“We’ve always believed that games are better with friends,” say Criterion in their announcement. “We don’t want your platform of choice to be a barrier for that experience.” When the update drops tomorrow, all players will be able to opt in to cross-play through the in game “find players” menu. They note that NFS Heat will be the first Electronic Arts game to offer cross-play. Criterion are already looking forward to the next NFS game as well....

Deep Silver’s parent company Koch Media have announced that they’re running a summer showcaser a week from today on Friday, June 11th. Deep Silver have posted today acknowledging the Koch event and setting expectations right down on the ground. “To give you a head’s up, you won’t see Dead Island, Saints Row, Metro or TimeSplitters there (or at any other E3 2021 event),” Deep Silver say. “We’ll let you know when we have news to share....

New World Invasions: how to take part Because Invasions are intended for experienced players, you need to be at least Level 50 before you can participate in them. Invasions happen roughly once every four days in real-time. Once you’ve reached the appropriate level, you can sign up to participate in the next Invasion up to 24 hours in advance by interacting with the Town Board in your settlement. Up to 50 players can take part in an Invasion event....

My point being - it never feels essential, you know? Which is why I liked New World’s take on crafting, which grips you firmly by the shoulders and shakes the complacency out of you. Here, there’s no getting away with it. Either you craft, or you don’t progress at all. Now this might make New World sound exhausting for those of you who, like me, didn’t sign up for a semi-relaxing MMO only to be dragged across the land by a crafting system like a digital Bear Grylls yelling “Survive, adapt, overcome!...

This guide will walk you through everything that you need to find and skin Turkeys in New World, so that you can save time searching for them and get on with completing quests for your faction. How to find Turkey locations in New World If you want to find a Turkey, you won’t need to look far. They can be found in every biome in New World. That’s right, every single biome!...

Nexus Mods have written an update about their plans for the Collections feature and, as they warn, it is indeed a long one. Foundationally, Nexus say that “it is our conviction and vision that modding should be as easy as possible, so more people can enjoy this hobby that has brought us all together and that laid the foundation for the very existence of our site and community 20 years ago....

You can catch the birthday trailer for No Man’s Sky right here, a bit of a little victory lap to celebrate all progress the game has made since launch. It ends with just the tiniest of teasers that the Frontiers update is up next “soon”. “As we push forward to 2021, our next update Frontiers is something I’m very excited about,” says studio founder Sean Murray in an anniversary post on the PlayStation blog....

In July, California’s Department Of Fair Employment And Housing went after Activision Blizzard with a lawsuit alleging that they treat women unfairly in pay and progression and have “fostered a pervasive ‘frat boy’ workplace culture” which “is a breeding ground for harassment and discrimination”. The company’s initial deflective responses were described in an open letter signed by over a thousand current and former employees as “abhorrent and insulting to all that we believe our company should stand for”....

Priced at £50 / $50, the Nuraphone Gaming Microphone is pretty reasonably priced compared to other standalone mics you can get for your PC right now. A Blue Yeti will currently set you back £119 / $122, for example, while other attachable headset mics such as Antlion’s ModMic can be had for a similar amount of money (or more, if you want the USB and wireless versions). It’s actually a bit cheaper if you buy it together with a pair of Nuraphones, as Nura currently have a bundle available for £370 / $420, which is only another £20 / $20 on top of the original headphone price....

But well-told though that story is, I found it only just compelling enough to motivate me through an awful lot of trudging back and forth along the same paths, as I trial-and-errored my way through camera placement puzzles. It feels so cruel to say this, when Nuts goes out of its way to avoid feeling repetitive, and to make its environments pleasant just to exist in. Indeed, it’s not a fatal flaw, by any means....

Pentiment is being headed up by Obsidian’s studio design director Josh Sawyer, and it puts you into the clogs of 16th-century journeyman artist Andreas Maler. Andreas works on illuminated manuscripts at a German abbey – hence the game’s visual style – but he ends up becoming tangled up in 25 years’ worth of murders, say Obsidian. You’ll have to help Andreas chat up everyone from saints, nobles and nuns down to lowly peasants and thieves to crack the mystery wide open....

This isn’t even me being a big grumpy gills, either: even people who liked the first two episodes had to admit that the third one was bad. Not even, like, fun bad, just bad, a meandering mess that ends abruptly in a wet splat - essentially the televisual equivalent of a sneeze. I ‘spose it’s not all bad. Claes Bang, in addition to having the greatest name in the world, is very good....

The demo recreates the Forest stage, and there’s a video with some side-by-side comparisons below: Over Jump Rally is the work of Alessandro Schiassi, a VFX who has been posting about the project in a thread at Sonic Fan Games HQ. Schiassi says he’s used the project as a platform to learn how to use the Unreal Engine, and thought recreating Sega Rally, a game he loves, was a good start because “it has just 4 tracks and 3 cars in total....

Ah the triple damage meta, you’ll know it well if you played Overwatch before all this role queue business, or if you’ve played Quick Play Classic. Three damage, two support and one tank. It was a nightmare - if you were the tank. “Don’t freak out,” Jeff Kaplan says. But I was freaking out quite a bit, until he mentioned that off-tanks like D.Va would be getting some hefty balance changes to deal with the onslaught of damage dealers....

Up front, it is a weird game. Amidst the palm trees of Paradise Killer stands a large, purple statue in reverence to Silent Goat, a cosmic god. In my inventory lies a book about an ex-gangster who became a master of grilled chicken skewers. A vending machine begs me to buy a drink, then calls me after I’d paid for it in Blood Crystals. I think an important part of Paradise Killer’s charm is that, despite what you just read, it isn’t trying too hard....

Sweden’s labour laws are pretty different to what we’re used to in the UK. They don’t have many government regulated labour laws in the first place, including no minimum salary, which is why most workers in Sweden are part of a large national union with a collective agreement. A collective agreement is, well, an agreement between employers and employees on their rights in their place of work. As mentioned before, some of the most important things these agreements do are regulate pay increases every year, and make it so employees don’t have to negotiate important conditions at work by themselves....

“In Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas, you’ll gain even more control over your end-game Path of Exile experience by specialising each region of your Atlas with its own passive tree, crafting Watchstones to refine your rewards, selecting up to ten map bosses to face simultaneously and challenging the Atlas’ new pinnacle boss: The Maven,” Grinding Gear Games say. Maven sounds like a particularly tricky new task as she’ll require you to defeat several other bosses before hiking off to her realm to fight them again—simultaneously this time....

If you’re looking for an easy start in Path Of Exile, look no further than the Witch. She’s a spellcaster who deals lots of damage at range, letting you stay out of the firing line and dish out punishment from afar. The Necromancer route is a great path to go down for beginners, as it allows you to get minions to deal the bulk of your damage. Here’s a great route you can go down to make a start as the Witch in Path Of Exile....

Basically, I never got into Persona 5 when it first launched on PS4. I played about three hours of it and then binned it off in favour of something else. In 2020, during a moment of first-lockdown madness, I bought Persona 5 Royal for full price, thinking maybe my issue with the original release was that there wasn’t enough of it, but surprisingly discovered it still wasn’t for me. At this point, I’d invested £100 into my “Do I like Persona 5?...

Get the Corsair 5000D for $99.99 (was $164.99) So: the 5000D. This is the standard model, offering a steel front (rather than more expensive glass or ventilated metal variants), so you get a case that is reasonably quiet while still offering decent thermals and a clean look. This is a mid-tower case, so it’s suitable for ATX motherboards or smaller, with room for 360mm radiators / AiOs in the top, side or front....