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Diablo 4‘s first expansion will arrive sometime late in spaceyear 2024, but it’s also a throwback to Diablo 2. That’s because Vessel Of Hatred is all about one of the Prime Evils, Mephisto, who auld players would have slain in that most-beloved of hack-and-slashers. It’s also going to add a new character class “never before seen in the Diablo universe.”
Many World Of Warcraft expansions add a new continent, but The War Within, announced at Blizzcon this weekend, is a little different. It’s set in a new subterranean world beneath Azeroth – and it kicks off a three-expansion story arc Blizzard are caling The Worldsoul Saga.
Remember remember the fifth of November, when either we celebrate someone being stopped from bursting the king or we celebrate someone trying. Sometimes I’m still not sure which. My head says thwarting, my heart says attempting. You wrap up warm, keep your pets safe, and enjoy the shmup particle effects. But what are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
“The game is called Bloodthyrster X,” the nerd-coded detective explains, twisting in their ill-fitting suit and furiously shaking an upside-down Xbox controller while their colleagues stare aghast at a TV screen looping a three-second clip of shoddy CGI ultraviolence. “The objective is to run over babies in your minivan while shooting cops and other players. It’s taking over the dark web… and IRL.”
You don’t need me to tell you that fake video games appearing in TV shows and movies are typically absurd and terrible. But just because something is bad, doesn’t mean it’s uninteresting. Having watched dozens of movies and episodes with fake video games, I’m going to celebrate a few over the coming weeks. Some daft fake games have neat ideas, some shows portray their fake games in an interesting way, and some fake games are even quite good. Let’s start now with Deadware, an unknown horror movie which does a great job recreating something a bit bad: a spOooky haunted browser game from 1999.
Honkai: Star Rail has dropped a release date and details for its 1.5 update, taking the anime sci-fi RPG to a spooky new region with new events and three new characters along for the ride.
Greg ‘Ghostcrawler’ Street, the influential developer with credits on both World of Warcraft and League of Legends – including the MOBA’s unreleased MMO – is working on a new MMORPG under his own studio.
This year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 remake will no longer feature Weapon Tuning, a feature introduced by last year’s Modern Warfare 2 remake, which lots of people appear to despise. Unlocked by levelling up a weapon to the max, Weapon Tuning is an extra layer of the game’s Gunsmith weapon-building editor that lets you tweak individual attachment stats such as weight and length of grip, as displayed on a radar graph.
Vampire Survivors is getting an Adventures update that will add “self-contained miniature story modes that reset and remix the game’s content, following the Survivor’s cast on a series of wacky sidequests”. That’s according to developer Poncle, who are clearly in a whimsical mood this week. After all, if there’s one thing this game about auto-massacring ever larger crowds of kamikaze night creatures has been lacking, it’s some proper narrative context.
What a great little thing. You’ve surely seen a hundred post-Minecraft games about building a base to smelt iron to build a base, and probably even thought to yourself that they look entirely fine but kind of… redundant? There’s only so many times you can walk back and forth from a cave to a forge.
But what if instead of trudging around a grey cave, you were driving a big drilling machine instead? It’s so simple, and yet it makes all the difference in GeoDepths.
Final Fantasy XIV’s world of Eorzea is a utopia. Sure, there’s the looming threat of Garlean invasion and/or the possibility of world destruction throughout A Realm Reborn and its expansions – but on the plus side, almost everyone you meet is up for a round of cards.
Over the last quarter-century, Triple Triad has managed to escape its origins as a fun side minigame in Final Fantasy VIII to become a fully-fledged phenomenon in XIV. The Gold Saucer runs regular tournaments, random strangers are happy to be challenged to a match – often throwing in one or more of the game’s many variant rules (though Chaos can do one) – and might even give up one of their prized cards when defeated, with almost 400 to collect as of the game’s latest patches. Emphasis on the “might”: I dread to think of the hours spent replaying NPCs in the hope of a random drop as I filled out my collection.
I headed along to Final Fantasy’s London Fan Fest last month with a fetching deck of Triple Triad cards in hand. (Square Enix provided entrance and accommodation for the event.) Where better to try and live the dream of challenging random strangers to a card game, and learn more about the community that has fallen in love with the MMO in the 10 years since A Realm Reborn released?
