One of the most shocking moments in Critical Role’s 4th D&D campaign was planned from the jump—yet with enough left to chance that Alexander Ward ‘did leave the table thinking I’d really f*cked up’

Critical Role 4’s Overture is officially all wrapped up, and we’ll be moving onto the three-group, 13-player campaign that’s had me salivating ever since it was announced. As confirmed during the last episode’s cooldown, one of its most shocking moments had been pre-planned. Kinda. As confirmed then—and re-emphasised now—enough was left up to chance that…

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Magical Randy Pitchford summons the ghost of games discourse past, says games ‘Haven’t even had our Citizen Kane yet’

Randy Pitchford, Gearbox CEO, chronic tweeter, and known warlock, has performed his greatest magic trick yet. The magician has resurrected the dead—summoning the spirit of the most tedious videogame discourse of 2010 in a new documentary from Shacknews called 24 ‘Til Launch: The Making Of Borderlands 4. “I love that we’re just getting started,” says…

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Microsoft might be silent, but Halo’s co-creator and Halo 2’s design lead have called the US government’s ‘Destroy the Flood’ analogy comparing immigrants to parasites ‘absolutely abhorrent’

Earlier this week, the official White House account jumped on a tongue-in-cheek post by GameStop to crib some credit for ending the console war. An eye-rolling, but otherwise uneventful AI-generated image of US president Donald Trump saluting an American flag with an incorrect number of stars. A slightly more eventful post happened when the X…

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The best way to innovate in gaming ‘is to have good margins,’ says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, so I guess he’ll be reinvesting his $96.5 million payday back into Xbox any second now

Days after a report from Bloomberg explained that Microsoft has expected unrealistic profit margins from its gaming division—one likely reason for its raft of studio closures, game cancelations and thousands of layoffs—a chipper Satya Nadella basically said as much out loud during an interview at a Github conference on Tuesday. “If we as an industry…

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Why is Battlefield 6 so afraid of big maps?

MORGAN PARK, STAFF WRITER (Image credit: Future) Last week: Fired up Halo: Combat Evolved on the Steam Deck and decided it’s the last game that needs another remake. One day is not enough time to confidently declare Blackwell Fields the worst map in Battlefield 6, but that hasn’t stopped folks from doing it anyway. I’m…

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New World is dead: Amazon ends new content updates following massive layoffs, says ‘servers will be live through 2026’

Amazon Games was hit with “significant” layoffs today, part of the massive 14,000 job cuts announced by Amazon but also reflecting “strategic changes” at the company, including “the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work—specifically around MMOs.” As it turns out, that includes the MMO New World: Aeternum,…

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