The European Union’s impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can carve another notch into the barrel of its pen, as the makers of Loadout have cited the GDPR as one of the reasons they plan to shut down the free-to-play arena shooter. Several problems squeezing at once meant it’d be too expensive to rework a game that was already losing money and so, similar to Super Monday Night Combat, it’ll shut down this month. Loadout had entered early access in May 2013, then launched in January 2014. And was pretty good, Old Man Rossignol said in his Loadout review. (more…)

The makers of hero shooter Overwatch have released a pink skin for health-giving hero Mercy, with all money going to breast cancer charity, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. As costumes go, it s as pink as pink gets, even bringing the colour to her wings. The pink ribbon, a symbol of the BCRF, is also emblazoned on her robes. There s more charity goings-on, as Blizzard explain below. But it s the healer herself who s front and centre. She feel, she heal, but most importantly, she donate to this appeal. (more…)

Fantasy sandbox survive ’em up Conan Exiles left early access and launched properly yesterday, and evidently it proved more popular than developers Funcom had anticipated. With the game peaking at almost 29,000 concurrent players yesterday and official servers filling up, Funcom hastily launched extra servers – and it sounds like more might still be needed. Turns out, people quite like the idea of building settlements, fighting monsters, crafting, enslaving NPCs, currying the favour of the gods to summon monstrous avatars, and crushing their enemies, seeing them driven before them, and hearing the lamentations of the players controlling the characters. (more…)

With Dota 2‘s huge annual tournament, The International, drawing near-ish, Valve have launched a new Battle Pass to help boost the prize pool. Dota 2’s Battle Passes are multi-faceted doodads including access to new modes, challenges, a sticker album, progression tracks to grind through, and oh so very many cosmetic pretties to unlock and collect. This year, it includes a battle royale-soundin’ mode. Battle Passes cost 7 to start, though you can pay extra to skip ahead in the unlock grind, and 25% of the proceeds go to The International 2018’s prize pool. (more…)

It feels almost unfair to call free-to-play ‘hero shooter’ Paladins an Overwatch clone, but then I look at screenshots like the one above, and another one with a big n’ heavy character with a chain-hook attack and… yeah, it’s pretty clear that Paladins is riding on Blizzard’s coattails. But it’s also fun, good-looking, and free to jump into. It’s been a regular in Steam’s top ten most played games for some time, and has officially left early access as of today.

(more…)

As much as I’d like to see some manner of solo expansion for Grand Theft Auto V, its multiplayer component is a massive, sprawling thing with easily as much to do as the base game, it not more. It’s just a pity that to get access to some of the more exciting events (such as gun-running), you need to grind for money for that initial investment. Thankfully that’s a little easier this week, as Rockstar are giving away fat sacks of in-game cash this week, and discounting many mission-generating properties.

(more…)

Every silver lining has a cloud. While much of the internet may be jumping for joy at Google Chrome’s latest update disabling auto-playing video and audio by default, the new feature may have a rather nasty knock-on effect on many older sites, including a multitude of art and game-related projects and many newer HTML 5 pages being left partially broken. Many sites and some games are still without music or audio layers, and the full scope of the damage done still unknown. (more…)

Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser’s running away from sea monsters and hunting down galleons in nautical battle royale, Maelstrom.>

I wasn t a happy pirate. I wasn t any kind of pirate, really; not with only a series of failed fights and a major lack of booty to my name. It was all a little embarrassing. So when I saw the Dwarven ship on the horizon, there was a storm brewing inside me, and I pointed my shark-drawn Orc ship at the stumpy corsairs and increased speed. Wood and metal and, of course, shark collided, followed by a barrage of cannonfire.

This would be it. I knew it. My first victory in Maelstrom.

(more…)

After making a strong impression with their pair of Streak mechanical keyboards and lightweight, symmetrical Flick 2 mouse, Fnatic are rounding out their second gen peripheral line-up with the decidedly right-handed gaming mouse, the Clutch 2. Featuring the same Pixart 3360 sensor, Omron switches and more or less all the same specs as its Flick sibling, is this one a better buy? Let’s find out.

(more…)

Collectible card games have been around for decades, but they’ve really been running hot ever since Blizzard unleashed Hearthstone four years ago. Since then, we’ve seen Shadowverse, Gwent, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Duelyst, Faeria – there are a lot of these things, if you haven’t heard. They all put their own spin on rectangles with numbers on ’em, but they also universally take cues from Hearthstone and, just as often, each other, and as a result they regularly run into similar problems, the biggest two being how to balance a competitive system and how to price card packs fairly.

Artifact, Valve’s upcoming Dota-inspired card game, is definitely using some pages from the same books, but it’s also doing enough things differently that it has the potential to solve a lot of those problems. (more…)