It s often said that the more restrictions you re working against, the more creative you ll become. We re planning to test that theory to its limits next Friday at PAX West, where our Nate will be inviting a team of developers to puzzle their way around some real thinkabouters in Rock Paper Shotgun s Game Design Hotseat.

How could you make a grand strategy game with only six old Casio calculators for display? How would you design a massively multiplayer online beat em up? What about an FPS controlled with a trombone? We won t be posing these questions (because we ve just put them here and that ruins the surprise), but we ll be posing questions just like them, and giving the team a tablet to sketch out their workings as they scramble for answers.

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Last night I met a guy, who knew a guy, who told me about a girl, who said she was penpals with some sort of rat thing, who wrote a URL down for her, all so I could get this footage of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 to you. I was up all night, and it turned out all I needed to do was Google. Anyway, here s some footage of the RPG straight from a developer s claws. It s so raw it s almost blue.

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New wee indie publisher Modern Wolf announced themselves to the world this week, and made a big show of declaring they are “committed to ethical game development.” Their initial lineup of five games sounds pretty neat, including the next games from the studios behind Neo Scavenger and Out There. More folks in the industry do talk openly about its troubles these days but it’s still rare for a publisher to make a big selling point of how they treat workers, so I asked Modern Wolf CEO Fernando Rizo more about what that means.

“Consumers are starting to care about how> their games are made, and we are striving to be the most ethical creator of games around,” he told me.

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Over the last week or so, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with the Logitech G432. I love it because it’s by far and away a much better gaming headset than the similarly priced Steelseries Arctis 1, and I’d probably even go as far as saying it’s arguably the best gaming headset I’ve tested around the 50 / $50 price mark. Its clear, natural and balanced audio is a revelation after the slightly muted efforts of the Arctis 1, and its flip-to-mute microphone is almost certainly the best I’ve heard outside of Logitech’s own G Pro X gaming headset.

What’s there to hate, then, exactly? Its damned headband, that’s what, which gives me a splitting headache after just half an hour of use. Curse you, my oddly-shaped cranium, because now I can’t enjoy one of the best headsets around for those on a budget.

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The Xbox Game Pass for PC is two things: firstly, it’s quite a mouthful; and secondly, it’s the new subscription service by Microsoft that gives you access to a bunch of games from the Microsoft Store for a monthly price. New games are being added each month, and we’ve got details of all the Xbox Game Pass games in August 2019, as well as the full Xbox Game Pass game list for PC.

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Bloodlines 2 asks you the same question of every vampire when they’ve gone through the Embrace: Do you hide in the shadows, or become fear itself? The original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was a cult favourite, so beloved that the fans fixed the issues with the game. The team at Hardsuit Labs know all too well that it is a big deal that Bloodlines 2 is being made at all.

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Teamfight Tactics has had its weekly update, now up to TFT patch 9.16b. It’s clear that the introduction of the Hextech origin has ruffled some feathers, with one champion in their number getting a nerf. But really its Nobles that have seen the highest number of people taking them under their wing. Items didn’t have a big change in the latest patch, but everything is dramatically different than when TFT launched into beta. Since there have been so many changes, be sure to check out our guides to see what’s changed.

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Teamfight Tactics had some new champions introduced recently, but in the TFT 9.16b patch, there was a small change to Brawlers. It’s not a massive one, but it did make them slightly weaker. Nobles also got their buff reverted from the 9.16 update. As Hextech is still new, we’ve put an overview of what they’re all about, as well as the updated versions to the TFT traits.

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Steam is in an odd position in China. It s like a pirate radio station, sitting offshore and letting the gamers access all that unfiltered content. With no official servers and awkward payment methods, the experience that the huge numbers of users have isn t optimal. So Valve and local partners Perfect World are setting up a version of Steam for China, named Steam Platform. The first details of which were dropped at an event hosted by Perfect World in China this week.

There s no launch date, and no look at the client or its features, but things are motoring along.

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We saw some changes to some champions in Teamfight Tactics in the TFT 9.16b patch. Draven and Jinx were picked frequently as they were incredibly good late-game carries, while Lucian saw a much-needed nerf to the incredibly efficient early-game champion. Below then is the updated TFT tier list 9.16b.

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