Update, 5/1/2019, 10:00 am, PDT: I've received a statement back from Marko Grgurovic of Triternion that better outlines Mordhau's server issues and how the team is addressing them. 

"Part of our server infrastructure couldn't handle the large amount of requests involving rewards, so it got slowed down to a crawl. We've been doing maintenance and upgrades and optimizations throughout the whole day and night, and it's doing much better now. Of course at the same time we also hit a new all-time high of concurrent numbers, so it can be a bit of an uphill battle, because we're a tiny studio with only two programmers on the team. The rewards have been top-priority, so we've lowered the official 64 player servers to 48 while we work on that, it helps keep them under control, but not entirely (some regions fare better) -- servers will be tackled next and once we get them in order we will be bringing them back up to 64 players as well as adding more. I wouldn't be able to give you an exact time on these, we're more or less working nonstop on getting them resolved and monitoring the situation."

To summarize, Grgurovic says Triternion's first priority is to fix the rewards and progression bugs, then improve the server stability to eliminate lag spikes and bring the player counts back up to 64 players. Finally, it'll begin working on matchmaking and server browser improvements.

Original story: Mordhau, a first-person medieval combat game where you can decapitate one another with polearms, is a very fun game. It's also very laggy. Since it launched yesterday and has crawled up to become Steam's global top seller, Mordhau's servers are buckling under the weight of all those would-be knights trying to stab one another. It's really spoiling the fun of its extremely deep combat.

Developed by indie studio Triternion, Mordhau is a lot like Chivalry. Its best mode is a 64-player team death match with a series of objectives to fight over and a very funny battle royale mode that inevitably comes down to who can get a horse first. But unlike Chivalry or Mount and Blade's multiplayer modes, Mordhau also offers extremely robust character customization and very fatal combat with a variety of weapons. Also dismemberment. Lots of dismemberment.

As you can expect, nuanced first-person melee combat—where a single well-timed swing can lop your head off—requires a stable internet connection to work well. But, right now, Mordhau's servers just aren't up to the task. Since it launched yesterday, servers have been plagued by excessively high and constantly fluctuating ping and some bugs that weren't awarding players with gold or experience points.

Triternion has acknowledged the issues and released several hotfixes, including one that temporarily has dropped the servers down to 48 players instead of 64. But after playing a few rounds this afternoon, things still aren't good. My connection is far more reliable, but the high latency still makes combat often feel unresponsive and weightless.

It's gotten to the point where I'm a bit frustrated with Mordhau. There's clearly a good game here and the few times I've been on a server with good latency has been really fun. Someone hit me with a throwing axe and I pulled it out of my chest and threw it back at them. The subreddit is also overflowing with amazing clips of gory beheadings or hilarious shenanigans. But until the servers start working better, I think those who haven't yet bought Mordhau should wait to see if it improves.

The good news is that Triternion seems to be making progress very quickly. The difference between launch day and today are noticeable, so I hope tomorrow things are even smoother. But until we know for sure, buyer beware.

I've reached out to Triternion to get some clarity around the server issues and timeline for expected fixes. I'll update this post if I hear back.

Images in this article are NSFW.

Subverse, a videogame created by a developer you've probably never heard of, passed $1,900,000 raised on Kickstarter on Tuesday, with 24 hours left to go. Unlike the names behind some of Kickstarter's biggest gaming successes—Double Fine, Obsidian, Yu Suzuki—Subverse creator FOW Interactive is only famous in the circle of people who watch CG porn of game characters on Newgrounds. But compare Subverse's haul to the $1.43 million that veteran Myst creators Cyan Worlds were just able to raise for their new game, and it's clear there's a very real, very hungry audience for Mass Effect meets Mass Erect.

The Kickstarter page describes Subverse as "a tactical RPG/SHMUP hybrid that takes place in a fully explorable galaxy where you get to be the Captain of your very own ship...which is crewed by the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit." It promises a story, grid-based combat reminiscent of a simplified Shadowrun, and women designed by "world-renowned art director and squidgirl-titty enthusiast Dzung Phung Dinh."

FOW Interactive clearly has ambitions to make a full game here, but the focus is most definitely going to be on having sex with your crewmates. Where Mass Effect's relationships were mostly about the talking, capped off with a brief PG-13 sex scene, Subverse is taking the porn parody approach. All the talking and the sci-fi trappings are there to set the tone for the hardcore sex scenes that follow. It's basically the Pirates of porn games.

Out of the 12,868 videogame Kickstarters since 2012's Double Fine Adventure, only 18 have pulled in more money than Subverse. In its last day, it has a good chance of surpassing Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Star Citizen. Subverse likely isn't going to raise another $200 million post-Kickstarter like Star Citizen has, but it's also a narrower pitch. Star Citizen promised the most immersive space game ever, from the creator of Wing Commander. Subverse says: You can have sex with a bunch of women, and also play some SHMUP and RPG combat segments. But mostly it's about the sex.

The thing that makes Subverse's success even more impressive, when you look at the history of gaming Kickstarters, is that most of the biggest earners date back to a time before crowdfunding fatigue had settled in.

All-time champ Shenmue 3, with $6.6 million, started in 2015. So did runner-up Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (both will supposedly be out this year). Many of the other big earners are even older: 2012 for Wasteland 2 and Elite Dangerous, 2013 for Mighty Number Nine and every game that followed that initial wave. By 2016, almost no videogame was pulling in $2 million+ on Kickstarter anymore.

Subverse has proven to be a powerful exception. It's wild that the internet has made porn an infinite and free commodity, and yet in 2019, more than 50,000 people have paid about $2 million to support a sci-fi sex game.

Its only close contemporaries are Firmament, that new Cyan game, and another Cyan project from 2018, a Myst anniversary collection. And compared to most crowdfunding campaigns, those projects are sure bets. Before Firmament, Cyan Kickstarted another Myst spiritual successor, Obduction, which turned out well. And even if the Myst anniversary collection's promised tchotchkes ended up disappointing, well, the games themselves already exist—there's only so badly that one can screw up.

For videogame crowdfunding, years of late, MIA, and disappointing games have dampened the enthusiasm that Kickstarter once ignited. Some of the all-time biggest Kickstarters, meanwhile, have happened fairly recently. Critical Role pulled in $11.3 million this year for an animated series. Board games continue to do well, and one earned more than $5 million at the end of 2018. In fact, between 2015 and 2018 board game funding on Kickstarter has grown from $84.6 million to $165 million annually, while videogame funding has fallen off a cliff, from $41.5 million in 2015 to only $15.8 million in 2018.

The comments on Subverse are mostly unabashedly horny, but then you get the occasional question that would fit right in on any gaming Kickstarter, where fans are hopeful the game will include some particular feature.

"Divinity: Original Sin 2 used a similar system where enemies had physical and/or magical armor on top of their hit points… My question to you is: how exactly does your armor system work in order to avoid problems similar to those in D:OS 2?"

"Do you have characters like futa?" (If you don't know what it means, maybe don't look it up)

"An idea for ending mechanism, bear with my [sic], usually there are two flawed ways to end an game…"

"Tbh i don't give a damn about the game play. I just wanna see tits."

And of course, sometimes those two passions combine: 

"From a purely academic perspective, will any of the mantics be egg laying hand holders?"

Apparently "hand holding" is the project's codeword for sex, and you'll see it brought up again and again in the campaign's 13,000 comments. It's a lot of comments. For comparison, the last mega successful gaming Kickstarter, the MMO Ashes of Creation, has accrued fewer than 5,000 comments since its campaign in mid-2017. Maybe those fans are simply talking elsewhere, but it's clear there's enthusiasm for Subverse that no gaming Kickstarter has matched in years.

Maybe because, much like the Double Fine Adventure, it's the first of its kind—not the first gaming Kickstarter, but the first porn game to promise a big budget combination of actual game design and CG sex scenes. It's also launching on Steam, which is possible thanks to Valve's decision to let almost anything on the platform, and will surely be the highest production value porn game on the platform. The developers appear to be careful about not going too far, though. "All content in the game will adhere to Steam's Community Guidelines, so no dark content like [rape]," a developer answered in the comments, after a fan asked if you'd have "options to take a more assertive approach."

Subverse's Kickstarter asks backers to "Support the Revolution!" which seems a bit grandiose for a game about having sex with comically-designed fantasy women. It's no more revolutionary than a porn movie having a story, but it does, at least, have a sense of humor.

What is now one of the most successful Kickstarter game campaigns of all time leads with this pitch: "Turning our curious eyes toward the glittering stars speckled around our little blue planet, we have often asked ourselves the eternal question: Are we alone in this universe? What is out there? More importantly… can we bone it?"

The audience's answer appears to be a loud, emphatic yes.

Oh, Ubisoft. If you're going to go there, you might as well go the whole hog.

The latest mercenary to appear in Assassin's Creed Odyssey is Testiklos the Nut. As well as his unfortunate name, he's laden with a tragic past. OK, it's not a tear jerker, but I guess it's a bit sad. He misses his brother, you see. Testikles (who you might've met previously in the game). They were separated when they were young, and Testiklos hasn't been the same since. 

Someone's already hunted him down and killed the poor guy and his pet boar. Yes, he's an animal lover. See, there's more to him than just a silly name. He's got lots of things going for him.  

You can fight and recruit Testiklos the Nut now. 

Update: we added a quick edit here to reference the fact Testikles had previously appeared in Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Sega recently published its financial report for the year ending March 2019, and it's not been a great one. While overall sales increased, profits declined for the second consecutive year, with digital games and its slot machines seeing the worst results. In light of this, Sega is refocusing its efforts abroad, particularly when it comes to packaged games and ports. 

Initially, 12 purely digital games were planned for the year, but only eight of them were released. Delays, competition, market saturation and simply taking on too many games are all cited as reasons for the decline in profit. 

On the packaged games front, which includes Yakuza 6 and Football Manager 2019, sales decreased but profits rose thanks to repeat sales in North America and Europe. Sega expanded its efforts abroad and believes that, along with the higher quality of its games, also contributed to a successful year, at least for this part of the business. 

Sega's plan for the next year is to focus on what's already working for the publisher. It expects the domestic Japanese market to stagnate, so it will be looking to the rest of Asia, North America and Europe when it comes to mobile, PC and packaged games.

Expect to see more Japanese console games ported over to PC, too. Sega's plan is to put more of its series on more platforms, including Yakuza and Persona. We've already started to see this, with several Yakuza games making their way onto PC, and they've been very welcome additions to Steam's catalogue. Check out Phil's review of Yakuza 0, the best of the bunch.

I've definitely put too much time into Persona 5 on PS4 to even consider picking it up again on PC, but I'm still eager to see it make the jump. I'd prefer Persona 3, though. I got a bug that killed my save data after 90 hours, so I never finished it. C'mon Sega, help me out.

Cheers, TweakTown.

Sonic The Hedgehog's official movie trailer is out now—watch it above—and it's quite the thing. Everything is just not quite right, as though the idea of Sonic has been described to someone who has never played a Sonic game. Sonic doesn't even do one loop-the-loop.

The trailer, inexplicably accompanied by Gangsta's Paradise, also gives us our first official look at Jim Carrey's Dr. "Eggman" Robotnik. Wiry Carrey doesn't resemble the megalomaniac, but he does at least look utterly bizarre. It seems like he's trying to channel manic '90s Carrey, but the clips from the trailer aren't promising. It's Jim Carrey doing an OK Jim Carrey impression. With a moustache.

Eventually he'll look a bit more like Eggman, however. 

There's a lot to work through—why are rings portals? Twitter is currently obsessed with the fact that Sonic has human teeth, which is admittedly quite unsettling. Poor Sonic, he seems to look worse every time we see him. Thank goodness hedgehogs only live for a few years.

Sonic The Hedgehog is due out this November. Relive the hedgehog's halcyon days in our round up of every Sonic game ranked for some reason & Knuckles.

As you may have already guessed, the first public tests for Halo: The Master Chief Collection won't be kicking off this month. Halo community director Brian Jarrard warned that there was a chance they wouldn't begin in April, which he's now confirmed. 

"I know excitement and anticipation is off the charts and everyone here inside the studio shares it as well," he wrote in a Halo Insiders update. "But this is a really complicated project and we all agree that quality trumps everything else and we need to bring MCC to PC at the bar Halo fans and PC players expect and demand."

Progress is being made, but it's proving to be more challenging than the studio expected. In a previous update, Jarrard explained some of the additional complexities that the PC version adds. 

"One of the team's main priorities to support PC flighting is getting the mouse/keyboard controls feeling as good as possible and there's been good progress on that front," he wrote. "Some key things are still coming together though—for example, in yesterday's playtest build, the full UI and functionality to remap keys isn't in yet so if you want to change defaults, it requires launching a separate application. That works for now, but isn't a viable experience for any kind of external flighting." 

Jarrard doesn't offer a new date or window, but 343 Industries will be posting a developer update later today, showing how Reach and the rest of the MCC are progressing. 

Lust from Beyond looks like Amnesia with giant alien vaginas. It's an erotic first-person horror romp inspired by the likes of Lovecraft and Giger, with a horny cult trying to open a door to a sex dimension. Typical cult stuff. Expect puzzles, corridors that look like xenomorph nests, and quivering, sentient cocks. Check out the Kickstarter trailer above. It's a bit NSFW. 

As a Victorian antiquarian plagued by visions of the aforementioned sex dimension, you decide to join the Cult of Ecstasy to figure out what's going on with your weird dreams. The cult seems to know how to have a good time, namely with orgies, but when that's not enough they decide to open the door to Cthulhu's sex pad. 

Though evocative of Amnesia, you'll actually be able to fight the monsters chasing you through the vagina tunnels, though you can still try to hide from them. I'm sure they just want a cuddle, though. 

Lust from Beyond is a standalone game, but it's also a sequel to Lust for Darkness, which had a nearly identical premise. A guy goes to a Victorian mansion and then finds himself hanging out in the same alien dimension we'll be visiting again. It looked interesting but James ended up just finding it childish. 

Such a juvenile, shallow fascination with sex makes Lust for Darkness hard to take seriously from the start. It fails to even attempt to explore the horrors of sexual trauma, anxiety, or taboos. Instead it banks on a simple apprehension with Doing It™ and the organs involved to get a rise out of its players, but its clumsy arrangement of story, themes, puzzles, and stealth are as flaccid and unfinished as I am right now.

The sequel was funded on Kickstarter in only ten days, though the developer was only looking for £8,000. Backers will get an exclusive demo within 24 hours, but there's no release date yet. The Steam page says "coming soon". 

Pandemic Express – Zombie Escape is a different sort of multiplayer zombie shooter. It starts with a group of 30 players, who must make their way to a waiting train in order to escape a zombie uprising. The catch is that one of them is already infected, and they're eager to share the brain-eating undead love with everyone else. 

It's not as simple as tag, though. Zombies have special abilities that will help them on their hunt: They can mark human players to make them visible to other zombies, and can throw each other around for increased mobility. Humans can equip various sorts of weaponry to fight back, and will have the opportunity to acquire more firepower as they go, but even with that zombies have an edge: They get unlimited respawns, and every time a zombie dies, it comes back with an increased chance of gaining an "ultra" ability that makes it even more dangerous. 

That should ensure that Pandemic Express – Zombie Escape remains a mobile game of evasion, rather than a hold-the-line, last-stand defense—although that's going to happen anyway. Reaching the train is not the end of the action: Once everyone is aboard and the train starts moving, zombies will begin respawning in front of the train instead, and the survivors will have to stand their ground and fend off the infected attackers until the train clears the station. 

It sounds a bit battle royale-like, and like it could be a lot of fun: Zombie shooters are great but a faux-permadeath survival experience with humans on both sides of the bloodshed is where the real action is. Balancing could prove tricky, but that's what an Early Access release is all about. 

Speaking of which, that is set to happen on May 2, which is also when the currently-underway alpha test will come to an end. More information about Pandemic Express – Zombie Escape is up at pandemicexpress.com, and you can lay eyes on some raw (but exuberantly narrated) gameplay video courtesy of Baron von Games in the video down below.

Predicting what Valve is and isn't going to do is a losing game, even with reliable information, so I'm giving myself a 1 percent chance of getting this completely right. 

Valve is going to reveal the specs of its VR headset, the Valve Index, very soon, and we have good reason to believe it'll reveal some VR games along with it—one of which is rumored to be a Half-Life game.

Valve told me on April 1 that it was "targeting May 1st for pre orders and a full announcement" of the Valve Index. That plan may have changed (especially because the Borderlands 3 gameplay reveal is also happening this week), but the announcement will probably happen soon, because Valve also told me that it wants to start shipping hardware in June. I've asked Valve if this Wednesday is still the big day, and will update this post if I hear back.

We also know for sure that Valve has been working on three VR games, which Gabe Newell described as full-sized games (as opposed to tech demo-like projects such as The Lab) in February 2017. "We think we can make three big VR games," Newell said at the time. "We think that we know enough now to do that, and we're going to find out if that’s the case. We're pretty sure that all the other game developers are going to learn positive or negative lessons from what we do, which is sort of where we have to be right now."

Valve didn't tell me whether or not it's going to announce any of those games when pre-orders for the Index open up, but that seems like the obvious move. I'd be surprised if one or more weren't bundled with the headset to drive sales.

Now for the Half-Life part of it: In November of last year, a source told UploadVR that one of the three upcoming Valve VR games is a Half-Life prequel. At the same time, UploadVR's sources confirmed that leaked images of the Valve Index were the real deal, and that turned out to be true. The photos from November 2018 look just like the actual hardware that was revealed earlier this month.

Additionally, Valve News Network reported in March that "hlvr" and references to a shotgun appear in a Dota 2 update. Valve game files are full of references to other games, and that doesn't always mean anything, but it does strengthen the credibility of UploadVR's report from last year.

To recap, here's what we know for sure:

• Valve is going to reveal the specs of the Valve Index soon, possibly on Wednesday.
• Valve plans to start taking pre-orders at the same time as the announcement.
• Valve plans to start shipping the headsets in June.
• Valve has been developing three "big" VR games for at least a couple years.

And here's what we're speculating about:

• Valve will probably announce one or more of its VR games with the Index specs.
• One or more games may be bundled with the Index.
• One of the games is rumored to be a Half-Life game, though not Half-Life 3.

As always with Valve, there's a small chance it does what all signs suggest it's going to do, and a much bigger chance it throws us a curveball at 5 pm on a Friday evening—but I'm certain that I'm at least partially right about all this. 

We'll be keeping an eye on the Valve Index Steam page this Wednesday to see if anything happens, whether it includes Half-Life or not.

Back when I first got a demo of PUBG's desert map in 2017, I asked Brendan Greene if he planned to add horses to the mix alongside motorcycles. It seemed to fit the theme of the Western-style landscape and battle royale on horseback felt like an intriguing and untapped premise. At the time Greene gave me a noncommital answer along the line of 'anything is possible', but horses never appeared in PUBG and my fervent desires for horsie royale went unanswered.

Mordhau, the medieval multiplayer brawler, has a 64-player battle royale mode, and it's also got horses. Finally! (Well, mostly finally—Realm Royale actually has horses too, but I've never played it.) And unlike vehicles in most battle royale games, there aren't dozens of horses scattered all over the map. The most horses I've seen in Mordhau's 64-player battle royale at once has been two.

And those horses got me killed every damn time.

It's not strictly the horses' faults. Yes, they're pretty tricky to steer, and if you have a lance or polearm it's also tricky to accurately aim at a moving player while awkwardly navigating the small and cluttered map on horseback. Even in the tutorial, it's not easy hitting motionless target dummies.

And if you steer your horse into a tree or a doorway or some logs or—and I'm ashamed to admit this—the entire side of a castle, the horse will rear up or get stuck or stop, leaving you exposed to the player who easily sidestepped your slow and obvious charge.

But that's not even the main thing that keeps getting me killed. I die because I spawn into the match knowing there are a couple horses on the map, and all I want to do is ride them, and so when I see one I make a beeline for it. If I spot a horse before I even have a weapon I will run straight for the horse because I want to get it before anyone else does.

I'm drawn to Mordhau's horses like a moth to a flame or a fly to honey or an idiot to a horse.

The same is true even if I spot a horse with someone already on it. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like very few players actually want to fight while on horseback (probably due to the steering issues I mentioned), and having learned they prefer to get off their horses, leaving that tantalizing saddle empty, I wind up in even more trouble. In the gif above you can see a guy on a horse with a shield and a sword, and when he spots me approaching he dismounts to fight me on foot. Ha ha, fool! Your beautiful horse is now mine!

Of course, his horse is only mine for the briefest of moments as I clamber into the saddle because he stabs me right in the back.

I've been killed three times now while climbing onto a horse, twice while running toward a horse, twice while on a horse, and once after getting off a horse because I got on the horse before I got a weapon leaving me incapable of stabbing anyone while I was on the horse.

And, yes, once after riding a horse directly into the side of a castle.