Larian hope to have future companions spend less time jumping straight into your bed, and more time with each other

With Baldur’s Gate 3 and its gang of rowdy adventuring mates in the rear view mirror, Larian are hoping to improve a couple of aspects of how they handle companions going forwards – a process that’ll likely kick off in Divinity. In particular, the development of deeper relationships between party members and a more subtle build to the moment when the player’s relationship veers into deeply horny territory are on their list of learnings.

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Rally Point: Unorthodox. Complex. Laborious. Not just XCOM again. Of course I love USC: Counterforce

What did you do while recovering from your big medical thing, Sin? Well. Loath as I am to talk about myself (“lol. lmao.” – Combative New Ed), I… don’t know? There was some Ultima Underworld, some workers, some resources, some Pagonians pioneered. But in the dimensionless vortex of first-time-off-since-2020, I think I did… nothing. The lists barely moved.

Except, finally, for a game I struggled with last year. A strange game, easily punished, as all turn-based games must be for dolt reasons, for not being bloody XCOM. USC Colon Counterforce is more like old XCOM, aka UFO. But it’s not a recreation of that, nor of Aliens, its other obvious inspiration. It diverges as much as it reminds, and makes some mistakes in a way that we all must, when pursuing our own identity instead of an impression of someone else’s.

I wish I’d given it a second chance sooner. I wish I could shake everyone and say “This! This is the way! There is more than one path, if you just look for it! Yes, the one before you stumbled. But look at it it. See the admittedly weakly-named USC, and its bruises. It is beautiful. It is itself”.

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For its gaming hardware contingent, CES 2026 was a good week to bury good news

CES 2026 doesn’t technically end until tomorrow, but then if it were a football match, it’d be the kind where the home side gets battered 4-0 and the cameras keep cutting to a stream of season ticket holders slumping towards the doors with 20 minutes left. An all-timer in the history of Consumer Electronics Show, it has not been.

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Minecraft’s getting cuter baby animals whose single pixel eyes you can stare into as you nudge them into lava

Minecraft‘s getting marginally cuter with its next update, as it continues to pretend it isn’t designed for the express purpose of teaching innocent children that in order to survive, you’ve sometimes got to beat some pigs and trees to death with your bare hands. Baby farm animal mobs, long just mini-mes of their adult versions with slightly different head/body size ratios are getting their own unique appearances.

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A new StarCraft shooter’s reportedly set to be revealed this year, possibly as a BlizzCon headliner

Right, so, Starcraft. A new shooter in the series is reportedly set to be revealed this year, possibly as the big headline act of Blizzcon in September.

The existence of such a secret shootery thing in the works at Blizzard was first reported by Jason Schreier last year, being one of the revelations to come out of his book on the publisher, titled Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment.

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Fortnite’s latest collab with an adult animated series that’s somehow still going is none other than South Park

You know what South Park feels like to me? It feels like randomly waking up in the middle of the night, looking around your bedroom as you think “cripes, it’s still not morning yet?” A feeling of waiting for the inevitable, the end, or the beginning. Not so much the contents of the show, none of that needs all that much thought, more so its very existence, which is now apparently transplanting itself into Fortnite.

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