Eurogamer

Loot shooters have changed a lot since Borderlands first introduced us to the idea of running around a battlefield like a trigger-happy magpie. The likes of Destiny and The Division have taken the simple act of robbing a corpse blind and added new layers of complexity, gear and painstakingly micro-managed weapon mods.

In this brave new world of agents, engrams and unlockable emotes, you might well ask whether the tried and tested Borderlands formula can really capture players' imaginations without being significantly reworked. To put it another way, will Borderlands 3 stick to its own format or will it cannibalise its more recent contemporaries in order to fit a changed landscape?

This was the main question on my mind as I sat down for a 90-minute chunk of hands-on time at a preview event in Los Angeles, and I can confidently say that Borderlands hasn't moved an inch - in a good way.

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DARK SOULS™: REMASTERED

Two years. One thousand hours. One masochistic programmer. Those are the key ingredients mod author Scott "Grimrukh" Mooney claims to have put into Dark Souls mod Daughters of Ash: an overhaul mod for PC which provides users with a huge amount of new content. It originally released back in January for the Prepare to Die edition of the game - and impressed us so much we even interviewed the mod author.

As promised, a version for Dark Souls Remastered has been released, and is now available for download. Unusually for a mod project, it's right on schedule.

So, what can you expect from this mod? Pretty much everything: it's constructed using existing models in Dark Souls - many of which are taken from cut content - and provides users with "new bosses and enemies, new characters, new storylines, new weapons and items, expanded lore, and plenty of new secrets". Grimrukh claims the mod provides "twice as much content as the original game", and will take players more than one playthrough to explore, thanks to its complex storylines. Here's a look at the Pinwheel boss fight in Daughters of Ash:

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Saints Row: Gat out of Hell

F. Gary Gray will direct a big screen version of Saints Row, Deadline has reported.

The director is no stranger to films about naughty folk up to no good, having previously helmed both gangsta rap biopic Straight Outta Compton and The Fate of the Furious, AKA the one with Charlize Theron.

Gray recently finished filming Men In Black: International, the upcoming reboot due to release in June.

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Mortal Kombat 11

There's so much to love about Mortal Kombat 11, a kind of Mortal Kombat greatest hits package and certainly NetherRealm's best-playing fighting game ever. But then there's a gnawing issue that drags down all the good the game does, like skeletal hands clawing at your feet.

The combat is considered. The action is hard hitting and high damage, but Mortal Kombat 11 is not a blisteringly fast fighter. Zoning - the act of lobbing projectile after projectile from a safe distance - is prevalent, as it always is with NetherRealm's games, but I've found success and a good deal of satisfaction getting up close and personal. Spacing is key, as is your ability to whiff punish your opponents for their mistakes. You'll also want a few low-high mix-up strings to hand and quickfire hit-confirming to turn those hopeful prods into juggles. For maximum carnage, special cancel into an eye-popping Fatal Blow.

If all this sounds like gibberish, fear not. Mortal Kombat 11 has perhaps the best tutorial yet seen in a fighting game. It eases you into an understanding of the way Mortal Kombat 11 - and indeed most 2D fighting games - work. I like to think I know my way around a frametrap, but Mortal Kombat 11's tutorial taught me a thing or two and refreshed my memory of a few fundamentals I'd long-since forgotten.

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Counter-Strike 2

It's another day of innovation in the games industry, as the latest CS:GO update introduces respawns and a ping system to the game's battle royale mode.

Update Sirocco brings some major changes to servers, and along with introducing a new desert-themed map (of the same name) it's adding a few mechanics which are becoming rather common in the battle royale genre. The new respawn system will allow players to resurrect "anywhere in the map" providing their squad survives. Players will have the option to either resurrect where they died or pick a new starting spot.

To be fair to CS:GO, this respawn system seems a little different to the one used by Apex Legends - and then Fortnite - which requires squadmates to pick up their teammates' banner and carry it to a respawn beacon. If anything this sounds more like Call of Duty's Down But Not Out mode for Blackout, which similarly just requires squadmates to remain alive before allowing respawns (albeit with each new circle).

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Eurogamer

Ubisoft has unveiled Ghost Recon Wildlands' latest free update, and it's a two-mission "narrative arc" called Operation Oracle, heading to PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 this week, on 2nd May.

Operation Oracle sees players embarking on what initially appears to be a routine hostage rescue mission to liberate a Skell Tech engineer from Unidad. As you might be expecting, however, things don't go quite to plan. "Forget what you know about your enemies and friends," says Ubisoft, "as you meet Cole D. Walker, a Ghost Team Leader on the hunt for truth."

Ghost Recon Wildlands' two new story missions can be played solo or co-operatively, and there's the briefest tease of what's in store in the reveal trailer below.

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Eurogamer

After much teasing and leaking, Valve has formally unveiled Index, its brand-new high-end virtual reality PC hardware. Pre-orders open tomorrow, May 1st, and it's out in June.

Index, which is being pitched toward more demanding VR users, consists of three new parts: the Index headset, the Index controllers, and new 2.0 base stations. While Facebook's recently announced Oculus Rift S utilises internal tracking, Valve has opted for an external tracking solution in Index, as it doesn't believe (it told Polygon) that headsets with built-in sensors are "there yet".

The Index headset features dual 1440x1600 RGB LCDs (compared to the original Vive's combined 2160 1200 resolution and Oculus Rift S's single 2560 1440 LCD panel), and promises "greater sharpness for the same rendering cost", as well as greatly reduced 'screen door' effect. It will run at 120Hz, but is fully back-compatibile to Vive's 90Hz (in contrast, the new Rift S supports 80Hz) and promises 20-degrees more Field of View than Vive.

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Eurogamer

Nintendo's Labo VR set is a lot of fun - not just the colourful, creative mini-games which come packed in, but the building of the whole cardboard Toy-Con, too.

But, let's be honest, its VR mode for Zelda leaves something to be desired. Nintendo's official Breath of the Wild VR update lets you peer through your cardboard goggles to view the game via a gyroscopic camera. Since you're holding the whole console up to your face, it's pretty hard to do much else.

Just as well, then, there's a couple of mods which have shown off what could be done with a more comprehensive option. First, a mod from MelonSpeedruns, SushiiZ, and Silentverge which offers up an impressive first-person view (thanks, Kotaku). Then, a mod which splits this view into VR, seen below:

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Eurogamer

Observation is trying to do something very complex, and if I feel, at times, like it's failing, I'm also not quite sure what "success", in this case, might look like. If I did, I suspect my ideas about existence in general would be rather different. The work of Glasgow-based Stories Untold developer No Code, the game casts you as an AI, SAM, aboard a damaged orbiting space station around seven years from now. In casting you as that AI, it also marks the point at which SAM ceases to be SAM and becomes something... else, a hybrid of human and machine traits, the player's curiosity and clumsiness mixed in with the AI's hitherto automated systems and procedures.

You struggle awake in darkness, starlight slashing remorselessly across a cabin hung with dust and components as the station spins in the aftermath of a mysterious collision. A woman is calling your name, her terrified face bleached by what you realise, with a start, is the light given off by displays and indicators that are, in some sense, "you". Announcing herself as Emma Fisher, she orders you to accept her voiceprint and give her access to the station's network, so she can work out what the hell has gone wrong. The trouble is, her voice doesn't match the print from your databanks. This creates the first of many introspective dilemmas, as you wrestle with the tension between what your mechanical faculties are telling you and the ideas and biases you bring with you, as the ghost forced into this machine.

"You can see that it looks like a glitch. An AI would reject it," observes No Code's co-founder and creative director John McKellan. "But a human would say, 'well, she sounds trustworthy, so I'll accept her'." The question of whether Emma is who she says she is, in other words, is also the question of who and what you are. "We wanted to create this sense of 'I'm meant to be in the walls' - I feel like I'm in the walls, like I'm the system, but the point is that right from the get-go, that's not your role," McKellan continues. "You're being asked to do that, but feeling like that's not your job anymore." Emma herself begins the game unconscious of your turmoil; as far as she's concerned, any delays or wayward actions on your part are errors brought on by the collision. This lumbers you with an unspoken second layer of objectives, on top of unravelling the enigma of your own being: either playing along with Emma, so that she doesn't begin to mistrust you and heaven forbid, try to deactivate you, or finding ways to communicate that you are not the mindless bundle of algorithms she takes you for.

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FINAL FANTASY XII THE ZODIAC AGE

As you may already know, this Final Fantasy 12 Zodiac Age remaster is based on the Japanese "International Zodiac Job System" version, which differs from the original release in a few key areas.

Most notable, of course, is the overhaul of the Licenses system. Characters now have a choice of permanant class, known as the Zodiac Jobs system, and within those Jobs a License Board is available which holds various upgrades, including new Gambits for your character.

As well as all that, we'll also be taking you through the best Jobs for each character - although it's a lot less important than you think.

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