UPDATE 5th December 2017: The streamer who hit the headlines after broadcasting a real-life UFC pay-per-view event while pretending to play the latest UFC video game says he's been issued a 24-hour ban on Twitch.
Adrian Lester, from the US, streamed the entire UFC 218 broadcast on Saturday night across multiple platforms, including Twitch - with controller in hand.
Currently, Lester's Twitch channel is unavailable.
There may be spoilers for the Dishonored series of games ahead.
"The Void is unspeakable. It is infinite and it is nowhere, ever-changing and perpetual. There are more things in the endless black Void, Kirin Jindosh, than are dreamt of in your natural philosophy" (Letter from Delilah). Despite the best efforts of natural philosophers, the world of Dishonored is defined by occult, unknown influences. Here, we performed dark magicks, battled witches, conversed with spirits, and even traversed the distance in-between worlds during our vendetta-fueled travels through Dunwall and Karnaca.
Any inquiry into the metaphysics of Dishonored stands and falls by the Void, that shadowy realm that is the source of all magic, witchcraft and arcane knowledge. Even the Outsider, who appears as an ancient god that grants his arcane mark to the player, ultimately derives his powers from the Void, not the other way around. But the Void is an elusive place that doesn't give up its secrets readily, and we as players don't understand it any better than the seekers of Gristol or Serkonos who struggle to catch so much as a glimpse of it. So, what exactly is the Void, or rather, how should we think about it to make sense of it?
A note from the editor: Jelly Deals is a deals site launched by our parent company, Gamer Network, with a mission to find the best bargains out there. Look out for the Jelly Deals roundup of reduced-price games and kit every Saturday on Eurogamer.
We're back, after all that Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales mania. While the vast majority of what some people like to call 'doorbuster' deals are over and done with, there's still no shortage of retailers offering up various sales and discounts right now. We've got a brief period between the end of Black Friday and the beginning of Christmas sales, so let's make the most of it and take a look at the best deals from around the internet right now.
As usual, we've got deals that'll work in the UK, deals that'll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let's get started.
Two things happened this week that made me think about beautiful stuff vanishing from the world, and about the strange notion that there might be a kind a melancholic pleasure to be had - if melancholic pleasures can be had - in the spaces created by fresh absence. I'm not ghoulishly thinking of death or anything as serious as that. More the weird kind of beauty you sometimes get when you look at a wall of framed pictures and notice the ghostly parchment patches where something else once hung and now hangs no longer. Ghoulishly, ghostly. We are not off to a great start here.
The first thing that happened was that I read a piece on Eurogamer about the fact that Demon's Souls is going to have its online elements turned off for good next February. I never played Demon's Souls properly, and I now suspect that I am not going to. In a vague way it is something I had always planned to do, though, and I know how I would have had to approach it. I have seen this game many times, a world of darkness in which the action unfolds in little pools of golden light that hover around the player. There is a hub world of sorts - in my memory a huge part of it is spiral walkways made of old stone - and there is the Souls DNA in rich form: waiting for an opponent to move, waiting for the perfect opening, thrilling to the energising thwack of a sword hitting a shield: still alive!
Mostly what I know about this game, though, I don't know from the screen. I know from long conversations with Simon Parkin over coffee in which he talked me through these dazzling discoveries he kept making in a game that kept its whole cosmology, as it were, a thing that had to be understood by the player tentatively and over a number of hours. He talked about the messages people left for others, and he talked about the way that some of these messages could not be trusted. I think he maybe talked about invasions, other people suddenly turning up in his game? Or was that Dark Souls? I guess I'll never know now.
Abandon Ship, a kind of cross between Sid Meier's Pirates and FTL, will now be released "early 2018" on Steam Early Access rather than this year.
"We're committed to delivering an extremely high-quality experience and to ensuring even our initial release is as feature-complete and polished as possible," wrote team lead Gary Burchell from Fireblade Software.
"So far the response from our play-testers has been exceptionally positive but why stop there? With a little extra time we can make the game even better."
Far Cry 5 is the first game in Ubisoft's franchise to be set in the US. After more than a decade, the series which has defined itself by inviting players to explore various weird and wonderful locales will next look inwards.
And what a time to do so. Since Far Cry 5's announcement in May there have been numerous think pieces mulling Ubisoft's choice of locale and antagonist (a magnetic cult leader named the Father who gathers followers to preach a doomsday ideology).
For a series defined by its sense of being a stranger in a strange land, some have argued the present day US is more than strange enough to fit the bill. Others, albeit a small internet-dwelling minority, have said they do not wish to play a game in this series with a white, American enemy.
EA Sports UFC 3 has a beta available, and some fans are calling it out for including pay-to-win mechanics. The response has floated around the internet for the past few days via angry blogs on various sites - but what's really going on?
On the face of it, things sound bad. There are articles out there with headlines like "EA UFC 3's Ultimate Team is Built on Pay-to-Win Loot" and EA SPORTS UFC 3 - The Single Most Egregious Implementation of Microtransactions to Date". Ouch.
First things first, it's important to note that the pay-to-win mechanics accusation is limited to the game's online Ultimate Team mode, where you create a squad of five fighters and open random packs of cards to upgrade them further. Cards give you better moves, or improve your punching power. Buy more packs and you may get one of the rarer tier of cards which offer a significant advantage over a card's base level.
Apparently Star Wars Battlefront 2 is not setting a bad enough example, because Hi-Rez has unveiled a loot box-based card-ability system for Paladins which works in much the same way.
It's not a one-for-one likeness. Paladins is a free-to-play game where microtransactions are the bread and butter income, whereas Star Wars Battlefront 2 costs 50 upfront. Also, Hi-Rez might have been planning this a long time before Battlefront 2 made a pig's ear of it.
Nevertheless, the similarities are strong. Paladins' new Cards Unbound system introduces card-abilities of tiered strength - level one to level five - and they're inextricably linked to the random contents of loot boxes, which you will of course be able to buy (although not yet).
Life is Strange's original stars Ashly Burch and Hannah Telle have both been confirmed as returning for the bonus episode of prequel Before the Storm.
Due to hit in early 2018, the episode will see Burch return to the role she originated, following the recent, lengthy voice actor strike. It will also mark the first time Burch and Telle have recorded together since the original Life is Strange.
Before the Storm (whose third and final main episode is expected later this month) has instead starred Rhianna DeVrie as Chloe, in a performance which has fought off all scepticism surrounding the switch. Burch, meanwhile, has remained on the project through the strike as a writer.
For decades now, console gaming has traditionally focused on delivering a specific experience for each platform, tailored by the developer. Sure, we've seen high frame-rate modes and occasional toggles between different presets but nothing like the kind of full suite of options found in a typical PC game... until now. That's exactly what developer Tri-Ace has delivered with its PlayStation 4 remaster of Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Every aspect of the game available for tweaking on PC is available to PlayStation owners, but is that actually a good thing?
With this remaster of its original PS3 and Xbox 360 RPG, Tri-Ace promises resolutions up to a native 4K on PS4 Pro, while the base system targets 1080p instead. In all cases, the target is now a full 60 frames per second for all aspects of the game - assuming you get your settings right, of course. Previously, Star Ocean's world exploration and cut-scenes were capped at 30fps on Xbox 360 and PS3 while battle sequences were instead updated at 60fps, albeit with plenty of slowdown.
The jump to 60fps across the board greatly improves the experience, but achieving a consistent lock ties in closely with the resolution you choose. Base PS4 users can select between 720p and 1080p, while Pro users can target 1440p or full 4K instead. By itself, this is a huge upgrade. On Xbox 360, the overworld and cutscenes are displayed at a resolution around 1248x702 with a visible black border around the image. In comparison, the 60fps battle scenes are instead delivered at roughly 900x510 resolution. Yes, just a notch above standard definition there.