Far Cry 3’s antenna towers undoubtedly cast the longest shadow on almost every Ubi open world that followed, but that’s not where they started. These vertigo-bating landmarks birthed Ubi’s most infamous open world feature: gradually filling up a map with mission markers. Far Cry 3’s antenna towers undoubtedly cast the longest shadow on almost every Ubi open world that followed. Image 2 of 8 Tagging enemies predated Ubisoft’s open world games, dating back to Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Over

One of the magical things about Divinity: Original Sin and now its sequel, Original Sin 2, is how complex and liberal their combat systems are. You have one party member cast Soul Mate on an undead party member. The caster of Soul Mate must have a passive ability called Life Leech, which will heal them every time they deal damage. So there’s another ingredient: the undead party member uses Shackles of Pain to deal all the damage they take to an enemy. According to Ashandis, the loop doesn’t prev

If you’ve found the current state of Hearthstone to be a little stale, you should consider trying Shadowverse. Shadowverse’s sixth card set, called Starforged Legends, is on the way, and we’ve been given an exclusive look at three of the new ones right here. And finally, Star Priestess, a 2/3 unevolved, 4/5 evolved Havencraft card that destroys and allied follower or Countdown amulet and then returns it to play. Of course, your mileage may vary: Feel free to let us know which of these cards (if

We’ve mostly been following the progress of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in Wii U emulator Cemu for the tantalizing prospect of playing it in high resoultion on our PCs. But clearly we’ve been missing out on the real point of Breath of the Wild being playable on PC, and that’s modding. CJ looks surprisingly at home in cel-shaded Hyrule, outfitted with a sword, bow, and hanglider. Seeing CJ in Zelda got me digging through the rest of the Breath of the Wild mod scene, and it just kept g

To get around that, Ubi implemented “multi-stage recoil” that lets it define unlimited recoil data sets at any point during full-auto firing. One of the more thoughtful posts, from a redditor named Icemasta, states that while the original randomized recoil “might give some ‘bullshit’ moments, fixed recoil patterns are even more bullshit.” This is actually a big issue in CS:GO, even at long range people will spray down because the recoil patterns are known and easy to use,” they explained. “Hell,

My first few hours with SteamWorld Dig 2 have proven that. You play as Dorothy, a twin-tailed robot miner on a mission to find Rusty, the protagonist of the first SteamWorld Dig. It’s Metroidvania at heart, but SteamWorld Dig 2 is as much about carving your own path as it is navigating an item-gated platforming adventure. That being said, the thing that really set the hook for me was SteamWorld Dig 2’s abundant upgrades and collectibles. SteamWorld Dig 2 is gorgeous and tightly designed, and I’m

The first big patch for Divinity: Original Sin 2 released earlier today, promising reams of fixes and changes. And with all of Original Sin 2’s complexity and weirdness, this first patch has some amazing entries, some of which I think are worthy of our strangest patch notes list. The rest of the world seems to agree, too: As of a few days ago, Original Sin 2 had already sold nearly 500,000 copies . “Lots of players means lots of support issues coming in and we’re trying to service them as fast a

The Humble Store End of Summer Sale itself came to an end today, which means it’s time for the Humble Store End of Summer Sale Encore! You should know by now how it works, but in case you’ve missed the previous sale freebie posts, it goes like this: Hit the Outlast Deluxe Edition page on the Humble Store. You’ll be links to separate codes for the game and the DLC, which have to be redeemed by October 7. The Humble Store Outlast freebie will be available until 10 am PT on September 23. The End of

Health regen on all roles is about letting teams without a Battle Medic have a chance, who previously had too much of an impact on the outcome of a match. Health regen on all roles actually keep players in combat LONGER, which we’ve seen has been a positive change during internal testing. It increases players amount of action and fun rather than having them retreat to a health station. It’s a major switch, especially for a game that’s not much more than a month old, but also one that’s probably

We often see Logitech’s G602 wireless mouse on sale, though usually it dips to $40. This is a decent mouse that at one point was our pick for the best wireless gaming mouse. It also has 11 programmable buttons and a wireless range of up to 3 meters (9.8 feet). Logitech also claims battery life of up to 250 hours in performance mode, or 1,440 hours in endurance mode. You can grab the Logitech G602 here.

Call of Duty: WWII is set for an open beta for all PC gamers starting September 29 and running through October 3. In the meantime, Nvidia has made available a new Game Ready driver (385.69) that includes optimizations for the upcoming beta, along with a handful of other games. For VR gaming, the driver release is optimized for Eve: Valkyrie-Warzone and From Other Suns, the latter of which is also in open beta. According to the release notes (PDF), the new driver release eliminates “sever flicker

One perk to installing Nvidia’s GeForce Experience utility is that you can sometimes score free games. Such is the case now—Nvidia has partnered with Warner Bros. to give away 50,000 Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor game codes (Steam) to randomly selected GFE users. The codes are for the Game of the Year edition that includes a bunch of DLC. The game currently costs $20 on Steam, so in effect Nvidia is giving away [pinky to lips] One. Nvidia periodically offers beta codes and other goodies (like i

If you are using f.lux—and you should be—there is an update available that makes an already great program even better. The developers focused on improving performance with games while adding a whole bunch of new features. F.lux is on our list of recommended programs to install right away when building or buying a new PC. In any event, we really like f.lux, and version 4 is a pretty big upgrade. In addition, you can now configure f.lux to turn itself off automatically for certain apps, as well as

Pixmax is betting on the latter, and you can too, if you’re interested in what the company is pitching—the world’s first 8K resolution VR headset. It took all of just a few hours for Pixmax and its highly hyped VR headset to blow past its $200,000 funding goal on Kickstarter. The 8K headset uses the company’s Brainwarp technology, which doubles rendering performance by skipping every second frame on alternating eyes. Anyone who already owns Vive’s base stations and controllers can buy the 8K hea

It seems increasingly likely that a GeForce GTX 1070 Ti is in the works. “Ti will get you too…eventually,” Gigabyte stated on its Facebook page, with a #comingsoon hashtag. Rumors of a GeForce GTX 1070 Ti gained steam last week when a user on a Chinese web forum posted a blurry image of his system specs, which listed an Asus GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Strix. At the time, TechPowerUp reported hearing from “well-placed sources” that Nvidia is indeed working on a 1070 Ti variant, and that it will be pos

The Evil Within 2 is the sequel to a throwback survival horror game, which means it’s a refined take on a old genre. It feels like a game made for people that miss foggy towns and writhing heaps of low-poly limbs. I miss those things too, but in trying to make something so familiar, jump scares aside, my time with The Evil Within 2 was without surprise. My experience was all quite tense and surreal, but in the same ways all the games The Evil Within 2 draws from—Resident Evil and Silent Hill—hav

Blizzard has issued a warning to the Overwatch community that beginning next week, players who have accumulated three or more seasonal bans will face a possible permanent ban from Competitive play. And permanent means permanent: “Neither seasonal bans nor permanent Competitive Play bans will decay or reset over time,” community manager Josh Engen wrote. “Seasonal bans do not need to be consecutive to qualify for a permanent Competitive Play ban. As these violations accumulate, access to Competit

Two new items have appeared in Fallout 4’s Creation Club store, both related to another Bethesda release: Doom. For 400 credits each, you can buy Doom’s BFG and Marine armor and bring a little Hell to the Commonwealth. Having already spent $15 in the Creation Club, I wasn’t super-keen to drop more dough, but I figured the BFG deserved a try. You can probably guess my feelings about that pricing structure. Here’s how it looks on the store page:Anyway, yeah, the BFG is pretty cool looking and fun

This week, Bundle Stars kicked off its seven-day Epic Gaming Loot Giveaway and we’ve partnered with the digital distributor in giving away a host of big PC gaming-related prizes over the coming days. Now, Day 3’s prize has been unveiled. The grand prize winner will receive an HTC Vive, one of these Razer bundles, and a GeForce GTX 1070. Our lucky grand prize winner will receive one of these high performance graphics cards, worth $399, courtesy of the folks at Bundle Stars and NVIDIA. Get your da

Last year, the Golden Joystick Awards opened its doors to the public for first time in its three decade-spanning history. This year the same applies—and voting is now open ahead this year’s ceremony. Hosted by actor and comedian Danny Wallace—who has of course voiced several videogame characters over the years—the 35th Golden Joystick Awards takes place in London on November 17. Voting is open now through November 3. Vote now in the 35th Golden Joystick Awards.