Steam

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

Marvel Snap should be back up in the United States “within the next 12 hours,” according to the development team after the title surprisingly went dark on Sunday following the TikTok ban. Developer Second Dinner expressed their “surprise” at the outage on Sunday, which occurred after the US’s TikTok ban went into effect. While the social media platform has since returned, Marvel Snap remains inaccessible. Thankfully, the beloved game is set to make its return very soon. A post on the official Marvel Snap X page (formerly Twitter) states that they “expect everything to be fully restored within the next 12 hours.” View the full article

Escape From Tarkov is still the first game that leaps to mind when you think of extraction shooters, and Battlefield - especially the superlative Battlefield 3 - has the best reputation in terms of sheer scale. But as Delta Force Season Two arrives on Steam, it's clear that the competition for PC's favorite tactical war shooter has a credible new contender. Multiplayer FPS games often have a short lifespan. Spectre Divide, Battlebit, and even The Finals have struggled to maintain an enthusiastic player base. But Delta Force seemingly has staying power, and it's just hit a new Steam record. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Delta Force's ****** Hawk Down campaign needs "a bit more time" Delta Force has huge 2025 plans, with four seasons of content on the way Delta Force Season 2 is going new map crazy and adding a 3v3v3 mode View the full article

Nvidia has hinted that its DLSS Frame Generation technology could in fact work on its older graphics cards, potentially bringing huge leaps in frame rates to aging hardware. However, if and when that support comes is for "the future" to decide. Nvidia launched its latest version of DLSS Frame Generation alongside the reveal of its latest RTX 5000 series of graphics cards, led by the RTX 5090. The new version, DLSS 4, incorporates a range of updates to existing DLSS technologies but the primary addition is DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation, which allows a graphics card to generate up to three frames for each conventionally rendered frame with AI, resulting in huge boosts to frame rates. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: This gorgeous Steampunk gaming PC build will take you 20,000 leagues under I played Indiana Jones on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, and it hits 213fps at 5K Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 only 30% faster than RTX 4090 without DLSS 4 View the full article

Cyclopean: The Great Abyss appears to have glorious dungeon graphics but I can't say for sure because I can't get torches to work. I think your character is supposed to kindle them automatically when you venture into a dungeon - at which point the view switches, classic Ultima-style, from top-down into first-person. My character never deigns to light a torch, however. Possibly this is because, no matter how many torches I loot or buy from the underworld's infrequent traders, my character page always tells me I have none. Is my character eating them? Are they too afraid to light them and expose what those dungeons contain? Do I need to read the manual properly? Or is it just a bug? Read more View the full article

Fans are taking us back to the Athkatla streets from Baldur's Gate 2, remade from the ground-up in Baldur's Gate 3, with their ambitious new custom campaign Path To Menzoberranzan. View the full article

Marvel Rivals currently has a challenge to trigger Spider-Man's Spider-Tracers, but how can this be done most effectively? Spider-Man has one of the highest skill ceilings of all DPS characters. He combines extreme movement, high damage, and light sustainably to become a major problem to enemy teams. However, the flip side is that an inexperienced Spider-Man can easily be shut down and become a burden to their team. View the full article

An alleged ex-DICE developer has stated on social media that Battlefield is entering a new era that follows a different “philosophy,” so fans should “temper their expectations.” While Battlefield fans eagerly await more information about the upcoming entry in the franchise, the former ex-DICE developer has important information for them. View the full article