Guild Wars 2 - ArenaNetJoie


Shed the old year and slither into the next—our annual Lunar New Year celebration has finally arrived! Tyria welcomes the Year of the Snake with vibrant festivities in Divinity's Reach, where you can participate in games, enjoy the fireworks while eating tasty Canthan food, and earn new rewards. The Lunar New Year celebrations start today and will be available until February 18.

This festival is accessible to players of any level. Even if you're brand new to the game, you can easily take part in our Lunar New Year activities and earn new cosmetic unlocks, utility items, and more! Check your in-game mail for an Invitation to Lunar New Year and double-click the item to teleport instantly to Divinity's Reach. The Wizard's Vault also has special objectives directing you toward Lunar New Year activities so you can earn more astral acclaim and collect your rewards!

For the full details of today's update, check out the release notes on our official forums.



Rewards

The Year of the Snake has many new rewards for you to sink your fangs into! The annual meta-achievement will reward players with their choice of weapon from the new Lantern weapon collection, which radiates festive brilliance, and the Snaketail Breeches—scale-adorned leg armor featuring a sinuous tail design. This new tail is perfect for channeling your inner serpent, especially when paired with last year's Dragon Descendant's Helm for a truly slithery transformation. Check the Achievements tab in your Hero panel and navigate to the Daily Lunar New Year and Festivals sections for more information.

If you're looking to add a touch of flair to all your combat encounters in the Year of the Snake, we have new weapon rewards this year! Open lucky envelopes for a chance to find the brand-new Jade Serpent Spear, Jade Serpent Dagger, and Jade Serpent Rifle! These new weapons are also available for purchase for gold and essences of luck from the kodan vendor Sparking Stone in Divinity's Reach.



There are also two new snake-themed back items that can be obtained by opening Lucky Envelopes. Take a chance to collect the elegant Lucky Snake Lantern or the striking Lucky Great Snake Lantern.

Speaking of lucky envelopes—don't forget to open your lucky envelopes! They affect your account's magic find attribute, allowing you to increase your magic find for chances at better rewards when opening them. Lucky envelopes can contain additional essences of luck, valuable trophies that you can sell to vendors for coin, and a chance at the special rewards listed above. This can help your search for those special snake-themed rewards you have your eye on!

There are also a few new homestead and guild decorations available so you can deck your halls with snake statues and lanterns. Finally, there is a new Mini Snake that can also be acquired from the Lunar New Year vendors.



Where to Go and What to Do

The Crown Pavilion in Divinity's Reach is your hub for Lunar New Year festivities. Check your in-game mail for an Invitation to Lunar New Year and double-click the item to teleport instantly to Divinity's Reach.

Celestial Challenge

Speak to the Celestial Challenge Attendant at the Crown Pavilion in Divinity's Reach to begin the Celestial Challenge, a series of activities that will require you to take down enemies, race through checkpoints, perform feats of jumping mastery, and more. The more activities you successfully complete during the event, the greater your rewards at the end.

Dragon Ball Arena

Speak to Finola at the Crown Pavilion in Divinity's Reach to enter the Dragon Ball Arena. This dodgeball-like PvP game mode is a race to the finish, where the first team of five players to reach five hundred points claims ultimate victory. Collect power-ups throughout the arena to gain access to new skills, zip around the arena with zip pads and jump pads, and master the art of the Dragon Sphere.



Mount Racing

Race around Divinity's Reach! You don't need to have any mounts unlocked to take part in this race—a nearby rental service is available to rent a raptor for just 10 silver.

Firecracker Lighting

Speak to the firecracker-lighting NPC at the Crown Pavilion in Divinity's Reach to start this seasonal adventure. Use your mastery of the world to quickly navigate through the streets of Divinity's Reach and light all the firecrackers! Gliding, mounts—anything goes! Just don't use any waypoints, or your progress will be reset.

Happy adventuring!
Barrage - CranioCreationsDigital
Howdy, everyone!

Today, we are thrilled to share some behind-the-scenes insights into our journey as we bring our beloved board game to life in the digital world.

Board games and video games share a love for strategy, creativity, and fun, but they’re fundamentally different beasts. While a board game thrives on tactile pieces, face-to-face interactions, and the simplicity of pen and paper, a video game must translate those elements into something intuitive, immersive, and dynamic for players sitting in front of a screen.

From reimagining mechanics for a digital interface to preserving the “feel” of the original while embracing the opportunities technology offers, every decision we’ve made has been about balancing faithfulness to the source material with the potential to enhance the experience in new and exciting ways; a necessity which clearly emerged in our previous work with Lorenzo il Magnifico.
We’ll explore some of these key challenges and share how we’ve tackled them—from redesigning complex systems to ensuring that every player, whether new or familiar with the board game, can enjoy what we’ve created.

So, put on a cozy blanket and join us on this multi-part journey!

1. Squeezing everything into a small screen
One of the first challenges we faced was translating the sprawling board game layout into the limited space of a screen. In a board game, the table is your canvas — there’s room for large boards, detailed player areas, and all the physical components that bring the game to life. In a video game, however, the screen is finite, and every pixel matters.

Our primary goal was to maintain clarity and functionality while staying true to the visual and thematic elements that make the board game special. This meant rethinking how information is presented. Instead of a single sprawling board, we explored breaking it down into interactive sections, allowing players to focus on specific parts of the game without feeling overwhelmed. These parts were: the map, the personal game board, the opponents boards, and the action boards, which were redesigned and recombined in different arrangements to find which one best suited the available space.



We started working on the horizontally tightest aspect ratio we decided to support, which is 3:2, as it’s default for many productivity-focused devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface series and certain laptops and tablets. Other resolutions would then have the content to be more spaced or stretched, to increase readability and reduce the “clumsiness”— something close to a responsive UI, where elements scale well across different devices, whether you’re playing on a widescreen monitor or a smaller laptop screen.

It was immediately clear that not all information could have made it to the final cut, but we wanted to ensure the player’s experience remained smooth and intuitive nevertheless, especially for the first-time user experience. This meant implementing tooltips, hover effects, popovers and easy navigation to let players interact with the game interface without getting lost or frustrated.



In short, squeezing a big board into a small screen was like solving a puzzle. A big, complex puzzle that likes to gnaw at your fingers.

If you made it this far, thank you! We’re excited to keep sharing our progress and can’t wait for you to see how it all comes together.
And if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to share your excitement, let us know in the comments!

Until next time,
Amintiri
Rocksmith+ - UbiFae
New Content Playable Now in Rocksmith+!
Check it out in game, or in our Spotify Playlist.

New Authentic Arrangements: 14
  • Teddy Swims - What More Can I Say - Bass, Lead, Piano, Chord Chart
  • John Mayer - Message In a Bottle - Bass, Lead, Simple Piano, Chord Chart
  • Sublime With Rome - Tangerine Skies - Bass, Lead, Piano, Chord Chart
  • Coldplay - Orphans - Chord Chart
  • Ryan "Fluff" Bruce - Rocksmith Fluff - Bass, Lead, Chord Chart
  • Karawan - Desolate Motion - Bass, Lead, Alt Lead, Chord Chart
Song Availability May Vary by Region
Voyagers of Nera - Cheery
Hello Voyagers! Michael / Spacenorth here with exciting updates from our first dev stream about creating UI in Voyagers.

Fresh Off the Ship
We've just wrapped up testing a build packed with changes directly inspired by your Demo feedback. If you played in that Discord playtest, we’d love your even deeper feedback here (Google Forms Survey).

For those who love the details, you can find the full Patch Notes here, but let's dive into the highlights!


Combat Gets an Overhaul
The combat system has received some much-needed attention:
  • New motion warping system makes targeting and hitting enemies more intuitive
  • No more sliding past your targets
  • Better enemy behaviors
  • More predictable enemy aggro and leashing
  • Goodbye instant night spawns in a zone around you.
  • We’ve seen too many players die to unjust enemy respawns at sunset!

Intermittent Fasting
We've completely reworked the hunger system to solve some major pain points and bring it closer to what players have been expecting:


  • Made a balance pass so there’s less frequent eating required - build and AFK without constant snacking
  • Hunger no longer deals direct damage to you
  • Instead, you can get hungry in multiple states, which reduces your max stamina, health, and oxygen in increasing amounts
  • Cooked food provides healing over time

Looking Good, Feeling Good
New particles, adding clothing/hair physics, and the character creator is easier to find.


  • Character creation comes at the start of creating or joining a new server instead of being hidden in a menu
  • Longer clothing now has proper physics and long hair is back!
New visual effects everywhere:

  • Sea foam in shallow waters
  • Wind trails and dust
  • Underwater bubbles
  • Improved character animations
Major Quality of Life Improvements
Keybinding v1:

  • We heard tons of great feedback on this and built our first version of customizable controls, making the game much more playable for non-QWERTY controls
  • We're eager for your feedback on this!
Multiplayer Responsiveness:
  • If you are a non-host player, gathering and inventory interactions will feel a lot more responsive now!
Crafting Overhaul:
  • Removed fuel requirement to streamline the experience
  • Added crafting queues to stack up multiple batches when you’ve got lots to craft
  • Did a visual redesign of crafting and refining menus!
Keep the Feedback Flowing!
These updates (and many more) all came from valuable, insightful player feedback we got during the Steam Demo launch. Thank you for all the survey responses, FeatureUpvote threads, Discord messages, and Steam discussions that have helped us jump on just a few ways that we can make Voyagers better.

If you're interested in playtesting, be sure to sign up through our Firstlook here: {LINK REMOVED}

And there’s more changes right around the corner! We're planning to update the public Steam Demo build in a couple weeks with even more improvements and will be eager to hear fresh feedback from all y’all then. Stay tuned!

- Michael and the Treehouse Team
Vampires: Bloodlord Rising - SwordsOfTheSouth


Hello, Children of the Night,

Today we wanted to share more insight regarding rituals in Vampires: Bloodlord Rising and how they’ll benefit you as a player.

Rituals rely on resources and ingredients you gather as you explore the open world of Sangavia and you’ll need to find these before you can perform the ritual and reap its benefits, for example, gather the necessary ingredients for the ritual ‘Shroud of Eternal Night’ and vampires will perform a dark ritual that engulfs the world in a thick fog - this provides great success of stealth missions ,no penalties on biting and transformation in the villages.

Rituals provide different kinds of gameplay benefits and are heavily reliant on your exploration of the game world of Sangavia. There are many different rituals to acquire the ingredients for in Vampires: Bloodlord Rising and all provide their own unique benefits.

Join the conversation on our Discord


Wishlist Vampires: Bloodlord Rising now on Steam.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/2191500/Vampires_Bloodlord_Rising/






Mystical Maritime Adventure - 泽渔Z_U
Version 1.0.70:
New: Item [Red Envelope]; 【 Red Envelope 】 After use, randomly receive 88 (80%)/888 (15%)/8888 (4%)/88888 (1%) gold coins.
New: You can use 'Red Envelope'! Become a decorative object.
New: During the period of January to March in the game, there is a 60% chance of winning battles and receiving red envelopes.
New: During the period of January to March in the game, there is a 40% chance of discovering and dropping red envelopes.
New: During the period of January to March in the game, there is a 20% chance of losing a red envelope while fishing or catching.
New addition: [King's Island] Construction function adds a new ship [Chinese sailboat].
Add: Automatically receive 1 red envelope every 1-3 months after entering the game.
Fix: [Gear Clipper] There is an error when clicking to modify the pattern.
Wishing everyone a happy New Year 2025!!
荷莱Horae - GKLKK
黎羽科技&荷莱制作组祝大家新年快乐!
Towerborne - KS44
Greetings, Aces,

With this update, Grandeur may be officially over … what’s that you say? What about all those Grandeur Writs you’ve accumulated? Don’t fret – you may have noticed, as a gallant gesture of Grandeur gratitude, that all your Grandeur Writs have magically transformed into regular Writs—ensuring nothing goes to waste!

Here’s a breakdown of what’s been updated:

Gameplay & Exploration

- Grandeur Event Curio Removed and Writs Converted: Grandeur Writs were supposed to be retired - so they won’t be available going forward … but don’t fret! All of your Grandeur Writs have now been converted to regular ‘ol writs, ensuring you can still enjoy the fruits of your Grandeur labor.

- Beta Label Removed: Some players may have noticed the word “Beta” in the bottom left of the title screen - that’s been removed.

Combat

- Focus Gain Affix Fixed: Resolved a bug where the "Focus Gain" attribute was doubling its intended value, causing balance issues. You can now expect accurate scaling when equipping gear with this attribute. Additionally, fixed an issue where repeatedly equipping and unequipping "Focus Gain" items caused misleading Focus Gain stat increases (it was a visual bug, stats weren’t actually affected; the visual bug has been fixed).
Maximum Football - MXFB Luke
Hey everyone, Luke here from the Maximum Football team.
I wanted to give you an update on where we stand with the fix for card packs in MPL.

What Happened?
Throughout December, we encountered critical issues with our backend provider, making it impossible to sustain our online ecosystem at the scale of players we were serving. We initially deployed a temporary solution that restored card pack functionality, but unfortunately, the same issue resurfaced a couple of weeks later.

After thorough investigation, we realized that to ensure Maximum Football and MPL function as intended, we needed to migrate our entire backend system to a new provider. As you can imagine, this was no small task. Our team has been working around the clock to create a long-term solution that eliminates these issues for good.

The Fix Is Coming Next Week!
We are excited to announce that next week, we will be releasing an update that will fully restore MPL and online play, barring any major setbacks in the approval process. Here’s what this means for you:

  • Card packs will once again be fully functional.
  • Any users who made purchases during this downtime will have their inventories restored and will be able to open the packs they purchased.
  • MPL card customization will be reactivated and will now properly save when exiting the customization menus.

Season Pass Progression Boost
We know that these issues have affected Season Pass progression, preventing many players from unlocking rewards—including the Aircraft Carrier Stadium for premium players at Level 50.

To address this, we will be extending the Season Pass and looking into additional means to give our players ample opportunity to earn their rewards.

More Than Just an MPL Fix
This patch isn’t just about MPL and card packs. It will also include:

  • Gameplay fixes
  • AI adjustments
  • Fixes for frequently exploited online issues
  • More improvements across the board

We’ll be sharing more details about new features and gameplay adjustments throughout the week on our Maximum Football social channels—so stay tuned!

We truly appreciate your patience as we worked through this issue, and we’re looking forward to getting everyone back into the action.

Thank you for your support, and we’ll see you on the field!
The Dawning Clocks of Time® Remake - spacefarergames
This first patch of the year is a revision of the previous, which fixes provisioning and launch issues that could occur when using Proton on Steam Deck devices for the Win64 version.
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