VR cybergoggles maker Oculus have insisted they’re still making a next generation Rift headset despite another key departure from the company. Brendan Iribe, the co-founder and former CEO of Oculus, is the latest person to have upped sticks from parent company Facebook following some internal restructuring of their VR division last week, according to a new report from TechCrunch, and was, until yesterday, meant to be heading up the development of the so-called Rift 2.

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October is meant to be a spooky month, but it’s been positively terrifying for free-to-play MMO studios – the latest victim is Trion Worlds, the team behind decent enough fantasy RPG Rift and the recently rebooted shoot n’ looter Defiance 2050, among others. According to reports from Gamasutra and Polygon, the studio has been bought out by German mobile publisher Gamigo, and the layoffs are massive, hitting the majority of Trion’s 200+ employees. A skeleton crew of around 25 are all that’s left to maintain the studio’s stable of games.

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The Elder Scrolls Online has a lot going for it these days, but probably the most exciting part is exploring the weirder fringe regions of its world. Today’s new DLC release, Murkmire, fits the bill, with dense marshlands full of flesh-eating plants, overgrown temples and lizard-folk living in and around the brackish waters. While perhaps not as strange as Morrowind’s mushroom-laden volcanic realms, it’s an enticing new location to explore. The DLC is out now. Check out the lengthy patch notes here, and launch trailer below.

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If there’s three things Zachlikes have become known for, it’s programming-inspired puzzling, histograms and animated victory recordings to gloat over on Twitter – now Exapunks has all three. After a brief tour of early access, grungy retro-cyberpunk hacking sim Exapunks is free to rampage across the internet. While no patch notes have rolled out for the official version 1.0 release, a patch a few days ago introduced the animated victory GIFs we all know and love, displaying scores and EXA movements, although not the code within.

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HDR on PC (or high dynamic range) is all well and good when it actually works, but let’s face it, no one wants to shell out north of 2000 / $2000 on one of Nvidia’s fancy G-Sync HDR monitors like the Acer Predator X27 or Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ when it’s still so damn fiddly to get right. Admittedly, things aren’t any simpler over on the AMD side of the HDR pool either, with the GPU giant’s FreeSync 2 tech offering an even woollier approach to nailing down a decent HDR experience.

The advantage of going down the AMD route, however, is that you’ve not only a wider pick of monitors to choose from, but they’re also a heck of a lot cheaper, with the AOC Agon AG322QC4 on test today costing literally a quarter of what you’d be forking out for one of Nvidia’s screens. Is AOC’s curvy, 31.5in, 144Hz, 2560×1440 monitor made of sterner best gaming monitor stuff than its flat, 27in, 4K, 144Hz competition? Let’s find out.

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As much as I loved jet-powered platformer Super Cloudbuilt, it was a deliberately lonesome experience for the self-improving speedrunner. For their next – the recently announced Sky Tracers – developers Coilworks are adapting the formula to multiplayer. Swarms of jet-powered lunatics will be able to hop, boost and wall-run their way through towering sci-fi cityscapes, in environments looking less abstract than the dream-like floating ruins of Cloudbuilt. There’s no release date yet, but Coilworks are looking for people eager to try out alpha test builds. Below, a debut trailer.

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Deep down, everyone loves a good party and according to Skeletal Dance Party those bones are eager to shake it all night, even if the flesh is unwilling. Released today by Catalope Games and No Studio In Particular, it’s an adorably bouncy physics’y spin on the dungeon crawler. Young necromancer Reva is throwing a dungeon dance party for her monster friends and bony pals. Sadly, the grumpy Temple Of Righteous Light frown on rowdy parties (and blasphemously raising the dead), so they’re trying to put a stop to all this. Below, a smile-inducing launch trailer and a demo here.

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The Ancient Greek world in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is honestly a colossally sized place. Set during the conflict between Athens and Sparta, there are a fair few returning features, such as sailing, but it also retains a fair few of the the big changes that were brought with Assassin’s Creed Origins. There’s plenty of new features as well, like romancing NPCs and dialogue choices. In this collection of guides, we will cover the basics of combat, which gameplay mode to choose, the multiple side quests, skills and sailing explained, and dealing with the mercenaries.

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Aha, a loophole! Some of the board games in the embarrassingly large tower behind me have been digitised, so I’m free to write about them without muddying the PC-focused waters of Have You Played. Let’s see … ooh, Splendor is rather pleasant.

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The game once known as ‘Fortnite‘ will not leave paid early access and launch free-to-play this year as planned, Epic Games have said. They’ve delayed Fortnite: Save The World‘s F2P launch as they want more time to make sure it’s proper good and stable for the hordes of potential players expected to flood in when it switches. It did seem that Fortnite might vanish without a trace after its early access launch in July 2017, charging 35 to play the beta of a bland base-building zombie shooter, but then Fortnite Battle Royale hit and now everyone’s heard of Fortnite. So there may be surprising demand for co-op PvE.

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