Artifact, Valve's collectible card game set in the world of Dota 2, has ceased active development. That means that Artifact 2.0, a reboot intended to rejuvenate the 2018 game's fortunes, will never be finished.
It also means that Valve have made Artifact, including every card, free for everyone.
I've said it before, but Teardown is that rarest of things: a technological gimmick with a game that utilises it to its full potential. It's a first-person heist 'em up set in an entirely destructible world, in which you must smash and explode routes through buildings to grab your targets and escape before a timer runs out.
Now it has Steam Workshop support, with over 100 mods already available.
Modding seems to be in rude health in 2021, as industrious players crack open game eggs to whisk and scramble their insides whether developers release tools to help or not. There's no shortage of player-made tweaks and fixes, of modest additions, or even of total overhauls.
This is cause for celebration, but more importantly, it's cause to argue. I ask you: what PC game has had the best modding community, past or present?
Elite Dangerous's next expansion is Odyssey, which is adding first-person shootybangs to Frontier's galaxy-sized space sim. This much we knew already, but now Frontier have announced that the expansion's alpha will begin on March 29th, and there's an extremely stiff-looking playthrough of it below.
All right, the title is a bit misleading. I do not think everything in The Eternal Cylinder, a very weird upcoming survival game by ACE Team, looks like a willy. I think some of the things look like fannies and bums as well. But according to people I have shared these thoughts with, they are not accurate, and are an indication that I am deeply strange.
Loop Hero is a new world-looping, deck-building RPG that launched today. It drops you in the shoes of a little adventurer, caught in an infinite loop by an evil Lich. As you travel around in endless circles, you can collect items and alter the world to attempt to escape. Over the last week or so, I've written about a fair few new indie roguelikes (because I love them), but I reckon this one is the most interesting of the bunch.
Last year, a lawsuit put a common FIFA fan theory into legal action. Three people sued EA for allegedly using a technology called 'Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment' to make good teams underperform in Ultimate Team mode, leading to players buying more loot boxes so they can build better teams. EA have always denied that. Well, now that lawsuit has been dropped, apparently after speaking with EA engineers about how the game works.
My friends and I are still continuing our odyssey in Viking survival game Valheim. Despite still-minimal progress towards an advancement of civilisation, namely into the Carrot Age, we march on. We are hardy folk, and we must persevere, even when we cannot fathom how to grow just one (1) of our five (5) a day.
We had booked in an appointment with a mysterious baddie who lives across the sea, but one of our clan, Dunder Mifflin, was absent for this planned trip (tattoo removal, an unfortunate double-booking). To prep for our kinsman's return, we attempted a little practice sail instead. A pleasant skim across the ocean, which left us naked... and afraid.
At the end of last year Razer announced a new conservation partnership with Conservation International to save 100,000 trees with the launch of their Sneki Snek plush (pictured above), a cute, wiggly mascot version of their famous snake logo. Having comfortably beaten that goal in less than two months, Razer are now extending their Sneki Snek campaign to save a million> trees, and will be shortly announcing brand-new Sneki Snek merch to go along with it (and I'm putting it out there now, I'm calling dibs on a rainbow-coloured Snek in honour of Razer's Chroma RGB).
If the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 represents the very best of what gaming laptops have to offer in 2021, then the Gigabyte Aorus 15G is probably what you'd call the next step down. It still has one of Nvidia's powerful new RTX 3080 graphics chips inside its slim black chassis, but it's the 8GB variant rather than the top 16GB one you get on the Scar. It also only has a 1920x1080 resolution display, albeit one with a higher 240Hz refresh rate, and its CPU is a fraction older as well, with Gigabyte choosing to stick with Intel's still very fast Core i7-10870H instead of opting for one of AMD's shiny new Ryzen 5000 chips. That's still a formidable set of specs, of course, and it's a potent combination for those after a top-notch 1080p gaming experience that will last for many years to come.