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An Assassin’s Creed level designer has claimed that Ubisoft have put him on unpaid disciplinary leave for speaking out publicly against the company’s recently introduced requirement that staff return to the office full-time.
Arc Raiders and The Finals developers Embark have warned players that the two shooters have been hit by “extensive, co-ordinated DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks”. The studio said these attacks were “ongoing” in a post put out at 11:59 AM GMT today.
Remember in The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers when Gandalf falls down the big chasm with the Balrog, smacking the sawdust out of it while plummeting towards the waters of the underworld? Well, give Gandalf a gun, play that sequence in reverse, and swap the Balrog for a flock of Space Invaders, and you are playing something like the demo for Dwarf Legacy – a “bullet-hell precision platformer” from Wulo Games about a dwarf clambering up the inside of a mountain.
Oh wait, Gandalf needs to be listening to crunchy dancefloor music to complete the analogy. Also, he needs to stop periodically to buy better guns from a blacksmith. I’m pretty sure this is still within Peter Jackson’s budget.
What Steam operators Valve are and aren’t prepared to allow onto their storefront has been a major talking point for the past year or so, especially when it comes to mature or sexually-themed content. Our Edwin’s done some fine reporting on the topic and how it relates to payment processors, as well as delving into individual cases like Santa Ragione’s Horses.
Now, the developers of point-and-click comedy Earth Must Die say things looked “unclear” for a bit in terms of whether they’d be able to launch on Steam, with the platform then offering a thumbs up after reviewing footage of an “alien orgy”.
Arc Raiders has a new Headwinds game update that, amongst many other things, removes an extravagantly drawn-out puzzle from the game’s Buried City map. Introduced in December, the puzzle in question saw people tracking down and pushing 15 buttons in a certain order to unlock a secret chamber containing an actual, strummable guitar. As of this updating, you’ll now be able to buy that guitar at Shani’s, like a millionaire tourist paying to be flown to the top of Mount Everest.
I regard this as a dilution of the game, on paper, but I am not one of the players who’ve driven themselves crackers trying to get hold of the instrument (or paying real money for the battle pass to unlock it). Arc Raiders is a multiplayer game, of course, so even if you survive being shot at while stampeding between buttons, it’s possible another, distant player might innocently press one and reset your progress.
Crusader Kings 3 developers Paradox have decided now’s the time for the medieval strategy game to take a leaf out of its predecessor’s book – as well as fellow strategians Hearts of Iron IV and Europa Universalis 4 – by getting its own DLC subscription service. Starting today, you’ll have the option to pay a monthly fee for access to all nine billion or so CK3 expansions and add-ons, if you don’t fancy paying to own them outright in the usual fashion.
It feels anticlimactic to say so, and I don’t know why Geoff likes it so much, but Highguard seems decent. Adequate. S’alright. It’s a fine competitive FPS that’s capable of producing spirited, back-and-forth gun battles between spec ops wizards on bearback, which can in turn tickle the itches of anyone burnt out on battle royales or exasperated with extraction shooters. That’s me. I’m talking about me.
Well, the last one might have only appealed to folks open to taking on a mission that demands a bunch of crouch-walking, but you can’t say Helldivers 2‘s second warbond of 2026 isn’t offering plenty of bang for your buck. It’s got an exploding hammer. There’s other stuff in this Siege Breakers warbond too, but I’ll be honest, none of that can boast being a stick with a thing that goes boom taped to the end.
Valve’s lawyers won’t be able to file away one of the legal legalings they’ve been dealing with for a little while now, at least not yet. A tribunal have ruled that the £656m lawsuit brought against the company by digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt and law firm Milberg London LLP last year – the one that could net UK dwellers who’ve bought stuff on Steam since early June 2018 up to £44 in compensation – can go ahead.
As a result, Valve’s Lionel Hutzes will have to face the lawsuit’s accusations that the company have used Steam’s “dominant position” in the PC market to behave “anti-competitively”, with the end result that regular folks are “paying too much for PC games and in-game content and have lesser PC Game platform alternatives”.
Quick confession: every time I come up with an absolute Frankenstein’s cocktail of allusion-cobbling Google-bait like the headline for this article, a fairy dies. But that’s OK, because Hell Express is a top-down 3D extraction shooter about delivering letters to the dead. When I play it – there’s no release date yet – I will convey a note of apology to the soul of the fairy I’ve just slain with my appalling SEO practices. This may be difficult, however, because many of the underworld’s denizens are hostile. The only thing you’ll be delivering to them is bullets, fire and explosives.
