A cosmic freebooter, a laser-loving bounty hunter, an eager explorer, but only now can you add “beautiful” to that list. Yes, with the arrival of alpha 3.1 comes character customisation, along with new ships and the beacon system. We’ve seen the character customisation in action a bit since it was announced way back through the mists of time, and it’s one of the subject’s in last month’s Around the Verse video, which you can slap your eyes on below. When you make your character, it will be linke

War for the Overworld, the mischievous dungeon management romp inspired by Dungeon Keeper, turns three today, but Brightrock Games isn’t quite done with it yet. This month, on April 20, War for the Overworld’s final expansion, The Under Games, will pop into existence, along with a free 2.0 patch. As well as the expansion, there’s also the 2.0 update that will be available to everyone. Then, a year later, War for the Overworld came along and it couldn’t have been more like the originals. If you f

One hopeful theory is that this is a precursor to the destruction of Tilted Towers. Perhaps Epic agrees, but instead of just removing it, they’re going to destroy it with a comet. Or maybe they’re just trying to get everyone off the scent. Still, I’m more convinced than I am about it signalling the destruction of Tilted Towers. While some assumed that the comet would strike yesterday, Tilted Towers remains standing.

Last week, Fortnite streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins dropped a racial slur into the middle of a song where it wasn’t used. Since then, however, a CS:GO commentator, Matthew “Sadokist” Trivett, has been suspended after using racist language and telling someone to kill themself. Racial slurs are tackled in Twitch’s community guidelines, lumped together under “hateful conduct”. The language used by Blevins would certainly fall under “race, ethnicity”, but a Twitch representative explained that contex

Remember Steam Machines? The Steam Machine launch wasn’t helped by Valve’s second bid for domination of the living room. While their Steam Machine partners were designing their first boxes, Valve was busy making their own device: the Steam Link. It essentially did the same thing: allowing people to play Steam games on their TV, but instead of being a desktop surrogate, the Steam Link was a streaming device. The old Steam Machine page can still be reached, but not through the front page.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the ways games have handled books, letters, codexes and more. Skyrim / UltimaWhat’s an RPG shelf without a few strangely short books that probably don’t need hundreds of pages and a stiff leather jacket? If you can stand to actually read it. The Witcher 3What separates The Witcher from most in-game codexes is its sense of character, with everything being described from the perspective of in-game poet, lover and occasional sidekick Dandelion. It’s fun to get los

VIDEO: A quick look at how Octahedron plays. Octahedron isn’t really a rhythm game—you won’t need to sync your every movement in time with the music like you do in Crypt of the NecroDancer. But you’ll find yourself doing it anyway, leaping into space in time with its trance beats just because it feels good. That’s the hook of Octahedron—it lets you fill the gaps between its solid ground with your own bespoke platforms. You can read our review, or check out an interview with its creator, indie de

Wes went hands-on with Amazon’s 4v4 fantasy sports game Breakaway in 2016, and Amanda did the same last year when it was in alpha. Both were left with more questions than answers, and wondered whether its mish-mash of ideas would come together into something coherent. Sadly, the answer is no: Amazon Game Studios has officially stopped development of the game. “In spite of our efforts, we didn’t achieve the breakthrough that made the game what we all hoped it could be. As a result, Breakaway is n

Source: Matthew “Sadokist” Trivett, FacebookCounter Strike: Global Offensive commentator Matthew “Sadokist” Trivett has been suspended from Twitch after he used racist language during a stream and told another member of the community to kill himself. During the Friday night stream, Trivett used the n-word while taunting a friend. The full stream is unavailable to watch but the clip was immediately posted on social media. Later in the stream, Trivett told community member Don Haci to kill himself

Welcome to April Fools’ Day, an annual hell for news writers everywhere. As is now tradition, we’ve rounded up the best of them here, and we’ll add more as they pop up throughout the day. What you need is nanotechnology that permanently alters your body—which is exactly what Razer’s Project Venom will do for you. And thus, PC Gamer’s new game review scale was created. Twitch Plays For HonorFor Honor’s “new game mode” appears to be two buffalo juking it out with giant swords.

It’s April Fools’ Day, so don’t trust anything you read. Most developers will make a throwaway announcement that will make you double take, chuckle for a few seconds, and then move on, but Grinding Gear Games has gone the whole hog and temporarily transformed its free-to-play action RPG Path of Exile into a 100-player battle royale game. “Based on community feedback, we are announcing that we have abandoned the action RPG genre to focus on what players really want. Path of Exile is being replace

The Steam Link was briefly available for $1/£0.80 plus shipping on Steam today, and a few fast clickers were able to snap it up before Valve changed the offer. It’s still the same price, but only if you buy it bundled with Hollow Knight, Doom or Human: Fall Flat before Monday. The Doom and Steam Link bundle is $15.99/£10.79, the Hollow Knight bundle is $10.89/£8.05, and the Human: Fall Flat bundle is $8.49/£6.79. If you’ve got a good internet connection, then the Steam Link is a steal at this pr

Orcs Must Die! developer Robot Entertainment has laid off more than 30 staff and cut the number of games it’s working on from two to one, it has announced. In a blog post, the company said it “grew significantly” during the development of Orcs Must Die! However, it is now “making a strategic shift” to working on a single project, which means cutting its staff numbers. 2 (roughly 1.1 million players compared to 1.8 million, according to SteamSpy).

The Kansas senate has passed an “anti-swatting” bill named after Andrew Finch, the 28-year-old who police shot in December after receiving a false report of a murder and hostage situation at his home. Finch did not play games himself, and reports at the time suggested that the perpetrator wrongly targeted his address believing that somebody else lived there. The Andrew T. Finch anti-swatting bill, if approved by Governor Jeff Colyer, would mean that anyone placing a swatting call that results in

Valve tinkered with Counter Strike: Global Offensive’s trading rules this week, and sections of the community are ticked off about it. Under the new rules, added in an update, any items you receive through trading will have a seven-day trading cool down, which stops you moving them on to another user quickly. The aim is to stop automated Steam accounts from trading items very frequently through third-party services, Valve said in a blog post. “Unfortunately, some of these third-party services ha

The Humble Store’s week-long indie sale draws to a close on Monday, which means it’s your last chance to grab Hollow Knight and Darkest Dungeon for $10 apiece (roughly £6.50). Atmospheric Metroidvania Hollow Knight was named our best platforming game of last year, and it’s still receiving regular updates. Darkest Dungeon is a stressful party-based dungeon crawler, and one of the best indie games you can play right now. If you’re quick, you can also grab excellent adventure game Thimbleweed Park

Total War: Rise of Mordor is a conversion mod for Total War: Attila that, in its final form, will let you play through a newly-crafted campaign featuring 19 factions from Middle Earth. First, the team will finish off the factions and add custom settlements into the mod. The grand strategy and large-scale battles of the Total War series make it ripe for Lord of the Rings conversions, and Rise of Mordor isn’t the first to attempt it. Third Age does something similar for Medieval 2: Total War, and

It’s really a pseudo-game made to be visited rather than played, with building blocks made of acid colors, scrambled words, clay, and an utter love for the absurd. Hylics (it means “matter”) was his first commercial endeavor, and mixed all-new visual pieces with older assets from past projects. Hylics actively discourages you from spending too much time on menu screens, as if ashamed of being an RPG. Hylics may be considered part of the “weird RPG Maker games” trend, like Gingiva and Space Funer

THE HIGHSChris Livingston: Far highWell I’ve played nothing this week except Far Cry 5, so even if it sucked I’d have to fit it in here somehow. You can read my review of Far Cry 5 here , and perhaps more importantly, learn the pros and cons of impaling people and fighting bald eagles with shovels . Like Chris, I’ve been playing Far Cry 5 all week and enjoying the bulk of my time spent. I grew up in Deer Lodge, Montana, a small town in the western half of the state Far Cry 5 is based on, and it’

We all know that Fortnite is big: The biggest game in the world by some measures. Those are impressive moments by any measure, but according to “influencer marketing platform” Matchmade, Fortnite has now surpassed an even bigger milestone—Minecraft—to become the most-viewed game on YouTube. “During the past 6 months, The average month-to-month growth rate of Fortnite viewership on YouTube is +97 percent. Matchmaker cited a few possible factors behind Fortnite’s spectacular YouTube growth. For a