Nathan Grayson

As 1.0 Approaches, Battlegrounds Is Having Some Growing Pains

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is, without a doubt, the breakout hit of the year. It’s sold more than 15 million copies and is the most popular game on Steam by a country mile (full of people trying to kill each other). All this, and it’s still in Early Access. You’d think it has a bright future ahead…

Valve Overhauls Steam Curators

Back when the feature first launched, Steam curation was supposed to be a guiding light through winding caverns of crap. Flash forward a few years, though, and curators are less relevant than ever. With a new update, Valve hopes to change that. Sometime in the next few weeks, Valve is planning to overhaul Steam curator…

Track: Price of Living | Artist: Ecca Vandal | Album: Ecca Vandal Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Gollum Sucks

I’ve been playing a lot of Shadow of War lately, and like in Shadow of Mordor before it, Gollum just goes through the motions. He menaces, he cowers, he tries to bash somebody’s head in with a rock. Then he says something zany and bounds away. Gollum has become the Jar-Jar Binks of Middle-Earth. I’m…

Spamming Overwatch Voice Lines Can Get You In Trouble

In Overwatch, each character has a series of prerecorded voice lines that players can deploy at will during matches. These include everything from greetings and taunts to McCree’s notoriously Kirk-Hamilton-irritating “I’m your Huckleberry.” It’s not hard to spam them. Just because you can, however, does not mean you should. In a recent Overwatch forum post,…

This Overwatch/Pokemon mash-up shouldn’t work, but it totally does. I’m not sure I’d want to play iDeViL360‘s Pokemon-style Overwatch game if it existed, but it’s a fertile, monster-ridden field for humor. Speaking of fields, of course patches of tall grass would be lousy with annoying level one Hanzos.

New Steam Game Gives You Achievements For Speedrunning

High Hell is by no means the longest game ever, but it can be really, really short if you want it to be. While the stylish first-person shooter should take most people a couple hours to beat, there’s an achievement for sprinting through it in 20 minutes. There’s also one for beating a level in…

The Story Behind TwitchCon’s Giant Bob Ross

During this year’s TwitchCon, Twitch patron saint Bob Ross was watching over everyone, literally, in the form of a towering bead painting that took 24 people six months to assemble. That colossal Bob Ross is made of Perler Beads, which people assemble into images and then melt together with an iron. If all goes according…

At TwitchCon, IRL Streamers Cause Problems By Streaming IRL

On Friday, the first night of TwitchCon 2017 in Long Beach, California, I was standing on a street corner, waiting for a stoplight to change. A roving pack of streamers walked up behind me. “Are you streaming right now?” one asked another. “Of course!” an IRL streamer replied. “If you’re here and you’re not streaming,…

Doabearandroll and Varghon are two musicians who got to know each other through Twitch, but had never played together before. Outside TwitchCon, they finally jammed for the first time, putting a new spin on an original song by Doabearandroll (Varghon, a professional cellist, improv-ed his part). The modern world is strange and frightening, but sometimes it’s…

Nexon’s booth at TwitchCon has the largest variety of booth foliage I’ve ever seen. So many different kinds of fake trees! Spring trees, fall trees, palm trees, and even bamboo. I counted six different types in total, all to promote a game called Durango: Wildlands. As a booth foliage aficionado, I’m impressed.

TwitchCon’s Glass ‘Streamer Zones’ Make Streaming Nerve-Wracking

This year at TwitchCon, the show floor is playing host to a handful of box-shaped, see-through “Streamer Zones” where people can stream for their usual online audiences and also a real life one sitting mere feet away. If you’re used to streaming from the comfort of your own bedroom, it can be terrifying. It’s one…

TwitchCon Has Some Amazing World Of Warcraft Paintings

World of Warcraft community artists are collaborating on pieces while at TwitchCon.  Maliveth, a streamer and illustrator, told me she’s part of a five-person group who planned out this (in-progress) painting a week in advance. It’s part of a big wall of community illustrations, all of which are very impressive.

The meet-and-greet lines at TwitchCon are so long that not even a perfect cosplayer could get face time with Dr Disrespect. WiiMoon, a partnered Twitch streamer herself, told me she didn’t even know what she’d say to the Doc, but was sure it’d come to her in the moment. It’ll be a crime if they…

To kick off TwitchCon, Twitch just announced a bunch of upcoming features. Some of them, like “raids,” which occur when a bunch of viewers from one stream join another (and can, it should be noted, be used abusively), are beefed up versions of things people already do, while others, like “achievements” for building up your…

The Runescape Players Who Farm Gold So They Don’t Starve To Death

Venezuela is in the midst of an economic collapse. What was once the wealthiest major economy in Latin America is now suffering from shortages of essential goods like food and electricity, as well as spikes in crime and unemployment. To put dinner on the table, many are turning to unconventional jobs. Like gold farming. In…

The first Mafia game is now available on GOG after years of being off stores like Steam. The uniquely period-appropriate open-world crime-a-thon is unfortunately missing its licensed music, but is otherwise intact and DRM-free. It’s a classic in most of, if not all, its glory. Worth checking out if you haven’t already.

What Happened After Three Developers Pirated Their Own Games

Game developers have been trying to figure out how to paddle their way through pirate-infested waters for decades. DRM, “glitches” designed to thwart pirates, and more DRM have done little to stem the tide. Seeing this, a handful of developers took less combative approaches, putting their games on sites like the Pirate’s Bay themselves. Months…

Divinity Original Sin 2 Player Collects Paintings Of Boss, Beats Him With Them

They say that pride goes before a fall. One Divinity: Original Sin 2 player decided to interpret the saying literally, killing jerk boss Bishop Alexander by having a plethora of paintings of himself—the surest sign of hubris—fall on his head until he died. In Original Sin 2, there are paintings of various characters scattered around…

World Of Warcraft Legacy Server Disbands Following Alleged Embezzlement [Update]

The group responsible for a major World of Warcraft legacy server has disbanded after alleging that a former team member embezzled thousands of dollars in donated funds. If somebody ever decides to write a book about the seemingly ceaseless saga of people trying to create a sustainable World of Warcraft legacy server—an unofficial server where…