In these days of rampant data mining, few things are ever truly surprises. Even Fortnite’s seemingly endless parade of (often literal) bashes isn’t immune, with big moments like the Tilted-Towers-leveling Vault event getting spoiled before players could experience them firsthand. This weekend, though, longtime leakers—people with the word “leak” front and center in their handles—have…
Sometimes, there’s just no point in trying—for instance, when you’ve got to nail a shot on a target that’s several football fields’ worth of space away. Luckily for Twitch streamer Jake “ChocoTaco” Throop, he wasn’t trying at all. Or at least, he wasn’t trying to do that particular thing. Throop just wanted to demonstrate a…
Even within the internet’s vast digital memory, nothing is guaranteed to last—especially not games. Maybe a company runs out of money and has to cut the cord. Or maybe disinterest turns servers into ghost towns, with not even a pixelated tumbleweed in sight. Dustnet takes the latter idea to its utmost extreme, positing a world…
Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has explained how the new role queue feature will work in-game. Both quick play and competitive modes will, by default, incorporate role queue. You’ll queue up for matches based on whether you want to play tank, damage, or support, and in the case of competitive, you’ll have a separate skill rating…
Ideally, Dota Underlords, like its auto-battler kin, plays out as a game of slow-build strategy in which you amass an army of heroes based on synergies between them. Maybe that means a chanting brood of surprisingly survivable warlocks. Maybe that means a beefy team of brawny boys who are even beefier together than they are…
Last time we checked in on endearingly grouchy democratic socialist uncle and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’ Twitch channel, it was notably lacking in Bernie Sanders himself. It also felt more like a campaign commercial than any sort of broadcast Twitch viewers were used to seeing. Yesterday evening, Sanders and company finally addressed one of those…
We’re once again in the midst of summer’s steamiest months, and you know what that means: Blizzard has made yet another Overwatch character hot. Also, Lucioball is back for the fourth year in a row. Between those two things, it’s unsurprising that it’s Hanzo “Hotzo” Shimada who’s the talk of the balmy beach town right…
Overwatch League is officially leaving Los Angeles next year. Well, for the most part. Season three will consist of 52 “homestand weekend events” at venues in teams’ home cities. Teams will be split into four divisions based on relative travel distance between their locations. All games will take place on weekends, as opposed to Thursday, Friday,…
Around this time last year, the professional Overwatch team Shanghai Dragons had just finished up a history-making 0-40 season. At the time, nobody would have expected that just one year later they’d be leaving the league’s top three teams in a heap of black-and-blue bodies on the ground. Maybe they should change their name to…
Unless you’ve got the world’s most powerful ad blocker, you’re probably painfully aware that it’s Prime Day, a holiday that Amazon made up because it could. Deals parade naked in the streets and the company hosts glitzy concerts, all to encourage Amazon Prime subscribers to stick around. For the second year in a row, however,…
Adding fully-manned spaceships and space combat to a gargantuan online game like Warframe isn’t rocket science. It’s portal science. It’s also game development wizardry that makes my brain hurt. Warframe’s upcoming “Empyrean” update will include space combat that allows players to do things like run around inside their ship while somebody else is piloting and…
Despite boasting the most followers, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins is not the undisputed king of Twitch. Data from streaming utility company StreamElements shows that Turner “Tfue” Tenney had six million more hours watched from April through June. In general, Twitch’s top five is in flux, with others like Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar posting strong numbers, as well.…
Last month, Ubisoft released a tool that allows players to create their own quests in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Players could choose to have other players’ custom quests appear in their games.. Almost immediately came a mess of quests dedicated to rapid-fire power-leveling. “To each their own,” you might say of this questionable practice, but Ubisoft…
Just days after the end of a summer sale that laid bare many of Steam’s issues with helping people discover new games, Valve has announced a new section dedicated to “experiments around discoverability, video, machine learning, and more.” It’s called Steam Labs, and the first bits of mad video game science to emerge from it…
A couple weeks ago, I came across a Dota Underlords video that changed everything for me. In it, a player managed to buff one unit, the self-cloning Arc Warden, such that he was able to spawn nearly limitless copies of himself. The board was a sea of crackling wizards with fishbowls on their heads. I…
This year’s Grand Prix-themed Steam summer sale was a bumpy ride, to say the least. Two weeks ago, Valve apologized and altered the sale’s meta game—in which players join teams and “race” against each other for prizes—after players found it unbalanced and confusing, and developers suffered a bloodbath of sudden wishlist deletions. Now, with the…
Today, after a nearly month-long absence following his E3 bathroom stream suspension, Dr Disrespect returned to Twitch. His suspension lasted two weeks, during which he released a series of trailers for his return and tweeted an awkwardly worded apology “on behalf of the Dr Disrespect brand.” The result of all that hype? 80,000 concurrent viewers…
G2A, a third-party gray market for game keys, doesn’t exactly have a sterling reputation, given the accusations of sub-par security, developer disenfranchisement, and fraud that have surrounded it for years. Today, someone from the company tried to take control of the narrative surrounding its shady public image—by sending out a “transparent” and “unbiased” pre-written article…
Are you someone who still battles in video games by using your fingers to directly input commands, like some kind of barbarian? That’s old hat. Today, auto-battlers are all the rage. Simply buy some guys, arrange said guys, and they (the guys) will do the battling for you. With Dota Underlords, Valve rushed to capitalize…
A very wise man who wore a hood and whose skin was practically melting off his bones once said, “Good! Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you.” Probably, he was talking to a gamer about video games. Competitive games make people mad. There’s no getting around it, so you might as…
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