The latest update for CS:GO is a significant one. Two maps have been added to the Defusal Group Sigma competitive pool, one of which is the popular Seaside map and the other a new one called Breach. Breach is, according to the CS:GO blog, "a defusal map set in a spacious corporate building". If you want to try the new maps they're in Deathmatch and Casual, and are also available as Scrimmage maps under the Competitive tab. 

Scrimmage is a five-on-five mode which doesn't affect your Skill Group. As Valve explain it: "When you play a Scrimmage map all of the competitive rules are the same, but there are no restrictions on players in your party, and your Skill Group will not be adjusted or displayed after your match."

On the way out is the Workout map, which will no longer pop up in official matchmaking. The Vertigo map has also been modified in some pretty significant ways including new approach to site B. For the full list of changes, check out the patch notes.

After starting out as a Humble Monthly exclusive in April, A Short Hike arrives on Steam and Itch with a free update packed in. This cute little trek starts out with a bird named Claire and her Aunt May getting away from the city to visit Hawk Peak Provincial Park. Apparently unable to give up modern comforts entirely, Claire sets off for Hawk Peak where she can get a cellphone signal.

The rest seems to be all the cozy goodness of Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing mixed with the casual meandering of a classic adventure game. As Claire, you walk up and down the many smaller peaks, valleys, and streams of the park where treasure chests and new friends wait to be found. 

All the other animals visiting the park, in adventure game fashion, seem to have things they need in return for something they can offer Claire. A frog by the beach has a shovel for digging up treasure, which they will only give up in return for a smaller, sand castle-making shovel. Two avid rock climbers offer to teach Claire the ropes, which she'll need to reach the summit of Hawk Peak, but only if she comes back with a golden feather. 

The pace of A Short Hike appears relaxed, there are no survival meters or timers or other impositions forcing Claire up the mountain any quicker than you choose to go. As you wander the park looking for new secrets and treasures, you can glide down through the air, allowing you to skip the hassle of reversing your route. Not only that, but the literal bird's eye view often reveals new nooks and crannies to explore that you didn't spot on the walk up. 

The new Extra Mile Update, which comes included with A Short Hike, brings a few tweaks and changes that developer Adam Robinson-Yu discovered during the exclusivity period on Humble. The update brings new characters, the ability to catch various kinds of fish, and touchups to several mountain areas with new discoveries even for those who have played already. This update also adds support for Linux. 

In celebration of its full launch, you can grab A Short Hike on Steam or Itch for 10% off.

Nowadays, if there's a successful and moddable third-person action game, you can rest assured that eventually Nier: Automata's 2B will be modded into it. It happened recently with Sekiro, it's happened in Monster Hunter: World, and now (thank god!) you can play as 2B in Resident Evil 2 Remake.

The work of modder TXYI, the '2B Claire' mod does what the name implies: it replaces Claire with 2B. None of the movesets have changed—it doesn't change up the gameplay at all—but I can hardly imagine her moveset slotting nicely into the corridor-laden world of Resident Evil.

The mod replaces the Noir DLC costume, and comes with the warning that using FluffyQuak's mod manager is "highly recommended". Thanks to DSOGaming for the heads up. 

Here's a few more screenshots courtesy of mod uploader zhongyingjie.

In 2016 we were impressed with the level of simulation Jalopy gave to maintaining and driving an old beater car across Germany, even in its early access stage. After its full release, we found it to be a haunting and nostalgic tour through the former Eastern Bloc. Sole developer Greg Pryjmachuk of MinskWorks has announced the next nostalgia trip he has planned—this time in the English midlands of the '80s. 

Unlike Jalopy, Landlord's Super looks to be a more tongue-in-cheek simulation of years past. The first-person simulation will take you through the process of mixing cement, laying bricks, and hammering nails. As Landord's Super's Steam page puts it: "build stuff, get drunk, build stuff while getting drunk. Your choice."

Pryjmachuk, who apparently spent time as a "concrete & steel erector" is drawing on personal experience, the same way he did with his experience driving a Minsk motorbike through Vietnam for Jalopy. Landlord's Super will simulate more than just the act of building, it seems. Pryjmachuk wants to capture the "more diverse, more northern, more working class" vibe that he remembers. "Some days you’ll be building scaffolding or mixing mortar or building a wall, brick by brick," he says. "Some days union interference might just mean you spend the day down the pub playing darts."

Landlord's Super will also be localized "in both American English and British colloquialisms," for those of us who can make only a bit of sense of this British word soup on the game's website: 

"It's all gone a bit pear shaped in the county of West Berklands. With the mines closed, the lads and lasses are skint & on the lash. Armed with hammer & spanner, it's up to you to navigate crippling poverty and union pressures to fix the county and rebuild hope." On the lash. Right.

From its trailer, Landlord's Super looks to give the same level of simulation to the mundane tasks of construction as Jalopy did to car maintenance. By our measure, that will hopefully lead to some more mute-colored nostalgia.

You can wishlist Landlord's Super on Steam, where it is "coming soon."

Game Boy-style platformer Downwell and board game adaptation Space Hulk: Tactics will be added to the Xbox Game Pass for PC next month.

Downwell will be added first, on August 1, with Space Hulk: Tactics coming on August 8. Confusingly, the announcement also lists Slay the Spire as a future Xbox Game Pass for PC game, but it's already there—what's new is that it's being added to the console Game Pass.

Xbox Game Pass for PC is currently $5 per month at its introductory price, and offers access to 100-something games through the new Windows 10 Xbox app. One downside is that games which are moddable on Steam probably aren't when purchased through Microsoft. Slay the Spire really is better with Steam Workshop access, so if you like it, you might consider picking it up a la carte at some point.

And, obviously, Game Pass being a subscription service means that if you cancel your membership, you lose access to the games. If you don't mind having fleeting experiences with them, though, you can get more than your money's worth in a couple months and then cancel. According to the site, Microsoft is still offering the first month for $1.

Earlier this month, Microsoft added Night Call, The Banner Saga 3, Killer Instinct Definitive Edition, and For The King. You can browse the entire Xbox Game Pass for PC library here.

Echo Fox founder Rick Fox has spoken out about the dispute between him and shareholder Amit Raizada, which came to light earlier this year when Raizada was accused of, and admitted to, using a racist slur in an email sent to former Echo Fox CEO Jace Hall. In an hour-long interview with Richard Lewis (embedded below), founder Fox said shareholder Amit Raizada "put a gun to the company's head" by personally acquiring the debt it owed and then demanding it be paid immediately.

Raizada has subsequently rebutted every claim made by Fox, saying that he was "falsely" called a racist, and that Fox himself was in on every deal.

Fox explained that while he's the "face" of Echo Fox, he wasn't actually in a operational position at the company until he acquired controlling interest from Raizada about eight months ago, which led him to discover that Echo Fox was actually in "a very distressed situation" financially.

The organization struggled but managed to stay afloat and even remained competitive, despite having "probably the lowest payroll" in the LCS. But trouble arrived when the first payment to Raizada was made.

"We expected the debt to be pushed out until the end of 2019," Fox said. "What we discovered that he did was, knowing that this debt was on the books to the company, he went behind [our backs] and acquired the debt, and instead of pushing it out, immediately put a gun to the company's head and threatened to call the debt—hence sending the company into a tailspin."

Raizada then "presents himself as a solution" by offering to convert the debt to senior preferred debt instead of calling it in immediately, Fox said, ensuring that his obligations would be covered before anyone else—and, apparently, at twice the rate of the initial debt. Echo Fox management agreed, but then "a short few weeks later," the dispute between Raizada and Jace Hall took place.

Efforts to meet Riot's demand to remove Raizada were hampered by the preferred debt situation: "That always created conflict, especially when you had investors wondering why would they want to pay an antisemitic, racist, self-dealing, fraudulent individual," Fox said. "Why would they line his pockets with their money?"

"It made it very difficult. Not only did his comments and his business practices damage the company, it actually also damaged the ability for us to raise [funding]. It damaged the ability for us to actually operate a healthy company."

Proposals have been made despite that, however, and Fox spoke at length about the process of selling either Echo Fox's LCS slot or the company as a whole—both options have been on the table. He also expressed very obvious frustration at the fact that despite the large sums of money involved, many current investors could end up losing out because of structural changes made by Raizada prior to relinquishing control.

"He's supposed to extend the contract, doesn't do it, and then at that point he engineers a fire sale, tries to engineer a fire sale through his behavior because he knew that if things got to a point where even if the slot was taken, he would be the first one at the top of the totem pole to get all the money. He damaged the company along the way, he eroded the value, he prevented a raise [of cash] by his behavior, he prevented a raise by the structure that he created through the fraud he created, and he breached the contract," Fox said. "All of this mess and confusion that we're in is at the hands of this individual."

Raizada responded to Fox's allegations In a statement sent to Kotaku, in which he denied being a bully and said that all Echo Fox partners were offered the opportunity to convert their debt or purchase senior preferred equity in the company—and that Fox himself approved the process. He described himself as a "passive investor" in the company, and said that Riot declared a default on Echo Fox's LCS contract in part because of "multiple financial breaches that occurred while Rick was running the company."

"The company was failing under Rick’s leadership after he removed Stratton Sclavos who built the company and created most if not all the value. Rick made several pleas to all investors for money to make payroll or pay players and teams. Rick not only approved the debt conversion and the waterfall changes about which he complains, but he sent multiple letters to the investors explaining that the transaction was good for the company, gave me an indemnity and full release of all claims. Rick and every investor in the company signed the amended partnership agreement that contained the waterfall change," Raizada wrote.

"I am not the only investor who converted debt or purchased senior preferred equity in the company—all partners were asked to participate. Those transactions single handedly allowed the company to continue operating through today, as Rick had no other funding sources. I was rewarded by Rick falsely calling me a racist, blaming me and the other investors for his actions that essentially bankrupted the company, and accusing me of fraud in connection with covenants agreed to and signed by Rick and all the partners. The only person who is not a victim and is crying wolf is Rick Fox."

A final agreement to sell the LCS slot or Echo Fox in its entirely still hasn't been reached, but Fox said that legal action against Raizada is being considered by multiple shareholders, including Fox himself. 

Artists online are no strangers to having their artwork stolen and repurposed. Most times I've seen artists work taken without credit it's been by art aggregating accounts or by individual personal accounts that just don't care to credit creators. This is the first time I've heard of a rock band pilfering digital art. Or, at least the venue the rock band is playing at, it sounds like.

Last week, Papa Roach posted a photo on Facebook promoting its Saturday night show at the South Side Ballroom in Dallas with a familiar pink face and fin ears. If you don't know Papa Roach offhand any better than I do, maybe you'll at least recognize this song in all its 4:3 aspect ratio glory from 2009.

Through the social media grapevine, a screenshot of the concert poster and the original poster, drawn by Ástor Alexander, wound up on Twitter. Vlad Calu of Those Awesome Guys, credited as the publisher for Monster Prom, posted a side-by-side making it entirely obvious that the poster uses Alexander's work. The original artwork is from a poster being sold on Monster Prom's Yetee store. 

Julián Quijano, creative director at Monster Prom’s development studio Beautiful Glitch, tells Kotaku that the theft has mostly just instigated some new in-jokes for the team. “The whole thing just gave us some good laughs, silly puns and a funny story to tell,” he says.

In fact, Quijano had a bit of insight on how it might have happened in the first place. “I used to work in nightclubs for a couple years, and clubs and venues always do the same: their graphic designers have to do some poster designs per week for each party, concert, whatever. What ends up happening is they just Google some random cool images to alter a bit and add the info,” he said. “So this is probably that: a venue that improvised a poster and their graphic designer found our poster to do so.” 

Fortunate for the venue that Beautiful Glitch is so accepting of their last resort to hit that deadline.

Next to nobody had heard of Atomic Heart before it dropped a disturbing, explosive trailer in May 2018—now, it's one of this year's most anticipated shooters. 

Its inspirations are varied: you'll spot flashes of Metro, BioShock, Nier: Automata and Stalker in its art and gameplay footage, while the world is a product of both Russian sci-fi and the experiences of the dev team, some of whom grew up in Russia. But what do you actually get when you mix all of those influences together? Here's everything we know about Atomic Heart.

Watch the trippy Atomic Heart cinematic teaser

Developer Mundfish put out a new cinematic teaser that depicts a cryptic conversation between what we assume is your main character and a shadowy figure on a screen. The trailer is only in Russian, but you can turn on closed captions to get the full picture.

What is it?

An alternate reality Soviet-era first-person combat game with killer robots, clown-themed torture chambers, and grandmas trapped in flowing molecular gloop. Yeah, it's weird. Its combat is a mixture of shooting and melee swinging with improvised weapons, and the scarcity of ammo means you'll want to sneak through some areas, too.

What's the story? The premise?

The devs say the story is a bit like an episode of Black Mirror—if the show were set in a warped version of the Soviet Union sometime between the '30s and '60s. As Mundfish CEO Robert Bagratuni told IGN last year, the USSR still exists in this reality, "but a technical revolution has already taken place: robots, the Internet, holograms have already been invented ... all these innovations are submerged in the atmosphere of communism, confrontation with the imperialism of the West and all the other inherent political and social aspects of the time.”

Robots have been mass-produced to help with agriculture, defence, timber production and simple household chores—and now they're starting to rebel. You're a mentally-unstable KGB special agent called P-3, and the government has sent you to investigate a manufacturing facility that's fallen silent. 

On arrival it's clear that everything is, to put it mildly, royally fucked. Robots are out of control, once-dead creatures walk again, and traps are set to ensnare any who enter. It's your job to find out what's happened and put an end to the chaos. 

Somewhere between the murdering and madness is a love story, although we don't know how big a part it will play.

10 minutes of Atomic Heart gameplay

Mundfish released 10 minutes of Atomic Heart gameplay earlier this year, and you can watch the full video below. It gives you a glimpse at both the shooting and melee combat, as well as the weird world the devs have created.

Also note the zipline ropes, the use of quick-time events, and the large robot enemy at the end of the video, which we suspect is some sort of boss.

Atomic Heart system requirements

Atomic Heart's Steam page lists both minimum and recommended system requirements. You'll need at least an i5 4460 / AMD FX-6300 CPU, 6 GB of RAM and a GTX 760 or R7 260x to run it. The recommended specs are an i7 3770, 8 GB RAM and a GTX 1060. 

However, there's a chance those are both placeholders: the game's website says it's "hard to tell exact requirements at the moment" (although it does say they'll be "modest"). 

Is Atomic Heart an open-world game?

It's not clear. The world encompasses "the entire Soviet Union—a vast circle, the borders of which reach the Arctic in the north, Altai Mountain in the south, and with plains, lakes and much more in the middle". Different areas of Plant 3826 will be spread "all over the map". You'll get some choice about the order you tackle them in.

In an interview last year, Mundfish CEO Robert Bagratuni told Austin that Atomic Heart was "conceived as an open-world game", but later declined to confirm that the map was fully explorable. When asked whether the world was seamless, he told Wccftech he couldn't yet answer. "Now, I can say that there will be many different biomes," he added.

We reckon it might be a series of connected levels spread out across a large map, Metro Exodus-style. It has a railway system to whisk you between different locations.

Atomic Heart will have a crafting system for makeshift weapons

Atomic Heart's weapons are makeshift, and you'll piece them together from "various metal parts, detached from robots or taken from the household appliances or fragments obtained during the game". It's not known exactly how the crafting system works, but the image above suggests there will be plenty of ways to boost your damage stats.

Will Atomic Heart support VR headsets?

A 2017 teaser listed SteamVR and PSVR as release platforms for Atomic Heart, but Mundfish has since said the game won't get a full VR release. "There are no such plans now," it told Wccftech earlier this year. "Maybe as we get closer to the game release, some elements of the game will be available in VR, but now it’s hard to say which and in what form."

The devs previously released a VR game called Soviet Lunapark VR that was set in the same universe as Atomic Heart, but it was removed from Steam earlier this year. Anyone that had paid for Soviet Lunapark will get a free copy of Atomic Heart.

Atomic Heart will have PvP multiplayer—and maybe co-op too

Atomic Heart's story is designed to be played solo, but the devs say they're "thinking about co-op mode". They've kept schtum about what exactly they're planning. 

They've revealed more concrete plans for PvP multiplayer. "If you are ready to challenge other players, a secret railway will get you to a special region meant for PvP battle," reads the game's website.

Atomic Heart development controversy

If you've been following Atomic Heart's development, you'll probably know that a bit of controversy bubbled up in January after a report—citing anonymous sources within Mundfish—told of mass layoffs and incompetency at the studio. A summary of the report, posted on a Russian gamedev-related Telegram channel (an instant messaging service), can be found on ResetEra.

The devs partially responded to these claims in a later interview with a Russian outlet. The (roughly) translated interview is here: basically, they dispute the initial report, and say the game is far more polished than the Telegram channel claimed.

In its Wccftech interview, the team also moved to reassure fans about its development process. "[Our] experienced developers, who worked in large game companies like Ubisoft … are experts in making AAA games and complex subsystems such as online multiplayer, AI ecosystems, analytics and scoring systems and other complex and high-tech tasks," they said. 

"Also, we’re working closely with Epic Games and we stay informed about all the latest technologies and UE4 features before they actually get publicly available. Our partners from Nvidia help us in graphics and performance optimization. So, for all the reasons described above our game is being developed at the highest technical level."

Mundfish has provided development updates infrequently, although a recent Discord post—copied and pasted to Reddit—hinted at more regular updates going forward. The team is currently putting together a video to show what it has been working on, and has recently opened a new office in Moscow, the Discord post said.

Atomic Heart RTX raytracing demo

The game is being built with Nvidia's latest RTX tech, including raytracing and DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), and the team has released a tech demo that you can download and try here.

If you'd rather just watch a video of the tech in action, the video above will do the trick. The team is particularly happy with how the tech improves lighting and shadows, and says the performance is holding up well.

Monster Hunter is hilarious. I'm wading through a chest-high snow drift as a sinister fin roams around the clearing. The piranha-like Beotodus swims under the snow looking for an opportunity to explode from beneath like a great white puncturing a seal. My instincts tell me to unsling the enormous sword-axe on my back and fight back, but instead I'm chugging cocoa from a steaming flask. Seconds feel like minutes as my character glugs, glugs, glugs, and the fin lurches dangerously in my direction.

Just in time the animation finishes, I dive roll sideways as Beotodus erupts from the snow with a spinning tail attack. The monster's body clips me and I fall backwards onto my butt. A bit of health lost, but could be worse. The main thing is I have another window I can use to stuff my face. I pull out an enormous chunk of meat and watch the circling fin again as I chomp... chomp... chomp.

High-risk snacking is an integral part of the Monster Hunter experience, and that's still true in the massive Iceborne expansion, which adds a huge snowy zone, new monsters, new weapons, and new crafting opportunities. The game has very funny running-while-swigging animations because the developers know how tense and necessary these moments are to a successful hunt. The Beotodus's claws inflict a new chilling status effect that slowly eats away my stamina bar. The hot drink gives me some resistance to that and other cold effects, and the well done steak restores huge chunks of lost stamina bar. My feline Palico buddy hits me with a vigour wasp to restore my lost health—thanks, chum—and I'm back to fighting form.

Later I learn that instead of the hot drink, I could have taken a run through a hot spring to hold back the chill. You can spot these little oases by the gentle heat shimmer, warm colouration, and hosts of tiny otter-things taking a happy bath. Iceborne really wants you to feel the cold. Frost coats your weapon as you fight, snow deforms realistically under your feet, and drifts can slow you down at crucial moments. Watch out for cold streams too, I lingered in one too long and was reduced to a shivering wreck.

After spending a few hours with Iceborne, I don't know what more I could want from a Monster Hunter World expansion. I'm not particularly interested in new weapon archetypes—there are ten or so I still haven't mastered—but the addition of new grappling moves and combo possibilities does just enough to broaden the charge blade moveset I'm familiar with. 

You use left-trigger to aim the grapple and press circle to launch it at a monster. The range is deceptively short, so it's something you use when you're already close to combat engagement range. If you hit, you grapple to the monster's hide. From there you can hop between sections—haunch, to back, to head—and land a couple of strong blows before dismounting. It's a different attack to the familiar leap-to-back attack that lets you repeatedly stab the monster until it falls over. The grapple is good for closing on a monster that likes to dart about quickly (*shakes fist at Odogaron*), and it lets you target bodyparts. Smashing Beotodus' legs stops it from afflicting you with that nasty chilled debuff.

The new landmass is larger than any of the existing zones. The four or five areas I explored were relatively flat, but the north of the map is dominated by a mountain where I'd hope to see taller locations reminiscent of the coral highlands. There are a few underground caverns too, where the floor is a glossy, transparent sheet of blue ice. The zone is rich with new plantlife and new types of ore to mine, and there is a lot of new ambient wildlife, such as skunk-like creatures that like to jump on you and claw your face until you shake them off.

There are a lot of other small but welcome additions. Overclothes let you keep your armour set bonuses but change your appearance to something more fitting for the wintry climes of Iceborne. There's a new camp where your utilities are much more conveniently arranged and easy to access. Crucially, there's a new chef brigade in the kitchen. I don't know why the sight of a homely cat massaging salt flakes into a hunk of beef makes me smile, but that's the peculiar charm of Monster Hunter. Sure, it's a game about hunting down beautiful creatures and stealing their bones, but it's all done with a powerful sense of enthusiasm and fun. Monster Hunter is hilarious.

Monster Hunter: World Iceborne is coming to PC in January 2020.

If you've ever wondered what Cyberpunk 2077 would look like if it came out in 1995 instead of 2020, you've now got your answer. Bearly Regal, who creates remakes and demakes for his YouTube channel, has posted a 'mini tour' of Cyberpunk 2077's Night City reimagined as a PS1 game. Check out the teaser above and stick around to see how it was made. 

Bearly Regal creates his remakes and demakes using Minecraft, Lego Worlds and, more recently, Dreams. The latter is where he built Cyberpunk 2077. It's a shame it's a PS4 exclusive, as I've seen some really impressive games coming out of it and imagine PC modders and creative types would have a field day. 

The teaser is brief, but you'll spot a lot more cool details during Bearly Regal's walkthrough of the demo. It looks both surprisingly true to Cyberpunk 2077's E3 2018 demo and a PS1 game, though Bearly Regal says it's still early days. 

At the 12:40 mark, you can see more of the work-in-progress Night City, including hover cars, but it's clearly in a much earlier state than the first section. The streets are pretty quiet, though Keanu is already there, hanging around. 

It looks great and I clearly need to get Dreams.