About a week after , Discord has announced - launched, even - changes to be more like Steam. The changes roll out now, apparently, and introduce game launching, news feeds and friend activity so, as on Steam, you can see what your nice mates are up to. Are they playing PUBG like they said they would or are they secretly playing Fortnite instead? It is this year's biggest gaming dilemma, said no one ever. Discord provided a screenshot of the new Games tab, where you can see featured news items at the top (I'm not sure where they're sourced from), a Quick Launcher bar underneath, and Now Playing and Listening Together areas below. It looks rather nice.
The Fortnite endgame has become a tad one-note. Anyone who's into the world's most popular game will know that late game strategy - most of the time - boils down to a building face-off with shotguns and rocket launchers. Well, it sounds like developer Epic knows this, too - and wants Fortnite's endgame to be about more. In titled Counterplay and Play Styles, Epic said it plans to make changes to the battle royale game to give players multiple ways to counter each other in combat and create more strategies to win the game.
Life is Strange 2's free prequel chapter, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, will be available to download next Monday, 25th June at 5pm UK time. So that's 6pm in Western Europe, or 9am Pacific and midday Eastern if you're in North America. Overall, it's a day earlier than planned - and the exact same timing for all platforms: PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Minecraft's Better Together version finally launches today for Nintendo Switch, and a new trailer has dropped to play up its cross-platform capabilities. Xbox One and Nintendo Switch owners can now play Minecraft as if they were on the same platform but notably - as the trailer hammers home - it is just Nintendo and Xbox on board. Not Sony. Minecraft's Better Together Update (which is in fact an entirely new game, although free to existing owners) is also compatible with Minecraft on Windows 10, iPhone, iPad and Android devices.
Arc System Works' superb fighting game Dragon Ball FighterZ comes out on Nintendo Switch on 28th September. All the already-released DLC characters will be available to buy day one, publisher Bandai Namco said. If you pre-order you get immediate access to Goku and Vegeta SSGSS, and you get the Japanese version of obscure SNES game Dragon Ball Z: Super Butoden, which was released in Japan, France and Spain in 1993. It looks like this: And here's an image showing how it looks on Switch:
Pining for a new Burnout? EA doesn't seem interested in having Criterion make a new one just yet. But we may soon get a couple of spiritual successors from the founders of the famed UK studio. Three Fields Entertainment, which is led by Criterion founders Fiona Sperry and Alex Ward, has announced Danger Zone 2 (the sequel to the studio's 2017 game ) and Dangerous Driving, both for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Danger Zone 2, due out in July, takes the crash testing of Danger Zone and puts onto real public roads. It's set on the freeways of the USA, the motorways of the UK and the autovias of Spain. There are 26 single-player levels set across 17 locations.
Warhammer: Vermintide 2 will launch for Xbox One on 11th July, developer Fatshark has announced, with an Xbox Insider open beta available from today. Vermintide 2 will also be an Xbox Game Pass game, so if you pay the £8 monthly sub, or regional equivalent, you'll be able to play the game from 11th July for free. But what about PlayStation 4? "Yes, the PS4 version is coming," a Fatshark spokesperson told me this morning. "We don't have a date for it yet, but will communicate that soon. We don't expect it to be too far away, but we want to do one system at a time to be able to maintain the highest quality of the releases."
Video games aren't that good at friends. Oh sure, they can be great for making them. Various multiplayer games have facilitated very real and valid friendships, but the games themselves scarcely contain an ounce of the same stuff in their characters. Bonds of friendship in-game are generally left to barks and grunts of command. Vermintide 2, despite taking place in the grimmest, darkest fantasy land there is, somehow manages the impossible and gives us a party of unlikely heroes whose bond feels terribly sincere. Vermintide 2 does a great job of forcing players to work together no matter which hero you choose to play as. No weapon or class reigns supreme and only a combination will see you survive the hordes of rat-men. This isn't the first co-op game to, well, encourage cooperation. What makes it special though, what makes it so memorable and pleasant on every visit is the banter between characters. In the fiction of Warhammer pretty much all these characters should be at odds with each other, forced only by circumstance to work together. The first game saw them working out the kinks in their relationship, but this sequel shows them having bonded, veterans of the perpetual apocalypse. Snarky remarks and in-jokes linger, they rib each other plenty as all good friends do. Equally though, they constantly throw compliments to each other. Hearing "Look at the elf go!" from the party's witch as you tear into a horde of baddies is the sincere encouragement that puts a little smile on your face.
The Elder Scrolls 6 location possibilities are... pretty vast. Or at least they are on first inspection of that super brief E3 2018 teaser trailer we saw - but we actually think it might be possible to narrow them down. Below, we're going to run through a series of potential locations and settings for the Elder Scrolls 6. We'll rule some out - at least in principle - and highlight some others that we think are particularly likely, and then finally, further below, we'll go through a quick rundown of everything else we know about The Elder Scrolls 6 - like its platforms and potential release date - so you've got all the information in one place. Do bear in mind though that, really, this is a bit of fun - even if we do start to get quite into it as we go...
- both a beautiful game and beautiful collaboration with Native Alaskans to show a culture we otherwise wouldn't see. It touched hearts, it won awards, and now creator E-Line Media is back with something new. This something grew from from a creative discussion with the BBC during the making of nature documentary Blue Planet 2, which is brilliant go watch it. This turned into a collaboration and the something became Beyond Blue. Beyond Blue is a near-future ocean exploration game where you lead a team of scientists, equipped with tech we haven't quite reached in the real-world, in making groundbreaking discoveries about the deep waters of our world. There'll be a story as well as a strategic element as you juggle resources and pick missions based on your priorities.
Layers of Fear was a turning point for Polish studio Bloober. Before it, Bloober had a reputation for poor games, but Layers began something new. It began a specialisation in a kind of insidious horror game - a horror which doesn't rely on jump scares (although it does use some) but which is strange, eerie and unsettling. In Layers you are a painter in a mansion, but all is not what it seems. , which counts for so much. And today, for a limited time, , so I suggest you get it.
It is, if nothing else, quite the double act. There's Id's Tim Willits, diminutive in stature yet towering in presence, and a man that, if you'd let him, would surely happily never stop talking. He's pacing to and fro around a meeting room on the upper floors of Avalanche's main studio, asking everyone assembled if they've got any good jokes about Stockholm, putting on a short one-man show before rattling his way through a presentation on Rage 2, the game his own studio Id is assisting Avalanche with. And then there's Avalanche's Magnus Nedfors - a towering man whose height is topped off by long, greying locks, yet his laconic, laid back demeanour can make it seem like he isn't there at all. They're an odd couple, this two, but in the partnership they've forged there may well be something approaching magic.
Myst, one of the most internationally renowned and often baffling adventure games of all time, is getting itself a 25th Anniversary edition, thanks to a earlier this year. They asked for $247,500 and got $2,810,127 from backers, so it seems safe to say that people still really like Myst. Ahead of the release of the fancy 25th Anniversary Edition of Myst, GOG's not only offering up a but also recently became the only place online where you can pick up copies of and digitally. In order to celebrate all these lovely things happening all at once, the folks at GOG and Cyan Worlds have gotten together with Jelly Deals to offer up yet another giveaway for you lovely people.
The next big single-player game from Skyrim and Fallout maker Bethesda Game Studios will be Starfield, the company's first new IP in a staggering 25 years. Bethesda's charismatic director and executive producer . "We also thought since we're all here together tonight and it's so special maybe we'd do something a little different too," he said on stage, "and tell you what we have coming beyond this year, in the future. We have also been working on a brand new, next-generation, single-player game, but this one is in an all-new epic franchise. Our first wholly original franchise in 25 years. We're excited to announce our next adventure." We were then shown a Starfield teaser trailer where sunlight slowly appeared from behind a planet in space, producing the bright ring effect you see during a solar eclipse, before the camera panned down to reveal a satellite, and then warped our view to blackout. Then the Starfield logo appeared.
Call of Duty: WW2 gets its - and alongside it players on all platforms get a major update that adds a cool new division. The Cavalry is an objective-focused class described as "the true team-play division". Cavalry soldiers use the Cavalry Shield, which you can use to protect yourself against enemy fire. Cavalry soldiers also have improved objective capabilities, including capturing Domination flags faster, planting bombs in Search & Destroy quicker and swiftly building and destroying walls in War mode. Additionally, the Cavalry gets more score from objectives, and every two assists equal a kill. And the Cavalry can get back to the objective quicker - ramming enemies along the way - by entering Shield Charge while sprinting.
Right now, you can get an extra 10 per cent off a variety of stuff at two entirely separate retailers in what appears to be weirdly coincidental special offer timing. Head to and use the code PICK10 to get 10 per cent off your purchase, or try to do the same there. Looking at Argos' offerings first, you can get yourself a , (or the ), an , , and more. Of course, Argos sells things other than games, so you could also get everything from an to .
Rockstar will once again expand the world of Grand Theft Auto Online next month with the launch of another new update - Los Santos: Nightclubs. Due at some point in July, the free expansion will let you open and manage your own nightclub, customise its setup, look, staff and promotion, and fill it with real-life music acts Solomun, Tale Of Us, Dixon and The Black Madonna. Here's a teaser:
Warning: this article assumes you have finished Rime. If you haven't, you should! It's only at the end you understand something very important about the game, which makes it very special - Rime is much more than the serene Mediterranean adventure it seems. If that sounds like a spoiler to you, look away, but please come back again when you're ready for more.
On a porch warmed by the Mediterranean sun, Raúl Rubio Munárriz, creative director of Rime, tells me the moment which changed his life forever. "It's pretty stupid," he says. "One day I nearly drowned." He was dating a girl who wanted to swim off the coast of Spain and, eager to impress her, he agreed. And so they started swimming, and swimming and swimming, into the sea. Soon they were one kilometre out, but Rubio was out of his depth. "We are very far," he called above the water, his body getting tired. "We should go back." But the girl was unfazed. "Oh come on," she answered. "Let's reach that buoy and then go back."
Minecraft maker Mojang has re-released its online collectible card game Scrolls for PC under a new name: Caller's Bane. It's also now completely free to download. The game was previously mothballed by Mojang - development ceased back in 2015 - so it's a surprise to see it return today. Scrolls' name change is less of a surprise - back in the day, Mojang and The Elder Scrolls publisher Bethesda came to legal blows over Scrolls' title. Ultimately, the pair decided Mojang's Scrolls could exist as long as it did not compete with The Elder Scrolls, and that neither company would squabble over the trademark.