Sea of Thieves left a good impression in its closed beta last week, and next Saturday at 17.00, Rare will take to the Developer Stage at the PC Gamer Weekender on to discuss the game’s journey to PC. Ted Timmins, PC design lead, will discuss his work in making the pirate-’em-up appealing to PC players. Here’s what you can expect from the panel:”As our first PC game, we had an opportunity with Sea of Thieves to build it for the PC community. We figured that to achieve this we needed to work with

And if you played PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds during its nine-month stint in Early Access last year, every in-game second has been recorded. But did you know that nearly 13 and a half million players suffered death-by-frying pan between March and December last year? Admittedly, I have no way of proving these facts beyond reading from the following infographic, which also informs us 130,260,892 dinners were won in Early Access—a total of 260,521,784,000kcal, which can, apparently, feed the popu

Biomutant is making its way to the PC Gamer Weekender—we already reported it’ll be there in playable form, but we’re pleased to add the cherry on top in the form of a Developer Stage talk about the game, taking place Saturday February 17. Stefan Ljungqvist, head of studio at Experiment 101, will be on hand to take attendees through a bit more detail about Biomutant. And who better to get it from than those who’re making the game? Beyond Biomutant you’ll also be able to see many more speakers, ga

Hand of Fate 2, the choose-your-own-adventure/Arkham brawler/RPG with cards, recently updated to give players access to its “Game Master’s Toolkit”. As they say, “With the Game Master’s Toolkit, you’ll be able to create anything from a simple encounter all the way up to a full-fledged challenge with its own win conditions, blessings, curses and artefact rewards.” Full details and some useful links are included in their news post announcing the update. If you just want to check out what other peo

Recently, we posted about the small, passionate community playing one of Rocket League’s alternate modes, Snow Day, and how its fans hope a ranked mode could attract more players. I traitorously return to the main Soccar mode now and then, but Snow Day is far and away the main attraction for me. That includes Snow Day, Hoops, Dropshot, and Rumble. I had just about written off the idea of ranked Snow Day in particular, given the small playerbase. Of competitive Snow Day.

And yet somehow—somehow—I played through two Divinity: Original Sin games, start to finish, with the same friend sitting next to me. Round oneOur first mistake was to both choose archer builds at the beginning of Original Sin. We long ago discovered that Divinity: Original Sin doesn’t spawn twice the bows or arrows if you play as two archers, and entered a kind of passive-aggressive standoff every time a new one appeared in a chest. By the time we were done with Divinity: Original Sin, neither o

A new Middle-earth: Shadow of War expansion called The Blade of Galadriel went live today, giving players the opportunity to switch things up as Eltariel, an elite Elven assassin who’s been sent by Galadriel to hang a job on the Nazgul. It also appears that she has a beef with Talion, the lead character from Shadow of War, who—and this is all quite spoiler-ish, so stop here if you’re still trying to avoid such things—took Isildur’s ring after killing him in Shadow of War. After sexy Shelob and O

Crossing Souls is an action-adventure game styled after ’80s cartoons like He-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It’s due out a week from today on February 13, and developer Fourattic is giving out free samples on Steam through a fairly sizable demo. Crossing Souls was first revealed when its Kickstarter launched in November 2014. Firstly, the studio is called Fourattic because it was formed by four dudes working in an attic. They’ve since opened an indie studio in their hometown in Spain—who

When you hear “deck building” the first thing you might think of is Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, but these are games for which you build decks, not “deck building games”. In deck building games the game revolves around building the deck as part of the gameplay. You have to disregard the very basic graphics, but otherwise it is a compelling blend of roguelike mechanics with deck building. The deck building is critical, because it gets difficult to mold your deck to deal with increasingly

Into the Breach, the next game from the makers of FTL, will launch on Steam, GOG and the Humble Store on Tuesday, February 27, two-man developer Subset Games announced today. Like FTL, it’s quite hard: Steven managed to wipe out humanity twice before he got the hang of it. “Here’s where Into the Breach really threw me for a loop: It’s not just about killing Vek,” Steven wrote. Ahead of its February 27 release, Into the Breach will also be playable at the PC Gamer Weekender on Saturday, February

It sounds welcome but, as someone still playing the game, I can’t help but think what’s really needed is for Bungie to implement some risky changes right now. Bungie should unlock the nodes so that players can pick any combination of four perks. Bungie clearly has no intention of ditching the old exotics, and plans to slowly release them back to us. Adding all the old Exotics into the loot table would fix the problem for a while, buying Bungie more time to work on its other improvements. Lest yo

Following yesterday’s report that Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon could soon become the first female player to join the Overwatch League, ESPN says that multiple sources have told it that she, along with three other players—Lee Eui-Seok of Element Mystic and Cheon “Ado” Ki-hyun of MVP Space, and an unnamed Chinese player—are set to join the Shanghai Dragons. The Shanghai Dragons are currently dead last in the Overwatch League standings with an 0-8 record, and an abysmal 6-36 record on individual maps, acco

Blizzard’s ambitious Overwatch League had been announced back at BlizzCon 2016, but there were still many unknowns. The lucky few—like CWoosH, who played for Sweden in the Overwatch World Cup—found a home on one of the now city-based Overwatch League teams. The big pieces of the puzzle are in place for Blizzard and most Overwatch League teams. People will look back at Overwatch League and compare it to the formation of the NHL or the MLB. The amount of effort, the sophistication, and the resourc

Manga and anime distributor VIZ Media is partnering with Portland-based studio Rose City Games to launch a new publishing program dedicated to original indie games. The World Next Door is being developed by Rose City Games and published by VIZ Media. Even if you’re unfamiliar, you probably know VIZ Media by reputation through some of the properties they license, like Sailor Moon and One Punch Man. Rose City Games, meanwhile, operated as something of a support studio until now. They’ve also assis

But for another quick fix, you may want to keep your eye on Freeman: Guerrilla Warfare, now in Early Access on Steam. While it’s a modern combat game with guns and grenades instead of horses and swords, it’s still extremely Mount & Bladey. Getting into combat is similar to M&B, too: just walk up to another force and tell them you’re going to kill them. When it comes to the first-person combat, for me at least, Freeman immediately turns into a game of PUBG. When it comes to the first-person comba

The Hearthstone 10.2 update, with changes to Ranked Play and a fond farewell to the dominance of Patches the Pirates, is now live for desktops and on the way to mobile devices. The new Mammoth Card Bundle that Blizzard revealed in the Quest for Packs announcement is now available for purchase, and Blizzard also announced that the Wildfest is on the way. All ranks will have five stars, and Legend players will be reset to rank four, with no stars. Changes to card balance will impact Corridor Creep

Backblaze released another HDD reliability report, this time with stats from both the fourth quarter of 2017 and for the entire year. However, that’s based on a single hard drive failure, and the way Backblaze crunches its numbers. Backblaze employed 60 of that particular HDD model and saw one of them fail during the fourth quarter. Back in May of last year, we noted that Backblaze’s stats made a strong case for 8TB models. The Toshiba 5TB model and the HGST 8TB model had zero failures over the

The upcoming Civilization 6: Rise and Fall expansion will add the Zulu to the roster of nations, led by Shaka, the illegitimate son of a Zulu chief who would suffer exile and humiliation before finding his place as a warrior in the ibutho, eventually rising to become one of the most influential rulers of the Zulu Kingdom. The unique Zulu unit is the Impi, a light, highly-disciplined force that is less expensive than other combat units of the same era, has an increased flanking bonus, and earns e

I’ll play 10 rounds following with each ruleset, hopefully bagging a few kills and learning more about the game on each outing. Naturally, I can only use silenced weapons, which limits me to the silenced pistol and the suppressed SMG. I even check the latest game update to make sure Epic hasn’t removed silenced weapons temporarily. Tracking players from afar is relatively easy in Fortnite, and this playstyle is a good way to learn how to do it. Still, I should’ve won at least one of those matche

New Jersey is the latest to do so, with its Governor Phil Murphy signing an executive order mandating that ISPs follow net neutrality rules if they want to do business with state agencies. The executive order makes New Jersey the third state to issue its own net neutrality rules. As for New Jersey, the executive order prohibits ISPs from throttling or creating paid fast lanes for lawful internet traffic and online services. According to Arstechnica, the FCC saw this coming and included language