Before the big “Foundation” update that surprise-launched this weekend, No Man’s Sky wasn’t in a great place. On Steam, the game’s concurrent player count hovered mostly between 200 and 500. It wasn’t even within spitting distance of Steam’s top 100 most-played games. What a difference a solid update (after months of silence, which drummed up…
Overwatch has a max level! Kinda. A Chinese account reached it a little while back, but they made judicious use of account-sharing, allowing a single account to level up for ungodly amounts of time each day. Now, finally, one player has done it all on his own. Per PVP Live, French player TaZzeRK just hit…
Ever since I played Metal Gear Solid 2 nearly half my life ago (shudders), my goal in stealth games has been the same: to knock people unconscious and then position their bodies so that they’ll wake up thinking, “What the shit was I even doing?” In Metal Gear Solid 2, that mainly consisted of me…
Counter-Strike’s best maps are finely tuned staging grounds for battles of tactics, will, and hair-trigger reflexes. A slight change can have a tremendous impact on how they play. Even something as seemingly insignificant as the weather, as this mod demonstrates. Lewis Palfrey and Luke Millanta’s Changing Weather Collection (via Eurogamer) adds a slew of weather…
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Crashlands, a mash-up of Diablo, Pokemon, and Don’t Starve lobbed at Steam’s collective face with unfettered glee. It’s ambitious, funny, and fun. Turns out, it was conceived when its creator found out he had cancer. This post originally ran on 2/10/16. Sam Coster is the co-founder of Butterscotch…
This year, for the first time ever, Valve is giving out Steam Awards. The whole thing is community-driven, with Steam users nominating games and even submitting their own award categories. As you’d expect, the Internet has taken its solemn duty very seriously. By which I mean the opposite of that. Here are some of the…
Overwatch’s Symmetra overhaul is live on the game’s PTR, and people are really putting her new kit through its paces. Thanks to the magic of custom games, Overwatch players have taken to spawning as many Symmetra shields as possible and watching as they sail into the sky like celestial frisbees. Until they collide with something,…
It’s the end of the year, which means a) oh fuck me blind thank christ, and b) it’s award season! For the first time ever, Steam is giving out its own set of awards. As part of the Steam Autumn Sale, which just kicked off, Valve is asking users to nominate games in a number…
A Good Bundle is offering 151 games, including indie hits like Gone Home and Proteus, for peanuts. 100 percent of the profits will be split between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Planned Parenthood. The bundle’s stated goal is to “combat some of the ugliness in our world.” Which is a badass goal. It’s…
The Symmetra revamp is now live on Overwatch’s PTR. In other news, we all live in hell now, but at least the weather’s alright. Nibel captured the madness from PikaIsCool’s stream. And of course: So there you go. Now you’ve got something to look forward to when you log onto the PTR this evening. Or…
Saints Row IV just added Steam Workshop support. Already, you can download a guitar the shoots fire and some clothes that (sadly) don’t shoot fire. Why now, though? Because Saints Row IV wasn’t originally created with mods in mind, so devs worked in their spare time to make this possible. Very cool of them!
For a little while, Blizzard’s acknowledged that Symmetra is too much of a situational hero. Now they’re doing something about that. In a new developer video, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan explained that a new version of Symmetra will soon be coming to the game’s PTR. Nu-mmetra will be the first Overwatch hero to have…
No Man’s Sky and Spore have a lot in common. Both were ambitious to a fault. They aimed for the stars, but fell well short of expectations. They also both hadplenty of dick aliens Evolution: The Ultimate Creative Sandbox recently got voted number one on Steam Greenlight, the service’s user-driven selection system for lesser-known games. Here’s…
Normally when I’m feeling down, I steer clear of multiplayer games. Competition is rad, but it can turn even kindhearted people into massive bags of Flaming Hot Cheetos, only all the Cheetos are dicks. Or at least, that used to be my policy. Then Overwatch happened. The world has not been a kind place lately.…
Roadhog’s hook is like one of those old math problems with the trains. If Hook X is approaching Sombra Y at a speed anchored to this reality only by wishful thinking, and Sombra Y decides to briefly exit this reality altogether by teleporting, who wins? Roadhog’s hook is busted. Blizzard fully acknowledges this, and they’re…
Disclosures on places like YouTube and Twitch are murky territory, but EA is pushing for increased transparency. In a post on EA’s German news blog (translated by NeoGAF), EA announced that they’re stepping up their disclosure game by contractually requiring content creators to disclose with EA-provided hashtags and watermarks. The watermarks are pictured above. I…
Our (aspirationally) weekly Overwatch show returns with a new name, Let’s Break It Down, and a new hero to discuss! Sombra can hack everything, teleport, and turn invisible. She is a handful, and also she has cool hacker hands. Listen to Cecilia, Heather, and I talk about our favorite Sombra strategies. And also who we…
Sombra is finally in Overwatch! No longer confined to an ARG, she can now hack the planet as she pleases. Maybe, though, pros ought to steer clear of her for a bit. The problem with competing in a third-party pro Overwatch tournament is that you’re kind of at Blizzard’s whims. If they decide to release…
For most of the election, many people thought Donald Trump was a joke, or at least someone who had no chance of being President. It’s no surprise, then, that many video games that featured or added modes involving Trump treated him that way, too. The creators of those games talked to us about the intent…
Today’s a big day for the ever-churning vat of intergalactic intrigue that is EVE Online. It just went free-to-play, which means a big influx of players to disrupt the universe’s precarious balance of power. I spoke with the game’s executive producer, Andie Nordgren, about how corporations are already using that to jostle for power, potential…
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