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[Update #3]: Steam's massive Winter Sale has now arrived along with the chance to vote for the Steam Awards 2022!
[Update #2]: Steam's Autumn Sale 2022 has now arrived alongside the annual Steam Awards nominations.
[Update]: Steam's Scream Fest 2022, one of the smaller sales, has now arrived with a whole bunch of horror game discounts and free demos.
While the holiday season is definitely a good time to launch some sales, Steam went a bit overboard with the whole thing by essentially having three massive sales release one after another: the Autumn sale in November, the Winter sale in December, and the Lunar New Year sale in January. Given how barren the rest of the year was, this needed to be changed.
As such, Valve has now decided to remove the Lunar New Year sale and replace it with the Spring sale as one of the four major seasonal events. However, while the Lunar New Year sale may no longer be directly supported by Valve, it's highly likely this period will bring with it a whole bunch of discounts regardless.
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[Update #2]: Total War: Warhammer 3 has made the Immortal Empires combined campaign map free for all owners!
[Update]: I'm pleased to say that everything has gone according to plan and so Update 2.2 has now been unleashed!
As a part of Update 2.0 in August Total War: Warhammer 3 added an absurd amount of new content, improvements and balance changes to play around with. This includes things like the unified Immortal Empires campaign map, a brand new DLC featuring four powerful Chaos champions, the long-awaited arrival of blood & gore effects, a full rework of the Warriors of Chaos faction, a ton of tweaks to a whole bunch of older factions and legendary lords, and the list goes on for a while.
Unsurprisingly, given the sheer scope of the changes, some of the new additions have launched alongside quite a few problems. For example, the AI is currently far too passive and weak to truly challenge the players, even on the hardest difficulty settings. So in order to fix this and similarly annoying problems, Creative Assembly is currently aiming to release Update 2.2 on October 18th!
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[Update #2]: Overwatch 2's October 13th update has fixed a bug that caused players to rank far lower than they deserve!
[Update]: As a small apology for the post-launch problems, Overwatch 2 is giving away a Legendary skin and planning double XP weekends
After what feels like an eternity of waiting, Overwatch 2 has now finally arrived as a free-to-play game. The sequel brings with it a brand new game mode alongside a variety of new maps, a new monetization system based around a Battle Pass and in-game store combo, as well as three new heroes to play around with: Sojourn, Junker Queen and Kiriko.
If you're wondering what the latter is all about, as well as what motivates her to fight, you'll find the answers you seek through the surprisingly lengthy animated 'short' below. Have a gander, it's a rather gorgeous one:
Guild Wars 2's October update has buffed up old elite specializations and rebalanced classes for PvP
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[Update #2]: The Guild Wars 2 team has now revealed the full update roadmap for Fall and Winter 2022.
[Update]: Guild Wars 2's highly popular Shadow of the Mad King event is returning on October 18th.
With the August update Guild Wars 2 unleashed a whole assortment of changes aimed at equalizing the damage potential between power (direct damage) and condition (damage over time) builds. Additionally, this update sprinkled a variety of buffs onto the old elite specializations like the Reaper, Daredevil and Scrapper to help them fit better with the more modern ones.
The recently launched October update has continued these efforts by removing most of the mechanical weaknesses built into some of the elite specializations. They were originally meant as a balancing tool to prevent the elite specializations from dominating the basic classes, but these days the average power level has advanced so far that the weaknesses mostly serve to keep interesting builds from becoming relevance. So in most cases these weaknesses have now been removed, and if necessary the affected specializations will be rebalanced in different ways later on.
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[Update]: It looks like the teaser was correct! Crash Bandicoot 4 has now made its way onto Steam, right on cue.
In a bit of a bizarre move, Activision recently sent a Crash Bandicoot themed pizza box to Youtuber Canadian Guy Eh. While the box unfortunately didn't contain any pizza, it did bring with it an important announcement - Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time will be launching onto Steam on October 18th.
That's not all, however, as the box also came with a brief teaser hinting at a major reveal scheduled for December 8th: "Hungry for more? Try out our new Wumpa Pizza for $12.08!" No further information has been given just yet, but I can only imagine it's going to be a brand new Crash Bandicoot game as building up hype for any other announcement doesn't make much sense. Then again, all of this comes from receipt for an imaginary pizza, so what do I really know.
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[Update]: With its very first major update, Moonbreaker has removed all of its monetization!
After spending quite a few years deep underwater, Subnautica studio Unknown Worlds Entertainment have now decided to do something a little bit different with Moonbreaker. So instead of an exploration game, Moonbreaker is a character-focused and turn-based strategy heavily influenced by tabletop tactics games.
The most unique thing about Moonbreaker is that all of your characters are adorable little miniatures in action poses that you can, in true tabletop fashion, painstakingly paint in order to have them look exactly as awesome (or as awful) as you want. How exactly this works, as well as what Moonbreaker looks like in terms of gameplay, that you can check out through the trailer below:
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[Update]: The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure will be following suit and launching onto PC, PlayStation and Switch on March 14, 2023.
Given the rising popularity of The Legend of Heroes series in the west, it should come as little surprise to hear that NIS America and Nihon Falcom have started going through their back catalogue in order to bring the rest of the series to PC and modern consoles. As such, the previously PlayStation Portable exclusive The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero has now been re-released for PC, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch alongside an English translation.
The new version of Trails from Zero also brings with it a variety of visual enhancements, an improved UI that comes with customization options, increased draw distance, support for 144 FPS, and the list goes on. Most importantly, Trails from Zero has added some extremely welcome quality-of-life features like a message log to help you keep track of everything and a high speed mode to help you get through some of the more tedious sections.
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[Update #2]: MTG Arena is getting a whole bunch of new cards on December 13th with Explorer Anthology 2 and Alchemy: The Brother's War.
[Update]: MTG Arena's big artifact focused expansion The Brother's War is launching on November 15th.
After a brief round of teasers, MTG Arena's Alchemy: Dominaria mini-expansion has now arrived. It brings with it thirty new cards to mess around with, many of which have been designed to complement previously underpowered or simply underutilized mechanics. Naturally, there's a bunch of entirely new ideas in the mix as well, the most exciting of which is Oracle of the Alpha that conjures and shuffles the entire Power 9 into your library!
You can check out the full list of cards, all neatly sorted by color, over at the MTG website. And if you would like to kickstart your collection, make sure to enter the currently ongoing free event that offers three packs, as well as to put in the "PlayDMUAlchemy" code in the in-game store for another batch of freebies.
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[Update #2]: As a small apology for the post-launch problems, Overwatch 2 is giving away a Legendary skin and planning double XP weekends
[Update]: My Overwatch 2 review is now out, and to put it simply it's a terrible sequel, though thankfully a terrific game!
As a part of its anti-cheating and anti-smurfing plan, Overwatch 2 made it so all players must link a phone number to their account in order to play. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a bit of a mess as some phone carriers throughout the world didn't seem to fit into Blizzard's plans, and so a large swathe of players was left unable to explore Overwatch 2.
In an effort to correct this, at least partially, Blizzard will be removing the phone number requirement for veteran players later today. What this means is that any Overwatch player with a connected BattleNet account, and this includes everyone who played since June 9, 2021, will be able to simply dive into Overwatch 2 without having to do anything else.
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As you've most likely noticed throughout the recent previews, Company of Heroes 3 was looking somewhat rough around the edges. With the November release date fast approaching, there was genuine concern that Relic would push the game out too quickly and that we'd end up with another Dawn of War 3 situation. Thankfully, it looks like that won't be happening as Relic has just announced that they're going to leave Company of Heroes 3 in the oven for a few extra months to ensure it launches in as finished and polished of a state as possible.
"As we approach the November 17th launch date for Company of Heroes 3, our team has decided the game is not quite up to our players' or our own high standards," reads the brief update. "There are still bugs to squad, pixels to polish, gameplay to adjust and feedback to address.