In the face of a dwindling player base for fantasy MMO New World following its barnstorming launch last September, Amazon Games has shared a "broad overview" of its content release plans for the game's next three seasons in 2022.

As previously announced, March will see the formal arrival of New World's Heart of Madness update - it was made available on the public test realm earlier this month - bringing the game's main storyline to a close with a new endgame expedition, Tempest's Heart, which promises a "final showdown" against Isabella in a corrupted dimension of reality.

March's update also introduces the new Blunderbuss, described as a "run-and-gun shotgun-type" weapon, and Amazon has now highlighted a couple more additions due in "spring", including 3v3 PvP arenas and a PvP reward track.

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Activision Blizzard - which continues its attempts to reassert itself following many months of shocking allegations it had fostered a company culture where sexual harassment, assault, and inappropriate behaviour were able to thrive - has announced its previously detailed Overwatch 2 beta will launch on 26th April.

Blizzard revealed its intentions to "decouple" Overwatch 2's PvP and PvE modes and begin a series of multiplayer-focused betas earlier this month, when game director Aaron Keller rather dubiously attempted to spin the developer's upcoming beta sessions as some sort of generous treat for content-starved Overwatch 1 players rather than the limited testing sessions for a select number of players they actually are.

At the time, Keller explained the developer would begin with a short closed alpha session for Blizzard employees and Overwatch League pros before embarking on a limited-scale closed beta test of new features, content, and systems toward the end of April. Stress-testing of servers with a wider player base won't occur until future beta sessions.

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Humble Games has launched its new Stand With Ukraine bundle, which will see 100% of its proceeds donated to support the humanitarian efforts currently taking place in Ukraine following Russia's devastating invasion of the country.

"The violent and unlawful invasion in Ukraine is taking a tragic toll-displacing people, devastating families, and creating an urgent need for food, water, supplies, shelter, and safety," explains Humble. "To help out how we can, we've joined forces with game creators, book publishers, and software makers around the globe for a bundle 100% dedicated to supporting the victims and refugees from Ukraine during this crisis."

To that end, Stand With Ukraine bundle will be available from today, 18th March, until next Friday 25th March, and include over 120 games, books, and software items. In terms of games, it's a bit of a corker, featuring the likes of Metro Exodus, Back 4 Blood, Satisfactory, The Long Dark, Spyro Reignited Trilogy, Quantum Break, Slay the Spire, Nex Machina, Endless Space 2, Kerbal Space Program, System Shock: Enhanced Edition, Wargroove, all three Amnesia games, Sunset Overdrive, Max Payne 3, Fable Anniversary, and more.

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Grand Theft Auto 5 arrived this week with a new update designed to leverage the capabilities of the new wave of games consoles. That's quite the thing: we're talking about a title that first launched in 2013 on PS3 and Xbox 360 before being revamped for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. With the arrival of this new premium edition, Rockstar's mega-selling game now arrives on its third generation of gaming hardware with the promise of three quality modes, including the addition of hardware accelerated ray tracing features.

We'll be tackling platform comparisons in another article (truth is, we only received code the day before release - and this work takes time) so our focus today is on what it is that the new version offers over existing versions of the game. If you're coming from the last-gen console experience, what kind of upgrades are you getting? And if you've previously played the abundantly scalable PC rendition of GTA5, just how close does the new version compare to the maxed out experience? For our tests, we concentrated and the PlayStation 5 rendition of the game, finding that the new hardware delivers a vastly improved user experience even before you start playing it!

I'm not just talking about loading, but also installation. After downloading GTA5 on PS4, I discovered that a further installation period was required, which took over an hour (!). There's far less friction on PS5 - just press play and you're straight into the introductory videos and from there into the 60fps menus. Full frame-rate menus might not sound like a big deal, but remarkably they're running at 30fps on last-gen consoles and even the PC version. Rockstar Social Club logins are a thing (skippable for single-player), but moving from menu to story mode takes around 20 seconds - far faster than PS4, where the same process takes two minutes and eight seconds on my system.

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Red Candle Games, the developer behind critically acclaimed horror outings Detention and Devotion, has shared a first trailer - and launched a crowdfunding campaign - for its previously revealed "Taopunk" action-platformer Nine Sols, which it's aiming to release in Q3 next year.

When first we heard of Nine Sols last year, Red Candle described it as a "lore rich hand-drawn 2D platformer with Sekiro-inspired deflection-focused combat" - and an accompany bit of concept art set the dark, manga-inspired tone of the experience with its combination of cute animal protagonist and piles of mangled, bloody limbs.

Following on from that initial tease, Red Candle has now revealed considerably more about Nine Sols as part of its newly launched crowdfunding campaign. We do, for instance, now have a name for its distinctive protagonist, Yi, and we know players will guide him on a vengeful quest through a dark fantasy world - melding sci-fi elements with Eastern mythology - to eliminate the 9 Sols, formidable rulers of the realm, and unravel the secrets of an alien race.

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Ubisoft has announced a new cloud computing project it calls Ubisoft Scalar, which it says will be the basis for even bigger game worlds.

Lead development on Scalar is being undertaken by Ubisoft Stockholm, which is also creating a new IP that will use this technology in an under-wraps game.

A flashy trailer today said Scalar will enable "the construction of gigantic game worlds at a scale far greater than anything that's come before" and support "massive numbers of assets, simulations, AI and player entities".

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Tunic is a game filled with secrets and challenges. While we don't want to spoil any of the secrets, we do want you to survive long enough to get to them, as they're some of the most rewarding moments in any game you can play at the moment.

To that effect we've put together a few tips for people starting out in the game, covering combat, which might be an early sticking point, but also a few ideas for approaching this mysterious and mesmerising world. We hope they come in handy!

Below you'll find some tips to help you get started in the world of Tunic:

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Amazon and Smilegate have shared a message with Lost Ark's players, following growing concerns within its community that the game was beginning to feel "pay-to-win".

"Launching Lost Ark in the west has been a wonderful, humbling, and great learning experience for us at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG.

"Our journey has been filled with late nights, creative problem solving, hopping into western servers to play together, and now, looking ahead at things to come. As we continue to learn from our players' feedback and dive into data, our goal is to remain transparent (sometimes brutally so) with our players," the developers wrote.

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Many of the NPCs in Elden Ring wear masks or hoods, but one dataminer has now uncovered their real faces.

Zullie the Witch is well known on YouTube for playing around with the Souls games, examining characters and exploring the world design.

In their latest videos Zullie unmasks Elden Ring's NPCs by uncovering their specific values in the character creator (spotted by PC Gamer).

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Ubisoft has now set a "late spring" release window for Roller Champions, its long-in-development team-based skating game that's a bit like Rocket League.

The game had been expected sometime in early 2022 following several rounds of alpha and beta testing over the years since its announcement back in 2019.

Now, however, Ubisoft has said it still needed a bit more time.

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