Eurogamer

Developer Pheonix Labs has announced that it will be migrating all existing accounts for its free-to-play co-op monster-hunter Dauntless over to the Epic Games Store later this year, and that all players will require an Epic log-in in order to continue playing after the move.

According to Phoenix Labs' FAQ on the matter, Dauntless' account migration will begin "as soon as possible", then, once the process is complete, the game's current launcher will be retired. Those players that don't currently have an Epic Games account will first need to opt-in to the migration process, at which point it seems their Dauntless accounts will be converted automatically. Those that do, however, will need to link their Dauntless and Epic accounts together manually closer to launch via the game's official website.

As Phoenix Labs explains it, players' current progress, friend lists, guilds, and platinum (Dauntless' in-game currency) should all be carried over and integrated into Epic's account infrastructure. However, those players that would rather avoid the Epic Games Store are out of luck. The developer writes that "Migrating your account is the only way to ensure that all your progress from Dauntless carries over after we launch on console and the Epic Games store."

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Eurogamer

Yesterday evening, Blizzard popped the cork on a brand new Overwatch map called Paris, which is set in Paris - wouldn't it be weird if it wasn't?

It's a gorgeous, ornate recreation of the city of love, complete with singing omnic cabaret robots, narrow alleys, macarons, the Eiffel tower and the river Seine. You can even hear familiar French police sirens wailing in the background.

More importantly, Paris has playable pianos - two of them! All their white keys and black keys work as you would expect, which is impressive - this is no mere window dressing. And just in like in real-life, when you plonk a playable piano down in public, people endeavour to play it.

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Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition

After 45 hours in Sunless Skies, it's tempting to offer your own spin on Roy Batty's "I've seen things you wouldn't believe" speech from Blade Runner. The problem is that it's hard to know where to start, and even harder to know where to stop. A hybrid, like 2015's Sunless Sea, of top-down steampunk naval sim and choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, Skies takes you everywhere from an asteroid circus to the howling corona of a clockwork star. Blending the juicier nightmares of Victorian astronomers, bureaucrats and sailors with some rather less antiquated-feeling characters and concepts, it's a tour of the heavens in which every port is an oddity, twinkling or at least glistening in the firmament.

Pick random moments from my playthrough and you'll find my captain doing something very different each time, all of it brought to life with Failbetter's trademark mix of dread and whimsy. Here I am having sex with a demon signaller, for example. And then there was that time I visited a laughing orchard to resolve an academic dispute about the exact occupant of a celestial tomb. Here I am trading shots with a ghost of wood and parchment as I skim the lip of a black hole - oh, and of course, here I am devouring my own crew after running out of fuel on the way back from hell. The great joy of Failbetter's latest is once again the ghoulish inventiveness of the writing and setting, though it's helped along in Skies by more accessible world design, relatively generous earning mechanics and some truly decadent background art.

A direct narrative sequel to Sunless Sea, the game's premise is that Queen Victoria has conquered the solar system, ensuring that Britain is, indeed, the empire on which the sun never sets by murdering the sun and replacing it with a mechanical one. She's also achieved immortality by somehow mining the raw stuff of temporality itself and selling it by the barrel - a wonderfully silly and brutal co-opting of the theory of relativity. In this universe, royal stipends are measured in hours, not coins, and time passes a lot slower inside factories than in palaces, the better to exact maximum blood and sweat from each labourer. Out in the solar system's recesses, meanwhile, upstart "Tackety" colonists battle London's representative the Windward Company while demons, the dead and other, even stranger entities go about their business.

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion® Game of the Year Edition (2009)

Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.

In his Foreword to The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the late Sir Terry Pratchett writes, "Imagination, not intelligence, made us human."

Most people know Pratchett as the author of Discworld, the famous fantasy series about a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants. However, what many people don't know is that the knighted author was also a massive fan of video games - so much so that he actually worked on mods for Oblivion, most of which were spearheaded by a Morrowind modder named Emma.

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Subnautica

Below Zero, the arctic-themed standalone expansion for deep-sea adventure Subnautica, is now available in early access on PC - and, to celebrate, developer UnknownWorlds has offered up the very first trailer.

Described as a "new chapter" in the Subnautica saga, Below Zero unfolds one year on from the events of the base game and challenges players to survive a disaster at an alien research station, located in a previously unseen, ice-bound region of ocean planet 4546B.

Up until today, we've only seen the smallest of glimpses of Below Zero's icy new environs. However, now that early access is officially underway and eager fans are finally able to experience the first few hours of the expansion for themselves, UnknownWorlds has offered a slightly more illuminating taste of things to come, albeit in cinematic trailer form. Allow me to summarise the key points: ALIEN PENGUINS!!!

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Eurogamer

Rare has announced that, following player feedback and lengthy internal discussion, it will be making Sea of Thieves' currently mandatory Xbox One and PC cross-play optional in a future update.

The ability for PC and Xbox One players to seamlessly interact with each other was one of the multiplayer pirate game's most trumpeted features prior to launch last March. In a new developer video, however, Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate said that cross-play will become optional prior to the arrival of the game's PvP-focussed Arena mode later this year.

The decision, Neate explained, is a response to continued player feedback. As anyone with an eye on the Sea of Thieves community will know, a day rarely passes without someone calling the current system (which pits controller users and mouse-and keyboard players against each other on servers) "unfair". Given that Sea of Thieves' PvP play is currently in the spotlight, thanks to Arena mode and the recent upswing in high-profile, PvP-focussed streamers on Twitch, it's not hugely surprising that Rare has opted to address cross-play sooner rather than later.

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

There's a dragon near Bethesda - dubbed "the Dragon of Bethesda" by its creator - and it's causing a bit of bother.

No, not that Bethesda. The Bethesda in Wales, the one on the River Ogwen and the A5 road on the edge of Snowdonia, in Gwynedd.

The Draig Dderw (oak Dragon) stands 6ft tall and 12ft wide, and guards the A5, presumably from misguided Skyrim fans. It's quite the sight - perhaps too good a sight, because motorists are apparently slowing down, or even stopping, to gawk at it.

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Eurogamer

The release of a new patch for Fallout 76 appears to have reintroduced old problems with the game, players report.

One such issue has to do with the weight of bobby pins. When Fallout 76 launched, players complained bobby pins were much heavier than they should have been. A single bobby pin weighed 0.1lbs, which meant 60 of the things weighed the same as a mini nuke. For a game so bogged down by over encumbrance, bobby pin weight was a problem.

On 10th January, Bethesda fixed the issue with a patch that reduced the weight value of bobby pins from 0.1 to 0.001. But the big patch that came out yesterday, 29th January, appears to have reintroduced the original bobby pin weight. I popped onto the post-apocalyptic open-world adventure to verify the reports, and, yes, bobby pins weigh 0.1lbs again.

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Wargroove

Halfway through playing WarGroove, which is secretly a pretty odd game, a thought occurred to me which turned out, the more I considered it, to be a pretty odd thought. What if this game isn't made by Chucklefish as the title screen suggests, the thought began. What if it isn't a forensic attempt at reconstructing an Intelligent Systems turn-based tactics game? What if it actually is an Intelligent Systems game, a new one, and this whole Chucklefish smokescreen is some grand social experiment, like that psych study that pretended to be measuring the efficacy of electric shocks on memory or ESP ability or whatever, but was really exploring people's willingness to administer electric shocks to strangers in the first place?

This thought bedded in and refused to go away. What I think I was really pondering, I guess, is the fact that I had approached WarGroove knowing it was a copy of something beloved, and that sense of it being a copy may have been dulling my enjoyment somewhat. Or was it?

WarGroove is a careful reworking of games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem. It takes the medieval fantasy of Fire Emblem, for example, but then its campaign flows more like Advance Wars, with little of Fire Emblem's cross-mission complexity. It's a very close study: the cheery tiled maps look almost identical to those of Intelligent Systems' games, while unit selection, movement, attack animations and all that jazz are very similar too. It's tempting while playing to work out which of WarGroove's units match up with which of Advance Wars' or Fire Emblems, but more importantly the action feels the same because the underlying principles are the same: capture towns to earn cash that allows you to mint new units from special buildings on the map, work out which units are strong against which other units and try to avoid overextending yourself. CO powers from Advance Wars become the titular WarGrooves here - each commander has a special ability that is charged up through play and will allow you to do something cool like heal everyone within a certain radius or pull friendly skeleton troops out of the earth to fight alongside you - and the battles unfold in a lovely corrugated manner as you press forward and then pause and then press forward again, getting the most out of different terrains like forests and mountains, pushing back fog of war on the maps that have it and, if you are really on top of things, placing units in the precise configurations that allow them to score critical hits.

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Eurogamer

Destiny's ever-labyrinthine lore has just been expanded with a fan-pleasing throwback to the original Destiny - and in true Bungie style, it's opened up another set of questions in the process.

(Naturally, spoilers follow if you're not keeping up with Destiny 2: Forsaken's endgame.)

Destiny 2's latest weekly reset results in a new meeting with is-she-or-isn't-she-good Queen Mara Sov, who once again dwells upon what's next for the Destiny universe. Did she see the Activision breakup coming? Probably.

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