Eurogamer

Viking-themed co-op survival phenomenon Valheim has now thundered through the six millions copies sold barrier on Steam, and developer Iron Gate Studios is celebrating with a tiny tease of the game's first major update.

Valheim has, of course, been a blistering success for the five-person studio; the game managed to shift an impressive 1m copies in its first week and, now, six weeks on, there's still no sign of those numbers slowing any time soon.

"We are very honoured to have gotten the opportunity to take part in several interviews, from podcasts and gaming newslets to Swedish television!," Iron Gate said of its success in a new post. "It has been a hectic time, but worry not! We are of course still working on the game."

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Apex Legends' new Switch conversion may be one of the system's most ambitious to date - but the severity of the cutbacks is clearly an issue. Much has been said about the game's low resolution and the impact this has on visibility when targeting opponents at long range, but as our video head-to-head below reveals, the gulf in terms of visual features is tremendous, to the point where so many missing graphical elements may well have implications for the balance of the game when viewed through the lens of the CrossPlay feature.

In bringing Apex Legends to Switch, EA certainly chose a partner with pedigree - core porting work is carried out by Panic Button, riding high after the success of the excellent Switch conversion of Doom Eternal. But this is a title that represents a major challenge: it's a game with a huge, detailed map, it's a full-on battle royale with 60 players, and it's running on Respawn Entertainment's rendition of the Source Engine, never designed with mobile play in mind (though Source itself was ported to Android, with several Valve titles running on Shield Android TV using the same Tegra X1 chipset). The end result is perhaps inevitably, a highly pruned back experience - and it's one where the specific presentation of CrossPlay brings the compromises into the harshest of focus. Put simply, when we start a party with one player on Switch and the other on Xbox Series X, we can allow one player to die, switch to spectator mode and see entirely like-for-like imagery. The differences can be astonishing - far more so than, say, Fortnite, where the same CrossPlay trick reveals much closer level of parity.

CD Projekt has announced details of Cyberpunk 2077's next big patch.

Patch 1.2, which was delayed from February to the second half of March following the damaging CD Projekt cyber attack, makes some changes to parts of the game that were criticised at launch, including the police and driving.

The changes are outlined in a series of videos, below. Here's the rundown:

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It's been a bumper seven days for video game news, with headlines sparkling with announcements from publishers plotting their 2021 and beyond. And so arrives another Eurogamer News Cast video, below, to digest the week that was.

Eurogamer news editor Tom Phillips, guides writer Lottie Lynn and me start with Square Enix Presents, the publisher's showcase event that revealed the promising Life is Strange True Colors and confirmed the final name of PlayStation 5 timed-exclusive Project Athia: Forspoken.

But it's Marvel's Avengers that's at the heart of our chat this week. Square Enix and developer Crystal Dynamics revealed the roadmap for content coming to the game during 2021, and a Black Panther expansion is expected towards the end. There are a few other events planned before then, but there's no mention of PlayStation-exclusive DLC character Spider-Man. Is all this enough to save the embattled super-hero action adventure?

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Warner Bros. has announced a delay for Gotham Knights, confirming its latest bat-adventure is now scheduled to launch some time in 2022.

Gotham Knights is the newest title from Warner Bros. Games Montreal, the studio behind 2013's Batman: Arkham Origins, and will deliver an open-world action role-playing experience - playable both solo and co-operatively - starring Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin.

The idea, if you're curious, is that the various bat-pals have teamed up in order to protect Gotham following the death of Bruce Wayne.

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Everyone knows Xbox Series X looks like a fridge. It's a fact Microsoft has previously acknowledged, and made into reality with a series of enormous promotional chillers shaped like Xbox Series X it shipped to people like Snoop Dogg.

Now, Microsoft has announced a partnership with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to create smaller fridges shaped like Xbox Series X but sized a lot closer to the console itself.

Why The Rock? Well, the wrestler-turned-movie star just so happens to have created a new energy drink, Zoa, to store in said fridge, and he's keen to get the gamers onboard.

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Fortnite fans think they've uncovered who plays the game's important new character The Foundation: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

The Foundation crashed into Fortnite this week as part of the game's Zero Crisis Finale event, and aided players in their bid to stabilise the island.

As leader of the mysterious group named as The Seven, The Foundation appears to hold a critical role in the game's upcoming storyline - and seems set to reappear as soon as he can be freed from being trapped inside the Zero Point itself.

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Dicebreaker Recommends is a series of monthly board game, RPG and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker.

When the world outside feels a little scary, there's nothing better than curling up with something comforting. Patchwork, a two-player tabletop title about making a quilt, is the absolute definition of a comfort board game. Its theme is seeped in an old-timey Americana or Scandinavian feel, so much so that you can almost smell the dust bunnies and fresh baking whenever you open its box.

That theme isn't the only aspect that makes it comforting - the gentle pace and light competitiveness of its gameplay allows it to be a kinder experience. Players might be trying to score more points than their opponent, but Patchwork rarely involves the kind of brutal interactions one might expect from other head-to-head board games.

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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: antique chairs, lighthouses and properly great pixelart.

The lighthouse at the start of Concrete Genie might be one of those rare perfect locations in a video game. I adore it. Beyond the gate is a little courtyard with a fountain. There's a door to push through and then an entryway where the wooden planks on the floor have become warped and bowed, and eventually cave inwards, curved like pieces of a ship. Below you is a cellar where treasures lurk and above you is a network of iron ladders and gantries leading you back outside, where you can curve your way upwards until you reach the light itself.

I never tire of playing around here, spotting the detailing, no two pieces of wood exactly alike, no railing without a twist or a kink in it. And before even that, I love the part of the game where you learn how to handle paint by filling in creature designs in your sketchbook. The paint is lovely - watery and occasionally thick, uneven, the sense of a powder or paste in suspension. You move it, but it moves too - the colour is something you have to tug around on the page.

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How quickly when you're thinking about Halo does the music come into your head? I'm imagining it's probably there before the first images. Mournful, ancient, righteous, heroic, the music in Halo is doing an awful lot. It's been described in interviews as the thing that makes everything else twice as good, and it's hard not to suspect that's true. Get in a Warthog and the camera moves back and that music starts up: let's get on with it.

Leaving that for just a second, it must be annoying having been part of the team that made the original Halo. Annoying in a way that being in the Beatles must be annoying. Whatever you do next, you know where the comparisons are going to lie. Even when you take a very different tack, like Alex Seropian, for example, who ditched the Master Chief for Stubbs the Zombie, a fascinating curio that has finally made the transition to modern machines, with a port that I've been playing on Switch the last few days. There's a lot to think about with Stubbs, but inevitably Halo comes into it quite often - and not just Halo, but Halo's music.

I remember playing Stubbs very briefly back when it came out in - jeepers - 2005. My take at the time, and it was hardly original, was that here was a game in which you played as the Flood rather than the Chief. Stubbs uses the Halo engine to conjure one of those atomic utopian hellholes the 1950s were so good at imagining. Punchbowl is the ultimate futuristic town for the decade of Doris Day and Reds in the Bed. It has its own monorail! People are doing weird things with agriculture! You get shown around by a robot! And the police force is gigantic and militarised.

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Starbreeze has signed a €50m publishing deal with Koch Media for Payday 3.

The Swedish developer said Payday 3 is now due out at some point in 2023 on PC and consoles, and the investment will pay for development, marketing as well as more than 18 months of post-launch "games as a service" content.

The deal means Payday 3 is "fully financed", Starbreeze said. Starbreeze remains owner of the Payday IP.

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Sony has co-bought the long-running Evo fighting game tournament.

Sony joined forces with RTS, a new venture from Endeavor's esports business, to buy the Evolution Championship Series, the world's largest fighting game event. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Sony said Evo will return this year in online form and feature Street Fighter 5, Tekken 7, Mortal Kombat 11 and Guilty Gear Strive.

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The Xbox Wireless Headset is here, Microsoft's first official audio accessory for the Series X and Series S, and it's fantastic. The £90/$100 headset packs in an astonishing amount of features and quality for its relatively affordable price tag, and it may be one of the only first-party headsets for any system that I'd actually recommend.

The standout feature for me is its multipoint wireless. The XWH comes with Microsoft's proprietary Xbox Wireless, allowing a wireless connection without the use of a dongle, but the headset also comes with Bluetooth 4.2. The neat thing is that you can use the headset with your Xbox and your phone simultaneously, making it easy to listen to music while playing games, or chat with your mates on Discord while playing a cross-platform title. Of course, having two connection methods available also provides a great degree of flexibility - I'm using it now, listening to chilled hip-hop beats in the garden while hammering on a mechanical keyboard, and later I'll be using it to play Rocket League and Tetris Effect in the living room.

The only issue I've discovered after a few days of testing is that the headset will cheerfully activate your Xbox Series X/S each time it's turned on; unfortunately I haven't discovered a way to disable this behaviour beyond leaving the house before turning on the headset - hardly ideal! It's also worth noting that the headset doesn't require a dongle for its Xbox connectivity, which is convenient but means that you don't have a 2.4GHz USB dongle that could be plugged into a PC or PS5 (more on that later).

Developer InnerSloth has announced Among Us' eagerly awaited fourth map, known as The Airship, will finally launch on 31st March.

Revealed during last December's Game Awards, The Airship is inspired by another InnerSloth series, the Henry Stickmin Collection, and introduces new rooms, tasks, and ways to move around, including ladders. It also lets players pick their own starting room.

InnerSloth had originally been hoping to launch The Airship map, which it describes as its "biggest one yet", a little sooner. As it explains in a new blog post, however, several factors prevented it from doing so - including the 5-person team needing to deal with everything from maintenance to hiring to working on last year's Switch port in recent months.

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Following the introduction of a monthly subscription service for Crusader Kings 2 last month, Paradox Interactive has launched a similar model for its dizzyingly rich flagship grand strategy game Europa Universalis 4, providing an easier entry point for its mountain of DLC.

Paradox initially began exploring a potential subscription model for Europa Universalis 4 last January, offering the feature to a "limited group of people" in an experimental capacity.

At the time, it explained, "We have heard for years from existing and potential new players that the cost of getting the game and all expansions all at once is quite expensive (and might be discouraging for completely new EU4 fans), it's been supported for almost 7 years after all. A subscription model has been suggested to us on many occasions, so we thought we'd run a test to see how popular such a service would be."

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Square Enix Montreal - the team behind the excellent Hitman Go, Lara Croft Go, and Deus Ex Go - has announced its first new title in five years, Hitman: Sniper Assassins for mobile.

Sniper Assassins (apparently just a working title) is, as you might already have surmised, the follow-up to Square Enix Montreal's 2015 shooting-gallery-style mobile effort Hitman: Sniper.

That game perched players up high and tasked them with taking out targets from afar in order to earn points and scramble up the leaderboards.

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Announced several months ago, the next generation upgrade for Marvel's Avengers lands today and Digital Foundry had the opportunity to check out the campaign element on PlayStation 5 in a near-final build - and the results are impressive. Developer Nixxes delivers a 60fps performance mode with improved graphics compared to PlayStation 4 Pro, upping the ante for the next-gen quality mode, and utilising the new console's advanced storage capabilities to provide a revelatory improvement in loading times.

Showing is perhaps better than telling, so I'd recommend digging into the video embedded below, but the bottom line is that the performance mode is arguably the best way to play. Just like PS4 Pro, it's running at 2160p checkerboard with a dynamic resolution window that extends as far as it needs to in order to sustain the crucial 60fps target. Essentially, the more mayhem you unleash, the lower typical resolution is likely to be - expect values in the 1800p range in the heat of the action, dropping to 1440p when all hell truly breaks loose.

Marvel's Avengers gets its Black Panther expansion later this year, Square Enix has announced.

The addition of Black Panther as a DLC character to the game, delayed last year due to the sad passing of actor Chadwick Boseman, arrives as part of the War for Wakanda expansion.

In the brief trailer, below, we hear the leader of A.I.M. talking with Black Panther villain Klaw. It sounds like an invasion of Wakanda is on the cards.

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Square Enix Presents has wrapped up with the reveal of the next Life is Strange game, a look ahead at the future of Marvel's Avengers, and a few bits and pieces for Tomb Raider's 25th anniversary year.

On that, the show kicked off with a look at plans for Lara Croft's 25th birthday through the re-releases of old games and Lara Croft popping up in other titles, such as Fortnite. On that note, Croft Manor will be playable in a Creative level within the game next week.

There will also be a Tomb Raider cookbook. We will try our best to review this.

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Square's enigmatic fantasy title Project Athia has finally been given a proper name, and will now be known as Forspoken as it continues its journey toward a PC and PS5 release next year.

Project Athia, a new narrative-driven adventure developed by Luminous Productions, was first revealed during Sony's big PlayStation 5 broadcast last year, giving players a glimpse of its mysterious be-caped protagonist and gorgeous fantasy world.

Now, as part of its spring showcase event, Square has shared a smidgeon more information on Project Athia, giving a name to both its protagonist and the game itself.

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Square Enix has announced Life is Strange: True Colors, the next chapter in the narrative adventure anthology series. Ditching the series' previous episodic model, the entire story will release in one go for PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Stadia on 10th September.

Set in the town of Haven Springs, True Colors stars Alex Chen, a new female Asian American protagonist, and feature a popular crossover character from Life is Strange prequel series Before the Storm. Here's our first look:

True Colors is, as expected, developed by Before the Storm studio Deck Nine, with the prequel series' lead writer and game designer Zak Garriss now True Colors' director. During tonight's Square Enix Presents livestream, Garriss said Deck Nine had been working on the game since 2017.

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Remember that game about sentient flower bouquets with horse legs? Well, you'll soon be able to find out more about these monstrosities for yourself, as Scarlet Nexus has a release date - and there's also news of an accompanying anime.

Scarlet Nexus is due to launch on 25th June, and will be coming to Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and PC. It's an RPG from Bandai Namco, set in an advanced society that's reliant on technology surrounding the brain. There's a brain internet called Psynet, and citizens can use advanced brain power to unleash psykinetic abilities. Yet it's a world frequently visited by strange creatures called "the Others", and a task force called the OSF is called in to deal with these. Playing as either Yuito Sumeragi or Kasane Randall, the player has access to a range of psychic abilities through brain connections between squadmates, making for some varied and wacky gameplay.

Along with the news of the release date, Bandai Namco also released a brief trailer for a Scarlet Nexus anime produced by Sunrise. The anime is due to arrive in summer 2021, and will have a simultaneous global release - so no waiting for years for it to become available over here. Things sure are looking rosy.

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Publisher Focus Home Interactive has just announced yet another Warhammer 40,000 game - and it looks a lot like Doom.

Necromunda: Hired Gun is a first-person shooter due out 1st June 2021 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The debut trailer is below:

Necromunda: Hired Gun is described as "fast-paced and brutal". You can wall-run, double-jump, use a grappling hook and upgrade yourself - even your brain and your pet dog.

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Microsoft will hold an Xbox indie game showcase event on 26th March.

The showcase will be hosted on Twitch at 4pm UK time, Microsoft said, and feature over 100 games.

Expect brand new game announcements from developers and publishers such as DrinkBox, Curve Digital, Devolver Digital, and Dear Villagers.

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Wrath of the Druids, the first major expansion for Assassin's Creed Valhalla, launches on 29th April.

Set in Ireland, a new country for the game, Wrath of the Druids will see Valhalla heroine Eivor tracking members of a druidic cult named the Children of Danu. You'll also dive into Gaelic myths and folklores, and meet even more local kings.

The expansion is available to purchase separately, or part of the game's season pass. Here's a quick look:

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Firaxis has released a first look at Portugal, the next civ for Civilization 6.

Portugal arrives as part of the Portugal Pack, the sixth and final DLC for Civilization 6's New Frontier Pass. It's out on 25th March. Check out the deep dive in the video below:

Portugal's leader is João III of Portugal. Here's the official blurb:

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Monster Hunter Rise and many more of the best Nintendo Switch games are discounted thanks to a new Currys voucher.

All-round it's an excellent set of Nintendo Switch deals with some of the lowest prices I've seen on many of the console's biggest releases.

The code you'll need to use at the end of the checkout is 'FNDDGAME'. It's intended use is to give you free next day delivery, but if you use it alongside the standard delivery option it'll just take £5 off the price of each game.

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This afternoon, it's the turn of Square Enix to shove its games in the spotlight and give us all a good look.

We're quite excited, actually! Square Enix has promised us a big reveal of the next Life is Strange game, which may also mark a big turning point for the development of the franchise.

Also included will be an update on Outriders, whose demo has gone down well and will soon launch straight in Xbox Game Pass for console subscribers.

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Gamescom will kick off again this year with another Geoff Keighley-fronted festival.

The presenter's Gamescom Opening Night Live show will return for a second year on Tuesday, 24th August, before the Cologne-based convention officially takes place on the 25th to 29th August.

Writing on Twitter, Keighley promised "a spectacular showcase event filled with video game announcements, news and surprises". It will follow Keighley's Summer Game Fest, due around E3 time, and precedes Keighley's Game Awards, which come down your chimney every December.

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Marvel directors Anthony and Joe Russo have said they helped Fortnite kick off its new season.

The brothers, who previously helmed Avengers: Infinity War, Endgame and various Captain America films, co-directed Fortnite's cinematic introduction that leads into Zero Crisis Finale, the game's first-ever solo event experience.

Fortnite also memorably appeared in Avengers: Endgame, though perhaps the less said about that, the better.

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Sony has revealed its next-generation PlayStation VR controllers designed for use with its upcoming, under-wraps PS5 VR headset.

The orb-like controllers wrap around each hand, with a design similar to Oculus Touch and a feature set akin to the standard PS5 DualSense. There's not a glowing ping-pong ball in sight.

Each VR controller contains adaptive triggers, haptic feedback and finger touch detection for your thumb, index and middle digits.

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Inspired by the fantastic work of our friends at Rock, Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer is today launching a similar paid work experience programme for ethnic minorities.

Eurogamer has run a reporter internship for a few years now, and after a hiatus last year due to coronavirus we hope to run it again in 2021. But before then, we are looking for two work experience reporters to join us in a new programme open exclusively to applicants from ethnic minorities who live in the UK.

Why are we doing this? The games media has a diversity problem - this website especially. We want to improve the diversity of voices on the site and provide better representation. Our hope is this work experience programme is the start of our efforts to reflect a broader and more inclusive gaming community.

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EA accidentally made the FIFA Ultimate Team debug menu available to all on the FUT web app yesterday and in the process let players see their account settings in a way never publicly available before.

Though the tools were visible, players couldn't use them to add content or make permanent changes to their own or anyone else's accounts, EA has insisted.

However, at least one player was able to disable their own FUT transfer market access using these debug tools.

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It's hard to believe that later this year we'll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a number that's making me feel rather old. But it seems some players have put those years to good use by religiously practicing the game's archery, resulting in combinations so ridiculous they've left me scratching my head.

A compilation shared on Reddit by user "Walter Fring" has attracted a fair bit of attention for the absurdity of some of the shots, all neatly edited into a video with jaunty Zelda music in the background. Walter Fring uses shouts like Unrelenting Force to create some mid-air snipes, at one point making a man levitate only to be shot and frozen on the way down. It feels very anime.

The shots only seem to get more outrageous as the video goes on: Walter Fring interrupts a wedding to take out the bride and groom with aerial shots, and in a later trick, five enemies are downed in a row with arrows from above. Walter Fring also falls down a cliff to shoot and then stab an enemy, just for good measure.

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UPDATE 18/3/20: PlayStation has thanked LittleBigPlanet fans for their patience as it works to bring the franchise's servers back online.

"We are aware of server issues with LittleBigPlanet and are working to get the issue fixed and the servers back online," a PlayStation spokesperson told Eurogamer today. "We will keep you updated on progress and appreciate the continued patience as we work to resolve the matter."

A week on from Eurogamer's initial report, LittleBigPlanet servers remain unavailable. Fans have blamed the downtime on a persistent DDOS attack by a disgruntled fan - more on all that below.

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Planet Zoo's menagerie is expanding again on 30th March with the arrival of its fifth content expansion, the Southeast Asia Animal Pack.

This latest paid DLC expansion, which follows on from Planet Zoo's Arctic Pack, South America Pack, Australia Pack, and Aquatic Pack, introduces a total of eight new creatures.

There's the Clouded Leopard, a medium-sized arboreal cat more commonly found in the forests and grasslands of Southeast Asia, as well as the docile sun bear, which won't require much ground space but needs plenty of room in the air to accomodate its fondness for climbing.

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Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Japan has finally opened its warp pipe to visitors, and marked the occasion with a small opening ceremony.

Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto and Universal Studios Japan boss Jean-Louis Bonnier struck socially-distant Mario poses, surrounded by costumed Mushroom Kingdom characters, as members of the public entered the park.

Nintendo provided the following snaps from the ceremony:

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Chris: I guess Interminal, which I read about in this month's Edge, is kind of a joke, on one level. Boy, Airports go on forever! And so many perfume shops! You walk and you walk and you walk and the terminal never ends. Planes move around outside, the sunset sky gives everything a touch of the otherworld, of quiet radioactivity, and miles of perfume concessions pass by.

You can pick up perfumes and learn how they smell. You can buy them or put them back down. Mainly I just walk, though, and soon I forget that Interminal is kind of a joke about airports and enjoy it as its other element, this playful exploration of modern liminal spaces.

There is a magic to airports - the same kind of magic Will Self finds on the M25. These are our Stone Henges, our Avebury Rings, they just aren't sufficiently old yet. There is a touch of the religious to them, and not just because I always find myself surprisingly religious whenever I have to get on a plane. Interminal gets at a lot of this feeling.

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It's not been particularly smooth sailing for developer Techland's Dying Light 2. Since its 2018 reveal, the highly anticipated parkour-infused first-person horror sequel has been plagued by setbacks, ranging from multiple delays to high-profile staff departures. Following a damning report on its troubled development, Techland has now delivered a video update on the game.

When last we heard from Techland, the developer was insisting Dying Light 2 wasn't, as widely reported, caught in development hell. "[As far as I know]," the company wrote in a tweet, "the definition of a dev hell requires the game to not make any development progress, while DL2 keeps moving forward. We announced the game too early but it's far from being in a dev hell."

At the same time, Techland promised that fans could expect an update on Dying Light 2's progress today, 17th March. And with that update now here, it's fair to say those hoping for anything resembling substantial news will likely have been a little disappointed. Most of the update was spent with various members of the team reading out angry messages from fans, while the remainder merely asked for their continued patience.

ReCore and Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate developer Armature Studio will be bringing its surreal narrative adventure Where the Heart Leads to PlayStation on 13th July.

Where the Heart Leads tells the story of Whit Anderson, who, one stormy night, tumbles into an enormous sinkhole while attempting to save his golden retriever Casey. Unexpectedly, Whit emerges in a strange world where snatches of his past, present, future unfold like a dream - vignettes that can be altered to forever change the course of his and others' lives.

It's the choices available during these pivotal junctures in Whit's life that form the core of Where the Heart Leads. By manipulating any of the "thousands" of malleable moments promised, players can steer Whit's life toward dozens of different endings.

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