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Steam, the ever-popular digital PC gaming platform, has just broken its own previous record for most concurrent players.

According to Steam’s own statistics tracker, a peak count of 19,728,027 people were using the service around 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning, a brand new record for the service.

The previous concurrent user record for Steam was approximately 18,801,944 as of February 2020, making the new record almost a jump of 1 million users.

Unsurprisingly, this also means that some of Steam’s (and owner Valve’s) most popular games have also set new concurrent players records. Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (also known as CS:GO) managed to peak at 1,007,062 players, while DOTA 2 peaked at 694,829. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has peaked at 525,462 players, while Rainbow Six Siege and Grand Theft Auto Online bring up the rear.

It’s unsurprising news, to say the least, considering many people around the globe are practicing a higher level of caution in the wake of the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak, and likely avoiding public gatherings. That leaves a lot of time to play video games.

For years videogames have encouraged us to make heroic choices and roleplay as an honest protagonist. But what about those times when you just feel a little… cruel? Games such as Bioshock, Fallout, and Infamous give players the choice to play dastardly for different rewards and story experiences, but what about when the only prize you want is the satisfaction of truly destroying a character’s day? We’ve all been there.

With that in mind, here are 13 times we’ve been truly evil to NPCs. Yes, we don’t feel good about this at all…

Watch Dogs 2 - No Escape from Alcatraz

Watch Dogs 2 is loaded with ways to torment NPCs, with many of them involving crippling some of the local’s bank accounts. With the ability to scan any character’s phone and find out their hidden, sordid secrets it's hard not to think some of the San Franciscans deserve it.

However, this insider info can also help you administer justice in a more traditional fashion. In an effort to be an accurate representation of San Francisco, Watch Dogs 2 features an extremely accurate and disturbingly operation-able version of the former prison and now popular tourist trap, Alcatraz. 

Alcatraz is swarming with visitors, much like real life. Not quite as authentic is the ability to open and close cells at will, and NPC Vicki Higgs found this out the hard way. It turns out the janitor had an EU arrest warrant, so I didn’t feel too guilty when I managed to position the unsuspecting (but completely deserving) NPC into a life sentence on The Rock.

Considering the real MLB has recently delayed its 2020 season, MLB The Show 20 literally is the closest you’ll get to real pro baseball for a while. So it’s a good thing it’s great, as usual! That said, this is an annual franchise, and this year’s version isn’t as much of an improvement over last year’s impressive MLB The Show 19 as we’ve seen in big years in the past. But it finally adds some much-desired variety in ways to progress through the excellent Diamond Dynasty card collection mode, expanded customization for its addictive Franchise mode, and further gameplay tweaks to improve what was already one of the best, most dynamic baseball simulations we’ve seen to date.

10. Uroboros Test Subject

9. Yawn

Today we're giving you a closer look at three dynamic #PS4 #FinalFantasy VII Remake themes!

February 2020's Best-Selling Games

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
2. NBA 2K20
3. Grand Theft Auto V
4. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot
5. Tom Clancy's The Division 2
6. Mario Kart 8
7. Ring Fit Adventure
8. Madden NFL 20
9. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
10. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
11. Minecraft
12. Luigi's Mansion 3
13. Red Dead Redemption II
14. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
15. Pokemon Sword
16. Just Dance 2020
17. FIFA 20
18. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege
19. Need for Speed: Heat
20. New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe

IGN UK Podcast #530: Warzone, Fudge and a Sleeveless Hoodie

• IIGN UK Podcast #529: Our Favourite PS2 Games
• IIGN UK Podcast #528:Spunky Ticker
• IGN UK Podcast #527: Mother: Unleashed
• IGN UK Podcast #526: Are There Hedgehogs on the Moon?
• IGN UK Podcast #525: The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Vincent D'Onofrio

The season isn’t over yet...

Black Mesa is unique in all of gaming history in that it’s a fan-remake of the original 1998 Half-Life that Valve has actually allowed to be sold as its own full game. That’s unheard of! It is unquestionably great to have a way to experience such a seminal first-person shooter with a little less of its 22 years of accumulated dust, and almost all of the liberties taken from the original design feel like improvements. That said, the project was in the works for so long – eight years! – that now that it’s finally been declared "finished" it feels like it’s a prime candidate for its own remake to bring it up to 2020 standards.

As someone who hasn’t replayed Half-Life since Valve ported it to the Source engine (without updating any of the models or textures) back in 2004, playing Black Mesa and fighting off a familiar interdimensional invasion was like putting on some smudged-up rose-colored glasses. Everything looks a lot better than it originally did, for sure... but not as good as I willfully misremembered. Human character models and animations aren’t quite up to the standard Valve set with Half-Life 2 in 2004 (let alone the new bar about to be set in Half-Life: Alyx) and textures are pretty rough in a lot of places. The most jarring thing, though, is the loading screens. Just like in 1998, they too frequently freeze the action as you’re walking down a hallway for around five seconds, even on an SSD. This is an engine limitation the Black Mesa development team at Crowbar Collective likely had no way of working around, but it still makes it feel very old because you just don’t see that kind of thing anymore.

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When a video leaked in 2018 of a rumored Harry Potter RPG, fans went into speculation overdrive over what it could possibly be, which developer is behind it, and most importantly – if it’s even real.

From the footage and the supposed leaked synopsis, we know the alleged game is a third-person, open-world RPG that takes place in the 1800’s – well before Harry Potter was born, and even before the Fantastic Beasts series, which takes place in the 1920’s. We previously broke down the possibilities on where the game could fit into the Harry Potter timeline, including potential familiar characters that could make appearances.

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Following the leak, many fans speculated on Reddit, sharing why they thought it had to be real – with some specifically saying the gameplay footage simply “looks too good” and was likely too far along to be fake. At the time, Warner Bros. Entertainment Interactive had all videos of the footage taken down due to "copyright grounds" as described on the original YouTube takedown screen, but the company never made an official statement acknowledging whether such a game was in development. Because there is official Harry Potter music and logos in the video, it's unclear whether Warner Bros. removed it due to copyright infringement or for the fact the game really is in development.

UPDATE: UPDATE: Valve has confirmed to us that you can now toggle an option that will have Barnacles pull you up. See the Barnacles section below.

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Our IGN First for Half-Life: Alyx is well underway this month, with new gameplay, some commentary from Valve, and our hands-on preview!

While we've got plenty more to come, last week we asked you to leave the burning questions about Half-Life: Alyx you wanted us to answer based on the four hours Ryan McCaffrey and I have each played. And this week, we've got answers!

We couldn't answer every question as there are still things we can’t reveal just yet (including many story and mechanic-specific details) but here are some of the top suggestions and ones we liked (edited very lightly for clarity), organized by question and answered by me and Ryan.

What’s movement like?

MrBurnsReturns: I'm curious to how you managed to tolerate free movement vs teleport movement? Is it viable to free move through the entire game?

Dipman: Which of the three movement options is the least nauseating? And are there any unavoidable portions of the game that can make you dizzy or lightheaded regardless of which method you're using?

BritBayonet: Did you try different modes of movement? Which ones do you think worked the best? Were head crabs absolutely terrifying?

Though it has been widely accused of being a Breath of the Wild clone, my second hands-on with Genshin Impact was a welcome reminder that Chinese developer miHoYo has plenty of its own ideas to set the game apart.

Sure, the similarities with Zelda are not subtle. While the character design takes a much more anime-inspired approach, the realm of Teyvat bears more than a passing resemblance to the plains of Hyrule. Mechanics such as gliding, use of stamina, an abundance of environmental puzzles, the UI for item management, cooking at fireplaces, hunting benign animals for meat, and other elements appear to have been plucked wholesale from Nintendo’s masterpiece.

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But what Genshin offers is a roster of some 30 playable characters, a considerably more complex RPG system and an undeniable Chinese charm. And of course its own intriguing original story, in which a mysterious playable female character named The Traveler and her companions explore a world of magic and fantasy in search of her missing sibling. (Indeed, there is already an ongoing manga series available online.) Genshin Impact is without doubt a game that wears its influences on its sleeve, but dismissing it as a clone would be a disservice to the many new ideas it brings to the mix.

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