Mortal Shell 2 finally has a release date, and it's arriving sooner than you might think. Like so many other games releasing this year, Cold Symmetry is getting ahead of Grand Theft Auto 6's attention tidal wave blocking out November's horizon, and will launch at the tail end of August.That makes the August-October release schedule even more stuffed than it already was, with games like Star Wars: Zero Company, Gears...

It's a miserable time in the upper echelons of game development right now, but in the midst of all the layoffs, cancelled games, and legendary studios being horribly and inexplicably gutted, one company at least is riding high—Saber Interactive.Previously known for vehicle simulators and middling action games like World War Z, Saber found itself with a monster hit on its hands two years ago, courtesy of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine...

Grand Theft Auto 3's Ghost City was my first proper experience of community discovery.I was too young to fully appreciate game-breaking in the likes of Super Mario and Alex Kidd, so the idea of flying the clipped-wing Dodo aircraft from the runway of Frances International Airport at a very specific angle in order to break the 3D map and wind up in an otherwise inaccessible area—the section which housed the...

Amongst all the news of brutal layoffs, studio divestments, and ironic task force appointments at Microsoft this week, over in the Call of Duty corner of the megacorp, something kinda cool happened. Activision released updated ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Black Ops 2 (2012).They come with caveats, of course: At $40 a pop, the Call of Duty tax is firmly affixed to these elderly shooters. They're...

For the first time ever, seasonal content is here for The Elder Scrolls Online. Return of the Thieves Guild, its inaugural season, has launched for the long-running MMO, something you'd expect fans would be all abuzz for—if not for the fact that ZeniMax Online Studios has been gutted as part of the mass layoffs at Xbox this week.Yeah, the timing on this one ain't great. The developer of the MMO,...

The Palworld 1.0 update sure is a big one, and with all of the new pals, weapons, and zones to track it's easy to miss the little things—like new resources for crafting. As I climbed the revamped tech tree again, I breezed through most recipes until I ran into hardwood. It's a new tier of the basic building block you'll see pop up in later level recipes (around 40 to...

I've seen a lot of complaints and concerns about the layoffs at Xbox that put 3,200 people out of work and resulted in the spinoff of four studios—eventually five, once the Arkane situation is sorted. One I haven't run across is a claim that it's all part of an effort to take jobs away from Americans and replace them with non-Americans on H-1B visas. That changed today, though, when Microsoft...

Today, Palworld left early access with a massive 1.0 patch that brought an avalanche of changes and has drawn hundreds of thousands of new and returning players with the seductive allure of making creatures work in conditions that OSHA would object to if they were people.Unmentioned in its massive 1.0 changelog, however, are a series of visual reworks the patch made to a handful of Pals that previously bore the...

I don't blame you for loading up Moonlight Peaks and saying: "Wait, how are you supposed to date Samael?" The broody bartender is easily the most conventionally attractive guy in town. If you peeked at the datable candidates list for Moonlight Peaks, you'll have seen Samael featured alongside all the other eligible townies. When you start playing, though, you notice pretty quickly that Samael only has four friendship hearts in...

The first hotfix since Arc Raiders' 1.36 update has rocked up, and while it may be small it does tackle some important issues, namely a new duplication exploit which has popped up recently and saw mountains of explosives spawn even faster than the throwables glitch. "We have just pushed a hotfix on all platforms to mitigate a duplication issue, an official blog post explains. "As we stated before regarding the...