After being delayed for a year, roguelike RPG Children of Morta will appear on PC in September. I've slept on this family-based monster-slaying romp when I absolutely should have been paying attention—it's stylish as heck. Do your eyes a favour and check out the release date trailer. 

The Bergsons are a family of heroes defending their mountain from the Corruption—yep, that again—that's filled it with monsters. You'll be able to pick one of six Bergsons with different fighting styles, personalities, and flaws, but the game's about the whole family working together. Even the granny has a job, though lamentably it's not fighting monsters.

It's a story-driven misadventure about familial ties, sacrifice, and hitting monsters with a sword. Colour me intrigued, but it's really the stellar art that I want to see more of. There aren't many trailers I'll pause to admire, and even fewer where I'll stop to look at a rug. 

I'm looking to replace the one the dog pooped on. 

Children of Morta is due out on September 3 on Steam and GOG. 

Though it sounds as if it may have already been patched out on console, there's currently a glitch in GTA Online on PC that will let you fill your pockets with casino chips quickly and easily. The glitch allows players to win the maximum payout on an Inside Track race while only risking a couple of hundred chips.

Seeing as how this is basically an exploit, I won't explain how to actually do it, but you can find it pretty quickly if you search the internet. It doesn't require any bots or scripts: it's just about using your mouse in a certain way when placing your bet. 

Be warned: We don't know if or how Rockstar will punish players for using this exploit, but you could be risking having your account banned or losing all those chips if you get busted. And it's probably not worth it, honestly, to win a bunch of fake money while you sit in a casino, though I myself have been doing it a bunch today because I'm a filthy cheater.

The exploit only works with the Single Event betting option, not the Main Event (multiplayer) races. Essentially, you start the race having bet only 200 chips, but while the race is running your bet continues increasing, even though you can't see it happening. If you lose, you just lose the 200 you bet before the race started. If you win, you win whatever the maximum payout is. I just tried it this morning and it's definitely still working.

The smart thing to do is not risk your account by using this exploit. But if you do use it, then the smart thing to do is to bet on the #1 horse, which always has the best chance of winning. The payout won't be massive if the odds are evens or 3/1, but you'll win more often than not. With even odds you'll get 20,000 chips with each win and only lose 200 if your horse doesn't finish first.

Or, you could do what I do, which is bet on the #6 horse which usually has odds somewhere between 20/1 or 30/1. You won't win often and you'll be losing 200 each race, but when the #6 horse does win the payout is huge. I just won 270,000 on a 26/1 horse. It's a big payday for a lousy cheat like me. 

I'll let you know if Rockstar takes away my ill-gotten winnings somehow. Proceed at your own risk for now.

System Shock developer Nightdive Studios posted its August update on the remake's Kickstarter, teasing a new level, concept art and character designs. There's a lot of art to rifle through, but more importantly we get a look inside one of System Shock's futuristic lavatories. Finally!

We're quite fond of videogame loos here are PC Gamer, even interviewing devs to find out what virtual toilets can teach us about the art of game design. They're important rooms. Who hasn't had an epiphany while their bottom is perched on a porcelain throne?

System Shock's toilets do not look comfy, unfortunately. They're a horrible mashup of a train toilet and a festival portaloo. This one looks clean, though, which is a plus. The red, ominous lights, on the other hand, are very off-putting. I don't want to put my bum on a menacing Cylon. 

Wes took the remake for a spin earlier in the year, saying that it feels like System Shock in all the ways that matter, even with remade levels and modern graphics. 

"It felt like a game from that era, but with mouse support and an easy menu screen for managing items. There's also a certain retro chunkiness to the graphics: Not a lack of detail, but a style of square corridors and sharp angles and big glowing buttons that all feel like they'd be at home in a '90s game." 

Give his System Shock preview a read.

System Shock is due out in 2020.

Update: Bohemia Interactive has clarified that the classification, or absence of one, doesn't effect the digital version of DayZ, only the upcoming physical edition. It's still available on Steam in Australia. 

Original story: DayZ has been refused an age rating by the notoriously strict Australian Classification Board. It's not unusual for games to not receive a rating in Australia, often leading to developers making changes to fit the draconian rules, but DayZ has been available in Australia for years. It entered Early Access in 2013 and finally launched last year. 

The classification page (cheers, Reddit) shows the decision was made in June and was applied for by Five Star Games, an Australian distributor. The reason for it being refused classification, which essentially means it's banned, is that it depicts naughty things that might offend. 

It apparently depicts or expresses matters of "sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that they should not be classified."

DayZ was already rated, so it's not clear why it was refused classification when it's exactly the same game. We know DayZ is getting a physical edition this year, which is probably why distributor Five Star Games is involved. What doesn't make sense is why the rules would be different for digital and physical games. 

So far, it's yet to affect Steam, as DayZ continues to be sold in Australia, but this may halt the physical launch. I've reached out to both Bohemia Interactive and Five Star Games for more details. 

If you needed it, this is your warning that images and links in this feature are entirely not safe for work.

There are mods to make the characters in just about any game you play naked. The virtual humans of Stardew Valley, Fallout, Fallout Shelter, even, and Hearthstone are all subjected to the whims of diligent modders. Every time I set out to grab mods for a new playthrough of Skyrim or Fallout 4 (the two most-modded games on Nexus Mods), I'm overwhelmed by the number of gravity-defying breast enhancements available. And yet the number of dicks on display? Dismal.

Where are all the penis mods? One simple answer is that PC gaming, ground zero for modding, still suffers under the misconception that men (specifically cisgender, heterosexual ones) are the majority, when studies have shown that women actually make up half the audience. Game development still fights to retain people of marginalized genders, an effect mirrored in the modding community which requires many of the same skills. The mods they create reflect the interests of the creators and assumptions about the people playing them—but as I learned, that's not the only reason they're so pitifully rare.

After talking with modders and developers, it turns out that tacking-on the ol' wedding tackle is just plain difficult.

An unfortunate dearth of dongs 

When I went digging for more dick mods and the reasons why they're so rare, I discovered that for a few modders, scarcity is exactly why they want to create these mods. "All over the place there are nude female body replacers and [almost] nothing like that for men, and that's exactly the gap that I intended to fill with this mod" writes modder Ratrace, in the description for Better Males for Skyrim Special Edition. 

As Ratrace says on the mod's page, the dongs of Better Males are quite rigid, and not in the sexy way. They don't animate. It's as if you'd taped a banana to your character's crotch and called it a day (though for variety you can choose upward banana or downward banana, whichever suits your fancy). "Animating genitals [...] is something that is way over my head," Ratrace says. "A topic for the pros among the modders." Better Males isn't the premier expression of modded penis glory, but for many modders even that level of detail is unattainable, both because of the skills required and how games are built in the first place.

I first noticed this sexy mod dick-screpancy four years ago (yes, I have been stewing on it that long), when there were even fewer options. Today, there are a few more choices, with examples from Skyrim, Fallout 4, Resident Evil 2, and even Soul Calibur 6. Still, I expected more progress since 2015. I didn't intend to spend my work days looking for penis mods specifically, but here I am again absolutely livid that there aren't more of them. 

Ratrace tells me about some other notable contributions to the naked modding community for Skyrim, the well-known Schlongs of Skyrim and Bodyslide. But when I investigate, I find Schlongs of Skyrim is no longer supported by its original creator, gone from Nexus and available only on the adult modding site Lover's Lab. By comparison, boob mods are easy to find on Nexus for tons of games. Bodyslide, a body preset generating tool, supports penises, but I really have to know what I'm looking for to find them. Searching "bodyslide" alone yields pages and pages of fantastical boobs but very few penis presets. As one of the most-modded PC games today, Skyrim's few hard-to-find dick mods don't bode well for games with smaller modding communities. 

The creator of the Nude Greece mod for Assassin's Creed Odyssey (which originated as only Nude Alexios) explained to me that penises are at a distinct disadvantage right out of the gate. Characters in 3D games very rarely have them, and building a dong from scratch is a difficult anatomical proposition. He blames what he feels is a lingering taboo across all forms of media on naked nads. "In games that means Ken doll models that are hard to work with," he says. 

Feminine models, by contrast, already have the proper silhouettes right out of the box. Their bodies may not be highly detailed in the places that nude modders care about, but they at least have all the necessary geometry to begin tinkering with. 

"No studio would release a title with entirely flat-chested females," Nude Greece's modder says. He's right. Unless by specific stylistic choice, realistic-looking 3D games will always have women character models with some kind of breast shape. "So while female models are easy to strip, males need some level of editing or they'll look completely fake. The tools need to be available for mesh modding to even get one started."

Aspiring modders may not have all the requisite skills for enlarging or physics-ifying breasts, but they can start by learning to retexture the ones already there. When it comes to dongs, the barrier to entry is much, much higher. As Nude Greece's modder says, that means a lot more work up front for penis modders. 

Ratrace describes just part of the technical work required to slap a sack and shaft on a character. The mesh, which I think of like the chocolate skin of a hollow chocolate bunny, has to hold together in all the proper places. When a character moves around, the mesh has to accommodate that movement without just snapping back and giving you a view into the hollow inside of, say, an arm. Or a penis. Ratrace says that "painting" the proper influence or "weight" that vertices of the model have is tough enough for commonly-used areas like the line between neck and body, let alone the unexplored territory of penis to body. 

Nude Greece's modder encountered issues with his original Nude Alexios mod, where all of the crotches just looked a bit flat. "The first version got a good response despite having a pretty flat-looking crotch," he said. "Hopefully my next release will have more detail in the places that need it." He's learning the skills and tools for modding as he goes, meaning that progress involves spending more time modding games than playing them. Nude Greece's modder and I get to spend a few minutes bonding over our shared hope for penis-filled games in the future. We settle on Dragon Age as a good penis prospect—Inquisition being his first attempt at penis modding, and a natural fit given the softcore sex scenes.

Since we've spoken, Nude Greece released an update for his Assassins Creed Odyssey mod that suggests his skills are improving: "Adds depth to the v2 penis so it looks less flattened." Important progress.

The professional penis scene 

Even though we know designing after-market dicks is a chore, the discrepancy is there at the source in professional game development, too. Only a few pioneering games have launched with their own packages packed-in. One that we got a particular amount of pleasure from was Conan Exiles' "endowment" slider.

Joel Bylos, creative director for Conan Exiles, explained to me by email how his game's disco sticks came to be. "I was more interested in nudity for the adherence to the setting," he says. "The Conan stories feature plenty of it and nobody in the stories bats an eyelid at it. I wanted to try and normalize it in the same way in the game, both for men and women." Bylos also points out the generally mature nature of Conan's universe. Given that the game would feature plenty of violence, it would already fall on the mature end of ratings scales before considering nudity.

This was heartening to hear, as multiple modders expressed frustration that so many games give violence a pass but turn their noses up at nudity. "In Skyrim people get decapitated, burnt to death, electrocuted, bludgeoned to death, torn to pieces by dragons etc.," Ratrace says. "But the sight of a naked body is a no-go."

Bylos says that Funcom's experience with digital dongs was far less hassle than what modders experience. "I don’t think the penises caused us too much drama," he says. "If I recall correctly we used the same physics system for simulating cloth that we used for our wedding tackle physics." That too is an imperfect simulation, of course—I've never seen a penis as unanimated as that of Ratrace's Better Males, but I haven't seen one flap like a flag like Conan Exlies' do, either. Even with professionals working on Conan's willies rather than vigilante riggers hacking together body parts in their spare time, not all Wilhelms are well-behaved.

"For a period of time, every todger in the game decided to stretch across the map," Bylos says. "This was due to a cloth physics bug, but it manifested as every character in the game having a wang that stretched from crotch to the far horizon. We had curious developers 'following the stretchy dick road,' in order to figure out where the wayward members had buried themselves. As it turns out, they went to coordinates 0,0,0 and nobody found any treasure at the end of the journey. Shame, really."

After everything I've heard about keeping peckers in line, I ask Bylos if the work of sorting out all the various boner bugs was worth it. "For the amount of work involved, it would have been worth multiple times the amount of time spent on it," he says.

So perhaps we'll see more games following Conan's lead? "Sadly, but understandably no," in Bylos's opinion. "There have been a few (SCUM, for example) but I think that most developers don’t want to deal with the uncertainty (whether it involves the process of modeling characters or dealing with ratings)." 

It is a shame that Skyrim and Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Dragon Age: Inquisition, all of which could benefit from some dongs to better serve their realism or sex scenes, haven't included them as Conan Exiles has. All three have ratings from the ESRB, PEGI, and Australia's rating system permit intense violence and nudity or sexual content. It seems that where bodies are concerned, breasts are deemed a necessity but penises are still a luxury.

By and large, dong development will likely continue to fall on our noble friends in the modding community. As Ratrace says, there's a gap to fill with fully-featured dong mods. Although the audience and talent pools may both be smaller than those for big-busted characters, both are growing. The original Better Males for Skyrim has a download total of 7.8 million on Nexus Mods alone, while Ratrace's version for Skyrim Special Edition is on its way up at over half a million. I don't have the skills to model and mod willies myself (though like Nude Greece I suppose I could learn). But I have, inadvertently, become a devoted lobbyist.

"I get angry too at all the bias against dicks. But that's how change starts," Nude Greece says.  "More dicks for everyone!" Modding penises may be hard, but we wouldn't have them any other way.

Decay of Logos is a fantasy RPG with a strong whiff of Breath of the Wild and Dark Souls about it. More specifically, it blends the art style and exploration of the former with the exacting, slow burn combat of the latter. The Steam description proudly boasts that it has "minimal hand-holding", and most importantly, it features a "mystical elk" companion.

According to studio Amplify Creations, Decay of Logos is inspired by European folklore and J. R. R. Tolkien (All it's missing is a Summoning soundtrack). "The girl [ie the player character] and the Elk fatefully meet after her village is destroyed by one of the King’s sons," so reads a description on the game's website. "Battered and oblivious of the culprit behind the attack, the girl will not rest until she has her revenge. During her quest she will unveil secrets about the King and his sons, slowly realizing that all is not what it seems."

As the video below demonstrates, the game has a "high risk-reward battle system" with a variety of weapons both long and close range. All the Dark Souls trappings seem intact: you can parry, dodge and counter-attack, and the combat seems fairly reliant on stamina management. Likewise, the game boasts a "semi-open world", so expect something more in line with Lordran than Hyrule. 

It'll have a pretty austere approach to its RPG elements, too. Equipped gear will only be visible on the character model itself, and levelling is "fully automated and based on your play style", presumably in the manner of Skyrim.

Whatever the case, it's worth keeping an eye on: it releases August 30. And thankfully, its resemblance isn't so close to Breath of the Wild that it might compel people to smash their consoles in protest. Phew.

After a detailed Kotaku report last year highlighted serious issues of sexism and harassment at League of Legends developer Riot Games, the studio hired a chief diversity officer, Angela Roseboro, to help it improve its workplace culture. On Tuesday Roseboro published a post on Riot's website outlining the studio's progress so far, stating that "My goal was to not only create a true 'North Star' or vision that would provide an anchor for our diversity and inclusion work, but I also wanted to have a solid foundation for a multi-year roadmap with tangible actions, accountability, and measures to monitor our progress."

Roseboro added that "it was clear that the last six months had taken their toll" at Riot, leading to divisive conversations and high tensions. "But even in the midst of all of this, Rioters never lost their love for this company and they wanted (demanded) us to be better," she wrote.

Roseboro listed many of the actions Riot has taken over the past year to address diversity and culture, including hiring Emily Winkle as chief people officer, Frances Frei as a diversity and inclusion adviser, and Youngme Moon as a member of the board of directors heading a committee "solely for holding Riot accountable on D&I." With those and other hires, the executive leadership team is now 28 percent women and 45 percent minorities.

Without getting into specifics, Roseboro wrote that Riot has "implemented a process to review all job postings to ensure we have the most inclusive language possible to attract diverse applicant pools," made interview training mandatory for hiring managers, and created a diversity initiative to include more minorities at "director level and above."

While Roseboro's post doesn't mention any of the sexual harassment allegations brought up in Kotaku's 2018 report, it does say that Riot has updated its Code of Conduct and company with input from employees. A recently completed list of 30/60/90 day goals for the diversity and inclusion team also references a "behavioral boot camp" for the Riot leadership. 

It's noteworthy that one of the high profile figures in Kotaku's reporting last year, COO Scott Gelb, was given a two month suspension but remains at the company. At the time, employees criticized the wrist-slap punishment for an executive who had farted on or humped employees as a joke.

As recently as this May, Rioters staged a walkout over forced arbitration (which the company has said it would let incoming employees opt out of, once the existing suits were resolved). At the time, some employees who participated in the walkout expressed frustration that little had been done to change the company's cultural issues.

"So far I haven’t seen a single outcome of our diversity and inclusion efforts at Riot. I haven’t seen a single metric or number to indicate things have improved and I haven’t seen a single project get finished," the employee told Kotaku. A California investigation into fair pay and gender discrimination is also ongoing.

Now three months later, Riot has concluded its initial 90 day plan to address those issues, spearheaded by Roseboro. Her plans for Riot moving forward include "putting actions and measures in place that hold leaders accountable for results," "creating and implementing strategies to increase representation of women and under-represented minorities," and "ensuring that diversity practices are embedded in all people processes."

The post does not include comments from any Riot employees other than Roseboro, nor has it been posted on Riot's social media channels. Until employees weigh in, we can't say whether they view the company's past three months of diversity work as positively as its chief diversity officer.

Everybody was excited about DuckTales: Remastered, the 2013 update of the hit NES platformer from 1998, until it actually arrived and we all learned an important lesson about nostalgia. It wasn't bad, really, just a little too faithful to its roots—"very much a 24-year-old game," we said in our review—yet lacking the touches that would enable players to enjoy the game as it really was, like an 8-bit mode or the original soundtrack.

If you haven't tried it yet, you'll probably want to get to it very quickly, for two reasons. One, it's currently on sale on Steam for $4/£3/€3.50, which is a pretty great price. And two, at 4:59 pm PT (or thereabouts) on August 8—two days from today—it's being removed from sale.

Disc-based versions of DuckTales: Remastered will continue to work as they always have (although that's probably more relevant to console versions of the game) and if you've purchased it digitally already, you'll still be able to download it after it's delisted. As for why it's being delisted, Capcom didn't say, but I'd guess that it has something to do with expiring license deals.

I've emailed Capcom to ask why the remastered tales of the duck are going away and I'll let you know if and when I receive a reply. In the meantime, Steam says the promotional price is good until August 10 but remember—August 8 is the hard deadline.

In April, Rocket League developer Psyonix disabled crate keys in Belgium and the Netherlands in order to bring the game into compliance with new loot box regulations in those countries. Today it went a step further—a big step further—by announcing that it's ditching them entirely.

"Here at Psyonix, and Epic Games as a whole, we are dedicated to creating the best possible experience for our players all over the world," the studio said. "In pursuit of that goal, later this year we will remove all paid, randomized Crates from Rocket League, replacing them with a system that shows the exact items you’re buying in advance."

Full details will be revealed later, but Psyonix said the new system will be similar to Fortnite Save the World's X-Ray Llamas, which enable players to see what's inside loot crates before purchasing them. Rocket Pass Premium, DLC Cars, and Esports Shop items will remain available for direct purchase when the new system goes live, which is expected to happen later this year.

Epic Games Store exclusivity deals have typically been met with unhappiness from a vocal contingent of the gaming community, but last week's Ooblets announcement has been particularly ugly. In a new statement released today, developers Ben Wasser and Rebecca Cordingley, collectively known as indie dev Glumberland, offered a look at just how ugly it's gotten, but said that they have no regrets about opting to go with Epic.

Much of the outrage was sparked by the tone of the exclusivity announcement, which some readers labeled as condescending or outright insulting. Wasser said that tone arose from years spent with the Ooblets audience, which "has always been understanding, friendly, and appreciative of our very open and transparent style," and is also familiar with how the duo operates.

"We don’t take ourselves too seriously and maintained that throughout our multiple communication channels. It’s been that way for as long as we’ve been around," Wasser wrote in a lengthy message on Medium. "That’s why we were totally unprepared for the attention we got from the broader gaming/internet community, which was fueled by a deep misunderstanding of the tongue-in-cheek tone as condescending and patronizing."

"I did expect a small percentage of that outside group to read our announcement, and I very naively thought what we were saying might get them to see the whole EGS debate as lightheartedly as we did. By engaging directly with that crowd, I mistakenly thought I could have some impact on their opinions and emotions and defuse the situation with some lighthearted criticism of the main things that drove them to attack people. You can see how well that went. It was a stupid miscalculation on my part."

After the announcement went live, Wasser says that the Ooblets Discord was quickly flooded by "extremely polarized people" from "certain subreddits." Wasser acknowledged that attempting to engage with the newcomers was a mistake, as his responses were captured and shared in out-of-context portions, or sometimes completely fabricated, such as one claiming that he'd said "gamers would be better off in gas chambers."

Wasser also shared a small but harrowing sample of some of the messages he and Cordingley received following the EGS announcement, which include horrific racism and threats of violence: In other words, precisely the sort of toxicity that Wasser referenced in his initial announcement.

"There’s a strange relationship a segment of the gaming community has with game developers. I think their extreme passion for games has made them perceive the people who provide those games as some sort of mystical 'other', an outgroup that’s held to a whole set of weird expectations," Wasser writes. "These folks believe they hold the magic power of the wallet over developers who should cower before them and capitulate to any of their demands. You can see this evidenced by the massive number of angry people threatening to pirate our game in retaliation to any perceived slight."

"We’ve been told nonstop throughout this about how we must treat 'consumers' or 'potential customers' a certain way. I understand the relationship people think they might be owed when they exchange money for goods or services, but the people using the terms consumers and potential customers here are doing so specifically because we’ve never actually sold them anything and don’t owe them anything at all. And if they choose to not buy the game when it’s released, that’s totally fine with us."

The statement addresses other specific complaints that have arisen in the aftermath of the EGS announcement, including Wasser's use of the word "entitled" to describe people acting in an entitled fashion, and claims that they were ripping off supporters of the Ooblets Patreon—which, he pointed out, doesn't offer a copy of Ooblets to backers anyway. And in case there was any question, he also made it very clear that despite the PR nightmare, he stands behind his original statements.

"A portion of the gaming community is indeed horrendously toxic, entitled, immature, irrationally-angry, and prone to joining hate mobs over any inconsequential issue they can cook up. That was proven again through this entire experience," he wrote. "It was never my intention to alienate or antagonize anyone in our community who does not fit that description, and I hope that you can see my tone and pointed comments were not directed at you."

Wasser thanked the Ooblets community and supporters, especially those who have helped to moderate the Discord through the uproar. He also expressed particular gratitude to Epic for its "unwavering support" throughout the ordeal: Yesterday Epic released a "statement on misinformation and abuse," decrying the "coordinated and deliberate creation and promotion of false information, including fake screenshots, videos, and technical analysis, accompanied by harassment of partners, promotion of hateful themes, and intimidation of those with opposing views," and pledging to "steadfastly support our partners throughout these challenges."

"A lot of companies would’ve left us to deal with all of this on our own, but Epic has been by our side as our world has gone sideways," Wasser wrote. "The fact that they care so much about a team and game as small as us proves to us that we made the right call in working with them, and we couldn’t be more thankful."

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, many of the comments on Wasser's post and the Ooblets Twitter feed continue to attempt to justify the abuse as fully deserved.