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Battlestate Games has a unique business model for Escape From Tarkov. The latest edition of EFT is upsetting fans and content creators alike. Let me show you how Escape From Tarkov is taking “Pay to Win” to the next level.Writer’s note: The backlash to this new edition was so severe that Battlestate Games CEO Nikita Buyanov addressed the situation on the official Subreddit. On the 28th of April, 2024, Nikita outlined several changes to the initial offer. I’ve explained what the original offer was in this article and have added a list of changes at the end. What is the Unheard edition of Escape From Tarkov?If you’re new to EFT, let me quickly explain how the game is monetized, as it’s important for context. Escape From Tarkov is effectively a live service game that is constantly being updated. There’s no monthly fee or microtransactions.The base version of Escape From Tarkov is $50 plus tax, but many existing players purchased ...View the full article

The hit game High on Life is making the jump to comics this summer. As we wait for this promising new spinoff, IGN can exclusively debut cover images and interior art from the second chapter of the series. Check out the slideshow gallery below for a closer look at High on Life #2: The High on Life comic is written by Alec Robbins, a veteran of the game who also created the web comic Mr. Boop. The series is drawn by Kit Wallis (Wonderland) and ******** by JP Jordan (Plough Man). Issue #2's main cover is by VV Glass (@ana_dapta on X and @anadapta on Instagram), while Cover C was designed using assets from the game. Cover B is yet to be revealed.Get a closer look at theupcoming spinoff from Titan Comcis and Squanch Games. Here's Titan's official description for the new series: Though they restored peace to the cosmos by ******** Garmantuous, there's no rest for the Bounty Hunter when a brutal new threat to Humans shoots its way onto the scene. Armed with plucky & determined Harper - and the rest of the Gatlian gang - the series will take them on an explosive, twisting adventure across the cosmos. A story of GUTS, GORE, REDEMPTION, and lost love, this brand-new miniseries will be a rollercoaster romp in the world of the eponymous video game. High on Life #2 will be released in July 2024. The High on Life game scored an 8 out of 10 in IGN's review, with Travis Northup writing, "High on Life is an irreverent, absurd shooter that manages to shine with its outrageous humor, silly setting and story, and some really goofy, foul-mouthed guns that pull the whole thing together for the vast majority of the time. Combat is a bit sloppy, especially during the first act, and the whole sci-fi adventure sometimes has an unpolished feel to it, but once you get some new tools of destruction and movement options, it rises to the occasion. Not all of its jokes find their punchline, but with memorable boss fights, unique alt-***** abilities and exploration, and way more terrible movies to watch than I expected, this wacky journey is definitely worth your time." More recently, the game received its first expansion in the form of the DLC campaign HIgh on ******. Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter. View the full article

Fallout is having a moment. Thanks to the new Fallout TV show being met with universal acclaim, the eight-year-old Fallout 4 is once again topping sales charts. Folks are drawing Lucy MacLean fan art, arguing over whether New Vegas is the best one, giving Interplay’s 1997 original a try, and tweeting about how much they’d like to make out with a ghoul. As if all the excitement around the Amazon series wasn’t enough, Fallout 4 is also getting its long-awaited “next-gen update” for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series consoles, and PC. Originally announced in 2022 for a ’23 release, the update brings performance and quality-mode settings to console, native ultrawide support on PC, Steam Deck verification, a new faction quest line, and more to Bethesda’s 2015 RPG. “Thou shalt get sidetracked by ********* every ******** time” Fallout 4’s a game some of us never quite stopped playing, and yet it has a fairly lackluster reputation among the rest of the series. Its use of a fully voiced protagonist was controversial following Skyrim’s success without one, and the urgency of its main plot can be hard to ignore in comparison to New Vegas’s mailman-survives-gunshot setup. The consensus seems to be that folks prefer a blank-slate character like the ones in the Elder Scrolls games; a premise as specific as looking for your lost child doesn’t lend itself to telling your own stories in the tabletop tradition. If not for Courtenay Taylor’s outstanding performance as the female protagonist, I’d probably agree on both counts. But there’s so much more to this game than it gets credit for. From its colorful post-apocalyptic Boston to the characters who call it home, Fallout 4 is one of Bethesda’s finest works to date. Where the studio’s first contribution to the series, Fallout 3, opened with a lengthy sequence inside one of Vault-Tec’s underground bunkers, Fallout 4 begins in a middle-class suburban home on the morning of the Great War. The 21st-century world lost in that nuclear ***** is not some abstract concept, but a meticulously crafted environment. This is where you enjoy a morning coffee with your husband, entertain your newborn baby in his crib, and then, against your better judgment, sit down to watch the news. *******-Packin’ Mama Like Walton Goggins’s antihero the Ghoul (formerly Cooper Howard), Fallout 4’s player character has one foot in the distant past — including that fateful day, in October 2077, when atomic warheads rained down on China and North America. “Thou shalt get sidetracked by ********* every ******** time,” the Ghoul tells Lucy in the new TV show. If you can embrace this truism and put off the search for your kidnapped infant, Shaun, Fallout 4 offers a wealth of open-world role-playing possibilities. Which is to say that getting sidetracked by ********* isn’t just half the fun in Fallout 4; it’s the whole appeal of the game. (Your son’s safe and sound, by the way. He’s hardly worth the trouble.) Bethesda Game Studios often takes a kind of toy-box approach to design, putting as many systems and ideas into a final product and its DLC as possible. A tutorial section guides the player through the basics, then the setting opens up in every direction, and you can be on your merry way. This has been the big draw of their games since at least Morrowind, and Skyrim and Fallout 4 are where they’ve best recaptured that magic in the years since. The world is in need of saving, your father or son is missing — but there’s so much else going on in the Commonwealth. Who wants to spend all their time chasing ghosts? One qualification to all this is that you’re going to want to play the game with at least some of the DLC installed. If the main quest is Fallout 4’s greatest weakness — something it shares with Starfield, you might argue — then its Far Harbor expansion is the remedy. In Far Harbor, you take on the role of private investigator, helping Kenji and Rei Nakano track down their missing daughter, Kasumi. (Seriously, Shaun’s fine.) She’s taken a boat up north, to an island off the coast of what once was Maine. You quickly learn that Kasumi has a passion for fixing up old electronics — something she picked up from her late “Granddad.” After repairing an old radio, she came into contact with a colony of synths, artificial people who fled the sinister Institute in the Commonwealth and took up residence in the ruins of old Acadia National Park. Suspecting that she might somehow be a synth herself, Kasumi sought out Acadia and its enigmatic leader, DiMA, who has a history with one of Fallout 4’s best companion characters: Nick Valentine. Dear Hearts and Gentle People Of course, you can point to the vampire Serana in Skyrim’s Dawnguard expansion or Starfield’s Sam Coe to argue with me here, but I don’t associate rich companion characters with Bethesda Game Studios titles the way I might with, say, BioWare or Larian. That’s just not what Skyrim is built on; it’s not why people go back to Morrowind or Fallout 3. But the companion characters in Fallout 4 are pretty phenomenal. I’m forever haunted by the great headline for Waypoint’s 2017 review “The Worlds of Mass Effect: Andromeda Aren’t Worth Saving.” When I first read that piece, my mind immediately went to Fallout 4’s Commonwealth, the fishing village of Far Harbor, and the great cast of characters Bethesda put together for their follow-up to Skyrim. Fallout 4 is a game that opens with the destruction of the civilized world and pretty quickly hands the player a set of tools with which to rebuild it. Most players leave Vault 111 and make their way toward Concord, Massachusetts, where a man named Preston Garvey and a handful of civilians are holed up inside an old history museum. The place is littered with artifacts of the Thirteen Colonies and the Revolutionary War, and Garvey is among the last survivors of the Minutemen, a group descended from New England’s real-world colonial militia. There’s a case to be made that the Minutemen are the game’s defining addition to the greater lore of the Fallout universe. They’re a little squeaky-clean for an armed paramilitary, but their earnestness, and their philosophy of helping others — anyone in need — lends Fallout 4 a charm and replayability it might otherwise have lacked. If helping people in trouble brings you joy in this sort of game, Preston Garvey’s going to love you. And you might even love him back. You can romance just about any companion in Fallout 4, though some offer greater depth than others due to their role in the narrative — Preston within the dynamic settlement-building system, Nick Valentine within the context of Far Harbor, Piper Wright within the ongoing saga of Diamond City and the inevitable search for Shaun. Piper is another of Fallout 4’s strengths: a lone journalist seeking truth and justice in a town grown too comfortable with turning a ****** eye to things. It’s a simplistic angle on the story of a corrupt city under the sway of an evil Institute, but there’s a reason people still adore and idolize Superman’s Lois Lane. Piper’s ****** was relevant in 2015, and it’s even more relevant now. One More Tomorrow Many of Fallout 4’s pleasures seem small at first glance. ********* a monster with the silenced Deliverer you get from the Railroad sounds cool, for instance; it feels good to switch on VATS and click the headshot command a few times. It’s fun to collect fusion cores and craft the power armor of your dreams. I like planting a garden, rebuilding Sanctuary Hills, and chasing that elusive “Benevolent Leader” achievement. Are these nobler pursuits than those found in New Vegas, Super Mario 64, or the latest Call of Duty? Of course not. But, for my money, their effect is cumulative. For all its flaws, there’s a beautiful game to be found in Fallout 4. I remember my first (and worst) playthrough well. That November, some eight-odd years ago, I selected the default husband character, changed his name from Nate to Alex, and went straight for Diamond City to find my ****. I was not yet a parent in real life, ironically, but in retrospect that was the worst possible approach to the game. Like Morrowind or even Animal Crossing, Fallout 4 is less an authored story, where the goal is to turn the pages till you reach the end, than a place you inhabit on occasion. Whether you’re becoming an old-time-radio vigilante, leading synths to freedom with the Railroad, taking a vacation to Nuka-World, or searching DiMA’s memories for ******* secrets, the people of the Commonwealth — and the island up north — have always been worth saving. Alex James Kane is the author of the Boss ****** Books entry on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. He has written for various publications, including Fangoria magazine, IGN, Polygon, RogerEbert.com, and Variety. He lives in west-central Illinois. View the full article

Outraged Elite Dangerous players accused studio Frontier Developments of adding pay-to-win items after it announced plans to sell its newest spaceships for premium currency. An upcoming patch for Elite Dangerous is expected to bring with it the first new ship type since the release of the Mamba and the Krait Phantom, which both hit the live servers back in December 2018. Unfortunately, many fans were displeased when developers revealed players would have to pay extra if they wanted to grab the latest ship at the earliest opportunity. View the full article

Former League of Legends World Championship winner TheShy has announced an extension of his competitive hiatus until the year 2025. After missing the LPL Spring Split, fans had hoped to see TheShy return for the Summer Split and, hopefully, compete at Worlds once again. However, it seems his return will only happen next year. In an interview shared today on X, TheShy reiterated his plans to continue his break this summer, aiming to return to the competitive scene in improved form for the following year. View the full article

If you love building sims with a sprinkle of management you should take a look at the new Create, Automate & Manage Humble Bundle. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Another Crab's Treasure is a unique and adorable soulslike by Aggro Crab, and our protagonist, Kril, takes on the dregs of the ocean armed with naught but a snail fork that can be upgraded by finding the right resources. The exposition sees Kril ****** his way through the shallows to reclaim his reposessed home, his fork as his stalwart companion. While you can't upgrade your fork right away, as you collect the necessary resources you'll be able to power up. View the full article

Manor Lords' sole developer, Greg "Slavic Magic" Styczeń, has made a plea to everyone with a review copy of the soon-to-be-released city builder: please stop messing around with the castle planner and breaking the game... Read more.View the full article

After two recent Preview releases of SteamOS for Steam Deck, Valve has now put out the latest Stable update for everyone with SteamOS 3.5.19 code-named "Grey Park Seagull". Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

The huge Fallout 4 next-gen update is rolling out now, giving fans a big reason to return to the Wasteland. Fallout fever is at an all-time high, as the Amazon TV series has inspired longtime fans to return to the series and has convinced newcomers to give the post-apocalyptic RPG franchise a shot. Fallout player counts are up across the board, and it's likely Fallout 4 is about to get another significant boost. View the full article

JEDEC finalized and published the CAMM2 standard in December 2023, paving the way for Micron to announce its first LPCAMM2 modules at CES the following month. Now, Lenovo is poised to become the first to ship a laptop running the newfangled memory. Read Entire Article View the full article

It's almost time to usher in a new era of AMD Ryzen CPUs with Zen 5 set to take the desktop and mobile markets by storm, with the latter segment proving particularly exciting following a recent specs *****. Documentation claiming to spill just shy of all the beans on 'Strix Point' APUs has come to light and one chip's iGPU looks to be so powerful that it could serve as a proper replacement for a budget graphics card. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Asus ROG Ally gets frame generation in every game, unlike Steam Deck Get AMD's most powerful Radeon graphics card for its lowest ever price Your old gaming PC might not run the next Windows 11 update View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

You knew she wasn’t about to let Loki have all the fun. Hela is coming to Marvel Rivals as a playable Duelist character just in time for the game’s upcoming closed alpha test, the devs announced today. Most known for her appearance in the MCU film Thor: Ragnarok where she was portrayed by the magnificent Cate Blanchett, Hela is the Asgardian goddess of ****** and ruler of the realms of Hel and Niflheim. Now, she’s about to let her presence be known in Marvel Rivals. View the full article

Sonic fans will love this one! Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers builds upon the idea of its predecessor SRB2Kart, a kart racing game built on the fangame Sonic Robo Blast 2, itself based on a modified version of ***** Legacy. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Well, here it is Vault Dwellers, the big update to Fallout 4 you've been waiting on after binge-watching the Fallout show. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Stellar Blade has finally landed, and if you've pre-ordered the Stellar Blade Deluxe Edition then you'll receive some extra in-game goodies when you finally load into Shift Up's Naytiba-slaying RPG on PS5. The only issue is you can't actually access these premium extras off the rip. So ***** not - you haven't been scammed, the game isn't bugged, and I'm here to let you know how to claim your Deluxe Edition loot. There are very light spoilers ahead, but nothing that will have you angrily emailing me. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Stellar Blade reviews praise Shift Up's must-play debut on PS5 Stellar Blade release date and latest news The Stellar Blade file size is a godsend for your PS5's SSD View the full article

In F1 2024’s career mode, you’ll be able to play as real drivers for the first time, providing a more authentic experience. Previously, the career mode in EA Sports’ F1 franchise was orientated solely around player-created drivers, putting them on an existing team or creating your own. While that option ********, there’s an entirely new way to play. View the full article

Today the Tribeca Festival, which recognizes achievement across various entertainment mediums, announced their games lineup for 2024. The lineup includes some indie games we already know about, like the upcoming "comedy slapformer" Thank Goodness You're Here!, and a couple new games, like a narrative adventure called Goodnight Universe. All seven of the featured games will be playable in New York City's Pier 57 from June 12-16 later this year. The seven games are: Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure This tile-shifting puzzle game comes from indie developer Furniture & Matress, and follows a misfit girl named Jemma who leaves her cozy town in search of adventure. Blue Prince This atmospheric first-person game combines strategy, adventure, and puzzle elemebts as you work to uncover the mysterious history of a large estate. It's being developed by Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury, and you can check out the announcement trailer here. Darkweb Streamer If you've ever wanted to play as an occult streamer on the dark web, this psycho-horror RPG will give you the oddly specific chance you've been waiting for. From developer We Have Always Lived in the Forest, this RPG utilizes a house-made narrative technology that promises every playthrough will have a uniquely generated story. Goodnight Universe In Goodnight Universe, you take on the role of a six-month old baby developing psychic abilities trying to evade capture from a corporation who wants to use you and your abilities for themselves. The game is being developed by Nice Dream, a studio recently founded by the co-creators of Before Your Eyes. Neva First announced at the PlayStation showcase last year, this emotional action-adventure comes from Nomada Studios, which previously developed GRIS. Skate Story This bizarre skateboarding adventure has you skating through the underworld with the goal of making it to the moon and swallowing it to win a wager with the ******. Sounds pretty ******** to me! Thank Goodness You're Here Thank Goodness You're Here is a comedic "slapformer" where you play a traveling salesman in an English town who becomes saddled with doing everyone's increasingly bizarre chores. The game features hand-drawn animation and an unhinged cartoonish art style. In addition to these seven titles, Tribeca Festival has also announced a special even on June 14th called "From ***** to Firaga: Remaking Final Fantasy VII, which will feature director of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Naoki Hamaguchi and the producer and game director of the original Final Fantasy VII Yoshinori Kitase. During the event the two will "discuss what it was like remaking the beloved classic and bringing an iconic cast of characters to life in the modern age." Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Cygames has detailed the new content coming in updates 1.2.0 and 1.3.0 of Granblue Fantasy: Relink. In addition to adding two new characters to the robust cast of Granblue Fantasy: Relink, the updates bring improvements to existing characters, bug fixes, and new quest additions. View the full article

It's another Thursday on the Epic Games Store, which means it's another day of reveals and rotations for its free game selection. Unfortunately, this means anyone who missed out on Epic Games Store's addition of The Big **** (April 18-April 25) can no longer claim it. Instead, they'll be able to claim Industria and LISA: Definitive Edition over the next week, and come May 2, they'll rotate out for the newly announced EGS free game: Orcs Must **** 3. View the full article

The announcement trailer for Lost Legions opens with a Roman Emperor bellowing “GIVE ME BACK MY LEGIONS” like a **** who’s just had his pudding taken away. I'd just had a big swig of coffee before watching, and was instantly swept off by visions of an apoplectic Roman bigwig rampaging through the forests of darkest Germania, gluing abducted legionnaires together into a sort of Octavian katamari... and then they revealed that it’s another open world survival game, with no less than two trailer beats dedicated to the act of hacking down a tree. I mean no disrespect to developers Tarock Interactive - they're not to blame for my addled imagination - but there are many open world survival games and as a weary Ed Thorn recently noted, the majority are heavily frontloaded with wilderness carpentry. I don’t think survival games should emphasise wood-chopping in their announcement footage. It's like doing a Call of Duty montage of people getting shot three seconds from spawn. Still, if there's no katamari mechanic, the idea of raising a small army of mostly AI-controlled Roman soldiers behind ****** lines has a certain charm. Without further ado, here’s the trailer. Read more View the full article

Songs of Syx is approaching the end-game now with a new Beta release out for version 66, which as usual has tons of changes for this massive city-building strategy game. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Manor Lords isn't content to just be an average, everyday city-builder, and the game's commitment to doing something unique goes beyond its central concept. The obvious thing that makes Manor Lords different from other games in the genre is its blend of tactical battles into the mix, which gives it an extra dose of Total War appeal. This isn't the only feature that's hard to find elsewhere, however, and another fairly unique addition also contributes to making its medieval settlements feel more like real places with real people. View the full article

Nintendo's latest takedown order is a huge ***** to Steam players, particularly fans of the physics sandbox title, Garry's Mod. When Garry's Mod launched back in 2006 - after starting as a mod for Half-Life 2 - the idea was to give players a world in which they can freely manipulate objects and create their own stories. As time went on, other developers began adding downloadable content to the game via the Steam Workshop, including characters, items, and even new game modes such as Trouble in ********** Town and Prop Hunt. View the full article

Facepunch issued an announcement for Garry's Mod players, to explain that a whole lot of user content is being taken down due to Nintendo. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article