It's all change for Rocket League this December. After four years of monetisation built around randomised loot boxes and DLC, developer Psyonix will soon be jettisoning both.

Rocket League's loot box replacements have already been well-documented, of course. When Psyonix rolls out its new monetisation overhaul some time in December, blind randomised Crates (ie. loot boxes) with pay-to-unlock key mechanics will be replaced by Blueprints. These are rewarded through regular play and, crucially, show players the exact item that will be crafted should they wish to spend premium currency to do so.

Blueprints, however, are only one half of Psyonix's new monetisation plan; December's update will also introduce a premium store where players can, also using the new premium Credits currency, purchase specific items directly.

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Microsoft's Black Friday sale has begun, which means massive savings for all you Xbox One owners out there. While you can head to our Xbox Black Friday deals hub for a giant list of great Xbox One deals, we also wanted to highlight the aptly titled Black Friday Game Deals sale.

There are currently lots of great discounts on the Xbox marketplace, but be aware that you have to be an Xbox Live Gold member to avail yourself of the offers right now. The deals will be made available to everyone else on 24th November, and the sale runs right up to Monday 2nd December.

We've had a poke around Phil Spencer's digital storefront and found some of 2019's best video games have been discounted by up to 50 per cent. Not too bad, eh?

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Autonauts, the game about colony management and robot automation, released a big old roadmap today, laying out all the free DLC on its way over the next six months.

The simulation game from Denki and Curve Digital is all about colonising procedurally-generated planets with the help of some programmable robots. Players need to collect resources, craft useful items and build their AI helpers in order to make their colonies thrive.

Today, the game received the very first of its free updates, introducing new bot variants, new cooking options and brand new apparel to decorate yourself, your bots and your colonists.

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I'm struggling to play Stadia games competitively online.

Google's video game streaming service launched on Tuesday night with 22 games, and I've spent the past few days trying out competitive multiplayer with those that have it.

I had wondered whether it would be feasible to play these parts of the games, given what from the outside looking in seems very much like a soft launch. I've found that, depending on what time of day you're playing, significant parts of some Stadia titles may as well not exist, simply because there are not enough people for matchmaking.

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If you ever wanted to be Woody from Toy Story, boah do I have news for you. The Red Dead Redemption 2 PC mod which lets you soar like an eagle, play as missing Princess Isabeau or completely in the nip has had another update - and this time, it's all about size. Not that it's the most important thing.

Lenny's Simple Trainer, authored by LMS on the website Mod Red Dead, is now in version 0.7, and has significantly improved in the space of only a few weeks. Holding F5 now brings up an in-game menu to let you easily swap between modes, and the new scaling features have provided me with yet another morning of fun, and strange looks from my colleagues.

By selecting "player" then "model scale", you can either supersize your chosen model all the way up to twenty times the normal size, or shrink it all the way down to 10 per cent of the original height. The scaling only seems to work on the character model itself, while items remain the same size - and therefore seemingly enormous in proportion.

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In just two weeks time we'll all be able to terrify ourselves running away from Xenomorphs on the Switch, as Alien: Isolation gets a December release date on the Nintendo console.

As spotted on Nintendo website and in today's new trailer below, the game will be available for the Switch from 5th December, and will feature gyroscopic aiming and HD Rumble.

If you've never played Alien: Isolation (and you really should because it's great), the game is inspired by Ridley Scott's Alien. It follows Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley's daughter, as she attempts to discover what fate befell her mother.

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It feels like a bizarre fit. Remedy, developer of esoteric third-person adventure games such as Control, Quantum Break and Alan Wake, is making a military first-person shooter campaign for the biggest game on earth. I mean, Remedy has never made an FPS before. So, what's going on?

CrossfireX was announced as coming to Xbox during Microsoft's E3 2019 briefing, but you'd be forgiven for missing it - or even forgetting about it. It felt like a curio then, one of those bring a massive game from Asia to the west and none of us really care sort of jobs. But the original Crossfire is probably the most popular game in the world, with over 650 million players, predominantly in South Korea and China. It's like Counter-Strike, with two factions shooting each other to infinity and beyond. And it's been going a long while: 10 years, developer SmileGate said. It's a really big deal. A massive deal, in fact.

But how did Remedy get roped in? At XO19, I had a chat with SmileGate's Jin Woo Jung, who told me he's a massive fan of Max Payne and so Remedy was his first choice when it came to working out who would make a campaign for the western version of Crossfire, and then I interviewed Remedy's Tuukka Taipalvesi and Thomas Puha to get the lowdown on how it all came to be, what's going into Remedy's take on a Call of Duty campaign, whether it'll have bullet time, and a cheeky question about whether there will be a Control 2.

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When I close my eyes and imagine a game based on drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's life, Narcos: Rise of the Cartels isn't exactly what springs to mind.

Whereas my imagination crafts a stealth-shooter with a bass-heavy soundtrack and slick bullet-time effects (yes, this is why I write about games and not for them), Narcos: Rise of the Cartels is an a more sedate affair, fusing an XCOM-esque strategy game with the true tale of DEA agent, Steve Murphy, and his fight to take down Escobar.

This surprising choice of genre isn't a criticism. The first game to hop onto the coattails of the wildly successful Netflix show Narcos, it could've easily slipped into the unsophisticated frame of a generic FPS and most of us likely would've been satisfied with that choice (well, we've all learned the hard way not to raise our hopes for TV spin-offs; personally, I'm still recovering from Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse).

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Every game service needs a Geometry Wars, a truth that has held since the days of Xbox Live Arcade, whose Geometry Wars was the actual Geometry Wars. Anyway, a Geometry Wars is a game to play in between other games, a game to glue everything together, a game which, after it's all over, turned out to be the game you most enjoyed anyway. Real talk: scattered throughout your brain are these things called neuroglia, little bits and pieces that keep everything ticking over. The word translates as "nerve glue", which never ceases to delight me. Geometry Wars was the nerve glue of XBLA. Testify!

And I reckon ScourgeBringer is going to be the nerve glue of Game Pass. Oh my God, ScourgeBringer. ScourgeBringer is a hyper-violent 2D thing in which you play a buzzing spark of malice who fidgets and swoops around various caverns beating up everything that crosses its path. There are things that look like orchids, things that act like bees and like slugs. There's a light attack, a heavy, a dash and a bunch of recharging specials. You level up in interesting ways, make tricky decisions about perks, and work your way through a bunch of bosses.

It's amazing. I'm playing the Alpha on Steam and it's already amazing. Once this thing is actually done and playable on a big telly I am going to be lost in it.

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Sea of Thieves might have had a relatively low-key few months in recent times, but Rare is pulling out all the stops in the multiplayer pirate adventure's latest update. Known as The Seabound Soul, it introduces a brand-new story mission, a series of slightly bamboozling limited-time voyages, fire and flammable ships, plus a whole lot more.

Personally, I'm most excited about Sea of Thieves' brand-new Tall Tale - the first new story mission to be introduced to the game since the Anniversary Update's sweeping Shores of Gold campaign in April. Rare's inaugural attempt at incorporating story into Sea of Thieves was an absolute delight, slickly presented, mechanically diverse, and full of genuinely memorable, swashbuckling story beats, so I've been eager for more.

The Seabound Soul might only be one mission but if its tale of legendary pirate Sir Arthur Pendragon, captain of the infamous Blackwyche, comes even close to capturing the highs of its predecessors, it'll be a real treat. Oh, and it's probably worth mentioning that it's started by visiting the derelict galleon on Shipwreck Bay.

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