Ark: Genesis was announced by Studio Wildcard—a two-part expansion pack for the multiplayer dino-survival game Ark: Survival Evolved. We've seen the announcement trailer and some screenshots, and we talked to Studio Wildcard to learn a few interesting details about the upcoming expansion.

Here's everything we know about Ark: Genesis.

Ark: Genesis release date

There are two parts to the Ark: Genesis expansion. 

We don't have solid dates for either part yet, but as the announcement trailer above shows, we know Part One is coming in December of 2019. Part Two will follow in Winter of 2020.

Where and when does Ark: Genesis take place?

The name Genesis would seem to indicate that this expansion could be a prequel of sorts. An interesting detail from the teaser could hint at that: The wrist of the player isn't embedded with the specimen implant we've always seen in Ark. However, the presence of Helena and the fact that this appears to link up with the ending of Ark: Extinction, the previous expansion, contradicts the idea of Genesis as a prequel.

In other words, we don't really know where this fits into the Ark timeline. Feel free to speculate!

As for the map that will arrive with Ark: Genesis, we can see it has some volatile volcanic regions, some snowy mountainous areas, and some more temperate biomes. There will also be an expansive water biome.

You'll have an AI companion, HLN-A

You won't be alone in Ark: Genesis. Helena, the biologist who authored the lore-filled explorer notes, has created a hovering AI companion designated HLN-A. Fully voiced, she'll act as a guide, providing you with missions, tasks, and story, and she'll also have practical uses as she follows you around, like illuminating dark areas.

HLN-A can also perform her own version of emotes—as you can see in the image above, she can display a danger warning by projecting a skull and crossbones (though you probably already grasped the peril from the looks of the extremely angry creature.) She can also signal warnings for extreme heat, dangerously low temperatures, or even just give you a thumbs-up.

You don't have to wait for December to meet HLN-A. Players who pre-purchase the season pass can have her join them in Ark immediately, on any map in the game. She's not fully feature-complete yet but she can talk a bit and Studio Wildcard says she may give players bits of lore relating to Genesis as we get closer to its release date. You can also customize her looks with various dyes.

You can build a base on a giant turtle's back

No need to settle on one spot to build your base in Ark: Genesis. If you tame a giant sea turtle, you can build your home right on its shell. The turtle can swim around in the water biome, and even dive underwater with your base, which will be protected and oxygenated by the turtle with no need for scuba gear.

Resources will grows on the turtle's shell, so you can even do a bit of farming on your new aquatic mobile home.

What new dinosaurs will be added?

We don't have names for all the new dinos yet, but we know a bit about them already. There's the sea turtle, obviously. There's also the giant volcanic lizard, who has a powerful AOE attack and can also spit huge lava projectiles. It will be tamable, which is great because I'd much rather be friends with it than fight it.

There's also a small shoulder pet nicknamed Tiny. It's adorable until it gets its hands on some Element, one of Ark's resources, which makes it completely hulk out and turn into a vicious, rampaging multi-limbed fangbeast. Seems like just the kind of pet you'd like in your arsenal.

I'm sure there will be more creatures to fight and tame in Ark: Genesis, and we'll update this article as we discover them.

A public test for Halo: The Master Chief Collection's Firefight horde mode was supposed to come to PC in July, but it ultimately failed to materialize. The short explanation for the delay was "bugs"; the long version is also "bugs," but with an in-depth explanation of the Halo testing hierarchy, the current status of the Firefight mode on PC, and why it all seems so complicated.

343 opted to hold back the testing due to "blocking bugs" that it simply could not get past before the end of the month. "'Blocking Bugs' are 'blockers' in that they are deemed severe enough to prevent a flight from functioning as needed," 343 explained in a new Insider Update. 

"Keep in mind that though we address, mitigate and solve 'blocking bugs' for each ring of flighting, this doesn’t mean that any flight is bug-free. In fact, it’s quite the contrary since each flight is very much a work-in-progress development build."

"Rings," as 343 explains it, are essentially Halo-speak for milestones: Each ring must be passed without blocking bugs in order for a "flight" to move on to the next. Ring 0 is made up of an internal 343 team, ring 1 is "external partners that work closely with the studio," ring 2 brings in even more external partners, and ring 3 is the Halo Insider Group, selected based on "Key Performance Indicators" to test various aspects of game.

"At the time of writing this, we have just completed our first Ring 1 test for Halo: Reach FireFlight [what 343 is calling the Firefight flight, apparently, because why just call it a "test" when you can be unnecessarily confusing instead] on PC. Late last week, the team resolved the final key issue that had been blocking entering Ring 1 and now has a few bugs being worked on that are blocking Ring 2," 343 wrote. "There are currently five Ring 2 blockers, and fifteen Ring 3 blockers the team is working through:"

• Security solution does not auto-install once game is installed
• Long delays in menus accompanied by matchmaking errors can happen
• Opening the settings menu during gameplay can cause the roster to stay stuck on screen
• Frame loss can be experienced in various menus when played in higher resolutions.
• Crash is present sometimes when a matchmade Firefight game starts

Once the flight gets to ring 2, other bugs relating to navigation, crashes, and other issues will have to be dealt with before it can go to Halo Insiders. No date for that has been set: 343 said only that "flighting has moved out slightly," and the next round will take place "when it's ready."

"When we announced MCC coming to PC and Reach coming to MCC, we thought we knew exactly what the roadmap was to bring about the best game for gamers. We were wrong about a few things and this is something that happens often in the complex, fluid world of game development. To compensate for this, schedules around flighting had to be shifted out," 343 wrote. "But, even with these challenges, the development team has overcome them and is continuing to work on it day-in and day-out towards bringing MCC to PC and Halo: Reach to MCC the right way."

Halo: The Master Chief Collection will be released as individual games in chronological order, beginning later this year with Halo: Reach.

Correction: The post originally referred to the Halo developer as Bungie in two places. As absolutely everyone on the planet (including me) knows, Halo has been under the care and control of 343 Industries since 2012. Sorry about that.

"This is not Ark 2."

That secret message, decoded by some clever fans, was embedded in an Ark: Survival Evolved teaser page, and it's now been confirmed. There's no Ark: Survival Evolved sequel coming (yet, anyway), but Studio Wildcard has announced two new expansion packs collectively called Ark: Genesis. The first Genesis pack will arrive this December, and the other is planned for the second half of next year. You can watch the announcement trailer further down the page.

In addition to a new map, a new story, and some cool new creatures—including a giant sea turtle you can build a damn fort on—Ark: Genesis is adding something that's not a something. It's a someone.

"For Genesis, we're actually introducing our first speaking character to Ark who's with you throughout the game, in the form of HLN-A," said Jesse Rapczak, technical art director and co-creative director of Studio Wildcard, when we talked earlier this week.

HLN-A (an acronym for Human Learning Neural Aid) is a fully-voiced floating AI companion who follows you around, talks, gives you missions and goals, and brings the story of Ark to the forefront instead of concealing it in scattered explorer notes as it has in the past. In fact, HLN-A is a reference to Helena, the biologist who authored those explorer notes and created this AI companion.

"So instead of just being a sandbox survival experience," Rapczak said, "Genesis takes that sandbox heritage that comes from the rest of Ark, but wraps it up with some direction on things that you would want to do to get through the story points, and tackle the final boss, and uncover the next chapters of the story we're telling."

While you'll need to wait until December to experience the first part of Genesis, the season pass is available for pre-order now and those who purchase it will immediately get access to the first version of HLN-A in Ark. 

According to Rapczak, HLN-A will work on any current Ark map, follow the player around, talk and react a bit to player actions, serve as a hovering flashlight in dark areas, and perform a few other functions. 

Over the months leading up to the release of Genesis, Rapczak said they'll probably use HLN-A to deliver little snippets of lore related to the Genesis expansion to players that have obtained her by pre-purchasing the season pass. You can still play Ark with friends who haven't pre-purchased the expansion and they'll be able to see HLN-A following you around in the game.

As for the Genesis map, it will contain a number of biomes including dangerous volcanic regions, home to the massive fire lizard you see above, and a high-altitude "crazy snow mountain biome" with some severe survival challenges. There's also a small, tamable shoulder pet nicknamed "Tiny" who completely hulks out into a rampaging monster when exposed to Element, one of Ark's crafting resources.

And, again, there will be giant sea turtles and you can build bases on their shells. You can even harvest the resources that grow on its back and use its oxygen supply when it submerges.

If you're wondering why Ark is getting yet another expansion instead of a sequel, Rapczak told me it's due to the overwheming response to the previous expansions, which has kept Ark in the top 10 most-played games on Steam for the past two years. "The game has had a much longer life and enthusiasm from the community than really we could have forseen," he told me.

You can learn more at Ark's official site or watch the VOD of the announcement livestream. The announcement trailer is below.

You tear home from school, barge through the front door, sprint upstairs to your desktop and…you’re back at school again. The classroom has proved a popular setting for PC games through the years, flipping what’s usually—let’s face it—a dull place into one full of drama.

Some of the schools and universities from videogames are magical, and we'd have given our favorite yo-yo to study at them (we really loved that thing), while others are murderous nests of vipers that you’ll be lucky to make it out of alive. We’ve sat through lessons at all of them all to bring you this list: here are the best and worst schools in PC gaming.

Wade Elementary School – F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

In my primary school, we had a spooky basement that nobody dared to go into. Looking back, it was probably just where teachers kept the spare foam footballs—the ones that weighed a tonne when it rained—and the rounders bats (English baseball, basically). The rooms under F.E.A.R. 2's Wade Elementary School are genuine hell. A twisted test facility where kids are sedated, genetically-modified and experimented upon, before the scientists wipe their memories and send them back above ground for their math exam. 

The underground facility also houses Abominations, humans injected with chemicals until they turn violent, which are kept in cells of their own filth. It's not fully clear what part those monsters play in the experiments with children, but whatever happens, you can bet it's a lot worse than detention. 

Grade: F

Suffolk County Charter School – Fallout 4

Think your school dinners were bad? Try attending Fallout 4's Suffolk County charter school, where the only food is blobs of bright pink goo that dye your skin salmon. 

To secure funding from the government, principal Jackie Hudson entered the Nutrition Alternative Paste Program (NAPP), which is about as appetizing as it sounds. Any outside food is confiscated, so the Glee Club's annual bake sale offers not warm cookies and muffins, but different-colored cups for your daily gloop. Yay.

The school is abandoned during Fallout 4, but you can hear about the nightmare meals in audio logs, and see their effects firsthand. All the feral ghouls guarding the school are the colour of lobsters, poor things.

Grade: D-

School – PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds

In PUBG dropping the kids off at school would be the worst decision a parent could make. Dead centre of Erangel, PUBG's original map, School is a guaranteed clusterfuck. Dozens of parachutes spring open in the airspace above it as players scramble for loot on the roof and then dive into the corridors of death below.

The building itself doesn't give you much idea of what it would've been like to study there, and everything is worn down by the bullets of millions of chicken dinner hunters, but it looks like a fairly grim building, and one I doubt will ever open its doors to students again. 

Grade: D

Hope's Peak Academy  – Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Imagine thinking you've been accepted to the most prestigious school in the country only to find out the whole thing is an elaborate, violent hoax orchestrated by a mechanical bear. At Hope's Peak Academy, you follow the villain's rules. The only way to 'graduate' is to kill another student and get away with it. Every death launches a courtroom-style trial during which your brilliant peers try to catch the murderer.

Those students are a fascinating group of oddballs, with weird senses of humor and extravagant backstories, and getting to know them is a joy. In trials, you interrogate a subject and then fire 'truth bullets' (literally, bullets of truth) at their dialogue on-screen, blasting holes in their argument. It's some of the most fun you can have in a classroom—if you can get over being a plaything for an evil animal.

Grade: C

Bullworth Academy – Bully

The students at Bullworth Academy are split into exaggerated cliques—jocks, nerds, preppies, and greasers—and students are pelted with eggs or sprayed with fire extinguishers on a daily basis. But as Samuel noted when describing how much he loves the game, part of Bully's charm is how it captures an idealised version of teenage life.

Lessons are short minigames that don't outstay their welcome, and all anyone cares about is petty rivalries, awkward romances, and going to the funfair. "It's like school life without the shit bits," Samuel wrote, and if you can put up with being pigeonholed into a clique for your whole life, it might be a fun place. If you want to learn anything you might struggle, but the upside is you get to see hero Jimmy beat up every bully in class.  And what kid doesn’t want to see that?

Grade: C+

The College of Winterhold – Skyrim

I still remember the first time I saw the College of Winterhold, nearly eight years ago. I was trudging up the road from the south, huddling against a blizzard, when its stony outline loomed up through the whiteout, an island of dark rock in a sea of snow. 

The slender bridge connecting the town to the college, perched atop a pillar of icy rock, is gorgeous, and if you look south the whole of Skyrim stretches as far as your draw distance will allow. The life of an aspiring mage isn't easy and scurrying around after magical artifacts at the behest of your elders is a bore, but it's worth it to study in this isolated, beautiful corner of Skyrim.

Grade: B+

Hogwarts – Various Harry Potter games

Harry Potter is a PC gamer, apparently. Aside from a trio of mobile games and a couple of forgettable console releases, all of the franchise's games have come to PC, including all the main games accompanying the books and a couple of solid LEGO adventures. 

All those different games mean everybody that's played one will have a different memory of Hogwarts. For me, it's trying to sneak by Argus Filch in the Philosopher's Stone, my sister and I taking turns on the keyboard and cowering behind our desk chair when Filch inevitably catches us. "Oh dear, we are in trouble," he says—I still shudder at those words.

For others, it's the joy of exploring Hogwarts in the LEGO games, where the school is a lavish, detailed hub, and a design that would influence later games in the series. Whatever your memory, the wizarding school is no less magic on PC than it was in the books.

Grade: A-

University – The Sims 2: University

One of the best expansions in The Sims' history, University added a whole new age group, young adults, and let you follow them to college. They attended class (sometimes), pulled pranks, and started pillow fights in their student digs. Swooping from the sleepy rows of houses in your chosen neighbourhood to a vibrant college campus felt like entering an entirely new and more exciting game. 

There, you could join secret societies that let you hack straight As into your school record, graduate into four new careers and, most importantly, streak across the university quad. It wasn't all fun and games, and you had to work to pay for tuition by training other sims or filling shifts in the local coffee shop, but it was a welcome break from the real world. 

Grade: A-

No Man's Sky Beyond's launch trailer gives us our first look at the space sim's overhauled online universe, and it is extremely weird to see the normally quiet sandbox filled with players. It's so busy! Comparatively, at least. At the moment, you can only group up with three other players, but in Beyond it looks like we'll see people just wandering around, getting on with their business. And also riding crabs. 

Yes, aliens you can ride! Hello Games can probably move onto their next game now. What more could anyone need? And presumably it will be more than just big alien crabs. There's a whole universe of procedurally-generated beasties, and I'm sure a few of them will be able to accommodate passengers. 

Even with this important revelation, Hello Games isn't giving too much away. The post accompanying the new trailer just reiterates what we already knew: this is a 3-in-1 update that introduces an expanded online system, VR and some mysteries. 

On the PlayStation Blog, however, Sean Murray did expand on how multiplayer works, introducing the Nexus, the new social space.  

"Suddenly your ship that you spent 50 hours earning can now be seen by others in the Nexus. Your rare spacesuit and unique helmet can be shown off to other players. Friends and strangers can visit that massive base you’ve been working on.

"Progression in No Man’s Sky is so much more meaningful when you can share it with other explorers and so much more engaging when any creations or missions become shareable. Once you meet fellow travellers who knows what space-faring adventures you will go on together?"

No Man's Sky Beyond launches on August 14. 

Most people scoff a bit when I tell them that one of my favourite things about Mass Effect 2 is scanning planets. I get it—the whole act of clicking on a planet, watching a transition screen, turning said planet around its axis for a while until you’ve found a mineral deposit and then listening to the same lines over and over again as your probe launches isn’t exactly a rousing experience. It doesn’t have to be. 

The Mass Effect universe is an accomplished piece of world building. The moment I step into Shephard’s boots, I have a personal history that ties me to the achievements of the human race in outer space. Humans made first contact with new species, became represented in an interplanetary council and can basically go wherever they please. But the Mass Effect saga is also about uncharted space, showing us that for all that humans have seen and built, there’s always more of space to be discovered. 

To me, scanning planets is about discovery, in the most scientific sense of the word. It is, like Spock’s technobabble in Star Trek, an important part in delivering a fully realised world. Of course there is no practical use to me as the player in knowing the radius and day length of some random planet, but without them, it wouldn’t be a planet.

All shapes and sizes

The codex entries for planets consist of two different sets of data: a set of numbers describing the planet by parameters such as atmospheric pressure and surface gravity, and a description of whatever has been discovered during previous expeditions, such as the soil quality or any life forms present. It’s the kind of background info doomed to go unread but stuffed with detail all the same, which makes me love it more. Imagine the effort and dedication that goes into making whole solar systems worth of planets with different conditions—an immense world building endeavour—all just for you to scan a planet and siphon off a few stones. 

From a mechanical perspective, scanning is a more economic and far less tedious alternative to going down to a planet in your Mako and driving around until you find minerals (hate!), the way you do in the original Mass Effect. It’s supposed to be a quicker and more efficient form of resource gathering, grounded in the realities of spaceflight. 

I’d go as far as to say scanning could be intentionally boring, because not every job on a spaceship involves going pew, pew, pew. But imagine a crew hanging tiredly over their consoles logging the data of one more planet scan, suddenly faced with a major discovery. 

Take the planet 2175 Aeia, a name that sounds like a keyboard smash. After a cursory flyby, nothing noteworthy was recorded, until you go back and scan the planet again, only to discover that its atmospheric composition is very close to that of Earth. Have you just discovered a new habitat for humans? What kind of species already call this planet their home? Those are the kind of questions I can’t get enough of.

Infinity and beyond

Some planets, like Parnassus, are simply not in the Citadel database due to bureaucratic snafu, which makes me think about how even space conquest is nothing without a good backend filing system. Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda even go a step further and tell more detailed stories of how the planets fit into the world, detailing noteworthy history of who lives there or what happened to render a planet inhabitable. Whenever I find a rusty spaceship or satellite, I imagine the mighty storms that might have ripped them apart, whole stories that played out before I uncover the debris. 

Scanning planets in Mass Effect 2 shows that even at a time when devs have the storage capacity and graphical capabilities to let players run wild and explore even the most detailed world, what really inspires the imagination is to sometimes not be able to look at something—the same way the vague shadows in the original Silent Hill were way scarier to me than the bright, crystal-clear HD version. I dream of the stars and the life undiscovered, but I imagine there will be a lot of scanning before we meet our first alien, too.

GreedFall, a pseudo-historical action RPG coming on September 10th, has a new gameplay overview trailer out today. And it is quite the overview, giving a mention to everything from character creation, to classes, action and stealth, and (oh yes) romance with party members. 

It's an ambitious list that, as some of the comments below the trailer on YouTube have pointed out, gives off some serious Dragon Age: Inquisition vibes. Not just for the smooching, either. The trailer starts off with the character creation screen, giving us a look at all the pomp, circumstance, and brass buttons of the fantasy island. 

GreedFall's combat system involves magic, melee, and a "tactical pause option" that puts the breaks on the fight and allows you to choose a target and ability. Hopefully that points to some good RPG fundamentals at play giving you the ability to micromanage the rest of your party during difficult fights. 

The trailer continues with a laundry list of other features including dialogue that can affect how encounters play out, skill trees that allow you to approach quests in different ways (like using lockpicking or crafted bombs), and customizable weapons and armor. It's a combination that will be impressive if pulled off, though I do wonder if it will manage to balance stealth action and RPG-style combat in a way that makes both feel like equally viable and rewarding options. 

Companions seem to play an equally important role. The trailer shows what appear to be some quest cutscenes where the protagonist is able to choose dialogue to encourage or stay the hand of their party members. You'll be able to pursue romances with them as well but if they don't care for your leadership style you may wind up enemies instead.

We pointed out previously that Spiders has a decidedly mixed track record, with The Technomancer and Bound By Flame falling solidly in the "fine" range, while Mars: War Logs was more successful. That concern remains, though today's trailer does show much more gameplay than previous videos which were more cinematic. 

We'll find out on September 10th if GreedFall can put its systems where its mouth is in this tale of fantasy colonialism. 

Werewolves in Skyrim are pretty overpowered. First of all, they can maul the scales off a dragon’s back in a mere five swipes. They can also feed on corpses to regain health at an alarming rate. To top things off, their stamina is essentially undepletable. They’re lean, mean, wolfy machines. 

I like being a werewolf in Skyrim, but even when I crank up the difficulty it feels a little too easy. The only real downside is that, well, people kind of hate werewolves. That's never really a problem, though: I can browse for trinkets and treasures along the high streets of Solitude without having to worry about anybody finding out that I’m a lycanthrope, and if the going gets tough I can just press the Beast Form key and turn into a ripped wolfman capable of claw-punching every single enemy in the game. Where’s the fun in that?

Instead of playing Skyrim with the same conveniences again, I decided to make things a little more interesting by cursing myself as an Accidental Werewolf. By equipping the Cursed Ring of Hircine, you lose control over your transformations. They become involuntary, and once you feel that rumbling in your tummy you’re left with no choice but to accept what’s about to go down. Obviously I don’t want to become a vicious murderer—I’m a human first and foremost.

But again, humans hate werewolves. I'll kill them if I have to, but I'll feel bad about it.

Now that I'm wearing the ring, I’ll have to be careful when I enter towns. No telling when I might, whoopsie, accidentally metamorphose into a bloodthirsty beast. No more hour-long antagonizations of Nazeem. I’ll have to settle for a Fus—there’s no time for a Ro Dah.

I decide I’m going to try it out in a safe place first, so I fast-travel to Whiterun and make toward Markarth. I quickly realize that it’s actually been a minute since I last played Skyrim, so I start to press every key on the keyboard to rediscover how the werewolf control mapping actually works. Accidentally, I unleash an almighty bellow, which is immediately met by the roaring cry of a too-close-for-comfort dragon. It’s fine though.

Rock beats scissors, werewolf beats dragon. Funnily enough, two rogue mudcrabs somehow find their way into the midst of this epic brawl, but they weren’t exactly the fiercest contenders in Skyrim. 

I know I’ll probably turn into a human again pretty soon, so I decide to head back to Whiterun. It’s high time I paid my pal Balgruuf the Greater a visit, and I’m keen to net some catharsis after my bloody encounter with the world’s bravest mudcrabs. My plan fails immediately.

I transform into a werewolf right in front of Carlotta Valentia’s food stall and within seconds the whole town is out to get me. For the first time in a long time, Gray-Manes and Battle-Borns fight as Shield siblings, working together to expunge the monster before them. Even Nazeem joins in—there’s no place for werewolves in the Cloud District. 

I really don't want to murder everyone in Whiterun. I like these people! Desperate to avoid any conflict, I beeline for the sewers in the northeastern corner of the city and hide until I’m human again. Under the cover of darkness I slip out of the city undetected, wallowing in the fact that I can never return.

I run non-stop to Solitude in search of a fresh start. In between transformations, I frequent the Bard’s College before going down the Skeever for a pint. One pint only, though. Transforming at the bar because I stuck around too long to get sloshed would be a really embarrassing way to get kicked out of another town. The locals will turn against me in a heartbeat. As night falls, I decide to leave the city—it’s been a while since I last wolfed out, so I’m well overdue. Sure enough, it happens just past the hill that brings you down to the East Empire Company. 

I barely have a second to consider my luck before things take a turn for the worse. A wickedly powerful dragon descends from the heavens and starts spitting some kind of frosty fire at me. I really didn't expect to spend this much time fighting dragons. This is supposed to be an inner struggle with my own humanity, dragons! Butt out.

It's not really that inconvenient—I kick the dragon's ass without busting a sweat, but then I see red on the screen. What hit me? A bear? A bandit? A blooded vampire, jealous of my lycanthropy? 

Nope. Staring at me through eyes teeming with hate—at least that’s what I imagine, his helmet’s kinda hard to see through—is a young Stormcloak soldier, arrow nocked on a cheap longbow. 

I’m caught. For some reason, even though I’m covered in thick wolfy fur and stand a solid three feet taller than usual, guards in Skyrim are instantly able to recognize me when I'm a werewolf. My bounty goes up just for being seen! What am I supposed to do, guard? Wait it out until I turn back into a human? Werewolves don’t carry gold. 

These guards won’t leave me alone and I have the game difficulty cranked up. I’m in trouble. I think to myself: What would a werewolf do in this situation? It's time to really get into character. Probably retaliate with bared fangs and slashing claws, right? So that’s what I do—no more Mr. Nice Wolf. I let out a roar and before these unfortunate souls can swing their swords, they’re all dead. 

I feel conflicted now. I managed to play for hours before having a moral hiccup like this (a murder hiccup). I decide to venture back to Solitude to snoop around a little. I quickly realize I don’t have a bounty anymore, probably because I killed all of the witnesses. After about 20 seconds of deep thought, I conclude that I should probably try to make it up to society, to use my wolven powers for good. So I make my way to the Blue Palace to visit my good friend Elisif, hoping she’ll have a cave that needs clearing out or a bandit camp worth bringing down. 

Turns out I’m fresh out of luck, and so is everyone else. I didn’t think it was possible to turn again so quickly, but here I am stood in the Blue Palace, eight feet tall with wolf hair sprouting out of my shoulders. Ah. Fuck it. 

“Never should have come here!” yells Falk Firebeard. Poor Falk. You don’t even know what’s about to happen, do you? 

I bound around the Blue Palace on all fours, lashing out at anybody who gets in my way. Due to Skyrim’s annoying mechanic that has essential NPCs drop to one knee instead of actually dying, I’m unable to kill everybody in the palace. I also realize that I’ve been checkmated: As a werewolf, I can’t open the door leading back out to Solitude. But these NPCs keep coming, jumping back up from their one-knee respite pose with fully rejuvenated pools of health and stamina. 

They keep stabbing me, and the ring's curse means I won't be turning human again soon enough. My health is dropping rapidly, the screen starts fading into darker hues of grey, and… I'm dead. I ungracefully fall down the stairs, defeated by the Cursed Ring of Hircine. Werewolves are OP in Skyrim, but I’ll be damned if I’m good enough to play one who can't control himself.

As more proof that there's absolutely nothing we can all agree on, the news that Psyonix will be removing paid loot boxes from Rocket League has had a mixed response. There's a lot of support for the decision in the replies to the announcement tweet, but also cries that Epic, which recently purchased Psyonix, is "ruining" the game.

There are some good questions in the thread. It's the keys used to open crates that cost money in Rocket League, not the crates themselves, and some players use keys as a trading currency. Players want to know if their big key stashes will still be worth anything after the change, or if they should open all their crates right now.

But many others seem to just like the loot boxes. Ultra-rare Black Market items are status symbols in Rocket League, and a community has formed around collecting and opening crates. YouTuber Jon Sandman regularly gets over 100K views on crate opening videos.

It can be hard to tell what's shitposting and what's actual rage on social media, but the number of angry responses indicates that there's real opposition to the paid loot box removal, which may come as a surprise if you've been following the general discussion around the practice for the past few years.

Ever since the Battlefront 2 debacle, criticism from players, press, and governments has led publishers to defend loot boxes, remove them, or publish drop rates as a concession. Our readers overwhelmingly express distaste for loot boxes when we report on them. See the replies to this tweet, for instance.

There are plenty of Rocket League players who are happy paid loot boxes are going away—Rocket League pro Tigreee responded with hearts—but clearly the idea that everyone hates them is false. When a community of traders and YouTubers and fashion aficionados forms around the practice, as it has in other games as well, opinions start to vary. (There's also some generalized Epic hate involved here.)

Personally, I'm glad paid loot boxes are going. I admit I've occasionally enjoyed having ultra-rare items, but to get that stuff I've spent a lot of money on crap that just clogs my inventory until I can trade it up. I'd much rather be able to express myself with themed car designs without having to throw money away on decals I'll never use.

Besides, pretty much everyone I play with and against in Diamond-level Snow Day is decked out with animated decals and fancy goal explosions and painted wheels. It's how you put those things together that's interesting these days.

My Time At Portia, the colorful crafting adventure game, has released what it calls the Romance Update in celebration of China's Qixi Festival. For what the developers call "Valentine's day in China," the game is getting additional side missions for a few different characters.

Romance isn't new to the small island of Portia. Players have long been able to woo and date characters while on a mission to run the best workshop in town. Reaching a certain heart level with datable characters by interacting with them or giving them gifts allows you to go on a cute date event with that character. You can take your beau for a chat by the sea, a soak in the hot springs, or stargazing, among other activities that you'd expect from a laid-back and pastel island. 

Side missions for other romanceable characters include special events and quests specifically related to that character. With these new side missions for Nora, Oaks, McDonald, Albert and Sonia, developer Pathea says you can unlock "new NPC shops, a relationship between NPCs and the opportunity to build your relationship with NPCs too!"

This update also fixes a number of bugs, which Pathea lists in its news post about the update.