PC Games

This week, Mount & Blade 2 finally got a release date (well, for early access), Kickstarter unionised, and the Gothic Remake got the go-ahead. Read on for more of the week’s PC gaming goings-on in our News Digest, and do also check out the Weekly Updates Update for the week’s big patches.

Fans eagerly anticipating Baldur’s Gate 3 have another significant hint that they’ll be able to play the Dungeons & Dragons game later this year. At an investor event at the New York Toy Fair this week, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast revealed that Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 is scheduled to launch in early access some time in 2020. Of course, this isn’t the first hint we’ve had that the arrival of Baldur’s Gate 3 is nigh. Earlier this month, Google let it slip that Baldur’s Gate 3 would be available on Stadia later this year. Larian told us that the inclusion of Baldur’s Gate 3 in the Stadia lineup was a mistake, but stopped short of denying that the game was scheduled for release this year. The investor event, covered by Bell of Lost Souls, provides even more support for the idea that we’ll be seeing Baldur’s Gate 3 this year – although perhaps only in early access form. That’s an important caveat for a heavily narrative roleplaying game, since many players will likely want their first experience of Baldur’s Gate 3 to be with the complete game.

Revenant is the newest legend to join Apex Legends, and he’s got a neat kit – his ultimate, Death Totem, resurrects your squad, and his Silence tactical shuts down enemy teams’ active abilities. But despite being a spindly-looking chap, it turns out Revenant is easier to hit than you might think thanks to an over-generous hitbox. Our sister site The Loadout breaks down the problem. Basically, characters in Apex Legends are evaluated based on hitbox volume to make up for the fact that smaller characters are, generally, more difficult to hit. Thus, characters with a smaller hitbox volume take additional damage – Wraith, for example, has the smallest hitbox in the game, and therefore takes an additional 5% incoming damage. Revenant also gets this 5% penalty. But as one redditor shows, it looks as though Revenant players are taking damage sometimes when shots appear to miss their character models. As the video below shows, shots aimed between Revenant’s arms and torso register as hits, even though they should be missing and hitting the rock behind him.

GeForce Now’s streaming catalogue has shrunk even further since launch. Following Activision Blizzard’s lead, now it appears Bethesda Softworks have backed away from Nvidia’s cloud streaming service. All but one of the publisher’s games on the service – from Doom to Dishonored – were pulled from GeForce now yesterday, leaving only Wolfenstein: Youngblood standing and […]

This week, The Witcher 3 let us take PC saves to Nintendo Switch, No Man’s Sky added living spaceships, and Wolcen looted some fixes. Read on for more of the week’s PC gaming patches in The Weekly Updates Update.

One of the hallmarks of BioWare’s Mass Effect series was the morality system that allowed players to choose their reactions to certain situations by opting for either the good-guy ‘Paragon’ response or the bad-boy ‘Renegade’ response. Regardless of where you came down on Femshep vs. Manshep, it seems just about everyone agreed on Goodshep vs. Badshep, and Badshep didn’t stand a chance. That’s according to John Ebenger, who worked as cinematic designer on the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series at BioWare. Since then, he’s directed cinematics for Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. A viral tweet last week made a wry observation about player behaviour in games that feature morality systems. In the tweet, an imaginary developer offers the player the alluring choice to play as the bad guy. The author of the tweet responds by sparing and forgiving enemies, refusing to steal, and taking the friendliest dialogue options in conversations, dismaying the developer. “This is supposed to be escapist fantasy about violating social norms,” the developer complains. “I am a nice villain,” the author replies.

I’ll probably never get to play Devotion. A year on from the Taiwanese horror game’s abrupt removal from Steam, there’s still no sign of it returning to sale. That doesn’t mean Red Candle Games’ work needs to be lost to history forever, though. This month, the developers announced that Devotion – and predecessor Detention – […]

The first season of Netflix’s The Witcher ends just as the elements of the story slot into place, which left us wanting more as the season drew to a close. Fortunately, the series will be returning for a second season, and Netflix has confirmed some of its key casting decisions for round two. While we don’t have any firm information about the Witcher Season 2 storyline, it’s clear from the cast that Geralt won’t be the only witcher running around anymore. Three more witchers will be featured in Season 2: Coen, Lambert, and Eskel. Coen is a witcher who appears only in the Witcher novels, and will be played by Yasen Atour, who has appeared in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, 2016’s Ben-Hur, and the 2018 adaptation of Robin Hood. Hailing from Poviss, Coen eventually trained Ciri in the art of sword fighting. Lambert will be more familiar to fans of the Witcher videogames, having appeared in all three of them. In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, you can run into Lambert by taking an ekimmara contract, and later on he’ll take part in the battle of Kaer Morhen. Netflix says Lambert will be played by Paul Bullion, who played Billy Kitchen in Peaky Blinders and appeared in The Bastard Executioner in 2015.

Crytek has reached an agreement to settle its lawsuit against Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games. It’s a pretty clear sign the years-long litigation is finally coming to a close, and according to the most recent court filing, the parties need only to submit a joint agreement to the court to dismiss the matter. Crytek’s complaint was that Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games had secured the rights to one CryEngine development license for the production of Star Citizen, but had wound up using the technology to develop another, separate game in Squadron 42. Attorneys for the two companies have argued over what constitutes a ‘separate game’ under the CryEngine license agreement signed in 2012, with Star Citizen’s lawyers at one point writing that CryTek had sacrificed “legal sufficiency for loud publicity.” At the beginning of the year, CryTek sought to dismiss its case “without prejudice” in light of its belief that Squadron 42 wouldn’t be launching by the time set for a trial, a situation that would have rendered its case essentially moot. That option would have left open the door for CryTek to re-file its lawsuit once Squadron 42 had launched.

Dang it, you’ve sunk my battleship. It’s fine, it had a smaller boat inside it all along. No, that’s definitely how the game Battleships work. I know what I’m talking about. Time was in EVE Online, losing your spaceship meant losing the fight. But CCP are mixing up intergalactic PVP by announcing new Frigate Escape […]