I tried playing the original Baldur’s Gate as a kid, but I had next to no understanding of D&D in 1998 and wound up bouncing off of BioWare’s legendary RPG because I just kept dying. Over time, some of the more esoteric aspects of videogame RPGs were sanded away, and when BioWare got to the…
Diablo 4 is officially on its second major facelift in the almost three years it’s been around. Its next season will make sweeping changes to how monsters fight back and how players customize their gear, and there’s even more reworks coming in its next expansion. A big question that has come up as the game…
It’s our duty to tell you every time XCOM 2 goes on sale and it’s happened again. This time, the discount’s part of a Firaxis sale on Steam that ends at 10 am on November 17, although XCOM 2’s 95% off discount will end 41 hours from now, so get in quick. After that, it’ll…
Hunting down the elusive Arc Raiders Anvil blueprint? Blueprints are one of the rarest drops in Arc Raiders, as they unlock the ability to craft weapons permanently instead of waiting for them to show up in the shop. The Anvil is a great blueprint to secure early on thanks to the gun’s high damage and…
Valve has just checked off a long-requested wishlist item for the Steam Deck: Downloading games even when the screen is turned off. The feature, available now in the Steam Deck’s beta client, is enabled by default when the Steam Deck is plugged in. The handheld will automatically complete all downloads in the queue with the…
When Telltale Games came to a messy end, it seemed like the end of the line for that particular style of episodic modern choice-and-consequence adventure game. In retrospect, Life is Strange looked like a blip, a one-hit wonder whose success wasn’t repeated by any of its spin-offs or follow-ups. No amount of editorials about why…
The Grand Theft Auto games are famed for their sprawling recreations of famous US cities: Liberty City is New York City, Vice City is Miami, Los Santos is Los Angeles. And despite being around for nearly 30 years now, the series has—with one exception, noted further below—never ventured outside of American borders. In a recent…
Princess Azula is introduced in a flashback in which she’s watching her brother receive his disfiguring scar while pumping her first in the air with glee. But even more tellingly, when her brother and uncle are torn between turning for help to the Earth people who might kill them, or the Fire people who might…
Amazon didn’t spin up its game development studios a decade ago just to be a regular game publisher: It wanted to take on Steam, but missed its shot by such a wide margin that we didn’t even realize that’s what it was trying to do. Now it seems to have at least partially moved on…
Arc Raiders is not a game that immediately reveals all to its players. Much of the experience in its early hours is cautiously sussing out where to find good loot and how and when to fight or avoid the Arc robots that patrol the surface. The tentative peaceful relationships formed with other raiders are just…