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It's late Summer, 210 BC, and the Balearic Sea glows orange with the reflected light of my shattered, burning warships. I levied all the might of Rome to launch an amphibious pincer attack on the Carthaginian general Mago Barca as he advanced through Northeastern Spain, only to meet crushing defeat at the hands of mountain troops who knew their homeland. Now my navy, too, is splinters and ashes. The real Scipio conquered Spain, but mine died in ignominy - and all because I completely underestimated Total War Rome: The Board Game. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Best board games for couples Board game that inspired Civ gets unreasonably large, 18-player reprint 150 best Truth or Dare questions for a spicy game night View the full article

Version 1.2 of Infinity Nikki will launch on January 24, and developer Papergames has revealed more details about what players can expect. Since its launch in late 2024, Infinity Nikki has seen incredible success, with countless players addicted to the title's unique blend of mechanics and focus on fashion. View the full article

The first tier one event of 2025 in Counter-Strike 2 is finally here. The top eight teams of the online stage have qualified for the BLAST Bounty 2025 Season One Finals in Copenhagen, where the winner will claim a lion’s share of the $500,000 prize. This year, the CS2 professional scene is seeing an abundance of new tournaments thanks to Valve’s changes in 2024. One such event is BLAST Bounty 2025, which features an entirely different format from the previous tournaments by the organizer. Here’s everything you need to know about its Season One Finals. View the full article

Epic Games has revealed that Tilted Towers will be making a return in Fortnite's classic game mode, Fortnite OG, on January 31. Since December, Fortnite has been busy adding more and more game modes to the popular battle royale. After the launch of Fortnite OG, Epic Games went on to add LEGO Fortnite: Brick Life and Ballistic, giving players even more ways to engage with the title. View the full article

Reforging in Dynasty Warriors: Origins is a feature that lets you make your weapons much stronger after finishing the main game. Instead of just hunting for better weapons randomly, reforging helps you upgrade and tailor your current weapons to fit how they like to fight. This isn't broadcast to the player; it is more of an extra feature the game gives everyone. It helps you when you know how to do it, but you're likely going to have an issue with how it's done. View the full article

According to a recently shared roadmap, Palworld is getting a proper endgame in 2025 - among many other improvements. The 2025 roadmap, shared on X (formerly Twitter) by the official Palworld account yesterday, features a long list of updates the devs intend to add to the game before the end of the year. One of those is an endgame scenario, which shares a bullet point with "World Tree," suggesting it may have something to do with the enormous tree that's been looming over Palworld players since launch. This will likely put an official end to its main story, although there's plenty of possibility for expansion in future updates. View the full article

Settling down for a quiet evening of Command and Conquer back in the day was brilliant - well, it still is brilliant, in truth - but playing your friends or other random players online was where the RTS game really shone. It paved the way for competitive strategy games, and now you can (briefly) get a taste of that magic all over again with the new multiplayer demo for Tempest Rising, the upcoming strategy game that is as close to a new C&C game as you're going to get. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Command and Conquer inspired RTS Tempest Rising gets early 2025 release date Command and Conquer spiritual sequel Tempest Rising opens new beta signups Retro RTS Tempest Rising is much more than a new Command and Conquer View the full article

Ready to think quickly on your feet? What about fast reactions, how are those? Ready for us to stop asking you so many questions? Ha. Steam's Real-Time Strategy Fest has you covered, with discounts and demos galore from January 20th - January 27th at 10am PST. Did we mention the focus is on real-time? Ooops, sorry, that was another question. Steam's Real-Time Strategy Fest is packed with deals on strategy games that aren't turn-based, but rather run in real time. Join us, won't you? Check out the discounts now through January 27th at 10am PST.View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Ready to think quickly on your feet? What about fast reactions, how are those? Ready for us to stop asking you so many questions? Ha. Steam's Real-Time Strategy Fest has you covered, with discounts and demos galore from January 20th - January 27th at 10am PST. Did we mention the focus is on real-time? Ooops, sorry, that was another question. Steam's Real-Time Strategy Fest is packed with deals on strategy games that aren't turn-based, but rather run in real time. Join us, won't you? Check out the discounts now through January 27th at 10am PST.View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Genshin Impact maker Cognosphere will pay a $20 million fine and change how it sells loot boxes in order to settle charges brought against it by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC has alleged that the company, which trades in the US as HoYoverse, is using deceptive tactics to hide the real cost of in-game transactions and players’ odds of obtaining rare prizes, and that it violated a children’s privacy law. Under the terms of the settlement, which still needs to be approved by a federal judge before it can go into effect, HoYoverse will be required to stop selling loot boxes to players under the age of 16 without parental consent. Read More... View the full article

Fortnite has always been a game with secret ways to get XP, find clues, or uncover hidden lore. Recently, they have been adding sneaky hidden areas where players can find a stash of chests and great loot. And players have discovered another one of these secret spots after some flooding receded in the last update. A few lucky Fortnite players, including streamer Ali ‘SypherPK’ Hassan, were exploring one of the locations to the north of the Chapter Six, season one island when they discovered a new underground treasure trove. This secret loot stash is hidden under Flooded Frogs, one of the northernmost named locations in Fortnite. Behind a broken wall beneath the buildings in Flooded Frogs are three rare chests, an Elemental chest, a safe full of gold bars, seven Slurp Barrels, and five ammo boxes. View the full article

Baldur's Gate 3 has 11 choices of playable races. The chosen race is what defines the first impression many NPCs will have of the player, and each of them comes with its own racial bonuses. All of these races are based on their appearances in Dungeons & Dragons' Player's Handbook, though BG3 allows more freedom for stat customization. View the full article

Manor Lords continues to go from strength to strength. The medieval strategy game and city builder hybrid has been out in early access for almost a year now, and each update added is even more game-changing than the last. For developer Grzegorz 'Greg' Styczeń, these massive updates are a very conscious choice. So if you've been periodically coming back to Manor Lords with every huge update, that system is going to continue going forward. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Gigantic Manor Lords update makes the medieval city builder feel like a new game Big new Manor Lords update adds fresh maps and transforms city-builder's economy Grab breakout medieval strategy game Manor Lords at its lowest price yet View the full article

Grinding Gear Games says it's sorry for the slow response times to Path of Exile 2 customer support requests, but it's dealing with an absolute avalanche of them—roughly 545,000 email requests since the game launched in November, far more than it was prepared to deal with... Read more.View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

TeamKill, the developer behind the upcoming sci-fi third-person action horror game Code Violet, reveals why the game will never be released on PC. In a statement released on X (formerly Twitter), TeamKill explained Code Violet won’t be released on PC to prevent people from modding “vulgar versions” of the game’s characters. “We hold our voice actresses and actors with high regard, as well as our artistic vision for the game and story, and reject any form of destroying that with ******* mods,” the dev stated. “Making a joke out of our art and possibly tarnishing the reputation of our voice actresses and actors is not worth the extra money we can make.” View the full article

Over the weekend, Marvel Rivals put on one of the first tournaments that the new hero shooter has seen in conjunction with Twitch, and while it was certainly set out to be a big success, some of the streamers involved had some not-so-nice things to say about it... Read more.View the full article

Do you love the idea of sinking hours into a fantasy RPG? Perhaps you like the sound of climbing gigantic beasts and hitting them in their weak spots à la Shadow of the Colossus? Well, Dragon's Dogma 2 should be the perfect game for you, and with this new Fanatical *****, one of 2024's best role-playing games is at its lowest price yet. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: 2024 was the year of videogame friction, for better and for worse Get Dragon's Dogma 2 at over 50% off and more in the Fanatical Winter ***** Grab Dragon's Dogma 2 for its lowest price yet View the full article

While we eagerly anticipate the final release of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 at the end of January, we thought we'd give you a taster of what to expect in terms of physical hardware, as we have a card in the labs right now. The new graphics card comes in a much smaller box than all the RTX 4000 cards, and inside it you'll find a svelte and slimline card as well. We can't definitively tell you if the RTX 5090 is indeed the best graphics card right now, but we can at least show you the card itself. Nvidia has really gone to town on the physical design, implementing a brand new flow-through cooling system that means the new flagship card only takes up two slots. It's positively tiny compared to the RTX 4090, as you'll see in a minute. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: MSI wants to help you not set your gaming PC on fire DLSS frame gen could come to older Nvidia GeForce RTX gaming GPU lineups This gorgeous Steampunk gaming PC build will take you 20,000 leagues under View the full article

"AI" systems have a way to go before they're ready to run games of Dungeons and Dragons, according to a thesis paper by graduate researcher Pavlos Sakellaridis which recently surfaced on the internet. The results of his tests are interestingly mixed, with players reporting satisfaction scores for the bot DM that came close to - and sometimes beating - those for a human. But there were notable problems with the droid railroading players, failing to keep the adventure to time, and not making the adventure challenging enough. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All DnD 5e languages explained Dear DMs, stop putting casinos in your DnD games DnD's Planescape meets Burning Man in 'The Painted Wastelands' adventure View the full article

A Marvel Rivals player recently took to social media to share a new strategy that allows Loki to self-resurrect by copying Hela with his ultimate ability. The popular hero shooter is currently in the opening weeks of Season 1, which has added Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman to the robust roster found in Marvel Rivals. According to the developers, players can expect to see Human Torch and The Thing added to the game during a mid-season update. View the full article

Marvel Snap developer Second Dinner has recently confirmed that the game will be back in the United States within 12 hours. The collectible card game Marvel Snap was released in 2022, and has become incredibly popular since then, so players were rightfully unhappy when the title became unavailable in the United States after the TikTok ban. View the full article

According to developer Poncle, the indie roguelike shoot 'em up Vampire Survivors will be adapted into a live-action film. Since its full release in late 2022, Vampire Survivors has seen incredible success, though the creation of a film based on the title presents some unique challenges. View the full article

The developer of Days Gone has said it still plans to create “cool s**t” after parent company Sony canceled its unannounced live-service game. Last week, Sony canceled two unannounced live-service games that were in development at Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games. The Bluepoint game was reportedly a live-service God of War game, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. Bend Studio’s live-service game remains unknown. A Sony spokesperson confirmed the cancellations to Bloomberg, adding that neither studio will be closed and that it will work with each to determine next projects. Sony's live-service push has struggled significantly. While Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 was a breakout hit, becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time with 12 million copies sold in just 12 weeks, Sony’s other live-service games were either canceled or suffered disastrous launches. Indeed, Sony’s Concord is one of the biggest video game disasters in PlayStation history, lasting just a couple of weeks before it was brought offline amid drastically low player numbers. Sony later decided to kill the game entirely and shut its developer. The Concord flop came after Sony had already canceled Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us multiplayer game. Last week, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida said he would have tried to resist Sony’s controversial live-service video game push, were he in the position of current Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst. In a tweet, Bend Studio community manager Kevin McAllister issued a short message to the developer's fans: “Thanks for the love and support everyone, especially to those that have reached out. P.S. We still plan on creating cool *****.” As it stands, Bend Studio's last release was 2019’s Days Gone on PlayStation 4. It launched on PC in 2021. In a recent financial call, Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki said the company had learned lessons from both the record-breaking launch of Helldivers 2 earlier this year and Concord’s failure. On Concord specifically, Totoki said Sony should have run its development gates such as user testing or internal evaluation “much earlier than we did.” “Currently we are still in the process of learning,” Totoki admitted. “Basically, with regards to new IP, of course you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for our reflection, probably we need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates, we need to bring them forward. We should have done those gates much earlier than we did.” The suggestion here from Totoki was that Sony should have noticed and reacted to Concord’s issues earlier in the development process, presumably so that it could have improved the game before launch — or canceled it. Totoki then went on to point fingers at Sony’s “siloed organization” and Concord’s release window, which may have caused cannibalisation. Concord launched in August, not long after smash hit ****** Myth: Wukong hit PS5 and PC. “We have a siloed organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother,” Totoki said. “And then going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalisation, so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches.” During the same financial call, Sony senior vice president for finance and IR Sadahiko Hayakawa compared the launches of Helldivers 2 and Concord, saying lessons learned would be shared throughout the business. “We launched two live-service games this year,” he said. “Helldivers 2 was a huge hit, while Concord ended up being shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both. “We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its release so as to strengthen our development management system. “We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan ******* that combines single-player games — which are our strengths and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP — with live-service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release.” Looking to the future, a number of PlayStation live service games remain in the works, including Bungie’s Marathon, Guerrilla’s Horizon Online, and Haven Studio’s Fairgame$. Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article

February 2025, a month that's famously not going to feature many big video game releases (to be fair, one of those has since been delayed), has just been revealed as the arrival point for another cool thing you might want to play. It's Keep Driving, the driving RPG thingy that has you fight stuff in turn-based fashion while accumulating stuff. Read more View the full article

An unannounced Warhammer RPG was seemingly canceled last year after funding for the project was withdrawn by its publisher. According to MP1ST, the title had been in development at Thought Pennies, which describes itself as “a fully remote role-playing game studio creating games with social storytelling”. Last November, Thought Pennies chief creative officer Daniel Erickson said the company had been forced “shrink the size of the studio” after funding was pulled for an unannounced project. Read More... View the full article