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Sure, the world may be a rough place, but sometimes games can help offer us a bit of a laugh to help ease the burden. For example, as part of its upcoming economy re-work, Cities Skylines 2 is solving its high rent issues by getting rid of all the virtual landlords. Yup, this isn't a joke, or a parody, or something you're hallucinating as you stand on a platform hungover and gradually realising that your rent's due. Colossal Order, for all the game's issues performance-wise at launch for those of us without NASA-spec PCs, is doing a thing that's bound to win at least some of us back over. "Let’s start with Rent," Colossal Order says in a development diary detailing some of the changes coming as part of the "Economy 2.0" update that's set to arrive in the game soon. "Most likely you have run into complaints of 'High Rent' in the game, so let’s talk about it. To complement the land value changes in patch 1.1.0f1 in March, we have tweaked how Rent works." Read more View the full article

In a recent update, Cities: Skylines II addressed problems in the game’s economy by simply eliminating the landlords. We say simply, but it goes a little deeper. Initially, rent prices were determined by an algorithmic “landlord” who would adjust prices. In order to help fix issues with the in-game economy, the landlord is gone and instead […] Source View the full article

One of the developers behind the upcoming Star Wars Outlaws recently revealed that the game once allowed players to swim, but this was ultimately cut due to technical constraints. Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment first announced that they were working on an open-world Star Wars game back in 2021, and this project was eventually revealed in full at the Xbox Games Showcase two years later. Star Wars Outlaws takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and puts players in the role of an aspiring smuggler named Kay Vess as she plans to pull off one of the biggest heists in the history of the Outer Rim. View the full article

A new anime-style series featuring Shaggy and Scooby-Doo titled GO-GO MYSTERY MACHINE is in production. The new series follows Shaggy, Scooby, and a new cast of characters. While visiting Japan, Shaggy and Scooby accidentally unleash a parade of ********* Yokai and other spirits. According to Variety, new characters include Daisuke-doo, Scooby’s uncle who appears to be […] Source View the full article

Any League of Legends fan who follows the title outside just playing it should be well aware of how big the ******** community is. Riot Games now plans to pay greater heed to them in balance decisions. In the latest League Patch 14.12 preview, Phreak, a former play-by-play caster and current developer shed some light on the company’s plans regarding the game. He outlined how the team behind patch notes will most likely take ******** data as a priority when making gameplay changes in the future, given how big the servers in the ****** country are compared to the other ones. View the full article

I don’t like Monster Hunter. Despite multiple friends trying to pull me into different iterations of the series, it’s just never been my cup of tea. The graphics have looked good, the mechanics interesting, but it’s never grabbed me. Then I saw Monster Hunter Wilds. To say the demo of Monster Hunter Wilds I saw at a behind-closed-doors Summer Game Fest preview was impressive would be my understatement of the year. It blew everything else I saw and played out of the water: The enormity of the world and its creatures, the fluidity as we moved from biome to biome seamlessly, and the overwhelming options at your disposal in your pursuit of a ******. In one hunt, I saw a particularly hearty Doshaguma climbed on, sliced, shot, lured into a gigantic sandtrap created by a different monster to thin its herd, baited into a ****** with a massive dragon that breathed lightning on the thing, chased into a massive sandstorm that turned day to night, had huge stalactites dropped on its head as it pursued our character through a *****, and finally finished off with the help of other hunters—and throughout, it seemed we’d only scratched the surface of the battles awaiting us in Wilds. View the full article

The creators of the popular social deduction game Among Us may have just accidentally confirmed the date of a highly-anticipated upcoming Nintendo showcase in a now-deleted trailer. Among Us is expected to release new content for players in the next few weeks, although this announcement will be properly announced during the next Nintendo Direct showcase, along with several other game announcements and other updates. View the full article

If you want to make the developers behind Monster Hunter laugh, apparently there's an easy way to do it: just ask them about the hunting *****... Read more.View the full article

decade ago, a Monster Hunter environment was essentially a series of battle rooms, with loading screens between each piece of the map. Chasing down a monster to finish it off meant having to put up with a few of those loads every hunt. With its two latest games, World and Rise, Capcom did away with that technical limitation, but another major bit of rigidity remained: every mission had to be selected from a job board or NPC, then launched to load into a predetermined world state... Read more.View the full article

Image: Epic Games It’s sad but true: Metallica is coming to Fortnite. Epic just announced that the group will be featured in the game’s next concert. The news is part of a larger musical collaboration between Fortnite and the heavy metal band. First up, the concert itself. It’s called “Metallica: Fuel ***** Fury,” and players can check it out during a few windows later this month: June 22nd at 2PM, 5PM, and 11PM ET and June 23rd at 10AM, 2PM, and 5PM ET. There aren’t many details on what the virtual show will entail, but it’ll be the latest in a line of in-game concerts from the likes of Eminem, Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, and Marshmello. Now that Fortnite is more than a battle royale (though that ******** the most popular mode), Epic is spreading the... Continue reading… View the full article

The 2024 Xbox Games Showcase was a smorgasbord of delights, offering up a fine dining experience for Xbox players to dig into over the coming months. Though the show was filled to the brim with exciting reveals and updates on upcoming games, there were more than a few notable absentees. According to gaming personality Parris Lilly, the publisher had plenty more courses it wanted to serve up at the event. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: New Xbox games 2024 7 surprising absences from the Xbox Games Showcase The new Xbox consoles are an almighty, all-digital push from Microsoft View the full article

Following Ubisoft Forward, associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois confirms the smaller map size of *********'s Creed Shadows' take on Feudal Japan. It's been a big few days for the upcoming action game *********'s Creed Shadows, as it was heavily featured at various summer events like Ubisoft Forward and Xbox Games Showcase. View the full article

According to sources quoted by Reuters, Qualcomm's arch rival in the smartphone space, MediaTek, is developing an Arm-based laptop processor for Copilot+ PCs. The report does not reveal any technical details about the new chip, but claims that it might debut late next year after Qualcomm's exclusive deal with Microsoft... Read Entire Article View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

I'm sorry if you were busy doing something else, but you need to drop it, and watch the trailer for Paddington in Peru right now. As we all know, Paddington is one of the best movies ever made. Despite all previous conceptions over sequels, Paddington 2 then went on to become one of the other best movies ever made. If you think they have any flaws, well, you'd be wrong and you should maybe talk to someone about that. And now, a whole seven years after the second film was released, we're finally getting a third instalment, Paddington in Peru. This time around, the titular marmalade sandwich loving bear is, unsurprisingly, off to Peru to visit his Aunt Lucy, along with the entire Brown Family, and the first trailer for the threequel is available to watch now. Of course, things are never quite that simple with Paddington, as when he arrives in Peru he discovers that his Aunt Lucy has gone on some kind of quest. In turn, he sets off to find her, again the Browns coming for the chaotic ride. While it is exciting to get more Paddington, there are some changes to make note of. For one, director of the first two Paul King didn't return for this third entry, as he was off directing Wonka. He's replaced by Dougal Wilson, who's making his feature film directorial debut with this one (though you might know him from his work on various music videos like Year 3000 for Busted or Life in Technicolor II by Coldplay). Read more View the full article

Ok, so the latest Helldivers 2 major order is a bit of a tough one. Some poor helpless kids, some poor helpless raw ingredients for anti-tank mines. Players can only save one, and the good news is it looks like the kids might get the nod. Well, provided Arrowhead comes through with some nice rewards. Who can blame them for wanting more stuff, to be fair. They've been hard done by in terms of news regarding upcoming warbonds and patches lately, with some of those definitely not scheduled to be deployed over the next couple of days. "An emergency distress call from Vernen Wells describes thousands of civilian survivors trapped in the ******** of Super Citizen Anne's Hospital For Very ***** Children," reads the brief for this latest order. "Food and water supplies are dwindling. Their survival even this long, after the fall of the SEAF Recruitment Facility on Vernen Wells, is remarkable. Without imminent rescue, they will soon perish of starvation, thirst, or Automaton butchery." Read more View the full article

You’re going to ****. Just accept it. Save often, grind where you can, and stick your nose into everyone's business to get all that lovely experience. Batten down the hatches, gird your loins, watch out. Boss battles might absolutely batter you the first time around, but then you get to go back in with your wits about you. Even some random encounters have the chance to one-shot you if you’re not careful. This game doesn’t take any prisoners. In the vanilla release of Shin Megami Tensei 5, life was hard. In the redux, it’s brutal. Good. Shin Megami Tensei 5 Vengeance is class-A RPG – none of that gateway Persona nonsense that holds your hand and sings to you as you plod through your fancy little high school life. The parent MegaTen series has always been hard, it’s almost a meme at this point, and whilst Vengeance isn’t quite as tricky as SMT3 or 4, it’s definitely still out for your blood. I say it’s not as cruel as its forebears mostly because of the quality-of-life changes that have been added – being able to save anywhere, tweaks to UI readability, and clearer explanations of RPG systems see to that. Read more View the full article

“There was a similar IP that was already established,” lead producer Bill LaCoste tells me when I ask him, on a bit of a whim, whether there’s anything he learned while working on NBA Jam in the early 2000s that still applies to his current work on Fallout 76. “We had to rebuild a lot of that from scratch ourselves, and it was really like, ‘how do we maintain consistency’, because, at the time, we weren't associated with Midway – we just had the licence to do NBA Jam. So, it was like ‘we need to recreate this, we know what makes it fun for people, we know what people are going to enjoy out of this’. With a Fallout game, it's the same thing: there's already lore, there are established timelines that are already there. We have to make sure that we are representing that title correctly.” When Fallout 76 initially launched back in October 2018, in an underwhelming fashion that’s been very well-documented at this point, it stuck out among its Fallout siblings. It was unpopular, and unpopular in ways that LaCoste says he picked up on while playing it at that time – before he joined Bethesda. Then, as part of the process of joining the team a little bit before 2020’s Wastelanders update, LaCoste says he flagged the areas of improvement he’d identified to the development team (in a manner expressly designed to be constructive, by the way). Read more View the full article

While the recent success of Amazon's Fallout TV show has been a boon for all of the series' existing entries, including Fallout 76, it also left a lot of folks wondering when the next big Fallout game - Fallout 5 - might actually arrive. Even if it’s pretty clear that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be arriving before Fallout 5 does, you can't blame Fallout fans - both new and veteran - for having had their imaginations dragged to the future of the wasteland. Especially since Fallout 4 is getting very close to being a decade old. So, during a recent interview with Fallout 76 lead producer Bill LaCoste at a preview for the Skyline Valley expansion, I asked the developer how he feels 76 fits with regards to the wider series at this point, specifically in terms of whether its role is to help bridge the gap between Fallouts 4 and 5. Read more View the full article

Shin Megami Tensei V is the only game where you willingly disclose to a manic ****** with ******** gear whether you’re a top or a bottom. Only a franchise as powerful as Atlus’ obscure, cult-classic JRPG could make you pity a disgustingly rotten, unwanted green ******. I couldn’t get my fix for zany ****** dialogue and utterly unfiltered rejection in any other game. And you’ll be pleased to hear that in crafting Vengeance, Atlus has injected the same wickedly fun cruelty that fans adore the franchise for. But Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance isn’t just the same ol’ snarky Demons making you feel like a ******, now in crispier 4K quality. This isn’t just a polished-up redo of the 2021 sensation. Instead, it’s a full-on revamp. Countless quality-of-life features, impressive new Demons and characters, and a major story overhaul give Shin Megami Tensei V—and Atlus as a whole—a redemption arc. View the full article

The new XDefiant patch, Y1S0.3, finally addresses the issues with snipers and jump/crouch-spamming that plague the game. The June 12 patch is minor overall, mostly making small tweaks in the lead-up to the release of season one on July 2. But the tweaks to some of the most annoying movement features in XDefiant will have a huge effect on the meta. View the full article

We’re fast approaching the sixth year of Fallout 76 and although the popular action RPG has received dozens of additions so far, it could be argued that the upcoming Skyline Valley update will be the most impactful of them all, at least from what I’ve seen of it so far. From the first-of-its-kind map expansion to the ability to finally play as a Ghoul in 2025, here’s six exciting updates coming soon for all you vault dwellers to enjoy. Appalachia is Getting ******* Fallout 76 has previously expanded its scope with new locations like 2022’s The Pitt Expedition and last year’s trip to Atlantic City. But unlike Expeditions, which take you to entirely different locations, Skyline Valley’s more seamless map extension approach means this is the very first time in six years that the core region is being expanded, spreading south into the Shenandoah region. “We [knew] that there was a skirt around the whole map of unused space,” says Fallout 76’s Creative Director, Jon Rush. “And we wanted to do a region expansion for a while. We wanted to make it impactful and really tie it into the story, so [Skyline Valley] just felt like the right time and place.” Previous Expeditions have been very isolated experiences, lacking maps or any real exploration opportunities outside of their specific questlines. Skyline Valley gives wastlanders the first chance to continue their 76 experience in new locations that are part of the main world map. “There are very pointed reasons for going on the Expeditions [with] specific things you're trying to get,” says Rush. “So we wanted an in-world place where [players] could adventure and explore. Camp builders can make new camps [here] and people can come up with their own new stories.” 20 New Points of Interest Skyline Valley isn’t just a side quest. With the map expansion comes 20 new points of interest for players to explore, with some such as Mary’s Rock Tunnel, Rapidan Camp, and Skyline Drive being based on real-world Shenandoah locations. There are also new factions, quests, and activities coming to the expansion, including a new event called ‘Dangerous Pastimes’ that tasks you as a storm chaser trying to power up a giant lightning rod and hopefully kick off an electrical light show. A Brand New Vault to Explore ********* Fallout 76 fans will be no stranger to Vault 63, a bunker that has remained mysteriously closed since launch. Skyline Valley will finally open its giant mechanical door for the first time and let players discover what’s hidden inside. “Why [has] that Vault 63 door been closed for so long?” asks Rush, hinting that the answers are soon to be discovered. “It has drawn so much intrigue and mystery [with fans], ‘What's going on back there? There's something.’” A lot of the true nature of Vault 63 is still a mystery, but what we do know is that Skyline Valley will trigger an incident that finally exposes Vault 63 to the wasteland, catapulting its once-sealed door across Appalachia. As for what’s inside, we know Vault 63 wasn’t completed before the ****** dropped, and so all of its residents were soaked in radiation and turned into (albeit quite content) ghouls. Their leader, Hugo Stolz, looks slightly different, though. Hugo is (at least cosmetically) one of the brand-new ****** types coming with the Skyline Valley update called The Lost. The Lost The Lost are former denizens of Vault 63 who now live out their days as electrified, almost feral ghouls. “The Lost dwell in their own skewed reality,” explains Rush. “[They’re] unable to communicate outside to others and will defend themselves against all outsiders.” Why they’re electrified and why Hugo’s mind hasn’t deteriorated like the rest of his kin is still yet to be explained. But what we do know is that The Lost will regularly roam the Skyline Valley region once Vault 63 is exposed, and are very much the main fodder you’ll have to deal with. They act almost feral-like, with a focused impulsion to hunt you down and swing their melee weapons in your direction. The Lost aren’t the only new ****** types coming to Skyline Valley, though. Storm Goliaths We’ve only seen some short glimpses so far, but the Storm Goliaths are three giant, raging robots that appear to harness bad weather and weaponise it directly into your face. “[Storm Goliaths are] a trio of super-sized robo-brains built by the great minds of Vault 63,” shares Rush, letting on that Vault 63 contains a bevy of bad ideas that have now been unleashed into Appalachia. But it’s not just technical monstrosities you’ll have to tangle with. Skyline Valley continues the tradition of irradiated mutations, with a particular new highlight being the Thrasher; a weird, cow-sized mutant turkey hybrid that now roams the hills of Shenandoah. In a later update coming in 2025, though, you won’t just be fighting radiated nightmares, you’ll become one. Play as a Ghoul For the first time ever, Fallout 76 will give level 50+ players the chance to don the leathery, noseless skin of a ghoul. According to Rush, this is significantly more than a cosmetic appearance. “If you're a ghoul, you're obviously not too concerned about radiation,” he says. “Radiation can actually heal you as a ghoul. It will also be positioned to have other very striking benefits as well, punctuated a bit more by dozens of ghoul-specific perk cards that we're going to be adding.” Rush explains that the key to ensuring playing as a ghoul was far more than a cosmetic experience was realising how it could alter the gameplay for experienced players. “Most players wear power armour to get away from radiation. As a ghoul, you wouldn't want to wear power armour, because [you want the radiation], right? ” explains Rush. “So that encourages a playstyle that doesn't [need] power armour and frees up a ton of perk points that can be used in a bunch of different other ways.” Playing as a ghoul will disrupt the meta for Fallout 76, changing the way players optimise their character and encouraging further, unprecedented experimentation. It’s clearly something that the team at Bethesda have had in their minds for a while, but It feels like no coincidence that this is arriving hot on the heels of Walton Goggins’ The Ghoul in the extremely successful Amazon Prime Video show. With the popularity around ghouls never being higher, it makes sense that fans of the show would want to live out their irradiated fantasies in Fallout 76. Rush also all but confirmed a gameplay mechanic is directly inspired by the show. Fallout on Prime established rules for how a ghoul maintains lucidity, via copious amounts of the *****-like remedy that prevents a downward spiral into the zombie-like, feral status. When asked if regularly drinking the mysterious concoction would be used as a gameplay survival feature he simply replied “Possibly” while maintaining a smile that would make a Vault Boy proud. For more from the Appalachian wasteland, why not check out our documentary about the weird and wonderful community that still plays Fallout 76, including roleplaying cannibals, a Shakespeare troupe and a full-time courier service. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Shin Megami Tensei is one of the longest-running RPG series out there, but despite its storied history, it’s never been as recognized as other genre staples. Even its spinoffs — mainly Persona — have dwarfed the main series in such a huge way that they’ve even dropped the SMT branding from their titles. Fans prop up every new Shin Megami Tensei release as the possible breakout moment for the mainline franchise in the West, and 2021’s Shin Megami Tensei V was seemingly the best chance the series had at reaching a wider audience.Being stuck on the Nintendo Switch and releasing during a remarkably busy holiday season didn’t do Shin Megami Tensei V any favors, though, but now the game is back with a Vengeance. Keeping with typical Atlus tradition, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is an expanded and enhanced version of the original RPG, addressing feedback from the initial release, adding a ton of new features, and — most importantly — releasing on multipl...View the full article

With a map that erodes and grows as the game progresses, Terrorformer TD puts a rather unique spin on the tower defense genre. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

A SimCity 4 player has reached a major milestone, achieving a population of 50 million citizens in their region after over two decades of gameplay. This impressive accomplishment caught the attention of fellow SimCity 4 players, who quickly poured in to congratulate the player on their achievement. View the full article

Ubisoft’s upcoming *********’s Creed Shadows is returning to smaller map sizes instead of going down the enormous open-world route. “It’s about roughly similar to [*********’s Creed] Origins, so it’s smaller than Valhalla in terms of territory,” Simon Lemay-Comtois, associate game director at Ubisoft Quebec, said in an interview with VGC on June 11. “There is some body of water around Japan, but it’s not like Greece was, [which was] half water. With Japan, that’s not the case. We have the coastlines, and Lake Biwa is a very big lake, but [the map’s] roughly the size of Origins.” View the full article