the game cold turkey over the new mandate, demand refunds, and flood Helldivers 2 with negative review scores.According to Helldivers 2’s Steam customer review tab, the game...

Seal: What the Fun is out now in Early Access on PC via Steam, welcoming players from around the world to compete and have fun in its chaotic, unpredictable, and hijinks-packed party royale world. This will be one party for the ages, and we’re here to help break down everything you need to know about the brand-new game you won’t be able to put down.Seal: What the Fun is all about getting straight to the mayhem and not overstaying its welcome. Each match starts with about 20 players and lasts only 10 minutes with three rounds of rotating party games. These games range from shooting sports to racing, climbing, surviving, and puzzle matching and the game supports solo and teamplay so you can get the exact party vibe that you want...