Cecilia D'Anastasio

Final Fantasy XIV is getting a huge content update on May 22, publisher Square Enix announced today. In addition to the new main scenario quest “Under the Moonlight” and a new dungeon, FFXIV is getting some much-needed user experience updates: improvements for color-blind players and cross-world Linkshell chat.

D&D’s Upcoming Adventure Will Showcase Its Grossest Monster

Sometimes, people create horrible and unconscionable things all in the name of fantasy. Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes is D&D’s upcoming sourcebook, to be released May 18, and its bestiary features something called the Sibriex. It’s appeared before in D&D’s 3rd edition, but in its current incarnation, it’s truly awful. The creature’s “blood and bile cascade”…

Nintendo Doesn’t Want The Best Smash Bros. Melee Player In The World At Its Big Tournament

Nintendo didn’t invite the top player of its longest-running esports title, Super Smash Bros. Melee, to its biggest (and likely only) tournament of the year. Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma isn’t exactly salty that he won’t be playing at the E3 Invitational next month; he’s more disbelieving. “It’s not as outlandish as flat earth,” said Debiedma over…

Twitch Counter-Sues Gambling Streamer Who It Banned

Two years ago, Twitch booted a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive streamer who, among other things, allegedly ran a potentially illegal and reportedly rigged site that let kids gamble on CS:GO skins. Earlier this year, that streamer sued the gigantic video platform. And now, Twitch is counter-suing the streamer saying he violated Twitch’s policies over 15 times.…

Nathan, Eric and I (Cecilia) will be streaming Overwatch on Kotaku’s Twitch channel at 8pm est. Tune in for the hooks!

You Likely Never Saw Twitch’s ‘Most Popular’ Emote

“Fed7,” a squished image of a man saluting in a white T-shirt, was until yesterday the most popular emote on Twitch, according to one analysis. So why is is that most viewers have probably never even seen it? StreamElements, a website that scrapes data from Twitch, said that Fed7 has been used a reported 431…

Cheaters, Conspiracies, And Miffed Girlfriends: What It’s Like Doing Fortnite Customer Support

Working customer support for Fortnite Battle Royale, the biggest game in the world, means sorting through a lot of salt. “It’s always the shotguns,” said Randi, a customer support specialist for Fortnite who asked that we not use their real name. Randi has received countless tickets from Fortnite players complaining that the game’s shotgun is…

‘C9ing’ Is The Bottom Of The Overwatch Toilet

A few weeks ago, at the end of a hard-fought game of Overwatch, my team was diligently wrecking the enemy team outside their spawn point when we suddenly realized that nobody was actually playing the objective. It was completely uncontested. In a moment, the words “DEFEAT” appeared on screen. Fuck. Chat exploded: “C9 nooo” “C99999”…

How To Read Twitch Chat

Twitch users post over 300 messages per secondand frankly, a lot of them are garbage. That’s okay, though. Under all those layers of spam and emotes, there’s some meaning. If you’ve spent even a few minutes on the game streaming site, you’ve probably noticed how incomprehensible its embedded chat can be. Like an American in…

After A Disastrous Debut, Pokémon Go Fest Is Returning

A year after Pokémon Go Fest’s calamitous Chicago debut, the event is coming back. Anyone who heard about the misery its 30,000 attendees stood through might be a little surprised, but today, developer Niantic announced 2018’s Pokémon Go Tour across Japan, Germany and the U.S. between June 30 and July 1. Mobile signal was a…

Inio Asano Is A Dark Manga Artist For Adults Who Want Something Real

When you’re an adult, sprawling out in the manga aisle of your neighborhood bookstore with a copy of Fruits Basket isn’t the same. Even though it’s got nostalgic appeal for adults longing to relive their childhoods, manga written for teens might not be stimulating enough for the 20+ crowd. These days when I read manga,…

After Yesterday’s Overwatch Update, Being A Hanzo Main Isn’t So Bad

Sometimes, Overwatch force-feeds its playersunwanted changes, like giving its robot turret Bastion an overpowered self-healing arm or breaking porcine tank Roadhog’s hook. On these days, the sky falls. Other days, it’s Overwatch Christmas, complete with a big ol’ sack of crowd-pleasing balance changes. Yesterday was one of those days: Blizzard solved its two-year-old Hanzo problem.…

My Hopes And Dreams For Super Smash Bros. On Switch

Lock a crowd of Super Smash Bros. fans in a room and make them agree on what they want in the series’ next game and it’s likely that, when you open the door again, there will be blood. People ask a lot of Nintendo’s 20-year-old fighting game franchise. With the game’s fifth iteration on the…

How Fortnite’s Battle Pass Works

Whether you’re a newbie Fortnite player jumping onto the survival shooter trend or a confused, out-of-touch parent wondering what that $9.99 “Epic Games” charge on your credit card is, Fortnite’s battle pass is a thing worth knowing about. First things first: Fortnite is a free-to-play video game for PC, Xbox, PS4 and iOS in which…

Overwatch‘s Placement Matches Are Just Telling Us What We Know

It’s placement time in Overwatch and, as you’re reading this, players are haunting the servers like cursed ghosts forever bound to relive their past lives. After ten seasons of this, players have noticed an unnerving and demoralizing truth: a lot of the time, players’ competitive rankings turn out to be basically whatever they were last…

Fortnite‘s New Hop Rocks Are Making The Game Wild

Not a sticky-sweet candy or an obscure club drug, Fortnite’s new hop rocks are popping off in the survival shooter’s gameplay. The hop rocks, which developer Epic Games introduced yesterday, are a consumable item players can find in Fortnite’s new Dusty Divet crater. After using them, players jump through the map with low-gravity physics that…

Our Top Four Spring 2018 Anime Picks

It’s time to pretend you have debilitating pollen allergies and can’t leave your bed, because this spring’s batch of new anime is here. There is a hell of a lot of anime this season, so us brave, selfless souls at Kotaku sorted through it for you. Here are our recommendations. Aggretsuko Studio: Fanworks Genre: Slice…

A Tabletop RPG For Storytellers Who Want To Be Infamous Criminals

If the industrial, supernatural world of Blades in the Dark was the backdrop for anything other than a tabletop role-playing game, I’d have written daily letters to its creator asking them to make it into one. Blades in the Dark’s world is so full of noir curiosities that it begs players to insert themselves in,…

Angry Over Busted Switch, Guy Files Class-Action Suit Against Third-Party Dock Maker

Several Nintendo Switch owners who purchased a third-party dock from Nyko were furious last March when the dock apparently brickedtheir $300 console. On Friday, one brought a class action lawsuit against Nyko alleging that the company wasn’t vocal enough about the dock’s manufacturing defect. Nyko’s portable Switch docking kit is a cheaper alternative to Nintendo’s…

In South Korea, Gamers Stage An Inquisition Against Feminists

On March 26, a top game development studio in Korea released an unusual statement about one of its employees: “The woman was mistaken in retweeting a tweet with the word ‘hannam,’” derogatory Korean slang for “disgusting men.” It continued, “In the aftermath of this incident, I promise that we will create preventative measures, including education,…