Russian cosplayer Lada Lyumos has been working her way through the women of The Witcher series, including Shani, Keira Metz, and now Triss Merigold. The attention to detail in these shots, both in fine elements of her outfit like that stitching, and in the Renaissance-style composition (thanks to photographer Kira Mitenkova), makes some of them look like oil paintings.
Plenty of great cosplay photography resembles screenshots from videogames but a few of these photos, to borrow a phrase from Indiana Jones, look like they belong in a museum.
You can see more of Lada Lyumos' cosplay at DeviantArt, though I should warn you that some of it's NSFW, as you'd expect from DeviantArt.
PS: If you're getting ready to paste your rant into the comments about how mad you are the version of Triss in the TV show isn't white enough for you, maybe save that for somewhere more relevant, or just plain don't bother.
Players who want a low-stress way to play autobattler Dota Underlords without risking their precious rank will soon be able to do that, as it's getting separate casual and ranked modes in the next update. As Valve's blog post puts it, with tongue firmly in cheek, "we've made the ground-breaking design decision to have two ways of playing".
To unlock the ranked mode you'll have to complete at least five games in casual. Daily challenges can still be completed in casual mode, and you can queue up solo or with friends. However, in ranked mode you'll only be able to queue solo, which is bound to be a bummer for some people.
There's also a new rank system coming, one that's designed to be more transparent, and in which "your Rank is now a number you can see that moves up and down in a predictable way. This change is based solely on where you finish in a Ranked match and does not depend on your opponents' Rank."
Eagle Island is about exploring a mysterious shapeshifting island while pelting its exotic wildlife to death with a docile bird. Is this how falconry works? I don’t know. But you’re definitely using a lovely creature as live ammunition, which is a bit of a shock at first. And then, after the shock wears off, actually pretty funny.
Quill is the main character, a cherubic pixel boy with a penchant for avian-led assault. Having witnessed the abduction of his pet owl Ichiro, he’s forced to traverse a gorgeous island with his remaining pet, Koji, in order to save it. The island is a dreamlike blend of airy waterside exteriors and moody caves, and the game’s structure is a refreshing hybrid of Metroidvania and roguelike. The overworld is static, but each sidescrolling dungeon is randomised.
Birds of Prey
It’s not a roguelike, though. Overworld progress, as well as certain major abilities and bird attack types, stay unlocked permanently. It’s inside dungeons where the roguelike aspect rears its head: Dungeons contain another tier of abilities that are lost upon death, alongside all progress made towards an inevitable boss. The dungeon abilities comprise various buffs and bonuses, and each takes up one of four available ability slots. Upon death, all slotted abilities are lost, as is any currency accrued in the dungeon.
It actually works really well, to begin with: Those averse to the crushing loss of progress associated with roguelikes don’t have much to fear, because while the difficulty of the dungeons does ramp up significantly, there’s never the risk of losing a dungeon ability that strengthens the odds in your favour. Very few do. It's a bit of a relief, but also a problem for Eagle Island as it unfolds.
Combat is all about tossing Koji at all manner of native wildlife: Raging boars, angry fish, pleasant looking sentient flowers. Quill can only toss in one of eight directions, and at first this limitation feels stifling. Once adjusted to (with a controller—keyboard is not recommended for this game), the combat in Eagle Island can feel like a whimsically violent take on snooker. Each toss of Koji allows a short midair pause, and downing foes in rapid succession provides combo bonuses which can provide mana and, very rarely, replenish health.
Chirp off the old block
As a bird-loving shoot-em-up, Eagle Island works, and there’s no doubting how beautiful it is: both overworld and dungeon are brimming with lively animation and detail. But it’s ultimately shallower than it first appears. The first hour or so is spent unlocking an additional three attack types for Koji, which add fire, ice and electricity effects. Apart from situations where they’re required to solve breezy puzzles, I rarely used these more powerful attacks during moment-to-moment combat.
The scarcity of the mana required to use them, combined with the awkwardness of switching between attacks mid-combat, makes them feel useless most of the time.
That applies to the looted dungeon abilities too, which range from the ability to pirouette higher into the air, more rapid recovery for Koji, and various buffs to drop rates, among many others. Aside from a small handful of abilities—in particular, one that turns Koji into a homing missile—these tend to feel insignificant. None will flip the fate of your run. It’s possible to expand your maximum HP, and I invariably spent my cash on that, rather than abilities.
The dullness of the abilities undermines the light roguelike approach Eagle Island’s dungeons take, and while the level randomisation is a neat way to keep things fresh, it can’t hide the fact that, 90 percent of the time, you’re basically playing an 8-directional shooter (with a bird!).
The completion of dungeons unlocks permanent abilities that allow Quill to explore the overworld, and this is where the Metroidvania elements creep in. I loved this (very light) exploration in the overworld. On the other hand, the compulsion to explore the meandering dungeons is virtually non-existent because, basically, none of the in-dungeon abilities are worth straying off the beaten path for.
So Eagle Island is a slightly confused hybrid of a game: The movement, combat, mood and setting I loved, but it’s all hampered by dull abilities and a roguelike touch that doesn’t feel necessary. I reckon I’ll still boot Eagle Island up occasionally to feel the gracefulness of its movement and combat, but it’s hard to recommend to anyone but platformer diehards.
If you're looking for something a little different to play this weekend, Tribes of Midgard might fit the bill. It's an isometric co-op survival game set in the time of Ragnarok that pits groups of up to ten players against invading Giants of Jotunheim, and it's open to all in an open beta that's set to run until Sunday.
The Giants don't actually have a beef with you, but to reach Asgard and throw down with the Norse gods—who they do have a beef with—they have to pass through the human realm. And by "pass through," they mean demolish entirely in order to destroy the Seed of Yggdrasil, "the last bastion that protects the Gods from other realms."
Gameplay sounds a bit like Fortnite: Save the World, from a top-down, cel-shaded perspective. During the day you'll explore a procedurally generated game world, battle all sorts of mystical creatures, collect resources, and craft powerful equipment to use against the Giants; at night, you must defend your village from the invading Legions of Hel, who seek the Seed's power for their own ends.
Each day you survive, you and your people will grow stronger as you craft new equipment and strengthen Yggdrasil with the souls of your enemies. But make no mistake: One way or another, your doom is at hand. "Ragnarök is inevitable," developer Norsfell said. "But fight fiercely and die a glorious death to ensure the tribe’s brave souls arrive at the gates of Valhalla."
The Tribes of Midgard open beta is live now and scheduled to run until midnight on July 28. There's no NDA so you can stream and share all you want, but because it's a beta there are a few potential technical hitches that could come up: Day/night transitions may happen very suddenly and rapidly if you run into lag, and crashes are possible if you leave a world and join another without exiting the game first. Performance may also be iffy with a full team of ten, so if you run into problems, try setting the maximum number to six in the game creation screen.
The Tribes of Midgard open beta is available on Steam. The full release is expected to arrive sometime in 2020.
Re:Legend is a "sim JRPG" inspired by games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, except that instead of raising crops and farm animals, you're taming and raising monsters known as Magnus. It enjoyed a tremendously successful Kickstarter campaign in 2017 and then connected with publisher 505 Games for a planned Steam Early Access release in 2018.
These things don't always work out quite according to schedule, but 505 has now committed Re:Legend to an August 30 Early Access release on Steam. Players will awaken on Vokka Island with no memory of how they got there, and must learn to survive—farming, fishing, making friends, and occasionally fighting—while embarking on adventures to reclaim lost memories. It's playable solo, or in co-op multiplayer groups of up to four people.
Developer Magnus Games Studio described the Early Access release as the final phase of Re:Legend's development, but a full release isn't quite imminent. The Early Access period is expected to last 9-12 months, during which time players can "help the development team define the final game content." The game world will also be expanded with new biomes throughout the Early Access phase.
Re:Legend is currently available for wishlisting, and will go for $20 when the Early Access release is live. Hit up play-relegend.com to find out more.
Guns shoot bullets. This is a well-established standard feature of guns since the invention of guns. Except in some videogames, when guns shoot different things instead of bullets. Maybe sawblades or lasers or, if you wanna get really weird, skunks. This gun, which someone has modded into Fallout: New Vegas nine years after its release, also does not shoot bullets. It shoots baseballs.
"My first mod for Fallout: New Vegas adds a .44 Baseball shotgun (?) revolver that can be found in the Vikki and Vance Casino in Primm," writes modder T3MBONE on Nexusmods. I love many things about this. That people are still tinkering with Fallout: New Vegas, that new modders are still modding New Vegas, and that T3MBONE thought about what to do for their first mod, and went, hmm... "baseball gun?"
As baseball guns go, this is a sneaky one. See, the 3D model for the revolver still has bullets in its cylinder, so anyone who looks at it would naturally assume it's going to shoot bullets. But no. Surprise! It shoots baseballs. No one sees that coming.
You might think baseballs are less lethal than bullets, so why shoot baseballs? According to Popular Mechanics, a baseball can leave a bat at about 110 miles per hour, and "the average pro swing imparts 4145 pounds of force to the ball." A .44 magnum can fire a bullet with a velocity of about 1,450 feet per second, which works out to nearly 990 miles per hour. I'm gonna be honest, I skipped physics and have no idea how much force that works out to, but I'm pretty sure either a bullet or a baseball to the face is going to mess you up pretty good so I'm not going to try to do the math.
To test my mess-up-your-face theory (I did take some science classes, okay) I installed the Baseball Revolver mod, and spent entirely too long trying to find it before realizing it was sitting in plain sight on the bar counter in Primm's Casino. Then I fired baseballs out of it.
Baseballs, it turns out, are extremely deadly, unless you're using VATS. Then they're apparently not so good. But if you're not in VATS, you get to watch the one baseball you fired spawn about 20 more baseballs, which then fly all over the place. Good mod. Check out our guide to the best Fallout: New Vegas mods for more.
My Cragheart was out of cards and needed to rest, but the room was empty and the Scoundrel was itching to stab someone. I opted to open the next room and pop her Smoke Bomb for invisibility, just to be safe. The door revealed a large room with over half a dozen foes, including Bone Rangers and Living Spirits, who were all too happy to shoot me from afar when my invisibility ended. By the time the slow Cragheart ran up to help, I'd taken too much damage. It was a slow, painful loss, and a lesson in being better prepared.
Despite its occasional difficulty spikes, I adore Gloomhaven, the tabletop game. It's a tactical RPG in board and card form, and has been the best board game on BoardGameGeek since 2017. Gloomhaven captures the turn-based combat and progression of Dungeons & Dragons along with unlockable hidden classes, a huge campaign of nearly 100 scenarios, over three dozen monsters and bosses, and a Choose Your Own Adventure story with multiple avenues and choices. I've completed dozens of scenarios and sunk well over a hundred hours, and now I'm starting over with the new digital version on Steam.
Adapting such a behemoth was never going to be easy. Flaming Fowl Studios, born from the ashes of Lionhead, is taking an interesting approach by directly tapping the passionate Gloomhaven community and launching via Steam Early Access. The bad news: It's definitely not the full Gloomhaven campaign. Right now it has limited enemies, classes, and tilesets, and only supports single player. But the pieces are in place to eventually create a worthy adaptation.
The full Gloomhaven campaign features 17 classes, each with their own decks of cards, character sheet, and playstyle. Only six are available when you start a campaign. Right now, digital Gloomhaven features only four classes: Brute, Cragheart, Scoundrel, and Spellweaver. The only available mode is Adventure, which creative director Mike West describes as "a replayable, infinitely varied roguelike mode."
The lack of multiplayer is maybe the community's biggest complaint in Early Access.
"The Gloomhaven campaign is a HUGE undertaking, and it has to be released in one drop," says West. "Therefore, the best way of getting the game to players early is to add a completely new mode where players can take on fun adventures with the currently implemented characters and enemies. All the content and mechanics in Adventure mode have been vetted by [Gloomhaven designer] Isaac Childres to ensure consistency with the quality standards of the board game experience."
Normally in Gloomhaven you progress through a story campaign, unlocking specific scenarios and gaining rewards while building up the town of Gloomhaven and leveling up, retiring, and creating new adventurers. In Adventure mode I can select any combination of party with the four available classes—with the major caveat that I first have to beat it with a party of two to unlock bigger party combinations.
The goal of Adventure mode is to defeat three bosses, including the Bandit Commander, an early boss from the tabletop game. To get there I choose from multiple paths on the new map, with each path featuring different randomly generated scenarios and difficulty ratings. The roguelike portion is a bit of a hybrid, as losing any one scenario in a path causes me to reset and fall back to where I was. Given my experience level with the board game I was playing on 'Insane' difficulty, and failing a scenario was a devastating loss of progress. One of the hallmarks of playing the board game is that even if we fail, we still keep any earned experience and gold, but that's not the case in Adventure mode.
Adventure mode puts a unique twist on loot. I still gather coins during battle and spend them on items like Boots of Striding (+2 movement) and Eagle-Eye Goggles (Advantage on ranged attacks). But in Adventure mode each item has a limited durability that counts down for every scenario I have them equipped, whether I use them or not. It's annoying, but the amount of gold I earn and frequent items for sale balances it out.
Singleplayer Gloomhaven is still a blast, but the lack of multiplayer is maybe the community's biggest complaint in Early Access. "The Gloomhaven board game community REALLY wanted multiplayer earlier than we initially planned, so we adjusted our roadmap in order to have co-op multiplayer released during Early Access," says West. Even then, multiplayer support, along with the full 95-scenario campaign mode, won't be coming until 2020.
One major advantage of the digital version is that it performs all the monster actions for you, which is a huge time-saver. The animations are a lot of fun to watch, like the Scoundrel hurling a poison flask with the bottom half of Special Mixture, and Cragheart leaping into the air to perform a Hulk smash with Rumbling Advance. A lot of work has been put into how each adventurer and enemy attacks and animates, making the tabletop game come to life.
It's not all that nice: Environments suffer from excessive bloom, gold, chests, and traps are a bit small and hard to spot, and my framerate bottoms out whenever I select multiple targets for attacks.
More egregious are the limited enemies and tilesets. After several hours of Adventure mode, I've fought nothing but an endless horde of Cultists, Living Bones, and Living Corpses in a series of green-glowing crypts—though the Bone Ranger is an example of an enemy new to the digital version. It's a testament to how much I love the tactical design that I still enjoy these repetitive dungeon crawls, but playing with only a tiny fraction of the game box makes me desperately yearn for the rest of it, as well as future modding support.
"We have a backlog of features we want to add, and from watching streams and listening to our community on Discord, we can better understand what people are passionate about," says West. "Previously the community shared some insights regarding the Brute aesthetics, and we improved its design. Currently there is a lot of feedback asking for tweaks to the UI, or the need for better onboarding as the game is quite complex. Later during Early Access I think new features and content will become more requested once the initial feedback has been implemented. If something new comes up that people want then the release dates and order may change; it's very agile development."
With such limited content and no real tutorial, the current Early Access version will probably only be of interest to Gloomhaven veterans looking for a singleplayer option divorced from the campaign. The UI definitely needs a less cumbersome way to end movement or skip actions (and please, for the love of Gloom, give us an Undo button). But even a limited, somewhat clunky digital version of Gloomhaven is still one of the best board game experiences around.
An influx of rare items is playing havoc with Team Fortress 2's economy. Unusual quality items are appearing in a high number of crates and the marketplace is starting to be flooded with them, driving down their price. Today, a warning went up on the unofficial Team Fortress 2 subreddit telling players to stop trading items until the glitch is fixed.
"There have been numerous reports, and sightings in the wild, of an apparent serious economy flaw that is resulting in the guaranteed uncratings of Unusual quality items," wickedplayer494 wrote. "As a result, demand for certain types of crates believed to be affected has soared, and supplies of Unusual quality items are flash flooding the market."
Wickedplayer warns that unsanctioned real-money trades taking place outside of Valve's official Community Market are especially high risk at the moment, though dabbling in any grey market comes with lots of risks.
While Valve is yet to confirm the glitch, its impact is already being felt by the 12-year-old game's still lively economy. A quick hop over to the Community Market shows the significant increase in Unusual items. Good news for people hoping to get a sweet hat they've never been able to afford, but probably less so for people who treat Steam trading like a second job.
Take a look at the Unusual Birdcage above. It's a level 10 hat that's exactly what it sounds like, a birdcage you can plonk over your head. Over the last month, it's sold for anything between $19 to $110. Sales are often all over the place as people who don't know the value of the item chuck them in the marketplace for a quick buck, but today saw it hit a new low, going below $4. So far, 89 of these hats have been sold just today, compared to 20 across the last month.
With players and presumably less scrupulous sorts getting wind of this exploitable glitch, Team Fortress 2 has seen an explosion in concurrent players. It's been teetering around 60,000 players or just below, but today saw that leap to more than 90,000. People love their hats. And a fat Steam balance. You can see the most recent numbers at SteamDB.
Even if Valve manages to fix things today, it's unlikely the Community Market will recover quickly, if at all, with all these additional and once incredibly rare items floating around. Perhaps more drastic measures will have to be taken, but I expect there will be a lot of pissed off people if their sales get reversed.
Who better to take out a naughty samurai clan than Toy Story's diligent lawman, Sheriff Woody? Modder huckleberrypie has added the cowboy to Sekiro, finally allowing him to tap into all that rage that's surely built up after years of living with Tim Allen.
There's no time for jokes or heartwarming moments in Sekiro, and Woody has no interest in quips, just killing and silently staring with those cold, dead eyes. All the better to watch the life bleed out of a man. He's got a taste for it now. Toy Story 5 is going to be messed up.
Watch him slicing away at Owl Father in the video below:
If you want to put Woody in your game, you'll need to download the Sekiro Mod Engine as well as the mod itself, then copy the contents of the folder to your Sekiro mods directory. Fire up the game and you should have Woody instead of Wolf.
I highly recommend downloading the Thomas the Snake Engine mod, too, as it complements Woody perfectly. It replaces the Great Serpent with, obviously, Thomas the Tank Engine, complete with manic whistling. It's a nightmare. Check out our list of the best Sekiro mods while you're at it.
This week, Total War community manager Michael "Wheels" Whelan ended his final stream and last day at Creative Assembly with a message for a YouTuber. "Arch Warhammer is a dickhead," he said. "Goodbye."
Creative Assembly released a statement on Twitter today apologising for Whelan's comment, saying it was not up the developer's professional or personal standards. "We apologise for any hurt or harm caused," it concluded.
Arch Warhammer is a strategy YouTuber who also appears to go off on tangents about 'SJWs' ruining games and censorship in Total War. In his own video—which inaccurately portrays Whelan's insult as an official Creative Assembly statement—Arch Warhammer claims that he "triggered" Creative Assembly by criticising their curation of Total War mods.
Creative Assembly removes mods that are designed to "provoke, intimidate, or antagonise other groups, reference other IP, or create content of a sexual nature." The last one has upset modders wanting to sex-up Three Kingdoms and turn female warlords into waifus. Some players, like Arch Warhammer, reckon that's censorship.
While lamenting Whelan's lack of professionalism, Arch Warhammer's video partner calls him a "shill" trying to impress girls by "virtue signalling". Ah yes, the language of professionals.
I reached out to Sega and Creative Assembly but they had nothing to add to the statement.
