Ethan Gach

For Honor‘s Dedicated Servers Make A Big Difference

After a bit of maintenance earlier today, For Honor’s dedicated servers finally went live on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Let me tell you: they feel good—real good—and it only took a year for that to happen. Previously, For Honor multiplayer relied on peer-to-peer hosting for matches. When the player hosting quit the match, whoever…

Will God of War have any microtransactions? “No,” said Corey Barlog, the game’s director, in an email to Kotaku. “Not even a little.” The question came up today when a blurry picture leaked from a preview event. Barlog tweeted something similar when a fan later asked if the game would have paid outfits.

Far Cry 5‘s Map Editor Sounds Totally Wild

The makers of Far Cry 5’s map editor are hellbent on giving the game a long and ridiculous life beyond its single-player campaign Ubisoft is calling the tool Far Cry Arcade. A new company blog post indicates that it will include approximately 7,000 different objects players can use to create new levels, some of which…

The Week In Games: Scribbling The Night Away

Scribblenauts Showdown looks like, uh, something. There’s a range of stuff coming this week, including not only the newest Scribblenauts (developed this time by Shiver Entertainment, new Miami studio led by a former Zynga executive) and Final Fantasy XV on PC (as well as the Royal Edition with some new content for consoles). Otherwise it’s…

For Years, PlayStation Plus Kept The Vita Alive

Last week, Sony announced that the Vita, along with PS3, will stop getting monthly games through the PlayStation Plus subscription service in March 2019. In the wake of that news, it’s worth remembering: Vita owners never had an easy go of things, but it would have been a whole lot worse without PlayStation Plus. Vita…

Ubisoft Cracks Down On Hate Speech In Rainbow Six Siege

Starting this week, Ubisoft plans to issue permanent bans for Rainbow Six Siege’s most toxic players, according to a recent announcement on the game’s subreddit “We will be implementing an improvement on the system we have been using to ban players that use racial and homophobic slurs, or hate speech, in game,” Craig Robinson, one…

The Makers Of Castle Crashers Have A New Game And It’s Great

Pit People is finally out of Early Access and officially released on both Steam and Xbox One and if you haven’t already tried it out you should. Pit People is part comedy show part tactical beat ‘em up. The Behemoth made it, the same studio that made Castle Crashers, one of those original XBLA indie…

How To Refund Digital Games

Back in the day, if a video game didn’t work or you just didn’t like it, you could take it back to the store and have the person behind the register laugh in your face when you asked for your money back. These days, getting a refund is a labyrinthine of web forms, logins, and…

Detroit: Become Human will be out May 25. The PS4 exclusive has seen its fair share of controversy during development including a trailer last summer that was criticized for its portrayal of domestic abuse. We’ll see whether the Quantic Dream game avoids the pitfalls of its predecessor.

Judge Orders Teen To Stop Playing Violent Video Games [UPDATE]

Earlier this week, a student at Lake Park High School in the suburbs of Chicago was arrested for threatening to commit a school shooting on social media. At his hearing, a judge yesterday ordered the teen to forfeit his smartphone to his parents and stop playing violent video games. According to a report by the…

Nintendo Adds User Reviews, Immediately Pulls Them [UPDATE]

Late last week, Nintendo began allowing users to post reviews on the Switch’s eShop for certain games, with ratings and comments also appearing under each game’s listing on the Nintendo website. This morning, Nintendo suddenly pulled the feature, and it’s not clear why. The new feature, which was originally brought to people’s attention last Friday…

The Week In Games: Out Of The Frying Pan And Into The Breach

The long awaited follow-up to FTL: Faster Than Light arrives this week and the timing couldn’t be better. Perfectly situated in the middle of an otherwise mostly quiet release week, Subset Games’ Into the Breach comes five and a half years after the studio’s first strategy outing. There are mechs, time travel and gigantic creatures…

All Walls Must Fall Is A Time Travel Tactics Game That Feels Incomplete 

A new strategy game set in futuristic German nightclubs, All Walls Must Fall offers a thrillingly fresh take on turn-based tactics that could still use a few more tuneups. It’s Berlin and the year is 2089. In an alternate future where the Cold War has been waging for 150 years time travel is now the…

Virtus Pro Seizes Top Spot In Dota 2 Pro Circuit

After a week of upsets, ESL One Katowice ended in a one-sided rout. It was only last fall that Russia’s storied Virtus.pro side finally won its first Major. Just four months later they’ve somehow managed to continue that streak and become back-to-back ESL One winners. While the Group A finals earlier in the week saw…

Hackers Are Working To Bring Every Doom Game To Switch 

This is the open source version of Doom 3 running on a Switch. It’s only a matter of time before Doom 64 and the rest arrive. There’s a long standing mission to run the original Doom on every object humanity’s ever encountered. But with Doom 2016 arriving on Switch last fall, the first time the…

Sunday Comics: Room To Change

Welcome to Kotaku’s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics that usually occurs on Sunday except when it doesn’t. The images enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon. Nerf NOW!! by Josué Pereira. Published February 23. Read more of Nerf NOW!!  Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published February 19. Read more…

This Might Be The Worst Way To Die In Fortnite 

Grenades are not toys. Fortnite player ErenOz-01 was reminded of that fact the hard way. A clip they shared on Reddit showed them dropping into a Battle Royale match near the Wailing Woods, but wandered around for minutes without seeing anyone else. So, like all bored players packing explosives, they lazily tossed a grenade off…

Facebook Pulls VR Shooter Demo From Conservative Conference After Backlash 

Facebook announced the removal of the Bullet Train demo from its virtual reality experience booth at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) after public outcry in light of the recent mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida. Developed by Epic Games to help show off the Oculus headset’s VR capabilities back in 2015, Bullet Train…

The Two Friends Dominating Borderlands 2 Coop Speedrunning

A chance meeting and subsequent trip to Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 resulted in two college students forming a speedrunning duo that’s still setting world records. Speedrunners Amyrlinn and Shockwve know Borderlands 2 intimately. It would be a cliche to say they know Gearbox’s shooter better than the backs of their own hands, but they…

Little Nightmares’ last DLC, The Residence, is now out. It adds some new traps and enemies and puts you up against a boss called The Lady. Though the Inside-like horror puzzler didn’t set the world on fire, I quite liked it and it’s been nice to see Tarsier Studios continue building out its story and…