Eurogamer

Ubisoft has unveiled Ghost Recon Wildlands' latest free update, and it's a two-mission "narrative arc" called Operation Oracle, heading to PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 this week, on 2nd May.

Operation Oracle sees players embarking on what initially appears to be a routine hostage rescue mission to liberate a Skell Tech engineer from Unidad. As you might be expecting, however, things don't go quite to plan. "Forget what you know about your enemies and friends," says Ubisoft, "as you meet Cole D. Walker, a Ghost Team Leader on the hunt for truth."

Ghost Recon Wildlands' two new story missions can be played solo or co-operatively, and there's the briefest tease of what's in store in the reveal trailer below.

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Eurogamer

After much teasing and leaking, Valve has formally unveiled Index, its brand-new high-end virtual reality PC hardware. Pre-orders open tomorrow, May 1st, and it's out in June.

Index, which is being pitched toward more demanding VR users, consists of three new parts: the Index headset, the Index controllers, and new 2.0 base stations. While Facebook's recently announced Oculus Rift S utilises internal tracking, Valve has opted for an external tracking solution in Index, as it doesn't believe (it told Polygon) that headsets with built-in sensors are "there yet".

The Index headset features dual 1440x1600 RGB LCDs (compared to the original Vive's combined 2160 1200 resolution and Oculus Rift S's single 2560 1440 LCD panel), and promises "greater sharpness for the same rendering cost", as well as greatly reduced 'screen door' effect. It will run at 120Hz, but is fully back-compatibile to Vive's 90Hz (in contrast, the new Rift S supports 80Hz) and promises 20-degrees more Field of View than Vive.

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Eurogamer

Nintendo's Labo VR set is a lot of fun - not just the colourful, creative mini-games which come packed in, but the building of the whole cardboard Toy-Con, too.

But, let's be honest, its VR mode for Zelda leaves something to be desired. Nintendo's official Breath of the Wild VR update lets you peer through your cardboard goggles to view the game via a gyroscopic camera. Since you're holding the whole console up to your face, it's pretty hard to do much else.

Just as well, then, there's a couple of mods which have shown off what could be done with a more comprehensive option. First, a mod from MelonSpeedruns, SushiiZ, and Silentverge which offers up an impressive first-person view (thanks, Kotaku). Then, a mod which splits this view into VR, seen below:

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Eurogamer

Observation is trying to do something very complex, and if I feel, at times, like it's failing, I'm also not quite sure what "success", in this case, might look like. If I did, I suspect my ideas about existence in general would be rather different. The work of Glasgow-based Stories Untold developer No Code, the game casts you as an AI, SAM, aboard a damaged orbiting space station around seven years from now. In casting you as that AI, it also marks the point at which SAM ceases to be SAM and becomes something... else, a hybrid of human and machine traits, the player's curiosity and clumsiness mixed in with the AI's hitherto automated systems and procedures.

You struggle awake in darkness, starlight slashing remorselessly across a cabin hung with dust and components as the station spins in the aftermath of a mysterious collision. A woman is calling your name, her terrified face bleached by what you realise, with a start, is the light given off by displays and indicators that are, in some sense, "you". Announcing herself as Emma Fisher, she orders you to accept her voiceprint and give her access to the station's network, so she can work out what the hell has gone wrong. The trouble is, her voice doesn't match the print from your databanks. This creates the first of many introspective dilemmas, as you wrestle with the tension between what your mechanical faculties are telling you and the ideas and biases you bring with you, as the ghost forced into this machine.

"You can see that it looks like a glitch. An AI would reject it," observes No Code's co-founder and creative director John McKellan. "But a human would say, 'well, she sounds trustworthy, so I'll accept her'." The question of whether Emma is who she says she is, in other words, is also the question of who and what you are. "We wanted to create this sense of 'I'm meant to be in the walls' - I feel like I'm in the walls, like I'm the system, but the point is that right from the get-go, that's not your role," McKellan continues. "You're being asked to do that, but feeling like that's not your job anymore." Emma herself begins the game unconscious of your turmoil; as far as she's concerned, any delays or wayward actions on your part are errors brought on by the collision. This lumbers you with an unspoken second layer of objectives, on top of unravelling the enigma of your own being: either playing along with Emma, so that she doesn't begin to mistrust you and heaven forbid, try to deactivate you, or finding ways to communicate that you are not the mindless bundle of algorithms she takes you for.

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FINAL FANTASY XII THE ZODIAC AGE

As you may already know, this Final Fantasy 12 Zodiac Age remaster is based on the Japanese "International Zodiac Job System" version, which differs from the original release in a few key areas.

Most notable, of course, is the overhaul of the Licenses system. Characters now have a choice of permanant class, known as the Zodiac Jobs system, and within those Jobs a License Board is available which holds various upgrades, including new Gambits for your character.

As well as all that, we'll also be taking you through the best Jobs for each character - although it's a lot less important than you think.

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Eurogamer

Let's say you're wandering in the desert. You're walking a trail, and fog has set in. Thick fog on both sides of you, obscuring all of the landscape that lies beyond the trail. But, occasionally, the fog clears for a second, and it reveals that the trail runs along the ridge of a mountain, which means that the ground drops away on either side, and you are teetering, forever teetering, on the brink of oblivion.

This is Forager. It's a decidedly cute game in which you control a funny sort of marshmallow person stuck at the centre of a brightly coloured world. The grass is very green here, the water very blue. Off to the north is a fountain where a fairy likes to hang out, and over to the east is a temple, emerging from the sands. The top-down perspective and the lovely, rounded trees, along with the punchy, screen-shaky combat against blobs of green slime and funny pig things, suggests that we're in Zelda territory. But the pickaxe you carry with you, the rocks and trees you can hit with it and the ore and lumber you can gather, suggests Minecraft. Then there are the furnaces and anvils and sewing tables you can make in order to turn materials into other materials. Maybe this is Stardew territory, or Terraria? I pondered all of this until I read the tooltip for the Treasuries entry on the skills screen. "Banks generate coins 50% faster," it told me. "When adjacent to other banks."

That's the moment the fog lifted, just for a second. The path I was walking was suddenly so high, the air so thin, and the ground dropped away on either side.

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Eurogamer

You've probably played a game like Aggelos before.

You might have played one recently - Owl Boy, Wonder Boy, and Hollow Knight are three recent examples - or perhaps, like me, you might have played one the first time around, too, before such games were really known as Metroidvanias and there was no such thing as internet guides (or any guides, for that matter - bless my dad for letting me abuse the Nintendo Hotline). I grew up loving and loathing those kinds of games in equal measure, and not much has changed - anything that requires timing or jumping remains the bane of my existence - but as much as I'm cynical about the many titles trying to jump on this retro bandwagon forged from little more than manufactured nostalgia, I fell for Aggelos and its wholesome charm in a way I hadn't quite expected.

If this 2D adventure flew under your radar when it released on PC last year - that's right, it's been out for the best part of a year on PC already - you're not alone. Now out on Nintendo Switch, too, Aggelos (AG-gelos? Ag-GEL-os? Agg-el-os?! HELP) is a bright, bold, and respectful homage to those games we grew up playing, the games I frequently quit part-way through because no amount of Twister-ing my fat little fingers could quite pull off the jump, dash, downward-thrust, bounce, dash-dash gymnastics required to progress.

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Eurogamer

Staff at League of Legends studio Riot Games are reportedly planning walkouts following last week's news that the company is attempting to quash ongoing gender discrimination lawsuits and impose private arbitration.

As reported by Kotaku, Riot's attorney is countering two of the five lawsuits filed against the studio, insisting that those involved waived their rights to sue under the terms of their employment contracts. That news, apparently, did not sit well with Riot staff - particularly given the executive team's repeated promises to improve company culture following damning reports of systematic sexism within the studio over the last year.

According to sources speaking to Waypoint, employees at Riot have been considering a walkout in protest of the company's latest aggressive stance against those filing lawsuits. "Talk of a walkout has been brewing among a number of folks with varying levels of investment since Kotaku's first article hit," revealed one source, "leadership consistently promised transparency/actions to be taken and then did not deliver on that promise."

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Eurogamer

Borderlands 3 is set to get its big gameplay reveal this week, courtesy of a whole bunch of livestream events. And viewers will be able to snag in-game loot simply by watching with their eyes (and by installing a special extension).

Those that tune into the Borderlands 3 Worldwide Gameplay Reveal on Wednesday, 1st May (from 6pm in the UK/10am PDT) will be able to watch "hundreds" of streamers playing the game. And those that install the Borderlands 3 ECHOcast Twitch extension can enjoy some additional benefits beyond vague feelings of excitement and light palpitations.

With the extension active, viewers can scrutinise a streamer's load-out, explore the contents of their backpack, or even study their skill tree - which should help give a little more insight into the experience as it unfolds. Perhaps more excitingly though, viewers that link their Gearbox SHiFT and Twitch accounts stand a chance of winning free in-game loot.

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Eurogamer

Borderlands 3 is set to get its big gameplay reveal tomorrow, courtesy of a whole bunch of livestream events. And viewers will be able to snag in-game loot simply by watching with their eyes (and by installing a special extension).

Those that tune into the Borderlands 3 Worldwide Gameplay Reveal tomorrow, 1st May (from 6pm in the UK/10am PDT) will be able to watch "hundreds" of streamers playing the game. And those that install the Borderlands 3 ECHOcast Twitch extension can enjoy some additional benefits beyond vague feelings of excitement and light palpitations.

With the extension active, viewers can scrutinise a streamer's load-out, explore the contents of their backpack, or even study their skill tree - which should help give a little more insight into the experience as it unfolds. Perhaps more excitingly though, viewers that link their Gearbox SHiFT and Twitch accounts stand a chance of winning free in-game loot.

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