January 2023

Yesterday, Valorant’s Episode 6 was teased as part of the cinematic trailer ‘Revelation,’ but now we’ve got the full details to share with you. The map, which forms the main bulk of new content for Act 1, is called Lotus. It’s set in India, has three Spike sites, and there are a bunch of unusual but interesting mechanics that look set to make it one of the game’s most exciting to play yet.

Here’s the official trailer:

“We wanted to make another 3-site map and show that this is more of a format we’ll keep using than just a single map. Additionally, we aimed to make a map with high flexibility and movement for both teams.” Joe Lansford – Riot Games Level Designer

The key features of Lotus include:

The Savage Lands season has just kicked off in Marvel Snap, and like every season before it, there’s a brand new card you can get by purchasing the season pass. This month, we get Zabu, a 3-cost card that reduces the cost of your 4-cost cards by 2. If you’re at all familiar with card games, this should immediately strike you as a pretty damn powerful card due to its cost reduction ability. And indeed, it’s only been a few days but Zabu is already shaping up to be one of the best cards we’ve gotten through a season pass so far. Is that a good thing, though? I’m not so sure.

First, we should take a look back at the other season pass cards in Marvel Snap so far. We’ve had Wave, Thor, Daredevil, Nick Fury, Miles Morales, and Silver Surfer. Out of all these cards, only one has been truly meta-defining: Wave. She’s a 3-cost card that sets the cost of every card to 4 on the next turn. Wave signaled the creation of the DeathWave deck, and also shifted the meta towards ramp decks, where you could play Wave or Electro to cheat out your bigger cards on earlier turns.

The Team Leaders in the Pokemon games have been recognized as some of the most intriguing villains, opponents, and friends that you encounter on your journey through each Region. Many of these Team Leaders have very interesting personalities, traits, and entertaining ideals and quirks that make them stand out. But who among them are the most engaging and beloved Team Leaders in the franchise? Here’s our rankings for every Team Leader in the Pokemon games, ranked by personality.

Game of the Week goes out to all of our supporters as part of the Eurogamer Essentials newsletter. There's going to be a slight shake-up of the supporters program in the near future (don't worry - it's all good news) so stay tuned for more details, and thanks as ever for your support - it's much appreciated.

True to my word I spent a fair amount of the festive break smashing through the rudimentary thrills of The Callisto Protocol, finding that a couple of hours getting stuck into its meaty combat provided perfect catharsis after a day with the wider family. A break from work is about getting a break from the screen, though, so whenever the rain let up I made sure to make the short cycle out of London into the North Downs and ride some of my favourite roads.

Recently I've come to know the network of villages and the routes that connect them as well as I do the streets of Lewisham directly around me; push through Chislehurst and you're straight into the countryside, pedalling through the picturesque Eynsford and past the lavender fields of Lulllingstone, picking up the Pilgrims Way through to Wrotham and up to Cuxton and Cobham (while looping back via Farningham and Brands Hatch, of course, where I'll sneak a look to see whatever might be in action that day). Some days I'll unearth new routes as I struggle to recall old ones, a ritual of discovery and remembrance that's helped keep me sane through what's been a trying few years for us all.

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Valve's Steam Deck has revolutionised PC gaming, its 15W custom AMD processor exceeding expectations and doing a great job in delivering handheld triple-A experience - but Unreal Engine 5 may well be its toughest challenge yet, owing to its Nanite micro-geometry and RT-based Lumen lighting. This is next-gen - or rather current-gen - stuff, so whether the Deck can handle it is key to its longer term prospects. To put that to the test, we decided to see if we could run the latest version of Fortnite with all of these features in play - and the results are surprising.

I went into this one with little optimisation. The Valley of the Ancient demo was a slideshow on the Deck, while the Matrix Awakens City Sample demo with big cutbacks still operates mostly in in sub-20fps territory. But remarkably, Fortnite is playable, even handicapped by a number of issues that hold the machine back.

Actually getting the game running is challenging enough. The biggest problem of all is that owing to lack of compatibility with Fortnite's anti-cheat technology, the game won't run at all under SteamOS, meaning that you need to install Windows to get it running. The second problem is a warning from Epic on booting the game, telling us our GPU driver is out of date and performing sub-optimally - which isn't going to help our cause.

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The wonderful Powerwash Simulator launches on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on 30th January 2023, Sony has announced.

The announcement was made as part of a PlayStation blog post rounding up a raft of indie games coming to the consoles.

We're big fans of FuturLab's Powerwash Simulator here at Eurogamer, and have written about it extensively. You clean dirt off stuff, essentially. It's satisfying, therapeutic and weirdly tricky at times. You can even go prone like an MLG powerwash pro to get right under those hard to reach bits.

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The RTX 4080 is a weird graphics card. It's hugely powerful, outpacing the RTX 3090 Ti with a smaller price tag and better power consumption, yet the RTX 4090 is the better value card thanks to the big leap in performance it delivers. So is there really an argument to be made to upgrade from the RTX 3080 to 4080?

To find out, I reached out to PNY who sent over their XLR8 Verto Epic-X RTX 4080 card. Priced at £1369 in the UK and $1199 in the US, this isn't the cheapest RTX 4080 available, but its 2205MHz rated boost clock fits the reference spec perfectly.

Its design is a good representation of current trends in custom GPU designs too, being slightly thinner than the FE design (138 vs 140mm) but longer (332 vs 310mm) and taller (66 vs 61mm). It has the usual complement of one HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4a connectors, one 12-pin power input (with Nvidia's 3x 8-pin power adapter provided for use with older PSUs) and a three-fan design that feels appropriate for this level of performance.

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Earlier this week, we got a new trailer for Sony's upcoming film adaptation of Gran Turismo.

To accompany this trailer's reveal, president of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group Sanford Panitch, along with the film's director Neill Blomkamp and PlayStation productions head Asad Qizilbash, gave a small presentation about their work.

Here, Panitch stated the company currently has "more than 10 projects in development and production between the film and television groups".

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When Twitch streamer MissMikkaa began her 2 Elden Ring 1 Girl challenge at the end of last year, there was one major question: how will she manage Malenia?

Well, she's only gone and done it. After three days and 199 tries, Malenia has been defeated - twice, simultaneously.

That's once with a controller, and once on a dance pad. At the same time.

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After an inglorious end to his career at Manchester United and, perhaps, his national team Portugal, Cristiano Ronaldo has left elite level football for Saudi Arabian club Al Nassr and a contract reportedly worth up to €200m (£177m) a year. And with the move comes an inevitable - some would say long overdue - FIFA rating downgrade.

37-year-old Ronaldo, who for years had been one of the two best cards in the FIFA games alongside World Cup winner Lionel Messi, had already dropped three positions for the FIFA 23 top 10 with a 90-rated card. Now, after Ronaldo's poor performance at the World Cup and his move to the Saudi Pro League, EA has knocked Ronaldo down a further peg to his lowest rating since 2007, when the forward broke through at Manchester United.

Ronaldo's overall rating is now 88, two lower than the 90 he started FIFA 23 with back in September. Crucially, his specific stats are also lower. His dribbling, for example, is down to 81 from 84, his stamina down to 70 from 74.

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There is not much longer to wait before HBO's The Last of Us makes its anticipated debut. Ahead of this, a few more details about how the show will differ slightly from the game have come to light.

Please note, some upcoming plot elements are revealed below. If you are keen to avoid any spoilers, please stop reading here.

In conversation with IGN, actor Gabriel Luna (who plays Joel's brother Tommy in the upcoming series) revealed the show will cover more of the Miller family's dynamic prior to the events of the game.

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A new mod for Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion reverts the voice acting back to the original English cast.

The remaster of the PSP game, released in December, used the voice cast from Final Fantasy 7 Remake, differing from the PSP original Crisis Core.

Now, thanks to modder Svenchu, Rick Gomez (Zack Fair), Steve Burton (Cloud), George Newbern (Sephiroth), Andrea Bowen (Aerith) and Oliver Quinn (Genesis) can now be heard in the remastered game - on PC at least (thanks Siliconera).

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HTC Vive has announced its brand new XR Elite headset, which combines Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality, for a whopping £1,299.

The headset includes a full colour RGB camera for passthrough, plus hand-tracking, meaning players can experience real-time overlays and more interactivity between the device and their real world environment.

The versatile, lightweight device can be used wirelessly or connected to a PC for PCVR games from Viveport and Steam.

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Dwarf Fortress' December Steam launch was a big hit - it sold almost half a million copies in less than a month.

Bay 12 Games' famously impenetrable simulation game launched on Steam on 6th December in spruced up form, with actual graphics as opposed to the text or "ASCII" graphics of the original version.

In a forum post, programmer and co-designer Tarn Adams declared Dwarf Fortress' Steam launch, which came after 16 years of free availability, a "wild success". Dwarf Fortress is also sitting on an "overwhelmingly positive" user review rating on Steam.

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Following on from our Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 5 7600X review, it's finally time to look at the two remaining CPUs in AMD's Ryzen 7000 family: the $449/£439 Ryzen 7 7700X, a potential gaming value champ, and the $799/£769 Ryzen 9 7950X, a sixteen-core titan expected to outperform almost every consumer CPU in content creation workloads. We've seen significant price cuts on Ryzen 7000 processors since launch - so are these CPUs worth buying in 2023?

As a quick recap, these Zen 4 processors are profoundly different from AMD's last-gen Ryzen 5000 parts. There's been a shift to a new socket, AM5, with an LGA design that can provide up to 230W of power, as well as a new 6nm I/O die, integrated graphics on all models and support for two key technologies: DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.

These upgrades unlocked some impressive gen-on-gen gains in the case of the 7600X and 7900X, and there's the potential for even greater improvements with the 7700X and 7950X. As AMD uses a chiplet-based design with up to eight cores per CCD, the eight-core 7700X and sixteen-core 7950X ought to represent the maximum performance possible from single-CCD and double-CCD designs respectively - and reports suggest that in some titles, the performance penalty of splitting a gaming workload across multiple CCDs could counteract the gains from having access to a higher number of threads, leaving the 7700X as a CPU of particular interest.

A lawsuit between Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red and its investors has been settled for $1.85m.

The game was released in a notoriously buggy state, particularly on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which led to a complaint filed in December 2020 that alleged the developer misled both customers and investors on how playable the game was.

Now, a federal judge in California has signed off on the settlement (thanks ArsTechnica), where everybody who acquired publicly traded CDPR shares throughout most of 2020 is eligible for settlement funds at roughly $0.49 per eligible share.

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Microsoft has backtracked on some of the wording in its recent response to the United States government's Federal Trade Commission (hereon referred to as the FTC).

In December, Microsoft claimed the FTC's lawsuit against its Activision Blizzard buyout was unconstitutional, and specifically violated the Fifth Amendment.

However, the company has now gone back on this argument, admitting it "should have dropped these defences before we filed".

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Kerbal Space Program and Shadow Tactics - Aiko's Choice are currently free from the Epic Games Store.

Both games are free to download now until 4pm on 12th January.

At that point, both games will be replaced by well-received party game First Class Trouble as part of Epic's ongoing free promotion. That’s free until 19th January.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: spooky Sardinia, worrying plants, and Claudia W.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

Saturnalia, with its ghoulish pursuers, ancient rites and shifting midnight streets, may seem like an odd choice for a game to play over Christmas, but actually it fits perfectly.

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NetEase has announced the acquisition of Canadian game developer SkyBox Labs.

Founded in 2011, the studio has co-developed titles such as Halo Infinite, Minecraft, and Fallout 76.

SkyBox will continue to operate independently under the supervision of its founders Shyang Kong, Derek MacNeil, and Steven Silvester.

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The beginning of the year is a good time to reflect on our day-to-day lives and where we could – perhaps should – make some changes. It's a clean break from the old habits, a fresh sheet of paper on which to write our future, a new beginning. In short, it's time for New Year's Resolutions.

The last time I wrote something like this was 2019, when my proposed resolution for the industry was "Let people know what they're buying."

Yes, that's setting the bar low, but I have to say the industry has made some real progress on this front.

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The latest of our Playable Futures series tackles the industry's foundational duo - publisher and developer - and looks at what the future holds for publishing in a sector in which the rate of change is rapid and accelerating. It's also one in which the balance between community, audience, developer and publisher has shifted irrevocably.

For Episode Five, presenter Will Freeman speaks to Jean-Paul Hardy, general manager of Gearbox Amsterdam, and Thomas Hegarty, founder and director of Roll7. Veterans of the publisher/developer relationship, the duo draw on their many years of experience in publishing and developing video games and take a long view on what is in store for the future.

You can listen to the episode in the player below or download the file directly here – and scroll down for some of the episode's highlights.

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Games are the most successful creative industry in the UK, bigger than TV, film and music. How often have you heard this statement to justify us as a sector?

We all know and feel how the UK mainstream media, especially print, likes to portray us. Whether it’s The Sun declaring "Mum’s Guilt – I found my son in a trance at 2am hooked on his games console... and I felt it was my fault for buying it" or The Mirror's "Mum bans son, 12, from adult game – but husband’s decision put marriage at risk." Even The Guardian, who is in my opinion the gold standard of games journalism, doesn't feature games significantly on its culture page. When I say "significantly," I mean "if at all."

But we don’t really need mainstream media, do we? We have our own media channels as well as YouTube, Twitch and Discord, our global revenues are predicted to be $339.95 billion by 2027 (Mordor Intelligence), games are predicted to be played by 3.32 billion players by 2024 (Statista), the average gamer is 34 years old, owns a house, and has children (ESA). 36 years is the average age of a game’s purchaser (Digital Australia) and 67% of parents play video games with their children at least once a week (ESA).

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It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from Hempuli aka Arvi Teikari, the developer behind the adorably excellent push-puzzler Baba Is You. Well, Teikari is back with another game in the Baba-verse. This time, though, instead of pushing objects and altering the rules of reality, you are pushing tax papers in a short…

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Doing well in Warzone is often about making the most out of what you can find on the field. But with the ability to recover or purchase your loadout, one of the best ways to gain an advantage over the competition is to grab your curated selection of guns and perks.

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Neuro-sama is a VTuber who streams Minecraft and the rhythm game Osu! on Twitch. But unlike most anime avatars, she’s controlled by an artificial intelligence program rather than a human being. That makes her catnip for the denizens of Twitch chat, who can prompt her to respond with all sorts of questions ranging from…

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I hollered while I was watching the Genshin Impact update stream. Aside from giving players free stuff (arguably the least exciting part of being a Genshin enjoyer) during China’s biggest holiday, the developers teased something that I suspected all along: The hyper-secretive Alhaitham could be the most interesting…

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It’s official: the ability to smell shows and movies is finally here.

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Goose Goose Duck—a social deduction game populated by lazy-eyed geese with, apparently, customizable farts—is tearing up the Steam charts. The game has been out since 2021, released in the wake of Among Us’ crewmate-shaped shadow, but its recent surge in popularity isn’t because of an inexplicable renewed interest in…

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Earlier this week, Hasbro released a new version of Clue, its classic, 75-year-old murder mystery board game. While the game is still played the same, the characters and artwork have been changed to better connect with players in 2023. And it seems the artists at Hasbro succeeded because the internet is now very …

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