Epic its 2019 Fortnite World Cup competition, which is open to all players and includes a not insignificant $100 million USD prize pool.
Fortnite's 2018-2019 competitive season, , will incorporate community events, online events, and major competitions all over the world. Anyone that wishes to participate is free to do so - but, to earn a spot in the World Cup, players will need to enter official qualifiers, which begin this autumn. The competitive season culminates with the Fortnite World Cup event itself in late 2019.
World Cup play will focus on solos and duos (although there'll apparently be "plenty of opportunities to squad up in competition too"), and Epic stresses that entry is based on merit - it won't be selling teams or franchises, and won't allow third party leagues to do so either.

Fresh off the back of Microsoft's announcement that even more titles are headed to the company's Netflix-like subscription platform, you can now get yourself a six-month membership of Xbox Game Pass for half its regular price, for a limited time.
At E3, Microsoft was proud to showcase some new additions to its Xbox Game Pass service, with promises of Halo: Master Chief Collection and Forza Horizon 4 later in the year and next year's Crackdown 3 available at launch.
The company also proudly announced its FastStart tech, which uses machine learning to get you playing your Game Pass games even quicker, starting with the June Xbox One update. For now, though, you can get yourself a and gain access to hundreds of existing titles including Sea of Thieves, State of Decay 2, Spelunky, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+, Halo 5, Fable 3 and many more.

Our E3 bulletins run every day this week. Previous entries: |
E3 2018 has now officially started. This fact is almost completely lost on those who have been working on it and watching it and creating disparate reams of #content on it, who have been processing announcements and livestreams that began last week. The harsh reality of the 21st century is that E3, like Black Friday and Brexit, can no longer be bound by the rules of time and will continue until morale and revenue improves.
As usual, opening was marked by a Nintendo happening, the scale of which has dwindled in recent years from full-bore conference to pre-prepared video, and this year hit its lowest ebb for a while with a performance that was light on wit, heavy on Smash Brothers, and yet which contained possibly the most significant release of the week in the form of Fortnite, which went live on Switch following the conference.

CD Projekt has finally pulled back the curtain on Cyberpunk 2077, revealing the game to press behind closed doors at E3 this week.
I saw a 50 minute live uncut gameplay demo and was blown away by the level of detail in Night City, the open world in which the game takes place. During the demo, a number of eye-catching features of the game were revealed. Here's everything I discovered during our Cyberpunk 2077 behind closed doors demo:
Cyberpunk is a first-person role-playing game. You play the game from a first-person perspective, shooting weapons in the traditional FPS style, with dialogue choices appearing on screen.

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.

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.

Following thats Monster Hunter World would be making its presence felt in Final Fantasy XIV later this year, Capcom has announced that an iconic Final Fantasy creature will soon be coming to Monster Hunter World.
Specifically, as part of Capcom and Square Enix's crossover collaboration, the formidable Behemoth - which has made an appearance in almost every Final Fantasy game in some form - will be making its way to Monster Hunter World in a free update this summer.
You can see the beast make its impressive entrance to in the trailer below. And if you watch to the end, there's a quick glimpse of a Cactuar - which presumably arrives as a Palico costume.

Rage 2, id's collaboration with Avalanche Software, is going to be a strictly single-player game, with nothing by way of multiplayer diversions.
It marks a slight departure from the 2010 original, which offered co-op and vehicle-based multiplayer, though it's in keeping with Avalanche's previous track record, in which the developer has always wanted to play to its single-player strengths.
"We're just focussed on the best open world single player game that we can make," Rage 2 designer Magnus Nedfors told Eurogamer at a pre-E3 event in Avalanche's Stockholm studio. "I personally really believe you can make single player games really fantastic, so that's what we're focussed on."

Microsoft kicked off its E3 2018 media briefing in epic style, revealing a work-in-progress technology demonstration of its next Master Chief series entry, Halo Infinite, accompanied by giving us a little more background on the ideas behind the game, the aim to recapture the style of the Bungie era for modern hardware, and an admission that almost three years on from the release of Halo 5, Infinite is still very early on in production. Naturally, as the current generation draws to a close, the question must be asked whether this is our first tentative look at a game destined for the next Xbox.
343 Industries' blog doesn't rule this out, but the current generation hardware is explicitly name-checked with mention of 'taking advantage of the full power of the Xbox One family', yet the freshly minted Slipspace Engine is clearly delivering an extreme visual feature set that would certainly sit more easily on whatever hardware Microsoft is cooking up next. A game targeting a cross-gen release, perhaps? The scale and scope of this Infinite teaser combined with 343's current-gen confirmation certainly suggests so, and what's clear is that in this two-minute teaser, the studio bombards us with rendering techniques that offer a vast increase in fidelity over anything seen from the series before.
Going in to E3 2018, we were hoping for - a reveal of epic theatre that would be remembered for years to come. Of course, the problem with that classic E3 2003 demo was that although running in real-time on OG Xbox hardware, Bungie's ideas were too ambitious to roll out into the final game. And for its part, the main concern with the Slipspace engine as revealed on Sunday is the question of whether 343 may be over-promising. Unlike the Bungie demo, there wasn't a real-time component here - this was an engine demo, meaning it could be run on any hardware 343 might have available, and it needn't be operating in real-time either. In short,'in-engine' can cook up extreme visuals impossible on consumer-level hardware for years or even decades to come. However, we suspect that 343 has a point to prove and for its part, the studio tells us that 'the engine demo is a clear indication of the direction we are heading with our next game and a great snapshot of where our tech is right now.'

Staying true to Ubisoft's previous Collector's Edition efforts for its mainline titles, Assassin's Creed Odyssey is available in an alarmingly large array of special editions and big-box versions, all of which are up for pre-order right flipping now. They are available at the and , though some are available from other retailers as well.
Right, I'll now attempt to detail the variety of Assassin's Creed Odyssey editions and where you can get yours if you fancy it. Buckle up.
Firstly, there's the standard edition, which will unsurprisingly be available everywhere video games are sold and presumably some places where video games aren't normally sold. This one is at the moment. Pre-orders will get you the extra mission 'The Blind King'.

Our E3 Bulletins run every day this week. .
E3 Tuesday is the point at which the dust starts to settle and we can start discerning the key trends, which this year appear to be terrible queue management, not bothering to pretend that there aren't new consoles round the corner and releasing games on February 22nd 2019, a date which has appeared on so many announcements as to suggest the development of a strange cult among retail marketers.
There were some great announcements on Monday but you simply can't have E3 without ennui, and Square served up a generous quantity to start the second (fourth) day, with a that confirmed two new games, neither of which it offered any details on, some trailers we'd already seen in the Microsoft conference and a game that has already been on sale in Japan for several months. Babylon's Fall is notable for being developed by Platinum, which had an interesting-looking game , and The Quiet Man is notable for being developed by Human Head, which , leading us to wonder if an agressively low-key E3 presentation was part of the contract to affirm things will be different this time.

BioWare's ambitious Anthem was the highlight of EA's E3 2018 press conference - although that was hardly a tough bar to clear. We gained full of jetpacking players in mechs, angry monsters and mysterious god energy - but some BioWare fans watching felt like the gameplay shown did not align with their own, personal expectations of what a BioWare game should be.
Here at E3 itself, the mission shown during EA's press conference is playable in full - and with better context and setup, including the introduction of some prominent NPCs heard during the demo via voiceover. It's a much better introduction to the game - but sadly one which the audience back home isn't able to experience themselves.
After the dust had settled on Anthem's showing, and after , I was able to sit down for a half hour chat with lead producer Mike Gamble, previously producer on the Mass Effect series, to speak more deeply about the game, discuss what was happening with BioWare's other franchises, and find out how this week's showing of Anthem had gone for him. Our full chat lies below.

Remedy has unveiled its next game, Control - a rather surreal looking shooter that's coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC next year.
As introduced by a guitar-playing banana at Sony's E3 showcase (unrelated), the brisk, largely inexplicable trailer sees an unnamed protagonist wandering through the constantly shifting innards of a very strange building - referred to as The Oldest House - walls ever-reshaping around her. "There are rules, and rituals," she explains, "you can keep travelling deeper".
Adding a bit of extra context, publisher 505 Games steps in, explaining, "After a secretive agency in New York is invaded by an otherworldly threat, you become the new Director struggling to regain Control."

Destiny 2: Forsaken looks to kill off a fan-favourite character, according to a new story trailer, with spoilers below for those who didn't catch it during Sony's E3 conference.
The expansion sees players return to The Reef, which has fallen into lawlessness after a fleet of dangerous Barons escape the Prison of Elders.
A mission to put things right goes awry, though, and appears to show the end of Cayde-6 - the chatty Hunter voiced by Nathan Fillion. Eagle-eyed fans have suggested it's actually Prince Uldren, the snide brother of the Queen from Destiny 1 - who does the deed.

Capcom's remake of Resident Evil 2 will launch for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 25th January 2019.
A fresh trailer with our first proper look at the game was just demoed during PlayStation's bizarro E3 2018 press conference. We saw a darker take on the game as people get flesh ripped out of them, rats getting turned to zombies and Leon once again looking handsome.
Both Leon and Claire will have their own, separate campaigns.