You have to play Unheard with headphones. A new detective game from Next Studios, Unheard drops you into the aural soundscapes of crimes-in-progress. In each case you're a fly on the wall, and you have to suss out the truth using only what you can hear. 

So, okay, you could use your computer speakers and get by just fine. But that’s like blasting Dark Side Of The Moon on phone speakers; headphones are the much better option. Unheard makes use of binaural and proximity-based audio to place you in the midst of ongoing scenes. It’s reminiscent of live plays like Sleep No More or found-footage mysteries like Her Story, only your sole input is audio. You can scrub back and forth along the timeline like a YouTube video and move your virtual avatar between different areas, following different characters or just exploring.

Unheard’s five cases start off slowly with a crime of stolen identity, but they quickly ramp up in density. Multiple rooms, speakers, and background noise complicate things. I found it easiest to start with the names; much like last year’s Return of the Obra Dinn, you’re left to your own devices to uncover who's who using a list of known persons present. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find two people alone in a room, but other times, you might need to rely on character traits. A character constantly referred to by his glasses, for example, is probably “Four Eyes.”

Each environment adds its own quirks. In some, you might just be seeking an admission of identity or guilt. But in others, you have to identify key items and track them, a difficult prospect in a world with extremely limited vision. Given only a barebones floorplan and the position of each speaker, audio cues are used to great effect to communicate critical non-verbal exchanges. 

In the second case, you’re tasked with finding a stolen painting and figuring out who nabbed it. Or rather, who stole it first, and who ultimately stole it, because as it turns out, that might be two different people. You can follow around a buyer, the owner, the painter and his assistant, or any number of shady characters, but the key becomes tracking the movement of one—or possibly several—copies of a painting you can’t see. Without handing you the solution, I’ll just say that I had to double-check my assumptions a few times as I repeatedly scrubbed through the logs. 

The excellent use of audio is what elevates Unheard’s mysteries. Hearing speakers move around you, whispered conversations in the corners of rooms, and muffled noises or ringtones through walls helps you start to establish the timeline of events. A comment tool lets you add short quips that will fly across the map at points you designate, which was immensely helpful in tracking when someone picked up the phone or sent a text. When I was trying to suss out who was calling who, the comments let me tail suspects and time the moment someone picks up a call with the moment another dials them.

Due to its sensory-dependent nature, it’s helpful that Unheard’s voice actors provide just the  right amount of personality and inflection. The delivery can seem cheesy to start, but over time the emphatic performances really helped me pick voices out of a crowd. In the art gallery, as a commotion stirred in the crowd when the star painting was stolen, art collector Greene’s distinct accent and delivery was discernible enough for me to pinpoint as he was having a clandestine conversation in the back corner of the room.

As the story progresses, the voices begin to play an even greater role. The framing between each individual case poses the player as a detective, participating in a groundbreaking new auditory investigation unit meant to solve cold cases. But as you unveil the hidden identities of the Keyser Söze-esque kingpins and culprits behind accidental tragedies, your situation grows more sinister. Where are you? Are you here of your own volition? Is this really what my handler is telling me it is?

Unheard is short. My own playthrough only took about three hours. But in the span of those three hours, I filled three college-ruled notebook pages with notes and charts. The auditory enigma of each new disaster pushed me to construct logic puzzle charts, crossing off who would be unable—or unlikely—to send ghost texts from a former cast member’s phone or detonate a remote explosive. The high bar for mystery games is to inspire the “a-ha” moment, where one contradiction or overlooked fact sheds new light on the entire case, and Unheard revels in these moments, taking you through each one after you’ve correctly solved the case. (Thankfully, it also informs you when you’re wrong, and how many correct answers you submitted.)

Taking away a critical sense works in Unheard’s favor, adding an extra layer of intrigue to each of its cold-case crimes. Every discussion is met with that much more skepticism, and as I listen in on one exchange in one room, I’m already peering at the names moving around like ants inside the glass. I’m marking off suspects and taking notes, all the while picking who to spy on next, knowing every question can be answered if I just listen closely.

Things have not gone well for Valve's much-publicized CCG Artifact since its November 2018 release. The player count began tumbling almost immediately, from a peak of more than 60,000 players to a concurrent count, according to Steam Charts, of just over 200. It's a remarkable decline, particularly for Valve, which had positioned Artifact as the vanguard of its return to game development. 

Today it acknowledged that things have gone very, very wrong, and said that it's effectively putting the game on hold while it figures out where to go from here. 

"When we launched Artifact, we expected it would be the beginning of a long journey, that it would lay the foundation for years to come. Our plan was to immediately dive into our normal strategy of shipping a series of updates driven by the dialogue community members were having with each other and with us," Valve's Jeep Barnett wrote. 

"Obviously, things didn't turn out how we hoped. Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome. But we don't think that players misunderstand our game, or that they're playing it wrong. Artifact now represents an opportunity for us to improve our craft and use that knowledge to build better games." 

Barnett said that it's clear that there are "deep-rooted" issues with Artifact that can't be addressed through the original strategy of updating with new features and cards. Instead, Valve believes that it needs to re-examine everything about it, including "game design, the economy, the social experience of playing, and more." And that's going to take awhile. 

"Moving forward, we'll be heads-down focusing on addressing these larger issues instead of shipping updates," Barnett wrote. "While we expect this process of experimentation and development to take a significant amount of time, we’re excited to tackle this challenge and will get back to you as soon as we are ready." 

The man who instigated a 2017 swatting that resulted in the death of a bystander at the hands of police has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. The sentence is double that of the ten years recommended by guidelines, according to this AP report, but was handed down as part of a deal in which 26-year-old Tyler Barriss pleaded guilty to 51 federal charges related to fake calls and threats. 

The charges against Barriss followed the death of 28-year-old Andrew Finch, who was shot by police responding to a call claiming that someone at Finch's address had killed one person and was holding others hostage. That call was placed by Barriss, allegedly at the behest of 19-year-old Casey Viner, who was embroiled in a dispute over a Call of Duty: WW2 match with 20-year-old Shane Gaskill. When Gaskill discovered that Barriss was trying to track him down, he provided an old address—Finch's—and dared him to do something. 

"We hope that this will send a strong message about swatting, which is a juvenile and senseless practice," U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister said after sentencing. "We’d like to put an end to it within the gaming community and in any other contact. Swatting, as I’ve said before, is not a prank."

Viner and Gaskill initially pleaded not guilty to charges related to the swatting, including conspiracy to obstruct justice and wire fraud, but Viner has notified the court that he wants to change his plea and Gaskill is also engaged in plea-related talks with prosecutors. The officer who actually shot and killed Finch as he exited his house as ordered by police was not charged; Finch's family has filed a lawsuit against the city of Wichita and the officers involved in the killing.

Last year, 6,142 EVE Online pilots flooded into the solar system of 9-4RP2 and participated in its biggest single battle ever—setting a Guinness World Record for most participants in a multiplayer battle in the process. But that record-breaking fight also illustrated how parts of EVE Online are aging much worse than others. The crippling lag created by 6,000 players smashing as many ships together was devastating to both sides. Everything slowed to a crawl, and the biggest threat became the random disconnects that pulled players from the fight.

This May, EVE will turn 16 years old. To keep its promise to make EVE Online live forever, developer CCP Games is experimenting with ambitious networking and simulation technology that could radically change (and improve) its aging infrastructure, unlocking all sorts of new possibilities.

During the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, EVE Online partnered with Hadean, the makers of an innovative game engine called Aether, for a grand experiment: Could they run a 10,000-player multiplayer tech demo that didn't immediately slow to a crawl?

And, more importantly, how could that technology be used to keep EVE Online relevant?

Death to latency 

On March 20, 3,852 human players and 10,422 AI pilots participated in the first public tech demo of Aether Wars—a barebones space combat sim using EVE Online's art assets. The idea wasn't to perfectly recreate EVE Online's fleet combat, but to see if Hadean's Aether engine could handle ten thousand ships and hundreds of thousands of torpedoes in one area without crippling lag. As you can see from the various livestreams of the event (like the one below), it was far from perfect. But it did work. Players could fly around and fire weapons with hiccups of lag that were much more tolerable than the crawl EVE Online's real battles turn into. 

It worked better than both CCP and Hadean had hoped for. A day before the tech demo, I caught up with CCP Games CEO Hilmar Pétursson to talk about the project and what it could mean for the future of EVE Online. 

"There are pretty good odds of it just crashing and burning," he told me. "EVE players are known for tearing apart whatever we throw at them. Either outcome is a good one, though, because this is such cutting edge technology we just have to learn the boundaries and the opportunities through these kinds of experiments."

The gist of what Hadean's tech does differently is in how it seamlessly scales to match the complexity of a game world without tons of bloat or middleware. Using cloud technology (not to be confused with the cloud tech powering Google's Stadia streaming service) and its proprietary operating system, Hadean's Aether engine will supposedly be able to handle complex simulations—like 10,000 ships launching missiles at each other—without skipping a beat. That could change a great deal about how EVE Online's battles play out.

"The [infrastructure] of EVE was largely set in place about 17 or 18 years ago," Pétursson said. "Just for perspective, we had dual-CPU pentium 3 servers. Since then the world has moved on many cycles and computing architectures are vastly different, especially when it comes to the number of CPUs and cores in a machine. And EVE cannot properly take advantage of that change because it was architected for a very different environment. It's held up nicely, but there are limits to where we can take it because of this initial condition."

That's why CCP is experimenting with Hadean's Aether engine. "The main difference is that Hadean allows the simulation to scale across multiple cores, multiple CPUs and multiple machines, and they have a very elegant way of managing that scale as it happens. And that is something that is hard to do with the architecture that we have for EVE," Pétursson explained.

A new kind of war 

Though Pétursson said it was impossible to predict when EVE players could benefit from this technology ("It's just so much speculation on so little data, it's just not productive"), the implications are game changing.

For one, it would mean no more Time Dilation (TiDi). Introduced back in 2011, TiDi is CCP's only way to combat the massive lag of its player battles. Since its servers struggled to keep up with the millions of processes happening at once as players fired weapons, launched fleets of attack drones, or repositioned ships, TiDi slows everything down so the servers can catch up. It's like bullet-time from The Matrix, which sounds cool until you're stuck in a battle that has been going on for eight hours because everything is moving so slowly. Under full TiDi, any action that should only take one second actually takes ten, stretching EVE battles into gruelling 14-hour-long conflicts.

But using technology like the Aether engine could also expand EVE Online's physics simulation, allowing for more diverse ship designs and more realistic battles. "There are limits to the variables that are managed by the physics engine," Pétursson told me. "One of them, particularly, has to do with rotation."

One of the corners CCP Games had to cut to get EVE Online running smoothly back in 2003 has profoundly shaped its fleet tactics: The EVE servers have no idea which direction any ship is facing at a given time. That little detail has big consequences on EVE's fleet tactics and ship design. "Not knowing the orientation of the ship means you cannot build a ship with guns on one side and not the other side," Pétursson said. "That's why all the weapon systems of EVE are mirrored."

"One thing that the Hadean solution will enable is that once [the server] knows a ship's orientation, we can start to make asymmetrical ships for real. You can imagine a fleet fight under those conditions would be very different. We can start to make ships that are shield ships that protect ships that are behind them."

Another big change would be proper simulation of line of sight. Right now, there's no such thing as "taking cover" in EVE Online. If an enemy ship can lock onto you, they can shoot you no matter what might be in the way. But if EVE Online's servers had the processing power to calculate line of sight at a massive scale, EVE's fleet battles would look completely different. 

"When you look at a typical fleet fight, often the tactic is to make a big ball of spaceships which is what you'd do if there was no line of sight occlusion," Pétursson said. "When you have line of sight then you have formations because it's important that everyone has a clear line of sight to the target. You go from being a giant ball to having a shape to the battlefield. This will massively change tactics of engaging in fleet fights." 

But change is scary. Assuming that the Aether engine does one day power EVE Online, it's likely that major changes to EVE's combat would be gradually rolled out in a contained way. Much like its Abyssal Deadspace expansion, which added dungeon-like encounters instanced from the open universe of New Eden, this new form of ship combat would be localized to a small portion of EVE instead of just rolled out to the entire universe all at once. "Obviously we don't want to overly disrupt the current gameplay, which people engage with on a daily basis," Pétursson said.

None of this is guaranteed to happen, either. Though the Aether Wars tech demo was a success, it could be years before EVE players see tangible changes to their game. Pétursson told me it's one of CCP Games' few long-term projects that are being offset by more immediate changes, like the upcoming 64-bit client and DirectX 12 support. "The Hadean thing is more like a leap into the extreme future of what could be done. But these incremental and revolutionary initiatives inform each other."

It's exciting stuff that could see EVE Online keep pace with the new wave of combat space sims like Elite: Dangerous and the upcoming Star Citizen—but with EVE's massive, player-driven universe behind it all. But at what point is CCP just developing an entirely different kind of space game?

"At some point we are developing a different space game," Pétursson laughed. "But if we're going to stay true to EVE Online going on forever, then at some point the current gameplay of EVE is just not going to be as relevant as it was. As we have more space games coming online, the gameplay and the simulation dynamics also need to evolve. But we have to be very careful about doing that." 

I respect a shooter that fills the screen with enough projectiles and enemies to render the action nearly incomprehensible. Risk of Rain 2 is one of those shooters. When I can't parse what the hell is happening on the screen, that's by design, and it's great fun.

The original Risk of Rain is a 2D sidescroller built around steadily buffing the player and modifying their skills with so much gear that they transition from little pew-pew spaceperson to opaque bullet tornado over the course of a short 10 minute run. Risk of Rain 2 transfers the same iterative roguelike loop into the body of a third-person shooter and pulls it off with surprising finesse. It may be in Early Access, but it's in pretty good shape already. 

The goals are the same as in the first game: once you pop out of your little space pod, you'll need to find the teleporter, activate it, and survive until it's fully charged. Teleport out and move to the next level, repeat until death. All the while the difficulty steadily ticks up as tougher enemies pour in from the sky and crawl out of the dirt in greater numbers. Some rush you while others harass with projectiles from a distance. They never stop coming and they never get easier. 

Dead enemies drop money used to purchase upgrades scattered around the map. These make keeping up with tougher waves possible, though what you get is determined by dice rolls. I'm only a few hours in, so my item pool is pretty limited. I've found spectacles that increase your chance to crit, a syringe that buffs attack speed, and my favorite so far, a gasoline tank that ignites enemies in a radius around any that I kill. A couple dozen aren't even in the game yet.  

Like Binding of Isaac, the gear you unlock will enter the item pool forever. Some are locked behind achievements and some are locked behind progression. Unless you're one of those fabled gamer gods, expect to die early and often until you unlock a couple of your own. 

The long term payoff of the original was filling out the item pool and getting to a point where buffs would stack and synergize in absurd ways, turning you into a frenzied, near invincible bullet beehive. Risk of Rain 2 feels close to matching that from the start, so I'm looking forward to the compounding mayhem that (hopefully) awaits. 

Singing in the pain 

Risk of Rain 2's shift to a third-person perspective has one major downside. While the first allowed for cooperative play, the 2D perspective made it possible to track all of the on-screen action by yourself. Now you can only see what's in front of you, and because enemies spawn in from every direction it's easy to get overwhelmed when playing alone.

A limited field of vision means co-op multiplayer is the only way to go right now, but I like the added chaos from four little spaceguys shooting and jumping around at once. I'm able to find full parties in quickplay without issue and consistently get to the second or third areas from just noodling around with strangers. 

Getting further will require a bit more teamwork. There's not much to encourage cooperation outside of text chat, though teamwork might naturally take shape as more people realize what an advantage sticking together is. I'd still like to see another class unlocked from the start, something that complements the default all-around Commando so players fall into supporting one another early on. Better player communication tools are a must, too. Apex Legends has ruined multiplayer games for me. 

And everyone is going to need help. The action is overwhelming at times, especially when a big boss, like a massive electric jellyfish, floats in during the teleporter charging phase and everyone panics. Glorious visual noise and hectic, desperate shootouts ensue, while I jam on the keyboard without much attention to what's firing off and where, so long as I keep seeing damage numbers. It's nice to get a sweat in. 

The looming scale and drama resulting from the grounded third-person perspective makes the original game look like a pathetic ant farm uprising. Risk of Rain 2 is decidedly less chill. 

Regardless of whether or not my teammates care about me, the shooting's great. I thrive on the stress of reading a busy battlefield and snapping between targets while trying to time dodge-rolls during clearly telegraphed enemy attacks.

I do wish the art were more expressive and distinct. The lumpy, lo-fi levels lack character, and the enemy models are flat, blurry interpretations of their detailed pixelated counterparts. Performance is also a problem. I get consistent hitches and the framerate chugs during particularly crowded, chaotic shootouts. Connection issues are infrequent, but happen every couple matches. 

These performance problems don't seem widespread, though, if the "Overwhelmingly Positive" review status on Steam is anything to go by. I might be an outlier, just know they're distracting enough for me to leave Risk of Rain 2 and check back in a few months from now. It's good fun as is, just something I might let bake until better communication tools and smoother performance settle in. 

Every one of FromSoftware's recent games has been loaded with badass weapons, from Dark Souls' classic Moonlight Greatsword to Bloodborne's whip-sword. And Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, FromSoftware's grueling action RPG set in Sengoku-era Japan is no different.

Sekiro, the titular shinobi, has a special Shinobi Prosthetic arm that can be modified with all kinds of wicked tools. In my 35 hours of playing, I've collected everything from a wrist-mounted flamethrower to a spring-loaded spear that impales enemies and pulls them to me. It's an excellent arsenal, and now a mad-scientist YouTuber is bringing it to life.

His name is Colin Furze and earlier this month, he partnered with Activision and FromSoftware to create functional versions of Sekiro's very dangerous weapons. So far he's only completed the Shinobi Axe of the Monkey and the Iron Fortress tools, but both are incredibly impressive to watch in action.

The spring-loaded Axe of the Monkey is my favorite because it works almost perfectly. If you watch the video above, you can see how effortlessly Furze can flick the axe into his hand and retract it back into its cradle parallel with his arm.

The Iron Fortress shield is less impressive to me—if only because making a shield that not only fans out but can also weather a direct blow from an axe is a tall order. The shield still works pretty well all things considered. It's slow to expand compared to the in-game version, which fans out nearly instantly, and is too lightweight to test against real weapons so Furze does the next best thing and tests whether it can withstand a flame thrower. The result is great.

You can watch him actually making the Iron Fortress in a separate video.

It's all really impressive, and I'm excited to see what he's able to do with the rest of Sekiro's arsenal. It's not clear how many videos he intends to make, but given that some of the Shinobi Prosthetic tools are pretty out there (there's one that causes you to vanish into a cloud of raven feathers when attacked), I'm guessing Furze will only attempt the more plausible options.

But what do I know? Maybe Furze will find a way.

Thanks to Kotaku for the cool find.

Hell Let Loose, the WW2-based multiplayer shooter that pulled in more than double its $100,000 Kickstarter goal in 2017, will launch on Steam Early Access on June 6. Ahead of that, a beta test will run over the weekend of April 5, followed by two more that haven't yet been dated. 

Where Battlefield 5 is mixes fast gunplay with vehicle stunts, Hell Let Loose is said to be all about realism. As seen in last year's announcement trailer, that means slow, clunky weapons, poor visibility, and shooting guys in the back whenever possible. (But all in a good way.)   

It's also big, with 50v50 battles on "real-scale iconic battlefields of World War 2" and a larger meta-game that requires resource and supply management, reinforcement of strongpoints, and other strategic decision-making. 14 different "playable roles" drawn from infantry, recon, and armor are available, including officer, scout, gunner, medic, engineer, and tank commander. 

"Hell Let Loose is not all about kill/death ratios and unlocks—teamwork is central to gameplay. Communication is essential," developer Black Matter said. "Players work together beneath the leadership of officers and their commander to take strategic targets on the battlefield and dominate the opposition. Hell Let Loose is a game that demands teamwork and communication not only to win, but to survive." 

The Early Access release of Hell Let Loose will go for $30. If you want to get in on the beta action, you can preorder one of two different packs at hellletloose.com. 

Devil May Cry 5 came out this month. Not just this year, but 21 freaking days ago. It's a phenomenal character action game, as deep and rewarding to master as it is flat-out ridiculous. Dante dances in a cowboy hat and uses two halves of a demonically possessed motorcycle to beat the shit out of things. It's the best Japanese action game of its type since Platinum's Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, or Bayonetta, or hell, maybe Shinji Mikami's God Hand, way back in 2006. The point is, if Devil May Cry 5 was the only Japanese action game that came out this month, it'd still be the best month for the genre in years. But then there's Sekiro.

FromSoftware went ahead and redefined the action genre with a combat system that captures the intimate fury and exhaustion of sword-on-sword combat. Sekiro is a fragile shinobi who has to break down enemies through relentless aggression and exact reflexes. There's no time to hesitate—any brief pause and your opponent can recover and let loose a frenzied retaliation. Swords are always out and always swinging. It's an aggressive inversion of Dark Souls all about making your own opportunities. It's empowering, punishing, and not quite like anything we've played before.

Two tremendous games released exactly two weeks apart. A few days before Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice came out, I started thinking about how crazy it seemed, these two games coming out in the same month. It's like Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 for Japanese action: Two different takes on the genre, for sure—Sekiro isn't a perfect fit for the nebulous "character action" sub-genre, but still has the same focus on skill and precision coursing through its veins. DMC5 asks players what cool shit they can pull off with three unique characters and a dozen weapons, while Sekiro just gives you a plain ol’ katana and says: Master the blade or bust. Have two similar games of this magnitude ever come out side-by-side before? Will they ever again?

It didn't just feel unlikely. It felt unprecedented. Sometimes it's fun to obsess over stats and trivia, so I decided to do some digging.

The question is simple and surprisingly easy to answer, because despite the love and reverence for the likes of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, there have been precious few of these types of games over the past 20 years. I pored over the release dates for 20 years worth of beloved character action games (most of them on consoles, though newer ones are also on PC) to pinpoint the genre's peak.

It's this month.

March 2019 does have a few good competitors, though. Behold, basically every character action game* on one chart. The X axis is years and the Y axis is months; look for blue dots with multiple game names for months where more than one action game came out at the same time.

*(Some games I excluded because popular opinion would clearly disqualify them from "best month ever" contention, e.g. Devil May Cry 2 and Platinum's Legend of Korra. I also excluded games that leaned more heavily into RPG than character action, like Dark Souls and Nier Automata, though I know that last one is borderline.)

Based on these release dates, sourced from Wikipedia, here are some of the best months in gaming history for 3D character action games (and Viewtiful Joe, which are 2D but just felt like they belonged).

December 2003, Japan: This month an incredibly rare three character action games came out at once, but only in Japan. Nightshade, the sequel to Sega's Shinobi reboot, got pretty mediocre reviews at the time. Fast, combo-y combat couldn't make up for bad jumping and bottomless death pits. Bujingai fared better: it was a weird mix of future post-apocalypse, traditional Hong Kong martial arts, and Japanese pop star Gackt. And then there was Otogi 2, made for the Xbox by FromSoftware, a hack-and-slash with a bunch of playable characters. It was quality, and the beginning of From merging action with its RPG roots. This definitely would've been a memorable month if you lived in Japan, but none hit the high bar of all-time-great action games.

March 2005, North America: If there's a single month that can compete with March 2019, I'd argue that it's this one. This is the month Devil May Cry 3 released in North America, followed by God of War three weeks later. God of War is the only non-Japanese character action series on this list, and it made a huge splash at the time. Kratos's blades made for lengthy and brutal combos and the setpieces were epic in a way action games hadn't been before. Action purists would argue all day for the superior depth of Devil May Cry 3's combat, though, and they'd be right—though it was greatly enhanced in the Special Edition released later, and the US version's bafflingly increased difficulty was reigned in.

Still, this was a hell of a month, if you lived in North America.

October 2006, North America: This could have been a stellar month, as it saw the release of Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition on PC and God Hand on the PS2. God Hand is a beloved, brutally hard action game from Shinji Mikami that still needs to get ported to PC, dammit. Unfortunately, DMC3's first PC port was as bad as most Japanese PC games of that era, thus souring October's chances. Besides, DMC3 SE had already hit consoles months earlier.

October 2009, Japan: A big month for quantity, but spread across regions. The Sigma port of Ninja Gaiden 2 hit Japan and Europe, Bayonetta came out in Japan, and FromSoftware's QTE-heavy Sekiro predecessor NinjaBlade released on PC in America. You could call this a high water mark for Japan, because Bayonetta was the successor to Devil May Cry fans had now been waiting several years for, and it was going up against the PS3 version of Ninja Gaiden 2, which likely put it in front of a much larger Japanese audience. It's largely considered an inferior version, though it's significant to me that this is the only time that the DMC/Bayonetta style of action and the Ninja Gaiden style went directly head-to-head.

March 2019, Worldwide: This is the month. Looking back across these other banner months, there are few games being released simultaneously that will stand the test of time like Sekiro and DMC5. April 2005 is the only one that comes close, and this month has one big advantage: universality. In past years staggered international release dates meant games rarely ever landed for everyone at the same time. And it was really the Special Edition release of Devil May Cry 3 that cemented it as the king of the genre for years.

But this month, Sekiro and DMC5 launched worldwide, and it feels safe to say people will be talking about them, and playing them (or re-releases) a decade from now. So, sure, they're great games. But I think there's a bit more to it than that. The words I keep coming back to are luxury and confidence.

Luxury, because Devil May Cry 5 feels like a game overflowing with ideas an energy. Three playable characters with totally different styles, all weaved into one campaign, all with unlockable movesets that you'll barely start mastering in a single playthrough. Luxury, because this game's characters look incredible, and unnecessarily lavish cutscenes were a key tenet for its designers in making the whole ride feel like a ridiculous movie. Confidence, because DMC5 is far smoother and more approachable than older games in the series, but the depth is still there for anyone who can dig it out.

Confidence, because FromSoftware built a towering reputation on the style of combat and arcane RPG features in its Souls games, and then at the height of that fame, made a pure action game. Elements of the Souls games linger, now codified in From's DNA, but Sekiro demands you play it more like the hyper-aggressive Ninja Gaiden 2, unlearning a decade of skills built up on its preceding games. Luxury, because just a few years ago both of these games would've been console exclusives, but they arrived day-and-date on PC with quality ports.

March 2019: Pretty damn good month.

Dormant. Sickly. Drunk, lying face down in a gutter. Those are all words that you can’t use to describe the PC Gamer UK Podcast, because it is back and strong like a man who is very good at competitively pulling trucks a short distance. Look. We’ve forgotten how to podcast, and we’ve forgotten how to write podcast descriptions. But we’re back, and that’s something.

Discussed: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Anthem, The Division 2, Destiny 2, Google Stadia, The Epic Store.

Starring: Samuel Roberts, Phil Savage, Tom Senior, Andy Kelly

Listen to Episode 70: A Return here. You can also subscribe on iTunes or keep up with new releases using our RSS feed.

The PC Gamer UK Podcast is a weekly podcast about PC gaming. Thoughts? Feedback? Requests? Tweet us @PCGamerPod, or email letters@pcgamer.com. This week’s music is from Destiny 2.

On Tuesday, an Ark: Survival Evolved YouTube channel called H.O.D. Gaming uploaded a video called "2019 GUIDE TO MESH MONKEYS (PART 1)." The owner of the channel, a 27-year old Australian named Luke, told me that it was at least partially inspired by his own personal vengeance. "Each time i would build a base a cheat or exploiter would come and ignore my base defense and exploit my base and steal my work," he said, over email. "Bases take hundreds of hours to build and cheaters can ignore the in game defense through this method."

So naturally, Luke framed his video as a dulcet nature documentary. "Mesh monkeys," he said, are the vile, regrettable creatures who populate the server blades of Ark: Survival Evolved and muck up the multiplayer with cheap tricks that ruin the experience for everyone else. "Today, we're going to explore the mesh monkeys, and the techniques they use to supersede base defenses," he says. For the next 10 minutes, Luke methodically unveiled a few of the tried-and-true exploits that have existed in the game code, he says, since the game released back in 2017. They include a clever server-relog that puts your character out-of-bounds, a hidey-hole in the top corner of a map that you can clip through easily, and a wall that can be rammed through with a jetpack. Luke mentions that he found all of those exploits with a simple YouTube search, and adds, "Why can't the devs fix this themselves?"

The following day, Luke uploaded another video, showing that he was globally banned from Ark servers. "There was no communication with the devs, and no reason given for the ban," he says to me, over email. "I have exposed meshing in the past and was not banned for it, and they still have not taken my feedback from this first video."

H.O.D. Gaming is one of the more prominent YouTube channels in the Ark community. In total, Luke has around 190,000 subscribers, so it was unsurprising to see that his banning emerged as a significant controversy. The news penetrated the front page of the non-denominational r/pcgaming subreddit, where it earned nearly 50,000 upvotes. (Personally, I saw the news on r/all, where it was also on the front page.) Several other Ark YouTubers made videos in response to the ban, and all offered the same tepid analysis of the situation.

When I reached out to Studio Wildcard, the company behind Ark, they directed me to a statement they made on the forums shortly after the Reddit indignation. In it, they announced that H.O.D. would be formally unbanned, but also didn't fully exonerate Luke's content. "Any issue that violates our Code of Conduct is subject to a fair appeal process. When things land in the gray area, our first instinct is to do whatever is in our power to prevent abuse," it read. "Upon further review of the situation involving H.O.D Gaming, we felt that it was not deserving of a permanent ban. Videos showing exploit techniques are admittedly a gray area when it comes to enforcement, which is just one of the reasons why the appeal process exists for bans."

This is fairly standard for a lot of publishers. You can find plenty of examples of prominent streamers earning bans after taking advantage of an exploit or an oversight. It's happened in PUBG, Overwatch, and most recently in Anthem. The difference for H.O.D. is that he claims the meshing he demonstrated happened in Ark's single-player mode, and also that the overall directive of his video was cached as a form of protest. I asked him what his response would be if Wildcard informed him that achieving exploits, regardless of the overarching context, was a no-questions-asked bannable offense. 

"I [would] respond that I deserve the ban for exposing these exploits, but sacrifices have to be made. It's the only way to bring enough attention to them to actually get them fixed," he wrote. These exploits have been in the game for far too long and have becoming widely accepted as a norm."

Wildcard, of course, addressed this guerrilla sentiment in its response, essentially saying that the company would prefer its community to address complaints about exploits more formally, via a troubleshooting report, rather than publicize them on a platform like YouTube. "There are established methods for escalating exploits to the development team that exist to prevent the spread of information to the general public," it read. "The more widely known an exploit is, the more likely it is to be exploited."

Your mileage on this controversy will depend on how effective you think H.O.D. Gaming's protest was, or if you think it introduced a whole new group of people to some of Ark's more fragile invisible walls. One thing is clear though; fixing the exploits would solve all of these problems, all at once. The simplest answer is usually the right one.