Counter-strike: Global Offensive has a new matchmaking system which takes into account your behaviour across Steam - not just in CS:GO.
Valve's new system assigns every player a hidden value, known as their Trust Factor. This score is derived from how you have played CS:GO - whether you have had reports lodged against you for cheating, for example - but also your activities in other Steam games.
In a blog post explaining the system, Valve said it deliberately avoiding explaining what other activities it was monitoring that would be folded into your Trust Factor value.
UPDATE 16TH NOVEMBER: Something really was afoot - the backer beta for Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire has launched!
It's not feature-complete and there are a "number of things" Obsidian is not quite ready to show yet but will be rolled out over time, said design director Josh Sawyer in an accompanying video. "There's at least one really big feature that's very complicated and we need to put some more time into before players take a look at it," he added, "but it's a very cool feature."
In the closed beta you'll poke around a Deadfire archipelago village called Tikawara, and the island surrounding it. You won't be playing with final-game companions because they're still in development, still being cast and their voice lines recorded, and Obsidian doesn't want to spoil any of their stories. Plus, Obsidian isn't doing the closed beta to get feedback on them so much as feedback on the core mechanics and interfaces in the game.
It's been three years since powerful civilian war survival game This War of Mine put Polish developer 11 bit Studios on the map. To celebrate, a new series of Stories downloadable content will be released, starting today and continuing in 2018.
The first of the Stories, Father's Promise, is available now for 1.69. It's based on an audio drama written by Polish author Łukasz Orbitowski, and follows father Adam as he struggles to save his daughters from the horrors of war. "Follow their steps and discover a story of love, hate and sacrifice - the emotions we all share in the darkest of days," the blurb says.
Father's Promise apparently offers several hours of play across four new locations and five remastered ones. There are new mechanics too, both in dialogue and when searching for clues.
As the Xbox One X game patches have come rolling in, it's been mostly good news for Microsoft and its new console. It's perhaps not been the 'true 4K' showcase many were hoping for and techniques like dynamic resolution are deployed to scale up current-gen 900p and 1080p games to better suit 4K displays. But the presentations have been convincing and the upgrade palpable - which made Titanfall 2's initial sub-par presentation so disappointing. Based on the findings of our report, Respawn Entertainment spent several days retooling the code and a new title update arrived at the tail-end of last week.
To quickly recap, our first hands-on with the Xbox One X upgrade did confirm that Respawn has deployed dynamic super-sampling technology - which can, in theory, scale resolution beyond 4K pixel-counts in order to keep the Scorpio Engine's six teraflop GPU fully tapped out. However, in actual gameplay, even the earliest campaign missions saw much lower resolutions - and occasionally even lower frame-rates - than the PlayStation 4 Pro version. It's safe to say that this is not what we expected, so we submitted our results to Respawn then spent a further couple of days testing and re-testing before publishing our article.
The extra testing highlighted a stress point that saw PS4 Pro's dynamic resolution scaler hit a low of 1080p, with Xbox One X sitting below that at around 864p. Something was clearly amiss. The good news is that the new patch massively improves the game's turnout in all of the crucial areas. Resolution issues are significantly improved and none of the advantages we saw in the earlier code - such as higher detail geometry at distance - are compromised. So in effect, we're looking at the best of both worlds here.
Editor's note: This week sees the re-release of L.A. Noire on PS4, Xbox One and Switch, and to mark the occasion we thought we'd return to Chris Donlan's piece on playing through the game - still one of the very best things ever published on Eurogamer, he'll hate me for saying - which first went live back in 2012. Enjoy!
Today, I'm going to tell you about the time my grandfather shot a man in the ass.
The year was 1949. The place was downtown Los Angeles. The occasion was a robbery with violence. A small store, I think: a tailor's, or maybe a family-run grocery market? History has not recorded all of the details.
While EA continues to fight Star Wars: Battlefront 2 fires ahead of launch this Friday, there are others who sniff an opportunity. In this case it's rival mega-publisher Activision Blizzard, whose StarCraft 2 Twitter account had a pop at Battlefront 2 overnight.
Pop number one: "Number of hours it takes to earn the full StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Campaign: 0."
Pop number two: "Number of hours before you can play ANY Co-op Commander in StarCraft II: 0."
Dedicated servers have returned to Call of Duty: WW2.
Developer Sledgehammer moved Call of Duty: WW2 to P2P servers shortly after launch when the game suffered from troubling online issues.
The P2P servers brought annoyances such as host migrations. This meant that if the host quit the game, the match would freeze while the game moved to a new host before resetting.
Far Cry 5 director Dan Hay has pitched a potential new game project, featuring a misplaced space teddy bear, during his developer lecture at the British Academy of Film and television. The question is, will it end up becoming into a real game?
Hay, who's variously been producer, executive producer and creative director on the Far Cry series since Far Cry 3, was presenting a talk entitled 'Rooted in Reality - How the real world can make your creativity soar', which broadly discussed how recognisable real-world experiences can be used to create games that are better, more impactful, and more affecting to players.
Toward the end of the discussion, Hay began to pitch a game idea, which had started out as a thought experiment, based on meaningful personal memories and interests. Namely, his childhood teddy bear, the tale of Prometheus, and his fascination with space travel: "I want to retell the story of Prometheus, giving that key moment of thought but I want to replace fire with a teddy bear and I want to put it in space because it's f**king awesome."
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege will be free to play this weekend on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.
Players will be able to download and access the full version of Rainbow Six: Siege for free during the weekend. The complete game will also be on sale for up to 50 per cent off from 16th November to 27th November and those who decide to purchase it can carry on their progress from their free trial and continue to play uninterrupted.
The free weekend comes just before Operation White Noise is deployed on the PC technical test server on 20th November. The Operation White Noise update will add a new map, set in an observation tower above Seoul, and three new operators. Additional details for Operation White Noise are to be unveiled during the Rainbow Six: Siege Pro League Finals on 19th November.
The fantasy world of Dragon's Dogma is pretty darn unremarkable isn't it? It's a collection of Google image results. You want a griffin? Here's one exactly as drawn on a fantasy novel cover from when you were a kid. Cyclops? Just like the one in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. There's so little of the Dragon's Dogma world that feels unique or standout. It's as if everything was borrowed from the most typical version of itself. The world has a name but it might as well be called Ye Olde Fantasy Place.
But that's okay, because Dragon's Dogma does have one ace up its sleeve: the character creator. Aside from being flexible in terms of the kind of character you can create, it also lets you create your very own sidekick, called a Pawn. You can also have two other pawns to make a party of four, but these pawns must be borrowed from other players in an online sharing system - you can't create them.
And it's not just for show - your character's attributes matter. If they're too short, they can't pick up enemies or heavy objects. The bigger they are the slower they are. The character you create informs how the game plays and shapes the experience you have with it. It helps the game backs all this up with an immense amount of freedom. There are few hard barriers. If you want to do something the game will let you, whether that's skipping important quests or chucking NPCs off cliffs.