Steam

Naturally you have to admire the work of game developers, particularly those with a talent like Valve. Between the original Half-Life, new hero shooter Deadlock, and maybe, just maybe, Half-Life 3, the Gabe Enclave has successfully produced some of the most defining PC games of the last two decades. But perhaps even more awe-inspiring is the work of speedrunners, and the ingenious ways they manage to reverse engineer and break Valve's games. 25 years since it was released, Half-Life Opposing Force, the Adrian Shephard-led expansion focusing on the HECU, has just been dismantled and rebuilt into a staggering speedrun record that almost defies belief. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Underrated Half-Life game gets huge new Steam record 23 years later Half-Life players are plotting to break a new Steam record If Deadlock is real, the visionary Valve we once knew is gone for good View the full article

Ballistic Moon, the developer behind the PlayStation 5 and PC remake of Until Dawn, has ***** off several staff members. Eurogamer first reported that at least two staff members had announced their departure on LinkedIn but 11 Ballistic Moon developers have now either posted about being made redundant or marked themselves as "open to work" and looking to start somewhere new immediately. It's unclear exactly how many of these staff were ***** off, or if the number is greater than 11, but IGN has asked Ballistic Moon for comment. "Like many others in this wonderful but turbulent industry, I am sadly being made redundant from my role," said junior game designer Cassy Cornish in a LinkedIn post. "Unfortunately my current role at Ballistic Moon is being made redundant so I'm looking for new opportunities," said game programmer Stuart Campbell in another The past two years have seen countless video game industry layoffs as big companies including Microsoft, Sony, and the embattled Embracer Group have not just cut jobs but shut down entire studios. Microsoft shut down Redfall developer Arkane Austin alongside Hi-Fi Rush and Ghostwire Tokyo developer Tango Gameworks in May 2024 in a move met with shock and anger by industry peers and fans. Embracer Group shut down Saints Row developer Volition in 2023, while Sony shut down its London Studio in March 2024 amid layoffs affecting 900 staff across the PlayStation business. ******** video game company NetEase also reportedly ***** off most staff at Visions of Mana developer Ouka Studios with plans to shut it down altogether. Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day. View the full article

In July of 2023, Baldur's Gate 3 was hardly a blip on my radar. When it was released one month later, it became one of my favorite games of all time. Now, the game is celebrating its one-year anniversary. Its seventh major patch, which will add official modding support and new endings to the game, is right around the corner, and developer Larian Studios launched a brand new YouTube channel to provide behind-the-scenes looks at the game and its developers. Between its critical acclaim, numerous awards, and financial success, Baldur's Gate 3 is worth celebrating, but its meteoric rise to success was just as surprising to the developers at Larian as it was to the rest of the gaming community. "At every single point, I thought it was going to stop," game director Swen Vincke says of the game's success. "I remember arguing with our director of publishing, who said, 'This is going to sell a lot.' I said, 'That's impossible. The number you're saying is just not possible.'" The interview with Vincke is done virtually, but while I'm home in my office, Vincke answers my call from the passenger seat of a moving car. He's the only one who can hear me, but he informs me of potential background noise from the ********* of the car, which is currently filled with several other developers who worked on the game. I don't know exactly where they're headed, but to schedule an interview for the travel time from one place to another makes one thing abundantly clear – Vincke is a busy man, but he's not ready to share the project taking up all of his time. "That's impossible. The number you're saying is just not possible." Despite months of patches and media attention on Baldur's Gate 3, Larian is already hard at work on its next project, and while we don't know exactly what it is, we know it isn't Baldur's Gate 4. In March, Vincke announced the studio's plans to end its partnership with Wizards of the Coast, meaning Larian won't be making DLC or a sequel to their critical success. Several months after this announcement, Vincke says the folks at Larian have no regrets about the decision. "We actually decided this only at Christmas. We were working on stuff, but [...] our hearts weren't as much in it, probably because we spent so much time already in it. So it was time for us to do new things, and ever since, we've felt better. We [got] our developer joy back [...] and that's the prime thing, right? If you don't have that, you can't make anything good." A Series Revivified It's only natural that after spending six years working on the game, Larian isn't as enthusiastic about Baldur's Gate 3 as it once was. But back in 2017, that exact enthusiasm was what led Vincke to pursue the project to begin with. The original Baldur's Gate games are hailed as BioWare classics from the late 90s, and after decades without a new entry, Larian saw itself as a developer fit to continue the legacy. Wizards of the Coast (which owns the Baldur's Gate IP) agreed to a pitch meeting, but the presentation's date was, ironically, set for the same day as the release date for Larian's then-upcoming title, Divinity: Original Sin 2. According to Vincke, the time crunch led to a subpar presentation. "I'm still ashamed for it," Vincke laughs when recalling the initial pitch meeting. Whatever it was Vincke showed Wizards of the Coast, it was clearly below their standards. "That was the best that we could do. [Wizards of the Coast] said, 'This is not very good.' We said, 'We know. Give us more time.' And then they gave us more time." Thankfully, the following presentation went much better, and the studio was given the green light. So, after shipping the definitive edition of Divinity: Original Sin 2, Larian focused all its efforts on making Baldur's Gate 3. The game entered early access in 2020. Just like with D:OS 2, the early access model allowed Larian to refine the gameplay experience with player feedback, but Vincke is unsure whether Larian will follow the same procedure for future games. "I think it has a tremendous amount of benefits," he says, "but every game has its own structure – its own language – so I think you need to judge that game by game." "That was the best that we could do. [Wizards of the Coast] said, 'This is not very good.'" In this case, players had plenty of feedback for Baldur's Gate 3 and Larian had to "course correct on quite a few things." In addition to a generally buggy launch (a complaint that would be levied at the game even months after its 1.0 release), fundamental pieces of the story and mechanics were completely reworked. Vincke recalls complaints about the past tense framing of the game's opening sequence, struggles with implementing the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, and general comments that it was too similar to their previous game. But the early access model ended up working quite well Vincke says. "At some point, we started figuring out how people wanted to play [Baldur's Gate 3]." For the following three years, Larian would constantly update and expand the content in their early access release, in addition to developing the latter two acts of the game. These updates often included adjustments to dialogue and story, which meant actors and voice-over artists frequently returned to the recording studio. Vincke and the rest of the writing team "changed the script continuously," fine-tuning the plot, making everything flow more naturally, and adding more instances where the game could react to player behavior. Vincke's audience of developers in the ********* of the car laughs as he tells this story. He adds, "Some of the victims of the rewrites are sitting here. The perpetrators, too." Roles With Advantages Of course, no one is more impacted by script rewrites than the actors themselves, but when I spoke to Devora Wilde, the actress who portrays Lae'zel, she remembers being glad for the extra work. "I felt very lucky in the beginning to, as an actor, have a job for such a long ******* of time," she says. "I was like, 'Oh my ****, I'm gonna have a job for two years.'" Due to delays in development, those two years would stretch to four, meaning Wilde spent a considerable amount of time in Lae'zel's virtual shoes – and a considerable amount of time with a recurring gig. Baldur's Gate 3 finally launched on August 3, 2023, but Wilde didn't feel the full impact the game would have for a few weeks. Between her TikTok posts and a video of the cast reading thirsty tweets, there was a considerable amount of online traction, but she didn't comprehend the physical size of the fanbase until MCM London Comic ****. Jennifer English, who plays Shadowheart in the game, felt the same way. "I'd gone to London Comic **** when the game was in early access and I remember being really honored that I had 10 people in my ******," English says. "I think I'd made my rent that weekend. And I was like, 'Wow, that's amazing.'" When she came back the following year, her lines had grown to six-hour wait times and the cast needed a security detail to handle the number of people stopping them on the show floor. Part of this ***** in popularity has to do with the actors themselves and their willingness to promote themselves and the game on social media. Popular games are released all the time, but it's not common for the actors behind video game characters to be thrust into the spotlight. While it wasn't Larian's suggestion that the cast begin engaging with memes on social media, Wilde says that Larian's encouragement of the situation has a lot to do with their ultimate success. "Larian [was] just gracious enough and fun-loving enough to be like, 'You know what? We're just gonna let them run with it.'" Wilde says. "Many other companies don't allow actors to do that actually, and I think that [Larian] really embrace the spirit of 'let the actors just kind of get on with it.'" "I'd gone to London Comic **** when the game was in early access and I remember being really honored that I had 10 people in my ******." In addition to the influx of followers, English says the online community's response to Shadowheart has made her more fond of the role. Despite initially not liking the character, she says, "The stuff that [players] like in Shadowheart is kind of the stuff I like about myself," and that fans have latched on to parts of the character that she hadn't even consciously portrayed. Meanwhile, Wilde was surprised Lae'zel was "so polarizing" at first, with many fans being turned away by her stand-offish attitude, though that attitude eventually softened. She says, "I was getting a lot of delayed responses, even now, where people are like, 'Oh, you know what? On my third playthrough, I gave her a chance and now I love her." Scheduling dilemmas mean my interviews with Wilde and English happen at different times, but I chose to speak with the two of them specifically because of their relationships with each other and the online community. Alongside Aliona Baranova, one of Baldur's Gate 3's motion capture directors and English's girlfriend, the actors have cultivated a following that has become separate from the game altogether. This includes a line of merch, with t-shirts referencing Wilde's love of ranch dressing and inside jokes suggesting the three of them are "****'s Favorite Throuple." The latter shirt references a meme of Shadowheart calling herself "****'s favorite princess," which English recreated per her girlfriend's suggestion. In fact, English credits her "chronically online girlfriend" Baranova for her social media successes, as English says it's "never been something I've really partaken in." Right on ******, Baranova peeks her head into the frame – she had been providing commentary from the other side of the Zoom camera the whole time – to say, "I just wanted to add that your Instagram was private. Do you remember?" Between her personal life, her professional life, and her self-image, Baldur's Gate 3 has had a profound impact on English. After Baranova leaves to grab dinner, English reflects on the anniversary and says, "It does not feel like a year. And yet, life has completely changed." The Next Campaign English isn't alone in that feeling; Baldur's Gate 3 has had a tremendous effect on everyone at Larian. In the months following its release, it won Game of the Year at the Game Awards, the Golden Joystick Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the GDC Awards, and the BAFTAs, not to mention a slew of other awards for narrative and performance, including the second ever Hugo award bestowed upon a video game. It has a staggering 96 on Metacritic and has been hailed as one of the greatest role-playing games of all time. In the face of this monumental impact, Larian's goals as a studio remain remarkably humble. "All this success means there are high expectations of what's next," art director Joachim Vleminckx writes over email. "We are playing it cool as always and we are not letting the success ****** us to the amount of hard work it took to get here." "So it was time for us to do new things, and ever since, we've felt better." "In practice, not much has changed," Vleminckx's fellow art director Alena Dubrovina says in that same email. "We are still hard working bees, ready for new adventures. The quality bar was set high by BG3, so we are wrapping our heads around how to raise it even higher." The idea of raising a bar past Baldur's Gate 3 sounds absurd, but Vincke has nitpicks with the game, even now – he wishes the encounter at the entrance to the grove in act one wasn't so much of a bottleneck, for example. "We could have continued for years tweaking it," he says. While their future game is sure to present plenty of unseen challenges, the nitpicks and unforeseen hurdles in the past projects will allow Larian to evolve for future ones. "BG3 was a game that was at a scale that was new to us, [...] so we learned a lot about dealing with scale," he says. "We learned a lot from what we didn't have, and we're trying to have that now so we [do] not make the same mistakes." "We're in the luxurious position now that we can pick our own destiny and our own path, which is really cool," Vincke says later in our conversation. "So I hope that we can sustain that. two main goals for the studio: being able to make things that we like to make and making sure that it's sustainable so we can continue doing so." This philosophy is directly opposed to much of what we see in the current gaming landscape. Between acquisitions, layoffs, crunching, and executives chasing infinite, exponential growth, it's a breath of fresh air to hear about a developer settling for a stable working environment. Baldur's Gate 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, in large part because of the personal, hardcrafted nature evident in its design. One year after the game's launch, it's nice to see that the people responsible for that product are excited about what's to come and satisfied with the work they've done. Charles Harte (@chuckduck365) is a writer, video editor, and podcaster based in Ohio. He can usually be found playing Dungeons & Dragons or petting his cats. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Oh boy, it's happening again. The war between cheaters and Call of Duty's anti-cheat software is kicking off once again. This time, the battle is rumbling aroun the Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6 beta, where early testing of Activision Blizzard's home-grown Ricochet anti-cheat software is ticking away and stamping out cheaters where it can. However, as is the way with this sort of thing, cheaters are hard at work trying to figure out their way around such measures. Already there are clips of cheats in-action within beta matches, but for the moment bans come fast as long as reports land on suspicious players. For those who are unaware, there'll be a back and forth between cheaters reigning supreme, and massive ban waves. Cheaters tend to run wild during periods in which the Ricochet anti-cheat team is gathering data, taking note of cheating accounts, and updating the software to clamp down on current workarounds. This then leads to massive ban waves, leaving a vast majority of cheaters banned and the game relatively pleasant to play while cheat developers work to find new workarounds. It's the circle of CoD life, and it moves us all. Read more View the full article

The MTG card Archangel Elspeth has seen a price spike of 228%. On August 10, the card was priced at $4 according to MTG Goldfish's tracker. Three weeks later, it's up to $13.10. The reason for the spike is a fresh new deck that's shaken up the Standard meta. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Could this Duskmourn MTG card be Red's version of Sheoldred? MTG Duskmourn's commanders want you to cheat out cards and hurt people MTG Duskmourn's Planeswalker card is ridiculously good for ninja decks View the full article

Pathfinder is a tabletop RPG that deals in delight. Its latest release, a character guide for the ******-inspired Tian Xia setting, is further proof of this. When such creativity and charm are on display, it's hard not to compare Pathfinder with other prominent RPGs. In particular, the market leader, D&D, could learn a thing or two from Tian Xia's character options. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: DnD rival Pathfinder gives away free Toy Story inspired adventure DnD's top rival Pathfinder rolls back controversial license changes DnD's biggest rival is giving away its fancy edition core rulebook View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Intel's programmable chip division Altera, which it acquired for $16.7 billion in 2015, is reportedly among the assets that may be put up for *****. The harsh reality is that Intel can no longer justify bankrolling underperforming subsidiaries with its dwindling profits. Read Entire Article View the full article

Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The 10 best DnD dragons to let fly in 2024 Fans compare the real DnD 2024 to their predictions from 2018 Dungeons and Dragons has neglected its lore for too long View the full article

The LEGO Harry Potter Collection is back in a big way so fans of the ever-popular games should prepare to pick up their wands and once again track down every collectible in Hogwarts. LEGO games are fairly hit-or-miss in how they're received by players with some of Traveller's Tales' earlier entries, like LEGO Star Wars, being revered over duds like LEGO The Incredibles. The community widely agrees that the studio's blocky take on Harry Potter was one of the franchise's peaks, so it's great to see them looking better than ever. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Genshin Impact 5.0 is without a doubt the biggest update so far, but even with a new major region and a ton of quality-of-life improvements, some players are simply furious with the new update. A TikTok video by hiranoos, posted on Aug. 16, shows Kazuha jumping off a cliff to his demise. The text over the footage says: “How it feels, knowing I can customize artifacts now,” suggesting the player dislikes the new quality-of-life improvements in Genshin Impact because they undermine their hard work. View the full article

Deadlock isn't even out yet, and Valve is already planning some big changes to matchmaking. Now that the Half-Life and Portal developer's new MOBA is public, with over 150,000 people playing the invite-only version at once, Valve is openly talking about how the shooter works. With so many players flooding in, though, it looks like Valve's matchmaking can't keep up. If you're in the Deadlock Discord you can easily get a sneak peek at the studio's plans, and one of them is a big change to MMR. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: New Deadlock patch adds game-changing wall jump mechanic Deadlock release date estimate, latest news, trailers, and more How to get into the Deadlock playtest View the full article

In most AAA games today, Digital Rights Management (DRM) software like Denuvo is standard practice. But in Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, Saber Interactive is going against the grain, and the dev is very emphatic about its reasons for defying the norm. In an official FAQ posted Sept. 1, Saber Interactive provides numerous details about Space Marine 2 ahead of its upcoming Sept. 9 launch. The FAQ includes a firm “no” in response to the question of whether the game will feature DRM software like Denuvo. View the full article

****** Myth: Wukong has a variety of materials you can find during your travels, but Rice Cocoons are one of the rarest without a clear purpose. These items are food for a divine creature you can interact with once you gain access to a secret area. You have to help out an NPC first before you can truly get the most out of the Rice Cocoons you collect. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Starfield had many issues at launch with both its core gameplay and approach to open-world design, but fortunately, much of this has been fixed throughout the many updates it has received. However, some issues still remain, with players wishing that Bethesda would fix them as soon as possible in future updates. Fortunately, it seems like Bethesda is listening, as the upcoming DLC, Shattered Space, will be addressing many of the issues with the base Starfield experience. View the full article

The Genshin Impact 5.1 leaks about the Imaginarium Theater game mode may finally push me deep into the activity to farm. Imaginarium Theater is a fairly recent endgame mode added to the action RPG by developer HoYoverse to accompany the Spiral Abyss. In its rotation, players have to build team comps around the available elements during the *******, though some guest characters are exceptions. There are elements of roguelike progression in the sense that players can select various stages and modifiers. There were Imaginarium Theater updates in Genshin Impact 5.0, making it much easier to build teams to challenge it. View the full article

From the moment its cinematic announcement trailer revealed that it would be played from a first-person perspective, Avowed has been viewed as Obsidian Entertainment’s answer to Skyrim. It’s a position Obsidian itself has tried to distance itself from, largely because Avowed is a smaller scale RPG made up of interconnected zones rather than a huge, sprawling open world game. Despite this, the Skyrim comparison makes a certain amount of sense; after proving it could do Bethesda games better than Bethesda itself with Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian created its own Fallout analogue in 2019’s The Outer Worlds. It cut short the agonising wait for Fallout 5 with a similar style of RPG (sure, it wasn’t open world, but it was directed by Fallout’s original creators), and so eyes have naturally turned to Avowed – could this be the game that finally gives us a new Elder Scrolls-like adventure years before Bethesda ships its own Skyrim successor? At gamescom 2024 I was able to play an hour of Avowed. That’s hardly enough to say if it truly is capable of standing up to such a landmark RPG as Skyrim – I didn’t even get to explore outside of a single *****. However, what I did play suggested it may well equal (or, hopefully, actually better) Skyrim in one important area: the stealth archer build. It’s a meme among the Skyrim community that everyone will eventually spec into a stealth archer build, no matter their initial intentions for a playthrough. That’s because playing a shadowy ******* in Skyrim is incredibly satisfying. You can decimate entire dungeons largely unseen and the thud of an arrow hitting an ******’s skull is delightful every single time, particularly when it triggers a slow-motion killcam. I think Obsidian knows all this and has gone to lengths to ensure its own ranger class is equally strong. The gamescom demo’s example ranger build was, naturally, equipped with a bow. The fundamentals of it will be familiar to anyone who’s played not just Skyrim but any other game with archery – aim, zoom, draw back longer to increase power, and release. But as any stealth archer knows, the first shot is the most important – if it doesn’t hit true, if it doesn’t ***** the target, then stealth is broken and chaos ensues. Seemingly recognising this, Avowed displays a small red diamond-shaped target on an ******’s weak point when you zoom in, a feature likely pilfered from the similarly ******** shot-obsessed ******* Elite games. While I’m perfectly capable of aiming between the eyes without assistance, I actually don’t mind this – it’s like a HUD representation of your character’s archery prowess. They know exactly where to strike. After slipping into a parallel shadow realm, you’re able to walk right through ****** patrols without disturbing even the air molecules. Archery is bolstered by two passive skills – power attacks and Steady Aim. Holding the drawn-back bow string engages the power *******, which empowers the notched arrow with a silver flame-like energy (I’m guessing this is because you play as a Godlike, a supernatural race from the Pillars of Eternity RPGs with which Avowed shares a setting with). Steady Aim, meanwhile, slows down time while aiming that power *******. These are, of course, repackaged versions of archery skills we’ve seen in Skyrim and beyond, but I’m glad they’re here because they’re a vital ingredient in the stealth archer’s return. Where Avowed’s sample archer build begins to deviate from Skyrim’s template is when it comes to sneaking. Naturally, you can crouch to reduce your visibility and crawl into long grass to disappear completely. But Avowed rangers also have access to the Shadowing Beyond skill, an active ability that renders you fully invisible until you make a combat action (provided you can afford its mana-draining cost.) It’s as effective as it sounds; after literally tearing a ***** in reality and slipping into some kind of parallel shadow realm, you’re able to walk right through ****** patrols without disturbing even the air molecules. It’s the stealth archer’s dream, enabling you to bypass tricky encounters or reposition to a more advantageous *******’s perch. It’s an ability that’s hard to come by in Skyrim; in Tamriel, a stealth archer needs to either find the Bow of Shadows and make use of its invisibility perk (which is nowhere near as powerful or flexible as Shadowing Beyond), or train as an illusionary mage in order to cast the invisibility spell. Maintaining silent stealth isn’t just for ranged encounters, though. I was pleased to see that Avowed has a proper stealth takedown *******; tap the ******* trigger while looking at an unaware ****** and your character lunges forward, a spectral dagger-like ******* forming around their fist. The blade reduces the ******’s body to shimmering ash, leaving no evidence of your ***** for ****** guards to stumble across. It’s a very satisfying animation and an ability I’m sure will shape the direction of a stealth archer’s overall approach. Of course, not every encounter is going to remain silent. For the occasions where things heat up, the ranger’s Tanglefoot spell allows you to summon thorny vines that root enemies to the spot for several seconds. It keeps them at a distance, letting you snipe them before they get into slashing range. I found this skill was also helpful when combined with other ranged options; the demo character’s backup ******* was a pair of flintlock pistols which are naturally louder and more explosive than a bow (plus can be fired twice in succession thanks to being dual-wielded), but they demand that enemies are kept far away thanks to their long reload times. Smart use of Tanglefoot, as well as directing my AI companion, Kai, to use his own abilities really helped here. Talking of Kai, I was pleased to see that Avowed’s companions don’t seem to get in the way of your stealth tactics – something many of Skyrim’s clumsy companions are unforgivably guilty of. Kai never busted my cover and I think he even disappeared from view along with me when I used Shadowing Beyond. It’s things like this that make Avowed feel like a Skyrim-style game from the 2020s – the movement, the ability to mantle up to vantage points, the environmental hazards, the impact of combat, and the general polish all make Avowed feel like the kind of Elder Scrolls experience I want to have in the modern age. I understand why Obsidian tries to push the conversation away from Skyrim when talking about Avowed – its zone-based environments likely will make the game structurally very different from The Elder Scrolls series. But there’s much more to Skyrim than its open world, and it’s those other elements that I think Obsidian can offer an excellent, updated analogue to. Hopefully, when we have the chance to explore beyond the demo’s ***** and experience the grander scope of Avowed’s setting and story, it’ll also prove itself a well-designed, modern-feeling RPG in the important areas: character, level, and quest design. But for now I’m left feeling reasonably confident that Avowed will, at the very least, tickle the same bits of my brain that Skyrim did when I let loose a well-aimed arrow into a lizard man’s face. Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor. View the full article

Have you ever driven away deer, rabbits, or ****** from your land? I have, because it’s very annoying to see invaders ruin your hard work. Today’s NYT Mini Crossword clue “Wards (off)” calls upon your knowledge to describe the act of protecting yourself. If you’re struggling, here are today’s hints and answers for the Sept. 2 NYT Mini Crossword. View the full article

Xbox Game Pass is losing Payday 3 and four other titles on September 15. These newly revealed departures will offset all of the Xbox Game Pass releases that have so far been confirmed for September 2024. View the full article

Massive Entertainment has decided to offer up its stance on the 'who shot first, Han or Greedo' debate in Star Wars Outlaws and has quickly proven itself wrong. Pretty much every Star Wars fan under the sun has a take on whether Han or Greedo shot first in A New Hope. It's an argument as old as time, and there is a correct answer if you like good storytelling, though creator George Lucas, ever the fan of retcons and alterations, did make it so that later versions of the film saw Greedo ****** first. In the very original, before Lucas made his wholly unnecessary changes, Han Solo shoots first, which is important because he's not meant to be a hero yet, and allows him to go on a character arc (storytelling, a novel concept). But Massive Entertainment has decided to go with what is technically canon in Star Wars Outlaws, with Greedo ********* first. In the latest Star Wars game, you can actually visit Mos Eisley Cantina, because of course you can, and as spotted by one fan on the game's subreddit, if you head to the booth where Han and Greedo have their famous interaction, you can see a blaster mark on the side Han sits on. Which obviously means that Greedo shot first, as he would have had to have missed his shot, so Han could ****** him back. Which is wrong! Wrong for the aforementioned reasons, and I won't listen to any other perspective because when has a Star Wars fan ever changed their opinion on anything? Read more View the full article

Baldur's Gate 3 does a lot to let you get up close and personal with some, er, bizarre stuff. You know the kind of thing I'm talking about, you DnDeviant. As it turns out, one of those encounters ended up how it is due Larian electing to violate its own camera distance guidelines, after going for the cinematic conversations we know and love over more Bethesda-style first person dialogue exchanges. This change in thinking came up during a panel at PAX West Larian put on to commemorate the game having been a fully released thing for a year (congrats). It features Swen Vincke in full armour and a teddy bear named Felix sat at the desk with the devs, because of course it does. In a section of the discussion that ended up morphing into chat about the challenges writing and putting together game with cinematics posed for the studio, art director Alena Dubrovina said: "During early access we weren't sure if cinematics were going to happen at all. We had a couple of proof of concepts and we were still like, ok are we doing it? Are we not doing it? Then we decided to do it. Read more View the full article

OneShot is a surreal top down puzzle / adventure game with unique gameplay capabilities that released back in 2016, a console adaption OneShot: World Machine Edition released in 2022 that is now coming to Steam with Steam Deck support. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Star Wars Outlaws is a new open-world action game, so we've locked ourselves in the lab for a few days to come back with a 43 GPU benchmark across five configurations at three different resolutions. Read Entire Article View the full article

Deadlock is doing ridiculously well despite not being officially out yet, and now a much earlier look at the game has been shared online. Well done Valve, your gambit paid off - despite pretending for the longest time that Deadlock wasn't real, while allowing people to invite literally any of their friends to play it, the game is doing incredibly well. Word of mouth has clearly helped it travel far, as over the weekend the game hit a concurrent player count peak of 164,855 players on Steam, according to SteamDB, a wildly impressive figure that puts it in the top 100 most played games on Steam. One can only imagine how well it will do once it's actually out and everyone can play it without needing an invite. Before the game was officially announced, everything that came out about it came from leaks, and it seems that even though everyone can talk about it without getting banned, there's still some leaks to come. Again over the weekend, Reddit user DeathwingTheBoss shared an early look at the game back when it was called Neon Prime. Considering it's had two name changes since then (prior to Deadlock, it was also reportedly known as Citadel), this is definitely an early look, but even so there's clearly a lot of the same foundations there. Read more View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

UFL‘s release date has been delayed, with the announcement coming just two days before early access was due to start. EA FC 25 rival UFL, the free-to-play soccer title that received funding from superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, was due to see early access begin on Sept. 4, with a full release following just over a week later on Sept. 12—but those plans have changed. View the full article

Kay Vess can learn many good abilities and skills from the Experts in Star Wars Outlaws, but some are more useful than others. Many improve skills or items you already have, and some give you more leeway than you had previously. All of them will help you become the best outlaw you can while making a name for yourself and climbing to the top. View the full article