Dorian the raven, to give the bird its proper name, isn't the first raven in Diablo 4. Druids have a spell that lets them summon a whole unkindness of ravens—yeah, that really is the proper collective noun for ravens—who can attack their enemies. But Dorian is a noncombat pet like the ridiculously cute tiger kitten everyone who forked out for the ultimate edition of Vessel of Hatred owns, only he looks like he's waiting for you to die so he can eat your delicious eyes.

As with all pets in Diablo 4, the raven can pick up crafting materials and currencies for you, sparing your finger the hassle of clicking on gold yourself. To unlock him you have to complete the entire seasonal journey with your freshly minted seasonal character, which means ticking off a checklist of objectives in return for Grim Favors—a currency I'd say ranks about a 6/10 on the Malfeasance Token scale.

As mentioned, the big-ticket feature of Season 7 is the witchcraft powers. There are 25 of them, including Poison Frog Servant, Firebat Servants, and the gloriously named Piranhado. Anyone who played the summoner-themed witch doctor class in Diablo 3 will find these powers familiar, and this season feels like a way of sneaking that class in via the back door, at least temporarily.

The Season of Witchcraft update also brings an armory that will let players save and swap between builds, something else Diablo 3 players will find familiar, and a new enemy type called the headrotten. It kicks off on January 21 at 10am PST.

Who would win in a word fight: three green letters, or me? I really thought it would be me. I had a flash of inspiration. This was it, this was my shining moment… so long as "shining moment" means "reveal two more grey letters". But being stumped like that actually worked to my advantage, as there was nothing left to try but today's winning word.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, January 15

This is a special skill, something you can just do really well. On a related note, if a door tends to jam unless you wiggle the handle just right, you have this for opening it.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Playing Wordle well is like achieving a small victory every day—who doesn't like a well-earned winning streak in a game you enjoy? If you're new to the daily word game, or just want a refresher, I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success: 

• You want a balanced mix of unique consonants and vowels in your opening word. 
• A solid second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• The answer could contain letters more than once.

There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by the end of the day. If you're struggling to find the answer or a tactical word for your next guess, there's no harm in coming back to it later on. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Enjoy today's win. The answer to the January 15 (1306) Wordle is KNACK.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Knowing previous Wordle solutions can be helpful in eliminating current possibilities. It's unlikely a word will be repeated and you can find inspiration for guesses or starting words that may be eluding you. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• January 14: FANCY
• January 13: CLOAK
• January 12: TOTAL
• January 11: DINGY
• January 10: CRAWL
• January 9: WAFER
• January 8: DRAFT
• January 7: ATLAS
• January 6: SPRIG
• January 5: CYBER

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's your job to work out which five-letter word is hiding by eliminating or confirming the letters it contains.

Starting with a strong word like LEASH—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good place to start. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second go should compliment the starting word, using another "good" guess to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.  After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS). 

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Forest Reigns is an 'emergent' FPS set in a post-apocalyptic Paris not ravaged by war or radiation but plantlife. The City of Light has been reclaimed by nature: vines choke the lamp posts, greenery grows up the sides of buildings, grass covers the asphalt, and a massive, twisted tree trunk winds itself around La Tour Eiffel. Mother Nature is back and she seems pretty pissed off.

You're there too, with some high-tech weaponry and a few tricks to turn these weird sentient plants into your allies. In this gameplay trailer secured by IGN, we see a few brief firefights against enemy agents where the player uses all that invasive greenery to their advantage.

Popping a round into a giant root causes it to expand, giving the player cover to crouch behind while shooting. Glowing orange orbs also sprout from the trunk which, when shot, will explode, burning your enemies. Shooting another type of plant causes it to react by blasting out spores, which appears to be the only way to injure some of the heavily armored boars patrolling Paris' streets. We also see exploding fruit chucked like grenades, tangling vines ensnaring enemy soldiers, and other weird plant-based hijinx.

"It isn’t just part of the environment—it’s a conscious entity with its own desires and intentions. Interact with it to reveal its mysteries, use it for defeating enemies, or face its wrath as it reacts to your choices," says the Steam page. "Resources are scarce, and danger is constant. Craft, scavenge, and plan ahead. Adapt to this green new world or become natural selection's next victim."

It looks kinda trippy, like Atomic Heart meets Stalker, and the nature-ravaged city is beautifully imagined, from the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe to several other French landmarks I should probably know the names of. There's no word on a release date for Forest Reigns, but here's the official website.

That update, 1.4.5, is currently holding as the final final Terraria update, but only because it's not actually finished yet. It was supposed to be out in 2023 but that didn't work, and neither did 2024. It's getting there, but the choice was to crunch to make a 2024 release, or to just let it go and get it out sometime in '25, which the studio eventually opted to do.

"We are sure that will not be welcome news for many—but we remain committed to being a quality-first studio, so we will take the time necessary for each update to feel 'just right'... and we think that once the update is out, everyone will appreciate that time and care," Re-Logic's Ted "Loki" Murphy wrote at the time. "Apologies for this one taking so long for sure, but it will be well worth it."

Ah, but there's another, secret reason Re-Logic won't stop working on Terraria: Life itself. "Terraria will never die as long as there is one last final update," lead developer Andrew 'Redigit' Spinks said on Bluesky (via GamesRadar).

He also revealed his ultimate long-term plan for Terraria, which isn't just to make a really great, unforgettable videogame, but to achieve immortality: "Before I die, I will upload my consciousness to Terraria, there I can troll the players for the rest of eternity."

Hey, it's good to have a goal, although I rather strongly suspect Spinks isn't being entirely serious here. He does, however, have a history of trolling Terraria fans: In 2022, for instance, nine years after announcing Terraria 2, Spinks changed the location on his Twitter bio to "Terraria 2 – A New Age," which caused a big stir among fans until Re-Logic confirmed that he (and a bunch of other people at the studio) were just having some "good fun" with fans.

Re-Logic gets away with it because it is all good fun, for one thing (Spinks also recently announced a new refund policy for Terraria: No questions asked as long as you can defeat him in single combat), but also because Terraria is a genuinely great game, holding an "overwhelmingly positive" rating across more than 1.3 million user reviews on Steam. That's a staggering number, and the fact that it continues to draw in thousands of concurrent players every day, 14 years after its initial release, is equally impressive.

The situation has become something of a running joke among the Terraria community over the years—Re-Logic just can't quit working on it—but I don't think that's an inherently bad thing, either. It's a lot like Eric Barone and Stardew Valley, really: We'd love to see them do something new, but if they want to keep hammering away on the old stuff until the sun goes cold and the mountains crumble to the sea, that'd be great too.

Unfortunately, Spinks offered no indication as to when Terraria's 1.4.5 update will go live. He did, however, commit to getting it done: "We are back to work tomorrow and I’ve got one single mission: releasing the final update. My game face is on."

This is Preface: Undiscovered World, a tech demo from PlayerUnknown Productions, that uses Melba, Greene's new game engine, to create an "Earth-scale world" using "machine learning agents." Preface is the first step in what Greene estimates could be a "five or 10 year journey" to create a massively multiplayer sandbox the size of a planet (and perhaps the metaverse, maybe).

While all these rocks and trees and hills appear to be perfectly sensible and normal, this planet-sized planet I'm trudging around on may be hiding a few anomalies, at least according to the team building the game engine that generated this world.

"We found that a lot of planet Earth is kind of dull, it's very flat," senior engine developer Leon Lubking told me when I visited PlayerUnknown Productions last year. "We could, for example, train [Preface] only on New Zealand, and then you would get much more extreme landscapes, or the Himalayas, or some some islands and tropical places, and then you get different results."

Training the engine on a specific part of the world doesn't mean there won't be some surprises, however, as machine learning (ML) occasionally will, as the Preface team calls it, have a "hallucination."

"We're using ML agents, which will generate things that you don't always know what it's going to be. Lubking said. "It's just gonna do stuff, and we don't really know. So in essence, we don't know what's gonna happen when people play it. And we don't know what to expect ourselves."

That means while the team has discovered a few anomalies on their own while testing it, there may be more hidden on the planet that they haven't seen yet. "The ML does what the ML will, and sometimes it does stuff that is not supposed to be there. So you get these precipices we had, like a black hole, or the naval thing, where we had one tiny little [gap] where it went all the way to the Earth's core," Lubking said. "It would create weird terraces. At some point we had some buildings, and it would put buildings up 100 meters in the sky on little poles."

"The ML is going crazy in generating these kinds of things," said Noel Lopez Gonzaga, lead ML researcher at PlayerUnknown Productions. "Of course, we tried to keep it more under control. But there's always going to be a little bit of hallucination."

While "hallucinations" is the marketing spin for "errors" that tech companies like OpenAI and Google have landed on to excuse their language models confidently stating incorrect facts and telling people to eat rocks, it seems somewhat fitting when applied to procedural environmental generation in a game. A few hallucinations in machine learning isn't necessarily a bad thing in this case, as Gonzaga added: "...sometimes it might create something [that] we don't want to constrain.

"We want to avoid obvious bugs," said technical director Laurent Gorga. "But we have to embrace anomaly as well. Because this is also part of the beauty. Some places on this real planet Earth look like total anomalies. And we don't want to avoid that."

"The sea urchin planet was interesting as well. There are some knobs and levers that you can turn on the ML, and they basically made the differences in elevation very extreme. [The planet] looked like sea urchins, they've got these spiky things," Lubking said, adding: "It's gonna be a weird place."

I haven't spotted any anomalies myself on my various sprints across the virtual planet, but I haven't been visiting for all that long yet, and it's a planet the size of Earth so it's gonna take quite a while to explore. If you want to hunt for a hallucination yourself, you can download Preface: Undiscovered World on Steam and take a stroll—and be sure to use the waypoint and postcard tools to mark the location of any sea urchins or a black holes you find.

This hasn't come without controversy. The question looms: how much can you change Civilization before it's no longer a main series Civilization game? If you're asking me, though, the answer is quite a bit more. This series has been around since before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and has inspired waves of historical strategy games that have gone on to inspire waves of their own. It's a grandparent at this point. I wouldn't even mind if they went further into the weeds than Civ 7 already is.

A big part of why it doesn't bother me is the fact that the older Civs remain so accessible and so playable to this day. Different parts of them have held up better than others, but I think you could sit down as a total newcomer to the series today and play Civ 4, Civ 5, or Civ 6 and have a really good experience. Those games aren't going anywhere. I have friends who still mostly play Civ 4, and see the era of one military unit per tile as high heresy. Civ 5 has remained my favorite all the way through the long post-launch life cycle of Civ 6. I fired it up again just over this last winter break.

So the most offensive thing Firaxis could possibly do, in my opinion, is give us essentially the same game again with better graphics. Civ 6 was never different enough to fully pull me away from Civ 5. I need something with a really strong pitch for why I'd switch over. Why would I play the launch version of Civ 7 over any of the other three relatively modern Civ games that already benefit from tons of expansions, patches, and a rich modding community? I don't want Civ to turn into something like Call of Duty or Madden where new entries often feel more like going through the motions than anything. And dang it, Civ 7 seems to want to give me a compelling answer to that question.

Prior to this entry, every main series Civ game had a different game director. Civ 7 is being helmed by Civ 6's Ed Beach, which initially rubbed me the wrong way. "But it's tradition!" I'd shout. "We need a fresh perspective!" But what I think this opportunity has turned into is, for the first time ever, seeing someone who finished an entire Civilization game getting to take a step back and think about what they would have done differently. And it seems like maybe that led to a more daring direction than the series would have gone otherwise. Beach already got his version of a "safe" Civ game out of his system with Civ 6. So now, why not swing for the fences? Get a little weird with it?

Civ-likes, as a specific subset of 4X, have become a bit of a crowded club over the last few years, too. We got Humankind from Amplitude, Millennia from C Prompt, Ara: History Untold from Oxide, and the somewhat divergent Old World from Mohawk. But for me, none of them have really come all that close to challenging Civ for the crown. The one that comes closest, Old World, is also the one that's the most different from the Civ formula, and I don't think that's a coincidence.

So to see Firaxis look at some of these competitors and incorporate bits of their innovative ideas here and there is also exciting, because frankly, I trust them to do it better. There is some kind of noticeable difference in craft at work here. There is a secret sauce. It's why I keep going back to Civ 5 and Civ 6 over and over and I've barely touched Humankind or Ara since launch (and might never touch Millennia again), other than maybe when I hear that they dropped some kind of huge patch. I'm glad that competition exists, because I think it's pushing Firaxis to reexamine their own design ideas.

I know there is probably a subset of players, maybe the type who don't really play games other than Civ, who would be happy to get a fairly safe sequel every five to ten years, and who would put hundreds more hours into roughly the same game with better graphics. But that's not the path I want to see Civilization take, choked by inertia and bogged down in decadence like a once-great empire fading into obscurity. I want to see a Civ that is bold, innovative, and recognizes that times change. Something new gets built on the ruins of what came before. I'm hoping Civilization 7 will truly be that game.

That's evident after an announcement made today on Marvel Rivals' Steam page, where NetEase characterizes the use of keyboard or mouse adapters as a form of cheating.

"We believe that gaining an unjust advantage through such methods significantly impacts the gaming experience for our players. Therefore, whether on PC or console, we will take measures to vanquish this nefarious behavior," the post dramatically promises. "Penalties for users of keyboard and mouse adapters may include temporary or permanent account suspensions, removal from leaderboards, or other punishments depending on the circumstances."

Anyone playing on a gamepad in Marvel Rivals (including on PC) has access to aim assist, a feature built into the game that's adjustable through six specific settings. What NetEase implies in the above quote is that using one of these adapters allows an infringing console player access to the best of both worlds: the fine control of using a mouse and the use of aim assist, since to Marvel Rivals that mouse is masquerading as a controller.

The adapters in question are small boxes that sit between a console and a paired controller, designed to allow console players to use mice, keyboards, or other USB input devices on platforms not designed to accept them. Today's consoles like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 do natively support keyboard and mouse connectivity, but support in games is left up to developers and still rare. Adapters cost $100-150 and are freely available through retailers like Amazon. One genuine appeal of these tools is that they allow players who strongly prefer a certain gamepad to use it on a platform that doesn't support it.

In its minor threat, NetEase went as far as to name names, manufacturers that it sees as enabling rulebreaking: XIM, Cronus Zen, Titan Two, KeyMander, and Brook Sniper, are examples of emulators that could lead to punishment if used. NetEase flaunts its ability to detect these devices—it's not unusual for a studio to project strength in order to discourage cheating—but what's surprising is that its method may rely on human moderators to some degree, saying "We have forged a strong detection tool and couple[d] with the keen judgment of our watchful human eyes to accurately identify those using keyboard and mouse adapters."

Players themselves can use Marvel Rivals' somewhat hidden replay tool to spot suspected cheaters; the game stores replays of many of your previous quick or competitive matches, allowing you to spectate from the perspective of any player and retroactively report them for misconduct. The existence of a replay tool is necessary infrastructure for many modern anti-cheat systems, and it could mean that player telemetry (like mouse movements) are being stored and analyzed in some fashion. Valve's been doing this in competitive FPSes with VACnet, a machine learning-driven system, for nearly a decade.

Though Marvel Rivals supports crossplay, the wall between console and PC players is higher than just hardware: console players cannot play competitive mode with PC players. Though you can queue with console friends in other modes of play, competitive crossplay is off limits.

On the FAQ section of the Cronus Zen kb/m adapter's website, the creators reassure that the device "does not 'hack' anything in the game or console," but admit that "it is always possible that you can be banned or blocked at any time without notice or warning" when using a third-party device while playing online games on a console. It also reassures players that because the Cronus Zen piggybacks on an official, connected controller to send inputs, "the console always believes that you are gaming with a controller meant for the console you are playing on."

Other competitive shooter studios have taken similar steps against input emulation devices. In 2023, Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2.0 cracked down on use of these devices (Call of Duty is notably one of the few shooters with official mouse and keyboard support on PlayStation). For Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft in 2023 introduced a system it called Mousetrap, not merely banning input emulation devices, but doing something much more cruel: introducing input lag against offending players, turning their advantage into a disadvantage.

Kojima's latest game, Death Stranding 2, doesn't have a release date yet, but it's slated to arrive sometime in 2025 and that apparently means it's time to crunch at Kojima Productions. "The most demanding period of game development—both physically and mentally—commonly known as 'crunch time'," Kojima wrote atop his initial "tired" post. "On top of mixing and Japanese voice recording, there’s an inevitable pile of other tasks: writing comments, explanations, essays, interviews, discussions, and non-game-related work. It’s incredibly tough."

That's no doubt true, and it's why a lot of game studios have taken steps to eliminate crunch in recent years, or at least talk about doing so in a reasonably convincing tone. Still, it's proven tough to avoid even when genuine best efforts are made, especially on large projects with big budgets, corporate overlords, antsy shareholders, and looming deadlines, and it seems Kojima is starting to feel the miles.

"At this age, I can’t help but think about how much longer I’ll be able to stay 'creative'," he wrote in another post. "I want to keep going for the rest of my life, but is it 10 more years? 20? Every day feels like I’m racing against the clock. Even now, at 87, Ridley Scott is still active. And back when he was past 60—my current stage in life—he created the masterpiece 'Gladiator'."

Gladiator is indeed a great film (although it's no Master and Commander) but it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, and even if you were inclined to view them as essentially equivalent in their fields, I don't think anyone would seriously say Kojima's contribution to videogames stands in any way inferior to Scott's impact on film.

But maybe Kojima's unfortunate case of auteur ennui will have a positive outcome: Perhaps, instead of wondering how long he can maintain the gruelling pace of crunch, he might realize that it's bad for everyone, and take some concrete steps to cut it out completely. And then who knows? Maybe in 25 years, he'll still be a "creative" too.

Many fields of inquiry have humble origins.

While I think we can all admire Lusty-Batch's initiative, it's produced an inadvertent poisoning of the collective knowledge pool. Luckily, thanks to the efforts of YouTuber Addypalooza, we finally have a measurement of Elden Ring's map with a bit more rigor behind it.

In a video detailing an Elden Ring geographic survey, Addypalooza outlined two main concerns with Lusty-Batch's measurement (neither of which involved the edible or the horse measurements). First, Lusty-Batch's 79 km² figure measures the entire Elden Ring map, the vast majority of which is water. Second, subtracting all that water still wouldn't account for the fact that much of the remaining geography isn't navigable for the player. Rather than an aerial measurement of the overall surface area of The Lands Between, Addypalooza wanted a measurement of Elden Ring's playable area.

To find that measurement, Addypalooza began by establishing a frame of reference for Elden Ring's illustrated in-game map. Conveniently, FromSoft's game maps are built using meters as a unit of measurement, so using map editor software to measure the precise length of an identifiable feature—in this case, the bridge to the Divine Tower of Limgrave—provided a "yard stick measurement" to determine the scale of the illustrated game map.

With that scale established, Addypalooza used image analysis software to manually trace the boundaries of player-navigable spaces in each Elden Ring region, allowing him to calculate the overall size of the game's playable area. Throughout the video, embedded above, Addypalooza provides interesting context and comparisons for notable bits of Elden Ring geography, like the fact that The Lands Between in their entirety can fit within the lagoon encircled by the main island of Tuvalu. The visual presentation is top-notch, too. It's definitely worth a watch.

Altogether, Addypalooza calculates the total playable area in Elden Ring as 13.48 km²—a much smaller figure than earlier edible-derived measurements. Worth noting is that the measurement doesn't include Elden Ring's many caves, catacombs, and castle interiors, but by Addypalooza's estimate, those areas are "little more than rounding errors compared to the vast open world."

In total, Addypalooza guesses they might combine to a generous 1.5 km², meaning the Elden Ring's overall playable area is around 15 km².

Of course, that leaves out Shadow of the Erdtree, but don't worry. Addypalooza took the same measuring stick to the Land of Shadow, too, measuring its explorable area as being around 5.5 km², providing a combined playable area of Elden Ring and the DLC at roughly 20.5 km².

Unfortunately, Addypalooza's measurements have almost three years of search engine dissemination to catch up on if we want to erase the long-standing asterisk on the Elden Ring map size that's been circulated since 2022. Hopefully, this story's a good start.

The biggest change, of course, is the addition of an offline mode that provides access to the main story campaign and all subsequent seasonal content without having to be online. Suicide Squad launched without an offline mode, which did it no favors: In December 2023, Rocksteady committed to adding one in a post-launch update, but the game's more immediate and pressing problems kept developers from getting to it in anything resembling a timely fashion.

Suicide Squad wasn't the five-alarm catastrophe some were expecting ahead of its release, but neither was it very good: "Flashes of greatness," PC Gamer's Morgan Park said in his 67% review, that are undone by a sub-par story mode, uninteresting loot, and an excess of busywork required to reach the good stuff. Concurrent player numbers cratered quickly, and publisher Warner Bros. said shortly after its release that sales of Suicide Squad had "fallen short of our expectations."

In June 2024, Warner committed to completing Suicide Squad's "currently announced roadmap" of future content releases, really just another way of saying that there would be nothing more beyond that, and the axe officially fell in December.

The good news for those still playing is that Suicide Squad's online features will continue to operate beyond this update, so you can still beat up the bad guys with your friends.

The full Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League season 4 episode 8 patch notes are below.

MEDIEVAL GENIUS

You’ll be able to explore more of the medieval Elseworld in Episode 8: Balance, with twists on familiar sights and new locations too. Take your quest to The Quarry, a fortified citadel you’ll have to besiege if you wish to triumph over the tyrant Brainiac. The Arena is the perfect place for jousting tournaments or interdimensional warfare, and the statues of King Jor-El and Queen Lara Lor-Van will be sure to inspire awe for this age of chivalry and honor.

LIBRA INFAMY SET 

The Infamy Set for Episode 8 is inspired by Libra, an incredibly dangerous DC Super-Villain obsessed with the idea of balance. This fascination with balance carries over to his Infamy Set, which applies stacks of Scales of Libra to enemies, increasing both the damage they deal andreceive by 50% for each stack. This makes it a high risk, high reward set that encourages a bold and dynamic playstyle.

NOTORIOUS WEAPONS

The perfect accompaniment to Libra’s Infamy Set is The Silencer’s Complete Silence. This set of weapons inspired by the deadly assassin The Silencer deals a bonus 200% damage to any enemy affected by stacks of Scales of Libra. The Alt-Fire is where this weapon truly shines, however, dealing 1,000% bonus damage and creating a Silencer Zone where the enemy was hit. Enemies standing in Silencer Zones have 100% reduced damage, making this a perfect crowd control tool while you and your squad dish out some major damage.

Doctor Sivana’s Magic Bullets is the perfect way to kill a lot of enemies really fast. Bullets from this weapon pierce through enemies, apply a stack of Scales of Libra and have a chance to electrify enemies hit. If you can position yourself cleverly to line up multiple enemies with one shot, this shocking weapon can devastate an entire army.

Chronos’ Equilibrium dials up the glass cannon playstyle to the max, dealing 25% bonus damage for every 1% of your Shield missing, encouraging a dangerous but incredibly powerful style of play where you’ll constantly be in the middle of the fray.

GAMEPLAY CHANGES 

• Reduced the duration of Deathstroke’s Suicide Strike against certain enemies, to be closer in line with other characters’. 
• The XP requirements for Squad Levels have been decreased, and rewards from previously earned XP are given retroactively. Players with profiles that have earned XP may notice an increase in Squad Levels, and that extra Squad Points are available to spend following the update to Episode 8.

BUG FIXES 

• Fixed a bug for players in the Japan region that caused LuthorCoin to expire prematurely. 
• Fixed a bug that prevented the Raising Hell Playlist from updating when playing in Episodes other than Episode 7. 
• Fixed a bug that prevented players from correctly receiving bonus XP from Critical Kills and from killing Infused enemies. 
• Fixed a bug that prevented B-Technology Resources from being rewarded upon completing certain missions. 
• Fixed a bug that prevented new personal bests in Killing Time from registering on the Leaderboards. 
• Fixed a bug in the Episode 7 Mayhem Mission that caused the kill counter to display incorrect values. 
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused Lootinauts to disappear when killing the host they were hiding inside. 
• Fixed a bug during the Episode 7 Mayhem Mission that sometimes caused Green Lantern Constructs to immediately reappear after being destroyed. 
• Fixed a bug that caused Harley Quinn’s Shorten Rope Traversal Ability to not be usable while using the Trigger Happy controller layout. 
• Fixed a bug that caused Captain Boomerang’s ‘Captain On Deck TFX Pack’ to charge the wrong amount of LuthorCoin. 
• Fixed a bug that occurred upon purchasing the Joker Emote Bundle that caused one of the emotes to appear to not be owned. 
• Fixed a bug that caused Gorilla Grodd’s Tier 2 ‘Mind Over Matter’ Infamy Set to deal 500% bonus damage to non-Crazed enemies, instead of correctly requiring them to be Crazed. 
• Fixed a bug with Orphan’s Heartseeker whereby nearby enemies failed to receive 50% of Suicide Strike damage when performed on a Marked enemy. 
• Fixed a bug with Brain’s Teaser whereby killing a Burning enemy with the weapon’s Alt-Fire did not always apply burn to nearby enemies. 
• Fixed a bug that caused issues for players navigating around pikes in the Medieval Elseworld. 
• Various crash fixes. 
• Various UI fixes. 
• Various SFX fixes. 
• Various gameplay bug fixes. 
• Various performance improvements and fixes. 
• Various animation and cinematic fixes. 
• Various audio fixes. 
• Various environmental fixes. 
• Fixed several incorrect or untranslated text strings. 
• Fixed instances of enemies spawning incorrectly. 

KNOWN ISSUES

• When attempting Riddler challenges from an Episode other than the one currently selected, progress can sometimes be tracked incorrectly. To correct this, exit out of your current session back to the main menu. 

Remember that kinda weird, chibi-Sim Animal Crossing-adjacent spin-off game? I wouldn't blame you if you said "no," considering the original MySims is the only one in the series that ever made it to PC back in 2008. But now it's re-releasing on our humble desktops alongside MySims Kingdom, which puts a lil' medieval spin on the whole formula.

The bundle landed on the Switch back in November of last year, so this isn't exactly totally new even by re-release standards, but I'm always happy to see old games that didn't make it over to PC finally getting their much-deserved port.

PC Gamer spoke to Sims series VP of franchise creative Lyndsay Pearson earlier this month, and had the opportunity to ask her a little bit about MySims. "At its heart, it's still very, very Sims," she said. "It's the little characters that have a lot of really silly personalities, and you get to customise their world, meet their neighbours, make friends with them. And so I love that DNA of The Sims which comes through with such a different feel."

Pearson added that the spin-off series "scratches a very different itch than I get out of The Sims 4 or 3 or any of our other bigger, traditional HD offerings on PC. So it's fun to be able to sort of reintroduce a different flavour and give new audiences a chance."

Hey, it's me, I'm the new audience. I never actually got around to playing MySims as a kid—I loved The Sims and had a Wii, but it was more of a Mario Kart box than anything I actually remembered to buy games for. I'm excited to dive in and give the games a go, and who knows? Maybe if we're good we'll get a MySims Agents port somewhere down the line, too.

In an interview with Metro, Chen discussed the reception to the game's release and where NetEase's philosophy stands for game balancing and content updates going forward. When asked about the rate at which the studio is planning to add new heroes, Chen said we can expect to see newcomers on the Marvel Rivals roster as often as every month and a half.

"Every season, we'll be rolling out fresh seasonal stories, new maps, and new heroes. We'll actually be breaking down each season into two halves," Chen said. "The length of one season is three months. And for each half of the season, we will introduce a new hero."

If NetEase manages to maintain that cadence, Marvel Rivals could have more than 40 playable heroes by this time next year. It's a blistering tempo, to the point that I'm worried for the artists, designers, and programmers who'll have to pull it off. As a point of comparison, Overwatch 2 has only achieved a roster of 42 playable heroes after more than eight years of adding to the original selection of Overwatch characters.

NetEase does benefit from having the Marvel universe to work with. Adapting a comic book character's established power set into a playable set of abilities is a lighter lift than building a character concept from scratch. I wonder how sustainable that rapidly-expanding roster will be, though, especially as it relates to monetization and player investment. Cosmetics are the lifeblood of a free-to-play shooter, but will NetEase be able to pump out enough cool skins for its dozens of characters that players won't feel like their favorites are being overlooked?

As an added wrinkle: Even a universe as big as Marvel's only has so many recognizable A-listers in it. Despite how it might feel sometimes, there's a finite number of Avengers and X-men. At some point, NetEase will have to start digging deeper in the barrel, and those heroes might not have the same broad appeal. Still, if NetEase ever adds Beta Ray Bill, I'll be one of the dozens celebrating.

As for which types of heroes NetEase will prioritize, Chen says it'll depend on where the game's at. Asked how the studio will decide how to distribute new heroes between the Duelist, Vanguard, and Support roles, Chen said hero additions "will be guided by the overall gameplay experience or theme that we want to create for each season."

NCsoft is working on a "modern reinterpretation" of its Blade and Soul MMO called Blade and Soul Neo, a remaster that promises a range of visual enhancements, gameplay updates, and a way for fans to "re-live that pure MMO action fantasy experience they once knew."

Blade and Soul Neo will follow the storyline of the original game: Players will select from one of four races based on "animal lore"—dragon, qilin, phoenix, and turtle—and from seven classes including Assassin, Blade Dancer, Blade Master, Destroyer, Force Master, Kung Fu Master, and Summoner as they embark upon an adventure to "restore honor to their clan that's been wiped out by enemy forces."

Visually, though, the game has been upgraded considerably, with enhanced textures and lighting, better animations, and more environmental details. Combat customization has also been expanded to offer players more flexibility in building their own unique combat techniques. The "Windwalk" mechanic will also be changed: Originally limited by a stamina bar, Blade and Soul Neo will feature "infinite Windwalk" for both walking and sprinting so you can get where you need to go without an excess of fiddling around.

Blade and Soul didn't really knock our socks off when it finally made its way to western gamers in 2016, following its 2012 debut in Korea and 2014 release in Japan. The PvP combat was "excellent" but the game as a whole was "just the same grind that's already done much better in other games." That might not be an issue, except PvP gameplay is limited until you've "pushed through the dreadfully dull PvE and leveled your character up to the cap. While arena matches equalize gear, you won't have access to all of your abilities until you've unlocked them through leveling."

How exactly Blade and Soul Neo will go about changing up its combat mechanics remains to be seen, but the promise of "enhanced combat customization" could be a sign that level-based ability locks are being cut, which would be a big step in the right direction.

A release date for Blade and Soul Neo hasn't been announced but NCsoft says it's "coming soon." In the meantime, if you're curious you can pre-register for the remaster at bladeandsoul.com.

If you've forgotten how things changed over the years (I did) the Sims Community fansite has a helpful refresher on several old Sims 4 start screens. Sat next to each other, it's a little unnerving how the list of packs you own just kept encroaching on the menu over the years until 2020 brought us the panelled look that gives me Windows 8 flashbacks. Lest we forget already, this is what we were rocking as of last week:

It was awful, sorry. It looks like a game launcher trying to cram in the latest update news while enticing me to make purchases, for starters. Somehow there are three different buttons on that screen that want me to try out the scenarios system, which makes no sense. The Sims 4 start screen had gotten pushier than door-to-door pesticide service salespeople.

My fellow Sims-liker Mollie Taylor and I got the chance to talk with Sims series head honcho Lyndsay Pearson leading up to this and other anniversary announcements, during which she acknowledged that information overload was definitely one of the pain points in the old menu.

"One of the challenges is the first thing you see when you open the game," Pearson said. "There's probably 100 things we could tell you, right? It could be: what were you playing last time? What is new in the gallery? What is new that you could play that you haven't played yet? There's so many messages that could be there. It becomes overwhelming to figure out how to curate where you might want to go."

The main menu had indeed accumulated approximately 100 things it was trying to tell me every time I started the game. The Sims 4 menu did take a step in the right direction when it added that 'resume' button indicating your most recently-played household. The new menu goes all in on that concept and really I dig it.

Squad vibes aside, this menu finally puts my save file front and center—literally. Things like scenarios and the gallery have been moved over to side modules while the ever-present DLC-pushing and the new limited-time events are relegated to different tabs in the menu entirely. It even includes a little context on the family you were playing with their name and household funds.

"What we've really learned is, the way that players often come to The Sims is you may play for a lot of time all at once, and then take a little break for a little while," Pearson said. "But sometimes you forget where you were, so bringing that family front and center is helping kind of draw you back into your story and say, 'Hey, remember these people? Remember what you were doing here?' And the sims are the heart of the experience."

I don't spend a lot of time praising The Sims 4 lately—it's got a lot of goodwill yet to claw back after years of buggy DLCs and a lot of confusing communication about future games—but reframing the opening of the game to feature my sims instead of my next DLC purchase does really feel like the right attitude for Maxis to be kicking off 2025 with.

"You are modding naturals," Larian posted on X, above an image of an unexpectedly chesty Withers—and in case you might miss it, the "00" in 100 million is very strategically placed to draw the eye.

And just in case you miss that, Larian followed up with a direct link to the Withers Big Naturals mod, "Hot to go on PC, Mac, and consoles."

Lest there be any doubt, I am 100% serious about this:

Withers Big Naturals has (Or is it have? Because, well, you know) been available on PC since April 2024, when it (they?) were first uploaded to NexusMods. But console players have had to do without until the release of patch 7 in October, which among numerous other things finally brought mod support to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S players. PC Gamer big naturals appreciator Harvey Randall expressed some concern in November that console gamers would never have the opportunity to appreciate Withers' enhanced assets first hand, but with the official green light from Larian now in hand(s), that's clearly not a worry.

If you're just getting started on your Baldur's Gate 3 modding adventure, Larian's got a good roundup of resources that'll help get you off to a good start on YouTube.

"I think the reason The Sims continues to be so unique is we can offer this breadth of content through DLC and over the years," she said, adding that such a large scope is "really difficult to capture in a lot of experiences, because maybe it doesn't always make sense and it's a lot of things to get to work together."

Similarly to what ex-Sims head Rod Humble told PC Gamer last year while he was making the now-canned Life by You, Pearson pointed to the sheer complexity that making something on this scale entails. "How do you make all those sort of pushes and pulls on the simulation make some amount of sense? And there's this very fine balance between being too smart, and your characters don't need you at all, and not being smart enough where they don't do anything unpredictable," she said. "That is really hard to get right. Even The Sims has swung back and forth over the years, right? Like, you go back and play an old Sims game, it's hard to keep your Sims alive.

"So there's a balance to find there. And I think that all the teams that I've ever met that have been working in this space struggle to find that, which is partially why they end up going after this particular niche, because then you can really focus towards whatever that story is. So it's really that open canvas that is a little daunting."

But despite the challenges other developers have faced—Life by You's demise, Inzoi's delay into 2025, and even EA's own challenges with Project Rene, Pearson is ready for more contenders in the life sim space. "I'm excited to see more people trying, because I think we can learn from each other, and we can look at what's going on in the space and see what players are reacting to, which is always great," she said. "I like to be challenged and try new things."

I'm glad to see Pearson ready to welcome her life sim rivals with open arms, and I hope those challengers actually begin to manifest themselves this year. After all, we've got Inzoi on the way, hopefully launching into early access on March 28, which is probably the closest thing to The Sims we have in terms of scope. There's also the smaller Paralives, which continues to chug along with a vague 2025 window, and Sims creator Will Wright's recent revelation of his new bizarre-sounding AI-driven life sim Proxi.

Personally I'm pretty positive on the new start screen, which feels like a great departure from the cluttered menu full of announcement boxes that looked inspired by Windows 8's tiles. In addition to that there are refreshes on old content, new items, and another limited time event coming too.

Also don't miss our big interview with Sims series VP Lyndsay Pearson about the new announcements, updates, and future plans for the series.

What's coming in the 25th anniversary base game updates?

On January 14:
Redesigned start screen featuring your last played family
Redesigns of townie homes for Pancake, Goth, Caliente, Landgraab, and BFF

On February 4:
70+ new items for CAS and Build/Buy mode
Limited time event called "Blast from the Past" with in-game rewards

New start screen

The Sims 4 just got a new main menu screen, and it's a pretty big change from what the menu has looked like for the past decade. It totally does away with the tiled announcements format that we've had for a while and instead features your last-played family really prominently in the center. It's actually a great change, sweeping DLC purchases and scenarios reminders into side panels and different tabs so that the focus of the screen is on you and your actual game.

Townie home redesigns

As it's been doing with redesigns on specific sim families, Maxis has also refreshed and updated the designs for some townie houses. The Goth, Pancake, Caliente, Landgraab, and BFF houses are all refreshed with new exterior designs and furniture swatches. You can really spot the difference on the Goth mansion which got a really overhauled roof design and much better contrast in its window trims, fences, and other details.

New CAS and Build/Buy

On the actual anniversary on February 4, The Sims 4 is getting another big content drop with new CAS fashion and Build/Buy items too. Maxis bills it as over 70 new items across CAS and Build/Buy. Revealed in EA's post are:

• Two new hairstyles
• Baby hairs added to three existing hairstyles
• A new goatee
• A toddler hairstyle
• Gold chain necklace
• Pearls necklace
• Fitted cap headwear
• Heels, sneakers, and sandals
• New clothes including a turtleneck, bodysuit, jackets, jeans, bike shorts, and more
• New windows and doors
• New wood finishes for kitchen cabinets
• A large pirate ship kids outdoor playset

Blast from the Past event

Maxis is also running another limited time event with rewards for The Sims 4. Like the recent Halloween and winter holiday events, there will be themed quests to complete in Live Mode that reward in-game items over the four weeks. The theme is a nostalgia-fueled "blast from the past" so there's some iconic Sims 1 stuff in there like colorful inflatable chairs and a giant cake along with more general aughts nostalgia like milk cartons and home phones.

PC Gamer recently got to sit down and chat with Lyndsay Pearson, vice president of franchise creative for The Sims, and whose history with the series goes all the way back to The Sims: Vacation in 2002. Having just hosted the Behind the Sims presentation—dropping news of a sizeable base game update for The Sims 4, including a townie home refresh, and the re-release of two MySims games on PC—Pearson spoke a little on the past of the series, as well as what's happening right now and what's to come.

Giving spin-offs a new coat of paint, and the old ones left on the backburner

With MySims being the first spin-off to be getting some attention in a hot sec—and also seeing MySims Kingdom released on PC for the first time—I couldn't help but poke Pearson to see if that would open the door for more re-releases down the line. After all, games like The Urbz, The Sims Bustin' Out, and The Sims 2 Castaway are huge wells of nostalgia, and I would absolutely kill to strut around a city while The Black Eyed Peas blast their songs in Simlish once more.

"I think there is a chance now to say 'Oh, maybe there is new life in these other titles, and that spin-offs have a place," Pearson tells me. "So one of the things that I get to think about is like, where should The Sims go next, and how do we create all these different experiences and touch points for different audiences? And I've had a lot of conversations lately about, like, what could this mean for other titles in our collection?"

As Pearson points out, her 23-year career on the series has never actually involved the spin-offs. "I was always on our core—Sims 1, Sims 2, Sims 3, Sims 4—but I very much wanted to be part of those teams as well. So maybe this is like, my chance to be like 'Great, now I get to do it again in some other way.' So I think it gives us an opportunity that maybe we didn't think was there before, which is really exciting."

Bringing townie homes to their full potential

Another big Behind the Sims announcement was the revamp of some iconic base game townie homes: the Pancakes, Goths, Calientes, and the Landgraabs being some of the lucky families to receive an architectural upgrade. It's been over a decade since The Sims 4 released, and in that time a lot has changed. I mean hell, we didn't even have pools in the original 2014 launch.

But now there are more tools, and a lot more player investment in the lives of these pre-created people. "The Pancakes, for example, were certainly not a family we thought would gain traction the way that they did," Pearson tells me. "And I love that it has, because that's one of the magic things that happens in The Sims." Pearson says the advancement in the game's tools and each family's story has offered the team a unique chance. "It's a really fun opportunity to go back and say 'Okay, what have we learned? What do people love about these characters? What do people love about our catalogue, and how could we show them off in a different way?'"

She continued: "I mean, particularly when you look at the architectural tools, there's so many more things you can build in a house now that we just didn't have when the game first came out. So it's a rare chance to be able to go back to something that you shipped originally and say 'Oh, I can refresh this and give it a new update.' And now we know that we don't have to build them to be the cheapest houses someone might kick them out of and move in to. We can actually build it as part of a story and part of the lore of the world."

Life sims are damn hard to make, it turns out

The conversation around life sims—and EA's continued monopoly on the genre—feels like it's ramped up over the last couple of years. The Sims continues to go largely unchallenged, though that's not without several attempts by other developers. Ex-Sims head Rod Humble tried with Life by You, a game that found itself unceremoniously scrapped at the finish line following several delays.

Humble had told PC Gamer last year that life sims are "the most complex RPGs ever written," a sentiment which Pearson echoed when asked what she thinks makes the genre so hard to replicate.

"You really can play it in so many different ways at so many different times, depending on how you kind of feel that day," Pearson said, explaining the sheer scope The Sims has. "And I think that that breadth is really difficult to capture in a lot of experiences, because maybe it doesn't always make sense, and it's just a lot of a lot of things to get to work together.

"And the other complexity about life sims is, how do you make all of those pushes and pulls on the simulation make some amount of sense? And there's this very fine balance between being too smart—and your characters don't need you at all—and not being smart enough where they don't do anything unpredictable. Even The Sims has swung back and forth over the years, right? Like, you go back and play an old Sims game, it is hard to keep your Sims alive."

Pearson is right. I've lost count of how many Sims YouTube videos I've watched that largely boil down to creators desperately trying to keep everyone alive in the original game, a surprisingly gargantuan task. "So there's a balance to find there," Pearson says.

It's interesting to look at those pushes and pulls even within the series. As Lauren Morton points out, The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 feel fundamentally different in just how you play them. The idea of you driving the story versus the game doing it is the most visible when comparing these two games, and that balance is something Pearson says is "a tension that we've tried to walk over the years."

While finding that fine line has been key for The Sims 4's ongoing development—something that Pearson admits the team has been increasingly experimenting with over the years, and trying to find a way that satisfies both playstyles—she also appreciates the difference each core game can bring. "I actually like the idea that they can all coexist for that reason, because I think they do scratch different itches. I think they do offer you a different way to engage and push back, but trying to solve it all in one game is, I would say, the ongoing mission."

How The Sims plans to stay unique in the face of competition

Like I said, other developers have been trying to come and stake their claim in the life sim genre. It hasn't been wildly successful thus far, sure, but upcoming 2025 games like Inzoi and Paralives are finally looking to turn the tide.

Pearson isn't worried though, telling me she wants to be challenged by more cooks in the kitchen. After all, the series has its legacy and its unique Simsness by its side. "I think our humour is a very particular flavour," she says. "I think there's a lot of puns, there's a lot of parody, there's a very specific flavour of The Sims world, because it is just enough character of our own that I think it's hard to replicate, because it feels very uniquely Sims to us.

"I think the relationship that the players have to their sims, the sims have to each other, is also just really unique in what I've been seeing in a lot of these other things. Now, I haven't played them all, obviously, but I watch them too, and I see what's coming. And I just think that The Sims offers this affinity to these little people because they are just human enough, but just quirky enough.

Pearson talked about The Sims' juxtaposition between crafting realistic people and stories with its more outlandish aspects, like a world filled with vampires and werewolves. "It's a really broad spectrum, and I think what's still very uniquely Sims-y, is that we've created a world where those things feel like they make sense together somehow, which is a very particular flavour. So I think that'll still stay unique to us," she says. "It's still our voice, our vibe."

How the commitment to transparency is going

The Sims as a franchise feels like it's firing on all cylinders at the moment. The Sims 4 isn't going away any time soon, continuing to be peppered with all manner of paid add-ons. There's also the recently-announced Sims Hub, encompassing everything from its core series to mobile game The Sims Freeplay and the slightly confusing Project Rene.

The team committed to better communication around these projects, something which has had mixed results. Confusion around what some upcoming projects are actually supposed to be, along with leaks, has sometimes muddied the message Pearson and the team are trying to send. "It definitely happens in any of these franchises like The Sims, where you have a lot of things happening, you're going to end up with crossed wires occasionally," she said. "I think we are always evolving our communication strategy to try and figure out what is the right way to share the right information at the right time that isn't confusing or misleading."

Pearson added: "You can have the best intentions one year that totally go out the window the next year for completely reasonable reasons, but sharing that path and that journey can be even more complicated sometimes, so it's really trying to find a balance."

Looking to the future

Despite some small snags in communication, it's still full steam ahead for the series. When asked if The Sims 4 would be getting some kind of major overhaul a la World of Warcraft or Runescape anytime soon, Pearson doesn't appear to be super jazzed about such a large-scale undertaking just yet. "We certainly entertain everything," she tells me. "I mean, we talk about all the different paths forward and what makes sense and what to do with The Sims 4 or any of our games."

Pearson said there are "so many different ways" to go about potentially giving The Sims 4 some sort of technical or graphical overhaul, and pointed towards the current ongoing effort to tidy up a decade of lingering bugs through the game's regular laundry lists fixes. "I think it's a question of looking at all those pieces and parts and saying 'Which pieces really need the biggest overhaul? Can we do them in parallel? Do we need to do that fundamental scaffolding?'"

For now, Pearson says the priority is "a continuing audit of what does the game need right now? What is the game going to need in a year or two years? And what is the best way to get to that thing?"

So it doesn't seem like anything major is coming our way yet, but honestly I don't particularly mind. A focus on patching some of the more lingering issues up feels like the best direction to take right now, especially as we could be sticking with The Sims 4 for several more years at this point.

When asked if Pearson had anything else to say, she called working on The Sims series an honour, adding: "I think that The Sims continues to be this kind of funhouse mirror to the world, and that's why it keeps growing and evolving and shifting and changing, and it's certainly one of the reasons that I've been part of it for so long.

"And I think that people, whether you're new to The Sims, or you've been with us all along or for many of these years, there's always something new and different and interesting. Join the community, connect with all of those creatives out there, and you'll learn a bunch of stuff you had no idea was even in the game."

League of Legends season 1 saw a bunch of new features and changes made, including a new thematic that revolves around Noxus, a change to ranked resets, and a more streamlined reward system. While the last change may seem like a smart idea, it's wound up causing more harm than good for some players.

"Over the years these systems have become needlessly complex, with an excessive number of currencies, unnecessary steps to craft and claim rewards, overlapping loot types, we could go on," developer Andrei Van Roon says in a dev update. "You've been given some key fragments that you then have to craft into a key that you pair with a chest, that you open up to get another key and a chest and some essence that you open up to get a skin shard then you pay for some orange essence or reroll to eventually get a random skin. That's sort of a level of unnecessary complexity going on."

Another problem with rewards in League of Legends was that everything was scattered throughout the client. It was needlessly hard to keep track of how to get rewards and where they ended up. So, to solve the issue of unorganised rewards, the developers decided to just put it all in one place: the battle pass.

"We're moving most of our scattered reward systems to the free track of those battle passes," Roon says. "So most rewards will now be in one place, with systems like Honor and Champion Mastery feeding into the pass. For example, having a higher Honor level will give a bonus to past experience earned.

"There will always be a battle pass active with both a free and a paid track, with the price the same as an Event Pass today. You'll get Pass rewards through the tracks, meaning we're removing the Event Tokens and Shop."

It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free。 from r/leagueoflegends

Unfortunately, streamlining rewards isn't the only consequence of these changes. Some players realised that this reliance on the battle pass now means level-up rewards are non-existent, making it harder for new players to unlock champions and skins.

"It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free," cpztpkqc says. "Right now, you can only get Blue Essence from the Battle Pass. After you grind through the first 50 levels, you need to play for 882 hours to unlock a single extra champion! Is League of Legends deliberately trying to shut out all newcomers?"

It used to be that players could get champion capsules after reaching a new level. Those provide champion shards and/or Blue Essence, which you could then use to unlock new champions. But you now have to get these entirely from the battle pass.

However, the battle pass will still provide some good incentives via free rewards for players to earn. "You can earn 12 skins per year with the free pass. Half of these skins will be themed to the season you unlock them in," Roon says. "We'll also be simplifying the loot and crafting system... Overall, we want the pass to be the core vessel for how you track and earn rewards. If you choose to buy the paid version, we also want it to be very clear what you're getting and how to make the most of it."

For the most part, players are angry on behalf of newcomers who won't have access to the 169 champions, and will now have to work even harder to unlock the roster. Or for casual players who don't want to invest a ton of time and money into League of Legends but still want to be rewarded for the effort they do put in.

"So, they have not only removed the weekly chests that kept the casual players that play very seldom in the game, [but also got] rid of the champion capsules once you level up, nerfing the pass and releasing deteriorated [skins] in terms of quality," one player says. "They really want to kill their own game by being anti-f2p."

League of Legends is 16 years old now, and has had a famously hard time when it comes to fostering new players. Last year, a senior Riot developer reported that the League of Legends playerbase is getting older: "Candidly, it's not the same situation it was 10 years ago."

Even after the success of Arcane, a report from Bloomberg suggested that Riot still couldn't retain the new players that it caught through the animated series. So making progression less rewarding may not be a step in the right direction for League of Legends, not if they want to encourage new players to withstand the onslaught of flaming from their angry teammates who, in my experience, zero in on newbs from miles away.

A user by the name of Dr. Mecha Kitten donated $43,690—more than my yearly salary—to Awesome Games Done Quick. This is, according to the site's own donation tracker, the most cash that a single person has given to the cause in one go—the Humble Bundle still takes the cake for highest overall donation at $51,578, but given that's, you know, a company? I'm willing to cut Mecha Kitten some slack.

The donation, which you can see clipped here, arrived during a race between speedrunners Vert and Storster to beat Super Mario World via a "96 exit run", where both players needed to find all 96 exits to every different level (the game has several secret exit doors).

The best part? Aside from a tremendously generous lump sum, Dr. Mecha Kitten's donation is also a shitpost. See, during Mario speedruns at the event, the audience began to yell whenever boos showed up on-screen because, y'know, ghosts are scary. This kind of charity-induced mania isn't at all uncommon for events like GDQ, by the way—it's part of what makes them so special. Like a dog playing baseball, or speedrunning Crazy Taxi with a live band.

As mentioned in the donation itself, the numbers 43690 are 0xAAAA in hexadecimal code—as in, "aaaa!" like the noise you might make when you stub your toe, or see a ghost.

Awesome Games Done Quick 2025 has now finished, as it ran from January 5 to January 12, but you can take a look at all the highlights over on the event's Twitch channel. Meanwhile, Summer Games Done Quick is slated to kick off July 6 this year, and I'm sure the unstoppable generosity of the gaming public—and their ability to meme with said generosity—is going to hold strong.

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to precariously make your way down a skyscraper riding a two-wheeled electric vehicle while dodging obstacles and completing minigames, then the devs over at Alien Studio have just the game for you. SickWay VR is the perfect way to experience this adrenaline-filled adventure without actually risking your life in the process.

This VR game just launched on Steam today and sees players navigate tricky obstacles as well as some thrilling minigames. But that's not the hard part—you're also suspended up at the top of a city skyline, trying to make it down to the bottom in one piece, meaning you can't just jump off the top and hope you stick the landing.

SickWay VR uses realistic physics to ensure that you feel every step, impact, and fall as if it were actually happening. But even if dropping 150 metres doesn't make you break out into a slight sweat, don't underestimate what a healthy fear of heights plus a VR headset may evoke.

It'll also look like you're actually up in the clouds, thanks to some really impressive, realistic graphics—you may even get the chance to briefly sit back and enjoy all the scenic panoramic views of the city, you know, between all the action-packed runs.

SickWay VR also offers more features to help players tap into their creativity and dial up the fun. The Multiplayer mode will let you compete with up to four friends or players worldwide to see who has the best skills, coordination, and stomach for heights. But beware, the five tracks that are on offer will be full of challenges to overcome, which will probably be that much more difficult to complete when you also have the pressure of competition on your mind.

Then there's the Track Editor, which will let you create your own kinds of courses that you can then test out for yourself as well as share with your friends or the rest of the player community. You can keep track of all the community creations and share your own experiences on social platforms, including Discord, Reddit, Instagram, X, Facebook, and TikTok, or check out Alien Studio's YouTube channel.

Don't shy away from giving the Track Editor a go. Even if you don't usually make your own builds, doing so in SickWay VR is really accessible thanks to its straightforward and approachable interface. It'll be exciting to see what kind of outlandish creations players manage to conjure up.

If all of this sounds right up your alley, then now's the best time to give SickWay VR a go, thanks to its 10% discount. This deal is a limited-time offer to celebrate its release, so it will only be available for the first seven days that SickWay VR is up on Steam—after this, you will be able to purchase the game for €12.99. That's also a pretty good price considering what's on offer, but striking while the iron's hot and taking advantage of the discount seems better to me.

You start the game stranded on an island following an airship crash. After a cutscene explaining this you're tasked with escaping the cave you woke up in, which introduces the crafting mechanic. It's easy enough since you just need to collect rocks and sticks to make basic tools and then re-build a collapsed bridge before you can scramble across some rocks and make your great escape. After this, you get to craft a glider to strap to your back like a wingsuit and visit some nearby islands to learn more about airship travel and how to fly before getting to build your ship and graduate from glider travel. It's the same routine a lot of survival crafting games follow of 'you wake up in a place and have to find a way to survive' with the added emphasis on sailing through the clouds.

But for a game so driven by its exploration, when I finally got to man the helm, it felt underwhelming. With such a dramatic swell of music playing as I ran out into the world for the first time and the excitement of learning about flight from what looked like ancient tomes on different islands, I may have set my expectations too high.

Sure, it's cool to travel around on a floating island airship or by glider rather than on foot. But in terms of what there is to do or see, it loses its charm pretty quickly. There are attempts to help Aloft set the foundations for what could be a unique addition to the survival game genre, such as its main mode of transportation being either glider or airship rather than by foot or the fact you never visit a mainland and you're constantly between islands. But for the most part, these novelties wear off once you realise each place you're visiting is almost a replica of the last.

Learn to fly

Once I'd clumsily glued a rudder, a sail, and a helm to my airship the world became my oyster. I was free to set off in any direction I wanted and continue the routine check over each floating island to see if there was anything worth pillaging. Unfortunately, a lot of the islands I came across at the start of my adventure felt surprisingly empty. While there were occasionally some animals or vegetation to add to the field guide you craft at the start of the game, and simple resources like wood and stone, more often than not I'd spend a few minutes here before venturing to the next.

The airship is not a simple means of transportation either, which is probably on my part for assuming it would be anyway. Instead, you have six different keys to bear in mind while you're floating around. Two control your elevation, two for your steering, and two for your speed. If you lean on one key for too long and then let it go, your settings won't automatically level out. I learned this the hard way since multiple occasions left me rolling through the clouds quite literally full steam ahead onto an island with no understanding of why I wasn't stopping.

It was an unexpected challenge, one which helped me engage with Aloft slightly more than just running around trying to find where I needed to go, and gave me the same satisfaction I had when learning to sail a boat in Sea of Thieves for the first time, which is a gold star in my book. Sailing through the air is a little tougher than the high seas though, so I ended up relying on the glider you craft at the start of the game to get around more than the airship for the most part.

From the ground up

To contrast how challenging flying your airship is, customising it feels like a walk in the park. As is the way with most survival games, you have to collect materials scattered around the world to craft and build on your base. This is where I finally saw Aloft start to shine. Crafting is basically just a game of mashing items together in the hopes that they become something useful, and a surprising amount of knowledge from other survival crafting games comes in handy here. If you're crafting something for the first time, you're met with a series of question marks rather than the items you can create, so it's a lot of guessing to start. But, it definitely feels more rewarding when you create your first set of tools. Having to blindly throw items together in the hopes of creating something useful, like rope, is one of the most rewarding parts of Aloft, so I was thankful it made up a lot of the experience.

Alongside customising your airship, you're encouraged to build farmlands and animal enclosures too. It lessened the amount of time I spent feeling like Aloft was barren, and it made the arduous journey through the clouds in my airship slightly more rewarding. But, it makes up a surprisingly small amount of the game at the moment. I assume this explains why certain islands are so empty since they're designed to be outposts for farming or animal care. But a lot of the time I didn't find any reward in this, aside from the obvious task of restoring the environment of each island to its former glory, so I can see other players quickly losing interest in another integral part of the game.

Aloft strives to be the next survival crafting game in the sphere of more relaxing gaming, but it has a long way to go before it gets there. It's got the potential of being a neat little game to play for a few hours in the evening, but currently, it's not something I'm desperate to jump into when I fancy something more laid back. Ideally, its world would be more populated and there would be significantly more to do rather than lose yourself in the clouds for a while. It has fun parts, and I appreciate its attempts to set itself apart from other games, but if it wants to be something I'm racing to play with friends then it does need some improvements first.

Amongst the veteran MMO crowd, though, Pantheon's been making waves. Understandably, too. EverQuest legend Brad McQuaid was developer Visionary Realms' chief creative officer until his death in 2019, and the promise of an extremely social MMO that maintains a lot of the friction that modern games have done away with sounds compelling. But it's been a decade since its announcement, and it's only now in early access, where it will be for at least two years, and it still doesn't feel close to prime time.

Monk-y business

Case in point: I had to leave the game and search online to get even a shred of information about the early access classes. After I discovered, via a detour to the official website, that the Dire Lord was a tank, I instead rolled a Monk, DPS coward that I am. Specifically, a handsome fish-man Monk. And then I was deposited in a cave surrounded by class trainers. A Necromancer player ran in circles behind me, his skeletal familiar following closely behind. Where am I? This was a question I would not find the answer to for a while.

Pantheon's tutorials explain the basic stuff that everyone already knows—how to move, how to turn the camera, how to open your inventory—but when it comes to the context of your adventure or even the subtlest hint of what you should actually be doing, the game obstinately refuses to give in. "You're on your own, kiddo," it says, as a spell-flinging skeleton murders you.

OK, to be fair, a letter in my inventory did tell me to chat to a tradeskill trainer in a village. But I was not in said village and had no idea where it was. No map. No quest giver to ground me in the world or start me on a fun adventure. I just had to wander around and hope for the best. When I eventually found what I would later discover was one of two exits to the cave, I entered a glade surrounded by mountains with no way forward. I returned to the cave, where a wolf killed me.

Reddit would later inform me that I'd need to dive into the glade's murky pond, swim to the bottom, and then travel through another cave, which would eventually allow me to start exploring the world proper. Of course the first area's exit is hidden in a murky pond. Where else would it be? But I made the right call by not leaving, it turns out, because my first unspoken objective was actually to grind a few levels in the cave.

Pantheon has travelled through a wormhole from a time when murdering bats, wolves and the occasional skeleton in a dank cave was the adventure, where little context was needed. Dungeon crawls where the only hint of story came from what you and your companions made out of it—told through your victories, failures and near-misses. Where the developers created systems rather than entertainment.

But if it was ever a joyful experience, it sure as hell isn't now. In a previous version of this article, I dedicated the entirety of it to my cave misadventures, growing increasingly frustrated and sweary. And then I was going to pack it all in because I do not have the patience for this kind of MMO in 2025. But for some reason I persevered, and somewhere along the way I started to see the appeal, but only by overcoming so many annoyances.

Rat catcher

I hit level 4 exclusively by killing vermin, while occasionally being killed by skeletons. Not the spell-flinging variety, who are meant to be handled by groups, but your regular, solo-grade skellies. Even they can be risky opponents, though. Normally only capable of dishing out 3-5 damage, sometimes they'll pull off an attack that does more like 35. At my level, that's instant death. Neat.

But reaching level 4 meant I could leave the cave. I know this because I asked some very helpful players, who confirmed I was good to bid farewell to this dismal prison. I swam through the underwater cave, where I almost drowned, despite being a fish-man, and reached the shore of a lake. Then a thief murdered me in three hits. I respawned in the cave.

At a glance, it's not clear how tough an enemy is. But you can investigate them by hitting C, which gives you a flavourful description, hinting at how tough they'll be in a fight. This is one system I actually really dig, but it's of no use at all if an enemy gets the drop on you. The thief was a group mob, but unfortunately I didn't have time to discover this until it was too late.

Upon respawning, I found out that there was another exit, but it also required me to run through mobs that were much higher level. So no matter which route I took, I was going to be facing enemies I couldn't handle. You might argue this encourages players to team up, and to be clear, this is very much the kind of MMO that doesn't expect you to go it alone, but to surround the small starting area with killer threats, before newbies can even get to the hubs where players gather, just seems needlessly cruel.

Attempt number two saw me avoid the first thief, but then aggro another (who was, frankly, pretty far away), and then two more, who chased me down and killed me once I ran out of stamina. I respawned in the cave yet again. I decided I'd make one more attempt before calling it quits. I found another spot on the shore that looked quieter, but there was no route forward. Just a small cliff. And that's when I discovered I could climb, Breath of the Wild-style. If I'd known this before, it would have saved me so much trouble.

But that sense of discovery is exciting. Not being fed a list of mechanics and hints means you get that thrill of figuring stuff out yourself. With this revelation, the whole map changed for me, and it made me wonder what else I'd discover as I pushed forward. At first, though, the answer was: not much.

X marks the spot

30 minutes of aimless exploration later—which included getting lost, getting chased by beetles, being gifted my first piece of gear by a friendly player, and achieving very little—I finally found the village that letter in my inventory had mentioned. I have several Reddit posts, two YouTube videos, and the in-game chat to thank for helping me reach my destination. I even started doodling a very primitive map

I haven't done this in years. But it felt good. The relief I felt when I saw the bridge into the village, and the mass of players wandering around, and finally the tradeskill trainer… it was immeasurable. The journey had been horrible, but reaching this ugly little settlement actually made me feel something. So I get it. I understand why the Steam user reviews section is filled with EverQuest veterans gushing about the fun they've been having, and why people have been following this game for a decade.

But that sense of accomplishment didn't really make up for all the frustrations. Pantheon just goes out of its way to make life needlessly hard. Take, for instance, how quest givers work. It is not clear if an NPC is a quest giver or set dressing until you actually talk to them. In three hours, I clicked on countless NPCs and got a grand total of two quests. They don't need to have a giant exclamation floating above their head, but any indication that they serve a purpose would be nice—especially since this already exists for merchants, with the cursor changing to a small bag when you get close enough.

Reaching the village, however, did significantly expand my quest log. Sadly not with anything particularly interesting. Lots of gathering and crafting quests, mostly, interspersed with rodent and bandit murder. Crafting even some basic weapons and armour necessitated hours of running back and forth as I raced other players for gathering nodes and manufactured countless components. Everything I made required the purchase of two schematics, the 'basis' and then the actual item itself, and after more than five hours of playing I finally had a pair of fighting gloves and a gi, which tragically looked identical to the leather rags I was already wearing.

It's also worth noting that crafting professions are permanent, so if you pick one that doesn't suit your class, you'll need to scrap the character and make a new one to rectify the mistake. This is not remotely clear. Gathering skills, at least, are available to everyone. If you have the tools, you can do it all—chopping down trees, mining ore, and harvesting lots and lots of potatoes.

Fashion crimes

Decked out in my hideous clobber, I once again felt both relief and a sense of accomplishment, but it still seemed like a lot of effort for very little. And while I was enjoying spontaneously teaming up with other low-level players—and the feel of the Monk class, which features a mix of magic and melee, along with attacks that change based on the ki mechanic—I was already starting to burn out.

Every task seemed to necessitate watching another video or scouring Reddit, or at least posing questions to other players, and I just wanted to get on with things—to make some real progress. Pantheon is just so stingy with its rewards, so not only does it feel like work, it feels like work where you aren't really appreciated. A gig that expects a lot and offers little aside from the satisfaction of doing a good job.

Pantheon is the kind of MMO that demands all of your time. It wants to be your only game. I can play Guild Wars 2 with my pals once a week and feel like I'm making substantial progress, getting into all sorts of world-shaping adventures while earning flashy gear. Pantheon, meanwhile, would require me to embark on a daily grind, while offering a lot less in the way of rewards. It just ain't for me.

The real dealbreaker, though, is that there's been no attempt so far to make me actually interested in the world. I couldn't tell you a single thing about it. I've encountered several factions, completed plenty of tasks, and learned absolutely nothing about this place. Between that and a bog-standard fantasy aesthetic and seriously old-fashioned visuals, I just don't feel much compulsion to explore further. It hasn't given me any reason to—even though I get why others might stick around.

In this strange and fascinating roguelike, depravity is survival. Chosen by the cruel and decadent Sultan to be his proxy in a mystical card game, you race to stay your own execution by indulging in dreadful excess.

Each round, you draw a "Sultan Card" representing a particular sin: Carnality, Bloodshed, Conquest, or Extravagance. It will have a tier, too, representing what quality of action will fulfill it—a Silver Bloodshed card, for example, can only be satisfied by murdering a person of Silver tier or higher. But where the Sultan himself, with his infinite resources, can easily complete any card he draws, you as a lesser noble of the court must scrabble and scheme to accomplish them.

The result is a game not just about doing bad things to excess, but having to work really hard at it. Success requires sustained manipulation, scheming, murder, and… well, a pretty in-depth knowledge of the local brothel. You're essentially being forced to be a monstrous, decadent sociopath against your will and beyond your means.

And like a sociopath, you see everyone around you as objects. In play, Sultan's Game is essentially a strange card game—one in which your hand consists of people, as well as items, money, and even abstract concepts like secrets and omens. Every day, you and each of the people in your inner circle can be assigned to one activity on the city map, in order to generate some kind of resource or event, or complete your current card objective—with the results usually dependent on a skill roll against one of the character's stats.

A typical day might consist of sending your wife to manage your estate in order to generate some money, your slave to the bookshop to buy you a stat-improving book and listen in on gossip, and your best friend to court to ensure your rivals don't sway the Sultan against you, while you meet with an old enemy you might be able to lure into some sinful scenario.

But the more you play, the more elaborate the options before you become. Finding enough opportunities to indulge yourself requires frantically exploring the city, buddying up to people you meet, and pursuing strange engagements. You always feel out of your depth, and depending on the luck of the draw it can be difficult to figure out how to complete even just your first Sultan Card when you're starting out. How, for example, does a man without any territory to capture, or indeed any army to capture it with, fulfil a Gold Conquest card?

The answers are rarely obvious, and with only seven days to complete each one, there's little time to dawdle. You soon find yourself leaping at any glimmer of opportunity, like a desperate sin addict scrabbling for their next fix. A feeling particularly amplified by the fact that a Sultan Card can never be completed by simply doing something you've done before—once you've exhausted the brothel, for example, you must turn elsewhere for your Carnality (or Bloodshed…). You're forced to endlessly chase new highs, leaving a trail of bodies and burned bridges behind you.

One day you're hunting a white rhino for its hide, the next adopting a mysterious orphan, and by the end of the week you've performed a black magic ritual, assassinated a widow to usurp her estate, and ingratiated yourself with a young heir by teaching him your favourite sexual techniques. New lovers, new enemies, new sensations, new locations—you have no choice but to go after them all in a frenzy.

The result is a dark, challenging, and utterly fascinating puzzle. There's a hint of Crusader Kings to the scheming and political machinations, and a touch of Sunless Sea to its branching, text-driven narrative and resource management, but altogether it's something unique. And while it plumbs the depths of depravity, it doesn't feel gratuitous, or like it's aiming to shock. The clever framing—that you are someone who doesn't want to do these evil things, but must to survive—ensures it never feels like some sick fantasy. And the sharp writing sticks the landing on its satire of the way those with power come to abuse it.

What I've been playing is supposedly just a demo (with the full game due for launch in the first quarter of this year), but after three hours of play I'm yet to notice any kind of limitations or stopping point. Outside of some missing art assets (a few of the characters you meet are simply silhouettes, rather than the gorgeous portraits found on most cards), this seems to already be a substantial portion of the final product.

Is it ironic that a game all about how everything has its price is offering up such a generous free demo? Either way, you shouldn't hesitate to indulge. I've played a lot of roguelike card games but I've never had an experience quite like this—and it's left me with a dark craving for more...

This patch will mean players can now attempt endgame bosses more than once, and will ensure there are less deadly explosions that seemingly kill you out of nowhere. All of those things will be welcomed by players, but the biggest complaint remains the fact that you get one chance at endgame maps.

This element of Path of Exile 2 is unforgiving: Die and you're booted out of the map, losing XP and any loot drops you haven't yet grabbed. And while you can restart the map on the Atlas, you'll need a new waystone to enter it, and you'll lose any modifiers that it originally contained. In some ways that makes sense for a game of this nature, a genuinely high stakes looting challenge where it can all go wrong in an instant. But some just don't like sinking hours of time into something and losing it all like that.

"We did discuss quite a lot about whether we wanted to go back on one portal or not," says Rogers during an interview with streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV discussing the patch. "I think it comes down to the fact that it would just not feel the same. The whole 'death actually mattering' thing is actually important.

"We were talking about the pinnacle boss and the discussion came up 'should we allow portals everywhere, should we be allowing checkpoints everywhere' and we ultimately decided we really don't want to go that way if possible. So first of all we try out this pinnacle stuff, make sure it's something where you have true economic value you have to preserve: It takes time to get there and that matters."

Rogers says that for the game to work "you have to have some level of failure being possible" and if players were allowed multiple opportunities you simply don't "fail in the same way… I'm not really a fan, I much prefer the whole 'one death' thing."

As for the XP penalty and whether that's too harsh, "part of the thinking around that is that it's keeping you in the place where you're supposed to be, as in if you're dying all the time then you're probably not ready to keep going up the power curve," says Rogers. "But maybe that's the wrong way of looking at it."

With all that said, GGG's Mark Roberts acknowledges that the endgame right now is not quite hitting that sweet spot of risk and reward the studio wants. “Right now there are too many penalty axes," says Roberts (thanks, Polygon), "so if you're dying all the time, you're not gonna get materials, and thus you're not going to go anywhere… and also an 'add insult to injury' thing [with the XP] where you're just not levelling.

"I think they’re just a bit too severe when all combined together, and I also think that the very start of maps is just too difficult, I think we should ease into that a little bit, bring that down a bit then ramp the difficulty up." Roberts says the rare monsters and the unusual combinations mean players are constantly having to adjust their tactics and the number of different combinations mean "there's nothing to really take from one map to another."

The devs say they're going to be watching how the new patch plays out and focus any bigger changes on the game's next league (season), which will come with more substantial changes. But it sounds like the "one death" principle is here to stay.

"It would be nice if you could just spin another map and still be able to do that content," says Rogers. "But unfortunately we can't do that because it would open up too many economic abuse things, where like you fail the map intentionally because you want to farm the items in the rest of the area. So it's very difficult for us to come up with a solution because I really would prefer that, honestly, if you could re-do a map without having all the problems that being able to re-run a map would actually cause."

"I personally want to keep the one portal and adjust the other axes and see how it plays out," ends Roberts, "before compromising on the one portal. But yeah, it's a bit tricky, it certainly is the case we've discussed it so many times before [PoE2] came out we knew 'people are definitely gonna complain about this' and we know and we haven't found a solution."

Still, that's small change compared to the onslaught of players during its launch. Palworld rose into viral stardom to the tune of 2 million concurrent players in January 2024—which is huge, with other games, such as Helldivers 2, buckling under comparatively smaller weights. In a recent interview with Polygon, John 'Bucky' Buckley, the game's community manager, paints a picture of panic at the studio.

The initial rumblings started at around 100,000 players, Buckley states, when "a couple of the developers had to go back to their desks because things started to get a bit shaky … Throughout the night it kept going. And there was a point, definitely after midnight (because a few of us had gone home who lived far away) that the servers broke. That was around a million."

You can actually see that meteoric climb if you consult the SteamDB charts—on Friday, January 19, Palworld was already gaining momentum with around 370,000 concurrents. Over the weekend, this shot up to 1.5 million. "All of our multiplayer capabilities started getting weird, going down and crashing. It was a lot of intense lag, but Epic was amazing. They super quickly allocated more resources to us and they helped out."

Buckley also adds that, at the time, there was just one guy defending the servers against this horde of newcomers. Buckley remarks that "he was trying his best." As for the rest of the team, he says "we definitely panicked more than we should have. Didn’t need to pull as many all-nighters as we did. And I wish I'd reached out to other people for advice sooner.

"You get caught up in it, especially when there’s a wind of negative sentiment from players, even if it’s 100% valid and they’re right. It’s very overwhelming when the comments are flooding in."

Despite my assertions that Palworld was just okay back in January—ones that, I realise, make me a small gust in that wind—I am rooting for it overall, especially since Nintendo has turned its gaze towards Pocketpair. I don't have to be a big Pal-head to consider the company's litigious behaviour as, well, troubling for videogames as a whole.

For me, today's Wordle was a fantastic demonstration of just how easy it is to get so close to the answer and then wander off for a bit. Now I know what I was supposed to find, it's almost embarrassing to see the way I expertly dodged the right word for two whole rows. Better late than never, right?

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, January 14

Anything unusually elaborate or heavily decorated could be this. A flight of today's answer is an imaginative, but silly, idea. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is not a double letter in today's puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Looking to extend your Wordle winning streak? Perhaps you've just started playing the popular daily puzzle game and are looking for some pointers. Whatever the reason you're here, these quick tips can help push you in the right direction: 

• Start with a word that has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer might repeat the same letter.
• Try not to use guesses that include letters you've already eliminated. 

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Here's your winning word. The answer to the January 14 (1305) Wordle is FANCY.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Wordle solutions that have already been used can help eliminate answers for today's Wordle or give you inspiration for guesses to help uncover more of those greens. They can also give you some inspired ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• January 13: CLOAK
• January 12: TOTAL
• January 11: DINGY
• January 10: CRAWL
• January 9: WAFER
• January 8: DRAFT
• January 7: ATLAS
• January 6: SPRIG
• January 5: CYBER
• January 4: RELAX

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's up to you to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the popular daily puzzle.

It's usually a good plan to start with a strong word like ALERT—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels—and you should be off to a flying start, with a little luck anyway. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to leave out any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

That was not the case with Reddit user ciaranxy's lengthy post on the Marvel Rivals subreddit called "Everything You Need to Know About Marvel Rivals' Secret Quickplay Bots." They were not crying bot, but laying out the results of over a week of testing. ciaranxy determined that Rivals is more than happy to throw losing players a bone by giving them some easy bots to stomp on, but only under certain conditions:

• Bots only appear in Quickplay not Competitive
• After two consecutive losses, your chances of being put into a bot lobby in Quickplay are very high.
• If put into a bot lobby, it will be 4 human teammates + 2 bot teammates vs. 6 bot opponents.
• You will be penalized for leaving these bot lobbies.
• All bots are Account Level 1.
• All bot profiles have "restricted access" (as opposed to "limited access" for human profiles).

Invisible Woman Hidden OP New Tech Discovered from r/marvelrivals

It's those guidelines that got me curious. I've seen enough questionable clips of "human" Rivals players online to suspect NetEase is throwing bots into the mix sometimes, but is it really serving up entire bot lobbies to boost engagement? If all it takes is going on a losing streak, I could just try it for myself.

So I played a few normal matches, making sure to watch enemy and team behavior for anything sus. After every game I checked my match history and viewed every player's career profile to check against ciaranxy's description of bots: Most real profiles were public, some had set their privacy set to Limited, and none were Restricted. Checking account level was a bit trickier. Public profiles show the number, but if I wanted a peek at a private account level, I had to get killed by them and check their nametag on the killcam. All accounts I saw were past level one.

Despite being pretty ass at Rivals, I was having trouble going on a losing streak, so I did the only thing I could do to sabotage our team while still trying to win: Play my first three matches as Spider-Man. I went one match with only a single kill, a couple of teammates politely asked me to switch off Duelist (sorry, can't), and a Rocket Racoon player rubbed it in my face when they successfully 1v1'ed me three times.

It was a bloodbath, but the job got done. I lost two matches in a row. After the third match, another loss, I examined the lobby. Still no bots, but ciaranxy did say it can take more than two losses. So I jumped into one more match, and I could quickly smell something funky going on:

🚩 For the first time today, there were no console players on the enemy team
🚩 Their account names were generic or cheesy, like "DieForMe" or "LanettMa"
🚩 I was actually getting kills as Spider-Man (should've been all the evidence needed, really)
🚩 I watched every killcam and noticed four accounts were level one (I never saw the other two)
🚩 After we won, I clicked on their profiles to find all six marked "Restricted"

It was exactly as ciaranxy described. Two bots on my team and six on the other. I'd lost three times in a row against confirmed real players, and then suddenly got nothing but bots. Their playstyles reminded me of the fill-in bot teammates you get in Counter-Strike: impossibly aware, but really bad at finishing a kill. One time the Reed Richards bot (who again, is supposed to be a level one player trying Rivals for the first time) had such an impressive command of his abilities that he yanked me out of the sky mid-Spidey swing. He then proceeded to barely attack.

This sucks no matter which way you slice it. This is bad for the community, who now have to deal with NetEase misleading them with bogus wins. It's bad for the competitive integrity of Rivals, whose default mode of play regularly serves invalid matches. It's even bad for the average player, who might take the wrong lessons out of a bot match they believed was real (though I wager NetEase only does this because its data says bot matches keep folks playing longer).

And fundamentally, it sucks that the goal of this seemingly intentional measure is to lie to us—to insult our intelligence by trying to pass off an obviously phony product as legitimate in the hopes that we don't notice the bots every time, take the victory at face value, and stay glued to Rivals just a bit longer. The live service "package" surrounding the 6v6 shooter that is Marvel Rivals is already one massive, multi-layered engagement trap. Can't this one aspect of Rivals, the core competition, just be pure?

PC Gamer has reached out to NetEase for comment and will update this story if a response arrives.

Since then, however, we've heard less and less about Ark 2. The sequel to Ark: Survival Evolved was originally announced with a 2023 release date, which was scuttled and then re-announced for the end of 2024. But as 2024 ended, Ark 2 wasn't released. There wasn't any explanation about another delay from Studio Wildcard (at least none I've seen), no announcement in the official Discord, and no revised release date.

Delays are nothing weird, but not announcing or explaining a delay is unusual, especially for a game that not only starred Vin Diesel but involved him on the development side of things: If you recall, Diesel was named Studio Wildcard's "President of Creative Convergence" as well as executive producer of the dino-sequel.

Which doesn't mean Studio Wildcard hasn't been busy. Ark: Survival Ascended, a remaster of Ark: Survival Evolved, was launched into early access in 2023, right about the time Ark 2 was delayed until 2024. That remaster is still going full speed ahead: while there hasn't been word about Ark 2, Studio Wildcard has unveiled a roadmap that takes us to the deep end of 2026. Some of that involves Lost Colony, an expansion for Ark: Survival Ascended. (It's worth noting that the remaster was supposed to leave early access at the end of 2024, so it also missed its date.)

The roadmap includes an update to Unreal Engine 5.5, new creatures like bison, and a remaster of the Ragnarok map, which will be free, in March and April. In June, a new premium map will arrive, and in August, the free remaster of the Valguero map. The following year, Ark: Survival Ascended will get more remastered content like Genesis and Bob's True Tales in April and August 2026, plus the remastered Fjordur map in December 2026.

That's a big, long look ahead for Ark: Survival Ascended. As for when we'll see Vin Diesel riding a dinosaur, we'll let you know if we hear anything. You can check out the roadmap for yourself here.

When Rebel Wolves teased its first project back in 2022, PC Gamer's Rich Stanton said it gave him "strong vampire vibes." When the studio revealed the game's title and some new concept art in 2024, I said it gave me "very strong vampire vibes." Today we got a look at Dawnwalker's debut cinematic trailer, and it pleases me greatly to say, we were right.

The Blood of Dawnwalker, as the game is now called, is set in 14th century Europe, amidst relentless warfare and the Black Death—not a great time for humanity. Sensing opportunity, the vampires make their move to take over, leading other "creatures of the night" to do the same. One of those creatures is you, a young man named Coen who's been turned into a Dawnwalker, but who may not be ready to fully embrace the lifestyle.

"Fight for your humanity or embrace the cursed powers to save your family," the website at dawnwalkergame.com says. "Whatever your choice, the question stands: is your soul worth the lives of those you love?"

Ah, but that doesn't necessarily mean all vampires are all bad: "Face your foes—be they human, monster, or the ticking clock itself. But remember—the real evil may bask in the sun's light, and the most loyal of allies could lurk under the cover of night."

Rebel Wolves is headed up by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, who previously served as game director on The Witcher 3 and head of production on Cyberpunk 2077—and before that, as lead quest designer on The Witcher 2 and story designer on The Witcher. That background really shows through in this cinematic, which could very easily be a Witcher trailer; Coen himself appears to be essentially a young Geralt, granted great powers through unpleasant supernatural rituals that robbed him of much of his humanity—or, maybe not!

The implied moral ambiguity—evil in the daylight, friends in the darkness—is obviously not unique to The Witcher but certainly a central part of it: One of Geralt's best friends, recall, is a higher vampire who wouldn't be at all out of place munching on the poor soldiers in this video. Even the line "the world needs what it fears" is a knockoff of Andrzej Sapkowski's fantasy stories, set in a realm that needs witchers but sure doesn't like 'em.

But even if The Blood of Dawnwalker doesn't look like it's going to set new standards for original ideas, I dig the concept and I'm eager to learn more about how it's actually going to play. For that, however, we'll have to wait: Rebel Wolves said in a reveal livestream today that a gameplay reveal will happen sometime this summer.

Each faction has five cards that can be played across all the classes of that faction, along with three class-specific cards per class, and of course one Legendary Hero card to serve as leader. The Zerg, led by Sarah Kerrigan, have the Death Knight, Demon Hunter, Hunter, and Warlock classes, and excel at generating minions to overwhelm enemies.

Artanis leads the Protoss, who claim the Druid, Mage, Priest, and Rogue classes, and specialize in powerful, high-cost cards.

Jim Raynor heads up the Terran forces, made up of Paladin, Shaman, and Warrior classes, with special "Starship synergies" that enable them to launch multiple Starships each game.

Blizzard actually revealed that this crossover was incoming back in November 2024, but now we've got a first look at the cards. As expected, the Zerg look to be a brutally efficient board swarm archetype. The Zergling minion will also benefit hard from hand buffing effects. Meanwhile, Protoss is the Mana cheat—no surprise it contains the Druid and Rogue classes—with an emphasis on playing expensive minions that pack a big punch. Finally, Terrans are the all-rounders, with a Mech theme for flavour and new Starship cards to play with.

Blizzard also announced a release date and pricing: Heroes of StarCraft will launch on January 21, and will be available for $20 or 2,500 gold—or if you're the mood to drop some big bucks, you can snag an All-Golden version of the Mini-Set for $80 or 12,000 gold. Full details are up at hearthstone.blizzard.com.

And here's a closer look at that zerg card art from up above. Quite the looker, eh?

I already have several active quests in this high-flying city builder from developer Wandering Band: I need to eradicate an island of pirates, deliver food to several friendly outposts, and help a scientist identify sea creatures. But I'll be honest: my real quest, my personal quest in Airborne Empire, is to balance my city so it's 100% level.

You can join me in obsessing over how level your own city is: Airborne Empire launched into early access on Steam today. It's the sequel to 2022's Airborne Kingdom, but there's a much, much bigger world to explore and now there's combat to consider, too: the realm is full of enemy airplanes, ground-based bandit colonies, and other hostile flying structures. Somehow, the game still pulls off a mostly chill and cozy vibe—except when something goes wrong and my flying city starts plummeting toward the ground.

The placement of new buildings is important in most city builders, but in Airborne Empire it's especially critical because you need to distribute weight evenly. If your city leans too much to one side, citizens will become unhappy (understandable, it makes me unhappy too) and if the tilt gets too pronounced they'll abandon you by walking to the edge of your city, hopping off, and parachuting to the ground (sad to watch, but also kind of adorable).

There's also lift to consider. Carefully consider. You know in an urban city builder when you plop down some new structure and suddenly the power goes out because you're now using more electricity than you produce? Imagine that, except your city is flying, and suddenly it weighs more than the lift you're producing. You haven't experienced panic until you've ordered your citizens to quickly construct a new fan or balloon to keep your city in the air while it's in freefall.

So, how do your citizens gather resources like wood, coal, and food while you're cruising around hundreds of feet above the places these things appear? With little bitty airplanes, of course. Build airplane hangars and you can dispatch pilots to the ground to do some gathering.

Later on, once sky pirates become a problem, you can weaponize your planes for battle, along with other combat options like auto-firing defensive towers, cannons you can use for manual bombardment of ground targets, and other weapons like flamethrowers and tesla coils.

I'm only a few hours in but Airborne Empire has been a solid challenge for my balancing skills: and not just literally balancing my city so it's not flying around lopsided. There are also lots of elements to consider when it comes to progression. What would benefit me most? More efficient engines so I burn less coal to stay airborne? More powerful propellers so I can fly across the world more swiftly? Better defenses to keep the pirates at bay?

Every time I have to choose a new research goal it takes a ton of thought, and that's a great sign for a new city builder. You'll find Airborne Empire on Steam, where it's 10% off for the next two weeks.

In Path of Exile 2, hardcore characters only last until their first death, at which point they're booted into the pool of standard characters. If those characters are ranked highly enough on the global hardcore ladder, a leaderboard tracking the total experience earned by the top 1000 hardcore characters, their deaths are announced in-game to all players. Percy_Verence's moment of death was captured in a screenshot by redditor JRoyales. At time of death, the level 97 Invoker had been Rank 7 on the ladder.

Elon just died at rank 7 from r/PathOfExile2

As a fun coincidence, JRoyale also captured the automated, in-chat captions the game provides for character combat barks. In this case, in Percy_Verence's final moments, JRoyale's warrior happened to be yelling "Weakling!" and "Meet your maker!" Happy accidents.

Musk first revealed the existence of Percy_Verence on January 5 via his alternate X account, @cyb3rgam3r420, so named because the weed number is funny. At the time, the character was already level 87, which was enough to earn it a placement on the PoE 2 hardcore ladder. Considering the difficulty of getting a hardcore character unscathed to higher levels—that was quite the achievement.

After Musk livestreamed an hour and a half of gameplay with the character on January 7, however, PoE 2 players were convinced the achievement belonged to someone else. During the stream, Musk seemed unfamiliar with basic components of how the game works as he repeatedly tried to enter inaccessible map nodes, neglected to collect valuable items, failed to notice his empty mana gauge for prolonged periods, and demonstrated a basic misunderstanding of PoE 2 itemization by calling his set of immaculate gear low level.

As an illustration of how cutthroat the competition is for top-tier placement on the hardcore ladder, in the three days since Percy_Verence's death, the character's experience tally has already fallen from Rank 7 to Rank 13 as other high-level PoE 2 players race to outlevel each other. For experienced PoE players, the gameplay Musk showed during his stream seemed insufficient by orders of magnitude for the execution demands of hardcore ladder placement, leading many convinced that Musk was taking credit for a character that someone else had leveled.

You could also be forgiven for thinking that the stash tab named "Elon's map" seemed like a red flag.

Unsurprisingly, the death of Percy_Verence was met with a chorus of jeers and widespread gravedancing. "Clearly it's his level 52 gloves that held him back," one redditor said, referencing Musk's assessment that his gear—including his unique, build-defining, best in slot gloves—"could be better."

"Probably got triggered by all the laughing and actually tried to play the character for 5 mins," said Tateybread, another reddit user. "F. He can just buy another one."

First things first, we do know a little bit about Larian's next project, which are actually projects, plural—the studio apparently has two things on the go simultaneously—neither of which are a new Baldur's Gate, or D&D in general. Larian boss Swen Vincke has previously promised they'll be "big," which will come as no surprise if you've played any Larian game ever, and some of the studio's "best work ever," which is setting the bar very high. One of those projects even has a known codename, Excalibur, and a cryptic warning that "it's not what you think." Although it is an RPG, which you probably were thinking, so make of it what you will.

Anyway, while all this is going on, Larian has also been unable to stop fiddling around with Baldur's Gate 3. Despite being more than a year old now, developers are still releasing beefy updates for it, including one coming a little later this year that will introduce 12 new subclasses, crossplay, and a photo mode. You might reasonably wonder, then: Is Larian pulling a Haunted Chocolatier on us?

Apparently not. "Swen and the team[‘s]… full attention is focused on crafting their next title," a studio rep told VideoGamer. Unfortunately, we likely won't be hearing much more about it for a good while to come because Larian has also apparently moved into a "media blackout," meaning we'll all be waiting patiently and watching closely for someone to accidentally blab on social media—or perhaps in an awards acceptance speech, as the case may be.

Whatever happens next, Vincke remains committed to his "best is yet to come" belief about Larian's work, writing on X that "the story ain't over yet. Stay tuned."

"I am sorry to let you know that we won't be continuing support of Powerwash Simulator VR," FuturLab CEO Kirstey Rigden said in a message posted to Bluesky. "We absolutely love and believe in VR, so this doesn't mean we won't support it in the future but we aren't able to continue with support right now.

"We have been faced with a crossroads: We have a truly excellent and kind VR team who were working on a platform which costs us more than it makes, while also having a list of job openings that were looking to be filled on other projects. We took the decision to redeploy our VR team into those other projects/roles. Whilst I would love to live in a world where we could support Powerwash Simulator on every platform going, I will always choose job security for my team."

It's undoubtedly disappointing for VR supporters, but not all that terribly surprising. VR remains extremely niche—Steam users with VR headsets continue to hover around 2%, according to the latest hardware and software survey numbers, which isn't universal but certainly a barometer—and Powerwash Simulator VR may have suffered further from being a Meta Quest exclusive, meaning no VR on Steam.

Even so, Rigden is earning some praise on social media for being frank about the reason for the end of Powerwash Simulator VR support—no money in it—and for reassigning developers to other projects rather than simply cutting the VR team loose.

FuturLab clarified in a followup post that the base game and currently released DLC will remain available for purchase and play, there just won't be any further support or new content for it.

Breaker's basic combat and traversal really haven't been in question for me since I first tried a preview build of the game early last year. It feels great in the hand: Fun, engaging combat with a Souls-y emphasis on precise dodging or countering, but a character action game's sense of speed. Moving around the world via hoverboard or Zelda paraglider is similarly great, and also shows off the procedural generation system Heart Machine has been cooking up.

If I hadn't been told the seed I was exploring had been procedurally generated, I could have believed it was handmade the old-fashioned way. Ravines, cliffs, and mountains chop up the map and require thoughtful navigation to get around⁠—apparently Heart Machine specifically wanted to avoid Skyrim "jump up the mountain" behavior, so every natural obstacle has an attendant ramp, pass, or other way around you're expected to find. During my session, we encountered an underground lab, an apparently rarer map feature with desirable rewards, and I'm excited to see if there are other surprises like that in store.

What I'm really curious about is just how much the map will change between runs, how much a new version of the map will be able to replicate the surprise and excitement of first stepping into an open world, and if the proc gen seams will become more apparent over the course of many runs. There are multiple potential biomes to keep things fresh, though, with more promised as early access progresses.

Hyper Light: Showdown

One of my biggest questions about Breaker was how it would encourage or even allow for thoughtful exploration if it had a time crunch like Risk of Rain 2, and thankfully Breaker addresses this in two ways I really like. First, your exploration isn't limited by time, but by productive actions you take out in the world⁠—I was reminded of how the clock in Disco Elysium only advances when you engage in dialogue. Hyper Light Breaker's danger meter will tick up as you acquire loot and keys to boss rooms or defeat enemies and bosses, increasing the volume and strength of enemies out in the open world.

The second design move is that Breaker is pretty much an extraction game: Rather than the world getting reset on your death, you essentially have a few lives to burn for a given iteration of the world. Progress like keys, looted points of interest, and most importantly defeated bosses are maintained between expeditions of a given run, while extracting early will reset the danger level without expending one of your lives. Sustained between wider runs/map resets, Breaker has the usual sort of roguelike meta progression: There are vendors at your home base to upgrade and support, character build configurations to acquire and upgrade, and alternate characters to unlock⁠—three at early access launch, with more on the way. Each character seems able to use every weapon, and I was told that their equippable, build-defining stat loadouts are what will really differentiate them, but I haven't seen how that works in practice.

That's pretty much where I'm at writ large going into Breaker's early access launch: Everything I've seen, experienced, or been told is exciting and encouraging, but it's going to take some time with the game in the wild to see if its long game has what it takes to offer the "infinite replayability" Heart Machine is going for.

During the season, you'll be able to unlock a bounty of Hatsune Miku-related rewards through the Music Pass, such as a Miku outfit, themed instruments, and a handful of Jam Tracks. Though some of them are locked behind the premium paid pass. If you already have this pass unlocked, you'll immediately get the Neko Hatsune Miku outfit as a reward, and you can work your way towards the Brite Hatsune Miku Style skin and the M@GICAL☆CURE! LOVE ♥ SHOT! Jam Track available toward the end of the pass.

The skins paired with the matching instruments you can take to the stage are enough to justify the cost of 1,400 V-Bucks to me, which I loathe to admit. You couldn't really ask for more from the collaboration, so everything else just feels like a bonus. Plus, each instrument comes with a very sweet leek charm which I particularly adore.

But if you don't want to pay the pass fee upfront, the rewards will probably be made available in the shop at a later date too. I'm just relieved if I don't seize the opportunity to become a beast at Fortnite Festival now I'll still get the chance to soothe my Miku obsession later down the line. A number of Hatsune Miku rewards will be available in the shop too, in case the pass rewards weren't enough. Throughout the season you'll be able to get ahold of the following:

• Hatsune Miku Outfit
• Pack-sune Miku Back Bling
• Miku Live Emote
• Miku Miku Beam Emote
• Miku Light Contrail
• Hatsune’s Mic-u
• Miku’s Beat Drums
• “Miku” Jam Track by Anamanaguchi, Hatsune Miku

But Hatsune Miku isn't the only selling point of the season, and there are some additional features coming in v33.20. Four new battle stage modes are being added, so you can get an extra layer of challenge to test your skills with certain instruments. Lead Only, Drums Only, Vocals Only, and Bass Only are the four game modes designed to let you compete with others on a more even playing field rather than with the support of a band, but these modes could also be a great way to practise if you're only confident in limited instruments.

Fortnite Festival Season 7 will come to a close on April 8, so there's plenty of time for you to practise and perfect your Hatsune Miku Jam Tracks and cash out every possible reward on the Music Pass before then. I'm more than ready to accept the fact that this is the thing that is going to get me really into Fortnite Festival. I just hope I don't blow it the second I step foot on stage and feel too embarrassed to play again after pouring everything from my wallet into cute skins.

Obviously, as revealed by game director Jeremy Crawford and principal game designer Wesley Schneider earlier this month, the Tarrasque is getting some "fighting buddies". The amount of high-CR BBEGs here is, in truth, honestly kind of impressive—with promises to add a bunch of "apex threats" like the Elemental Cataclysm, a multi-headed beast with varyingly-flavoured maws of doom doing their best Tiamat impression.

Other big bads included the Animal Lords, CR20 demigods with different abilities based on your flavour of furry, as well as a Haunted House Revenant. My favourite by far is the Blob of Annihilation, a cataclysmic ooze with the skull of a dead god inside it. One which hosts its own demiplane that can draw you and your compatriots inside, which presents a problem—since killing it would collapse the demiplane and eject its inhabitants into the Astral Sea (that's 'outer space' in nerdspeak).

My immediate thought upon regarding this thing wasn't to use it as a CR20 battle, but instead as a plot hook for a Spelljammer campaign—why start in a tavern when you can be a gaggle of unassuming nobodies sucked into a giant ooze and shot into space after a group of high-level murderhobos kill it without regard for your safety?

And that, really, seems to be the major draw of this book. More impressive than the 80+ new creatures and the Tarrasque being able to blow up buildings now is the renewed emphasis on providing stories for fledgling DMs. For instance, there's more NPC-style blocks, like an entire crew of pirates to throw into your campaign, as well as a set of cultists for different types of worship. Not all cults sacrifice with the same brush, as they say.

But the real draw is how almost every type of monster—not all of them, but damn near close—comes with its own set of random tables to help gestate ideas within your mind. As Schneider describes, there's been a deliberate move away from didactic loredumps and into suggestions: "For us, these monsters are not about 'here's the lore, here's the only way to play a gargoyle' … every monster is a whole host of adventures."

Here's a couple page examples shared with me by Wizards of the Coast—the Gargoyle and the Gelatinous Cube:

Gargoyles, an otherwise throwaway construct, get two tables. One with suggestions for what kind of sculptures they can be, and another for where they're hiding. While some of these are your bog-standard gargoyle activities, others—such as the suggestion to place them amongst a graveyard of Medusa victims—are super good encounter ideas.

The Gelatinous Cube also has some winners, with its random table being dedicated to the debris you might find inside—such as the sadistic choice to put a mimic inside one like some kind of monster turducken, or an indestructible tablet in an ancient language.

These little touches are small, but if the Monster Manual is full of them, it means that Wizard's transformed it into something more than its predecessor—it's not just a book of numbers, it's a book of plot hooks. Coupled with some of the stuff that the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is doing, any new DM to these revised rulesets is going to have a bounty of ideas to help them put together their first homebrew campaign.

The art helps sell this visually, too. They really kinda pulled out all the stops here—if the Monster Manual keeps hucking high-quality scenes into its pages, this will be one of the prettier books that Wizards of the Coast has made.

Mind, lofty promises are one thing, proof is another. These high praises I'm singing will only stick if those tables are constantly applied throughout the book with the same generosity, and not once every five pages. That's to say nothing of the larger mechanical implications of this book, like whether the CR system will actually work now—and that'll have to come out in the wash after hours of actual play. What I can say is that this effort to douse every critter in flavour is an extremely welcome one.

The revised Monster Manual will arrive February 18 for most people, though D&D Beyond's doing some early access on February 4 for "Master Tier" subscribers and February 11 for Hero Tier subscribers—which I'm only sharing here for informational purposes, not because I think early access periods for D&D is a good thing.

If you don't know what a desktop pet is, then I'll try and break it down to the best of my ability without sounding like I've lost the plot. It's a virtual creature, or in this case, anime girl, who lives on your desktop screen and occasionally interacts with you. If you've ever owned a Tamagotchi, it's basically like that but on a larger scale and you don't have to worry about any of the responsibility of feeding it or cleaning up after it. If I was responsible for changing Hatsune Miku's newspapers, I probably wouldn't have decided to spend the money on this DLC.

You may find yourself asking why you would ever want to download this. Truth be told, I don't really know why I felt so compelled to. But to me it feels no different than an idle game. Except I've got no need to keep checking it to make sure whatever I'm monitoring is going well, nor is it as distracting as I find having an idle game running in the background. With Desktop Mate, Miku will sit on my toolbar or play peekaboo with the side of my monitor. It's nothing groundbreakingly special, and it doesn't have the typical features of a desktop pet since you don't need to worry about feeding it.

As cute as she is though, she's not great for productivity. Even when typing this article I'm having to battle with a pocket-sized Miku running around trying to grab my mouse. I've had this with other desktop pets in the past, and at first I'm always charmed by them running around my screen chasing my mouse. But unlike the thumbprint sized bundle of pixels resembling a pet I've had in the past, the significantly larger anime character makes it a lot harder to evade.

For $15, I do wish there was a bit more going on. The interactions are pretty limited and clicking the avatar only results in a brief change of expression or a wave of the hands. Most of the time once you place her on your taskbar or on the side of your screen she'll stay there until you move her again. I expected slightly more sentience for what I was paying for, but I'm sure having her drag my tabs around or jumping between my monitors when I'm trying to focus on something or even play another game would give me a little more to complain about than just stealing my mouse.

This does feel like just the beginning for Desktop Mate though, and Hatsune Miku is a massive character to essentially launch with. It does keep me optimistic for more characters released in the future, and given they don't all cost the same I'd happily spend some pennies on a couple additional characters later down the line. I'd also want to see some improved interactions and a little more substance to what exactly they do first rather than just letting you move them around and then watching you work away.

So is Desktop Mate an effective desktop pet? Yes. Is the Hatsune Miku DLC worth $15? No. Absolutely not. As much as I love Hatsune Miku, and I can't express how this isn't even close to the most amount of money I've ever spent on her, I cannot recommend spending $15 for the sake of her just living in your computer for a bit. It's cute, sure. If it was on sale and you're an avid collector of all things Vocaloid, then it might seem like a little more bang for your buck.

But there's a reason HoT starts like that: It's a mission statement. Yes, it's saying, you're one little guy against an army of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of other little guys, and yes, you're sucking up experience gems by the bucketload, but this isn't that other autobattler. This is something different, more deliberate, more considered, and altogether less slot-machiney than its razzle-dazzle forebear. This is Vampire Survivors with a heavy Diablo gloss. It's exactly as dangerous for your time and productivity as it sounds.

Hellbound

I'm not namedropping HoT's clearest influences to demean it. The game doesn't shy away from its inspirations—they're there on its sleeve for all to see, but it would be unfair and inaccurate to call Halls of Torment derivative. By some mad alchemy, it blends the compulsive loops and endless enemies of Vampire Survivors with the gear and build-crafting of Diablo and produces something wholly its own.

Despite the writhing masses of sprites, it's a little more thoughtful and conservative than other autobattlers I've played. Your hero has over 20 stats for you to take into account and consider as you massacre your way through dungeons. There's the usual stuff: health, defence, damage, but there's also stuff like piercing, force, and a critical hit system composed of multiple substats.

Rounds are 30 minutes, so you're not likely to max them all out even if you want to. You have to decide how you're going to spec your little guy over a multitude of +1% and +0.2% increments to their myriad stats. And where ordinarily those kinds of minute increases are barely noticeable in RPGs, the constant churn of level-ups means they quickly accrue into meaningful differences.

Plus, your buildcrafting is made easier by one of HoT's primary cleavages from Vampire Survivors: Level ups only give you a chance to buff stats, not to choose new weapons, and you'll get four options to choose from (with opportunities to reroll your options, once you get in far enough). If you want new gear, actual gear, you'll have to slay one of the bosses roaming the levels, but it's not strictly necessary. Filling all your possible weapon slots is a rarity, and it wouldn't be unheard of to make it all the way though a level without ever getting anything on top of your default, class-based weapon.

Take my favourite class and probable war criminal: The Exterminator. He's got a flamethrower. Notionally, you could have other weapons, but who cares? My focus when playing him is turning him into a roving, angry Roman candle, melting hordes of enemies into masses of undifferentiated flesh. Is this optimal? Perhaps not. Is this satisfying? Like you wouldn't believe.

That's the handle: The thing that makes Halls of Torment different to Vampire Survivors and the thing that makes me keep coming back to it is that I feel like I'm following something resembling a plan. Vampire Survivors is great, but its experience is one of frantically assembling an ad-hoc toolkit out of whatever its level-up gachas spit at you. Failure is a quirk of the slot machine. In HoT? My failure is the failure of my plan or my ability to adhere to it. There's an element of luck, but only an element.

Plus, Halls of Torment's specific aesthetic couldn't be more attuned to my sensibilities as a child of the ARPGs of the late '90s and early 2000s. Give me two honking great orbs representing my health and mana and a protagonist who has no articulating joints in his legs and I'm a happy man, and HoT makes me very happy indeed with its lo-fi heroics and diffuse, stygian levels. If I could play this thing on a beige CRT while Rob Zombie screamed in my ears I wouldn't know it wasn't 1999. Actually, wait, I can do that. If anyone needs me, tell them I'm busy for the next… foreseeable future.

That, as per SteamDB's leaderboards, puts it at a downright respectful number 14 at the time of writing, placing it below other such videogame giants as Baldur's Gate 3 (which had around 40.6% more players at its peak) and above heavy hitters like Path of Exile 2, Valheim, and Helldivers 2.

That's more than enough to be classified as a phenomenon, considering Arrowhead's flagship shooter pulled in 458,700 bug-shooting super patriots at launch. And that's not taking into account its players on other platforms such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

As to why? Well, Season 1's here, for starters. And it's free, obviously—which is bound to account for a lot of the 'eh, screw it, let's give it a shot' crowd. Of which I am one, to be fair. I'd never have typically tried something like Marvel Rivals for a premium, but its zany overpowered nonsense has absolutely hooked me. Even our own Fraser Brown, who was initially down on the game, came around on it in time for Christmas.

But there's also the fact that NetEase has put together something that's just downright solid and a good bit of fun, marrying that competence up with recognisable characters. Let's face it, the star power of Marvel is a huge power up to any marketing efforts. Everyone wants to get a teamwipe as their favourite hero, and you get to enjoy learning more about the comics, too—in other words, players are coming for Spider-Man, and staying for Jeff the Land Shark. Sure, the monetisation ain't great, but it's also cosmetics only, so you can just sort of close your eyes and ignore it.

Whether it keeps the momentum of its opening web swing is another thing entirely. 2024 was not a great year for live service shooters, making Marvel Rivals a notable outlier among its newcomer brethren. X-Defiant, Concord, and Suicide Squad all launched and flopped—I'd even given up hope that a new kid on the block could even make a dent.

Well, I'm eating humble pie now. Both because I was wrong, and because I keep getting my ass kicked when I dive into the backline as Spider-Man, along with everyone else. At least its developers are staying humble, too, with its game director admitting that there's really no basic formula to success: "It's really hard to tell ahead of time." That makes me feel better about my faltering powers of prophecy, at least.

The New Year has brought forth a new "Letter from the Chairman" to Star Citizen's devotees, in which Chris Roberts hits a few familiar notes before introducing 2025's big theme for the game: Playability. Stop sniggering at the back. We'll get to the actual content that CIG hopes will make a difference soon, but as Roberts acknowledges performance and stability remain sizeable issues for the game:

"The sentiment many of you have shared—and one we wholeheartedly agree with—is that if the current game, as it stands today, ran smoothly with fewer obstacles and bugs, it would provide an unparalleled experience."

Roberts says they've tried various approaches over the years to improving things, but have struggled to balance this with introducing new features and technology to the game, and have on occasion ended up with "unintended ripple effects—creating instability, hindering performance, and impacting overall gameplay."

So the new approach is to hive-off feature development entirely from the ongoing work of content creation and general fixes. New features that require testing will get their own experimental and isolated channel and won't be integrated with the full game until "fully greenlit." Roberts claims, and this did rather raise an eyebrow, that the developer has in the past "frequently been held hostage by tech or feature work that has taken longer than anticipated."

Roberts then goes on a rather unconvincing rant about big publishers which, a dozen years after he made more money than Croesus from a game he hasn't delivered yet, feels a little bit off.

"Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are two games that would never have been greenlit by any of the big publishers," says Roberts. "They are both too ambitious, and in a genre that up until recently was viewed as niche. They require patience and investment that I doubt any publisher would have the stomach for. Yet here we are, thanks to all of you!"

I'm fairly sure that publishers have in fact greenlit various space MMOs and FPSs, but whatever: People are so far in the hole on this one that I suppose it needs to feel special. But naysaying like that is exactly what this project thrives on. "Server Meshing is no longer a question mark, but a reality," says Roberts, "and seeing the results of a more densely populated universe, as well as better performance and stability—we are closer than ever to realizing a dream many have said is impossible."

Roberts is here referring to 4.0's new "server meshing" backend, which now sees players "navigating seamlessly through a mesh of servers that encompasses the entire game. Each planet, landing zone, or major station is now covered by different game servers. Thanks to this technology, server boundaries are effectively invisible, even at our high levels of fidelity, ensuring smooth, uninterrupted gameplay." Roberts lists further benefits such as crashes being localised to small regions, and improved performance thanks to each server simulating fewer entities. The main benefit to players is that each server can now handle 500 players at once, as opposed to 100.

This all comes alongside some substantial additions in 4.0, primarily the new Pyro star system, which is made up of six planets plus dozens of outposts and bases. But notably absent from Roberts' letter, beyond a fleeting reference to the roadmap, is Star Citizen 1.0: The full release of the game.

Roberts previously claimed server meshing was the last big technological hurdle and, once it was in place, the team was setting sail "for Star Citizen's own finish line… Star Citizen 1.0 is what we consider the features and content set to represent 'commercial' release. This means that the game is welcoming to new players, stable, and polished with enough gameplay and content to engage players continuously. In other words, it is no longer Alpha or Early Access."

Those words are from March 2024. Almost a year on, Star Citizen remains in alpha and early access. But I'm sure 1.0 is coming soon.

That's as per a recent interview with streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV. When asked whether there was data breach at Grinding Gear Games, game director Jonathan Rogers states that "there has been a situation where someone got access to an admin account," but that the full extent is yet to be seen.

"We now understand how that happened—we don't fully understand the scope of everything that occurred here, but we're sort of in the process of looking at logs, and so on … there were a few really shitty things that occurred here that I'm very unhappy about."

As Rogers puts it, the hacker in question managed to pry open access to the admin account through a bit of social engineering—which, when referring to cyber security, means the practice of sneakily getting secondary information via human interaction to achieve a hack, rather than hacking directly. The weak point in GGG's armour here was an old Steam account that the admin was no longer using, but that was nonetheless linked.

"[The person who] had it attached didn't really consider the fact that this old Steam account they weren't using anymore was attached to their admin account … that got compromised through Steam support." While Rogers doesn't know the exact details, he states that the hacker must've had some personal details such as credit card information.

Steam's "proof of ownership" page, for instance, will let you use a Visa credit card's name, billing address, and last four digits to reset a password to an account—all things a malicious actor could obtain via social engineering.

This was then made worse by a bug on GGG's end. When it came time to investigate, it was revealed that the studio's software was registering password resets for Path of Exile 2 accounts as "notes" rather than an "audit event", meaning that someone with admin permissions—the hacker, for instance—could go in and delete them, covering their tracks.

"It was really not obvious to us what was going on there. I don't have the full information yet about the extent of everything that happened, but what I can tell you is that 66 notes were deleted, so that would imply that 66 accounts were compromised," though Rogers notes they only have audit logs going back 30 days due to privacy regulations.

This meant that investigations into the issue—and whether it was a data breach or not—took a lot longer than they otherwise would have. "We initially had no idea, right, so we were like—ah shit, what the hell is going on here."

GGG is determined to patch up this vulnerability, though, as Rogers states: "Since then we've added a bunch of extra security stuff that, honestly, should've already been in place around this to sort this out, so, all of that is to say that we totally fucked up here, with security stuff on this account. We're certainly not gonna have any Steam accounts linked to [admins], we're gonna make sure there's no Steam accounts linked to customer service accounts any longer."

Obviously this kind of security breach is no joke—especially in an age where catastrophic data breaches seem downright commonplace (this is a reminder to go and change your old passwords). Still, studios are large and complex machines, and social engineering is downright hard to spot unless you're jumping at shadows. I hope GGG's able to close ranks around these weak spots soon.

NetEase considers modding a no-go. Despite a whole host of mods being available for players to use and download, it is a bannable offense alongside botting or cheating as it also uses unauthorised third-party software. So it was only a matter of time before NetEase got wise to all the Marvel Rivals mods available on Nexus Mods. But it turns out there is a way to bring your favourite mods back if you're willing to put everything on the line.

Instead of just putting your files into a mod manager and loading them into Marvel Rivals, now you need direct access to the game's .pak files. One player has even put together a helpful tutorial in case you need some guidance with this (via Dexerto). Some people may use this to just mod Luffy into the game as Mister Fantastic or so they can wear Jeff's skin when playing Iron Fist, but those aren't the only reasons to use mods.

A few players found that using mods to help with optimisation was a game-changer. While Marvel Rivals has improved a lot since its launch, it's still a little patchy in some areas. I've experienced some annoying FPS drops, enemy players randomly turning invisible, and cluttered maps breaking my games. One mod for performance-boosting fixed stuttering and helped your game look cleaner at lower resolutions. Unfortunately, while that may have worked to help game performance before NetEase effectively disabled mods, it will probably only make things worse now.

Another way to get around the modding ban is with another mod that effectively lets files be read as pre-unpacked. However, one of the side effects of using this is that the process could hurt your SSD and make your performance even worse in Marvel Rivals. The mod even recommends that you only use this for audio files—character models could really mess up your PC.

There's also a risk of getting banned by NetEase if you end up using mods. While it doesn't seem like NetEase has dished out any permabans to players using mods so far, the devs have warned against using any, just in case. "It is not recommended to modify any game files, as doing so carries the risk of getting banned," NetEase said in a statement to IGN.

Right now, I honestly don't think modding is worth the risk of borking your PC or getting banned. While it's a shame that a ton of creative mods have now been rendered obsolete, this was really only a matter of time and was an expected next step for NetEase to take. It also seems like Marvel Rivals' performance is getting better with every update, and there are plenty of skins already in the game for players to pick from and dress up with. While that does rule out Luffy or Goku from appearing in your Marvel Rivals games, that's probably not the worst outcome possible.

I quickly found a nice cluster of green letters today, I just had to work out what on earth I needed to do with them. My earlier guesses had already ruled out a lot of the most obvious responses, although that did mean I spent a lot of time going "It's got to be… ah, no." as I poked at the puzzle. Finally revealing today's answer felt great. 

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, January 13

This is a sleeveless garment worn instead of a coat. Generally it'd fasten around the neck, and then hang down someone's back and shoulders. It can also mean to conceal or cover. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is not a double letter in today's puzzle 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you've decided to play Wordle but you're not sure where to start, I'll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all your guesses count and become a Wordle winner with these quick tips: 

• A good opener has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer could contain the same letter, repeated.
• Avoid words that include letters you've already eliminated. 

You're not racing against the clock so there's no reason to rush. In fact, it's not a bad idea to treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Sometimes stepping away for a while means you can come back with a fresh perspective. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

One win, coming up. The answer to the January 13 (1304) Wordle is CLOAK.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Previous Wordle solutions can help to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer isn't likely to be repeated. They can also give you some solid ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• January 12: TOTAL
• January 11: DINGY
• January 10: CRAWL
• January 9: WAFER
• January 8: DRAFT
• January 7: ATLAS
• January 6: SPRIG
• January 5: CYBER
• January 4: RELAX
• January 3: CHEAP

Learn more about Wordle 

There are six rows of five boxes presented to you by Wordle each day, and you'll need to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the daily puzzle.

Start with a strong word like ALIVE—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you've typed your guess and hit Enter, you'll see which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

As our Harvey Randall wrote, we're all still playing Baldur's Gate 3 more than a year after its release because there's so much to find in it. Gale can write a sad resignation letter if you ignore him long enough, and there's a game over just for people who go out of their way to lose a plot-critical item. When I was playing I triggered an ambush by Astarion's vampire-spawn siblings by long-resting repeatedly in the Lower City, something that apparently a lot of other players didn't experience. Even I didn't notice what happens if you let Astarion get vamp-napped, however.

As documented on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit by Soft_Stage_446, Astarion gets taken to his master's torture kennel to be punished by a skeletal interrogator called Godey. An entire scene you'd otherwise never see plays out from Astarion's point of view, whether or not you chose to play him as your origin character. And then you've got the opportunity to escape as Astarion, or switch over to the rest of your party and launch a rescue attempt. There's even dialogue for various companions' reaction to Astarion's abduction.

It's not a sequence you're likely to see by accident, even if you're a habitual long-rester like me. The vampire spawn aren't a challenging fight, so you have to go out of your way to let them down Astarion and then make off with him. And you have to have him in your party when the attack happens. If you don't he'll still participate, but not helpfully. (When tested, he spent 15 rounds throwing fireworks instead of attacking.) And if defeated, in this case he'll simply die.

In terms of rarity, this is right up there with the conversation you can only experience by choosing to be the Dark Urge, and trying to collect your inheritance from the Counting House. Or the ending you can only unlock by playing as evil Lae'zel, and doing it badly. Only 34 players had found that when we wrote about it, but those 34 people had a great story to tell.

• Adjustments to make endgame mapping "more rewarding."
• Quality of life tweaks like being able to override runes and other socketables.
• Four new Towers and significant changes to the one already in the game.
• The addition of respawns to pinnacle content, starting with Arbiter of Ash.

Speaking in an extended interview after the seven minute video, Rogers and fellow PoE2 game director Mark Roberts explained that the respawn system would see a wider rollout to other pinnacle fights shortly, maybe even in 0.1.1, but that Arbiter of Ash was the only one they were ready to guarantee for the update due to time constraints. Players will have six respawns by default in the fight, with that number decreasing at higher difficulties.

The new Towers seem like a particularly hefty addition, with the single one present at PoE2's early access launch in December set to be augmented with an additional four. Along with this change to the endgame, 0.1.1 will see the loot and monster numbers on endgame maps tweaked, with Rogers saying it should result in a "more rewarding" mapping experience.

As for what's next after 0.1.1, Rogers said that GGG "has a huge amount of much more meta-shifting changes" planned. "One of the best things about having the game in early access with the endgame is that we now have a much better idea of where we want character power to be, and what the balance of bosses and monsters should be relative to that," Rogers explained. "But those types of changes are going to have to wait until we're ready to make a new League with a new economy for people to play in."

It was an unusually musical Awesome Games Done Quick this year, with an Elden Ring hitless boss showcase performed using an electric saxophone controller, followed by a Crazy Taxi speedrun with a live backing band.

The original soundtrack of Crazy Taxi by Bad Religion and The Offspring is an essential part of its appeal, but also a sure way to get a DMCA strike on your video of it. To get around that, runner chuckles825 performed this run with Limiter Cut, a backing band formed for the occasion. They played the songs to a thrilled audience, skipping to the next track when chuckles825 finished each level and restarting whatever song they were playing when he goofed and, for instance, drove an entire taxi-load of grandmas into the sea.

It's not the kind of speedrun you watch to learn about how various glitches and skips are performed—the all-romances speedrun of Fallout: New Vegas went a little deeper on that stuff. This one you watch for the entertainment value of recurring hard stops whenever a level's complete followed by the drummer doing that snippet of Change the World over the menu screen.

You can tell the song order was chosen to suit the level length, so don't worry, you'll get to hear a decent amount of Bad Religion's excellent Ten in 2010. (And less of The Offspring's not-so-great Way Down the Line.) While clearly a test of everyone involved's stamina, and the singer's vocal cords especially, it's a fun watch and I'd be happy to see them do something similar next year. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is the obvious choice, but consider: Trombone Champ.

This year AGDQ raised more than $2.5 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, pushing the event's lifetime fundraising total over $54 million.

In a post on December 29, the Classic Offensive team wrote that they had submitted a build of the mod for review in October, and that they were still waiting to hear from Steamworks despite a usual turnaround of three to five business days. On January 11, the Classic Offensive team shared a longform message stating that Valve "retired our app without any reason explained. This is devastating as we've worked on the project for almost eight years."

Classic Offensive was approved by Steam's now-defunct Greenlight program in 2017, with mod team leader ZooL indicating that he was experimenting with CSGO modding as early as 2015⁠—we first reported on the project back in 2016. Classic Offensive was positioned as a sort of CS 1.6 revival built in the latest iteration of the Source engine⁠—Counter-Strike's different versions command a similar schismatic devotion to the various entries of the Super Smash Bros. series⁠—with art, sound effects, animations, and mechanics that all hewed closer to the GoldSrc era of Counter-Strike, but touched up with modern production values and features. Classic Offensive was also positioned by its creators as a more pure, stripped down alternative to the cosmetic and microtransaction-laden CSGO.

The Classic Offensive team stated that it did not use leaked Source engine code, despite having the opportunity to do so, in order to keep things above board. The Classic Offensive team also said that they had been in contact with developers at Valve who were interested in the project, and that they had responded to requests from Valve's legal team like removing "Counter-Strike" from the project's name.

"Nobody at Valve told us to stop what we were doing during all those years, no sort of formal request, yet this feels like an even worse form of Cease and Desist at this point," the Classic Offensive statement reads. "Many people at Valve are aware of our and many other projects, yet have refused to communicate since late 2020. We feel like we were treated unfairly, and have been blinded by our passion for the game, as many projects did before.

"We now feel required to tell any modding team related to Valve projects to reconsider what they're doing if their sole way of releasing is through Steam, especially multiplayer mods, as they will probably get rejected the way we did. We do not think our case is an isolated one at all."

The hard work of the Classic Offensive team being allowed to continue to the last second before getting rejected is gutting, and this situation would have been ameliorated with clearer communication from Valve, whether positive or negative. At the same time, we might be able to deduce what led Steamworks to reject the mod. Users SlayerN and abyssalsolitude on Reddit's r/pcgaming and r/games respectively pointed to posts from the Classic Offensive team back in 2022.

"Following [Valve's] update on modding and license access," reads a Classic Offensive tweet from June 4, 2022, "it is now very clear that our only solutions are now either cancelling the project or hacking the core files on every security update in order to fix our mod-breaking issues." In a follow-up tweet, the Classic Offensive team wrote, "There is no leaked code involved. We're using a build from 2020 that has security exploits and a hacked dedicated server to be able to even play online while working internally."

In a ModDB update from around the same time, the team wrote, "When we passed Steam Greenlight back in 2017, we had a few email conversations with Valve and CS:GO devs, where we got to explain issues we had with modding CS:GO and how we could remedy them. Sadly, it never really got anywhere. Two years later we asked about getting a license to access their source code, which didn't result in a positive answer."

Absent that license and CSGO source code access, the mod would not have been able to support online play due to CSGO's security updates. "The only solutions are to patch the game ourselves through plugins/binary patching, wait for them to fix it (it's been 6 years), or release an unsafe version that didn't have those issues (way too old and risky)," the team wrote.

"You've guessed it, we got tired of sending them emails and went the patching route to continue our work, which is extremely complicated and requires us to be careful about how we go about it," the Classic Offensive team wrote. "For legal reasons, we cannot use the source code that got leaked, meaning we'll have to patch the existing binaries released with CS:GO's latest security fixes."

I'm sympathetic to the Classic Offensive team: The project is a longtime, noncommercial labor of love that's eaten up its creators' free time for the better part of the past decade. Faced with a choice of abandoning 6 years of work on a largely modding-unfriendly game or rolling the dice on "hacking the core files on every security update," the route they went with makes sense, especially absent clear word either way from Valve. Much of the company's mystique comes from its black box nature, the inscrutable pint-sized powerhouse that remade PC gaming. The dark side of this can manifest in examples of uneven moderation and approval of games on Steam, complaints from former employees about its freeform internal structure, and whatever happened last summer with Deadlock.

At the same time, while not explicitly forbidden by Valve's guidelines on distributing Source engine games and mods, Classic Offensive's ad-hoc digital scaffolding around Global Offensive⁠—a game Valve has retired and does not support, whether you agree with the decision or not⁠—strikes me as something reasonable for the company to be circumspect of. Meanwhile, Classic Offensive's rejection by Steamworks doesn't seem to have come entirely out of the blue: The licensing question was a frequent topic in Classic Offensive development updates. This feels like a story with room to develop, though, and I'm hopeful Valve might reconsider the decision or find a way to accommodate Classic Offensive.

Look on the Steam forum for XCOM 2 and you'll see threads noting that some mods no longer work, and having them installed can result in consistent crashing. Similar complaints have appeared on Reddit. Using the Alternative Mod Launcher, a community project that helped players get around the 2K launcher, doesn't help either.

Testing it myself, I found that XCOM 2 would only launch with certain mods enabled, and fail no matter which launcher I tried—both the old and new options provided by Steam and the Alternative Mod Launcher. The unifying factor seemed to be that mods with the War of the Chosen expansion as a hard requirement worked, while those without it did not. Mods like the Armory Camera Tweak, which prevents oversized characters from blocking the UI, were fine, while mods like the Imperial Guard Voice Pack, which lets you give your squaddies voice lines ripped from Dawn of War, did not.

I did find a fix for this, however. Go into the directory where Steam keeps your XCOM 2 mods, which should be Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\268500, and then open the subdirectory for any mods you've got installed. Each one will have a file that ends in ".XComMod" which can be opened with Notepad. If it doesn't have the line "RequiresXPACK=true" in there, add it at the end, then save. Do that for every mod you've downloaded, enable them in your mod launcher, and they should work. I've tried it with 40 different mods so far, from one that refreshes the reward deck when you enter the Avenger, to one that lets you outfit your soldiers in Sisters of Battle armor, and they seem to be working fine.