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At the same time as Warner Bros. announced the release date however, Polygon published a lengthy report on extensive crunch suffered by employees working on the game at developers TT Games. Based on interviews with more than 30 current and former TT Games employees, Polygon’s report paints a bleak picture which includes crunch on several Lego games in the studio’s past. There are also allegations of workplace bullying, managers who would yell at employees to return to their desks if they attempted to go home on time, and a substantial gender pay gap and lack of women in senior roles....

Me doing that to advanced Sims builders is like how you watch the figure skating at the Winter Olympics once every four years and, after a human at the peak of their physical fitness performs a stunning feat of graceful athleticism, you go “He totally screwed the landing there,” whilst spraying Wotsit dust from your open mouth. Last night I spent four hours building a rudimentary and not that tiny Tiny Home, and with my definitive expertise I have identified the best item in the pack....

Back 4 Blood does have a whole rich story (including that the Ridden are technically mutants and not zombies, but potayto, potarto. There’s also some lovely set dressing, particularly in safe houses. One is a flat that has a calendar with a picture of a snapping turtle. Ed really liked that. My favourite bits, though, are the graffiti and post-it notes. The header there is like yer most basic kind of graffiti in an apocalypse, right?...

New protagonist Alex Chen is a young woman with the ability to sense other people’s emotions and the reason they’re feeling them, and to adopt and change those feelings. When those feelings overwhelm her, she “loses control”, with world-shaking consequences if the trailer above is any indication. I’m guessing there are going to be some strong feelings given the game’s plot. You might consider this a spoiler, so hey, stop reading now, but the trailer above explains that Alex is visiting her brother in the too-good-to-be-true town of Haven when, in mysterious circumstances, he dies....

“It is with heavy hearts that we announce Magic: Legends will be shutting down,” begins the brief post on the Magic Legends blog. “All players who spent money in-game across Arc and the Epic Games Store during the Open Beta will be refunded their full purchase amounts. Servers will remain open for play until closing day, however we will be closing the Zen Shop effective immediately. Later this week, all items will instead be purchasable using Aether, our free in-game currency....

Wizards CEO Cynthia Williams didn’t share any other information about the crossovers. Previous cards in the Universes Beyond initiative have been released as individual cards via MTG’s Secret Lair drops, or as complete sets in the popular Commander format. Previous crossovers have included those for The Walking Dead, Warhammer 40K, and Stranger Things, and next year will see the addition of The Lord Of The Rings and Doctor Who sets....

I was always hoping Buddy Bot might get a beefier role when the Director’s Cut was first announced during E3 this year. When you first touch down in Lake Knot City, hologram notEdgarWright man gives you a new toy to play with - the delivery bot. These walker drones let Sam carry out more deliveries while he was off doing more important things, such as chilling out admiring Heartman’s DVD collection, or taking BB to look at the pretty waterfalls down the road....

There you are, trying to shoot through the demon hordes of hell, doing violence along with the soundtrack. “The more in sync you are with the rhythm, the more intense the music will become and the more destruction you will cause,” the blurb explains. Along with a story campaign, it’ll have leaderboards and a challenge mode. The action in this trailer doesn’t look to have much oomph, though they say this is pre-alpha so there’s a long way to go and plenty of time for polish....

Microsoft’s KB5000842 and KB5001330 update pages explain the issue and note the fix. “A small subset of users have reported lower than expected performance in games after installing this update,” Microsoft said. “Most users affected by this issue are running games full screen or borderless windowed modes and using two or more monitors.” My two monitors and have experienced wonk since the March update, though computers are such mysteries I hadn’t pinned down a specific cause....

Sure, the Matterhorn looks better, alongside famous castles and several beloved cities now recreated using photogrammetry. Yet I’m drawn towards the less flashy historic landmarks: Germany’s Femarn Sound Bridge, the Berlin television tower, the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex… Overall the update brings finer 3D imagery to several German cities, Basel in Switzerland, and Graz and Vienna in Austria. It also adds 100 well-known points of interest, and several new airports “including Lübeck, Stuttgart, Klagenfurt and St....

While there’ll be a deeper look at Xbox Games Studios’ offerings in the coming weeks (hint hint, Halo Infinite), today’s stream showed off the third-party games headed to the new Xbox, well, box. Fortunately, that also means that most of the games shown off tonight will make their way to our lot here on PC Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has a loose definition of “gameplay trailer”. Our first look at Assassin’s Creed Valhalla gameplay was, admittedly, quite brief - with scant shots of combat interspersed between all the birds, boats and brooding shots of the English countryside....

Our Nate called it “a charming, lively little looter-bruter, with all Minecraft’s aesthetic elements, but absolutely nothing in common with it beyond that” in his Minecraft Dungeons review. Fun, though. “But then, at one point, I had a weird build that involved blowing a horn to knock enemies away from me, then rolling around shooting lightning at them while a pet llama distracted them. I mean, it’s not one of the classic class archetypes, is it?...

Colour me intrigued, then, as I sat in a quickfire presentation at this year’s Gamescom and bore witness to some mythical gameplay. I can now report that what Minecraft Legends appears to be is as mix of real-time strategy and building, made all the more approachable by being set in Minecraft’s colourful cube-verse. With Minecraft Legends, you’re dropped into a procedurally generated map that’s littered with resources you can gather and evil Piglins (pig peeps)....

Mixer first launched in 2016 under the name ‘Beam’ then was bought by Microsoft later that year, who renamed it ‘Mixer’ in 2017. One of its big selling points was shorter delays between the broadcaster and the viewers, so folks could have more back-and-forth and interact more. It also had built-in support for novelty streams like Pokémon controlled by viewers. Microsoft also had their studios integrate Mixer features into games, so Forza Horizon 4 gave rewards for both streaming and watching it on Mixer, Minecraft let viewers vote on things, and so on....

In the video tweeted by Monster Hunter’s Japanese account, Rajang’s motion capture actor uses a bunch of practical props to help his performance and gets, honestly, super into it. He puts on what look like forearm braces to help give him the hunched over gait of a giant gorilla for some parts. In others, he’s grappling with an huge foam representation of another monster hanging from the ceiling. He grips the water bottle meant to be its unicorn-like horn and rips it off....

The first of these twists is the wirebug, a giant, luminous firefly-cum-grapple hook that lets hunters launch themselves skyward, recover from brutish pratfalls, and put reins on stunned beasties so you can briefly ride them rodeo-style to dole out some mega hit points. It’s a highly versatile piece of equipment, giving rise (sorry) to not just the game’s moniker, but also what elevates it from the rest of the series....

Better yet, it’s getting a demo, and it’ll be available on October 13th. Rise is the successor to Monster Hunter World, which brought the series to PC for the first time and which was a massive success. Rise continues the progress World made towards making the long-running series friendlier and more accessible, and as a consequence its the first MonHan to properly obsess Katharine. It’s got the same big open maps as World, the same easier monster tracking - but importantly, it’s also got dogs....

I still absolutely adore the look of Moonscars. Its moody, dark apocalypse and ruined stone fortresses immediately call to mind the ornate detail of later Castlevania games, while its possessed knights and eldritch monsters are like the estranged 2D cousins of FromSoft’s Eldenborne menagerie. The clay-borne warrior Grey Irma also cuts a striking figure as the game’s main protagonist, too, with her long white hair creating a stark contrast to her gloomy surroundings....

On this page, we’ll tell you how to capture prisoners, how to recruit or ransom them, and how to execute lords or nobles (as well as explaining why this might be a bad idea in most cases). How to capture enemy soldiers in Bannerlord To take an enemy prisoner in Bannerlord, no matter if they are regular bandits or the noblest of lords, you need to defeat them in battle by knocking them unconscious by using blunt weapons....

Made by Chinese studio 24 Entertainment, Naraka: Bladepoint sends players to the pretty Morus Island to murder each other. Since a previous beta, they say, they’ve redecorated it a bit with “poisonous mushrooms, a rideable ballista and shrubbery that players can stealth their way through”. I’m sorry did you say rideable ballista? Sea Of Thieves has taught me that launching yourself as artillery can only end well. Though while I was initially drawn to the Sekiro-lookin’ grapple violence, I will confess it’s the character creator I might spend the longest time in....