This weekend, the ESL Pro Tour Masters Championship stops at Poland’s Spodek arena for three days of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and StarCraft II matches in the Intel Extreme Masters Katowice 2020. The arena can hold 11,500 spectators but while IEM Katowice sold out, it has no crowd. Last night, barely 15 hours before the event started, Polish authorities revoked its mass event license due to concerns about that there coronavirus. The matches are still going ahead, just with no spectators. ESL say they will refund IEM tickets but can’t refund travel and accommodation costs.

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The list of developers and tech companies dropping out of GDC is growing, as Microsoft, Epic Games and Unity confirm they’re pulling out due to health risks presented by coronavirus (COVID-19). This is a big blow for the physical conference, but both Microsoft and Unity have mentioned sharing their GDC presentations digitally, so we’ll still have a chance to see the behind-the-scenes info they had prepared.

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If you’re in the market for some new storage, then you’ll find the best prices for today’s best SSDs right here in our regularly updated best SSD deals of the week guide. Below, I’ve gathered together all the best prices for nearly all of my [cms-block] recommendations that I’ve been able to find this week, although quite a few have seen some unfortunate price rises since last Friday. Only by a couple of quid, mind, but you may want to wait another couple of days to see if prices get any better. If you’re in desperate need of a new SSD right now, though, I’ve got you covered. Whether you’re after a deal on the best SATA SSDs or mega discounts on super fast NVMe SSDs and portable SSDs, you’ll find all the best SSD deals right here.

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It’s no secret that I like pretty fighting games like The King Of Fighters XIII. While I’ve never been as into SNK’s style of fighting as I have Capcom’s Street Fighter, the genre’s shift away from hand-drawn sprites to 3D models has never appealed to me. It made Ken’s hair look like a bunch of bananas, and that’s a cardinal sin. It’s sad, then, that KoF XIII was the last sprite-based game before SNK followed with its own crude 3D models.

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Ah, religion. I know this is a topic we all have trouble agreeing on. But fear not, humble practitioner of a good pray, I am not here to squint angrily at your favourite book of life advice. I m only here for the videogame religions. The ones that are very, very, very, very bad. You know, the gun-loving cults and the xenophobic people-burners. The (mostly) fictional religions that involve an uncommon volume of murder. Step this way, sprinkle yourself with some of my 100% genuine oil of the almighty, and peruse the 9 most dodgy religions in games.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 looks like it might be Larian Studios’ most ambitious game yet – and if you’ve played Divinity: Origin Sin 2, you’ll know that’s saying something. Below we’ve answered the biggest questions about the upcoming RPG, from the Baldur’s Gate 3 release date to our knowledge of the game’s setting, companions, system requirements, and more.

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Packed enough shield batteries, champ? Apex Legends is going all robotic with its next Collection Event, System Override. As usual, that means two weeks of themed get-ups for the arena’s characters, weapons and intangible banners. But respawn are also taking this chance to experiment with the ApeLegs format by introducing a power-hungry new shield and removing the randomness from their battle royale.

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A maquette, Wikipedia tells me, is a “scale model or rough draft of an unfinished sculpture”. Maquette is also a beautiful new game from Graceful Decay and publishers Annapurna. Fittingly, those two definitions aren’t as separate as they might seem. Releasing sometime later this year, Maquette is a recursive first-person puzzle box about models within models, where small-scale adjustments can have a massive impact on the world at large.

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If you play tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons – heck, if you play a lot of video games like Hitman or XCOM where you rely on a blend of skill and luck – you’ll know that it’s more fun when everything goes wrong but you manage to make it through anyway. Things going according to plan are boring. This is why it was great that, when a handful of journalists were shown a hands-off demo of Baldur’s Gate III, founder of Larian and director of BG3 Swen Vincke failed almost every dice roll, every passive skill check, and every attempt at sneaking he made.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an epic RPG with turn-based combat, and is the long awaited sequel to the ’90s BioWare classic. The demo went terribly, which meant it was a very good demo. Vincke stood at the computer, his failures writ large in a projection on the wall behind him, and steepled his hands over his face. It had been a long couple of days. To get this, the world premiere preview build of Baldur’s Gate 3 working, they’d had to sync it via a mobile phone because the hotel internet was broken. “I think,” he said, “I will throw my shoes.”

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The Epic Games Store exclusivity of Borderlands 3 will end on March 13th with a Steam launch, developers Gearbox Software announced today. They had previously said the looter-shooter’s exile would end in April 2020 so apparently the Steam launch has been bumped up a bit, now coming exactly six months after the Epic debut. Steamers will be able to join Epiceers in multiplayer to burst monsters together, though some multiplayer features won’t be enabled for crossplay at launch.

Gearbox also today announced the second story expansion, a stag do gone monstrously wrong named Guns, Love, And Tentacles: The Marriage Of Wainwright & Hammerlock.

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