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After going through a bit of a delay, Total War: Three Kingdoms has recently made its way to PC alongside some highly positive reviews. Out of all the new features Three Kingdoms brought with it, the two completely different campaign modes are quite possibly the best idea a Total War game has had in a long while!
Instead of forcing everyone to play a realistic campaign like Rome 2's or a completely and ridiculously over-the-top one like Warhammer 2's, Three Kingdoms has wisely opted to give players access to both. So depending on your choice between "Records" and "Romance" modes, you can either try to relive a pivotal moment in Chinese history, or just go full Dynasty Warriors and mow down hundreds of troops with your godlike generals.
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[Update]: NetherRealm is stopping development on Mortal Kombat 11 and moving onto a new game.
While the actual matches in Mortal Kombat 11 run at a fairly stable 60 FPS, there are certain animations and places where this was unfortunately not the case. As you might imagine, these shifts between 30 and 60 FPS can be quite annoying, so much so that a community mod was created in order to correct the entire issue.
Thankfully, you will no longer need a special mod in order to solve the FPS discrepancies as the developers have now released an update that enables 60 FPS throughout the entirety of Mortal Kombat 11. The first of the newly introduced options allows you to turn on 60 FPS in menus and during cinematics (including intros and fatalities) at a relatively low hit to performance.
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[Update]: Cities: Skylines' Plazas & Promenades DLC will allow you to make pedestrian-friendly cities.
If you're in the mood for expanding your Cities: Skylines playthrough with even more stuff, you might be interested to hear that the latest Campus DLC has now arrived. As you would imagine from the name alone, the Campus expansion brings with it a bunch of new features relating to education and academic work, college living and recreation, as well as a variety of sports arenas to experiment with.
You can get a bit of an idea of what all of this looks like in-game, as well as check out some of the new buildings you can create, through the recently posted trailer. Have a gander:
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After somewhat recently creating a couple of new Doom maps, John Romero has decided to take things a step further and create an entire map pack called Sigil. Each of the nine new singleplayer levels will feature weapons, monsters and tilesets from the original Doom, while the music will be a combination of new and old tracks from Buckethead.
However, while most of the content will be coming straight from the original Doom, Sigil's maps will be designed in a significantly different way than the originals. You can expect to see a much higher difficulty level, a variety of neat tricks that haven't been used much in the vanilla Doom maps, as well as plenty of John Romero's signature monster traps.
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While the console version is slated to arrive on June 4th, the PC version of The Elder Scrolls Online's Elsweyr expansion has now been released in full. Besides giving players the ability to explore the Khajiit homeland, the Elsweyr expansion brings with it a brand new Necromancer class, a variety of new dungeons and bosses to fight against, as well as storyline that's focused around a massive dragon invasion.
Since the new Necromancer class is definitely the highlight of the expansion, allow me to share with you the recently posted preview showcasing just what the Necromancer has to offer. Have a gander, it's a pretty cool class:
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[Update]: The latest patch has brought in experimental Assault (2CP) changes and Genji nerfs.
Out of all the game modes in Overwatch, it is the Assault (2CP) mode that seems to attract the most criticism, and for good reason. If the teams are evenly balanced the matches can take around 30 minutes to finish, the whole thing is incredibly 'snowbally' and even a single mistake on point A defense can result in a quick loss of point B, while the attacking team can often feel like they're slamming their heads against the wall for minutes and minutes on end.
While I'm afraid the upcoming patch does not offer solutions to all of those problems, it does at least make things slightly better. The time awarded for capturing point A is being reduced from 4 to 3 minutes, while any defenders that die upon losing point A will be given a respawn time that caps out at 3.5 seconds maximum. Not exactly massive changes, but they should help reduce some of the frustrations inherent in the Assault game mode.
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[Update #2]: Dota Underlords has entered Open Beta and can now be played on both PC and mobile for free.
[Update]: A closed beta version of Dota Underlords has now been released for Dota 2 - The International 2019 Battle Pass owners.
Valve has pretty much made a name for themselves by picking up talented groups of modders, giving them resources, and then having them create some of the most popular games out there. They've done this with Dota, they've done this with Counter-Strike, they've done this with Team Fortress, and they planned to do the same with the hugely popular Dota Auto Chess.
However, due to what appears to be creative differences, Valve and the Dota Auto Chess team Drodo weren't able to reach an understanding. While this could've ended badly, the two parties thankfully decided to each develop their own version: Drodo would continue to work on the mobile version, while Valve would create a PC-focused one.
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[Update]: The base version of The Sims 4 is now entirely free-to-play on both PC and consoles.
If you're looking for a game that has the potential to absolutely devour your free time, you might be interested to hear that EA is currently giving away The Sims 4. All you need to do is head on over to the Origin store, log into your Origin account, and you'll be tormenting your poor sims in no time.
The offer will only last until May 28th, however, so do make sure to grab yourself a copy as soon as possible. It's also worth mentioning that this is merely the Standard Edition, so if you want any of the million DLCs, you will have to buy them separately.
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[Update #2]: The replay system has now been extended to support official Overwatch League matches. So if you ever wanted to see what your favorite pros do throughout the course of a match, you now have a chance to do just that!
[Update]: This patch will also be accompanied by a variety of balance changes, as well as tweaks to the Assault (2CP) game mode!
Even though Overwatch may be three years old at this point, the team behind it doesn't seem to have lost even a shred of passion for their work. Just recently they have released the massive Anniversary event alongside the very first Workshop modding tools, while today they are introducing the long-awaited replay system.
Right now the replays are somewhat limited in the sense that you can only watch your ten most recent matches, as well as only the replays that are from the current patch. That said, Blizzard is working on expanding the system, so consider all of this a small proof of concept.
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[Update]: Elex 2 will be landing onto PC and consoles on March 1, 2022.
THQ Nordic has acquired an absolutely ridiculous amount of studios and IPs over the past two years. They own the rights to classic games like TimeSplitters, Kingdoms of Amalur and Carmageddon, they're actively working on the Darksiders and Titan Quest series, they own both Warhorse Studios and Deep Silver, and the list goes on for a while.
The latest in this series of acquisitions is Piranha Bytes, the developers behind the Gothic and Risen series, as well as the most recent ELEX. While the exact details behind the deal have not been announced, it would appear that THQ Nordic will continue their usual strategy of mostly leaving the developers alone and just focusing on the business and marketing side of things.