Quake Champions‘s December update is live, and it’s one of the biggest the old-school arena shooter has seen since it entered early access. The much-maligned loot box-based economy of the game is dead, replaced by a linear progression of cosmetic rewards for each character, and extra goodies for those who pick up a Fortnite/Rocket League-styled season pass. They’ve also brought back Capture The Flag mode (my favourite way to play classic twitchy shooters), added a new map and squeezed a little more performance out of the game for those on lower-spec PCs. Check out the full patch notes here.

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Not only has Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Final Season found a new developer in Skybound Games after Telltale’s sudden implosion, but it’s setting up shop on the Epic Games Store. If you already bought the season on Steam or anywhere else, you’ll find the upcoming two episodes there, but for anyone thinking of picking up the series now, it’s exclusive to Epic’s new storefront starting with Episode 3: Broken Toys on January 15th. Below, the voice of Clementine – Melissa Hutchinson – gives us an official FAQ on what’s happening with the rest of the season.

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For Honor may have bounced back from the brink, but that hasn’t saved it from being subsumed into the UbiGame collective, becoming an Assassin’s Creed game for the holidays. Ubisoft’s clever online take on the fighting game genre is largely transformed by the For The Creed event until January 10th, now featuring armies of Assassins and Templars fighting in the Animus. The event features a time-limited spin on Dominion mode, where players aim to hack through enough of the enemy grunts to draw out the rival commander, including AC characters like Ezio Auditore (yay!) and Cesare Borgia (boo, hiss!). Take a peek at the trailer below.

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Hope your Christmas shopping is already done, because Steam’s Winter Sale is liable to drain what remains of your holiday funds. No awful minigames like in summer – this sale’s twist is a virtual advent calendar here, where you can click a door each day for a handful of Steam wallpapers, chat emoticons and holiday-themed fluff. Beyond that, users can cast their vote on the The Steam Awards nominees and get a fistful of trading cards for your effort. The sale ends on January 3rd, and I’ve got some personal stocking stuffers picked out below.

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Did you know that the way our ears interpret sound is as unique and personal to you as your own speaking voice? I certainly didn’t until earlier this week, but it’s probably the reason why no one can ever agree on what the best gaming headset is, or why one pair of headphones might sound great for one person but all kinds of rubbish to someone else.

The audio wizards over at Australian firm Nura, however, have struck upon an idea that uses this ear science magic to their advantage. Enter the Nuraphone, a pair of headphones that measures exactly how you hear things and creates your own personalised audio signature off the back of it, ensuring that games and music are perfectly tuned to your own ear drums. It sounds bonkers and something like pure witchcraft if you ask me, but by golly does it work.

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Fortnite might be more about building hard cover than snowmen, but it’s getting plenty festive for the holiday break. Launched yesterday, the 14 Days Of Fortnite event brings a set of Christmas goodies to both Battle Royale and Save The World modes. There’s also (not too rough) daily challenges with their own rewards until new year’s day – today’s being to just check out the new Creative mode. This update also marks the debut of The Block, a chunk of the Battle Royale map dedicated to showcasing Epic’s favourite player-made deathmatch arenas. Today’s has a plane in it.

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“When people have looked at Minecraft and tried to understand what it is, they’ve looked at Minecraft as this game,” says Aaron “Noxy” Donaghey. “And Minecraft isn’t just a game. Minecraft is a collection of different communities that have all done amazing things with it.”

Donaghey knows this better than most. He’s the content lead on the newly announced Hytale, and Hytale is being made by Hypixel, the company behind a massive set of Minecraft servers of the same name. They’re holders of several Guinness world records including “most popular independent server for a videogame” and “most popular Minecraft server network”. They’ve seen first-hand what players have done with Minecraft.

Plenty of other developers have had the idea of making a game like Minecraft but with a few tweaks, and many have failed. But it’s their experience that gives Hytale’s creators a chance of succeeding where others haven’t.

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There’s more than a smack of Fallout around new post-apocalyptic RPG Atom RPG (yes, “RPG” is part of its name), and that’s an inspiration the developers are unashamed to declare. Atom’s an open-world RPG with turn-based combat, set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland – this time in the irradiated ruins of the Soviet Union. Look at a screenshot and hey, if you’ve played either of the first two Fallout games you’ll instantly know what’s up. But enough about Fallout! I’ve read good things about Atom, and now it’s actually properly out following a Kickstarter in 2017 then a stretch in early access. This wasteland is now appropriately wasted, the ruins finally finished ruination.

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By the time you read this, Behemoth will probably have dropped on PC, but there’s even more exciting updates announced for Monster Hunter: World inbound. While the console versions will be getting a large number of the free updates first, they have been confirmed as coming at a later date to the PC version. All of this will drop at some point in the coming year, before the main new expansion – Monster Hunter World: Iceborne – which was announced at the same time. This new expansion will include a slew of new monsters to slay, as well as a host of other goodies for you to craft and new moves for your weapons. This guide will go over all the details we know so far for Iceborne, as well as details for the free updates that are coming to PC for Monster Hunter: World.

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Virtual farmers, today you shall know true mastery of the land. No longer are you limited to tilling the soil in Farming Simulator 19, today you shall raise mountains, erect houses, and spend ages fiddling with fences to perfect your cute chicken run. Today’s update adding landscaping, see, letting us editing the ground itself as well as slap down props like buildings, fences, and such; it looks pretty neat. Today, farmer, you become geomancer. The update also adds economic difficulty modes, making your harvest more bountiful or making The Man really gouge you with poor pay.

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