The end of war should be a cause for celebration, but there was only frustration when Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds ended its latest War Mode event after less than a day due to the servers crashing all over. A fortnight later, it’s fixed and back, raining heavily-armed players over tiny slices of Miramar for 5v5v5v5v5v5v5v5v5v5 team deathmatch with respawning. The event will end on Sunday night, mind, so you’ve only got two-and-a-half days to lock and load.

(more…)

Battle royale is indeed coming to CoD in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4, as had been rumoured, throwing together characters, weapons, and locations from across all the Blops – including the Zombies modes – in one big last-man-standing rumble. Activision today held their big reveal-o-rama event for this year’s face-shooter, see, blabbing all sorts of details. They also confirmed the rumour that Cod Blops 4 won’t have a traditional CoD story campaign. While it does have a few missions sprinkled around, the focus is on multiplayer, and I’m quite curious about how this will turn out. One unsurprising change: this time it’ll run on Blizzard’s Battle.net, not Steam. (more…)

Once upon a time, Myst got many to buy a CD-ROM drive. Quake was the reason to own a 3D accelerator. The question asked of new PCs for years was “Will it run Crysis?” And, er, cryptocurrencies are devouring new graphics cards. Now, it seems multiplayer battle royale shooters are boosting sales of headsets.

Once-struggling audio hardware company Turtle Beach have credited the mega-popularity of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite Battle Royale with a large role in reversing their fortunes. It seems many people are finding themselves in want of a decent headset to ask “Where we dropping, lads?”, to sing Chelsea Dagger, and to hear footsteps too I guess. (more…)

Hallo! John’s away so I’m taking over for our latest weekly rundown of the biggest-selling games on Steam over the previous seven days. Familiar faces are here, of course, but the charts also include more survival games than I’ve seen in yonks. The slightest peek of sun outside and you lot start acting as if it’s the end of the world, eh?

(more…)

The stag & hen weekend banter of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds will enter fruity new heights tonight when the new 4x4km Southeast Asian map, now named Sanhok, enters public testing. Having previously required a key, it’ll launch in the new Experimental Client overnight (at 3am UK time on Friday; 7pm Pacific on Thursday), a little more polished than before – and with the new ability to pelt each other with apples while in the lobby. Scrumping? Foodfights? Classic banter. Oi OIII heads up you wankers. (more…)

The stag & hen weekend banter of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds will enter fruity new heights tonight when the new 4x4km Southeast Asian map, now named Sanhok, enters public testing. Having previously required a key, it’ll launch in the new Experimental Client overnight (at 3am UK time on Friday, which is 7pm Pacific on Thursday), a little more polished than before – and with the new ability to pelt each other with apples while in the lobby. Scrumping? Fruitfights? Classic banter. Oi OIII heads up you wankers. (more…)

The wee new map coming to Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, previously known as Codename: Savage, still needs a few months of work but it’s done enough to get a wider testing audience and finally receive a name. Sanhok is the name, developers PUBG Corp have announced, a portmanteau of the Thai word for fun and the Filipino word for chicken. Sanhok is a place inspired by islands around southeast Asia, see. Sanhok will launch another period of beta testing this week and this time it won’t require players to sign up for a key, letting everyone who owns the game have a play. (more…)

Hullo! John is preoccupied with wizards right now, so I’m taking over for the rundown of last week’s top ten on Steam. It was an interesting week, bringing back some welcome old games and slamming in some shiny new ones. Largely, it’s all about robots and survival.

(more…)

Bluehole ran into a serious issue this week, as their servers crashed 24 hours into the return of their 50 player deathmatch mode. War Plunkbat was the temporary return of the team deathmatch from last month, which breaks from PUBG s traditional once you re gone you re gone structure and allows you to respawn. There are ten teams of five and everyone starts with top-tier loot. Or, would start with top-tier loot, if anyone was able to connect to the game. Desert Knights mode was supposed to run until the end of the weekend, but had to be yanked by Friday afternoon after a Thursday night launch. (more…)

The folks of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds have made one of the most significant adjustments to how the game is played, via the Weapons Balance Update (Patch 12), which re-balanced everything from damage to scope reticle to movement speeds while certain weapons are equipped. It’s such an intricate and deep re-alignment of the entire game that Plunkbat players are encouraged to take part in a new survey in order to make sure PUBG Corporation haven’t, you know, completely ruined the game. In exchange, there is a lottery system for survey participant rewards.

Also, if you’re still not on board with Plunkbat, please read about Plunkbat’s creator agreeing with you. You’re wrong, though, and so is he.

(more…)