Many of you are by now bathing in twinkling neon ravelights and swooning into the metal arms of Cyberpunk 2077‘s humourless unhunks, who stalk the streets of Night City like animatronic pizza restaurant mascots gone feral. That is fine. There are worse places to find oneself in the labyrinthine hell of video games. Places such as these. Here are 9 neighbourhoods you wouldn’t want to bring up your children in.

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Last year brought RPG gems like Disco Elysium. Was there an RPG as good released in 2020? We’ve updated our list of the best RPGs of all time to reflect the best of the past year – and there’s still dozens of older classics, too.

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Fallout: New Vegas

celebrated its 10th birthday last week. Can you believe the best Fallout game came out on October 19th 2010? 2010! To honour an entire decade of Obsidian’s brilliant-but-buggy RPG, the game’s director Josh Sawyer did a couple of charity streams to raise money for the California Wildlife Relief Fund.

Over the weekend, he managed to raise just under $24,000 (around £18,000) for the cause, all while beating up hordes of radscorpions with dynamite and answering questions about the game’s development.

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Ray tracing is the big buzz word of 2020 in PC gaming, and Nvidia have just announced another fresh batch of ray tracing and DLSS games, including a couple of old ones that will be getting support in future updates. To help you keep track of them all, I’ve created this list of all the confirmed ray tracing games you can play on PC right now, as well which of this year’s [cms-block] will get ray tracing and support in the future. And because ray tracing tends to go hand in hand with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS tech these days, I’ve also listed all the current and upcoming games that support DLSS, too.

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If I remember correctly, one of the bigger complaints against Fallout 4 on release was that it wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian’s spin-off is seen by many as the series’ last stab at proper, old-school RPG’ing before Bethesda turned the post-apocalypse into a playful sandbox. Naturally, a group of modders have been hard at work bringing New Vegas’ guns ‘n’ graphics up to date with a total recreation inside Fallout 4, showing off their spit-shined spurs in a new progress trailer this week.

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Have you played Quake? If you have you’ll, like me, probably have wondered why Episodes 2 and 3 don’t end with a boss fight. This week, former Id designer Sandy Petersen explained some of the hacks he and American McGee tried bashing together to fill those boss-shaped holes, from a tower-block sized rotter to a giant grotesque spiderthing wot would’ve chased you around the entire map.

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Quake

‘s a gritty fast-paced shooter where you dance around enemies and splatter them with beefy guns. Modder “Redfield” clearly thought, “But what if I inject some Bloodborne into it?”, and so Raven Keep was born. It’s a mod which throws players into a gothic castle where “Old Ones” (sound familiar?) have left some spooky chalices behind. To uncover their mystery, we’ll have to blast knights, ghosts, and even some bosses straight from Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Count me in.

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Yes, Skyblivion is still going folks. A team of volunteers are still plugging away at remaking The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in Skyrim as a mod. Will it ever come to a close? Well, in a new developer diary, we got an insight into how it’s looking and where it’s headed. In among all the details surrounding UI and clothes and objects, I found one thing really stood out to me. They’ve nearly completed the ‘first pass’ of the overworld, and they’re injecting some extra flavour into many of the original’s dull, empty spaces.

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Microsoft are buying Bethesda

, or rather their parent company ZeniMax Media. Like a nesting doll, Bethesda themselves are the parents of yet other game studios that Microsoft will also own. What of, say, Id Software? One of Id’s co-founders John Carmack reckons that the Bethesda buyout is a good thing. He says that the new Microsoft ownership could allow him to “reengage” with his old work.

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Update: Microsoft say they’ll “keep the commitment” to bring Bethesda’s Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo to PS5 as timed exclusives. More below.>

Microsoft just announced they’ve bought ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda. The developers of games such as Skyrim, Fallout, Dishonored, Prey, Doom, Quake and all those classics are now technically Xbox Game Studios. Xbox boss Phil Spencer made a post welcoming the developers, in what he calls a “landmark step” for both Microsoft and Bethesda.

What a year.

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