It’s a good day for free stuff – the second giveaway of the day is Lego The Hobbit. While not the greatest of Traveller’s Tales’s sprawling list of film-to-virtual-plastic adaptations, it’s a decent way to distract the kids, or yourself if you’re young at heart. Based on just the first two films, it’s a platformy action-adventure with local co-op and tongue firmly in cheek. Blocky little dwarves – including the gratingly handsome one – accompany the smallest person (a tiny plastic Bilbo Baggins) on his quest to irritate a dragon and conclude on a cliffhanger. Yoink yourself a copy here before December 15th, 6pm GMT.

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Book Of Demons wears its inspirations on its book-sleeve. Leaving early access after two and a half years of testing and updates, developers Thing Trunk have wrapped a cute papercraft aesthetic around this clear Diablo tribute. It’s an unusual little dungeon crawler – feeling a bit like a real-time version of Card Hunter, it’s more about planning and careful use of abilities than other ARPGs. While single player only, it did recently add Twitch and Mixer integration support, allowing stream viewers to help or hinder a streaming player. Stay a while, and see the launch trailer below.

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With aid and investment from League Of Legends studio Riot, Hypixel Studios – the folks behind the massive Hypixel Minecraft server – have just announced Hytale, their secret project of the past three years. Unsurprisingly, it’s a block-building sandbox, but with a bit more of an RPG focus as its core module. Building on what Hypixel liked so much with Minecraft, Hytale will support community servers, official and unofficial mini-games, and support full modding with an integrated toolkit – good stuff, and they’re taking beta sign-ups now. See the announcement trailer below.

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Look out. The year 2018 is going down in a storm. There are hundreds of games aboard, running, jumping, trying their best to survive the maelstrom. But there s only one tiny lifeboat, and only enough room for three games. It falls on the sorry shoulders of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, to decide which trio of games clamber onto the life raft and which games drown and become lost to history.

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The sci-fi generals of Planetside 2 s never-ending conflict will be waging a new kind of war early next year. Planetside Arena is a battle royale shoot-the-lads that will launch as a full game on January 29, developers Daybreak are telling everyone today. It s going to have a shrinking battleground, reworked guns, spacebucks, jetpacks, orbital strikes and big group matches that see 250 boots-on-the-ground shooting at 250 other boots-on-the-ground. Also, everybody has a quad in their pocket that they can whip out whenever they want and drive across the hills.

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Anyone who didn’t uninstall Final Fantasy XV in a fit of despair and/or rage last month after the abrupt cancellation of 75% of its upcoming DLC will have noticed a delightful 15GB update waiting for them on Steam today, in which finally arrives support for Nvidia’s frame rate rocketing tech, DLSS (or deep learning super sampling, if that makes things any clearer).

It’s one of the things I’ve been most looking forward to testing on Nvidia’s new Turing RTX GPUs, but as with almost everything to do with the launch of Nvidia’s RTX family, there’s a catch. You can only enable it if you have a 4K display.

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The deals deluge begins, and GOG’s winter sale opens with free goodies. Swoop on down to the giveaway page here and you can grab Full Throttle Remastered, Double Fine’s polished-up version of the classic short-but-sweet Lucasarts adventure. While John wasn’t sold on its new (and optional) art, he still had a lot of lovely things to say about it in his review. It was worth the money then, and it’s absolutely worth your time now. There’s some other, near-free goodies to snag and some time limited deals too, and the sale runs until January 3rd. Full Throttle is available free for its first 48 hours – see my pick of the day below.

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Take one look at Turtle Beach’s Atlas Three and Stealth 300 headsets and you’d probably swear blind they were exactly the same thing. Apart from the Stealth 300’s giveaway blue highlights, both headsets share the same design, the same 3.5mm audio connection and flip-to-mute microphone, and both have the rather baffling need to be charged every 40-odd hours due to their built-in bass amplifier gubbins despite the fact they’re both fundamentally wired> headsets instead of wireless ones. Thankfully, the Atlas Three is much more than just a monotone palette-swap of Turtle Beach’s mid-range console-oriented headset.

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Zanki Zero: Last Beginning‘s strangely picturesque apocalypse and oddball cast sent to their repeated ends feels fitting as a followup to teen murder mystery-fest Danganronpa. Confirmed for a PC launch on March 19th, Spike Chunsoft are putting their spin on Wizardry and The Legend Of Grimrock-style real-time labyrinth RPGs. Danganronpa 2 director Yakauki Sugawara and series producer Yoshinori Terasawa are at the helm, so expect death – its eight heroes are clones, dying of old age and needing to be respawned every thirteen days. The release date trailer is below.

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Fallout 76’s magazines work in the same way that Bobbleheads do, but only in this game. Instead of being permanent upgrade, Magazines are now consumable temporary buffs that provide traits such as weapon specific boost or damage increased against certain enemies. Since they work slightly differently this time, there are more places that you can find them, this guide will have more on their locations, exactly how to obtain them, and when it is best to collect duplicates. (more…)