War never changes, but the number of people who are allowed to participate occasionally increases. Call Of Duty: Warzone is upping squad sizes to four. You can still queue separately for the version with three, if you like, and new weapons and modes are planned for later on.

This is part of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare‘s Season 3, which means that we’ve also got a couple new guns, three new regular multiplayer maps, and a truckload of cosmetic nonsense attached to the new battle pass.

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Doom Eternal doesn’t have a Deathmatch mode. The multiplayer not a place where marines chase other marines: it’s a place where one character gets to be the Slayer from the singleplayer, and two other players gang up on them as chunky demons. The idea was to capture the same feeling as the campaign, and yep, that it does. Grappling up to a jetpack monster is all the sweeter when there’s a human lurking behind that demon’s eyes.

What I like best about it, though, are the moments where you flip from fleeing to eviscerating.

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In The Red Strings Club, a corporation believes it holds the keys to happiness, and it’s preparing to slip them down the throats of everyone in the world. It’s a chemical end: to discrimination, to suffering, and to freedom.

So what. A little brainwashing never hurt anyone.

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It’s not all just battles in Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord. You’re also be able to take on the role of ruler in your own kingdom. This means managing the many settlements that you’ll be conquering along the way. Taking over the settlements is rather difficult, but keeping control and developing them further is also a big challenge.

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Sea Of Thieves’ Ships Of Fortune update is just around the corner, inviting players to join up with their favourite trading companies to earn loads of extra gold and reputation. For the more “traditional pirates” amongst us, a brand new trader has emerged that I think you’re going to like – The Reaper’s Bones. These are the evil-looking folks that have been hanging out on Reaper’s Hideout, and joining up with them will task you with robbing your rival sailors for all they’re worth.

But that’s not even the best bit! Get out of the way parrots and monkeys, because when the update drops on April 22nd we’ll finally be able to have cats as pets!

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The Xbox controller long ago became the de facto standard for playing PC games with a pad, but Sony’s DualShock 4 also got PC support a long time ago via Steam or a piece of software called DS4Windows. The DS4 a fine controller and I’ve used it every so often on PC, particularly when dabbling with PlayStation Now, Sony’s remote play service on PC.

Sony have today released the first images and information about the “DualSense”, the new controller that will ship with the PlayStation 5. There’s no confirmation yet but the assumption is that it will follow its predecessor by working on PC as well. So: would you give up your Xbox controller for Sony’s latest?

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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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