I know October is over and we’re meant to be taking down the decorations, but it feels a little excessive that Rainbow Six Siege is excising all> skulls, blood and more from its maps. The bizarre cuts to the tactical team shooter are due to developers Ubisoft Montreal no longer wanting to juggle multiple regional versions of maps as they expand into Asian territories. The changes seem mostly minor and purely cosmetic, but the before and after pictures in the developer blog-post here are eyebrow-raising.

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Having remastered StarCraft last year, Blizzard are now updating another of their classic real-time strategy games: Warcraft III. During BlizzCon today they announced Warcraft III: Reforged, a revamped release of WC3 with redone artwork, UI improvements, and other such modern fancying-up. Wait. Hang on. Warcraft III first came out on 2002? That can’t be right. That would mean… oh god, this is a lot to take in. While I wrestle with my own mortality, here, you watch the announcement trailer showing off the new look.

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Hearthstone‘s next expansion is putting on its best faux-Jamaican accent for a big blue throwdown. Launching in December and unveiled at BlizzCon today, Rastakhan’s Rumble tells the story (through the act of card-battling) of a once-in-a-generation tribal contest. Trolls from around Azeroth are assembling to beat each other black and (more) blue in order to impress the Loa spirits and King Rastakhan in a big arena rumble. It’ll also feature its own new solo campaign mode. Check out the cheerful musical trailer below – a staple for new Hearthstone announcements.

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While I bounced off it back in the day, the original incarnation of World Of Warcraft remains beloved by many. Some are even nostalgic for the days of chunky character models and grinding werewolves for a pittance of gold. That, and Barrens chat, although anyone hungry for that is just weird. Today, Blizzard announced that their retro MMO throwback – World Of Warcraft Classic – will be launching next summer. Better still, the polished-up legacy version of the game will be free to all existing World Of Warcraft subscribers.

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The next character coming to Overwatch is a female gunslinger named Ashe, Blizzard announced during BlizzCon today. The leader of the Deadlock Gang and an old acquaintance of McCree, she’s armed with a lever-action rifle, carries a double-barrelled shotgun she can ‘rocket-jump’ with, tosses dynamite-shaped explosives, and summons a honking great robo bandit as her Ultimate ability. I’m always up for gunslinging and rocket-jumping so yes, please, let’s do this. Come meet Ashe in new videos fresh out of BlizzCon.

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After smooshing decades of Blizzard history into mega-crossover MOBA Heroes Of The Storm, the studio have announced that a brand-new, original, never-been-seen character is joining the fight. Orphea, whose title I believe is “Heir of Raven Court and daughter of the Raven Lord”, hasn’t been in any Blizzard game before, which is… weird? Perhaps they wanted to create a specific type of character and, with so much of Blizzard history mined out, the closest they could find within the lore was a wizard whose most notable deed was selling Jaina bubblebath once. Here, come meet Orphea.

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Activision are giving Destiny 2 away for free right now, yours to keep if you grab it before November 18th. This is the base edition of Bungie’s multiplayer looter-shooter, not including its expansions, but that’s still a huge hunk of game. And I suppose handy as a demo to see if you want to keep up to speed by buying the DLC. I never played the first Destiny on console so I wasn’t interested when the series debuted on PC with the sequel; now, yeah, go on, I’ll give that a go. I hear it has good dancing. And people mutter eerily about “gunfeel.” What’s up with that.

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From zombie survival to weird naked cave-jerk game to hot air balloons and anti-air missiles, the evolution of Rust has been a strange one to behold. Facepunch’s previous few updates to the sandbox survival craft n’ shooter have focused on new and expanded NPC factions and their territory, but the latest has its head in the clouds. Scattered around Rust’s plains are pre-assembled hot air balloons, ready to fly if you can fuel them up. They can hold items and a handful of passengers, but perhaps aren’t the best weapon of war yet, as you can see in the amusing clip below.

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From zombie survival to weird naked cave-jerk game to hot air balloons and anti-air missiles, the evolution of Rust has been a strange one to behold. Facepunch’s previous few updates to the sandbox survival craft n’ shooter have focused on new and expanded NPC factions and their territory, but the latest has its head in the clouds. Scattered around Rust’s plains are pre-assembled hot air balloons, ready to fly if you can fuel them up. They can hold items and a handful of passengers, but perhaps aren’t the best weapon of war yet, as you can see in the amusing clip below.

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A recurring problem I’ve had with HDR gaming monitors lately is that they don’t seem to be able to do HDR levels of brightness at the same time as HDR levels of colour. Whether it’s the ludicrously expensive Nvidia G-Sync HDR-enabled Acer Predator X27 or the cheap as chips BenQ EW277HDR, there’s always been some sort of compromise involved. Sometimes it’s due to a limitation in the hardware – the BenQ’s maximum brightness simply isn’t as high as the Acer’s, for example – but other times it feels like you’re wrestling with a naughty child (or cat, whichever you prefer) that flatout refuses to do what it’s told, making it even more frustrating when you happened to have paid through the nose for it.

The beautifully parsable and succinctly-named Philips 276E9QJAB isn’t an HDR monitor per se, but at least it’s upfront about what it’s trying to achieve. Instead of setting itself up for disappointment by jumping on the same HDR bandwagon as everyone else, Philips describe this 27in, 1920×1080, 75Hz FreeSync screen as an ‘ultra wide colour’ display, and man alive is it WIDE.

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