Apex Legends official artwork for Pathfinder

Apex Legends released a little over a week ago, and already it has managed to become incredibly successful. According to one of the recent announcements, Apex Legends has had more than 25 million players roam across its world, with over 2 million people playing at the same time throughout the weekend. Truly impressive numbers for a game that has launched without any sort of marketing campaign.

However, while Apex Legends is a pretty darn good game, it does still have some major problems. Crashes are a surprisingly common occurrence regardless of how powerful one's PC might be, there are some noticeable issues with lag when playing at prime time, and as is tradition with free-to-play games, there are a whole bunch of cheaters running around. In order to address these problems, as well as announce their plans for the future, Respawn has now released the first of a series of developer updates.

MTG Arena screenshot of the alternate card artwork for Duress and Ghalta

During the recent holiday season MTG Arena devs experimented with the very first special event - a free Pauper mode that offered players a chance to win alternate artwork for Llanowar Elves and Firemind's Research. As you might imagine, the whole event was a resounding success, and so the developers have now decided to expand the concept to Singleton as well.

Much like before, wins in the free Singleton event will give you access to alternate card artwork - this time around for Duress and Ghalta. While both cards are a bit niche, they do see a decent amount of play, so I'd say it's well worth giving the Valentine's Singleton event a shot.

Telltale's The Walking Dead: The Final Season screenshot of Clementine hiding

Telltale Games closed down its doors back in September and filed for bankruptcy, which as you might imagine, didn't exactly bode well for the future of its The Walking Dead series. Instead of ending in utter disaster, however, The Walking Dead: The Final Season wound up being rescued by none other than The Walking Dead's comic book writer Robert Kirkman and his Skybound Games!

After hiring a good chunk of the original developers, Skybound Games then fairly quickly released Episode 3: Broken Toys and set to work on the fourth and final episode of the final season. If you're as eager as I am to see what sort of ending they have planned for Clementine, you'll be glad to hear that you won't have to wait for too much longer as Episode 4: Take Us Back will be coming this March 26th.

Official artwork and logo for PUBG

The Steam Awards are essentially a community-driven effort to celebrate the best games and developers out there. With absolutely no rewards and the entire thing being primarily a popularity contest, the Steam Awards aren't exactly a serious ceremony, but so far I didn't really have much of a reason to dislike them as they always encompassed a nice variety of games, both AAA and indie.

The newly announced Steam Awards 2018 winners, however, leave a lot to be desired. You can find the full list (including runner-ups) over at Steam, but if you're just interested in the short version, I'll include the winners right below, as well as explain why I have such an issue with them. Have a gander:

Total War: Three Kingdoms official artwork

Total War: Three Kingdoms was originally supposed to arrive for PC this March 6th, bringing with it a whole host of new features and improvements over the previous Total War games. However, according to the latest announcement, Total War: Three Kingdoms' release date has now been pushed back all the way to May 23rd.

"With Three Kingdoms, we set out to create a new level of complexity," reads the developer update. "As such, we need a little more time to make sure these systems deliver as intended and give you the Total War experience you’ve waited so patiently for."

Apex Legends artwork showing off Bloodhound

Instead of doing any sort of lengthy marketing campaign or publicity stunt, Respawn Entertainment simply released their new Battle Royale game Apex Legends a couple of days ago and let the gameplay speak for itself. The results, as you're probably well aware by this point, were quite spectacular indeed!

According to the latest developer update, Apex Legends has seen more than 25 million players in its single week from launch, across both PC and consoles. Given those gigantic numbers, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to hear that Apex Legends has also managed to reach "well over 2 million concurrent players" throughout the weekend. How exactly those numbers will hold up once the novelty factor wears off, only time will tell, but this is certainly a great start for any multiplayer game.

Axiom Verge screenshot of a giant robot boss

The Epic Games Store launched a little while ago, and in order to attract a bunch of new customers Epic vowed to give away a free game every two weeks throughout the entirety of 2019. The current game on offer is Axiom Verge, so if you're interested in a bit of Metroidvania action, you should head on over to the Epic Games Store before this part of the promotion ends on February 21st.

I haven't played Axiom Verge myself, but I have heard a great deal of good things about it, so if you're a fan of the original Metroid or the genre as a whole, it might just be worth checking out. After all, it is entirely free! The one thing you should know before diving in is that Axiom Verge is a rather tricky game, so do make sure to approach it with a bit of patience, lest you find yourself dying over and over again.

The Witcher 3's Geralt fighting against a Rathian

After his appearance in Soulcalibur VI, The Witcher series' Geralt has now continued his interdimensional tour by paying a visit to the console versions of Monster Hunter World. Rather than being a simple cosmetic addition, Monster Hunter: World's Geralt has arrived alongside his own unique quests, voice acting, equipment, combat moves, as well as two new bosses to square off against - Leshen and Ancient Leshen. A rather sizable amount of content for a free update!

If you're wondering what all of this looks like in gameplay terms, however, allow me to share with you the recently posted trailer. Have a gander, it's quite an exciting one:

Screenshot of Ciri from The Witcher 3

If you're like me and you've been hiding under a rock for the past few days, you might be interested to hear that Steam's Lunar New Year sale has now arrived with a bunch of discounts in tow. The one catch is that the sale will only last until February 11th, so if you feel like grabbing something, you might want to do it sooner rather than later.

On the other hand, if you're not certain about which games to pick up, allow me to give you a couple of suggestions across a variety of genres, with the only real qualifier being that the game is both good and cheap. Here's my little list, in no particular order:

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice screenshot of a battle against the Corrupted Monk

FromSoftware's action-RPG Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is set to arrive this March 22nd for both PC and consoles. While you can expect Sekrio to carry forward some of the elements found in Bloodborne and Dark Souls, it's important to mention that it's not aiming to be a simple successor to those games, but rather a more fast-paced and movement-focused RPG. After all, you'll have a grappling hook to help you move around the various levels!

While the recently posted trailer won't exactly tell you much about the gameplay itself, it will give you a bit of a sneak peek at the sort of narrative Sekiro will be taking us through, as well as what sort of character we'll be playing as. Have a gander: