Vermintide 2 screenshot of the Warrior Priest in action

[Update]: A Parting of the Waves has now arrived, and I'm happy to say the new map is quite awesome!

I have to give credit where credit is due. The Vermintide 2 team is remarkably dedicated to their craft! And so, over six years after the launch of the original game, Vermintide 2 will be getting yet another free content update on April 11th.

The freshly announced A Parting of the Waves update will bring with it a mist-shrouded new map to explore, and with it the conclusion of the recent Karak Azgaraz storyline. Despite the connection to Vermintide 1, the new map won't be a remaster, but rather an entirely new creation!

Total War: Warhammer 3 artwork for the Nurgle armies

To say that the launch of Total War: Warhammer 3's Shadows of Change DLC was messy would be quite an understatement. Creative Assembly tried to charge more for it than previous DLCs while simultaneously offering less unique content per faction, to which the community response was about as negative as you'd expect.

In order to salvage the DLC, as well as to regain some favor with the playerbase, Creative Assembly recently released an update that added a whole bunch of new units to the Shadows of Change DLC - and pretty good ones too! So while DLC is still heavily overpriced in my humble opinion, it now at least offers a sizable amount of quality content.

Helldivers 2 artwork for the explosive crossbow primary weapon

[Update]: A brand new hotfix has just been released. As expected, it's a whole lot of fixes for the recent crashes!

It's not even been a week since the last batch of content arrived, and already Helldivers 2 is getting ready for a brand new update. However, unlike the previous update that beefed up the Automatons, the Democratic Detonation Warbond will instead bring with it an assortment of explosive new weaponry for the players to toy around with this April 11th.

You can look forward to seeing an explosive crossbow, a grenade launcher sidearm, two variants of explosively charged rifles, as well as a really mean-looking and armor-piercing grenade! There's also going to be a brand new booster that makes extraction easier, three new armor sets, as well as the usual batch of cosmetics like capes and emotes.

Darktide artwork for the new Tox Bomber enemy

[Update]: Darktide's Path of Redemption update has added a free Battle Pass, numerous cosmetics, Tox Bomber enemy and more.

After a couple of announcements announcing a future announcement that will announce more details, Fatshark has now finally spilled the beans on what's coming next for Darktide. And I'm happy to say, the freshly revealed Path of Redemption update is looking pretty darn good!

First and foremost, once the update arrives in late April it'll bring with it a brand new enemy - the Dreg Tox Bomber. As the name might imply, the Tox Bomber will be an area denial specialist chucking Blight Grenades filled with toxic fumes in order to both damage the players and force them out of cover. A significantly stinkier alternative to the current bombers, I suppose.

Helldivers 2 official artwork and logo

[Update]: Helldivers 2 is getting a bunch of very explosive new weaponry on April 11th.

Barely any time has gone by since the last major Helldivers 2 update, and already the Arrowhead team has returned with more stuff to mess around with. First and foremost, the Automatons now have two massive new units to contend with: flying, armored gunships, as well as AT-AT inspired walking fortresses that spew out bots and bullets in equal measure.

And if that's just not enough danger for you, Patch 1.000.200 has also added two new planetary hazards: blizzards and sandstorms. I've unfortunately not a had a chance to try them out just yet, but I can only imagine they're going to severely limit visibility and make it so the brave (or foolish) Helldivers can sneak in a couple of objectives while the enemies are nearly blind.

Horizon Forbidden West official artwork and logo for the PC version

When Horizon Zero Dawn first landed onto PC, it did so alongside quite a few problems. The performance was spotty, crashes were frequent, bugs were everywhere, and most annoyingly of all, mouse sensitivity seemed to change completely at random.

It took quite a while for Horizon Zero Dawn to get properly polished up, so I must admit I was slightly weary about the fate of its sequel. Thankfully, my fears ended up being completely unfounded as the freshly released Horizon Forbidden West looks and runs great straight out of the digital box!

Helldivers 2 official artwork without logo

[Update]: Helldivers 2 is getting a bunch of very explosive new weaponry on April 11th.

If you've tried to play Helldivers 2 over this past weekend, chances are you've noticed that things have become a bit... unstable. Besides the random performance dips, ever since the last update the game has been prone to randomly crashing, and apparently one of the reasons for this was players using lightning based weaponry.

So in order to sort this nonsense out, the Helldivers 2 team has now launched the small Patch 1.000.104. The patch notes are about as blunt as it gets: Arc Tower, Arc Shotgun and Tesla Tower stratagems should no longer cause the game to stutter, freeze and potentially even crash.

Dota 2: Patch 7.35d artwork for the brand new hero ban system

While most people were expecting the Crownfall update to arrive alongside the Ringmaster hero teased last year, the Dota 2 team has instead released a small but still rather meaningful update. It brings with it a brand new hero ban system, a couple of additions to Dota+, as well as some much-needed balance changes to help keep things interesting.

First and foremost, you can no longer select a hero to potentially get banned at the start of a match. Instead, you're now able to 'lock in' four heroes you never want to see, of which each one has a 25% chance to get banned (even if you leave a spot empty). So it's still not a guaranteed ban, but the new system is a bit more resilient against cheaters targeting specific players, as well as automatic so you won't accidentally pick Tinker just because you missed the banning window by a second... not that I've done that before!

Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree official artwork

It has taken an entire year for us to get here, but I'm happy to say that FromSoftware has now finally announced that Elden Ring's first (and hopefully not last) expansion Shadow of the Erdtree will be launching on June 21st. As you would expect, the expansion will bring with it a sizable new world to explore, a whole host of bosses and deformed monstrosities to fight against, a new storyline that is likely to bring up more questions than it answers, and naturally, a wide variety of new weapons, spells and equipment to mess around with.

The one bit of bad news is that the price tag is going to be a fair bit larger than any previous Souls DLC. To be more specific, even the basic version of Shadow of the Erdtree will set you back 40€, which is almost as much as the base game itself. Whether this is a simple price hike or if the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion will contain an absurdly large amount of content, that still remains to be seen. Personally, I really hope it's the latter as I certainly wouldn't mind losing another 100 hours or so to Elden Ring!

Vermintide 2 screenshot of Sienna in Winds of Magic

If you're in the mood for filling out your backlog with even more games you don't have time to play, you'll be delighted to hear that Steam's Spring Sale 2024 has now arrived! Much like its predecessors, it brings with it a boatload of discounts across a wide variety of games and genres.

For those of you that have no clue where to even start, allow me to share with you a couple of games that have managed to catch my eye - all of which are currently on a sizable discount. Without further ado, here's the brief list in no particular order: