Eurogamer

Sony's feeling generous again and is giving away another batch of free games - including Horizon Zero Dawn, Subnautica, and The Witness - as part of its latest Play at Home event.

Horizon Zero Dawn is, of course, the biggie, and developer Guerrilla Games' open-world adventure - which sees outcast and hunter Aloy embarking on a journey across a sumptuous future version of Earth - will be free to add to your library from 19th April.

More specifically, players can get their hands on Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition, which includes sizeable wintery expansion The Frozen Wilds, and interested parties have until 14th May to claim their free copy.

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Disco Elysium - The Final Cut launches on 30th March, developer ZA/UM has announced.

That's for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC via Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store, the App Store and Google Stadia priced £34.99.

The Final Cut will be available at no extra cost to all current owners of Disco Elysium. An Xbox version is planned for the summer.

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Destruction AllStars is getting seasons, with season one set to include a ranked mode, a battle pass and a new character, developer Lucid has announced.

In a post on the PlayStation Blog, the developer said Season One: Hotshots includes the "first steps" towards a ranked mode. It's called Blitz and features 3v3v3v3 action.

Meanwhile, a battle pass is on its way with Season One. It sounds like this works as you'd expect, with exclusive cosmetic content only available in the current season up for grabs. There's a free tier and a premium tier.

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Doom Eternal is bringing its increasingly ludicrous saga to a close tomorrow, 18th March, with the launch of its second and final campaign DLC, Ancient Gods Part Two.

Tomorrow's DLC doesn't just put a cap on Doom Eternal, however; it also brings an end to the story of the Doom Slayer first seen in 2016's Doom reboot, concluding with an instalment that, in among the usual hellfire and decimated cityscapes, leans hard on the high fantasy.

As seen in the trailer below, Doom Slayer's journey to the Dark Lord's stronghold - for one final, epic showdown - takes him to cities nestled among sprawling forests and ice-capped mountain, impossible waterfalls at the end of the world, and there's even time for a dragon or two.

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Why is there a Final Fantasy 7 battle royale? It's a good question. Now, FF7 Remake director Tetsuya Nomura - who will act as creative director on battle royale mobile spin-off The First Soldier - has given an answer.

In an interview with Famitsu translated by RPG Site, Nomura said it exists to expand the typical audience attracted to Final Fantasy games, which has become "quite fixed" over time. Yes, you know who you are.

"Fan demographics for long-running IP series do tend to become quite fixed," Nomura said, "making it something of a challenge for us to appeal outside of that existing fan group.

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After a delay of several months, EA Play is finally making its way onto the PC version of Xbox Games Pass - and it's doing so tomorrow.

EA Play first popped up on Game Pass back in November, but there was a caveat: the games were only available on console, so those hoping to access EA games on PC (either through Game Pass for PC or Ultimate) would have to wait. The PC versions were scheduled to arrive in December, but the launch was delayed until sometime in 2021.

As detailed in the official update video, those hoping to access EA PC games through Game Pass will first need to sign into the Windows 10 Xbox app, then click install on an EA Play game. This will bring up a prompt to install the EA desktop app. You can then head back to the Xbox app to install the game - at which point you'll be asked to log in with your EA account. If you haven't already done so, you'll then need to link your Xbox and EA accounts, which will allow access to EA Play. At this point you can finally download and play the game. Phew.

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You might have forgotten Batman: Arkham Origins had multiplayer. Heck, it's been so long you might have forgotten Batman: Arkham Origins altogether.

But now, eight years after Oranges launched and five years after its multiplayer servers were switched off by WB Games, fans are working to get its team-based mode working again.

A new community-made mod, Arkham Origins Revival, restores multiplayer and also unlocks some additional single-player skins like Bruce Wayne's Formal suit. It can be found on Nexusmods (thanks, PC Gamer).

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Starting a game like If On A Winter's Night, Four Travellers I can't help but feel as though I'm going to miss a few important references. The name, after all, is a reference to Italo Calvino's novel If On A Winter's Night, A Traveller - which I haven't read, but know to be, apparently, a kind of reflexive post-modernist novel, in second-person, about you trying to read a novel called If On A Winter's Night, A Traveller. A reference to a thing that self-references, which I have just discovered by Googling. I'm already struggling.

Anyway: do not worry about that. Four Travellers, a free, 1920s point-and-click mystery created by Laura Hunt and Thomas Möhring, is full of things that are probably references - recurring classical music, quoted novels, recited poetry - or maybe not! The point is it helps to be an ignoramus here. All the heady literary-ness of the Proust and Satie piling up and congealing into a kind of fog, the same kind that clouds the minds of its three-ish main characters. Just as it does - so I hear - in Calvino's Traveller: Did I get that right? Is this supposed to be here? Am I remembering this correctly?

This is Four Travellers, a game of confusion and epistemic doubt. You begin on a train - that is definitely a Calvino reference; I've just skimmed the first chapter - and none of the travellers seem to know how they got there, which leads to a plundering of memories and regrets and all the rest, Hunt's story progressing from romantic tragedy, to romantic despair to total, gothic depravity in its three or four hours.

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Riot Games has announced that following an investigation into allegations of misconduct by CEO Nicolo Laurent, no evidence to support the claims has been found - and Laurent will not face sanctions.

The investigation was commissioned by Riot in response to a lawsuit by former Riot executive assistant Sharon O'Donnell, filed in January, which accused Laurent of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and wrongful termination. Outside law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP carried out the investigation, then gave its results to the Special Committee of Riot's Board of Directors (a committee of directors created in 2018 to "oversee the company's progress in diversity and inclusion" following a Kotaku exposé on widespread sexism at the company). The Special Committee reviewed the results of the investigation, and concluded that there was no evidence to support the claims.

"Since 2018, when we revamped our internal investigation process, we've used a rigorous, outside investigation process to ensure that any allegations against our senior leaders are investigated thoroughly and without bias - and that those investigations involving our senior-most executives are overseen by a Special Committee of Riot's Board of Directors," Riot Games said in a statement. "Following the recent allegations of misconduct raised against Riot and our CEO, we were fully prepared to do so again.

A never-before-seen Hyper Neo Geo 64 Samurai Shodown 64 prototype was found sitting under a tree in a Californian field recently.

It had been sitting there for 20 years, retro video game collectors believe.

Samurai Shodown 64 is a December 1997 fighting game released for the Hyper Neo Geo 64, the arcade system created by SNK as the successor to the Neo Geo MVS.

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Call of the Sea was one of my favourite games of 2020. Even when I think about it now, I feel warmer. Partly that's to do with the literal warmth of the tropical island setting, but I think more of it is to do with the gentle nature of the game. It's a game without combat, a game about puzzles. A game with an eerie mystery pulling you farther in. It's an adventure played at walking speed, both metaphorically and literally. And I relish that. I relish an adventure I can sink into like a comfy armchair each evening, one that doesn't rough me up and shake me around before I sleep. I wish more games were like it.

And the more I read about Call of the Sea, the more remarkable it seems. It is the debut game by a Spanish studio called Out of the Blue Games (appropriately), and it was made in only a year-and-a-half. For a game to be built so assuredly in such a short space of time, by a new studio, is very impressive. Intrigued, I tracked down studio co-founder and Call of the Sea game director, Tatiana Delgado, for a chat.

Hello! How are you? How are things over in Madrid?

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So far, AMD's Big Navi graphics cards have lived up their name, giving gamers a true alternative to erstwhile industry leader Nvidia. The RX 6800, 6800 XT and 6900 XT have proved that Team Red can compete at the highest level of the graphics card market, something that hasn't been true for generations. Now though, AMD is expanding its RX 6000 lineup, towards the more mid-range and mainstream cards that will far outsell the 'halo' products at the top of the stack. The first step comes in the form of the RX 6700 XT, a mid-range graphics card aimed at high-end 1440p gaming.

The new $479/£419 card is intended to slot between - and compete with - the $399 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and $499 RTX 3070, and starts shipping from tomorrow, March 18th. With those price points, we expect to see a card that trades blows with the RTX 3070, offering the same major features, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing and other DirectX 12 Ultimate goodies, while coming in slightly cheaper. It's a recipe that has worked well for AMD in the past, and with both next-gen consoles using the same RDNA2 architecture, the company just needs a standout - yet affordable - PC product to complete the trifecta.

Microsoft has added a new "suspend my game" feature to the Xbox download queue screen. Selecting it will "help improve download speeds".

The option is appearing now on Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One consoles for those signed up to Xbox's Insider program, which unlocks new dashboard features early.

"Suspend in the queue will let you download at full speed while making sure your game remains resumable (or quick resume-able on Series X|S)," Xbox engineering lead Eden Marie wrote on Twitter.

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There's a fascinating moment in Disney's Fantasia where Deems Taylor invites the soundtrack onto the centre stage. This is the flickering line that carries the movie's audio, and with Disney's animators in charge it starts to ripple and splatter as music rushes through it. Spirograph curls and lily pads drifting across the surfaces of ponds, writing their own wakes. And then it's over and back to the main event.

I haven't seen Fantasia in about 30 years, but I still think of that moment every time I bend my head forward, which is quite often, all things considered. When I bend my head forward, I get a blast of energy rushing down my spine. It's a friendly thing for me, a warm jolt, but as it burns out in my ankles, I almost see that dispersing, collapsing wave rush of the Fantasia soundtrack. It's a symptom - in my case of a lesion on the spine, highly indicative of multiple sclerosis - but it's almost a musical instrument. I can bend my head forward and back, and I swear the rush of electricity responds to this, as if I'm moving my fingers over cello strings, or sculpting the thick, mineral air around a Theremin.

Evil Genius 2: World Domination, the Rebellion-developed sequel to Elixir Studios' cult-classic management sim, finally comes to PC on 30th March - and in the run-up to release, Rebellion has shared early details of its post-launch content plans.

For those needing a quick refresher, the original Evil Genius released back in 2004 (its developer, Elixir Studios, was founded by former Lionhead and Bullfrog alumni Demis Hassabis), casting players as international supervillains intent on global domination.

In the broadest of terms, it's a game of base building and minion management, giving players the tools needed to carve out an underground lair for their villainous machinations and defend it from do-gooders determined to thwart their evil schemes. There's quite a lot more to it than that of course, and some of its nuances are detailed in Rebellion's entertaining new trailer below.

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Ubisoft's online tactical shooter Rainbow Six Siege officially enters its sixth year of content updates today, 16th March, and things kick off with the launch of new season Crimson Heist on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.

Crimson Heist's flagship addition is new operator Flores, a "sly and tactical" Attacker character hailing from Argentina. Flores uses an AR33 or SR-25 as a primary weapon and a GSH-18 as a secondary weapon, and comes equipped with a new gadget know as the RCE-Ratero Charge. This small, remote-controlled device can be set down and driven across the map for a limited before it detonates in a powerful explosion.

Notably, Flores is the first operator to be made available as part of Rainbow Six Siege's battle pass, and those that purchase the Premium tier will gain immediate access to the character. Other players will be able to unlock Flores with Renown or R6 Credits starting 30th March.

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Genesis Noir, developer Feral Cat Den's stunning cosmic jazz adventure through time and space, is coming to Switch, Xbox, Steam, and the Epic Games Store on 26th March.

Genesis Noir, described as a non-traditional point-and-click adventure with a focus on "tactile puzzles and exploration", casts players as No Man, a watch peddler embroiled in love triangle with other cosmic beings. As things turn sour, a gunshot is fired by a jealous god and the resulting Big Bang kickstarts creation, sending No Man on a jazz-infused quest across the lifespan of the universe to change the course of destiny and save his love.

Each jump to a new pocket of time and space presents another visually sumptuous vignette - I mean, just take a look at the trailer below - to experiment with and manipulate in order to proceed. "Dial a rotary phone," teases the developer, "destroy a civilisation; plant a garden; improvise with a musician; create life - all in your search for a way to save Miss Mass."

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UPDATE 16/3/21, 7.07pm: Just a day after confirming it would be officially implementing a fan-made fix to reduce Grand Theft Auto Online's load times by up to 70 percent on PC, Rockstar has announced the update is now live.

The fix arrives as part of GTA 5's Title Update 1.53 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, which - as detailed on Rockstar's support site - includes general network connectivity improvements alongside better load times specifically for players on PC.

"Thanks to t0st for his contributions around this part of today's title update", says Rockstar.

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As part of its celebration in acquiring Bethesda, Microsoft's second wave of FPS Boost titles for Xbox Series consoles sees the delivery of some dramatic upgrades for classic titles from its newly assimilated publisher. Heavy hitters Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 will get the Digital Foundry treatment in due course, but to begin with we wanted to revisit Dishonored Definitive Edition and Prey from Arkane Studios. These are both brilliant games, but they're also somewhat sub-optimal in their original console incarnations. FPS Boost dramatically transforms the both of them - and what's fascinating is that it's not just the doubling of frame-rate that is key in improving the experience. Remarkably, FPS Boost goes further than you might expect to the point where with Prey in particular, I feel we're close to remaster territory.

We'll kick off with Prey - an immersive sim that I happen to rate as one of my favourite games of 2017, but also a release that I just couldn't bring myself to play on the last-gen consoles. A combination of performance problems, input lag issues and some extended loading times were very off-putting - and why put yourself through that when the PC version is so much better?

Super Bomberman R Online - a 64-player battle royale spin on the classic series - will soon be waving goodbye to Stadia exclusivity and launching on PC and consoles as a free-to-play game.

Super Bomberman R Online is, as its name somewhat implies, a pared back version of Konami's 2017 effort Super Bomberman R. This updated version, which initially launched as a timed Stadia exclusive last August, jettisons the original's story campaign and various multiplayer bits in favour of a single, online-only 64-player battle mode, imaginatively titled Battle 64.

Each Battle 64 match begins by dropping participants (who can select from various characters and customisation options beforehand) into one of 16 battle arenas.

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Assassin's Creed co-creator Jade Raymond has announced Haven Entertainment Studios, a new independent developer that will build a fresh IP for PlayStation.

Raymond most recently served as head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, until Google announced it was shutting down its internal development studios at the start of February, only 14 months after Stadia's high-profile launch. Raymond previously served as boss of EA's Motive studio, following a long stint at Ubisoft.

"It's been a strange and difficult past 12 months," Raymond wrote today in a message announcing her studio via the PlayStation blog. "The pandemic, social injustice, and job elimination have impacted many of my closest friends, family, and co-workers. All of these factors, paired with an inability to see friends and family face-to-face, lulled me into a kind of self-reflective cocoon where I had to ask myself some tough questions about what really matters.

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There was once a time when Xbox Game Pass announcements would come along every month - or every couple of weeks, at most. This week, however, is not one of those weeks.

Confirming the raft of upcoming games headed to the service today, Microsoft has snuck in one more title worthy of mention: Square Enix role-player Octopath Traveller. Previously available on PC and Nintendo Switch, it'll jump onto Xbox Game Pass for PC and consoles on 25th March.

It's been an extraordinarily busy few days of Xbox Game Pass news, with some eye-opening additions announced. To recap, the promising Outriders will launch via Xbox Game Pass on day one after a positive response to its demo. Cult favourite Undertale hits Game Pass as it finally arrives on Xbox today, 16th March many years after its debut elsewhere.

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Tiger Woods will return to the front cover of PGA Tour golf games after a long absence.

2K Games, the current publisher of the franchise, announced a "long-term exclusive deal" with Woods today.

"Woods will play an active role in the video game landscape as an executive director and consultant with PGA Tour 2K," a 2K spokesperson said. "2K will also partner with Woods' TGR Foundation, which provides award-winning STEM curricula and college-access programs to offer underserved students the tools needed to thrive in school and beyond."

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Yes, it's really been a year. Animal Crossing: New Horizons celebrates its first anniversary this week with new features, items, and the dreaded return of Bunny Day.

It's an odd milestone, but Bunny Day will be New Horizons' first repeated in-game event. It will run again from 28th March to 4th April with the original egg hunting gameplay as well as some newly-added items to collect. However, these new items will simply be purchasable from Nook's Cranny. It's safe to say Nintendo heard the feedback on that one.

This week's update arrives on Thursday, 18th March, and also includes improvements to New Horizons' custom design capabilities.

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Dark Alliance is back, many years after the originals made Dungeons & Dragons work as a co-op action RPG on PlayStation 2 and Xbox, and many months after this spiritual successor was first announced. But after an AWOL 2020, we now have a final and firm release date of 22nd June 2021.

So what does a new Dark Alliance game look like? Because we haven't actually seen it before now, except for an in-engine teaser that didn't give a lot away.

Now, though, I've played it.

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Fortnite has begun its new season with a one-off single-player sequence, Zero Crisis Finale. The 10-minute mission acts as a coda to last season's shenanigans, as well as a leap forward in Fortnite's storytelling ability overall.

In the past, Fortnite has nudged its plot along through season-ending live events that bring buckets of spectacle and typically doom swathes of its map. But avenues for more intricate storytelling have been limited, with players typically left as a distant audience to the events unfolding around them. More recent events have added in a smattering of dialogue and player interaction, but this has been few and far between.

All of that changes with the playable Zero Crisis Finale and its three minute introduction cinematic, below, that sets the scene:

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In early March, EA issued a lifetime ban to a FIFA Ultimate Team player who racially abused Arsenal football legend Ian Wright on social media. EA was praised for taking a strong stance against the former player, and Wright himself applauded the company's actions, saying: "they stepped up for me."

"We are committed to continuing our work in positive play, through actions that will make our communities fun, fair, and safe for everyone," EA said at the time.

Despite EA's welcome efforts here, its FIFA game is far from free from racist behaviour. And while it's the controversial Ultimate Team mode that often grabs the headlines, a Eurogamer investigation has found extensive racist user generated content in another online mode that flies under the radar: Pro Clubs.

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Intel unveiled its full range of 11th-generation desktop processors today, codenamed Rocket Lake S, which are due to debut on March 30th, 2021. That release date is just two weeks from today, which is also when you'll be able to read reviews of the new hardware from Digital Foundry and other sterling outfits around the world.

The Blue Team is heralding up to a 19 per cent improvement in single-core performance (specifically, instructions per clock or IPC), up to 50 per cent better integrated graphics performance (thanks to Intel's new Xe graphics architecture) and support for PCIe 4.0 (allowing Intel to finally match AMD with support for high-speed SSDs). There are also new deep learning capabilities that should accelerate certain workloads, AV1 decoding and some interesting new overclocking features we'll get into later.

We'll be testing two chips to start, the Core i9 11900K and the Core i5 11600K, representing the top and mid-range options from Intel's new stack, on a Z590 motherboard - although Intel's new chips will also work on Z490 and H470 motherboards that have received a BIOS update to add support for the new CPUs, as both 10th-gen and 11th-gen CPUs use the same LGA 1200 socket. As well as these two models arriving soon at Digital Foundry's Bristol HQ, the full lineup incorporates some 19 11th-gen processors - not even mentioning the 11 refreshed 10th-gen parts and Pentium Gold processors that we won't be covering in this article. Here's how the whole family looks - note that the prices listed are for lots of 1000, so retail prices may be a few notes higher.

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Total War: Warhammer 2 is getting a new character voiced by Iwan Rheon, the actor who played Ramsay Bolton in HBO's Game of Thrones.

In a video tease, below, for the strategy game's next free Legendary Lord - the Dark Elf beastmaster Rakarth of Karond Kar - we hear Rheon's voice acting. He's doing a great Ramsay Bolton impression! And I love the "flay them alive" line. Ramsay was always fond of flaying victims alive, after all.

It's a great fit, really. The Dark Elves are one of the most sadistic races in Warhammer, and Bolton is one of the most sadistic characters in Game of Thrones.

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Tomb Raider's Lara Croft is part of the new Fortnite battle pass.

Chapter 2 Season 6 kicked off this morning - more on all that very soon - with the arrival of a refreshed map themed around the wilderness and survival. And among the characters you'll get with its battle pass? Survivor Lara herself.

Extra styles for the character will let you swap between her classic and prequel trilogy looks, as well as a third retro look unlocked via completing in-game challenges.

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For years, I am ashamed to admit that Dungeon of the Endless was one of those strange games I loved much more than I actually played. I longed to play it though, to be good at it - nobody is actually good at it - or at least to truly understand it. I was drawn in by the stylish French sci-fi, the elegant, elongated pixel art, this El Greco futurism with a brutal tower defence twist. But I felt frozen out. And now I'm finally in, I don't really know why I was so afraid. I think I was probably fretful about being overwhelmed, but in Dungeon of the Endless being overwhelmed is actually the central thrill.

I see that now. Today, Dungeon of the Endless has finally arrived on smartphones, which means that this bewitching game will have a huge new audience to win over. The port is not bad, I think - it's the game I remember, with all the DLC, but I should warn anyone else like me with long-sightedness: the text can be pretty small and I can struggle to make out the more frantic action.

Nonetheless I think there has been love spent here. Dungeon of the Endless is a game about exploring deadly underground mazes, to first find the exit to the next area and then get your crystal from the starting position to the exit. You control a handful of characters who auto-attack anything in the current room they're in, but even with auto-attack, I was still worried about fiddliness. Selecting characters can be fiddly on a touchscreen, and how would the game handle Dungeon of the Endless' two signature moments, opening a door to somewhere new and possible horrid, and lighting a room once you've cleared it out?

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Harvest Moon for the SNES could have been lost in the wave of excellent games released in Japan during 1996, yet the farming simulator grew into a well-established series that celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. During these years Harvest Moon has visited multiple platforms, experimented with different playstyles and even been renamed to Story of Seasons when, in 2012, Marvelous Inc. stopped licensing the series to Natsume. From 2014 onwards, Marvelous Inc. has instead used its own publishing brand, Xseed Games, to localise for western audiences, while Natsume began releasing its own farming simulator series using the Harvest Moon title, which, understandably, has confused many fans.

Alongside its silver jubilee, Story of Seasons is celebrating its latest addition - Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town for the Nintendo Switch. This game was directed by Hikaru Nakano, who has a long history with the series; being part of the development team since the days of Harvest Moon 64 and previously directing the 2020 remake of Friends of Mineral Town.

Talking to Eurogamer in a new interview, Nakano explained the series began with "the general idea of not having a fighting game, but one of those peaceful games in which you just move to a farm", and developed around the idea of "what kind of lifestyle would you live actually if you were working on a farm?". When it comes to Pioneers of Olive Town, Nakano views the game as a "new chapter" that "really gives new life to the series".

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Developer SCS might still be hard at work on American Truck Simulator's previously announced Wyoming expansion, but its eyes are already on the horizon, with the studio having now confirmed that Texas is next in line for the DLC treatment.

Texas will be the ninth state added to American Truck Simulator since its release in 2016 - following on from Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and the upcoming Wyoming - but it sounds like the expansion is still some considerable way off.

As explained in SCS' announcement post on Steam, American Truck Simulator's Texas DLC is still very early in development, and its sheer scale - Texas is the second largest state in the US, both by area and population - means it's a significant undertaking for the team.

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Fall Guys is going full-on retrowave for its fourth season, flinging its bean-shaped heroes to a neon-hued - and a very 80s - future when things gets underway next Monday, 22nd March.

Previous seasons of Mediatonic's knockabout battle royale game have spruced up the bean-jostling action by introducing medieval and calendar-appropriate winter themes. Season four, however - officially known as Fall Guys 4041 - mixes things up with a throwback sci-fi aesthetic that'll inform everything from its cosmetics to its seven new levels.

Mediatonic unveiled one of these levels, the 60-player Skyline Stumble, last week, offering a chaotic look at its "Low Gravity Zones, Forcefields, Flippity Bippities, Chonky Buttons, and Spicy Light Swingers". New cosmetics outfits include a disco ball and extremely shiny shark.

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Developer Toby Fox's cult RPG Undertale is finally making its way to Xbox tomorrow, 16th March - more than five years after its PC debut - and it'll be available as part of Game Pass too.

Originally released in 2015, Undertale tells the story of a child who tumbles into the Underground, a strange world beneath the Earth's surface. What follows is a game of big heart and wilful idiosyncrasy that's earned it a legion of fans - and countless memes - over the years.

"Undertale dances happily in the footsteps of Shigesato Itoi's Mother series, and like those games before it, it's a JRPG that's endlessly playful and inventive," said Eurogamer's Martin Robinson when he reviewed the PlayStation Vita version back in 2017.

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Assassin's Creed Valhalla will deploy its next big update tomorrow, around midday UK time.

Version 1.2.0 brings gear transmog to the game, new skills, a fresh camera option and support for Valhalla's upcoming Easter "Ostara" Festival.

The addition of gear transmog has been a frequent fan request since the game launched, and after it became a popular addition to the series in Odyssey. There's a change here, though, from how it operated in that game. You'll need to transmog your items in Ravensthorpe via your blacksmith, Gunnar, and pay a small fee of 50 silver for each item you change the appearance of.

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UPDATE 15TH MARCH 2021: Microsoft has confirmed FPS boosts for a handful of old Bethesda games on Xbox Series X and S - and they're out now.

Five games from Bethesda - all freshly available with Xbox Game Pass - just got an FPS boost:

Microsoft said to expect to see an increase from 30fps to nearly60 fps with FPS Boost for the above games. To experience FPS Boost, make sure your console has the latest update installed and the FPS Boost function is turned on in Compatibility Options under the Manage Game section.

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Firaxis has announced the sixth and final DLC pack in the Civilization 6 - New Frontier Pass.

The Portugal pack includes a new leader and civilisation (Portugal, obviously), the new optional game mode Zombie Defense, two new world wonders in the Torre de Belém and Etemenanki, and a new Wetlands map script.

Firaxis is saving a deep dive on Portugal for a future update, but as you'd expect the civ will revolve around naval gameplay, particularly maritime exploration and trade - something not a lot of other civs specialise in. There's more in the video below:

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Outriders will be available from its 1st April launch date via Xbox Game Pass on consoles and Android devices, Microsoft has now confirmed.

Developed by Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgment studio People Can Fly, the sci-fi RPG shooter has picked up positive reactions from its recent demo.

Today's confirmation of an Xbox Game Pass launch comes after a knowing tease by Microsoft over the weekend - and after People Can Fly announced two million people had downloaded the game's demo so far. (Including one person who has, for some reason, played 254 hours in just 15 days.)

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It looks like Zack Snyder's Justice League accidentally uses an Halo icon.

As PCGamesN reported over the weekend, the Deathstroke character has a symbol on his sword that appears to be a Halo emblem.

The symbol was spotted on Deathstroke's costume by actor Geoff Reeves, who visited the #SnyderCut Exhibit in Dallas, Texas recently. At the time, this symbol was taken to refer to the famous Batman villain, Ra's Al Ghul.

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