Ah, industry. You gotta love it. Men with twirly moustaches posing in front of giant chains. Women standing next to teetering piles of code used to send astronauts to the moon. Countless ghosts of mangled Victorian children haunting the greased cogs of matchbox factories. Elon Musk riding atop a tiny submarine like a cowboy to the bottom of the Mariana Trench to rescue his frisbee. Humanity is at its very best when it’s building, designing and producing the vast quantities of plastic garbage demanded by the growling and insatiable stomach of our sexy benefactor and god, global capitalism.

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The Valorant weapons arsenal is an intricately, painstakingly crafted repository of destructive potential. And perhaps more so than in most other FPS games, you really need to know what you’re doing with them. Our Valorant weapons guide will offer up detailed stats on each of the 17 different weapons you can purchase between rounds, along with clear recoil patterns so you can start to tame these powerful beasts and become a true master of weapons in Valorant.

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Hearthstone‘s new Ashes Of Outland expansion is out this evening, and having spent a couple of days last week playing with the new card set, I can confirm it’s really, really fun. Completely ridiculous, as is increasingly the case with Hearthstone, but undoubtedly a solid expansion – and in my opinion at least, more fun than any of last year’s three.

Obviously, the headline addition to Ashes is the new Demon Hunter class, and its angsty purple frontman Illidan. To get the measure of Hearthstone’s first new playable class since its launch in 2014, I asked Blizz if they could sort me out with a preview build of the new expansion, and they responded by creating a personal hell for me: a server with room for only two people, where I would be magically imprisoned, like Illidan himself, until I had learned the secrets of the big purple man. The games that followed would involve an awful lot of magical green fire, plus a swarm of albatrosses and more than a few self-replicating tyrannosaurs.

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In Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord, the most efficient way to get new troops for your army is to recruit prisoners who are willing to change their alliances. That’s not all you can do with your prisoners though, as you can ransom them for a good source funds for your campaign.

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The former creative director of DayZ‘s standalone version has joined RocketWerkz, the studio of DayZ creator Dean Hall, to work on a new survival game. Brian Hicks split from Bohemia Interactive and DayZ in 2018, and now he’s with Dean “Rocket” Hall, who bailed on Bohemia and DayZ in 2014. All Hall says to describe RocketWerkz’s technically-unannounced survival game is that it is “massive”. Hang on, you know what else is massive? Jungle. That can only be a huge hint at a tropical setting.

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I’m still playing Legends of Runeterra, Riot’s card-me-do set in the world of League Of Legends. It remains quite good, albeit deeply familiar. The emotes elevate it.

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Every time I sit down to write, the first thing I do isn’t open up a blank document, it’s find some nice video game music to listen to. And loads of it can be found free on YouTube. Ambient music from Skyrim, relaxing compilations from Animal Crossing, lo-fi Legend of Zelda remixes Sometimes, work or study just can’t get done without my 10-hour loop of Chrono Trigger’s Corridors Of Time.

Looking at the millions of comments, uploads, and views these uploads get, it’s clear that I’m not alone. If you’re reading this on a PC right now, there’s a statistically decent chance that YouTube is currently open and playing some video game tunes in another tab. And it’s only possible because YouTube doesn’t treat video game music as it does other popular music.

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In case people haven’t yet heard or don’t believe that staying home when possible is pretty sensible right now, the UK government have launched a partnership with several video game companies to spread the message into games. Sniper Elite studio Rebellion say they’re going to put messages echoing the government’s “Stay At Home, Save Lives” instructions onto game menus, and Dirt Rally 2.0 has already raised warning banners on in-game tracks.

“I’m delighted to see the UK’s brilliant video games industry stepping up to strongly reinforce this message to gamers across the UK,” culture secretary Oliver Dowden said.

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In Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord, you can potentially command large armies in big battles, but you’re first going to have to win them over. Keeping their loyalty, feeding them, and upgrading them to stronger troop types will be the key to conquering the land. It’ll take a lot of work, so we’ll explain how to do it here.

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Movement is make or break for VR games. A convincing, non-nauseating solution is vital, and Half-Life: Alyx does an admirable job of navigating through that. Valve have explained how they got there, in a new video that brings up sound design, pathing fiddliness, and why they had to ditch a certain system because tall testers kept hitting their virtual heads on low-hanging pipes.

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