Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s battle royale mode, called Blackout, will be free to play all month long. The promotion starts April 2 and runs through April 30, giving players everywhere access to the mode on PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One. Blackout launched shortly after the release of Black Ops 4, coming out in October of last year. Blackout eschews the survival game roots of the battle royale genre, replacing them instead with a fast-paced and approachable take on the formula. The promo

While Nintendo’s E3 2019 plans are still under wraps, the game maker is officially bringing two of its big competitions — the team-based Super Smash Bros. Ultimate World Championship 2019 3v3 and the Splatoon 2 World Championship 2019 tournaments — back to Los Angeles this June. Over the weekend, at PAX East, Nintendo crowned the winners of the Splatoon 2 North America Inkling Open 2019 and the Super Smash Bros. Nintendo’s decision to allow semi-random gameplay elements in its official Super Sma

But the moderators over at r/Games, a subreddit with over 1.7 million subscribers, decided to take a different approach this year. According to the people who oversee the community, it’s time to talk about a pervasive problem poisoning discussion on the internet at large: comments. Either people don’t want to talk about real-world issues in video games, or they can’t discuss it civilly without concerns about doxxing, swatting, and harassment campaigns. Video games have felt like an angry, intole

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a punishing game, though that’s something you’d expect from the developer of the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne. That’s something that wasn’t possible in most of the previous games — Dark Souls 2 used to allow animation canceling, but it was mostly patched out — and it makes a world of difference. This is how it works: If you begin an attack in Dark Souls 3, and you miss, you have to wait until the entirety of the animation plays out before you can dodge or block t

Star Citizen’s next update, alpha 3.5, will deliver the game’s newest world — ArcCorp, a sprawling, overbuilt planet that makes Coruscant look like a model of urban planning. Female avatars may be chosen for player characters for the first time, among several other choices in an overhauled character creation suite. There’s also a new flight control system and, of course, six vessels on sale from $65 to $95. “The advantage of this approach,” Roberts added, “is you always get realistic looking pla

There isn’t much to go on (that’s kind of the nature of a teaser site) but Valve has tossed up an official first look at its VR device and, more importantly, named it: The Valve Index. This is a stand-alone product (Valve had collaborated with HTC on the Vive). Valve said in February 2017 that it was working on three full-size virtual reality games — which he characterized as longer and more in-depth than previous demo-like games. But then, the following May, writer and VR evangelist Chet Falisz

One of its most interesting projects is The Wanderer: Frankenstein’s Creature from Parisian developer La Belle Games. The young Dr. Frankenstein shows the creature the world. Larouzée said the company is looking to offer support to games that have “meaningful content,” and that speak to European culture. The Wanderer is certainly an artistic project, but it also represents an ideal of European integrity. The Wanderer: Frankenstein’s Creature is due out later this year on Nintendo Switch, Windows

Sega will bring back the Sakura Wars series next year with a PlayStation 4 launch that is bound for the West, too. “Project Sakura Wars” (a working title) will be just the second game in the franchise launched in this region, and the first one overall since 2005. It follows Sakura Wars: So Long My Love, which launched in 2005 on PlayStation 2. The newest game will be set in “a romanticized version of 1940s Imperial Tokyo,” 10 years after the events of the last game. The Sakura Wars franchise is

It’s not like everyone couldn’t see this coming, but Driveclub is officially being towed to the great public radio charitable write-off in the sky. The servers for Driveclub, Driveclub VR and Driveclub Bikes all go dark on March 31, 2020. Before then, Aug. 31, 2019, the games and all of their DLC will be delisted from the PlayStation Network Store. Driveclub launched in 2014 but, like many online-dependent games, buckled under the load from a large community at launch. Sony promised a PlayStatio

The Sega Genesis Mini, the latest in the line of throwback, shrunk-down consoles from the 1980s and 1990s, will release Sept. 19, 2019, Sega said from Tokyo today. The unit will include 40 games, including staple titles such as Altered Beast, Castlevania: Bloodlines and, of course, Sonic the Hedgehog. When the Sega Genesis Mini was first announced a year ago, AtGames was developing the unit. It was behind the disappointing Sega Genesis Flashback console that launched in 2017, panned mainly as a

Hearthstone’s new expansion, Rise of Shadows, is centered around a world where a team of villains from previous Hearthstone adventures team up with the goal of taking down the magical city of Dalaran and everyone in it. Those villains have an army of minions at hand, among which is the neutral epic card Batterhead. He has rush, meaning he can attack minions the turn he is placed on the board, and after Batterhead attacks and kills a minion, he may attack again. These iterations led to the final

Valve’s digital card game based on Dota 2, Artifact, has not turned out how the company hoped. Despite praise for its depth and complexity, the game’s November launch drew harsh reaction from players, primarily for its pricing structure and game economy. Since then, the game’s player base has bottomed out, plummeting from a peak of some 60,000 concurrent players to a few hundred per day. Recent Steam reviews of Artifact have been overwhelmingly negative, accusing Valve of abandoning the game and

Journey to the Savage Planet invites comparisons with No Man’s Sky, mainly because of its gaudy, alien palette. Savage Planet is an entirely different beast. It’s set on a single planet, every inch of which has been carefully designed by developer Typhoon Studios. Apart from exploration and experimentation, I also need to solve puzzles, jump across platforms and negotiate tricky encounters with increasingly hostile aliens. Montreal-based Typhoon Studios is headed up by Alex Hutchinson, who is be

At a recent, highly enjoyable Game Developers Conference session, veteran EverQuest team members gathered to reminisce about the game. One story: At launch, EverQuest publisher Sony Online Entertainment spent $250,000 on servers, now long since surpassed by new kit. As games like World of Warcraft, League of Legends and Fortnite have transformed online play, so have consumer expectations. Today’s game is published by Daybreak Games, a renamed remnant of original publisher Sony Online Entertainme

Sony Corporation chairman Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai, the former head of the company’s PlayStation business, is retiring. Hirai will step down as chairman on June 18, bringing his 35-year career at Sony to a close. In a statement, Sony said Hirai will “continue to provide counsel as requested by Sony’s management team, acting as Senior Advisor for the Company.”Hirai was named chairman in 2018, after stepping down as president and CEO of Sony in April. “I am confident that everyone at Sony is fully aligne

Dragons were never really supposed to be a part of the second age of Tamriel, the time in which The Elder Scrolls Online takes place. But ESO is nothing if not fluid in its lore, and so, here we are, with dragons. According to the updated lore, they’ve been in the land of Elsweyr the whole time, confined, in a zoo of sorts. But with dragons on the loose, I’m obliged to get to work, uncovering secrets, recruiting friends, slaying enemies, and all that fantasy narrative stuff. Elsweyr also comes w

Blizzard Entertainment’s classic real-time strategy games Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft 2 Battle.net Edition are now available for purchase through GOG.com. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, originally released in 1994, has been “fully optimized to run out-of-the-box on today’s operating systems,” according to an announcement from GOG.com. The GOG.com version costs $5.99 and is available for Mac and Windows PC. The GOG.com version, Warcraft 2 Battle.net Edition, includes the original Tides of Dark

Occasional references to the game’s creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, have been removed from the splash screen on PC. A tweet from 4J Studios, which handles the console versions of Minecraft, also mentions upcoming changes to these “splash texts,” as they’re known internally. When players start up a game of Minecraft, they’re greeted with a traditional splash screen and a starting menu. In the upper right corner, overlaid on top of the Minecraft logo, there’s a bit of yellow text called splash te

For the first time in several months, the building has been completed once again, and this time it’s got a subtle dig at the most infamous type of Fortnite player. In the Fortnite community, certain players are referred to as “sweats” or “sweaty.” These players are kind of like tryhards. There are a million ways to identify a sweaty player in your game, but the fastest shorthand has become the soccer skin. Anyone who wears a soccer skin will be considered a sweaty tryhard, even if that’s not act

The most recent Pokémon Go Community Day staring Treecko just ended, which means the new star of the upcoming day has been announced: Bagon. The rock head Pokémon will be spawning in abundance on Saturday, April 13 from 3 p.m. until 6 p.m. in your local time zone. Just like any other Community Day, lures placed during this time will also last for three hours. Community Days also typically bring about a special move that the featured ‘mon can only learn during this time, though Salamence’s specia