Eurogamer

Hazard Zone, the third major part of Battlefield 2042's offering, has finally been revealed, with the mode seeing squads of four compete with each other across existing maps to extract packages.

The mode, which seems to cobble together familiar elements from the likes of The Division's Dark Zone and Escape From Tarkov while serving them up in Battlefield style, got its reveal via a new trailer with DICE working to fill in the gaps in a pre-briefing.

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Michael 'KiXSTAr' Stockley, Rainbow Six Siege caster, has died at the age of 24.

Stockley was a caster, streamer and former professional player of the game.

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Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality will at last launch today for PC, PlayStation and Xbox.

The time-travelling adventure starring Jodie Whittaker and David Tennant was previously set for 30th September, but did not materialise.

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Sledgehammer Games, one of the key studios behind the Call of Duty series alongside Treyarch and Infinity Ward, has announced a new studio in the bustling UK development hub of Guildford.

The studio will support Sledgehammer's other teams in the US, Australia and Canada in its development of Call of Duty: Vanguard's content updates as well as future projects.

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Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden is being removed from Madden NFL 22 following racist, misogynistic and homophobic remarks in emails.

As reported by the NY Times, the coach frequently used derogatory language in recently surfaced emails to denigrate people involved in the NFL.

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Video games are getting bigger. File sizes are growing; patches are growing (and getting more frequent); cloud gaming is more accessible than ever; and downloading games digitally, as opposed to buying them on physical discs, is now on average very much the norm. Like it or not, the future of video games is delivered in bits and bytes, rather than boxes, and there is one obvious result: a considerable increase in the amount of data this hobby requires us to download.

This is what got us wondering about the effects of gaming downloads in the first place, and is why we published our recent (very) long-read yesterday, asking: What does gaming's all-digital future mean for the climate crisis?

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ResetEra, one of the biggest gaming forums on the internet, has been acquired for $4.5m by Swedish media company MOBA Network.

MOBA owns a number of other gaming communities, such as Mobafire.com, Dotafire.com, and Smitefire.com.

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PC players can now experience the Monster Hunter Rise demo.

Originally released on Nintendo Switch earlier this year, the PC version of Monster Hunter Rise is due out on 12th January.

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A remake of retro classic Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja will launch for consoles and PC in 2022.

This remade and expanded version of the 1991 arcade original is being developed by Asterix & Obelix: Slap Them All! developer Mr. Nutz Studio and published by Microids.

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UPDATE 14/10/21: All three potential mobs have now been announced ahead of the Minecraft Live event this weekend.

Newly added to the vote are the Allay and Copper Golem mobs.

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Heart Machine's Solar Ash has been delayed until 2nd December.

The game was originally intended to release this month, but has been pushed back "to get the last pieces of polish and bug fixes into the game", as per a tweet from the developer.

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Nintendo's new Switch OLED has sold well on its arrival, and comfortably beaten the UK launch sales of Switch Lite.

Console launch sales are always restricted to the stock available to retailers. But there has also been a question mark over how attractive a prospect the £309 OLED is for those looking to upgrade.

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UPDATE 14/10/21 9.00am UK: A Ubisoft spokesperson told Eurogamer this morning that the issue has now been fixed. Fans with boxed PS4 copies of the game are now encouraged to try the upgrade process again.

Let us know how you get on!

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Hemingway had some excellent advice for where to break off for the day when you're working on a long piece of writing. Maybe it works for more than just writing. I think Hemingway used the analogy of drilling or mining - of course he did.

Anyway, the advice goes like this: if you're breaking for the day, don't break just before you have to write something difficult. Break before you have to write something easy. The easiness of what you have to write will bring you back in the next day and let you get properly on your way.

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Last week, EA shared the surprise news it's currently "exploring the idea of renaming" its long-running FIFA football series - and we might now know why; a new report claims the football association wants EA to pay "more than double" its current deal to continue using its licence.

According to the New York Times, the current ten-year agreement between EA and FIFA comes to an end in 2022, and negotiations to extend that deal are due to conclude this year. However, "at least two years of talks" are said to have now stalled as the two parties struggle to agree on specifics, with FIFA wanting to increase the cost of its licence to "more than $1 billion for each four-year World Cup cycle" - perhaps eager to capitalise on the exponential growth of Ultimate Team, which made EA $1.62bn in its 2021 financial year, mostly through FIFA.

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LookingGlass Technologies' cult-classic 1994 sci-fi horror System Shock is the latest in a rapidly ballooning list of video games to be getting the live-action TV adaptation treatment.

As detailed by Gamespot, the newly announced show will be a collaboration between Nightdive Studios, which currently holds the System Shock license, and Binge.com, an "immersive streaming platform created for the gaming universe" that's set to launch next year.

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Activision - still embroiled in increasingly messy legal battles following the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing's lawsuit alleging sexual discrimination, harassment and a "frat boy" culture at Blizzard Entertainment - has finally shared details of Ricochet, its previously teased new anti-cheat solution for Call of Duty.

Ricochet is described as a "multi-faceted" approach to combatting cheating, and includes "new server-side tools which monitor analytics to identify cheating, enhanced investigation processes to stamp out cheaters, updates to strengthen account security, and more."

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What, you might ask yourself, could be spookier than a grouchy man dressed as a bat? And if you answered your own question with an emphatic "Nothing!", well, then let me introduce you to Rocket League's upcoming Batman-themed Halloween event.

Rocket League is, of course, no stranger to Halloween celebrations, and it's annual Haunted Hallows limited-time event returns again this year, albeit with a new DC Comics twist.

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Ubisoft has announced a last-minute delay for Ghost Recon Frontline's planned closed test, which was originally due to get underway tomorrow, 14th October.

Frontline - a free-to-play, class-based spin on the long-running tactical shooter series - was unveiled last week during Ghost Recon's 20th Anniversary livestream, with the announcement focussing on Frontline's "flagship" Expedition mode, a "new take on the battle royale genre" for 102 players where teams of three complete objectives before calling for extraction.

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A new studio named Possibility Space has been set up by Jeff Strain.

Strain is best known as the co-founder of Guild Wars developer ArenaNet (now acquired by NCsoft) and founder of State of Decay developer Undead Labs (acquired by Microsoft).

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Sony is giving PlayStation Plus members three free PS VR games to celebrate the fifth anniversary of PlayStation VR.

It's not yet known what the games will be, but they'll be available at no extra charge in November.

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Final Fantasy 14 is now the most profitable game in Square Enix's RPG series.

Naoki Yoshida, Final Fantasy 14 director, revealed at a recent Endwalker expansion preview event that the MMO has now surpassed 24 million players, as reported by IGN.

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AMD's new RX 6600 graphics card has launched, as we've reached the card's October 13th release date and the 2PM BST / 9AM EDT release time. Our RX 6600 review shows that AMD's promise of an affordable 1080p performer at $329/£299 is fulfilled, despite some close competition from Nvidia's RTX 3060, so expect a lot of demand for cards at RRP/MSRP. New GPUs are almost impossible to find at a good price right now, but if you visit the links below at the right time you still have a shot of picking up a shiny new RX 6600 in the US or UK. We've linked to both prebuilt systems and the cards themselves, so consider checking both categories.

AMD Radeon RX 6600 answers

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Watching a new, roughly 25-minute presentation on Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, something struck me: Pokémon is actually kind of cute, right?

Of course I know this - the Pokémon Company did not hoist it's brand to the top of the highest-grossing media franchise lists by playing down the snuggliness of a Pikachu - but it's weirdly easy to put out of your mind when thinking about the main series games. Generally, people get into Pokémon when they're still a child, and so the games - whichever they play first - tend to feel big and imposing. Challenging, even.

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A new graphics card has arrived: the $329/£299 RX 6600, little brother to the RX 6600 XT that launched back in August. It's intended to compete against Nvidia's RTX 3060, which also has a $329 RRP, as well as older graphics cards like Nvidia's RTX 2060, 2060 Super and 2070.

The pitch here is pretty simple: it's faster than those older cards, competitive with the RTX 3060, and its position at the bottom of AMD's current GPU stack should mean that it can be made in large quantities. In fact, the pitch is so simple that our press briefing for the GPU was extremely rapid - a few slides of specs, expected performance versus the RTX 2060 and RX 5600 XT, a few shots of partner models and then the call for questions. The briefing wrapped up before 15 minutes had expired, a relative instant compared to the hour-long calls we normally expect - so is the RX 6600 that simple, or is there more here than meets the eye?

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A behind-the-scenes tour of developer Pearl Abyss has provided a fresh glimpse of DokeV gameplay.

The South Korean developer showed footage of the forthcoming game back at E3 and immediately caused a stir with its cartoon visuals set against its South Korean backdrop.

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The forthcoming Skyrim Anniversary Edition could have a big impact on mod users.

Some of the best Skyrim mods available use the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE) plug-in, but each time the Bethesda Creation Club receives a new update of content the SKSE can break.

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New details have emerged on Microsoft exclusive RPG Avowed from Obsidian.

The game was first announced at the Xbox Game Showcase in July 2020 and is from the studio behind The Outer Worlds and Pillars of Eternity.

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HBO's The Last of Us is filming now, and a fresh set photo has given us our best look yet at The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal as Joel.

Pascal was papped in costume this morning by Kristin Raworth (thanks, The Last of Us News) entering the downtown Edmonton set which is standing in for the game's Boston area.

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Remember Games for Windows Live? It's a name I've not heard for a long time, but something which was still plaguing Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition on PC until just this week.

Games for Windows Live was Microsoft's much-hated first attempt at getting Xbox Live-style features on PC, stuffed in a launcher that no one wanted to use, and initially for a $50/year subscription.

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Note: there are two parts to this piece. This page is part one; the next page is part two (you can also use the Previous/Next buttons to navigate).

It's not unusual to turn on a console and be greeted by a screen of pending downloads for games you have installed. It happened to me today. Several games needed updating, meaning hundreds of gigabytes of data to download. This didn't particularly bother me. I have an uncapped and relatively speedy internet connection. My primary concerns were exactly how long it would take and how much hard-drive space it would require. What effect all that data would have passing through the network didn't occur to me. I couldn't see it so I wasn't thinking about it.

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I think I've always suspected that something happens behind the TV when I download a game or a patch, or I play online, but I've never seriously stopped to think about what. And when I say behind the TV, I don't mean actually behind the TV, I mean on the internet. I know that data gets piped out and sent back, because that's how I download the files to play games, but beyond that, I don't really know what's truly taking place. I've never needed to think about it before.

Except recently, I began wondering. I am worried about the climate emergency and I was looking at my life and thinking about the things I do and the effect they have on our world. And I looked at gaming and I didn't know. It seemed quite clean. There's no packaging waste in the way there once was because I download most of my games, and none of my machines cause noticeable spikes on my electricity smart meter, not like my shower does.

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While the future of EA Sports' licensing deal with FIFA is looking increasingly uncertain, the publisher has announced it's renewed its contract with FIFPRO to "deliver the greatest, most authentic football [video game] experience".

The renewal, described only as a "long-term commitment", will enable EA to continue using the "thousands of player names and likenesses" supported by the FIFPRO license agreement in its football games, alongside various official leagues, including the UEFA Champions League, CONMEBOL Libertadores, Premier League, Bundesliga, and LaLiga Santander.

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Mario Party Superstars is poised to delve into the series' past to deliver some classic board-and-minigame action on Switch later this month, starting 29th October, and Nintendo has offered a closer look at both ahead of its launch.

Drawing on over two decades of releases, Mario Party Superstars features five boards taken from the series' N64 era - Yoshi's Tropical Island, Space Land, Peach's Birthday Cake, Woody Woods, and Horror Land - all redesigned for Switch and featuring their own unique events, while its minigames have been selected from all across previous Mario Party instalments.

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Quake's 25th anniversary enhanced edition, which released for PC and consoles back in August, has just received a free "next-gen" upgrade for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The original enhanced edition - which bundles together Quake, its two official expansions, plus two additional expansions by Wolfenstein: The New Order developer Machine Games - was already an extremely solid brush-up of the quarter-century-old FPS classic, but the newly released "next-gen" upgrade adds a little extra oomph for Xbox Series X/S and PS5 owners.

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UPDATE 18.31pm: Now that Epic has finally acknowledged the source of its 'inspiration' for Fortnite's social-deduction-in-space Impostors mode, the brandter has begun in earnest on Twitter, pointing to an official collaboration with Among Us and its developer Innersloth.

In response to a tweet announcing Fortnite's 18.20 update (which also credited Among Us as the inspiration for Imposters), Innersloth offered up a googly-eye emoji before the official Fornite account swept in with a, "Hey @AmongUsGame! Since you're here we've got something we wanted to ask you."

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Let's Build a Zoo, the adorable DNA-splicing management sim from developer Springloaded Games, will be throwing open its doors and inviting guests to admire its scientifically dubious exhibits from 5th November on Steam.

On the face of it, Let's Build a Zoo delivers pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a zoo tycoon, tasking players with importing and breeding animals (from a list of over 500), managing staff, and fashioning an appealing park using scenery items, shops, and amenities in order to keep guests happy and the money rolling in.

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A new report published by Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (paywall) has detailed a "culture of silence" at Paradox Interactive, the developer behind strategy game hits such as Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis.

Content warning: this article includes descriptions of assault.

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The second annual World Esports Day will take place on 23rd October.

Hosted by the British Esports Association, with support from the Global Esports Federation, Singapore Esports Association and Twitch, the event aims to increase awareness of the positive impacts esports has on society.

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