Obsidian Entertainment tonight announced an early access launch date of July 28th for Grounded, their craft-o-survival game about teenagers shrunk down smaller than ants and turned loose in a back garden. If I’ve learned anything from the oeuvre of Rick Moranis, is that those kids are in for a tough time. It’s a surprising game to see coming from a studio known for RPGs including The Outer Worlds, South Park: The Stick Of Truth, and Pillars Of Eternity, but who are you to pigeonhole them? While we’ve mostly heard about the four-player co-op so far, tonight’s new look focused on the singleplayer side. Observe!

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No Man’s Sky has received a number of transformative updates since its initial launch, including multiplayer, base building and VR support, but I think this is the one I find most exciting. The Exo Mech update, out now, adds mechs. Really cool looking mechs, if the trailer below is any indication.

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There are currently 1.7 million people watching Valorant on Twitch, which means it’s matched the game streaming platform’s all-time record for the number of people watching a single game at the same time. That’s not bad when you consider the previous record holder was Fortnite, a global phenomenon, and Valorant has only just entered closed beta. Maybe people are watching because they’re excited for a new game from the makers of League Of Legends, or because they’re excited for a first-person shooter following in Counter-Strike’s footsteps. Or maybe it’s because watching Twitch streams is how you get a key to enter the beta.

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The Steamlords at Valve have rummaged in their reams of data and emerged with a new blog post talking about what the growth of Steam (and the number of games on Steam) has meant for developers. Coming up with a questionable definition of “success”, they note that Steam in 2019 saw three times as many games earning $10,000 in their first fortnight compared to Steam in 2013. They went on to estimate that if they had kept Steam’s catalogue curated and tightly controlled, a whole lot of games they consider successes wouldn’t have even been released on Steam. So, that’s good? Also, obvious?

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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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