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League of Legends is turning red as Noxus makes his way to Summoner’s Rift, introducing multiple changes that will change existing systems in the game. With the Noxus taking over League, players are getting a total revamp in the Noxian colors where multiple game-changing objective changes, champion adjustments, new runes, and a new epic monster are making their way on the Summoner’s Rift. View the full article

Sid Meier's Civilization 7 has a new Emergent Narrative system that introduces thousands of Narrative Events to mix things up for players during each match. Emergent Narratives function based on players' choices, and making certain choices affects which Narrative Events will be available later on. These changes are designed to make the story of each leader's civilization more immersive and reflective of the specific choices that the player makes. On top of that, Narrative Events will also make each campaign more unique and add a ton of replay value to the game given the sheer number of narratives available. View the full article

With Lenovo's announcement at CES 2025 of the Lenovo Legion Go S, we are pleased to share that their "Powered by SteamOS" model is the first handheld officially licensed to ship with Valve's SteamOS. We built this operating system to provide a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC. SteamOS is the same operating system we run on Steam Deck, and the team is making updates to ensure it fully supports the Lenovo Legion Go S and provides the same seamless experience customers expect. In addition, the same work that we are doing to support the Lenovo Legion Go S will improve compatibility with other handhelds. Ahead of Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of SteamOS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases. Frequently-asked questions: What is SteamOS? SteamOS is an operating system built by Valve. It features a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC, and plays tens of thousands of games on Steam. SteamOS currently officially ships on Steam Deck and will soon ship with certain Legion Go S models. Valve is working on SteamOS support for more devices in the future. What are the key benefits of SteamOS? SteamOS is optimized for gaming and provides a console-like experience that's meant to be used with a controller. It offers features like quick suspend / resume to get you quickly in and out of games, and offers seamless system and game updates. What is the user experience of SteamOS? SteamOS puts the player directly into Steam, with access to the full Steam ecosystem - your Steam Library, Steam Cloud, Steam Chat, Steam Game Recording, and more. The user interface is optimized for controller use and it's easy to install and play Steam games. Best of all, users don't have to worry about driver updates and hardware tweaks - all of this is handled seamlessly through built in system updates. Can this run every game on Steam? SteamOS is Linux based, and the vast majority of the Steam library runs on SteamOS, thanks to the Proton compatibility layer Valve ships. This allows developers to ship games for Windows without worrying about porting to Linux, and games will seamlessly work on SteamOS. When a game doesn't run well on SteamOS, we call it out with our Verified program so customers know what will and won't work well. Is this the same operating system that is on Steam Deck? Yes, it's the same operating system that Steam Deck runs. Is a user locked into playing only Steam games? No, if players wish to they can go to desktop mode and install other game launchers and software if they wish.  View the full article

With Lenovo's announcement at CES 2025 of the Lenovo Legion Go S, we are pleased to share that their "Powered by SteamOS" model is the first handheld officially licensed to ship with Valve's SteamOS. We built this operating system to provide a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC. SteamOS is the same operating system we run on Steam Deck, and the team is making updates to ensure it fully supports the Lenovo Legion Go S and provides the same seamless experience customers expect. In addition, the same work that we are doing to support the Lenovo Legion Go S will improve compatibility with other handhelds. Ahead of Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of SteamOS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases. Frequently-asked questions: What is SteamOS? SteamOS is an operating system built by Valve. It features a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC, and plays tens of thousands of games on Steam. SteamOS currently officially ships on Steam Deck and will soon ship with certain Legion Go S models. Valve is working on SteamOS support for more devices in the future. What are the key benefits of SteamOS? SteamOS is optimized for gaming and provides a console-like experience that's meant to be used with a controller. It offers features like quick suspend / resume to get you quickly in and out of games, and offers seamless system and game updates. What is the user experience of SteamOS? SteamOS puts the player directly into Steam, with access to the full Steam ecosystem - your Steam Library, Steam Cloud, Steam Chat, Steam Game Recording, and more. The user interface is optimized for controller use and it's easy to install and play Steam games. Best of all, users don't have to worry about driver updates and hardware tweaks - all of this is handled seamlessly through built in system updates. Can this run every game on Steam? SteamOS is Linux based, and the vast majority of the Steam library runs on SteamOS, thanks to the Proton compatibility layer Valve ships. This allows developers to ship games for Windows without worrying about porting to Linux, and games will seamlessly work on SteamOS. When a game doesn't run well on SteamOS, we call it out with our Verified program so customers know what will and won't work well. Is this the same operating system that is on Steam Deck? Yes, it's the same operating system that Steam Deck runs. Is a user locked into playing only Steam games? No, if players wish to they can go to desktop mode and install other game launchers and software if they wish.  View the full article

Neal.fun came out with a new browser game, and this time it’s directed at the highly stimulated internet users. Stimulation Clicker works similarly to Cookie Clicker, but the more you click, the more things will appear on your screen to stimulate you. Unlike Infinite Craft, Stimulation Clicker doesn’t require any logic or any thinking—on the contrary. The objective is to create as much stimulation as possible to the point you can’t even think. This game is a nod to the recent trend of consuming a lot of content at the same time, such as watching a video with a clip of subway surfers on the bottom, or listening to a podcast or an ASMR video while doing other things. View the full article

When booting up Path of Exile 2 for the first time, players are offered the choice of six playable classes. One of the classes currently available is Monk, and if built properly, it’s extremely fun and satisfying to play. In PoE 2, players have to pick between active and passive skills, Persistent Buff Skill Gems, Ascendancies, and items in order to create the best build. With so many options, finding the right build may be tricky. But, don’t worry, Monk players. Here is our favorite Monk build in PoE 2 so far. View the full article

Who better to make a true rival to the behemoth that is Minecraft than the developer that created it in the first place? For a short while, this seemed like a genuine possibility, as Markus 'Notch' Persson pitched the idea of making his own 'Minecraft 2' sandbox game. However, it now seems like that dream is over already, as the developer has revealed he's going to pursue a roguelike passion project instead. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The 32 best Minecraft servers list 2025 - Java and Bedrock The 44 best Minecraft texture packs January 2025 35 Minecraft build ideas for 1.21 View the full article

If you're looking for a fresh MOBA experience after sinking hundreds of hours into League of Legends, or if you're completely new to the genre, you can give Smite 2 a go as a free-to-play game incredibly soon. With a diverse cast of deities from myriad cultures, stories, and myths, Smite 2 is poised to already challenge LoL. So, it's time to brush up on your tactics if you're not already in the game. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Smite 2 release date, gameplay, progress transfer, and latest news Smite 2 unveils its next 19 gods with an exquisite PowerPoint Grab a free Smite 2 Steam key before they're all gone View the full article

Yakuza fans who are eager to learn more about Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii before its February release can tune into a Like a Dragon Direct later this week. Unlike the recent mainline Like a Dragon RPGs, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii will allow players to enjoy the fluid, real-time combat the original Kiryu saga was known for. This time, Goro Majima is in the driver's seat, as Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii follows his story in and around Hawaii after the events of last year's Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. View the full article

Smite 2 will kick off its free-to-play open beta on January 14, kicking off a new chapter for the third-person action MOBA. Entering its Alpha stage in early 2024, Smite 2 is promising new modes, Gods, Aspects, and much more as it prepares to introduce even more players to the new generation of Smite. View the full article

Riot Games practically adds new skins to League of Legends with every patch. The one champion who has amassed the most so far is rather underrated, though. That is Miss Fortune, one of the original characters in League. The fact that she has as many as 21 skins was pointed out on Reddit on Jan. 6. The data on League’s wiki says the character has 22 skins. However, one of them, Prestige Bewitching Miss Fortune, is displayed twice (since her original version is not available anymore). So 21 is the correct count, and is still enough to put her atop the League skins list. View the full article

CES is jam-packed with announcements, and Asus has brought the thunder with a refresh of nearly everything under its gaming brands. That includes a world first, with an update to its ROG XG Mobile external graphics card. It's received a major bump in specs, now coming with an mobile Nvidia RTX 5090. The XG Mobile line has been around since 2021 and provides a means of equipping your laptop or PC gaming handheld, such as the ROG Ally, with a powerful GPU, without the need to fit the GPU inside your device. Instead, it uses a cable to connect to your device and provide its GPU processing power externally. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: This new Asus ROG Strix gaming laptop has enough RGB to make your desk glow Loads of Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 laptop gaming GPU specs just leaked in blunder Grab the Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld at its lowest ever price, saving $150 View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

The identity of the company who purchased former Take-Two indie publishing label Private Division has seemingly been revealed. Following months of speculation, Take-Two announced in November that it had sold Private Division, including most of its existing and unreleased titles, but it didn’t disclose who had acquired the label or for how much. According to Bloomberg’s sources, the buyer was Haveli Investments, a private equity firm based in Austin, Texas. Read More... View the full article

You can use and discover multiple Jokers during your run in Balatro. Each has a distinctly unique quality that makes it useful, but it all comes down to your cards, and how you use them. Not every Joker might work the way you want, like the Séance Joker. Getting the Séance Joker to work can be tricky, and it comes down to how you structure your deck. Like other Jokers, it has a distinct effect with prerequisites to activate it, and if you don’t do exactly what it says, the effect is not triggered. You also want to make sure you have room when you use the Séance Joker in your line-up because must have an open consumable slot to redeem it. We’ll breakdown how the Séance Joker works and how you can make the most of it in your next Balatro run. View the full article

Marvel Rivals‘ roster of heroes and villains expands by four in the game’s first season. And that four is especially Fantastic, including the iconic Human Torch. Johnny Storm was affected by the same cosmic rays that altered his sister, her husband, and their friend while on a mission in space, altering him on the cellular level and giving him the incredible ability of being able to manipulate fire and engulf his own body in flames. View the full article

After having players depend on manual voting for years, VALORANT is finally embracing a more reliable automated system for remakes starting with Patch 10.0. As announced in the latest VALORANT patch notes, you no longer have to enter the “/remake” command to bring up the voting system. Upon detecting an AFK player, the game will automatically trigger the remake for your team. But that’s not all. View the full article

Despite the lack of any official announcement, the Nintendo Switch 2 has had countless potential leaks and rumors circulating over its development. While most of these potential leaks turned out to be false or more akin to fan concepts than anything, 2025 might finally be the year that the highly anticipated console finally releases, given the rapid rise of reputable rumors. The new year has plenty of exciting potential for a new Nintendo console, but the lengthy wait has led player expectations to skyrocket into dangerously unachievable territory. View the full article

WWE 2K25 was teased during the first RAW live on Netflix as Roman Reigns walked backstage. Following the reveal of the WWE 2K25 on a backstage door, the game's Steam page went live, showcasing debut screenshots for the sequel. Cody Rhodes, Bayley, Liv Morgan, Damian Priest, and CM Punk have all been shown off in the sports entertainment title. View the full article

******** publisher Tencent are the biggest video game company in the world. Their wholly owned subsidiaries including League Of Legends developers Riot Games, Path Of Exile developers Grinding Gear Games, and *** outfit Sumo Group. They own shares in everything from Epic Games through Ubisoft to Silent Hill 2 rebooters Bloober Team. Are you a game developer? Odds are that at least one percent of your body belongs to Tencent. Maybe one of your toes. And now it turns out that Tencent are some kind of military operator, as well. Or at least, that's what the US Department of Defence would have us believe: they've just somewhat randomly added the firm to an infamous list of ******** military companies, together with lithium-ion battery maker CATL. This potentially makes it difficult for Tencent to do business in the States, but Tencent say that it's all based on a "misunderstanding". Read more View the full article

Here at Ars, we're judicious about which of the many, many Switch 2 rumors we decide to highlight on this page. For every report on hardware power or magnetic Joy-Cons that we share, there are probably five others we see and decide are too lightly sourced, too unlikely, or just too plain obscure to spread here. But when we started hearing reports that the Switch 2's Joy-Cons could be cradled on their sides and manipulated like a full-fledged gaming mouse, we knew the concept was one you'd want to hear about. Rumor: More images of Switch 2 Joy-Cons have immerged from China. Source: [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] — Stealth (@Stealth40k) January 5, 2025 The rumors of mouse-like functionality on the Switch 2's included controllers got supercharged over the weekend when a Reddit poster shared detailed photos of purported Switch 2 Joy-Cons, sourced from an unnamed ******** social media user. In between the longer shoulder buttons along the Joy-****'s inner edge (SL and SR) and a new central connector port, eagle-eyed viewers noticed what looks suspiciously like the optical sensor that sits on the bottom of practically every mouse these days. Read full article Comments View the full article

The Lenovo Legion Go S, with SteamOS. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Lenovo is trying an experiment. In May, it will officially become the very first company outside of Valve to ship a handheld gaming PC with the Steam Deck’s wonderfully pick-up-and-play SteamOS instead of Microsoft Windows. And at $499, it’ll be a true Steam Deck rival, joining it as one of the lower-priced PC handhelds you can buy. [/url] That handheld will be the 1.6-pound Lenovo Legion Go S, a new and improved version of the company’s eight-inch handheld that ditches the Nintendo Switch-like detachable gamepads and kickstand for a lighter and more traditional design, with a sculpted grip that felt supremely comfortable in my hands. It’ll also be one of the few handhelds on the market to offer a 120Hz variable refresh rate screen — a highly desirable feature that lets low-power handheld gameplay feel smooth, even if it’s not generating lots of frames. That screen will be lower in resolution at 1920 x 1200, too, and feature a hopefully power-sipping new AMD Ryzen Z2 Go chip. (It’s a Lenovo-exclusive chip, by the way.) View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Verge (@verge) In other words, it might address every major complaint I had in my Legion Go review, while additionally adding fun configurable RGB lighting around the joysticks, a slightly larger 55Wh battery, a pair of levers to reduce the throw of the triggers, and a less obtrusive touchpad, too, while retaining the dual USB 4 ports. But Lenovo isn’t going all in on SteamOS. Not only will it hedge its bets by shipping a Windows version of the Legion Go S as well but it’ll also ship with Windows this month — four months ahead of the SteamOS models. The Windows model is white: It’s not like the SteamOS model is ready now anyhow. Valve codesigners Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais tell me they’ve only been working with Lenovo for a couple of months, and the integration isn’t quite done. The new touchpad, gyroscope, and both RGB lighting and TDP configuration options are among the things on their to-do list. But the Windows version shipping in January will cost $729.99, with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. In May, the true experiment will begin when gamers can pick between a $499.99 SteamOS version with 16GB / 512GB, a $599.99 Windows version with 16GB / 1TB, or the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED at $399 and $549, respectively. And it does sound like there will be one important reason to pick the Steam Deck over the Legion Go S and vice versa, because AMD’s Z2 Go is a different chip. While the Z2 Go announced yesterday sheds cores and GPU generations to be slightly more akin to the Steam Deck’s semi-custom Aerith and / or Sephiroth parts, we noted that it targets higher power levels, and Legion Go product manager Alex Zhu confirms to me that the Legion Go S is aimed at 20-watt performance, 30-watt, maybe even 40-watt configurable performance, which will likely offer higher performance (and lower battery life) than the 15-watt-and-below Steam Deck’s chip. Zhu says Lenovo is targeting between two and 2.5 hours of battery life in demanding heavy games — which lines up with the basic math of dividing a 55 watt-hour battery by 20 watts, assuming the rest of the system doesn’t eat up a lot more. Versions with AMD’s existing Z1 Extreme chip will also be available in some markets. All Legion Go S can fit full-length M.2 2280 solid state drives. BTW, Valve isn’t keeping key Steam Deck features like precompiled shaders to itself, or anything else, for that matter. Yang and Griffais say it will be one SteamOS, and the Legion Go S and any future SteamOS devices will get the same updates as the Deck, minus hardware-specific tweaks. Valve tells me Lenovo is currently its only partner for a SteamOS device — there are no other third-party SteamOS devices currently in the works. But Griffais hints that Valve is close to publicly releasing a new beta of its SteamOS that just might possibly start working on other handhelds as well. (Valve previously confirmed to us that it was building toward some level of support for the Asus ROG Ally in SteamOS as well.) And it’s vaguely possible that SteamOS beta could arrive before the SteamOS Legion Go S — Valve says it’s slated to ship sometime after March. But the real dream is to pull a PC handheld out of a box and have it just work, the way a Nintendo Switch works, not to shoehorn an operating system on it afterward, no matter how good the result. That’s why Lenovo is working with Valve: Zhu agrees that SteamOS has the best out-of-box experience. But, he says, Windows offers a whole ecosystem of gaming and productivity that the company believes its customers still want. Zhu agrees that SteamOS is an experiment for Lenovo and says it’ll look at the feedback and momentum before making its next move. Speaking of what’s next, Lenovo is also building a larger Legion Go 2 with detachable controllers and an 8.8-inch OLED screen, and it brought prototypes of that unit to CES: Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge The new Legion Go 2 prototype, with a smaller kickstand and more sculpted grips. Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Zhu tells me Lenovo doesn’t have “any specific plans” to put SteamOS on the larger Legion Go, just Windows — but perhaps it depends on what customers buy in May. Meanwhile, Valve is still looking ahead to a future version of its own Steam Deck, saying that partnering with companies like Lenovo hasn’t reduced the desire to build its own. But AMD’s Z2 isn’t the “leap” that Valve’s been waiting for, Griffais tells The Verge. There won’t be a Z2 Steam Deck. View the full article

Sorry, Until Dawn fans, but the characters you know and love seemingly won't be in the upcoming live-action film adaptation. Read more View the full article

Microsoft has announced the first wave of January Game Pass line-up, kicking off the new year with a selection of new titles for subscribers to check out. Though, if you're a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber playing on Xbox, you're only getting one new game. Read more View the full article

Street Fighter 6 fans aren't happy with the game's newly announced battle pass, which includes typical items like player avatars, stickers, and other customization options. What fans are taking issue with is not what's included in the new battle pass, but rather what's missing, as players were quick to notice no new character costumes are featured. This prompted a fierce storm of backlash and controversy, with the trailer for the new battle pass coming to Street Fighter 6 essentially being pounded into the ground on YouTube and other social media platforms. View the full article

Lenovo have lifted the lid on the world's first officially licensed handheld powered by SteamOS, the Lenovo Legion Go S, which should arrive in May. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article