Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Warzone 2 drops tomorrow, November 16th, bringing a DMZ extraction mode, Al Mazrah map, and an all-new map-based battle pass. Some Call Of Duty players looking forward to getting their itchy trigger fingers on the free-to-play battle royale have been struggling to sort out their preloads, though. This confusion echoes what happened with Modern Warfare 2019 when Warzone 1.0 launched back in 2020. If you’re bemused by the current preload sitch then watch the Warzone 2.0 launch trailer below, and let Freebird chill you out.

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Straighten up your big rig’s neon signs and make sure you’re sitting comfortably, because American Truck Simulator devs SCS Software have sneakily revealed Oklahoma as the game’s next DLC. A store page for the Oklahoma expansion has popped up on Steam, although there hasn’t been an official announcement just yet. That’s most likely because today sees the launch of American Truck Simulator’s Texas DLC, so you expect to hear more about Oklahoma after that's out of the way.

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Remember Gamescom last year, and the peppy trailer for open-world creature collecting RPG DokeV? Well, the game’s slipped out of its 2023 release window and into the distant reaches of 2024, devs Pearl Abyss have revealed. DokeV.Club report that Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young acknowledged that the game would overshoot 2023 during the company’s earnings conference call last week. Pearl Abyss also delayed their upcoming action adventure Crimson Desert.

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Overwatch 2's commercial lead Jon Spector has revealed the free-to-play hero shooter's next new character will bolster the ranks of its support heroes. Spector dropped the hint about Overwatch 2’s next hero in a Q&A session with Korean site Inven. Spector said that the next hero would be a “more solid support”. We can expect them to arrive in Overwatch 2 when Season 3 of the game begins in early February 2023.

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It’s late evening. A family is dozing in front of the TV, their dog at their feet. Suddenly the TV turns to static, the ground shakes. While the parents peacefully sleep on, the toddler stirs. Oh no. I instantly expect nothing but the worst for the toddler, seeing whose game I’m playing – developer Jumpship was co-founded by Dino Patti, himself co-founder of Playdead, the studio behind Limbo and Inside. Both aren’t exactly known for treating their child protagonists well.

Somerville has clear stylistic parallels to Playdead’s work. Its 3D sidescrolling and light puzzle mechanics are similar, and the beautiful lighting effects and minimalist environments have led a lot of people to initially confuse Somerville as a Playdead game.

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MSI's RX 6650 XT is a capable graphics card for 1440p gaming, and it's down from £380 to £299.99 at Overclockers after a healthy discount.

It also comes with AMD's Raise the Game Bundle, which includes copies of two upcoming games: Dead Island 2 and The Callisto Protocol (confusingly titled 'The Callisto Project' by a potentially short-sighted Overclockers staffer). This is a pretty solid deal for three hundred of your Great British Pounds, especially as GTX 16-series cards were selling for this much recently and offer far worse performance.

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Micro SD cards are getting increasingly affordable, with even high-capacity 512GB models breaching the £50 barrier. Today we've seen one better though, as this 51GB Integral Ultima Pro model has dropped to £42 at Amazon UK.

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It takes a very special game to give you so much to learn, so many ways to do everything, that even after 1000 hours of playtime you still feel like a beginner. Factorio is daunting in the extreme, and I remember bouncing off it the first time I tried. Thank goodness I gave it a second chance. Building up a gigantic world-spanning, atmosphere-destroying factory slowly and methodically over dozens of hours is probably my favourite singleplayer experience in games.

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Post-apocalyptic survival sim Forever Skies has floated its release date straight out of this year and into the first half of 2023, developers Far From Home have announced. Their reasons for the delay have been detailed in a lengthy Steam post, but it's mainly good news: after receiving tons of feedback from their recent demo, the devs are now looking to expand the game's scope and spend more time working on its futuristic dirigibles and such. They also released a new teaser trailer showing some customisable airships from the game, too.

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I shouldn't enjoy Sonic Frontiers as much as I do, but I do? The game brings out the worst in me on the regular, as I turn into a spittle slinger who screams into their fist after hitting the tiniest ledge or fighting an awful, awful boss. Frontiers is a janky beast - a mess. Yet, it's a lot of fun when you're mindlessly collecting stuff and sliding on rails and listening to excellent drum and bass tracks. It's a playground of the best and worst kind, so if you'd like a test of patience with your precious spare time, then you simply can't get any better than this.

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CD Projekt Red have confirmed the release date for The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt’s ray tracing-enabling Complete Edition update as December 14th. The update will also bring a number of other visual and technical improvements, as well as integrate a number of mods into the fantasy RPG, originally released in 2015. Gameplay from the Complete Edition of The Witcher 3 is due to be shown off in a REDstreams event on Twitch next week, along with some new stuff for the game based on Netflix’s version of Geralt Of Rivia’s adventures.

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Eagle-eyed Microsoft Flight Simulator players have uncovered a secret that lets you play the first four games in the long-running series inside the cockpit of one the game’s planes. The Easter egg was introduced along with the game’s 40th Anniversary update, which went live on Friday. Activating the secret games will let you play them in your aircraft’s cockpit, using the keys on the screen to control the plane-within-a-plane.

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Supporter posts mean I can talk about things that aren't PC games - at least that aren't PC games yet - and this weekend I used a giftcard to get God Of War Ragnarök, the hacktion-dadventure sequel to the God Of War soft reboot. So far I am finding it, you know, fine, by which I mean it is good and fun but also almost exactly the same as 2018 one, right down to the tension between Kratos and his son Atreus. Their dynamic seems to have largely pressed the reset button so they can do a character growth again, with the differences so far being that Atreus is now taller and his voice has broken, Kratos doesn't call him "Boy!", and also he won't shut up under any circumstances.

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Set aside your Vermintides, because there’s not too long to go until Fatshark’s next co-op action game, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, strikes out onto PC on November 30th. To gear players up ahead of time, some more details about one of the game’s four classes have been revealed in a new gameplay video. Watch below to find out why you don’t want to mess with the Psyker class.

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Canny members of the Skyrim modding community are working on a plugin to enable support for DLSS, FSR2, and XeSS upscaling in the Special and Anniversary Editions of Bethesda's sprawling RPG. Modder PureDark is working together with a small team on the unofficial plugin, called Skyrim-Upscaler, and it should help bump up those frame rates somewhat. It's available to download now from Github if you want to give it a go yourself, but there’s no plan to release the plugin publicly until the modders sort out VR compatibility.

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The future has arrived in Monkey Moon's new narrative management game, and you can see it all the next time you go and fill up your car. At EyeLife's Flat Eye stations, why stop at getting milk and snacks when you can also pick up a whole new stomach, liver and other assorted organs? You'll find them on aisle five, right next to the surgery booths. Perhaps you'd prefer a quick medical checkup instead, though? After all, your tailored biometric predictions for the day looked a bit dodgy earlier, and goodness knows you're not going to wait to see an actual doctor about it.

Afterwards, why not escape for a bit and treat yourself to an immersive VR experience? They've got everything from hour-long fantasies to ones that last days, or even weeks. Your choice. And if you're short on time, you could always just give yourself those happy memories by sitting in their mind-altering MemoryMachines for a couple of minutes. Just don't forget to steer clear of the big recycle chambers. I heard something terrible happened to a dog who wandered into one recently, and the owner went absolutely ballistic. And watch out for the GentleSleep pods, too. I've only ever seen the clerk take long black sacks out of there and stick them in the incinerator, and the smell was awful.

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Nvidia DLSS 3 is arguably the single most interesting thing to emerge from the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPU launches. Even with, I’ll concede, some limits: whereas previous DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) versions have been available to any GeForce RTX graphics card, DLSS 3 is currently only usable on these RTX 40 series models. Or will be, once the RTX 4080 goes on sale on November 16th. Yet having tested it out on the RTX 4090, I’m convinced it could be as big a deal as the cards themselves, especially if you have a high-refresh-rate gaming monitor.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This past weekend was particularly fruitful, so enjoy a bumper-sized edition of Screenshot Saturday Mondays with all manner of cute frogs, stylish ultraviolence, dinosaurs cooking pizza, giant beasts to climb, and chill landscapes to roam.

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The end of another Fortnite map is nigh, with Chapter 3 of the free-to-play battle royale drawing to a surprisingly early close next month. The change will coincide with the end of Season 4 in an event called Fracture, teased by devs Epic Games at the end of the Fortnite Champion Series held over the weekend. Fracture kicks off on December 3rd at 9pm GMT / 1pm PST.

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Survival city-builders put the fear of God in me. There’s just something about managing an entire civilisation of people that just shreds my nerves. Managing the last group of people alive on whatever world they inhabit has me questioning my every decision like I’m cutting wires underneath a bomb.

It’s a relief then, that Floodland is a bit more chill than some of its city-building contemporaries. Gone are the humanity-ending threats like Frostpunk’s great Winter storm, forever bearing down on you and periodically tightening its grasp around your neck. Here you have a simple group of stranded civilians looking to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of an apocalyptic flood.

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Crucial's rather excellent value SATA DRAM-less QLC SSD, the BX500, is down to £56 on Amazon UK from an RRP of £74. I feel that's a decent savings on a drive ideal for upgrading an older machine or as media/game storage in a new one, where money spent per gigabyte is the primary measurement of a drive's suitability. (If performance is the objective, then a faster NVMe SSD drive is the way to go.) And by that measure, this drive is almost off the scale, with a cost of just 5.6p per gigabyte.

• Get the Crucial BX500 1TB for £56 (RRP £74)

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AMD's Ryzen 5000 series CPUs are getting increasingly affordable, with this week bringing rather good prices on the lowest-tier Ryzen 5 5500. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the cheapest Ryzen CPU in the lineup, but still quite a capable chip with power that's roughly equivalent to the old Ryzen 5 3600. This processor normally retails for £110, but today you can pick one up for £88 when you use code BAG20OFF.

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Sundays are for crossing off Saturday on your calendar. Before you slash, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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After launching into early access in April last year, the free-to-play shooter Scavengers is closing down. Its servers will close on December 16th, with publishers Improbable pinning the cause on a "decline in the playerbase."

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Last month, EA Maxis showed a few early images from Project Rene, the in-development Sims 5. They said they were showing the project early because they wanted to involve the community in its development.

Well, now it looks like someone has leaked images from a recent Sims 5 playtest, which seemingly shows a city environment with several apartments to build inside.

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Next week will bring the release of Warzone 2.0, Call Of Duty's free-to-play battle royale mode, but it also marks the beginning of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's season one. With it, two new maps are coming: Shoot House, which you'll find a trailer for below, on November 16th; and sometime after that, the return of the infamous Shipment.

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Final Fantasy XIV's patch 6.3 will land in January 2023, with a new one of everything. A new 8-player trial, a new unreal trial, a new ultimate raid, a new dungeon, a new 24-player Alliance Raid, plus new main scenario and side story quests. Among all of the newness are new housing wards within existing districts, allowing more players to purchase their own in-game home.

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Internet's exciting this week. Reminds me of being on some video game forum in the early noughties where a moderator absolutely flips their nut and everyone runs around pulling pranks and engaging in tomfoolery, then the bans start flowing. What a weird chaotic energy. Honestly, if there had been any hint of doubt around Elon Musk, he wouldn't have played such a prominent role in my cyberpunk novel about teens saving the world with NFTs. How could I have known, those six long months ago. Wow. Egg on my face. On all our faces.

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Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a pretty bleak game, but it’s also really good! It’s set in Depression-era America, a time when many folks were having their assess kicked by the economy and manifest destiny. The game is about these people, specifically travellers and nomads who wander the country in search of answers. Migrant workers, preachers, poets, folk healers, Dustbowl refugees, and even men with wolf’s heads make up this cast, and it’s your job to meet these strangers and collect their stories.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 devs Larian Studios are hosting another of their whimsical Panel From Hell streams in December, and they're teasing that we’ll get to find out more about the RPG threequel’s 2023 release. The broadcast will coincide with the launch of Patch 9 for Baldur’s Gate 3, although Larian are keeping schtum for now about what new things are coming to the game. Start gathering your party, folks.

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Dave the Diver (character) is a bit out of practice, but he's an easygoing sort and it doesn't take much to convince him to get back in his flippers to look into the local anomaly at the behest of his arms dealer "friend", who would be clearly bad news even if his name wasn't Cobra.

Said anomaly fills with new sea creatures from all over the world every time it's visited, and possibly building-sized terror beasts and ancient merfolk, but Cobra's sure it'll all be fine, so in you go, mate. It's certainly pretty down there if nothing else, and Dave the Diver (game) is, if nothing else, a rare game that makes the usually tedious water level a bit of a treat to wander round in.

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Obviously, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe in the pleasurable side of PC hardware. Building a PC (or even just swapping out a component) can be a series of lovely little tactile moments: the peeling-off of plastic wrapping, the K’nex-like click of a graphics card slotting into place, the soft whoosh of the fans on a first successful boot. Great stuff, and of course, that’s all before games start coming out of it. What’s not to like?

Oh, reader, so many things. So many, many things not to like. Gaming PCs are still only computers, after all, and computers break, often and for reasons that may be invisible to the most intensively trained eye. Introduce this volatility to a line of work that involves handling a lot of sometimes heavy, usually expensive equipment, and enjoying those little pleasures will eventually come at a cost. Namely, time spent dealing with arcane troubleshooting practices and the occasional spot of minor personal injury.

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Put down any objects that might be philosophically troubling, because a sequel to brain-boggling, sci-fi action adventure Control's been confirmed by Remedy Entertainment and 505 Games. The companies have signed a deal to co-develop and co-publish Control 2, formerly known as Codename Heron, revealed in a statement shared by Remedy today. The game’s being developed in the Northlight engine, and will be published on PC by Remedy.

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Being a Dragonborn in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim might have its privileges and accompanying superhuman abilities, but precognitive avoidance of incoming projectiles does not rank among them. Until now, thanks to a Special Edition mod that slows down time when arrows are flying towards your mightily voiced fantasy warrior. Enabling the Projectile Sense – Incoming Arrow & Magic Slows Time mod should give you just enough advance warning to hotfoot it out of the path of any pointy ended sticks that have been loosed and are heading your way.

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I slammed back into the team chat after an appointment this morning, and Katharine asked me to take a look at the new It Takes Two merch - specifically the plushy elephant. And I was like, "Sure!" and toddled off to have a look. I was delighted! But I think Katharine was anticipating it would arouse a different emotional response in me to what it actually did, because she used the word "horrifying".

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Happy 40th birthday to Microsoft Flight Simulator, which has been swooping around on PC in some form or another since 1982, as of today. To mark the occasion, devs Asobo Studio are hosting a community fly-in and heading for Chicago’s sadly demolished Meigs Field, the very first airport to feature in a Microsoft Flight Simulator game. You can join in on Twitch and Discord at 8pm GMT/9pm CET/12pm PST.

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EA and Dice are still trying to revive their flagging near-future military shooter Battlefield 2042 a year after launch. They’re targeting the subscription service market, together with the start of Battlefield 2042’s upcoming Season 3: Escalation in December, bringing the game to both EA Play and Microsoft’s Game Pass Ultimate. Of course, EA Play is included in regular PC Game Pass, so there's that. You can find out more by watching the development update video below.

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We’ve finally got a proper look at the upcoming fantasy animated series Dragon Age: Absolution, heading to Netflix on December 9th, thanks to a new trailer. The series is made up of six half-hour episodes following Miriam, an elven mercenary, and it’s set in Tevinter. That’s where the next Dragon Age game, Dreadwolf, will take place, too. Have a watch of the trailer below.

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Harvestella is a JRPG. This may seem like an incredibly obvious thing to say about a role-playing game from Square-Enix, but it’s the most important thing to know going in. Billed as a life sim RPG, and with a title that evokes farming, you could be forgiven for expecting something along the lines of Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, but with more monster biffing. Instead, Harvestella sits firmly in the epic quest camp, with your adventuring being supported by your rural activities.

Anyone looking to build a pastoral paradise is going to be sorely disappointed, as the farming elements are somewhat rudimentary. Even calling your property a farm is a bit of a stretch. Even after a few upgrades, my plot is more of a large garden, maybe an allotment, if I’m being generous.

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I've been eagerly anticipating Pepper Grinder since I saw a series of tweets with GIFs several years ago. It's a pixel platformer in which the protagonist, Pepper, has a drill which she uses to plow through scenery, and a grappling hook for all the moments when she's not underground. It's now been officially announced with Devolver as publisher and there's a reveal trailer below.

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