
In the future, after The Brands take over, people bubbling with folksy charm will be required to say “It’s raining the fourth Sims 4 expansion pack out there” when pointing out heavy rain. EA today announced that The Sims 4 [official site] will expand again with Cats & Dogs on November 10th, see. As you might guess, it will focus on our dearest furry friends by adding cats. Dogs will be there too, desperate for attention as always. Folks will get to keep, customise, and train ’em and whatnot, and the expansion will also introduce a new vet job for players to run their own clinic. Observe: (more…)

A 5v5 mode named ‘Incursions’ is coming to Battlefield 1 [official site] to satisfy the bloodlust of that ‘digital sports’ rabble, EA announced today. Tch! 5v5 is over, gramps. Everyone’s Battling Royale now. But fine, fine you take that to testing next month.
More immediately, everyone who owns the Battlefield 1 DLC season pass today gets access to one map from the next expansion. Lupkow Pass is part of the ‘In the Name of the Tsar’ expansion due to launch in full next month. It has lots of snow, which sounds nice and cool on a day when everyone’s going on about that ol’ scorching sun doing a party trick. (more…)

Blizzard today announced that they are making Team Fortress 2. Wait. Hang on. That they’re… making a TF2 map for Overwatch [official site]? That they’re dropping the pretence that Overwatch isn’t as much of a goof-o-rama as TF2? Some combination of the above. Overwatch is off to Australia in its next map, Junkertown, Blizzard have announced. It’s the gang-run town of scrap which Junkrat and Roadhog were exiled from, and it looks like a lark. The map is still to come but you can, right now, enjoy the fun animated short with Roadhog and Junkrat going over their plan to double-cross the Queen of Junkertown. Watch: (more…)
	
	
You like big numbers? Here’s one for you: eight million. Big, I know! And yet it’s a number insufficient for how many copies of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] has sold. Bluehole’s fab multiplayer-only Battle Royale ’em up has now sold more than eight million copies, creator Brendan ‘Playerunknown’ Greene confirmed during Microsoft’s Gamescom present-o-rama stream yesterday. Plunkbat passed that sales milestone during the second weekend of August, which means by now it surely has an even bigger number. It could even be eight million and two. That’s not half-bad for a game which launched into early access less than five months ago. (more…)

Ten years ago yesterday, four of Britain’s loveliest, most adorable games hacks got together and said, “YES! Our time has come! Our hour is nigh! Our moment is born!” In a ritual that violates all decency, the giant meat-lever was pulled, and Rock Paper Shotgun Dot Com went live. The internet finally had purpose, PC gaming was about to have its day. Happy Birthday To Us. (more…)
	
From the unpleasantly chilly northern edge of Total War: Warhammer s [official site] Old World comes its final DLC faction: Norsca. These mammoth-loving Viking analogues, despite being a minor faction that don t quite have the star power of the Orcs or Empire, manage to encapsulate and then build on all that’s great about Creative Assembly s post-release armies. They re aggressive, experimental and blessed with an exotic and intimidating roster of warriors and monsters.
	
The Dota 2 [official site] cooperative campaign Siltbreaker concluded with the launch of Act II on Friday. The campaign, which is only available to folks who buy Dota’s latest Battle Pass tournament sticker album, is a bit bum but it does at least now have an easier mode. Those who want treasures and cheevies can still grind their faces against Siltbreaker’s boring difficulty but girls who just wanna have fun can play in the easier ‘Adventure Mode’. It still won’t be good but it will be less of a chore. (more…)
	
You want to know which are the top ten selling games on Steam this week, but you also still> don’t know the capital city of Turkmenistan. What is a person to do? Well worry not, because here at Steam Charts HQ, we’ve got you covered! All the games that are in the top ten games in the Steam top ten games chart, and all the facts you need for that surprise government test!
Join us today as we laugh and> learn. (more…)
	
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>
Confession time! I’m not the biggest fan of Homeworld. I played it on original release and bounced off it like a meteor off a deflector shield. I liked it more when the HD remakes landed a couple of years ago, but it was still more admiration than love. I’m not sure what exactly I found unsatisfying about them, but it may well have something to do with trying to think tactically in 3D space, because while I didn’t enjoy the original Homeworlds, I loved the recent prequel, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak [official site]. (more…)