At this year’s Minecon (called Minecon Earth) players will be able to vote for the next mob coming to Minecraft. The three that aren’t selected will be thrown in a dusty filing cabinet, never to see the light of day again. Well, the top left is the squid-like creature, although it appears to have some kind of sticky rope dangling from its mouth. I’m thinking something akin to Half Life’s barnacle that will suck you up given half the chance. Rounding out the lineup is a creature that looks simila

Perception had an interesting premise—you controlled a blind woman navigating a haunted house using echolocation—but failed to impress Samuel in his review thanks to its cut-and-paste environments and lack of inventive scares. Developer The Deep End Games this week attempted to address some of the horror game’s big issues with an update that adds two new difficulty modes, boosts the frame rate, streamlines the plot and reworks the checkpoint system. On the other end of the spectrum is the ‘Scary

This week: which game do you regret spending money on? I generally don’t regret spending money on cards, but I do regret quite how much I spent on The Elder Scrolls: Legends. As for Harry Potter, those films and books never got a great tie-in, which is a shame. Wes Fenlon: Dead Space 3I feel a little guilty speaking ill of Visceral given the studio’s recent closure, but Dead Space 3 was a maddeningly bad videogame. I was angry almost the whole time I was playing it, because Dead Space and especi

Everyone’s favorite Omnic has been seeing quite a bit of love in professional Overwatch lately. EnVyUs’ Taimou used him with great success on Route 66 back at the Overwatch Contenders finals, and France just had AKM on Bastion for an amazing overtime victory on Junkertown at the Overwatch World Cup finals at Blizzcon. The keys, as you can imagine, were great shielding, a Mercy boost, and some good ol’ Zenyatta debuffs. Important to note is that “sneaky” Soon, as he’s become known, kept China on

[In West of Loathing] not having the player be the most important person in the world was a real goal. It makes me wish there was a comedy game category, because that is the only actual category it would belong in. It makes me sad that there aren’t enough comedy games to really be a category. We basically do whatever the industry says you’re not supposed to be doing any more. We did ‘games as a service’ before that was a thing, we’ve switched to single-player now that the industry is moving to g

As someone who loves a bit of the old virtual photography, I’m glad this feature is becoming more common in big games. It’s really in a developer’s interest to have players showing their worlds in the best light and sharing it with people. My roommate had to drag me to a bar to watch the unprecedentedly crazy World Series games between LA and Houston. Suddenly I’ve spent 14 hours playing the sport I allegedly don’t like during one of the busiest gaming weeks of the year. I love that World of War

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth is coming in 2018. There’s a ton to unpack about Battle for Azeroth, so here is everything that you need to know. Battle for Azeroth will expand on that in a big way by focusing on key characters from Warcraft’s lore. With Battle for Azeroth, Artifact Weapons are being retired and replaced with a new system focused on a necklace called the Heart of Azeroth. As Blizzcon continues and we get closer to 2018 and the launch of Battle for Azeroth, more details wil

Blizzard knows that Overwatch, like every other competitive game online, is full of toxic players who make the experience worse for everyone around them. Mercer said that the team has “a multitude of initiatives internally” that they’re working towards as ways to address toxic behavior. It’s something that across Blizzard, we’ve become very, very mindful of,” Mercer said. We have groups within Blizzard that are trying to help address this for all of Blizzard. It’s going to take continued vigilan

Just before Blizzard’s highly anticipated 11th annual Blizzcon, Razer has announced another Overwatch-licensed set of peripherals. Inspired by the game’s (probably) most cosplayed hero, the new Razer D.Va line includes a headset, mouse and matching mousepad. While the mouse and mousepad are based off of currently available Razer hardware, the headset is where things get interesting. (Image: © razer)Available now, the D.Va themed Razer Goliathus mousepad can be purchased for $19.99. The D.Va them

(Don’t feel a need to rush, though, these are repeating events.) For everyone else, since the new one announced yesterday will be the first Faction Rally that PC players can take part in, read on. (And yes, if you’re not eligible yet but curious anyway, you’re welcome to come along too.) Faction Rallies are week-long events that pit the game’s three factions—Dead Orbit, Future War Cult, and New Monarchy—against one another in indirect competition. Those tokens can be turned in to faction vendors

Guardians of Ember is a fantasy hack-and-slash MMO released in September that bears more than a passing resemblance to traditional action-RPGs like Diablo 2 and Grim Dawn. Steam user reviews have been mixed, although post-release updates appear to have improved that pictures somewhat, but what’s important right now is that it’s free to play this weekend, so you can find out for yourself what it’s all about without spending a dime. “Through the whole weekend players can try out each of the six di

In that spirit, Blizzard has announced sweeping changes to its World PvP system and the elimination of PvP-only servers. “Our ruleset doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense for how the game is right now,” Hazzikostas said, explaining that since 2005, the rules governing open-world PvP haven’t really been updated. First up, PvP servers are going away entirely. Instead, all servers will operate under the same rules of engagement, where players can opt-in for open-world PvP or choose to stay neutr

If you’ve tried leveling through World of Warcraft recently, you know how imperfect it is. You’ll quickly outscale zones, and others you’ll leave untouched entirely thanks to more rapid experience point gains. But in the upcoming 7.3.5 patch, Blizzard will be taking a version of Legion’s level scaling and applying it to all of Azeroth and Warcraft’s previous expansions. During the World of Warcraft panel at Blizzcon 2017, game director Ion Hazzikostas took the stage to lay out plans for the next

Blizzard is bringing back vanilla WoW, and we got to talk to them about making it happen. We also had Bo Moore in the crowd at BlizzCon 2017 to watch the opening ceremony play out live, and he took the video above of the crowd learning that Blizzard is creating official vanilla servers under the name World of Warcraft: Classic. Blizzard vice president J. Allen Brack took his time with the announcement, teasing it out with an ice cream metaphor. Brack loves cookies and cream, but the crowd defini

Ys Eight: Lacrimosa of Dana, which was originally slated to debut on Steam in mid-September, has been delayed once again. Publisher NIS America announced early this week that the localization overhaul it began in October is a bigger job than expected, and so the game won’t actually be out until sometime in 2018. He added that, because NIS America wants this to be “the definitive release of the title,” the PC version will be held back as well. “While this does constitute a further delay of the PC

Alter Army is a fast-paced 2D action platformer currently in development at Vague Pixels, a small indie studio based in Jaipur, India. Well, Vague Pixels has two members: Mridul Pancholi and Mridul Bansal. Alter Army grades your performance at the end of each level. However, Vague Pixels says the key to success is playing aggressively. Vague Pixels says they’re targeting a December release date and expect Alter Army to cost around $10 USD.

series of action-RPGs has slashed onto Steam, offering all three games in the trilogy plus a new, fourth chapter called Reconnection. The originals are well-loved and the new PC package, called .hack//G.U. Bandai Namco has also slipped in a brand new fourth game to the collection called Reconnection, which continues the story of the previous games. You control Haseo as he logs back into the MMO to try and rescue Ovan before the game shuts down. If you fancy it, the collection is £39.99/$49.99 on

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday on the horizon, and Nvidia having released a new GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics card, it’s a perfect storm for discounts on the GeForce GTX 1080. It has already begun—over at Newegg, you can score a Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Amp Edition for $510. The card is marked down to $540, but if you use promo code EMCSBBRC3, it shaves $30 off the price. Zotac’s card sports a factory overclock with a 1,683MHz base clock and 1,822MHz boost clock. Reference cards ship with a 1,6

Battle for Azeroth takes players on a high-seas adventure to the South Seas islands of Kul’Tiras and Zandalar, just as the community predicted. It’s a nautical-themed expansion that is reigniting the conflict between the Alliance and Horde as players embark on the quest to level 120. In Battle for Azeroth, each faction is racing to recruit new allies before waging war against the other. Typical to the cycle of expansions, Battle for Azeroth won’t feature any new classes to play as. In the next f

Lest there be any doubt, the company today announced a new Naga Trinity mouse and Tartarus V2 gaming keyboard. Starting with the Tartarus V2, it is an ergonomic keypad with 32 fully programmable keys—that’s seven more than its predecessor. The Naga Trinity is the ninth iteration of Razer’s Naga line. The mouse also has a 1,000Hz ultrapolling rate, a tilt-click scroll wheel, and Razer Chroma lighting support. Like the new keypad, the Razer Naga Trinity will be available in the fourth quarter, for