PUBG is a bloodsport played beneath a pantheon of fickle gods. First, you fall out of heaven. When you hit the ground, you're immediately praying that the Loot Lords put an SMG or double-barrelled shotgun in your hands. Survive this genesis and exodus, and you'll redirect your prayers to the Goddess of Circles, whose force field decides who lives and dies. Later you'll look up to The Crate God (Kratos), hoping for a long-barrelled gift from the sky. Other minor deities govern vehicle fuel levels, 8X scope propagation, and high-tier armor.

It's a competitive game governed by semi-randomized systems that can feel capricious, but PUBG works in part because it throws conventional balance out the window. You've thrown yourself into a maelstrom of unfairness, an ever-shrinking RNG colosseum. You're trying to be the last man standing among 100 competitors, and if you're incredibly good, you'll win 20 percent of the time. The normal way to die is suddenly, from an unknown direction. 

As a shooter, it is the opposite of the kind of mathematical, chessboard balance seen in CS:GO or Rainbow Six Siege, where a comparatively finite number of variables narrows decision-making. The only time this happens in PUBG is when you reach the final circle or two, where the play area becomes small enough to fit in your brain. 

And yet, something wonderful happens as a result of PUBG's scale and randomness: you accept that you probably won't win. Failure is the expectation. Death is basically inevitable, so hey: might as well make meaning out of the death you're given. Technical issues, uneven art, and pesky cheaters erode that fun, but with the pressure to win somewhat lifted, PUBG becomes a playground for giving and receiving peril. 

The art of not giving a damn

I'm happiest when I'm harassing a team that can't locate me. There's an art and science to it. You've got to pick a great spot: ideally a narrow crook between some wreckage, with at least a 4X scope and a suppressor affixed to your gun. You have to pick the right moment to engage, and to do that, you have to read the body language of your enemy, at range. Where are they headed? Are they on alert, or at ease? If I'm lucky, I can catch them while they're exchanging gear—a huge opportunity to put shots on someone while they have an empty AR in their hands.

I don't care if I win or lose in these situations, which is weird, considering how explicitly cutthroat PUBG is. The population count in top-right corner of the screen is a constant reminder of how close you are to being crossed off a list, and how much competition you have. Loot box currency is on the line, too—winning and eliminating players earns Battle Points, which can be spent on cosmetic item crates filled with mostly dull shirts and pants. 

Despite PUBG's booming skirt economy, loot boxes are probably the last thing on your mind. Most people I play with measure success by how much trouble they get into—whether your match generates a good Twitch clip, whether you were able to get revenge on the group that KO'd your friend, or whether you took the opportunity, in a kill-on-sight game, to backflip your motorcycle off a hill at the least appropriate moment. The mindset PUBG cultivates in its players—let's call it 'casually competitive'—may be its biggest achievement.

That doesn't undercut its status as a skillful shooter, with many merit badges to earn: cartography, looting, boating, tactical driving, parachuting, cross country, sieging, spotting, first aid, airdrop retrieval, boxing. The breadth of verbs and micro-skills makes PUBG a richer experience over time because it always feels like there's another trick to learn about driving, vaulting, grenading, whatever. I also like that distributing duties among a three- or four-person squad is itself a skill: hand the scoped Kar-98 to your best shot, and the keys to the Dacia to your daredevil.

Shooting has surprising depth. Despite its spacious maps, winning a team duel at short range takes about the same mixture of snap reflexes, aggression, stealth, and peeking ability you'd need on de_dust2. Damage is modeled differently across the body, limbs, and head. Guns have touchy, individualized recoil and bullet travel time. Check Twitch on a weekday and you'll see CS:GO ex-pro Shroud at the top of the channel list, prefiring around cover and pulling off sick spray transfers.

Luckily for those of us without divine aim, it isn't everything. What's more gratifying about PUBG's gunfights to me is the ad-libbing and creativity it takes to manage the complex situations it puts you in. Say someone's ambushed you from a second-story window—they've tagged your friend, who's now incapacitated behind a tree and bleeding out. Your body armor is shot up and about to break. Do you pop a smoke grenade and run to revive them, or fight from where you're standing? Maybe your third teammate could put some suppression into the windows of the building while you rush in, but wait, you can't be sure how many friends this attacker might have. And look, there's a vehicle parked at the bottom of the building—should you pop its tires to prevent a getaway, or keep it intact for your squad? 

Decisiveness is a skill, and PUBG is a platform for dumb schemes and accidental bravery. The best areas of PUBG's two maps promote this stuff, like the school on Erangel, or Pecado and Hacienda Del Patrón on Miramar: sprawling compounds with hiding spots, escape holes, ambush perches, and other traps waiting to be sprung. Unfortunately, it's indoors that some of the combat dynamics fall apart. Melee is clumsy and unreliable, relegated to desperation or taunting. Almost all surfaces are impenetrable, and some fences can't be shot through. Footstep audio doesn't have enough fidelity to make hearing a reliable sense in all situations, making it hard to be certain whether someone's above or below you. 

Another gripe is that the level of visual polish varies a lot between the weapons. When you feed ammo to an empty AKM, your left arm reaches across your body to smack the charging handle, a nice detail. But some ironsights, like that of the M416, are blocky and low-res. The shotguns are unpleasant, unreliable, and hard to read. Worst, PUBG's scale means that my framerate still occasionally dips by 20 fps at an inopportune moment, although hardware performance has improved tremendously since its early months.

These problems melt away at long range, where I think PUBG is at its best. My favorite phase in a match is about 10 minutes before the endgame, when anyone still alive is geared to the gills but the circle is big enough that engagements are happening through 4X and 8X scopes. Each shot across a long canyon or field is a parabolic prayer—the target might've shifted three feet by the time your shot travels 300 meters and burrows into the dust, kicking out a particle effect. Hitting someone on the run at this distance convinces you you're the son of Neo and Robin Hood, gifted with precognition. It feels damn, damn good. 

Read more on the next page, including thoughts on PUBG's unique tempo and its problems with hacking.

Out of the blue

PUBG's simplest system is also its most important. Every couple minutes, a new, smaller safezone is randomly declared, telescoping within the area of the previous one. If you're blessed, successive safezones will seem to mirror your position. Anyone caught outside takes damage over time, and has to migrate under pressure. This asphyxiating grip PUBG exerts on its map is the force that puts its mechanics in motion. It works wonderfully, forcing players out of their comfort zones, encouraging mistakes and bad decisions, limiting how much looting and shooting you can do, and making the value of your real estate uncertain. Without this sense of urgency, PUBG would be dull.

It's also artificial to the point of dissonance. No attempt is made to explain the origin of the scary blue electric field, the setting, or why you're fighting to the death. Absent of voice acting or even rudimentary narrative handholds (the vaguely post-apocalyptic setting doesn't offer many clues either), PUBG can feel hollow of personality, especially with each custom character issuing the same thousand-yard stare regardless of their situation. There is some upside to this story vacuum: you fill the void with your tales of heroism and idiocy.

PUBG's guarantee of intensity is one of its best features, but it's also pleasantly lazy. When 100 players are consolidated into teams of four, paranoia shrinks and the mood relaxes considerably as you wander from compound to compound absorbing gear. If an early-game bloodbath thins the server population, you might spend 15 minutes of a match wandering with your friends, exchanging loot, seeing and hearing no one, shooting the shit about work or what else you've been playing. 

There's surprising space for socializing, and it makes PUBG a rare multiplayer game with good pacing. The airdrop is an initial burst of excitement before lower-key migration and looting sets in, punctuated by ambushes that lead up to a crescendo finale. I find it best in duos or trios, where the ratio between shit-shooting and shooting shit feels roughly equal. As a foursome, combat can feel overcomplicated, and the endgame more asymmetrical, where the final dozen players might be a squad of four facing off against eight orphaned survivors.

In all modes of play, PUBG allows you to set your own risk level, beginning with the opening jump. You learn the hotspots quickly: the military base, Georgopol, and School are magnets for confident, deadly players. Hitting an unmarked farm will give you lots of security, but boredom and bad loot too. It's elegant design: choosing your spawn point is a way of choosing what kind of match you want to have. 

Widely known

Months into PUBG's lifespan, it broke records for concurrent players on Steam, and it's already one of the best-selling PC games of all time. Success threatened to be its biggest obstacle—few games commit to exiting Steam's pre-release program in just nine months, and I can't think of any others that have become worldwide phenomenons, run multiple major esports events, launched on console, and introduced microtransaction systems on their way to doing it. 

For the most part PUBG has navigated its unprecedented growth well, but there are a few serious stretch marks. Hacking is the biggest present concern, but depending on who you ask, PUBG is either experiencing a pandemic of cheaters or nothing unusual for a popular multiplayer game. A natural downside of PUBG's 100-player capacity, though, is that it gives hackers more room to hide than your average FPS. On December 28, the anti-cheat service employed by PUBG, BattlEye, noted that 1.5 million accounts had been banned. 

Anecdotally, I've struggled to spot clear examples of hacking. In 31 recent first-person squad and solo games, in 14 of which I survived into the final 10 players, I didn't encounter any bad apples. I have witnessed a few clear incidents on livestreams where players manage unnatural headshot accuracy, or seem able to track location through terrain and walls. There's a reporting tool and killcam system for managing these jerks, but flagging someone after losing an unfair gunfight isn't exactly revenge, especially when there isn't confirmation that your report led to action. PUBG Corp. recently announced its intention to ban 100,000 players in an upcoming wave. I'm unsure whether that's comforting or concerning.

The specter of hacking isn't the only problem—PUBG still has an assortment of bugs, although a few of these masquerade as features. Both maps have strange collision issues with vehicles. You might clip an invisible piece of terrain and go cartwheeling down a hill, grimacing as your vehicle barely lands on its feet. But driving over the same hill or bump in your next match, the collision gods might direct their arbitrary wrath at you, spontaneously trampolining your UAZ into the air and detonating it, killing your whole squad.

A few less spectacular issues eat away at the fun. When leaping off a ledge, in rare cases PUBG will register the fall twice, inflicting double damage. Parachuting is similarly awkward, as PUBG struggles to sync your position if you clip a roof or ledge, making finesse drops harder to pull off. In a few spots, gear disappears through the ground completely if dropped. And at extremely long ranges, you may be able to spot a player but be unable to shoot them, as a rock or ridge fails to render, operating as a buggy, transparent barrier.

The true trouble is network performance, which simply isn't a match for PUBG's heavy emphasis on precision. As diagnosed in detail by experts like Battle(non)sense, the average server tickrate (around 20 Hz) isn't just slightly lower than we'd expect, it's also inconsistent throughout play, which makes hit registration feel likewise uneven. You might occasionally absorb a shot after you made it safely behind cover, or see a blood particle effect trigger a full second after you tag someone. It's worst when the netcode and animations don't shake hands—I've died several times to players who look like they're facing 90 degrees away from me, which makes me think I have an extra second to aim, and then they suddenly dome me.

The poky netcode isn't a huge distraction for me, but because there isn't a network overlay or the ability to check other players' pings, it's frustratingly hard to diagnose the problem on your own. At least servers are broken into seven regions, though I'd like to see PUBG go a step further and soft-lock players with a certain ping from joining servers outside their region.

On the hardware side, I'm pretty happy with the state of PUBG's graphical performance. Although framerate dips are common for everyone, it doesn't crater for me in the way that some sandbox games do, despite cities and vistas dotted with thousands of objects. On a GTX 980Ti at 1440p and ultra settings, I easily manage more than 70 fps. On a more modest rig, with graphics turned to their minimum global setting at 1080p, I can hit an average of 60 fps on a variety of cards, from a GTX 1050 and GTX 680 to AMD's R9 380 or RX 560. PUBG's graphics settings themselves are flexible, but not exceptionally so. Currently there's a 144 fps cap that I'd love to see removed, or at least replaced with locked framerate options. The addition of three colorblind modes is good, and first-person FOV caps at a comfortable 103.

Taking it as a whole, PUBG is an achievement in contradictory brutality and breathing room. It's a hyper-competitive sandbox shooter where you can be killed from half a kilometer away without any warning. It also has an autorun button so you can take a generous bite of your sandwich or shout thanks to your most recent Twitch subscribers. PUBG has plenty of issues to address before it fully exits adolescence, but its mixture of nonchalance and military intensity is deep, respectful of your time, and a reliable war story generator. 

Off the back of its Poundmaker-led Cree and Tamar-fronted Georgia, Civilization 6 now welcomes Scotland the Brave. Led to battle by Robert the Bruce, the tartan army will debut in the game's incoming Rise and Fall expansion.

Cue hordes of kilt-wearing, ginger-headed, haggis hunting soldiers—whose 'Highlander' Unique Unit replaces Civ 6's Ranger as a recon ensemble, that gains strengths from fighting on hills and within forest terrain. 

Moreover, Scotland's Unique Leader Ability is 'Bannockburn', in reference to the famous independence-fighting battle; whereas its Unique Structure is 'Golf Courses', which provide additional Gold, Amenity and Culture. 

The civ's Unique Ability is 'Scottish Enlightenment'—whereby happy cities are granted surplus Science and Production. They also generate a Great Scientist point per campus, and a Great Engineer point per Industrial Zone. 

Other traits that failed to make the cut include 'Being Inherently Tight With Money', and 'Whinging About The Snow, Despite The Fact It Happens At This Time Of Year Every Year'. Writing as a Scotsman, these are my own best qualities too. 

Despite the film's historical inaccuracies, I'd quite like to have seen a William Wallace-in-Braveheart-led Scotland feature here. Perhaps Civilization 7 might consider Nicola Sturgeon, Billy Connolly, or Glasgow Airport terrorist-kicking John Smeaton at its helm.   

More information on Rise and Fall's Scottish contingent can be found over here. The expansion is due on February 8, 2018.  

The Banner Saga wiki describes its bearded Varl race as "warlike" with a "fondness for mead and brawling". If you've ever braved last orders in a Glasgow pub, you'll be familiar with their kind. If not, you might be interested in a video short that highlights one of The Banner Saga 3's most influential characters.

The following marks the first of a planned series. It stars Fasolt, The Loyalist:

As you may already know, The Banner Saga 3 marks the closing chapter of Stoic's painterly tactical role-playing series. It was successfully crowdfunded to the tune of $416,986 (of its $200,000 goal) last year, however hasn't given us much to write about since. If it follows the standard set by its first and second outings, though, I imagine we'll be onto a winner. 

I particularly enjoyed this excerpt from Chris Schilling's The Banner Saga 2 review:

You’ll forgive the occasions where the narrative and mechanics don’t always dovetail perfectly for the moments in which they do—spectacularly so during one story beat, as Stoic somehow generates nerve-fraying tension from a sequence conducted at walking pace. Yes, there’s still room for improvement, but this is a smart, worthy sequel: denser, richer, more complex and yet more intimate. Even if you’ll feel in dire need of a stiff drink once this second act draws to its devastating close. 

Alongside the above moving pictures, publisher Versus Evil says The Banner Saga 3 is "coming summer 2018". 

I'm not sure what to expect from Shadow of War. On the one hand, I’ve little interest in Lord of the Rings, and no desire to spend any more time with returning protagonist and charisma vacuum Talion. On the other hand: the orcs seem fun. I decide to give it a shot, in the hope of encountering a potential nemesis.

Once I’m let loose on the starting area of Minas Ithil, I go hunting orc captains. Some ambush me while I’m in the middle of a fight. Others are big, tough and difficult to dodge away from. All, eventually, go down. I’m good at Shadow of War’s combat—at least this opening version of it—because I’ve played three Arkham games and it’s basically the same. 

I start ticking off sidequests and missions. It’s as I’m running between these that I aggro Koth, the “poisonous dark beastmaster”. Koth’s specialties include multiple things I haven’t seen before, all of which are bad. Poisonous means his weapon deals damage over time, which is bad. Beastmaster means he’s flanked by giant Caragors—also bad. I’m unsure what the “dark” refers to, but I doubt it’s his favourite type of chocolate.

He gets in some good hits, and soon I’m close to death. I attempt to rally, and even manage to take off a chunk of his health, but then I’m ambushed by yet another orc captain. Koth uses the distraction to finish me off. Finally, I have a nemesis.

Nowadays, Sun Tzu is only referenced by overachievers on TV shows about lawyers or CEOs or crab fisherman, but I’m starting to think that knowing my enemy might be a good idea. Every orc has strengths and weaknesses, but they’re hidden until I extract them from the mind of a subordinate. I do so, and discover that Koth is vulnerable to executions. So we have that in common.

Koth runs away every time I go in for the kill. This cat-and-mouse game gives me time to get to know him better. I’m pleased that my nemesis is no stereotypical warmonger. Yes, he’s adorned with skulls and piercings, and his face is stained and messy—all orcish traits. But his received pronunciation accent gives him an almost regal bearing. The overall effect is of a Shakespearean thespian playing a Mad Max bandit, who also happens to be four plates deep into the backstage buffet cart. I like him.

Together forever

Finally I get the drop on him. As we fight, my combat meter charges up. When it’s full, I unleash an execution attack. Koth goes down. He’s dead.

I return to the objective grind for another hour, but my heart isn’t in it. Shadow of War is less interesting without a nemesis. But as I sprint towards my next objective, I’m interrupted by a familiar accent. It’s Koth. He’s cheated death, and is now explaining in detail all of the things he’s about to do to me. My nemesis is back, and I couldn’t be happier. 

Two Point Hospital is a new management sim from the creators of Theme Hospital, that aims to bring the tongue-in-cheek ethos of Bullfrog's late '90s classic to the modern age. As we've seen already, Light Headedness echoes the likes of Bloaty Head and Slack Tongue—and now the game's latest behind-the-scenes short demonstrates who you'll fix it. 

Because if you woke up of a morning with a bulbous, glowing light bulb strapped to your shoulders, you'd want to have it unscrewed by an industrial machine and replaced with a new stockpile capitulum. Right? Who says the taxpayer's money is wasted on the health service.

"They're not very scientific," says Two Point Studios co-founder—and ex Lionhead and Bullfrog veteran—Gary Carr of Two Point Hospital's illnesses and diseases. Which of course is part of the fun.

Two Point Hospital is due at some stage later this year. For more on what it hopes to achieve, check out our interview with the devs in this direction.   

PUBG's pre-match starting island is the pits. And even if being punched in the privates for 40 straight seconds while someone else screams expletives in your face is your idea of fun—watching your performance cough and splutter as your fps nosedives below 20 surely isn't. 

The game's latest patch targets the latter (for the former: mute lobby sound. Always mute lobby sound) by introducing multiple spawn areas, designed to prevent players from gathering in the same place at the same time. In turn, this aims to boost server performance. Likewise, weapons have also been removed from the starting island.

"Through the last patch, we were able to improve server and client performance by adjusting the visible distance while the character is in the air," says this Steam Community update. "In the current patch we are spreading out the pre-match starting locations. Previously, all the players would spawn together at the same location awaiting the start of the match."

The post adds: "Lots of interaction among multiple players in such a small area had a high impact on the servers. To solve this, we have introduced multiple areas where players gather before the match start. As a result, the performance, both server and client-side, has improved."

The developer adds that "additional modifications" tied to airplane performance are also planned, which we should expect more on soon. 

In the wake of its 100,000-player "single wave" ban—not to mention official banned player figures pushing 1.5 million—PUBG Corp is also testing a new anti-cheat measure said to be "still under development". As always, when the above tweaks are stable on test servers, they'll be applied to the live ones. 

During the holidays I started a new playthrough of Dragon's Dogma, and while I barely made a dent in it (it's a long game), it did remind me that there's still nothing else like it. The sense of going on adventurous expeditions rather than simply ticking off quest icons is what I love most about it, but I love pretty much everything else too (except for the absence of the original and best intro theme).

Anyway, it's super cheap on Steam at the moment – $9.99, down from the usual $29.99. At that price (and assuming you have the money) it's pretty much essential. And if you don't like it, you can either a) let it sit unplayed in your library forever or b) maybe try having better opinions? 

Leif enjoyed it back when he reviewed the PC edition in 2016. "The PC port doesn't introduce much new and certain elements could be stronger, but Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen still shines as a uniquely enjoyable RPG," he wrote.

Golem Gates is a card-powered RTS game from former Epic Games folks. It launched on Steam Early Access last December, and developer Laser Guided Games says it will officially release on March 28. 

One main goal of the card system is fast-forwarding through the building stage seen in most RTS games. Your units and buildings are determined by the 'glyphs' you put into your deck, which can also contain traps, buffs and debuffs. You deploy glyphs as you draw them, speeding up development and putting a bit of RNG into each match. 

As it stands, Golem Gates supports multiple singleplayer and multiplayer modes, including bot fights, standard PvP, and survival mode. A full campaign is also planned for the final release, along with additional maps. Nearly 100 different glyphs are also already available. 

Golem Gates is a collaborative effort by Laser Guided Games and their partner Hollow Earth, a design studio containing visual artists who worked on films like Avengers: Infinity War, which shows in its dark yet flashy artwork. The studio says it's set in a dark fantasy world, but its plentiful and pretty particle effects are anything but. 

Update: The fight has ended in a disappointing win for the defenders of the Keepstar Citadel. With massive server lag preventing combatants from participating to their full potential, The Imperium refused to deploy their supercapital fleet of Titans and eventually called off the assault. EVE's $1 million USD battle has been a bust despite a record-breaking number of participants. We'll have more on what happened in the coming days.

Original Story: EVE Online pilots will engage in a battle this afternoon that could dwarf every other major conflict in its history. Across the entirety of New Eden, thousands of pilots are making their final preparations and traveling to the cluster of star systems known as Cloud Ring, which has already become a warzone. In the system of 9-4RP2 sits the primary objective: One of the many Keepstar Citadels that populate New Eden and act as strategic headquarters in player-held territories. 

But this particular Keepstar is of special importance. It's owned by Pandemic Horde, a legion of newer players that belongs to a larger coalition called PanFam led by the terrifyingly powerful Pandemic Legion. At 1:55 PM PST, this Keepstar will enter its final vulnerability window, making it susceptible to complete annihilation by PanFam's enemies, The Imperium. The fight to either save or destroy this Keepstar could see the destruction of an estimated $1 million USD worth of virtual spaceships—but only if both sides decided to commit the full might of their supercapital fleets. This is the latest chapter of a conflict that has been brewing for years between EVE's biggest player-led factions.

How to watch 

If you don't play EVE Online, the in-game battles that give rise to these incredible stories aren't nearly as dramatic. With 4,300 players already flying in 9-4RP2 to either attack or defend the Keepstar, CCP Games' servers simply cannot handle the immense network traffic. To compensate, Time Dilation ('TiDi') is used in high-traffic areas to slow time and allow EVE's servers to process the massive amounts of information without crashing. While TiDi is in full effect, an action that would normally take your ship one second to perform now takes ten seconds. That's the main reason why major battles can take dozens of hours to resolve.

That doesn't make the most compelling viewer experience, but the best place to watch this battle will either be The Imperium News stream or Pandemic Horde's stream—both of which will offer a good insight into the battle despite their respective bias. The field of battle will be the 9-4RP2 Keepstar itself, but Imperium forces have also built their own smaller Citadels a hundred kilometers away that they'll use as their trench. Meanwhile, the surrounding star systems will host smaller but still significant battles as each side struggles to control resupply lines. 

Prelude to war 

The last major battle in EVE history, 2014's Bloodbath of B-R5RB, led to the destruction of nearly 11 trillion ISK (estimated $300,000 USD) worth of ships all because one alliance forgot to pay rent on their starbase, opening it to attack. While almost every player faction in EVE fought in B-R5RB, the two chief combatants were The Imperium and Pandemic Legion. The Imperium won that battle and, for a time, became the unassailable ruler of EVE by building a vast northern empire reinforced by a ring of staunch allies. Then, in 2016, a series of events took place both in- and out-of-game leading many of the Imperium's enemies, including PanFam (Pandemic Legion), to band together as The Moneybadger Coalition to unseat the would-be kings of New Eden from their throne.

Funded by the exorbitant wealth of several casino owners that let players gamble their ISK (EVE's in-game currency) through third-party websites, the Moneybadgers stormed north to wage what many hoped would be the biggest war EVE Online had ever seen. But during the crucial battle of M-OEE8, one of The Imperium's greatest allies, Circle-of-Two, defected from the coalition, leaving it vulnerable to the overwhelming assault of Moneybadger forces. In the months that followed, The Moneybadger Coalition launched a full-scale invasion of the North, taking every single Imperium-controlled system as its pilots began a full-scale evacuation back to the relative safety of low-security space, which isn't controlled by any of EVE's player-led alliances. In the span of weeks, EVE's most powerful faction crumbled to dust.

But The Imperium didn't die. Instead, they colonized a southern region of New Eden and began to rebuild. Meanwhile, their homeland was divided up among two chief factions in the Moneybadger Coalition: PanFam and Guardians of the Galaxy, a smattering of smaller but still formidable alliances. For almost a year, these three factions have been embroiled in an arms race to build up their stockpile of Titans. Equipped with devastating doomsday weapons and unparalleled defenses, these supercapital ships are the nuclear warheads of the EVE universe—and each side has hundreds of them to deploy on the field.

While The Imperium's claim to the throne of New Eden was taken away, it's clear that they're still a force to be reckoned with. In September of 2017, Imperium spies managed to 'flip' the head diplomat of Circle-of-Two, The Judge, over an in-person dinner in Iceland hosted by EVE Online's developer CCP Games. In a stunning act of betrayal, The Judge handed the keys to Circle-of-Two's own Keepstar Citadel over to Goonswarm, leaving 4,000 Circle-of-Two pilots without access to their own ships. In a single night, one of The Imperium's biggest enemies imploded. 

The Judge even livestreamed the moment Circle-of-Two's leader, Gigx, found out about this deception knowing that the sudden loss of everything he worked 12 years to build would cause him to lash out. Without realizing he was being livestreamed to an audience of thousands, Gigx made several threats against The Judge's life, forcing CCP to ban him permanently from the game. The Imperium had their revenge against the ally that betrayed them, and now it appears they're looking to settle the score against the enemies that took their homeland.

Weeks ago, The Imperium launched a series of skirmish campaigns against PanFam to test their defenses in what many believed was the precursor to an invasion to retake the north. It was during these conflicts that The Imperium managed to significantly weaken Pandemic Horde's 9-4RP2 Keepstar Citadel, creating the opportunity to destroy it outright and secure a beachhead in the North. At 1:55 PM PST, the 9-4RP2 Keepstar entered its final vulnerability window and each side will have to lay their cards on the table. Whether both sides will commit to the battle remains to be seen, but it's clear the entirety of the EVE community wants bloodshed.

Understanding the battle 

Whether the EVE community gets that bloodshed is another matter, however. When ships are destroyed in EVE Online, they're destroyed for good and must be replaced. For the average player flying average ships, that's usually not a problem. Titans, however, cost around 100 billion ISK and can take weeks to build. Losing one is devastating, but losing several hundred in a single fight is unprecedented and could significantly weaken either faction. It's this reason that has many skeptical that either side will want to risk their supercapital fleets—is one Keepstar Citadel worth it?

Battles of this magnitude in EVE are best thought of like a game of poker. Each side is trying to bluff the other, but if one decides to go all-in and the other doesn't like the hand they're holding they'll simply fold and take their losses and live to fight another day—albeit with bruised egos. But with each side flexing their military muscle so extensively, doing so would appear as a massive act of cowardice. 

This issue became even more complicated when, last night, well-known fleetcommander Progodlegend made a post about the battle on Reddit that quickly went viral. Progodlegend isn't participating directly in the conflict, but his post drew a massive amount of attention—raising the stakes to the point where if either side backs down they won't just look like cowards to the EVE community but the wider gaming community too. It was a genius ploy to goad each side to make good on their threats.

It will take some hours before we know if this fight will become the biggest in EVE history, however. When the 9-4RP2 Keepstar enters its final vulnerability phase at 1:55 PM PST, a 15-minute countdown timer will begin. If the timer reaches zero, the Keepstar repairs the damage to its hull, the last of its defensive layers, and will be safe for the time being. PanFam will have won the battle. The Imperium can prevent this by maintaining a steady stream of damage to the Keepstar, which pauses the timer as long as damage-per-second is maintained while simultaneously whittling away its remaining health points.

Earlier in the week, Imperium forces were able to deploy several smaller Fortizar citadels within range of the Keepstar. One relatively unpopular feature of Citadels is that friendly players who stay within a certain range of one cannot take damage from enemies unless they attack first. The predicted strategy for the Imperium will be to park fleets of carriers and supercarriers within the protective bubble of their Fortizars and unleash waves of fighter drones to bridge the several hundred kilometer distance to the Keepstar and attack it indirectly without risking actual ships. Meanwhile, the defenders' own Citadel-protected carriers will unleash their own drones to try and stave off the assault in addition to using ships that specialize in electronic warfare to try and jam the drones' targeting computers and render them ineffective. Fleets of smaller ships from both sides will engage in the space in-between, attempting to tip the scales on one side or the other.

That's just the anticipated strategy, however. Anything could go wrong. Before today, both of EVE's biggest battles were started because of single mistakes. In the Bloodbath of B-R5RB, one player-faction forgot to pay the rent on their station. In the mad rush to secure the starbase, both sides kept escalating the conflict by throwing more and more of their Titans onto the field. In the Battle of Asakai, one pilot accidentally jumped his Titan right into the enemy formation. In the scramble to destroy or protect it, both sides committed their supercapital fleets.

At the outset of this battle, there is no reason why either side would risk a deploying their Titans, but all it takes is one mistake to turn this relatively mundane battle into a full-on slaughter. And both sides will be eagerly trying to get the other to over-extend. With so many pilots itching to participate in the biggest battle of EVE's history, anything could happen.

We won't know for sure until it does, but we'll be reporting the outcome of this tense situation as it unfolds.

Update: Looks like it's over. VOD embedded above.

Yesterday, James and I discussed our time with SOS, a 16-player survival game which encourages loose alliances and betrayals, and where half the goal is to entertain viewers. This morning, it released on Steam Early Access—and now Snoop Dogg is streaming it on behalf of developers Outpost Games.

You can watch Snoop's stream on Twitch above, or on Hero, where you can react with emojis. It's exactly what you'd expect. Most impressive is how Snoop is able to play with one hand:

SOS is $30 on Steam for the base game, and there are a couple of more expensive packs that include in-game clothes and emotes. I'm still debating whether or not I like it, but sure, I'll watch Snoop Dogg play it for now.

Update: Some sick no-hands play below. (Yes, he's obviously not steering, but whatever.)