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Sign of the times. As I emerged from a panel at GDC in San Francisco, I saw a huge line that wrapped around itself, easily the biggest I’ve seen at GDC so far. Curious, I decided to see which presentation it was for. The sign at the door read “Making Indie Games That Sell.”

Assassin’s Creed Origins’ New Expansion Goes Full Crazy, And I Love It

Assassin’s Creed tries to be a series about history, but over the last decade it hasn’t been afraid to get a little loose with that. We’ve had a tyrannical King George (Washington), and a bizarre hunt for Jack the Ripper, but it’s the series latest dalliance with fiction—Curse of the Pharoahs—that’s become my favourite historical…

$25,000 HQ Trivia Game Contestant Booted From Game, Accused of Cheating

Popular live trivia app HQ Trivia usually pays out a cash prize after 12 questions, but last night, for the second time, they’ve tried a “winner takes all” approach. After 27 minutes of trivia, with $25,000 on the line, two players remained—then the game abruptly ended as one of them reportedly got kicked from the…

“Call me when you’re on Switch.” I think this sign at the Double Fine “Day of the Devs” booth may have single-handedly captured the indie game mood at GDC.

Choosing Your Pirate In Sea Of Thieves Is Hard

Instead of giving players a deep, involved character creation tool, Sea of Thieves generates groups of eight pirate characters at a time, of which the player can choose one. One might think that would make character selection easier. One would be wrong. It’s a character generator locked on random. There are no sliders for body…

Fortnite‘s New Blitz Mode Is Fast, Furious

Fortnite Battle Royale’s new Blitz mode makes the fast-paced survival shooter even faster and harder to survive in. It’s riotously fun for players who enjoy confrontation, but players who prefer more roundabout strategies might feel a little stressed out. The limited-time mode makes slight alterations to Fortnite Battle Royale’s theme that pick up the pace…

PUBG Mobile is live in the US for iOS and Android Our colleagues at Kotaku UK liked what they played of it last week via its Canadian soft launch.

Sea Of Thieves Gets A Day-One Eyepatch

Someone on the Sea of Thieves subreddit asked Rare for a day one patch. Not, like, an update to fix the game or anything, but a literal patch with the number one on it for people’s characters to wear. Today, the company obliged. It was 19 days ago that user Jefabell first made the request,…

GDC 2018 Is In The Middle Of A Construction Zone

The Moscone Center, the sprawling downtown San Francisco convention hall where Game Developers Conference takes place, is currently undergoing a massive renovation and expansion—but GDC is going on as usual. Well… not quite as usual. Moscone is split into three halls, each on different sides of the city streets: North, South, and West. Currently, half…

Someone Survived They Are Billions Using The Tiniest Base 

They Are Billions took Steam by storm not too long ago and has been growing and evolving in Early Access ever since. Not content simply to master the regular game, however, some expert players have taken to making up their own personal challenges, like trying to survive using the least amount of defenses possible. Unlike…

The Paul Brothers’ Attempt To Bandwagon Fortnite Turns Messy

Infamous YouTuber Logan Paul started a Twitch channel yesterday, and he reached 100,000 followers without streaming once. If you go to the channel right now, the chat alternates between spamming racial slurs and ascii penises. Following the Fortnite bandwagon has turned into a mess for the Paul brothers. The Paul brothers have a reputation for…

How To Get Decent At Overwatch

Overwatch is a very approachable first-person shooter, but if you’ve watched the pros, then you know that the game has a high skill ceiling. How the hell do they do thing with the backline flank and the Pulse Bomb without dying? Surely you want to do that, too, and feel like a champ. (Maybe you…

How To Know Whether To Play Assassin’s Creed Rogue Remastered

Ubisoft is releasing a PS4 and Xbox One version of one of my favorite Assassin’s Creed games on Tuesday. Back in late 2014, I raved about the marvelous Assassin’s Creed Rogue. Then, I’d recommend it to anyone. Today? It depends. The game features Shay Cormac, an Assassin who becomes a Templar over the course of…

Monster Hunter: World’s Best Event Quest Is Its Simplest

Monster Hunter: World offers new limited-time quests every week. Some of these involve brawling tons of monsters, while other feature giant versions of familiar beasts. But the best quest so far is one of the most straightforward. “Ya-Ku With That?” is one of the most common event quests in Monster Hunter: World, repeating three times…

The Faster A Video Game Treasure Chest Opens, The Better 

About one hour into my Assassin’s Creed: Origins playthrough, I came upon my first treasure chest in an out-of-the-way cave near Siwa. As I walked up to it, I pressed the E key and braced myself for that everlasting example of minor gameplay annoyances: the chest-opening animation. But it never came. Instead of sitting through…

Tabletop role-playing game Pathfinder recently announced its second edition ten years after Paizo published its first. “We can do a much better job now than we did 10 years ago,” Paizo said. Paizo hopes to make the Core Rulebook more approachable, streamline combat and include more art. Playtesting begins August 2nd.

Adventure Time And Steven Universe Make A Great Mobile Game Better

Here is how to make a great video game featuring licensed characters. Step one: find a great video game. Step two: put characters from We Bare Bears, Steven Universe and Adventure Time in it. That’s pretty much how Cartoon Network Match Land was born. I’m barely exaggerating here. Last year indie developer Race Cat Games…

We Played An Hour Of The New God Of War And Really Liked It

On a snowy day last week, in a fancy hotel suite in Manhattan I controlled Kratos in his newest PlayStation adventure. The new God of War is out in a month, yet the public has seen very little of it. The game is a drastic stylistic departure from the previous games in the series, so…

Flashback is coming to the Switch on June 7. There’s a physical 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition but unfortunately that’s only for Europe and Australia. For those too young to remember what was going on back in 1992, Flashback was a cinematic adventure platformer about an amnesiac on the run from mutants.

With Paragon Dying, Epic Games Is Making The Characters And Environments Free

Multiplayer battle arena Paragon shuts down on April 26, but its characters and environments have a chance to live on. Epic Games has released “$12 million worth” of the game’s character and environment assets onto the Unreal Engine Marketplace for free. Epic’s got no time for a MOBA that spent two years trying and failing…