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Sounds like we're in for a big serving of eating your best friends with Yellowjackets season 3, as its co-creator has warned viewers to "buckle up". Read more View the full article

A 49-inch, 240Hz Samsung monitor could be in your future, thanks to this gaming monitor deal on Amazon. This curved Samsung Odyssey G95C display now has a cool 43% discount, making it the perfect Christmas present for yourself (or a loved one) at just $739. There have been some incredible Samsung monitors released in recent years, as our Samsung Odyssey G95SC review shows. While this G95C model isn't quite the best curved gaming monitor that the G95SC is, it can still hold its own, thanks to some seriously impressive specs. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Save 47% on this 2TB Steam Deck gaming SSD deal from Crucial this Cyber Monday This Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 gaming GPU repair video is incredibly satisfying Logitech's top wireless gaming mouse is half price this Cyber Monday View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

PUBG has been out for almost seven years already and in that time plenty has changed, from great new maps and weapons to the introduction of seasonal battle passes. For a game to survive this long though, it's not all about cramming in new toys. Sometimes you have to look back at the existing content and bring it up to standard, and that's exactly what PUBG update 33.1 has done. Bringing destructible environments to the jungle, it's time to relearn Sanhok all over again. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: PUBG system requirements Best PUBG settings for max fps Best PC games you can play on mobile View the full article

Two uncommon Magic: The Gathering cards have leapt up in price in the past few weeks, reaching surprisingly high values for cards so lacking in scarcity. In terms of percentage increase, the biggest jump has been for Pawpatch Formation, a green instant card which has gone up from $0.40 when Foundations came out to $3.50 - a jump of 775%. Meanwhile, Sheltered by Ghosts - already a pricey uncommon at $2.10 - has risen to an impressive $6.75. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All MTG sets in order, as of November 2024 MTG Arena codes for December 2024 Rarest and most expensive MTG cards 2024 View the full article

We haven't got long, so I'll keep this briefing brief, soldier. Call of Duty's just dropped a cheeky teaser for a crossover with Squid Game, that TV show everyone and their mum was utterly obsessed with a few years ago, and you've got a mission you need to complete before it drops. Read more View the full article

Developer Infold Games has revealed the preload and global release times for Infinity Nikki, the open-world dress up role-playing game from former The Legend of Zelda director Kentaro Tominaga coming to PlayStation 5, PC via the Epic Games Store, iOS, and Android. The highly anticipated sequel, which logged more than 35 million pre-registrations in its lead up to launch, is now available to preload, meaning players can download it ahead of time to begin playing the moment becomes available on December 5, or even December 4 in some locations. Infold Games released a story trailer to celebrate this preload availability, which can be watched below, and also announced some bonuses players who pick up Infinity Nikki at launch can enjoy in the game. Infinity Nikki: Official Release Trailer - About Wishes Pre-download on the official website: ➤ [Hidden Content] This journey, designated "INFINITY", marks both a new beginning and a long-awaited reunion. We look forward to seeing all of you stylists in Miraland!… [Hidden Content] — Infinity Nikki (@InfinityNikkiEN) December 3, 2024 Infinity Nikki Global Release TimesLos Angeles - 6pm on December 4New York - 9pm on December 4Rio De Janeiro - 10pm on December 4London - 2am on December 5Amsterdam - 3am on December 5Cape Town - 4am on December 5Kuala Lumpur - 10am on December 5Tokyo - 11am on December 5Sydney - 12noon on December 5 "With over 35 million pre-registrations, and even more players signing up today, Infinity Nikki and the development team are incredibly excited to welcome players with open arms to the breathtaking world of Miraland," Infold Games said of the imminent release. Bonus items include a special stylist background, a camera pose, two 4-star outfits, and enough crystals to fuel up to 126 total pulls across the limited and permanent banners. These come alongside a handful of rewards made available for hitting so many pre-registrations, including 50,000 Blings, 300 Threads of Purity, 20 Resonite Crystals, and a 4-star outfit. IGN's preview of Infinity Nikki certainly had positive things to say. "We never knew dressing up could be so much fun," we said. "Our time with Infinity Nikki left us eager to try on the finished game when it eventually arrives." Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day. View the full article

Now that Windblown, the new roguelike from original ***** Cells developer Motion Twin, has been out for some time, the first feature patch of the game's Steam Early Access ******* is almost here. I've been thoroughly enjoying Motion Twin's isometric co-op spin on what it does best, but there's been one looming problem. The current Sudden ****** mechanic, which activates when a co-op ally *****, is far too brutal. With Windblown's first big patch of new features, though, that's going to change. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Windblown early access release date, trailers, and latest news ***** Cells dev's Windblown to get mechanic rework after community feedback The Windblown demo is here, and the ***** Cells dev's new roguelike is a blast View the full article

William ******, the man behind the 'This 'Effin GM' DnD YouTube channel, has shared the painful story of his brother's ****** by ********, to help explain the value of safety tools in tabletop roleplaying games. Via a thirteen minute video, ****** explains both the circumstances of his brother's ******, and how safety tools helped him participate in a dark horror TTRPG while still grieving. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All DnD races and species explained This 97% off TTRPG bundle leaves DnD Beyond's Cyber Monday deals in the dust One of DnD's best books in years is half price for ****** Friday View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Warning: Spoilers for Fallout New Vegas lie ahead. Read more View the full article

In Sony's latest bid to get you to buy some tickets to see Kraven the Hunter, it's released the first eight minutes online for you to watch completely for free. Read more View the full article

As confirmed in the newest COD POD, the next Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6 Zombies map, Citadelle des Morts, is bringing back the Vulture Aid perk. View the full article

GSC Game World creative director Maria Grygorovych shows me a message on her phone. It’s proof, she says, that she’s telling me the truth about Stalker 2’s A-Life 2.0 system. The message is about why mention of A-Life 2.0 was pulled from Stalker 2’s Steam page and replaced with a generic description about the way AI works in the game. It turns out that Maria found out the description had changed when she saw players complaining about it on Reddit. Stalker 2 launched late last month to a positive reception on Steam and one million sales. It’s a success for the Ukrainian studio, a miracle, really, considering the harrowing circumstances that followed Russian’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022. Stalker 2 suffers from well-documented bugs; GSC knows this and is working as hard as it can to fix them. But it’s A-Life 2.0 — or its apparent absence — that has gained the most attention from fans. A-Life was a key feature of the first Stalker game that governed AI behavior across the game world. At a high level, it is a system for simulating life in the Zone that works its magic seemingly independently of the player’s actions or whereabouts. It helps to create convincing AI and the emergent gameplay Stalker is famous for. GSC had said A-Life 2.0 would make the Zone feel alive as never before, that it would fuel emergent gameplay on a scale previously thought impossible. Indeed for some fans, A-Life 2.0 was Stalker 2’s biggest selling point. Unfortunately, now Stalker 2 is out in the wild, A-Life 2.0 hasn’t quite lived up to that billing. In fact, it feels as if A-Life 2.0 isn’t even in the game. Players have found little evidence to suggest anything approaching a life simulation is in operation at any scale, with NPCs and enemies spawning around the player and sometimes in obvious ways. This, players have said, lends Stalker 2 a more scripted feel than its predecessor, with emergent gameplay sorely lacking. So, what happened? GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych and creative director Maria Grygorovych offer an explanation during our interview, which takes place at BAFTA in Piccadilly, London following a screening of War Game: The Making of Stalker 2. The 90-minute documentary, which includes interviews with GSC’s Ukrainian staff as they contend with the invasion, reveals the remarkable circumstances surrounding the extremely difficult development of Stalker 2. It’s with this in mind that Ievgen and Maria explain what went wrong with A-Life 2.0, revealing for the first time how the studio's battle to optimize the performance of Stalker 2 in the months before release caused the feature to break down. A-Life 2.0 is in Stalker 2, the pair insist, it’s just bugged. Massively bugged. Ievgen offers a technical explanation of what happened. In short, optimization issues ahead of launch forced GSC to shrink the area around the player in which A-Life 2.0 works. It is supposed to extend much farther in virtual distance terms than it currently does, but to get Stalker 2 into a decent place performance wise across PC and Xbox Series X and S, the developers had to reduce this distance. then came the bugs on top. “This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources," Ievgen says in English, which isn't his first language. "We were fighting with optimization. To optimize, you have a lot of things that need your resources, and you try to cut things from different directions to properly optimize the game well. “But to make it work we had to optimize some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations not as it should. Also, we created some bugs not long ago before release with NPCs spawning in the air and dropping back to the bottom. They should actually spawn in the terrain. Why it happened, I don’t know! And also we had some bugs with AI behavior. “So, all these things connected make it look like it's very broken and not working. But we are now continuing working on the optimization part to bring more resources for the A-Life system, to increase the range where A-Life is actually visualized. “There are NPCs outside of the range of the player and they are in offline mode. And when the player reaches some distance, they are going to online mode and they pop back up. The distance is dictated by our optimization range, where we stream the real world and not real world with all the collisions. It was tough work, and because of these optimization problems and bugs, it's become broken.” OK, so now we know what went wrong with A-Life 2.0. The question is, can GSC fix it? Or, can it get A-Life 2.0 into a place where it realizes the developer’s ambition and makes good on that initial promise? Absolutely, Ievgen and Maria insist. In fact that’s exactly what the developer is working on now. “For now we committed to players to make it work and it can be done from directions both optimizing, giving more resources to A-Life, fixing bugs, making it work properly, and then putting more efforts to make it more advanced,” Ievgen says. All this brings us nicely back to A-Life 2.0’s mysterious disappearance from Stalker 2’s Steam page upon the game’s release. Its original description, which mentioned A-Life 2.0 by name alongside promises about how game-changing it would be, was removed and replaced by another description that fails to mention A-Life 2.0 at all. "Advanced artificial intelligence systems that will keep engaged even the most hard-boiled players,” it now reads. That’s not particularly exciting to fans, who are at best worried about the future of A-Life 2.0, at worst accusing GSC of misleading them. He did that without any discussion or permission. He didn’t ask, ‘Do we have some bugs with A-Life or something?’ Because we had. Maria tells me someone on GSC’s marketing team took it upon themselves to change the A-Life 2.0 description to make it easier to understand. The thinking, apparently, was that Stalker newcomers wouldn't have a clue what A-Life meant and might dismiss it. But this marketing person didn’t run the change by Maria first before pushing it live. “He told me there will be a lot of new players who don’t know what A-Life is,” Maria says. “They need to understand what we’re talking about in this description. So I will try to change it to a more understandable form. He did that without any discussion or permission. He didn’t ask, ‘Do we have some bugs with A-Life or something?’ Because we had. We knew that. It’s a really huge and difficult system. But, when he did that before release, it was a surprise for me, because I noticed it because of Reddit. We did the Steam page in 2021. So for me, I was shocked, honestly.” Maria admits her explanation of events might sound unconvincing or suspicious, and suggests I probably don’t believe a word she’s saying. “People think it looks like it’s connected to us releasing the game with broken A-Life,” she says. “But it’s not. Even now, I’m talking about it to you, and you’re thinking, 'Hmm, yeah yeah, it was some guy in the marketing team.' I understand it sounds suspicious!” So she pulls out her phone and scrolls for a bit before showing me a screenshot of the inter-company message proving she was telling the truth about this marketing person changing the Steam page without her knowledge. I tell her I believed her anyway, but she insists on showing me her phone screen and yep, it’s there, in ****** and white. So, will GSC put that A-Life 2.0 description back on Stalker 2’s Steam page? Not until the feature itself is fixed, Maria says. But there’s no timeframe for that, and it’s hard to push for one given half the development team is still working out of Ukraine and faces week-long power cuts that turn blanket the country in darkness and cut off internet access. "We have relationships with our players and players wanted to see something," Maria says. "We have to do it for them." To help you survive in the Zone, we've got a list of Essential Stalker 2 Tips and Tricks, plus a guide on Things to Do First in Stalker 2 to help you through the early game, and Things Stalker 2 Doesn't Tell You - everything we wish we knew before we started playing. Save time scouring the wasteland with our Artifacts checklist and locations guide, and every Stash location we've found so far. 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

As Graham pointed out earlier this year, A Difficult Game About Climbing is a difficult game about climbing. A Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It-inspired limb-flailer, where hoisting yourself up a mountain as a bald man is painfully moreish. Well, let me introduce you to A Difficult Game About Driving, a difficult game about driving. Again, you play as a bald man (called Jeff) who sits in a 4x4 bathtub and must ascend a series of difficult roads. There's a demo out now and let me tell you, it's awfully good. Read more View the full article

Synergy is a free mod for Half-Life 2 that allows you to play the Half-Life 2 series and many other singleplayer Source Mods cooperatively with friends. It was recently upgraded to support the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Treyarch has finally addressed the ****** Ops 6 hit registration problem, and the community is far from happy with the developer's response. If you've been ********* enemies, getting hitmarkers, and seeing blood gush from their bodies only for you to do no damage, then you've experienced the hit registration issue. It's been happening in ****** Ops 6 and Warzone for some time now, and players are concerned about what Treayarch's new statement could mean for how hit registration is dealt with. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Best BO6 loadouts for the current meta Best BO6 guns and weapons CoD ****** Ops 6 guides View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

A new ****** Bandicoot game is heading to Xbox Game Pass on December 4 for standard and ultimate subscribers. ****** Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled is a remaster of the classic PS1 title, complete with many different maps and characters to choose from. View the full article

Exploration and choices are important in Stalker 2, and at several points in the main story you'll have to make key decisions that affect how events and the conclusion of the game play out. Overall, there are four main Stalker 2 endings in the game depending on who you align yourself with... Read more.View the full article

Monster Hunter Wilds is only a few months away now, and a lot of hunters are already whipping out their whetstones and sharpening their tools ahead of facing some of the series' most threatening monsters yet. If it's your first time delving into a Monster Hunter game, or if you're looking to try a new approach to the hunt this time around, your first port of call will be your *******. And we all know that Monster Hunter isn't shy in giving us a lot of variety... Read more.View the full article

Jingle Jam 2024 has begun and runs until December 14th, where you can donate to get a bundle of games and support various charities. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

While Kagurabachi was treated as a bit of a joke in the west last year, it's seemingly been popular enough to get an anime adaptation. Read more View the full article

With Fisch’s new update, players can finally craft new fishing rods with unique passives in the Ancient Archives area using the anvil. After reaching the Ancient Isle island in Roblox’s Fisch, you will have to find the waterfall to the left of the island and use your glider to go inside the waterfall. After that, use the rope to go down, and you should find the puzzle to unlock the Ancient Archives area. You need to use all four Ancient Fragments to unlock the door and use your glider to make your way to the end of the room to find the magical anvil to craft your special fishing rod. View the full article

One of the big problems many Dragon Age fans have with The Veilguard is its lack of RPG elements, especially when it comes to choice. View the full article

Here we go again! Each week Prime Gaming, part of what you get with a subscription to Amazon Prime, add and remove various games you can claim to keep. This week we get two sets of new games! Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Disney was already ***** set on making sequels, but the opening weekend for Moana 2 will have absolutely cemented that decision. Read more View the full article

While they've still been busy with the usual Major Order stuff too, a lot of Helldivers 2 have also been keeping a keen eye on the game's SteamDB page over the past week and a bit. And now Arrowhead's thoroughly confused a bunch of them by updating a depot that sounds a bit more *****'s Kitchen then Helldivers. Read more View the full article