
Remember Warcraft 3: Reforged? It was meant to launch in 2019, but with less than two weeks of the year still to go, well, it was looking unlikely.
On the upside, Blizzard has now provided the game with a firm release date and it isn't long to wait at all: 29th January 2020.
This is, of course, the big reimagining of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos and expansion The Frozen Throne. Expect shiny new versions of the old characters, campaigns and maps, plus a world editor with mod support.

Wake up. Time to relive Westwood's classic adventure Blade Runner now that it's finally available from GOG.
Undoubtedly, Blade Runner has been one of the most requested games to make its way to the service given the scarcity of physical copies, along with the technical and legal complications surrounding a potential re-release.
These issues have thankfully been resolved, with GOG dancing around the legal limbo and praising the efforts of the ScummVM community whose recent update to the classic point-and-click adventure engine has made it possible to play the game on modern PCs.

Hello, and welcome to our new series which picks out interesting things that we'd love someone to make a game about.
This isn't a chance for us to pretend we're game designers, more an opportunity to celebrate the range of subjects games can tackle and the sorts of things that seem filled with glorious gamey promise.
Check out our 'Someone should make a game about' archive for all our pieces so far.

Quite frankly, I've been looking for an excuse to show off my piano skills on Eurogamer for some time - and this month the perfect opportunity fell right into my inbox. A few weeks ago, Rust - the survival game infamous for its anarchy and general brutality - added a surprisingly wholesome instruments DLC pack, allowing players to construct a variety of instruments such as trumpets, drums... and pianos.
This was already intriguing, but one line of the press release really caught my attention. The instruments accept MIDI input. Oh boy. Did this mean I could hook up an entire electric piano to a computer, and play live piano in Rust? I had to try it out.
And, of course, it's the Christmas season - so to make it festive, and my life extra complicated, I announced to my editors that I would go carolling. Live. In Rust.

Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy are coming to PlayStation Now, Sony has announced.
The two big Sony first-party games launch on PS Now on 2nd January 2020, alongside Overcooked! 2.
Sony's strategy for PS Now differs from that of Microsoft's for rival video game subscription service Xbox Game Pass. Sony has so far been reluctant to launch its PlayStation 4 exclusives on PS Now at the same time as it releases them in shops, whereas Microsoft launches its Xbox exclusives on Game Pass day and date with disc retail.

For some reason I'm rapidly accruing a collection of dumb stories about my time in multiplayer games - and seeing as the Rust murder tale went down so well, I thought I'd recount another. This time it's about my brief foray into the world of Fallout 76 virtual gunrunning, which has since escalated into a detailed look at the life of the traders making serious bank from selling Fallout 76 items. I don't know how I ended up here.
Back in January, when the first wave of Fallout 76 backlash was at its peak, vast swathes of the Fallout subreddits were busy complaining about in-game glitches - and in particular, a cheating method called duping. It's a process by which players exploit a bug to duplicate items, with potentially game-breaking consequences if uncontrolled numbers of top-tier items suddenly flood a community and upset the balance. It's a phenomenon witnessed in other online games, but for Fallout 76 it was perceived as a serious problem by the community - with Bethesda constantly playing whac-a-mole trying to patch out new glitch methods as they appeared.
Over on eBay, some enterprising hustlers capitalised on the mess by creating their own cottage industry. Using the various duplication methods, the eBay accounts started selling dozens of Fallout 76's most valuable items. Fallout 76, of course, doesn't sell guns in its Atomic Shop on account of Bethesda's pledge to avoid pay-to-win microtransactions (although some argue it's already broken this pledge) - which means there's a market for gameplay-affecting items such as weapons and armour (and the raw in-game money and materials to acquire these). Then the secret dev room was discovered and unreleased items started appearing - a problem that hasn't quite gone away, judging by some recent listings.

Just in time for the holidays, Hello Games' exploratory space sim No Man's Sky has a brand-new update, this one adding a music and audio creation tool to its ever-growing list of features.
Update 2.24, as No Man's Sky's latest patch is known, ushers in a "full audio creation application" that Hello Games is calling the ByteBeat Device. At a basic level, it's a machine that you can build by acquiring the appropriate blueprint from the Space Anomaly, then slap it down in your world - whereupon it will parp out a procedurally generated tune, or even specific noises that players have sequenced in.
Musical tinkerers can arrange tracks, modify melody and drums, or even adjust octave, key, or tempo. That's just the basics, though. "ByteBeat formulas are made out of simple waveforms that are manipulated through maths - but by default, the device handles all of the mathematical heavy lifting, procedurally generating random presets for you to play with," explains Hello Games, "Dedicated audiophiles have the option to explore deeper, manually sketching out note sequences, rhythms, and even manipulating the raw sounds."

This weekend's live Star Wars event added lightsabers to Fortnite - and now fans are properly having fun with them.
The addition of Star Wars' elegant Jedi weapon allows for some high intensity duels. When holding one, you can attack and parry, block weapon fire and do a kind of ninja roll.
In fact, some fans have now gone full Jedi and are only using lightsabers. In this clip, posted to r/FortniteBR by Fortnite fan Sucboy, the final two players out of 100 drop all of their other weaponry to go head-to-head in a duel to the death for the prized Victory Royale. Sucboy ended up winning the contest, scoring his first Victory Royale of the season:

Surgeon Simulator, Bossa Studios' weirdly popular game about cack-handed medical malpractice, is getting a sequel and it's heading to PC next year.
There's not much to go on in the way of hard facts just yet, but Bossa promises to "inject a delirious dose of adrenaline straight into the heart of the original, cranking everything up to a whole new level". Care-free surgical abandon will, as you'd expect, remain the focus, but there are hints of a more involved experience around that core this time around.
Surgeon Simulator 2's reveal trailer ends up at the operating table, but before that there's assorted zaniness as Bob's severed head travels through a distinctly atypical, contraption-laden medical facility, which features the likes of conveyor belts, bowing alleys, and more.

Since we last spoke, Red Dead Online has made the move to PC, and with the Moonshiners update has finally caught up to its console counterpart, wrangling it into submission with its 4K 60FPS lasso. This fancy new patch grafts in the second season of the much-loved Outlaw Pass, a new wardrobe worth of cosmetics and a brand new Frontier Pursuit to pursue in Moonshining, which introduces property ownership and a separate five-mission narrative.
A lot to dig into then! The boozehound business model is the main focus, and as you kickstart the new role you're introduced to the baroness of shine, Maggie Fike, a woman scorned and left to fry in a burning shack by federal tax agents. You're tasked with reclaiming her extremely illegal operation and seeking revenge against a trio of bad blokes. It might sound familiar if you've played through Online's main story: a long-winded redemption song spearheaded by Jessica McClerk, the woman who broke your green behind out of Sisika penitentiary in the opening so you could avenge her dead husband.
Even so, this side story comfortably overshadows that arc across five meaty missions that ply the player with a refreshing approach to Red Dead mission design. Most importantly, the objectives in Fike's campaign don't so quickly dissolve into dissatisfying combat arenas.