Sorry battle royale fans, but that 1000-player game nobody could stop talking about on Reddit is no more.

Ever since it was announced as Project X back in 2017, Mavericks: Proving Grounds was tossed around as the potential future for the battle royale genre. The original plan was to have 1000 concurrent players in a single world, with up to 400 people playing the PvP mode at the same time on a stonking 12km x 12km map. It sounded incredibly ambitious - possibly too ambitious, as UK studio Automaton Games has now gone into administration.

"Paul Cooper and Paul Appleton were appointed joint administrators of Automaton Games Limited on 30th July 2019," the studio announced on its website. "Please be advised that due to insufficient funding, the development of the Mavericks: Proving Grounds game has now ceased.

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According to EA's earnings call - an explainer of their financial results and expectations - Apex Legends will see its next big event at some point next month.

"The event coming in the next few weeks will bring new content and deliver one of the most fan-requested features since the launch of Apex," said EA boss Andrew Wilson.

But Apex fans have requested a lot, from cross-platform play, to singles and duos game modes, so it's hard to guess right now what feature Respawn will be blessing us with in the coming months.

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The Blackout Club is a co-operative crouch 'em-up that sees up-to four players assume the role of wily American teenagers who form a backwoods society dedicated to figuring out what the heckin' flip is wrong with their neighbourhood. Why do they keep waking up in strange places with blood on their clothes? Why are their parents sleepwalking in the street at night? And what is that weird-ass music emanating from underneath their homes? A lazy person might describe it as Thief meets Left4Dead. A lazy person, but also a correct one.

Setting up their headquarters in an abandoned rail-carriage, each night sees your teenage team embark on a mission into the neighbourhood to learn more about the mysterious entity invading your dreams. These missions are usually a combination of two randomly selected objectives, which could involve anything from putting up Blackout Club recruitment posters to following a trail of blood and seeing where it leads. You start out scouting the neighbourhood itself, but you'll almost always end up venturing beneath the houses, into a warren of white-walled tunnels simply known as "The Maze".

Developers Question have a strong heritage in immersive sim design, with credits that include Bioshock, Neon Struct, and Thief: Deadly Shadows. This heritage is apparent both in the style and systems of The Blackout Club. The neighbourhood's endless night is drawn in a rich, saturated palette reminiscent of Rapture's bloom-lit architecture, where the sky is a deep-ocean blue and each light is glaringly bright, emphasising just how visible you are when illuminated by them.

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Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled, developer Beenox's slick remake of Naughty Dog's much-loved PlayStation kart racer, is getting a brand-new dinosaur-themed track this week, as part of the freshly unveiled Back N. Time Grand Prix event. Oh, and Activision is taking the opportunity to introduce micro-transactions too.

Back N. Time is a new limited-time Grand Prix event (following on from Nitro-Fueled's recent Nitro Tour effort), and comes to Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One this Friday, 2nd August at 3pm in the UK/7am PDT. It runs until 25th August.

Activision's latest offering is an all-round dino-flavoured affair, introducing new karts, skins, characters, and customisation items, plus the aforementioned new track, Prehistoric Playground. This is said to feature "Jurassic-sized flora, violent geysers bursting from the ground, caves with mysterious wall-paintings, and of course, giant dinosaurs roaming the land".

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Free-to-play battle royale hit Apex Legends is continuing its foray into the heady world of organised eSports, with Respawn Entertainment today unveiling the game's upcoming Preseason Invitational, to be held in September with a prize pool of $500,000 USD.

Apex Legends' ongoing Preseason is a series of standalone competitions which has so far included the EXP Pro-Am Apex Legends Exhibition in Los Angeles and will resume this August at the EXP Invitational during X Games, Minneapolis.

The big money, however, is being reserved for the newly unveiled Apex Legend Preseason Invitational, which will be held from 13th-15th September in Krakow, Poland.

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Julian Gollop's X-COM spiritual successor, Phoenix Point, has once again been delayed, with the game now expected to launch on Xbox One and PC some time in December.

Phoenix Point - which delivers a blend of turn-based squad combat and base building, and has been described by Gollop as "a continuation and evolution" of the the ideas introduced in his classic 1994 strategy title X-COM - was previously given a release date of 3rd September.

However, in a new blog post from the developer team announcing the delay, posted by community manager Kevin Hill, the studio stated: "While the development team [Snapshot Games] is working hard, and Phoenix Point is shaping up really well, we now know we're going to need more time to get it to meet our very high standards."

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In what appears to be a regular occurrence now, eBay has launched another 20 per cent off voucher that you can use across a number of eligible retailers. The most interesting of these is Hughes Direct where you can take advantage of some big savings on 4K TVs, laptops and other home tech.

You can start with this LG 49 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV for only 279.20 when using the code 'PAYDAY20'. Its usual price floats around the 350 mark so that's a considerable 70 saving on what is a decent TV. Alternatively if you're looking for something a little smaller, the 43 LG model is also in the offer for 255.20.

These two are some of the best value offers you can get with the discount code, but there are many other TVs on the Hughes Direct store from various brands that you can apply it to, depending on your budget.

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A Nazi-infested world crafted by Arkane looks exactly as you think it should.

Dishonored's Dunwall excelled at polarity, its pomp and majesty juxtaposed with decay and death. Neu-Paris, too, echoes Arkane's masterfully macabre world-building. But where Dunwall's untold stories swam in the eyes of its dead and dying, Wolfenstein: Youngblood's Neu-Paris has no time for such sentiment. It is a city ravaged by war, yes, but there are no survivors padding these cobbled streets. There are only the self-indulgent trappings of the Reich, the endless pageantry of polished mahogany and billowing banners and scarlet soft furnishings... all swastika-branded, naturally.

Whether I was two, 12, or 20 hours in, it never failed to surprise me - shock me, even - to explore this alternate timeline and happen across another interrogation room, its tools and weapons and torture devices stamped with Nazi branding. While it might not quite rival that of Dishonored, take the time to look, and the detail in Youngblood's playsets is really quite extraordinary, especially if you cast your gaze upwards.

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This year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will bring back killstreaks, publisher Activision has revealed.

The rebooted boots-on-the-ground shooter is the first in a while to include the feature. Other recent games have used a simpler "scorestreak" system which tracks other actions as well as kills.

In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019, you'll be able to unlock the hulking Juggernaut armour and drive a tank. But perhaps most eye-openingly, you'll also be able to call in a burning white phosphorus smokescreen.

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I still can't believe it's really happening. World of Warcraft Classic! Blizzard has remade WoW as it was all those years ago when it launched (don't look at the dates, it's a bit depressing - where did all that life go eh? Nervous laugh). But here we are, one month to go. One month until we can play old WoW anew. Will the experiment work? Will we actually want to play it? Will all the yearning and petitions and hoo-ha have been worth it? Or will we discover it was a bit boring after all?

As the doors close on the beta, and as the team knuckles down in preparation for launch, I take lead software engineer Ryan Birmingham, and senior software engineer Omar Gonzalez, aside for a chat.

Thank you for joining me. I've just been watching videos of the final moments of the WoW Classic beta, of Ragnaros stamping on everyone in Orgrimmar, and it was joyous! What a great idea to spawn him in from Molten Core - who came up with it?

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