It’s taken a few years longer than most big publishers, but Activision are finally turning away from paid DLC map packs for the next Call Of Duty. New maps and modes will hit Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare free for all players, the CoD crew announced last night. Loot boxes are also being ripped out, replaced with the new hotness of a Battle Pass system with free and paid tracks. And they insist that “all functional content that has an impact on game balance” can be unlocked by playing. Sounds better, on paper.

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There’s a lot about Resident Evil that is laughably bad and has always been that way. “Master of unlocking.” “Almost a Jill Sandwich.” But there’s a ton that’s been updated since its early polygonal days on the PlayStation. Its current remastered version on Steam is the best way to play it. I still haven’t finished it.

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It must be hard to make Halloween updates for a game where most enemies are swashbuckling skeletons. But that’s just what Sea Of Thieves is trying to do with Fort Of The Damned, October’s harrowing Halloween twist on Rare’s sea shanty. With a damnable new castle and skinless pets, Sea Of Thieves wants to make sure your timbers have thoroughly shivered.

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Fallout 76‘s long-awaited flesh-and-blood NPCs won’t be arrive in West Virginia this year. Bethesda has delayed the free Wastelanders update into early 2020, leaving players alone in the post-apocalypse with each other for a few months longer. But there’s a silver lining to this mushroom cloud. Private Worlds finally arrive in Fallout 76 next week, giving survivors the option for some much-needed permanence.

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Perhaps I don’t know jack but I do, by now, know the Jackbox Party Packs. Yet another bundle of silly multiplayer party games has arrived from Jackbox Games, which broadly have the usual goals of making your pals laugh with bad jokes and bad drawings. And yup, with The Jackbox Party Pack 6 is sounds like once again some of the minigames are a right lark, and others exist. Here, have a look at the lineup in the launch trailer.

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It’s Thursday again, meaning its time for Epic’s ongoing cycle of free games to tick over once again. This week’s offerings are grimy cyberpunk horror Observer and bizarre spin-off Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. That’ll be that sorted for some low-lit thrills, then. As per, you’ve only got seven days to grab these freebies before they slink back into the shadows from whence they came.

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It s the newest instalment of A Panel Shaped Screen, a monthly column about the way comics and games influence each other. The article promises to tell you everything about interactive webcomics.

What will you do?

> Click on read the rest of the post

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I want to explore. Like, everywhere. I didn t expect that to be the main takeaway of my Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order hands-on preview, but here we are: amongst the windswept vistas of Zeffo, or careening down its ice caves, or clambering around the crumbling red stone of a temple on Dathomir. The team behind Titanfall 2 have built some more beautiful worlds for me to jump around, where I don t simply hop from A – B.

You won’t catch developers Respawn Entertainment doing this, but I m going to compare their upcoming space magic franchise action-adventure game to Dark Souls. A pepped up version of the From Software formula. I ll move on pretty quick, promise.

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With Red Dead Redemption 2 coming to PC in just a few weeks, Rockstar have made a new PC-specific trailer demonstrating the fancy technical features our version benefits from. Chief among these is support for higher resolutions and framerates, so the trailer’s available in 4K at 60fps as it shows off “include increased draw distances, improved shadows and lighting, new grass and fur textures, and much more.” This means the video also focuses heavily on landscapes and animals, which are certainly a large part of why I’m interested in roaming the wild wild west. You can’t stop me from pretending it’s a walking simulator.

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A college Hearthstone team that raised a “Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz” sign on-stream during their Collegiate Championship game last week has finally been suspended by Blizzard. With their own finals taking place shortly after Hearthstone Grand Champion Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai’s now-famous protest and subsequent punishment, the American University Collegiate team jumped in to support their fellow pro.

It took only two days for Blitzchung to lose his prize money (now reinstated) and be hit with a year-long ban from Hearthstone (now six months). But for a full week, it seemed uncertain whether the US team would face similar consequences. Yesterday, the email finally came in – AU are barred from tournament play for the next six months.

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