Nathan Grayson

Blizzard Accidentally Gives Fans Access To Treasure Trove Of Overwatch League Stats

For as long as the Overwatch League has been around, its most diehard contingent of fans has clamored for in-depth, match-by-match stats. Earlier this week, they got what they wanted. By mistake. First, the good news: through the Overwatch League app, fans can finally access map stats that include each players’ contributions to eliminations, deaths,…

YouTuber Keemstar Makes A Fuss After Epic Muscles In On His Fortnite Tournament Turf

For millions of Fortnite fans, Friday Fortnite—a YouTuber- and streamer-focused tournament series hosted by shameless drama profiteer Keemstar—has become a weekly ritual. This week was supposed to be its swan song, but the party’s been called off because Epic decided to host an even bigger shindig just down the block. Keemstar’s series took off due…

Blizzard Is Sorry World Of Warcraft Patch 8.0 Messed Up The Game

Earlier this week, what should’ve been the second-biggest event of World of Warcraft’s calendar year landed with a dull, wet thud. The big 8.0 patch, which lays the foundation for the upcoming expansion Battle For Azeroth, sailed into players’ lives aboard a raft of bugs and tedium. Now Blizzard has apologized and vowed to improve…

Epic Admits Disastrous Fortnite Tournament ‘Did Not Go As Planned’

Last weekend, Epic kicked off its $8 million Fortnite “Summer Skirmish” series with a $250,000 tournament featuring top-tier players and content creators. Thanks to latency issues and confusing camera work, it was a disaster. Now Epic has put out a postmortem acknowledging that, yeah, between lag and hyper-cautious players, things didn’t go super great. The…

Clicker Game Ditches Microtransactions, Becomes Steam Best Seller

At first glance, Clicker Heroes 2 doesn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary. It’s a clicker game in which you incrementally build up a fantasy hero and watch numbers skyrocket to the point that perspective dies. You do this forever. What makes Clicker Heroes 2 different from other games in its genre is the…

An Overwatch Fan Is Remaking Every Hero In Torbjorn’s Image

Overwatch’s hero roster keeps changing—all in the name of perfection that’s ultimately unattainable. Or at least, it would be, if one fan hadn’t cracked the code. One word: Torbjorn. For the past two months, Overwatch fan and subreddit poster Drewhead118 has been meticulously splicing every hero’s DNA with Torbjorn’s. The results have been both stunning…

You Can Now Play Most Of World Of Warcraft Just By Subscribing

World of Warcraft has finally gotten with the times. You can now play the game and all but one of its expansion packs just by paying the monthly $15 fee. As of today, you can play World of Warcraft and every expansion except the most current one—in this case Battle For Azeroth, which isn’t out…

Star Citizen Backer Sues To Get $4,500 Back, Loses

Ken Lord used to be a Star Citizen super fan. Once upon a time, he helped fund Roberts Space Industries’ endless maiden voyage with $4,500 of his own money. Now, after years of delays and changes, he wants out. RSI didn’t get back to him, and he sued. It didn’t go his way. Lord first…

Track: Voice Of Trespass | Artist: Between The Buried And Me | Album: Automata II Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Under A Porcelain Sun is a first-person adventure set in a surrealist colonial India. It’s about two thieves searching for the mythical city Kayamgadh. Along the way, they’ll encounter castles of glue, wax people, and other strangeness. It comes from a studio in India called Oleomingus and will be out this summer.

Amazon Temporarily Sells Pirated Copies Of Popular PC Games

Over the weekend, people shopping on Amazon thought they’d hit the jackpot: popular recent PC games like Frostpunk and Surviving Mars for the price of a cup of coffee. Problem: these copies were pirated. Word of the dubious deals first got out in a Reddit thread on Saturday. “I think this is a screw up…

The ArenaNet Catastrophe Has The Whole Game Industry Rethinking Harassment Policies

One week ago, two Guild Wars 2 narrative designers, Jessica Price and Peter Fries, were fired after Price called out a player of the game on Twitter, prompting widespread backlash. Since then, mobs have tried to employ similar tactics against more women, and game development studios have had to take a hard look at their…

The Total War Steam Community Was ‘Awful’ Until The Devs Brought In A Moderator

According to developer Creative Assembly’s Grace Carroll, the Total War series’ Steam community was, until very recently, a mess. Largely left to their own devices, forums became “toxic” and “an awful place to be.” Instead of letting the trash fire burn, though, the developer decided to dedicate resources to putting it out. Speaking at the…

Overwatch League’s First-Ever MVP Illustrates Its Support Problem

NYXL support player Sung-hyeon “JJonak” Bang is a monster. He came out of nowhere during Overwatch League’s inaugural season and single-handedly redefined the way people perceive peace-loving robo-monk Zenyatta, transforming him into a lightning-handed murder machine. The league has just awarded him as its first-ever “MVP,” but what’s weird is, we haven’t seen him play…

Pillars of Eternity II is getting an expansion. The Beast Of Winter takes place in an area occupied by worshipers of the god of cold and decay who believe that your character heralds the end of all things. Fun! It’ll launch on August 2 alongside a 2.0 patch full of tweaks, fixes, and challenge modes.

Fallout: New Vegas Player Beats Game On Hardest Difficulty Without Killing Anyone Or Dying

There are self-imposed challenges, and then there’s gleeful masochism. This Fallout: New Vegas run looks like the latter. Rhetam, the gleeful masochist in question, played the game without allowing himself to do any direct lasting damage to anybody but himself. It took him more than a year to complete. In March 2017, Rhetam began his…

Overwatch‘s Highest-Level Player Games 12 Hours Per Day On Top Of His Job

Earlier this month, TreeboyDave became the first person to ever hit level 6,000 in Overwatch, a climb to the top of the 40-million-player heap that he estimates has taken him 9,000 hours. Despite that, he says he’s not even close to ready to hang up his keyboard. TreeboyDave is currently level 6,087, having gained more…

Valve has overhauled Steam’s “upcoming” tab. It was an unfiltered list of games (and asset flips), but now it’s decided upon by wishlists and other data. Valve said that “less than half” of 1% of users clicked the old upcoming tab, while only 4% click “top sellers.” Steam users don’t really use Steam, I guess?

Wasteland 2 is coming to the Switch next month. The post-apocalyptic CRPG throwback originally came out on PC in 2014, and it’ll be arriving on Switch in the form of a director’s cut with new perks and quirks, a precision strike mechanic, and expanded voice acting.

Somebody’s Making A Game About Making Battle Royales

Think there are too many similar battle royale games? Or perhaps you’re a member of PUBG’s community, ready to revolt over the state of the former king of the genre. If you think you can do a better job, Battle Royale Tycoon will give you a chance. The developers of the upcoming PC game say…