Theological battle arena Smite‘s gone all Nickelodeon on us today. Those Avatar: The Last Airbender skins Hi-Rez Studios announced last month have arrived, packed inside their own bespoke battle-pass added to the god-smashing MOBA today. They might not be full characters in their own right – instead, possessing three of Smite’s existing mythical warriors – but if you’ve ever wanted to batter Zeus as a child-like cartoon demigod, now’s your chance.

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The next fighters coming to mythological MOBA Smite are not gods or fantastical creatures at all, they’re movie characters. Hi-Rez Studios today announced a cross-over with Avatar: The Last Airbender, the M. Night Shyamalan movie. Aang, Zuko, and Korra (and her dog Naga) are all coming to Smite as skins for existing characters, to be clear, not new characters. They’re looking a lot more cartoony than their original movie designs but hey, I suppose we have to allow a little creative liberty. Smite added Cthulhu earlier this month so Avatar is fairly mundane, really.

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Hi-Rez, the developers of Smite and Paladins, don t have it easy. They compete head-on with Blizzard s juggernauts; with their fingers stuck in the same hero-shooter-flavoured pies the comparisons are inevitable, and rarely favourable. Depending on whose questionable extended metaphors you listen to, you might hear it argued that they spend their time looking at where their competitors fingers are, and then follow suit.

You might also hear that their games can be uneven, or poorly managed. Some of that rings true, though much is hyperbole. Hi-Rez have made a few missteps, but that s partly because they take a lot of steps in general.

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The Smite and Paladins World Championships didn’t get off to an impressive start. Several thousand fans gathered around several adjacent screens occupying the back wall of Dreamhack Atlanta, each blasting out hype reels with near identical scripts. It was cookie-cutter drama played in disconcerting semi-stereo, leaving me uncomfortable in half a dozen different ways.

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Two weeks ago, I was sat in a dive bar so scuzzy it was practically underwater. It was there my friend told me he spent nearly all his time playing Paladins on his Xbox, and I learnt two things. 1) Paladins must be bigger than I thought, and 2) platform restrictions can make me sad.

Today, in the opening announco-blast of Atlanta’s Hi-Rez Expo, Hi-Rez announced that cross-platform play is coming to Paladins, Realm Royale and Smite.

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The developers behind Paladins, Smite, Realm Royale, and Tribes: Ascend today announced they’re formally splitting into distinct new studios to handle their big games (no, not including Tribes) under an overarching publisher. At the very least, this should assuage some fears about Hi-Rez’s track record of ditching older games when their limited teams shifted over to newer games. For now, it seems their three core games are secure. Hi-Rez are also opening two new arms, one company focused on running esports events and the other making art assets. To speak in business terms, all of Hi-Rez’s limbs are possessed by alien parasites and wrenching out their sockets to skitter off on lives of their own.

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We’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.

2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…)

Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they’ve been changed for better or worse.>

Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of the Hindu faith, is legendarily generous, wise, and optimistic. He s a patron of the arts and sciences, and busies himself by working to remove obstacles in the path of honest and caring people.

It s not really on then, I d say, to call him a fucking idiot.

That s just what my teammates in deity-themed MOBA Smite kept doing, though. Maybe they had it in for the kind, gentle, and benevolent god? Maybe that was why they spent half an hour just absolutely roasting him? Or maybe it was my fault. You see, this was my first time playing Smite as fairly recent addition Ganesha, and I didn t really get how he worked. I died. I died a lot. (more…)

Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games.> But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol’ breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.

Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.

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I tried to wait out the Smite: Trials of King Hercules microsite loading loop by listening to the Disney Hercules soundtrack. Alas, the loading loop is indeed an eternal loop for me and I moved on to Moana before remembering I was supposed to write/finish/publish a news story. Let’s listen to Moana’s You’re Welcome and then I’ll explain Smite’s new MMO dungeon-style event: … [visit site to read more]