The Last Jedi has come to Star Wars Battlefront 2 in the form of a free update that adds Finn and Captain Phasma to the lineup of hero characters, along with a new hero ship (Tallie Lintra’s RZ-2 A-wing), new campaign missions, and a pair of new multiplayer maps. First things first, though: Battlefront 2 writer Mitch Dyer hit up Twitter to reassure Star Wars fans that the DLC doesn’t spoil The Last Jedi film in any way—but if you want to go into it “totally blind,” watch the movie first. The thr

For gaming purposes, nothing trumps the importance of your graphics card. Last year gave us Nvidia’s Pascal architecture, and this year came the GTX 1080 Ti right on cue. Performance is up to 30 percent faster than the GTX 1080, making 4K ultra 60 fps on a single GPU a reality in most games. Even among air-cooled models, it’s difficult to pick just one, but this year’s best graphics card award goes to EVGA’s GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Elite Gaming. You can achieve similar results with just about any 1080

PC Gamer Club members have a chance to win one of three Razer prize packs featuring some great gear. One grand prize winner will receive a Razer Kraken 7.1 Pro V2 headset, Razer Base Station Chroma, and a Razer Rogue Backpack! The first runner up will win a Razer Kraken Pro V2 gaming headset and a Razer Basilisk mouse, and the second runner up will score a Razer Kraken Pro V2 gaming headset. If you’re a PC Gamer Club member already, you should be getting an email soon with instructions. This giv

Metal Gear Survive is the first post-Hideo Kojima Metal Gear game that’s due on February 20 in the US and February 22 in Europe. Despite being a Metal Gear Solid 5 spin-off, the following short explains that Survive immediately follows Ground Zeroes, and that the protagonist is one of the soldiers present on Mother Base at that time. It’s in this odd dimension where the the game’s Wanderer zombie-likes live. Again, Metal Gear Survive is due on February 20 in the US and February 22, 2018 in Europ

INON ZUR Inon Zur is a professional musician whose work on television, movies and videogames spans three decades. Zur also worked on 2007’s Crysis, however is perhaps best known for his orchestral contributions to the Fallout franchise. This is what I’ve found in the scoring for games world and this is why I like to work in this medium so much. What we call ‘organic sound design’ is the main tool when it comes to the Fallout world of music. How does your approach differ when writing a Fallout sc

Named Operation Endeavor, the forthcoming update brings with it a host of premium skins, five new Featured Modes, two Holiday Banners, and an adjustment to grapple charges. Here’s all five in greater detail:Turbo LTS: Last Titan Standing gametype with double core generation and dash regen rates. Turbo Titan Brawl: Titan Brawl with double core generation and dash regen rates. Check out more on the Operation Endeavor in this direction. Titanfall 2’s Operation Endeavor patch is due December 19.

Following a very successful Kickstarter campaign in mid-2015, Ys Net has spent the last two and half years slowly but steadily developing Shenmue 3. In August this year, the dev announced a publishing deal with Deep Silver—and it’s now revealed a partnership with game art studio Lakshya Digital. Lakshya Digital operates out of Gurgaon in India, and has offices in Pune and Seattle. In reference to Bloodborne, Lakshya’s co-founder and CEO Manvendra Shukul said this in conversation with Gadgets 360

Now, it hopes to open up to more players still by going free to try for the next seven days. From tomorrow, December 14, H1Z1 will be free to download in full. All progress made during the free trial period is also transferable to the main game, should you decide to make the jump. If this applies, you’ll probably want to take advantage of the game’s coinciding Steam sale which knocks 75 percent off its recommended retail value. H1Z1’s free week kicks off tomorrow at 10am PT/6pm GMT, and runs til

As Andy reported last week, Ghost Recon Wildlands is getting ranked play, new classes, weapons and maps in its incoming Jungle Storm update that’s due tomorrow. Alongside that, Ubisoft will also launch The Hunt—a special event which appears to feature the Predator. The extraterrestrial hunter doesn’t feature overtly in the following trailer, but with its dense jungle setting, human carcasses stripped and hanging from trees, the same font as the earlier films, and that spine-chilling noise the ba

Finding Paradise is the loosely tied follow-up to Freebird Games’ To the Moon and A Bird Story. The latest similarly-styled narrative role-player is due tomorrow, December 14, and now has an official trailer. Here’s that:Finding Paradise sees the return of To the Moon’s Dr Rosalene and Dr Watts—while Colin, the child from 2014’s A Bird Story, features now as an adult. Finding Paradise is the second full episode of To the Moon’s series. Finding Paradise is due tomorrow, December 14.

These types of stories are common in Don’t Sink, a new 2D sandbox RPG published by Studio Eris. Pixels of the CarribeanOne of the best things about Don’t Sink is that it never gets bogged down in wordy tutorials or overbearing expository text. It’s worth mentioning Don’t Sink has a couple of limitations at the moment. Don’t Sink stands out for being simple, streamlined, and well-presented. But while these games have huge production values, Don’t Sink is a more lo-fi and uncomplicated pirate-’em-

These types of stories are common in Don’t Sink, a new 2D sandbox RPG published by Studio Eris. Pixels of the CarribeanOne of the best things about Don’t Sink is that it never gets bogged down in wordy tutorials or overbearing expository text. It’s worth mentioning Don’t Sink has a couple of limitations at the moment. Don’t Sink stands out for being simple, streamlined, and well-presented. But while these games have huge production values, Don’t Sink is a more lo-fi and uncomplicated pirate-’em-

In the Indie GIF Showcase, we dig up the best-looking new and upcoming indie games and explore what makes them special. I’m a sucker for gravity-based games, but that’s only half the reason Etherborn caught my eye. There’s a grand sense of scale to its inexplicably suspended geometric world which dwarfs its tiny humanoid protagonist, and I’m all about it. Developer Altered Matter describes Etherborn as a platformer where gravity is relative to where you’re standing. “The main character experienc

WW2 shooter Battalion 1944, you may recall, ran a fireball of a Kickstarter in early 2016. They didn’t provide an exact date, but the studio did say Battalion will come to Steam Early Access “not long after” the trailer’s release. Bulkhead also addressed a possible post-Early Access price increase, which has proven to be a thorny subject for some developers in the past. When it enters Early Access, it will include “a base level of maps, features and content.” This is to reward and encourage thos

A major Quake Champions update that’s coming later this week will add the Quake 3 Arena heavy hitter Keel to the shooter’s lineup. The dead-but-then-he-got-better cyborg brings a Grenade Swarm active ability to the fight (that one should be pretty obvious, it’s a swarm of grenades) and a passive ability called Stockpile that reduces the Grenade Swarm cooldown every time he picks up an ammo box. Also coming in the December update is a new Duel map called Vale of Pnath, “a wickedly vertical shrine

With the addition of rogues, Book of Demons has completed its high fantasy class trilogy. Where mage does magic things and warrior does tanky things, the rogue is described as a flexible class with long- and close-range options thanks to her bow and daggers. Like mage and warrior, rogue also has unique class cards—16 to be exact. Book of Demons’ combat works on a deck system: the cards you include become the skills you can use while dungeoneering. Developer Thing Trunk says Book of Demons will e

For the first time ever, the UK Gambling Committee’s year-end report on Young People and Gambling has looked into “awareness and participation rates” of skin gambling (if you’re not sure what that is, here’s a primer). “‘Skins’ are in-game items, used within some of the most popular video game titles. In fact, the rate of playing those games matches the incidence rate of skin gambling, at 11 percent. That’s also how the concept was introduced to survey respondents: “When playing computer games/a

With the recent PS4 beta, we finally got to spend some much-needed hands-on time with Monster Hunter: World, which is slated to hit PC early- to mid-2018. I’ve already talked about some basic fun-factor stuff World needs to account for to ensure a proper debut for Monster Hunter on PC (in the West; Monster Hunter Frontier Online notwithstanding), and happily the beta addressed almost all my concerns. The beta system was also disconcertingly reminiscent of how Monster Hunter did multiplayer on th

Since HDR performance details are typically not provided, consumers are unable to obtain meaningful performance information. With DisplayHDR, VESA aims to alleviate this problem,” Vesa explains. DisplayHDR 1.0 establishes three distinct levels of HDR performance, labeled DisplayHDR 400 (baseline), DisplayHDR 600 (midrange), and DisplayHDR 1000 (high-end). Finally, the DisplayHDR 400 spec requires HDR10 support and global dimming at a minimum. With this tiered specification, ranging from baseline

While the Core i5-8400 has a base clockspeed that’s relatively low (2.8GHz), on all the Z370 boards I’ve tried the chip runs at 3.8GHz when fully loaded, and up to 4.0GHz on two cores. In performance tests, the i5-8400 basically matches the previous generation i7-7700K (running stock) in games and applications. Intel is still the best CPU choice for gaming, but the Zen architecture is a huge leap forward in AMD processor performance. 2017 was the year of the CPU, with five new platform launches