March 2023

Blumhouse - the horror-focused movie production company behind the likes of Paranormal Activity, Sinister, Insidious, and Get Out - is adapting Dead by Daylight into a film.

The project is being developed in conjunction with Dead by Daylight studio Behaviour Interactive and Atomic Monster (the production company run by prominent horror director James Wan), with the latter calling the game's "incredible environment teeming with atmosphere and terrifying villains...perfect for a scary cinematic adaptation".

There's no writer or director attached to the adaptation yet - the companies are "commencing their search" for both - but Blumhouse says it's "imperative we find someone who appreciates and loves the world as much as we do, to help us bring the game to the big screen".

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Playdate owners - you know who you are - take note! A fresh update on the dinky handheld game system with a crank is coming next week.

The showcase will air on YouTube next Tuesday, 7th March at 5pm UK time (that's 9am Pacific, back in Playdate's Portland, Oregon home).

Expect 13 minutes of updates showing new games coming to the Playdate in the very near future, plus an update on Catalog, the device's upcoming on-device store.

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Microsoft's $68.7bn Activision Blizzard deal looks set to pass EU regulators, news agency Reuters has now reported.

Citing sources familiar with the deal, the report claims that Microsoft has won over the European Commission with its show of concessions last week, when it announced deals to ensure Call of Duty would be made available on Nintendo platforms and Nvidia's GeForce Now streaming service.

The EU is set to publicly state its final judgement on the case before 25th April.

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The nominees for this year's Bafta Games Awards have been announced, and God of War Ragnarök is dominating the list with nominations in 11 of the 18 categories.

Elden Ring, Stray and Tunic follow behind Ragnarök in terms of number of nominations, whilst Eurogamer favourites OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome are in the running for Best British Game.

(One of my personal favourites, Trombone Champ, is up for best debut game. I'll be tooting for you!)

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I absolutely loved both the Resident Evil 2 and 3 Remakes, so unsurprisingly I’m super excited for the RE4 Remake that’s on the way in just a few weeks.

To tide us over until then though, Capcom sent us over some brand new footage of the game to pore over, which includes brand new footage of some familiar scenes, a look at a couple of new mechanics in action, and a peek at some new features for the merchant and the attaché case. I’ve broken down everything I found interesting in a new video on the channel, which you can check out above.

Of particular interest is the new focus given to your knife - born out of a desire from the developers to reinvent the QTE-heavy knife fight with Krauser in the original game - and the ability to stealth past enemies now, which may come in handy as Leon and Ashley try to navigate through the castle and its nightmarish cultists and Garrador enemies.

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As ever, with a new month of Game Pass additions comes a new month of Game Pass losses.

We already know Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty will be available as a day one release tomorrow, which Alan Wen gave a recommended badge in his preview.

Unfortunately, some other pretty good games will be leaving to make room for the anticipated release.

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Good news, Birdo fans. The Mushroom Kingdom's pinkest dinosaur will arrive as a playable character within Mario Kart 8 Deluxe next week, on 9th March.

Birdo is the star of the Switch racer's Booster Course Pass Wave 4, which also adds another eight tracks, including a brand new level themed around Yoshi's Island.

A trailer released today has now confirmed the rest of the crop, including the brilliant DK Summit from Mario Kart Wii and classic Waluigi Stadium from Mario Kart Double Dash!!

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Frontier Developments is making its F1 racing management sim - the aptly F1 Manager 2022 - free to try this weekend on Steam.

F1 Manager 2022 - the first of four games planned for release under Frontier's F1 licensing deal - launched last August, putting players in the role of a team principal and challenging them to lead their "drivers, engineers and fans to glory in the 2022 FIA Formula 1 Drivers' World Championship and FIA Formula 1 Constructors' World Championship".

While it adequately filled enough of a niche to draw a positive response at launch, players quickly began to criticise the game for its shallow, undercooked features and a significant number of bugs - but any hopes of major improvement were quickly quashed when Frontier announced it was ending support for the game less than two months after launch.

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The Legend of Zelda and Doom are both legendary, genre-defining titles from decades ago, but with vastly different gameplay, technical makeup and release platforms it's hard to find too many similarities between them. That is until late 2021, when solo indie developer DeTwelve released a Doom mod set in the original NES version of Hyrule called The Legend of Doom. It's a stunning mash-up that's well worth playing, as Digital Foundry's John Linneman and My Life in Gaming's Marc 'Try4ce' Duddleson discovered when they synced up to play version 1.1.0 of the mod alongside the original Legend of Zelda on original NES hardware.

That video is embedded below, but what really struck me watching the playthrough was how well the combined game really works - and how completely the Hyrule environments and gameplay from The Legend of Zelda have been transplanted into the world of Doom.

The original sprites work surprisingly well in a 3D environment, with only minor changes to some room layouts or the colour palette (which may be influenced by the RGB mod Marc is using with his hardware). You get a lovely sense of scale compared to the top-down perspective found in the original game, and being a first-person shooter it's perhaps a bit easier to side-step enemy attacks. Of course, having infinite arrows helps a lot too.

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When I first played the demo for Phantom Brigade, I realised it did something I'd been wanting from games for years. It's a turn-based game that uses the magic of our computer boxes to produce fantastic action scenes. Not only that, they're action scenes featuring giant robots, which astute readers may have noticed I have a fondness for. (Taking screenshots, I should add, has been an absolute joy, as I've scrubbed back and forth through each turn's timeline, rotating and zooming the camera to find the perfect angle of huge mecha smashing into each other and exploding.)

There's nothing particularly original in how Phantom Brigade achieves this. It's essentially Frozen Synapse blended with Into the Breach, with a dash of Battletech for good measure. You have a squad of mechs with which to engage in turn-based battles with enemy mechs and tanks. Rather than moving and shooting with each unit in sequence, you plan out the actions of your squad over each five-second turn, then hit the execute button and watch your tactical brilliance play out in real time. Where Into the Breach comes in, other than the big robots, is your ability to see the predicted actions of your opponent. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and you can use your Cassandra-like powers of prophecy to move out of enemy fire arcs and line up perfect kill shots of your own.

Yuji Naka, the former boss of Sega's Sonic Team, has reportedly admitted a charge of insider trading over the ownership of shares worth around £865k.

In December last year, Naka was accused of violating financial laws after it was reported that he had purchased a large number of shares in Japanese mobile developer ATeam while employed at Square Enix.

It was alleged that Naka had done so in the knowledge ATeam was working with Square Enix on mobile game Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier - a fact which had not been made public.

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Footage which appears to show an unannounced world editor mode for Minecraft has appeared online.

Editor mode is a rumoured but still officially unconfirmed mode expected by fans to arrive in Minecraft Bedrock - Microsoft's mainline version of Minecraft it offers for PC and consoles.

Footage posted to Twitter today shows a straightforward interface used to quickly edit Minecraft worlds on the fly by creating large structures, as well as edit individual blocks.

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Facebook parent Meta is reportedly planning to release its Quest 3 VR headset later this year, according to a roadmap presentation from Reality Labs to its employees.

The presentation, which was shared with The Verge, contained details on Quest 3 as well as two more headsets and Meta's AR development projects.

Speculation of a Quest 3 release sometime soon was fuelled recently by the news that Meta is ending support for its original Quest VR headset, with the company continuing to deliver security patches until 2024.

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Happy World Book Day! What better way to celebrate on Eurogamer than to think of some of our favourite connections between games and books. We hope you have a lovely day spent reading.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

Meeting a freshly formed team of unlikely heroes with a perfect balance of contempt for one another and sarcastic quips would have been enough, but M.K England took it one step further. Their book seamlessly alternates between the present time, before we meet the team in the 2021 game, and 12 years before that, where a young Peter Quill encounters Ko-Rel while battling the Chitarui on Mercury. Sure, inferring parts of their relationship in the main game is part of the charm, but having a book that explores a big point in the history displayed between the Commander and the rogue Ravager makes their eventual alliance all the more bitter-sweet.

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Rapper and TV producer Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson has sparked speculation he is involved in a Vice City-related Grand Theft Auto project, following a cryptic tease posted to his Instagram.

"I will explain this later," he wrote, alongside an image of a neon pink Vice City logo. "This shit bigger than POWER trust me."

While best known for his career in music, Jackson has found further fame in recent years with the hugely-successful Power, the crime drama TV series which he starred in and executive produced.

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Publisher Focus Entertainment has announced the release date for Atlas Fallen, the next game from The Surge developer Deck 13.

When it was first announced during Gamescom Opening Night Live last summer, details of the game were light and a release window of 2023 was given.

The game's first trailer mostly contained of cinematics showing off the game's desert setting and monster enemies, with perhaps some short snippets of gameplay sprinkled in at the end.

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Humble Bundle has launched a new charity bundle in aid of Türkiye-Syria earthquake relief efforts.

All funds from the Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Game and Book Bundle will go to supporting three charities in their ongoing efforts: Direct Relief, International Medical Corps, and Save the Children.

The bundle is available now until 8th March and features over $1000 worth of PC games, books and comics for just $30.

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Well Microsoft, Sony sees your brilliant Mandalorian-themed Xbox Series X and S consoles and raises you... a LeBron James designed controller and PS5 console cover.

The collaboration is the first in a series called PlayStation Playmakers, which PlayStation's head of global marketing Eric Lempel described as a partnership with "passionate PlayStation fans who also happen to be some of the most exciting creators, atheletes, actors, artists, gamers, and entertainers in pop culture today".

Lempel described James as a "natural fit" for PlayStation Playmakers, and recalled James' appearance with his son Bronny in that one God of War trailer with Ben Stiller as Kratos.

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Microsoft has successfully won access to a trove of internal Sony documentation pertinent to its Activision Blizzard deal - something the PlayStation maker was fiercely opposed to.

Sony has emerged as the acquisition's key opponent, and Microsoft is hoping this ruling will allow it to gain leverage with the US regulator ahead of its own judgement.

A judge has now ruled that Microsoft can view Sony's communications with regulators about the Activision deal, as well as details of Sony's own exclusivity agreements with game publishers since 2019.

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Stig Asmussen, director of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, wants to make the story of Cal Kestis a trilogy.

Survivor will follow on from 2019's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, continuing Cal's adventures - now with a beard.

The sequel was discussed before the release of the first game and, should it perform well, a third game would be likely, Asmussen told IGN.

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There's always a cause for concern when you think you've hit a wall early on in a game, or in the case of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, at the end of what's meant to be its tutorial mission. Thrown straight into the thick of China's turbulent Three Kingdoms era during the Yellow Turban Rebellion, you find yourself up against one of its formidable leaders, whose strength has been enhanced by a cursed elixir. Surely this is meant to be a trick boss you're supposed to lose against, like in Sekiro? Or there must be an easy exploit right under your nose, as with Dark Souls' Taurus Demon? Fortunately, after almost an hour of struggle, I realised it was the latter, the price for turning on Chinese audio for authenticity but failing to read the subtitles during the thick of battle.

It's a rather cruel first hurdle to put in front of you, perhaps characteristic of Team Ninja's "masocore" sensibilities, but almost an anomaly to the rest of the marathon ahead of you. In leaving behind the Nioh series set in Sengoku-era Japan, the studio introduces new mechanics and features that actually make Wo Long one of the most approachable Soulslikes I've played in years, without simply sticking it in easy mode.

The road to Final Fantasy 16 has begun. After presentations, previews, and a general sense of breathlessness surrounding Square Enix's latest iteration of the Final Fantasy series, an interesting titbit has emerged. Final Fantasy 16 will include a level of accessibility in the form of equipable rings that alter the fundamental gameplay experience.

Square Enix has revealed five of these rings that we're expected to fit into three slots: one that slows incoming attacks, another which removes the need to give commands to an ancillary character, another that ties combos to a single button, and one each for automating dodges - because every game must have dodge rolls now, apparently - and healing.

If these sound like typical accessibility features, that's because they are. Square Enix's intentions behind this system aren't immediately clear. As reported by Game Informer, Naoki Yoshida, the game's producer, suggests the rings about making "something that felt accessible but also customizable so that each player could create something that felt like a difficulty level that matched them," going on to suggest Square Enix had "listened to players that are maybe not as good at doing combos and attacking." (This is spoken through a translator.) "Some players maybe are not as good at dodging as other players." This is the target audience for the rings then, as opposed to being considerations specifically for disabled players.

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Telltale Games has delayed The Wolf Among Us 2 out of its 2023 launch window and into 2024, in order to avoid burnout and crunch at the studio.

The Wolf Among Us 2 - the sequel to Telltale's acclaimed 2013 narrative adventure based on Bill Willingham's Fables comic books - has had an eventful development. It was first announced in 2017, but progress halted after the studio shut its doors the following year. It was then unexpectedly re-announced in 2019, after Telltale was resurrected under new management.

This new version - which is being co-developed by AdHoc Studio, co-founded by original Wolf Among Us co-director Nick Herman, and made up of almost 50-percent former Telltale employees - was initially expected to launch in 2023, but Telltale has now pushed the game's release into next year, as detailed in a statement shared on Twitter.

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Developer Sloclap's acclaimed martial arts adventure Sifu will - after a year of PlayStation and Epic Games Store exclusivity - be making its way to Xbox and Steam on 28th March.

Sifu, if you've not yet had the pleasure, is a third-person, single-player action game - focused on intense hand-to-hand combat - that charts a young Kung Fu student's quest for revenge following the murder of his family. It also features a magic pendant capable of resurrecting the protagonist on defeat, but he'll grow older with each revival, making its uses finite - but at least you get to keep any unlocked skills for another attempt.

Sifu was extremely well-received when it launched last February, but some players found its extremely tough challenge a little too much to handle. Pleasingly, though, Sloclap took feedback on board and added new difficulty options several months in - and has continued updating the experience with new modifiers, systems, and outfits since.

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If the old screen capture trick isn't quite getting the results you're after in Tango Gameworks' gorgeous, eminently snappable rhythm-action treat Hi-Fi Rush, the studio now has you covered with an official photo mode, which launches today on Xbox and PC.

Once today's update is downloaded and installed, players can pause the action as required and summon in protagonist Chai and friends ready for their close-up (or otherwise). All characters can be posed, and the photo mode also features a choice of frames, filters, and camera effects to memorialise the moment in style.

Alongside the new photo mode, today's Hi-Fi Rush update also brings a number of fixes and tweaks, including stick and trigger dead zone adjustments, attack behaviour changes for the game's first boss, and more, as detailed in Tango Gameworks' patch notes.

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New job listings posted by Gears of War studio The Coalition indicate the developer is in the process of ramping up production on a new title in the long-running shooter series.

That the studio specifically set up to make new Gears games might be working on a new Gears game isn't news in itself, of course, but The Coalition has been pretty quiet since its last major release, Gears 5 in 2019. It had a hand in 2020's Gears Tactics and The Matrix Awakens in 2021, but there's been scant word of any major new Gears projects from the studio in that time.

First hints that Gears 6 might finally be on the way came from Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb in February, who claimed The Coalition had ditched two unannounced projects amid Microsoft's Xbox layoffs to focus on a new entry in the flagship series - and now, new job listings posted on The Coalition's website lend credence to that report.

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The International Olympic Committee has announced the Olympic Esports Series, an esports competition which will feature a dance event using Just Dance and racing within Gran Turismo.

Nine virtual sports will be featured, including archery, baseball, cycling, sailing, taekwondo and tennis. Also, chess.

Qualifying events will be held in various video games over the next few months, the IOC said, before the first-ever in-person finals event to be held in Singapore in June.

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I've had a presentation for a promising new sandbox MMO called Pax Dei.

It looks like an Arthurian fairytale. I saw characters in flowing dresses in a sun-dappled wood working together to build picturesque hamlets or settlements. They placed down floors and walls in a blueprint-style way, as in other building games, before equipping plate armour and weaponry and venturing to darker, more barren and dangerous areas of the world. The smoky spirit-like enemies they encountered there were genuinely scary.

One of the most eye-catching things about Pax Dei is its looks. This is Unreal Engine 5 and Pax Dei is a handsome beast, and you can see some of that in the screenshots here, although I think they're pulled from the announcement trailer. But in play, it looks similar, and the settlements you create are gorgeous.

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Microsoft has designed a custom set of Xbox Series X and S consoles, themed around The Mandalorian.

Baby Yoda/Grogu features on the dinkier Xbox Series S design, while the beefier Xbox Series X features Mando himself. (No, there's no option with Pedro Pascal's face instead.)

The bundle will be made available via sweepstake - so yes, you get both consoles - and also includes a Yoda-green controller and a replica of little Grogu's sweater. Entry is as simple as retweeting the official Xbox Twitter account from today until 11th May.

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Cockpits and virtual reality are practically made for one another, with VR racing games delivering a sense of place and realism beyond anything you can experience on a flat panel. Many earlier VR headsets, like the original PSVR, were limited both by lower fidelity panels and hardware driving them. That makes the arrival of Gran Turismo 7 VR on PSVR2 exciting, with the entirety of the game now playable within virtual reality at a far higher level of fidelity. This no compromise approach has the potential to provide a truly killer experience, but does it deliver?

GT7's VR mode comes courtesy of an update, which also adds the fancy new Sophy AI opponents we'll touch on later. After installing the update and launching the game, it's not clear how to play in VR with the game just floating in space like other non-VR content - but once you begin a race or a select a VR-specific feature VR activates automatically. This approach is a little odd, but makes sense given that the game uses a gamepad (or wheel!) rather than the Sense controllers. The game seamlessly switches between 2D and VR modes as the headset is removed or replaced, so you can also take a breather when needed.

UPDATE 4pm UK: Activision has provided Eurogamer with a statement in response to the charges filed by the CWA.

"The company is focused on building a culture of inclusiveness," reads the statement. "We have a workplace Code of Conduct policy that has been consistently shared with employees, and when that policy is clearly violated, we take appropriate disciplinary action. Using abusive, harassing, or threatening language toward colleagues is unacceptable, and we are disappointed that the CWA is advocating for this type of behaviour."

The original story follows below.

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We're hot off the launch of PSVR2, and whilst it's received glowing reviews from our own VR expert Ian and the tech wizards at Digital Foundry , it's fair to say most people haven't bought one.

Looking within the Eurogamer team, you can count the number of people who own any VR headset on one hand. According to estimations shared by former president of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aimé and calculated by online business platform Statista, only 1.3 percent of the world's population will own some form of VR hardware this year. By their projections, in 2027 that percentage will have plateaued out at 1.7 precent, whilst the percentage of people playing video games in any form will jump from 45 to 51.3 percent in the same timeframe.

So what's going on? Why isn't half the world enjoying scaling mountains in the world of Horizon or getting stepped on by Lady Dimitrescu?

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It's been four expansions since Destiny players waved farewell to Cayde-6, the wise-cracking Hunter originally played by Nathan Fillion - and for many, the best character in the game.

Now, Bungie has added a touching memorial to the fallen Exo, which players can visit within Destiny 2's Tower hub.

Interacting with Cayde's bust prompts dialogue lines reflecting on Cayde's life from other Destiny 2 stalwarts such as Ikora and Zavala. These memorials also include a line from The Crow - who does not remember killing Cayde in his former life as Uldren Sov.

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Story details for the upcoming Silent Hill 2 film have leaked online, suggesting this adaptation will pivot from its original source material.

Officially announced back in October, Return to Silent Hill will tell the story of "a young guy coming back to Silent Hill, where he has known a great love and what he's going to find is a pure nightmare", according to film director Christophe Gans.

All in all, that sounds very Silent Hill 2. But according to German film site FilmPortal (via reddit), there will also be a few changes made to the game's main plot.

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Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has criticised the term JRPG, sparking debate among players online.

In an interview with Skill-Up following previews of the game, Yoshida was asked about how JRPGs have advanced in comparison to action games. According to the interviewer, Yoshida was visibly uncomfortable with the phrase.

"One thing [Yoshida] wants to get across is that when we create games, we don't go into them thinking we are creating JRPGs, we are just creating RPGs. The term JRPG is used by western media rather than users and media in Japan," said localisation director Koji Fox.

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Call of Duty will no longer feature console-exclusive DLC content if it is owned by Microsoft, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said.

Speaking to Xbox On, Spencer said future versions of Activision's shooter franchise would simply aim to be "the best version of Call of Duty" on any platform, without offering extra skins or guns to Xbox players.

Of course, all of this is contingent on Microsoft completing its $68.7bn Activision Blizzard buyout - which is by no means a done deal.

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Five of the Best is a weekly we've resurrected for supporters because we wanted to do something nice for them - for you. It's a series about highlighting incidental features in games that often get overlooked. And it's also a series about having your say, so don't be shy, use those comments below and join in!

You can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

Today: expansion packs. And there's a lot to like about expansion packs. They are that last hurrah for developer and player alike - an almost reluctance by both parties to let go. Developers get a chance to let their hair down and do some of the things they couldn't do in the more serious main instalment of the game, and players get another chance to spend time with the characters and worlds they love. It's a win-win situation. So let's have a hurrah for the last-hurrahs; here are five of the best.

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EA has reportedly laid off over 200 contract QA testers at its Baton Rouge, Louisiana office - the vast majority of its Apex Legends QA team - during an unscheduled Zoom call this morning.

According to Kotaku, QA testers were informed they were losing their jobs, effective immediately, during a mandatory Zoom meeting held at 8am CT by their contracting agency Magnit Global. Sources told the site that EA's whole Baton Rouge QA team has now been disbanded as a result of the call, amounting to what one former employee called "essentially their entire Apex Legends QA staff" on Twitter.

In a statement provided to Kotaku, EA did not comment on the layoffs directly, but did confirm changes at its Baton Rouge office. "As part of our ongoing global strategy," the publisher wrote, "we are expanding the distribution of our Apex Legends testing team and ending testing execution that's been concentrated in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, impacting services provided by our third-party provider."

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Universal Pictures is shifting the release date of The Super Mario Bros. Movie forward by two days to 5th April in the US and "60 other markets".

If you've already lost track of when The Super Mario Bros. Movie is due to arrive, that's entirely understandable; Universal has shunted its release date around the calender a number of times already, initially aiming for December 2022 before switching to an early March release across a large number of territories, including Australia, Europe, and the UK.

The US, meanwhile, was due to receive the movie a little later on 7th April - a date seemingly adopted as the new global release by the time The Super Mario Bros. Movie's most recent, easter-egg-laden trailer arrived earlier this month.

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11 Bit Studios, the company behind the acclaimed likes of This War of Mine and Frostpunk, has unveiled The Thaumaturge, a new "story-rich" isometric RPG from developer Fool's Theory being published as part of partnership announced last year.

Fool's Theory - a "collective of AAA veterans" whose work includes open-world RPG Seven: The Days Long Gone and the in-development remake of the original Witcher for CD Projekt - initially teased its new RPG under the name Project Vitriol last June, describing it as a "deep, morally ambiguous, narrative-driven" game and promising more details soon.

A little later than expected, Project Vitriol has now been given its proper unveiling as The Thaurmaturge, a "story-driven RPG with a unique take on combat, character development features, and investigation mechanics" that touches on the "complex theme of inner demons".

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