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As opposed to the original weekly Valor cap established in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft Classic will instead increase it by 60%. Since The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft has toyed with the idea of offering players competitive raid gear obtained by trading in currency. On paper, it was a smart way to ensure bad luck protection and reward players for clearing the content. In practice, the community embraced the feature and took its absence in Warlords of Draenor hard. View the full article

A new Genshin Impact chart shows the most popular characters for the second phase of version 4.6 Spiral Abyss. Genshin Impact's Spiral Abyss is an endgame domain where players must take on a formidable roster of enemies to secure rewards like Primogems, Mythic Enhancement Ores, and Hero's Wit. It's unlocked after reaching Adventure Rank 20 and separated into 12 floors, each giving players a different buff and debuff. View the full article

Rumors have been circling recently that the upcoming Call of Duty game will be added to Game Pass on launch day. However, due to how massive this move is, Microsoft is also planning to make some “changes” to the service, according to an insider. Per Eurogamer, the insider alleged that these unspecified “changes” will occur after Microsoft launches the next Call of Duty (rumored to be a new ****** Ops title) on Game Pass day one. They said this in a May 17 thread on Resetera after being asked if Microsoft would introduce new fees or tiers for players who wish to play the new CoD. While they didn’t provide more information on what exactly these changes would imply, it is highly likely that Microsoft will introduce a tiered system of payment similar to how other subscription services. View the full article

Ubisoft has revealed the system requirements and PC hardware needed to effectively play XDefiant, its upcoming multiplayer shooter. PC players interested in playing XDefiant will want to meet or exceed the requirements to ensure a smooth experience and see the game at its best. View the full article

The next Call Of Duty will arrive on Game Pass on day one, according to anonymous sources. Microsoft's strategy has long involved releasing all their first-party games on Game Pass, but there had been doubt over whether the same would be true of the first Call Of Duty to be released since Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of publishers Activision. Read more View the full article

I have played Sins of a Solar Empire 2, and I am poorer for it. This sequel is extremely similar to the original real-time 4X strategy game from 2008 (including a lot, but not all of the content from its 2012 Rebellion expansion) with nicer graphics and needed engine improvements. That alone is more than welcome for a game that’s had such staying power, and revamps to its well-differentiated and complex factions give them even more depth to explore. However, the version that stealth-launched out of early access on the Epic Games Store feels rougher and less complete than a lot of games when they launch into early access. Expanding my empire, conquering planets, and watching my fleets do battle with rivals and ***** their planets to ash did grow on me a bit once a friend and I worked together and eventually taught ourselves its ins and outs, but getting to that point was so much less fun than it should’ve been that any joy was sucked out of it like atmosphere through a hull breach. For context, I played Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion a fair amount a decade ago, and have been playing 4X and real-time strategy games habitually long before and since. And yet, after buying Sins of a Solar Empire 2 and jumping in, I felt completely lost. There are no tutorials for this enormously complex game (outside of a website with a quick-start guide that’s barely more than a glossary), and the in-game instructions you do get for things as relatively simple as climbing the research tree to unlock essential technologies often send you on wild goose chases through the confusing interface. For every ounce of interstellar entertainment I managed to laboriously mine like metal from an asteroid, there was always some major headache to accompany it. Between that sort of thing, bugs, grayed-out options in the map creation interface, and a lack of a server browser to play with people you don’t know, it clearly isn’t a finished product. There is no way to talk about how Sins of a Solar Empire 2 ended up like this without addressing its strange exit from early access at some uncertain point earlier this year – a warning label it really shouldn’t have dropped in its current state. After arriving on the Epic Games Store back in early 2022 as a “technical preview,” it recently removed all caveats from its store page without so much as an official press release. Instead, the publisher, Stardock, has announced a Steam launch date for this August, which promises a major patch that will include significant new features, such as the third race called the Advent and its two factions that are already listed as playable on the store page but are currently nowhere to be found. In comments around that announcement, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell stated that you “only get one shot at a Steam release,” (where the vast majority of PC games are sold). So the plan is to wait until then to get the word out properly. It’s not a crazy idea: any strategy game enjoyer will tell you that you should save your limited resources for the moment they’ll have the maximum effect, and the same is true of game marketing dollars. But while that may sound reasonable from a business perspective, the reality is quite misleading for anyone looking to play Sins of a Solar Empire 2 who stumbles across the Epic Games Store page right now. This isn’t some hypothetical misunderstanding, either: my friend and I actually did spend a while looking for the Advent as we played. Did we have to unlock them? Enable an option in some menu? Play a couple games with the other races first? Nope. They’re just not there yet. As of today, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is about as barebones as can be. I’d like to tell you the rest of it is better, but as of today Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is about as barebones as can be considering how many systems are packed in on top of combat, including diplomacy, trade, culture spread, and pirate bounties among others. It’s disappointing that there’s no story campaign – there isn’t one in the original Sins of the Solar Empire, either, and it proved it didn’t require one any more than Civilization or Stellaris do, but it’s long been a fan-requested feature and it might’ve gone a long way toward gradually introducing us to how everything works rather than throwing you into the deep end. Instead, it took me and a friend several hours of fumbling through a couple of games against the AI to nail down how one of the two human factions even worked, and again, we’re both RTS and 4X veterans. Once, when I was trying to build something I had insufficient research points for as the alien Visari race, I was told to build more orbital labs. The problem is that you don’t get research points for building orbital labs – they just speed up your research rate. You get the actual research points by buying upgrades on each planet’s development tracker menu, but you’d never know that unless you happened to mouse over the tooltip on the right button instead of doing what you’re told to do. Sometimes buttons don’t seem to do anything at all… until they do. Here’s an example: the construction ships you get from colonizing planets have a button literally labeled “Build Structure,” but clicking it has no discernable effect because nothing you click on afterward, be it a planet, ship, asteroid, or anything else will give you the option to build something… unless you click on an orbital structure that’s already queued to be built, which then tells the ship to prioritize that building over any others in the ******. If you actually want to build a new building, you’ll select it from a separate menu; the ship will build it without you ever having to be controlled directly. It’s a problem that the interface is confusing because you'll spend a lot of Sins of a Solar Empire 2 in menus. When you’re not grouping your ships into fleets and ordering them to jump from one planet’s gravity well to the next or focus their ***** on an ****** capital ship, you’re going into a menu, clicking a button, and waiting for the thing you’re researching or the ship you’re building to complete, and then you’ll click another button in another menu and wait some more. That’s fine because that's just the kind of game Sins is – it has as much or more in common with Crusader Kings 3 as it does with StarCraft 2, so there’s very little micromanagement of individual units beyond retreating them as they’re damaged or triggering capital ship abilities manually. Managing an efficient build order offers satisfying challenges, but you want those challenges to be about interesting choices rather than figuring out how to make them in the first place. Through hours of experimentation, I finally discovered that the developers at Ironclad have actually added some nice quality-of-life features to the interface. If you want to build or research something but don't have the necessary prerequisites, the Intelligent Construction System will ****** all of the things you need up to be researched in order and let you check their progress in real-time. The new Empire Management screen lets you, well… manage everything in your sinful solar empire – planets, fleets, starbases, the whole space enchilada – from one page. That beats the heck out of clicking around the star system for each of them, shortcuts or not. Then there's the new Fleet Management System, which allows you to request reinforcements for any of your specific fleets directly from that fleet's menu – no heading back to a planet to ****** them up and setting the rally point required. New ships are then built at the closest factory and rallied to that fleet automatically (though you can opt for traditional rally points if that's more your speed). These are all good, smart additions that make Sins of a Solar Empire 2 easier and more engaging to play, once you figure them out. Most of the fun combat stuff is saved for the late game. When it comes to space combat, the basic idea hasn’t changed: you mostly build big fleets and throw them at your opponent, then watch them duke it out in entertainingly flashy battles that – as you’d hope – put the original Sins’ to shame in terms of detail and ship behavior. Instead of ships largely lining up and plinking away at the other side until someone explodes like a Civil War reenactment in space, we now have smaller classes that dart around like large fighters, and larger ships are loaded with **** turrets that swivel to track targets, bringing much more of a sense of action. Long-range missiles can be intercepted by point defenses or blocked by other ships before they hit something expensive, which is a nice nibble of tactical depth for those looking to micro something. And at the top of the Warfare tech tree sits the Titan, a single enormous, faction-specific behemoth that can take on entire fleets by itself. Watching all of these ships ********* all these different weapons, exploding, and making emergency phase jumps out of a system before their hull points tick down to zero looks pretty cool when you’re zoomed in, but early skirmishes with basic units are generally pretty dull. Like its predecessor, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 saves most of the fun stuff for the late game when you unlock tech that can do a lot of damage in a hurry. The pinnacle of that is the human’s Novalith cannon, which can ****** massive, literally world-ending shells across the solar system and take out ****** planets in one hit, as opposed to bombarding them into submission with a fleet after bashing through whatever turrets or starbases the ****** has built up to defend it. That’s awesome normally, but it’s even more so (and way funnier) when you have two Novaliths target the ******’s home planet – you know, just to be sure – and eliminate them from the match without ever moving a fleet into orbit. Then you’ve got the Visari’s Orkulus starbase, which is essentially just a *******, angrier version of the Cylon Basestar from Battlestar Galactica. Armed to the absolute teeth and containing several support fighters, it’s all but unstoppable by conventional weapons and, once you upgrade it, it can jump to other planets like a spaceship. ******. Speaking of the two current races, they’re fairly different from one another, which means there’s a lot of learning to do but also a ton of opportunity to experiment with tactics and strategies geared toward their strengths. The human Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC), for instance, needs credits to manage their economy and build things. The super-advanced alien Visari don’t, though money gives them access to the galactic markets where they can buy resources. There are unique ships and structures for each race, including several that are unique to one of their two sub-factions. The TEC, for instance, currently has the only ship that repairs others on the fly, while the Visari can build Phase Gates that allow them to immediately jump between planets that aren’t connected by phase lanes. That’s taken even further by some of the biggest additions to Sins of a Solar Empire 2, such as the Empire System bonuses. The TEC’s Trade Port structures were in the original game and provided a steady stream of credits, but now they allow you to allocate points to boost your production of metal, crystal, or credits on the fly. The Visari, meanwhile, can build all-new Phase Resonators that let you allocate points to upgrade ships, their research rate, and so on. I love these additions; they add some spice to each race’s already distinct flavor while offering interesting strategic choices that allow you to build your economy or military in cool, unique ways. Drilling down further into the subfactions, there are a lot of options to suit different playstyles. The Loyalist TEC, for instance, are more defensive, gaining access to planetary garrisons of ships that are produced automatically and don’t take up population cap, but have limited range. They can also build two starbases around a planet instead of one, which can make conquering their systems an especially difficult nut to ******. The TEC Rebels, however, are much more about offense: They get the aforementioned planet-destroying Novalith cannon, can ally with pirate factions and build a pirate base in a system they control, get economic bonuses for going on the *******, and can use *********** abilities to make their ships more effective in combat. Your chosen faction makes a big difference in how you play. The Visari are similarly divided between defensive and offensive factions. The Exodus are here for a good time, not a long time, so they’re happy to force humans into labor camps, strip mine the cores of planets they don’t need, and gain resources by destroying things. The Alliance, meanwhile, is all about fostering cooperation with other races, trade, and good table manners. They want to put down roots and stick around for the long term. These distinctions sound subtle, but they make a big difference in how you play (and serve as the majority of the lore you’ll find). I was more fond of the Rebels for the TEC because I tend to prefer an aggressive playstyle, and in my experience, purely defending in Sins of a Solar Empire 2 isn’t going to win you the war. Like any good – sorry, successful – empire, you have to expand or you’ll eventually get overwhelmed. But when I needed to hold out long enough so my teammate could provide support against the two AI opponents I was facing down, those Loyalist garrisons sure did come in handy. With the Visari, though, I much preferred making alliances with the Minor Factions (small AI players who don’t expand) and supporting my teammate, though I had a couple of ****** fleets capturing planets by the end. I like that the Factions provide so much variety, and when Sins of a Solar Empire 2 works, it feels good (mechanically, not morally) to build your empire up, expand, and conquer your neighbors. And, in a nice touch, there are a lot of options for map generation, ranging from recommended player counts (between two and 10) on procedurally generated star systems to specific scenarios with unique challenges. Most of that is carried over from the original, but Sins of a Solar Empire 2 introduces planets and other astral bodies that rotate around stars, which can open up new phase lanes between them when they get close enough. That sounds a bit cooler than it is in practice because it can take hours for rotations to sync up in a way that truly matters (and on smaller maps, it might never happen at all), but when the stars literally align it can let you hit an ****** with a surprise ******* on a world they thought was protected by heavily defended neighbors. You have a Future Orbits button that shows you how phase lanes will change for up to an hour into the future, so it’s not left up to chance or guesswork. But, man, so many things just feel incomplete or underbaked. Take the Minor Factions, for instance. You gain favor with them – and special bonuses – by spending Influence Points; when I was playing the Visari Alliance, Influence Points were easy to get, so I earned lots of bonuses, but once I’d more or less unlocked everything I could only use the points to bid on auctions for resources. Being buddy-buddy with a Minor Faction doesn’t really do anything for you aside from getting you some abilities and making it so they’re (sometimes?) not actively hostile. Like most things in Sins of a Solar Empire 2, it’s hard to tell because there’s not much in-game to clue you in until you’ve pieced together a lot of disparate tooltips and experimented enough to you find the right answer. Then there are the bugs. I’ve already mentioned misleading audio cues telling me to build the wrong thing, but I’ve also had incorrect notifications telling me an ****** had conquered a planet I’d just colonized and so I spent a minute trying to figure out what happened before realizing, “Oh, it was me who conquered the planet, actually.” Once, I started a team game with a friend where we were clearly set to be allied, only to be told we weren’t once we got into the match, forcing us to fix it in-game. There are also entire menu options grayed out that control things like “Orbiting Planet Speed,” or “Research Rates,” or “Ship Build Rates” when you try to adjust pre-game settings – you know, things you might like some say in when you’re setting up a match – that just aren’t available. There’s a tooltip telling you that these options are disabled “as we collect balance feedback,” which is fair, but these limitations just drive home how unfinished everything is. When it works, it really works - it just needs to get us there with less frustration. All of that said, when Sins of a Solar Empire 2 works, it really works. There's a lot of nuance when it comes to choosing your upgrade paths, deciding which structures to build on your planets, how to spend each planet’s limited orbital slots, and constructing your fleets. Do you go for an economic opening or a military one? Which capital ship do you start with, and why? What upgrades do you give it? What kind of research do you prioritize? Do you trade with other players, or buy the resources you need on the market? How much, if at all, do you engage with the Minor Factions on the map? If a battle looks like it will come down to the wire, do you pull your fleet out and live to ****** another day, or go all in and bet on the victory? The consequences of those choices, and the choices your opponents make in response to them, determine how games play out. The right decision at the right time – even one as seemingly small as prioritizing one research upgrade over another or choosing a specific capital ship to lead your first fleet – can snowball and make all the difference in an interplanetary power struggle that can last for a dozen hours or more. In its best moments, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 understands that, and that makes for compelling, memorable matches. It just needs to get us there much faster and with less frustration along the way. View the full article

There are many ways to be evil in Fallout: New Vegas. Like most games in the Fallout series, player choice is at the forefront. Players can choose everything, from the outcome of the most minor side quest, to which of New Vegas' factions ultimately takes over their corner of the country. View the full article

Checkpoints are easily lost in Destiny 2, but managing to use a Checkpoint **** can give Guardians a way to skip content to farm loot easily during missions. Certain encounters, like boss fights, can be exploited using the Rally Flags you can place during certain sections of a mission. These allow defeated Guardians to rejoin the ******, but a Checkpoint **** can be used to skip or restart various activities. View the full article

Ghost of Tsushima has been available on PC for a couple of days and is already one of the top games on Steam in terms of concurrent players. Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut was released May 16 and has already hit one of the highest peak player levels among games available on PlayStation and PC. View the full article

Redfall is getting a final update which will add an offline mode and singleplayer pausing, among other changes. The news was announced via the Redfall account on X, which also thanked players for their "supportive messages" in light of developer Arkane Austin's imminent closure by Microsoft. Read more View the full article

After months of speculation and growing hype, the first trailer for EA Sports College Football 25 has touched down for PS5 and Xbox players. In typical EA Sports fashion, it showcases some of the cleanest visuals in sports gaming right now, and a thrilling tease of the franchise's evolution. Not only does it look promising, but College Football 25 pre-orders include this mega bundle featuring Madden NFL 25. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: College Football 25 gets full reveal in May, but here's a quick teaser View the full article

Western Digital's portable 2.5-inch HDDs are now available in 6TB variants. The new models are the highest-capacity portable HDDs currently on the market, as WD's offerings have maxed out at 5TB since 2017. Read Entire Article View the full article

In Hades 2, Shades are a common ally to Melinoe. The crossroads are filled with Shades of various shapes, sizes, and purposes, but these ghostly apparitions can even become assets during combat. Shades wont simply help Melinoe without any effort from her end, however, as players need to find a way to compel these potential allies. View the full article

The release of Hollow Knight: Silksong is one of the most anticipated events in gaming right now, but there's one big reason why it could come with a cost. Announced in 2019, Silksong has been on the receiving end of some serious delays, and a lack of frequent updates makes it hard to tell when it might actually arrive. Developer Team Cherry has popped in just frequently enough to make it clear that progress on the game has been steadily ticking along all this time, but a release date ******** up in the air. View the full article

After a devasting 3-0 loss to T1, G2’s top laner BrokenBlade is asking the League of Legends developers to shake up the lane-swapping meta that has taken over the 2024 Mid-Season Invitational. “I do hope [lane-swapping] gets removed because I don’t think it’s very enjoyable or entertaining to watch as a viewer, probably. Because there’s not much happening, usually. It really defeats the purpose of matchups and how drafting champions works,” BrokenBlade said [Hidden Content] after their elimination match against T1 at the 2024 MSI. View the full article

Horror icons Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger are terrifying, but Jason Voorhees might just be in his own league. Now, you could be harnessing his seemingly supernatural strength from the Friday the 13th franchise in MultiVersus. According to a recent datamine of the game's PvE Rift Mode trailer metadata, it looks like Player First Games has a surprise up its sleeve. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: New MultiVersus PvE mode, Rifts, will put your meaty hands to the test New MultiVersus Joker trailer hides yet another Powerpuff ****** tease MultiVersus Townsville teaser paves the way for a trio of new fighters View the full article

The lead developer of the popular Pokemon fan game, PokeRogue, has suddenly resigned from the project. PokeRogue describes itself as a "fangame heavily inspired by the roguelite genre," although it will now have to finish development without its original creator and lead. View the full article

At 1-1 in the League of Legends MSI ****** bracket final, you’ve got to pull out all the stops to win and keep your tournament hopes alive. Faced with an exit from Chengdu, Faker reached deep into his pool and pulled out something totally unexpected—the Zac pick. It was the first time Faker pulled out the Zac pick in a professional League match, according to Leaguepedia, but given the result, it’s safe to say the Secret ******* was far from its namesake. It didn’t go to plan for the world champion mid lane, who was rather ruthlessly wrecked after a well-oiled Bilibili rolled over T1 in just under 24 minutes in game three of the series. View the full article

One cosplayer recently showcased their incredibly accurate depiction of a Baldur's Gate 3 character, making many think their image was an action figure instead of an actual person. The huge success of Larian Studios' Dungeons and Dragons-inspired RPG brought about an impressive array of fans showcasing their love for the game and discussing their favorite companions to journey with. With an avid debate about the worst Baldur's Gate 3 companion, everyone's opinion will differ, but the disdain towards one particular character is understandable, especially considering the way they treat the player from the start. View the full article

Palia developer Singularity 6 recently announced that it has ***** off 36 staff members, adding to the long string of job cuts impacting the gaming industry. The company stated that the layoffs resulted from some of the same factors plaguing other developers this year. On Wednesday, May 15, Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter reported that Singularity 6 had gone through its third round of layoffs. The developer reportedly ***** off 36 staff members, amounting to approximately 40 percent of its staff. While no official statement from the developer was made regarding the layoffs at first, a spokesperson provided a statement to Game Developer on Friday, explaining the reason for the decision. View the full article

How did Manor Lords become so successful? It's no slight against developer Greg 'Slavic Magic' Styczeń to say there are a lot of medieval games, a lot of city building games, a lot of strategy games - a lot of medieval city building strategy games. Just look at Bellwright, which launched three days before Manor Lords, and has many of the same conceits. Speaking exclusively to PCGamesN, Tim Bender, CEO of publisher Manor Lords' publisher Hooded Horse, reveals how Steam's most-wanted game came to be, and how wishlist numbers, no matter how dramatic, can possibly be misleading. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Manor Lords release date, gameplay, and news Manor Lords dev details three big reworks coming to early access Manor Lords bans mod discussion until full support arrives View the full article

Steer clear. Continue reading… View the full article

Kai Cenat has named the popular souls-like game Elden Ring his “favorite” shortly after beating it today after a gigantic 167-hour marathon of a stream, to what many claimed was an impossible feat to complete. “This game is a cinema. It is very rewarding,” Cenat said in his post-run recap about the game, which took the streamer an entire week and well over a thousand deaths to complete. “I’ve never felt something in my soul like this. I don’t know what game compares to this right now. This is an absolute cinema.” Kai Cenat reflected on the gratifying experience of beating Elden Ring, one of the most challenging games on the planet, and held it in high praise as he struggled to find a gaming experience he could compare it to. View the full article

Just prior to Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2024 on May 16, Xbox announced the development of the Proteus, the company’s latest ***** into the accessibility market. Starting this week, the new controller is available to preorder with an expected shipping date of fall 2024. Xbox revealed the project in a blog post covering the team’s developments on May 15. The Proteus, developed in tandem with ByoWave, features modular adaptivity which lets you move and replace its buttons. As someone who’s always learning about inclusive accessibility in game design, the importance of customizable buttons cannot be understated especially in a controller that lets you create your ideal custom layout. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Fans of Stardew Valley are known to bring their love of the farming game to life in a number of ways, with one player making an adorable stained-glass nightlight in honor of the Junimo creatures. Stardew Valley fan crafts have proven to be incredibly popular among community members, with a number of unique creations popping up in online spaces and even in real life. View the full article