When EA Sports released the free World Cup update for FIFA 18, some players thought it played differently compared to the main game. Actually, it was more than some - there were loads of players who thought it played differently.
These players, who suspected EA Sports had tinkered with the gameplay of FIFA 18 for the World Cup update on the quiet, , with . I've also seen plenty of people say the World Cup mode plays more "arcadey" than the main FIFA 18 game, with overpowered shooting from distance. I've also seen people say , and even spotted the suggestion .
The truth is, the gameplay in the World Cup update is exactly the same as the gameplay in the main FIFA 18 game, Andrei Lazarescu, producer of the Switch version of FIFA and the World Cup update confirmed to me at E3. So, why do players think there's a difference?

It's likely to go down in history as one of the greatest E3 demos, its iconic status only embellished by the fact that outside of behind-closed-doors visitors, nobody has actually seen it. But the trailer footage looks sensational and are stoking plenty of excitement. And now, we have confirmation of the PC hardware that was actually running it.
CD Projekt RED's junior community specialist Alicja Kozera posted on the game's Discord channel that Intel's Core i7 8700K was the CPU of choice for the demo, while Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti provided the all-important graphics component. Digital Foundry's John Linneman witnessed the demo first-hand during E3 and noted that the game - which was fully playable and running entirely in real-time - was operating at a capped 30 frames per second on a large 4K screen, though it was unclear whether the in-development code itself was rendering at native ultra HD. John reports that performance was smooth by and large, but there were some occasional performance drops.
It's worth pointing out that CDPR brought along a development build of the game, rather than a vertical slice that would have been optimised specifically for demo purposes. In effect, what lucky attendees saw was a game clearly in a very early stage of development but still running rather well overall. Here's the full demo PC spec, as revealed by CDPR. The extent to which the current demo requires such a large amount of memory and state-of-the-art storage remains to be seen.

After IO Interactive's announcement of a new instalment of murder-sandbox-playground series Hitman due later this year, it seems apt for Humble to gather up every game in the series and have a .
The aforementioned bonanza features the entire Hitman franchise on PC with discounts of up to 75 per cent, which is a bit nice.
Perhaps most notably, you can pick up the Hitman Game of the Year Edition - which features all episodes of the most recent Hitman title as well as all DLC - for £23.84 / $31.79. That'll give you plenty of murder adventures to go on while you wait for the game's sequel, though if you wanted to revisit some of 47's previous escapades, you can also .

Yesterday evening I shot a railgun bolt through three players at once in Quake Champions instagib and I can't begin to tell you how satisfying it was - especially when Quake's iconic announcer said how impressive I was for doing it.
Through Quake Champions, you see, the frenetic multiplayer delights of Quake have gloriously returned, albeit slightly buried in cosmetic loot boxes and character hero powers, which maybe will make more sense to me over time.
Anyway. I've been playing Quake Champions during the free access period over E3, and I've been having a lot of fun. It's with a happy heart, then, I tell you the free access period has been extended! It'll now run until 25th June.

Nearly 10 years after Microsoft introduced avatars to Xbox Live on the 360, the company has pushed a big update to the virtual gamer creation system that makes it more diverse than ever.
Today, Alpha ring Xbox Insiders can fiddle about with the new and improved avatars with the beta Xbox Avatar Editor app - this should be live by 8pm UK time.
There's a wide range of body types and gender-neutral clothing available. New categories of appearance items and accessories include fingernails, makeup, limbs, nose rings and moods.

Epic will remove an accidental swastika from Fortnite.
Redditor EuBestCityEu posted an image showing the accidental swastika on , which sparked a swift response from an Epic developer.
It's achieved by placing four metal floors next to each other and editing them into a circle. As EuBestCityEu explained: "We were making a dance floor in Tilted when one of my teammates noticed this."

Fallout 76 will get a beta - and it begins first on Xbox One.
In a recently updated , Bethesda said the beta for Xbox One will begin first, followed by other platforms (PlayStation 4 and PC via Bethesda.net).
Bethesda has yet to say when the Fallout 76 beta will kick off, but we do know you have to pre-order the game to get in. Bethesda said that's the only way to get access to the beta.

Time limits are a much maligned bit of game design. A single level with a race against time is fine, Halo's final warthog run or Call of Duty Modern Warfare's desperate fight through a nuclear silo. But turn that into a whole game? People still argue over The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and Dead Rising. The creeping pressure is quite the stress, and finding a balance that still pays off people's potentially lengthy investment should they fail to meet certain actions in time is evidently not easy. Minit's solution is right there in the name and it's magic.
Minit has a time limit, at the end of which you will die and lose your progress through the game's world. Some things are kept but you'll be starting from the last bed you slept in. What makes it work? You're only sent back a mere minute in time. That sharp focus and tiny scale turns the time limit from just an obstacle and into a way to actively encourage the player. 60 seconds isn't much to lose and so instead of a frustration, it's a prompt to do things better, quicker and smarter next time. It pushes you to really engage with the world because, when every second counts, you've got to find every shortcut, every exploit and get very good at taking out or avoiding enemies. That self-imposed limit means the designers have to fill every space, every single screen with things to do as players will return again and again. Density over vastness.
This mechanic highlights so many of the problems in other game worlds, especially open worlds. Some games are so big, and yet we engage with such a small percentage of their space in a meaningful way. When time isn't an obstacle, why not have miles and miles of samey fields? "More is better" is such a common characteristic of big budget titles and the result is big spaces, filled with repetitive content and scarcely anything memorable. Our interactions with so many gaming worlds is passive. Even when they're pretty enough to make us stop and snap a screenshot we're still not learning them or unravelling them. They just want to get us to the next item on a checklist.

It's the weekend, which of course means many things - a chance to bask in the sun and/or mourn the loss of it, a little bit of extra time to catch up on games, books or that Westworld finale and, most importantly, a brand new roundup of the very best deals from the week. That last one is the very article you're reading, so let's cut to the chase and check out some of the fun things you can treat yourself to this week.
As a heads up, don't forget that is creeping ever closer and we've got our own guide to finding the best deals and generally surviving the faux-holiday itself, which we'll be keeping updated all the way through.
As usual, we've got deals that'll work in the UK, deals that'll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let's get started.

There's something magical about video games set in the real world. At the intersection of the fantastical and the mundane you get to become the hero of our very own world while taking in some of the most beautiful vistas our planet has to offer, all from the comfort of your couch.
For a long time, I had no particular feeling on the topic, since I had as much of a connection to contemporary Hong Kong or Seattle as I had to Skyrim and Mordor.
That changed on an overcast day in March 2012, when I was living my best life as an exchange student in Japan. I had flown to Okinawa with two friends to escape the surprisingly persistent, wet cold of early March, and on our first day, while we were idly exploring the town of Naha, it began to rain and we ducked into a roofed shopping district.

At some point in 2007, I become hopelessly addicted to World of Warcraft.
I was 24 years old, finishing art school, severely depressed and dealing with the fact that my life was just not going the way I expected. Somewhere around that time, during a drunken few hours in a restaurant in downtown Jerusalem, a friend and I created JarWow - a mod of World of Warcraft that translates the mechanics, races and areas of the game to early 21st century Jerusalem. Jerusalem seemed like a perfect stage for a complex MMO, with two culturally different factions in a bitter territory dispute. Conversely, World of Warcraft, which relies on simplification and stereotypes, cannot truly represent the complexity of modern Jerusalem.
I moved to Jerusalem in 1993, when I was nine years old; I left in 2009 when I was 26. The Oslo accords, a set of agreements made by Israel and Palestine which started the peace process, had just been signed in 1993, and while Jerusalem will never be entirely calm, there was a sense of hope in the air and some optimism - even if the question of the unification of the city continued to be a contentious issue. By 2007, the situation was completely different. The second intifada - the second Palestinian uprising against Israel and a period of intense violence - had ended, but its legacy lingered in the empty streets of downtown Jerusalem and the quiet tension between the different groups that share the city. This was a tension not just between the Jewish and Arab population, but also between the more traditional and more liberal forces in the city. While this tension would escalate again in the next few years (with Operation Cast Lead and the situation in Gaza just around the corner), at this point the status quo was maintained and the city was (at least on the surface) calm.

Uniqlo is no stranger to licencing designs from notable video game companies. You may remember, just under a year ago, the company launched its - well, now it's Blizzard's turn for the Uniqlo treatment.
The official Blizzard x Uniqlo collection includes a range of T-shirts featuring designs based on World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone, Diablo, Starcraft and Heroes of the Storm and are available in-store and online .
As this is Uniqlo we're talking about - a company that prides itself on offering quality clothing at abnormally cheap prices - each of these shirts will only cost you £12.90 (shipping is £3.95, for what it's worth). As with most official Uniqlo crossover collections, the stock is limited and only available for a certain time, so if you happen to be a particularly Blizzard-tinged fanatic, you may want to get one of these sooner rather than later.

A "gaming disorder" could become a proper medical condition should a draft of the updated International Classification of Diseases manual be approved unamended roughly a year from now.
A proposed definition of "gaming disorder" appeared in - the 11th revision of which is in development and has been for a few years - published this morning.
The 10th revision of the ICD, implemented by many countries in their national health policies, is 26 years old, having been approved in 1992. We first heard word of its inclusion .

Summer landscapes can be taken for granted as bright and breezy backdrops to games. However, what spring started, summer finishes. Following on from , summer further fuels and invigorates the landscape. Lands become majestically colourful, gorgeously lush and bursting at the seams with life as the peak of the growing season and life cycle are hit. Bright sunlight basks the land in glorious light and stretches the days, while vivid foliage spreads as far as the eye can see, punctuated by glorious flowering plants, laying a carpet of life over the land. These are the hazy days of summer, indeed. Life breeds life and swathes of landscape are transformed, covered in lush foliage and colour, while the land becomes more productive, increasing interaction and function.
Summer has its own meaning, and this can be injected into games through the landscapes they have and portray - and all of their elements they contain. Smash this wonderful, bright season together with narrative and story arcs and there is a new side to summer environments to be enjoyed and experienced.
The success and majesty of The Witcher 3's landscapes are further elevated when examined through a seasonal lens as it can reveal even more environmental nuances and specific landscape features. The configuration of summer landscapes through fidelity, function and beauty underlines the environment's importance in contributing to The Witcher 3's place-making, story and atmosphere (particularly in Velen and Toussaint), but also demonstrate the sheer importance and power summer has over the landscape, guiding its life and character. Avoiding fawning over each individually hand-placed, wholly-accurate plant (this time) as examples of The Witcher 3's summer landscape, it is the active and productive horticultural landscapes that show summer's power.

A beta version of Beyond Good & Evil 2 is due for release towards the end of 2019, creator Michel Ancel has said.
Ubisoft Montpellier's ambitious, currently-half-built open world multiplayer space opera thing got another showing at E3 this year - where we were treated to around 30 minutes of gameplay behind closed doors.
We'll have more on what we saw shortly, but as impressive as BG&E2's tech currently is - and as lovely as that CGI trailer reintroducing BG&E1's Pey'J and Jade was - it was clear the game still had a long way to go.

The Dead or Alive series is infamous for the sexualisation of its female characters. That, and its breast physics.
Dead or Alive 6, announced during E3, marks a shift in the fighting game series' approach, with toned down female sexualisation and, Japanese developer Koei Tecmo said, more natural breast movement.
The concept of the game is "intense fighting entertainment", producer and game director Yohei Shimbori told Eurogamer. It's a more realistic look inspired by mixed martial arts.

With cross-platform play after it emerged you can't use your Epic account on the Nintendo Switch version of Fortnite if you've used it on the PlayStation 4 version, many within the FIFA community have also wondered whether the feature might come to the world's biggest sports video game.
Currently, FIFA has no cross-platform play at all. Unlike, say, Rocket League, which lets PC players match with other players across PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch (the PS4 can't be matched up with Xbox One nor Switch), FIFA does not let players on different platforms play together.
FIFA does not let you use one account across multiple platforms, either (FIFA players have long called for the ability to use the same account for a persistent FIFA Ultimate Team experience across console and PC). And the online FUT marketplace is platform specific, too, which limits market activity.

is a tricky game, sure, but it is mostly just incredibly oppressive. It is too close to your face, somehow. Its breath smells wrong, and you can smell its breath because it is too close to your face. Its worlds are drawn in an unloveable internal-organ palette of reds and purples, so cone fatigue plays a certain role in its queasy success. You finish a game and feel like you've emerged from something, like you've been swallowed and have spent an age fighting your way out. How long was I in there? Oh. Five minutes. But what minutes they were.
My mum has a word for things like OVERWHELM. The word is "horrid". Horrid is one of the lonely Everests of her vocabulary, the word that stands at the uppermost peak of how a given thing might be. If something isn't nasty, if it isn't even wretched or ghastly, mum will say it's horrid and you know - jeepers! - that whatever she's talking about wasn't screwing around.
Horrid, by its sheer power, is almost a compliment in a way. Well done at being so committed to unpleasantness. And so it is with OVERWHELM. OVERWHELM is a pixelly action blaster side-scroller thing in which you drop down into a Hive - listen up, Anthem, this is the effect of the right fictional word in the right fictional place - to reclaim a series of crystals. The crystals are, of course, blood red, and they are, of course, guarded by bosses. You can see their location on the map, but to see the map itself you have to fill it in through exploration.

FIFA 19 will include pack odds disclosures, EA has confirmed to Eurogamer.
Speaking to our reporter Robert Purchese at the Gamelab conference in Spain, EA Sports vice president and COO Daryl Holt said FIFA Ultimate Team Packs will show odds from FIFA 19 on.
Here's what Holt told us:

It's launch morning for The Crew 2, and I've logged in to do a final network test. The always-online racing game's predecessor on release, so I want to see if the new game is holding up. It's been stable playing with early access players this week, but would the influx of new people cause problems? So far, all is well (unless you're .) Players are popping up nearby, rather than halfway across the map as they have done during the sparsely populated early access period. They crawl their Lamborghinis up to my stationary 1993 Porsche and rev in wordless invitation to a drag race. They don't need to ask twice and we roar off up the Pacific coast road out of Malibu.
It's a fun moment, but then we just peel off and go our separate ways, because there is hardly anything for us to do together in this game.
The Crew was a scrappy but ultimately lovable open-world racing game with unrealised massively multiplayer aspirations. It was made by Lyon studio Ivory Tower, itself formed by veterans of Eden Studios, makers of the Test Drive Unlimited games, which were scrappy but ultimately lovable open-world racing games with unrealised massively multiplayer aspirations. Things have changed, a little: The Crew 2 doesn't feel so scrappy. It is almost polished (though my PS4 version crashed three times during review). But those aspirations are still unrealised, and the game is underdeveloped in other areas than its network code and bug fixes. There's a sense that it will be much better in six months to a year's time than it is at launch - just like The Crew was. Plus ça change.