It would be fair to say that Valve's digital card game, Artifact, failed to make much of an impact following its high-profile launch at the end of 2018. Mere weeks after its arrival, user numbers had tumbled - and now, after a year of silence, Valve has finally announced a radical overhaul for the game, one that even ditches its fundamental monetisation model of selling cards.

Designed by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, who left Valve last March, Artifact struggled from the off, with players rejecting everything from the game's perceived complexity to balance issues and even its pricing model, which - unlike free-to-play competitors Hearthstone and Gwent - included an upfront cost, alongside payment for additional cards. By the time July came around, Artifact was barely seeing 100 players online in a 24-hour period.

Valve said little about Artifact for almost year, but suddenly, earlier this month, it began to tease new activity for the game, saying it would reveal "more news after the launch of Half-Life: Alyx". Now, with Alyx out the door and basking in the light of rave reviews, Valve has kept its promise, outlining some early changes for what it's calling Artifact 2.0.

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Wasteland 3, the post-apocalypse-tinged squad-based RPG from developer InXile, will no longer release in May as originally announced, and is now due to arrive in August.

InXile had originally set a 19th May release date for Wasteland 3 on Xbox One, PS4, and PC, but the developer today announced a new launch date of 28th August, citing the "logistical challenges" arising from coronavirus-related home-working as the reason for the delay.

"As with most companies, we moved to a work-from-home environment some weeks ago," explained studio head Brian Fargo in a statement posted to Twitter, "and that of course introduced challenges that many of us throughout the world have been learning to manage. We've been excited to see the Wasteland 3 Beta so well received, but the reality is that with these new logistical challenges our release was going to be impacted".

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Risk of Rain 2, developer Hopoo Games' enormously well-received co-operative rogue-like shooter sequel, will be free to play this weekend on Steam, in celebration of its first anniversary and newly released Artifacts 2.0 update.

Risk of Rain 2 initially entered Steam early access in March last year (a 1.0 release is expected this spring), and Hopoo has been steadily ploughing through its extensive early access roadmap ever since. Artifacts 2.0, one of the key milestones on that roadmap, focusses on "long-term content, replayability, and flexibility in the way you play", reintroducing the Artifacts system seen in the original Risk of Rain, albeit with a bit of an additional kick up the bum.

As you might already be aware, Risk of Rain 2 follows a similar formula to its wonderful predecessor, featuring gloriously chaotic shooting action (this time in full 3D) that grows ever fiercer - bringing tougher, more plentiful enemies - the longer players manage to stay alive. Artifacts serve as a way to amplify that chaos even further, acting as modifiers that can be toggled on or off at the start of each run.

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Bethesda and id Software have "made the difficult decision" to cancel this year's QuakeCon, which would have marked the 25th anniversary of the event, as a result of the ongoing upheaval caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

"In recent weeks, we have spent a lot of time discussing how we might still move forward with QuakeCon this year," the companies wrote in a joint statement, "However, with all of the logistical challenges and uncertainties we currently face due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have made the difficult decision to cancel this year's QuakeCon."

"The health and safety of our employees, volunteers, vendors, sponsors, and players will always be our top priority, "the statement continued, "and in these times it felt wrong to be talking about a gathering when gathering is the last thing any of us should be doing right now".

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Minecraft Dungeons - developer Mojang's exceedingly promising, if somewhat leftfield use of the Minecraft brand - will be making its way to Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC on 26th May.

Dungeons, if you've not been keeping an eye on its progress, takes the classic Minecraft aesthetic and fuses it with a top-down dungeon-crawler very much in the vein of Blizzard's classic Diablo series. What follows is an appealing chunk of procedurally generated, co-op focussed monster bashing and treasure hunting for up to four players.

Despite its family friendly outlook, Dungeons is very much a fully realised take on the dungeon-crawler genre, packed with fearsome (if inevitably angular) enemies from the Minecraft universe, bosses and mini-bosses, oodles of loot, deadly traps, even different combat styles.

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After feeling like the longest month in history, March is nearly over - and frankly we could all do with a pick-me-up. Thankfully Xbox Games with Gold is here to help.

Next month Xbox Live Gold subscribers can get their hands on Fable Anniversary, the remastered version of the 2004 RPG classic. Players will also be able to access the 2017 game Project Cars 2 by Slightly Mad Studios, and the bundle edition of turn-based RPG Knights of Pen and Paper when it arrives later in the month. Then, if that still hasn't satisfied you, there's Toybox Turbos - the 2014 racing game by Codemasters.

It's worth noting each game is only available for a limited time: Project Cars 2 between April 1st-30th, Knights of Pen and Paper from 16th April to 15th May, Fable Anniversary from 1st-15th April, and Toybox Turbos from 16th-30th April. Still no word on a release date for Fable 4, though.

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Almost eight years after it was first announced, Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord finally arrived via Steam Early Access yesterday.

The medieval action role-player is doing well, too. Developer Taleworlds has trumpeted some impressive concurrent player numbers - enough, it says, to make it Steam's biggest launch this year.

These numbers have only grown over the past day, with upwards of 200,000 people now playing at the time of writing.

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Gamescom will scale up its digital portion this year with a "significantly expanded" Opening Night Live announcement show.

The event's "Gamescom now" streaming schedule, which features demos and interviews with developers, will also be ramped up.

As for the physical show - which last year welcomed a staggering 373,000 people to Cologne's cramped convention centre - organisers said today that no final decision has yet been made.

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Another update, another week without patch notes - but it seems v12.30 has a couple of surprises in store for players, as two new items have been introduced.

Continuing this season's spy theme, Kingsman umbrellas are now available as legendary items in the game. Presumably these are based on the Kingsman comic and film series, particularly the scene in which Harry uses an umbrella to deck a bunch of thugs in a pub - and similarly, the item seems to be fairly useful in Fortnite too. You can use it to dart forwards, smash things, hit other players, and even block bullets (for a short amount of time). Like a very dapper riot shield.

The umbrellas even briefly work as a glider, but this has been causing problems for some players, who clearly assumed it would stay open for longer than three seconds. An easy mistake to make, given it looks very similar to Fortnite's famous victory umbrella gliders.

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Update: Wow. Looks like it's gone already at Game. Incredible. You might still get lucky, though, if there are any incomplete orders so do check back regularly. If I catch listings at any other retailers, I'll be sure to keep this page updated over the coming days.

Original Story: After weeks (months?) of zero availability, Nintendo's quirky home fitness curio Ring Fit Adventure is now starting to come back in stock.

At time of writing, Game is currently taking orders for Ring Fit Adventure at 69.99. It's unlikely to last long, so better snatch a copy quickly if you've been hankering for a home workout.

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