It does indeed look like Rampart’s turret Sheila may be a deployable deal good for peppering your enemies from a safe distance. Rampart also appears to have some ground shields with one-way barriers that teammates can use to shoot through. The World’s Edge has gotten a few changes as well with some new blast walls. The big change looks to be the crafting system, accessed through terminals. Don’t get caught staring at those unawares, right?...

Well, it’s here now, Thursday, and it also adds a new Blunderbuss weapon and endless balance changes to the MMO. Here’s a trailer for the update, which is very nice: The expansion continues New World’s storyline with a new Expedition called the Tempest’s Heart, in which players pursue Isabella, one-time explorer turned big meanie, into an alternate version of the capital city of Myrkgard. Isabella is the corrupted (possibly Corrupted) boss monster, basically....

Every New World Trade Skill goes up to Level 200, meaning you’ll be levelling up pretty frequently, although the real rewards for levelling up (better-tier materials and craftables) tend to kick in every 50 levels or so. Read on below for information on how to increase your skill levels in every practical activity New World has to offer. New World Trade Skills leveling To level up a Trade Skill in New World, you simply need to use that skill over time....

Right, I’ll get this out of the way now. While I enjoy zipping about the spacelanes in No Man’s Sky, the bloody cursor has always massively irritated me in its menus. That’s why I’m mightily pleased to see that Hello Games say it’s been improved for playing with a gamepad. Less fiddly cursors are part of the Waypoint update’s tweaks to the game, with an eye towards improving ease of use and quality of life....

It’s an eyebrow raising feat, to be sure, and I bet there are a fair few RTX 2080 Ti owners out there who are biting their knuckles in remorse right now as a result. It’s also probably the most compelling upgrade option out of all Nvidia’s RTX 30 cards released so far, too. Its 1080p and 1440p performance are well into the 80s and 90fps zone on max settings in today’s big blockbuster games, and it’s also perfectly equipped for Medium to High gaming at 4K and ultrawide, too....

Get an RTX 3070 Founders Edition for £469 (UK RRP) Get an RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition for £369 (UK RRP) Both of these GPUs are great value options, particularly at their original 2020 RRPs as these models are. Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards are genuinely great designs, often more compact than third-party models while maintaining great cooling performance, so don’t be put off if you were a little disappointed with Nvidia’s reference designs from earlier generations....

Oculus didn’t name an exact date for when they’ll be stopping sales of the headset in their recent blog post, but they said they won’t be shipping any new features for the headset moving forward, and they won’t be accepting any new Oculus Go apps or app updates into the Go Store after December 4th 2020. They’ll also won’t add any new apps to the store after December 18th 2020....

Fighting Lion is an Exotic-rarity breech-loaded grenade launcher, originally created by a legendarily punchy Titan who thought her girlfriend would approve more of her venting frustration by forging weapons rather than literally punching mountains. Shine on, Wei Ning. Fighting Lion is unique among Destiny 2 grenade launchers because it uses mere Primary ammunition, not Power or even Special. That means it’s less powerful than others but you can use it as much as you want....

It’s loosely connected to Sigono’s other two OPUS games, The Day We Found Earth and Rocket Of Whispers, but only in the sense it’s vaguely set in the same universe rather than being a direct sequel. I played it without any knowledge of the other two OPUS games and got on absolutely fine with it, so you needn’t swat up on the rest of the series before playing - although I’ve since bought both of them on the strength of how much I loved Starsong....

I got to spend a few days exploring the new changes that Overwatch 2’s second season will bring around this time tomorrow, and I’ve come away feeling a little torn. On the one hand, the brand new additions - the new Tank, Ramattra, and the new Shambali Monastery map - are gorgeous, intriguing, and enjoyable. On the other, the balance changes to existing heroes really don’t seem to have done much to rebalance the most overpowered heroes in the game, which has left me feeling a bit frustrated....

During a recent hands-off preview for Lost Signals, where Night School Studio director and co-founder Sean Krankel, lead writer and studio co-founder Adam Hines, and lead developer Bryant Cannon walked us through the first 30 minutes of the game, it’s clear that Oxenfree II is very much building on all the good stuff from Oxenfree I. We also absolutely did not discuss Night School Studio being bought by Netflix, which was announced the same day I saw the game....

Developers Pocketpair describe Palworld as a multiplayer “open-world survival crafting game”. You know the score: exploring, building, fighting, crafting, and such. To help you with your tasks, you’ll be able to enlist Pals, big critters that are just Pokémon. But while Pokémon have often worked jobs alongside their human friends, Palworld sounds like a cruel extrapolated endpoint of treating Pokémon as tools. While in Pokémon I’ll use electric-type ‘mons to help me battle critters I catch while fishing, in Palworld you can straight-up throw electric Pals into water like a toaster....

Perfect Dark’s development is being led by The Initiative, a new studio founded by Microsoft in 2018. In the past year, The Initiative has lost most of its senior design team, including game director, design director, lead level designer, principal world builder, two senior system designers, two senior writers, its technical director, tech art director, lead gameplay engineer and lead animator. And more. VGC’s sources say that the departures are due to a lack of creative autonomy, with The Initiative studio head Darrell Gallagher - and now departed game director Dan Neuburger - taking a top-down approach to the Perfect Dark reboot’s direction....

Phonopolis stars a young lad called Felix who actually has some thoughts of his own while existing in an authoritarian regime. Amanita say the game’s themes are individualism and manipulation, but that it’ll still somehow be “playful and light-hearted” in their traditional style. Exploration will also be as important to Phonopolis as the rest of Amanita’s back catalogue, they add. The announcement goes on to say that Felix’s main goal in Phonopolis will be stopping the city’s capital-L Leader from playing the “Absolute Tone” and scuppering everyone’s lives....

John Walker called Pikuniku “a very lovely thing” in our Pikuniku review. “This is a joyful, happy-faced good time,” he said. “There are ‘boss fights’, but they’re deliberately not an impediment to progress. (One especially in a way that I shan’t spoil, but gosh it made me laugh.) The chatter is plentiful, but always fun to read (or enact). And it’s extremely funny.” Along with a story campaign that’s a few hours long, Pikuniku does have cooperative and competitive multiplayer levels too....

When I last played Inkbound, I sampled a run with Shiny Shoe’s CEO Mark Cooke and creative director Andrew Krausnick, and I was left smitten with the game’s turn-based combat (do give it a read if you want a quick rundown of how the game’s runs and upgrades actually work). At the time, I had no doubts in my mind that the game successfully sped up turn-based bashing without hurting the strategic side of things....

Liam was wondering it, anyway. Thus, he picked ten difference game genres from the most-played on Steam, asked me to play at least one game that would broadly represent each, and report back on which are the most (and least) suited to life on the Steam Deck. You can listen to our full chat in the video above, while enjoying the predictable results of me trying to play Super Meat Boy for maybe the second time in 12 years....

So please keep that in mind when I say that I really want videogame developers to stop making me kill guard dogs. I absolutely abhor it. They come bounding up to you, like they just want to give you a big, sloppy kiss, and they always make a sad little yelp when they die. Always. What kind of monster thinks that’s a good time? Pathway was the game that really got me....

There aren’t none diversions. We talk quite a lot about scaffolding, for example. Don’t forget to tune in to the Five Nights At Freddy’s Book Club spin-off podcast. You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. You can find the RSS feed here, and you can discuss the episode on our Discord channel, which has a dedicated room for podcast chat. Music is by Jack de Quidt....

But by the end of my first turn, I realised Old World was not a Civilization game at all, despite its looks. Which left a pretty major question: what was it? Scratching my head over the next hour, I saw elements of Crusader Kings-style “grand roleplaying”, resource-based cost/benefit calculations familiar from economic strategy games, and choice-based narrative elements familiar from interactive fiction games, all built onto a familiar 4X structure....