I maintain that the bounties of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s drum-tight action and hyper-intricate world exploration ultimately outweigh its repeated acts of smirking sadism. It’s a fine dining restaurant where the waiters insist on bashing your kneecaps out with claw hammers before serving the most delightful, perfectly layered mille-feuille you’ve had in your life. It’sh delishush>, you mumble through a full mouth and agonised tears.

Still, sometimes I’ll fancy a taste of the good stuff without necessarily having my skeleton destroyed. To that end, I’ve been taking regular breaks from Silksong’s usual heroics to pursue the simpler life of a package courier for Pharloom’s surviving insects.

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Battlefield 2042 supported 128 player matches at launch in 2021. Battlefield 6 will support 64 player matches, when it launches on 10th October this year. Some mistake here, surely? Battlefield 6 is a sequel to Battlefield 2042, and sequels are supposed to have More. If I have just given voice to your innermost thoughts, then I fear it is time to bamboozle and horrify you with the nightmare-physics of the arcane game design proverb, "sometimes, less> is more".

"But how can this be?" you shriek, as the ground crumbles and the walls peel away. Matter cannot increase and decrease simultaneously! A "+1" cannot be a "-1"! You reach for the whiskey bottle in a frenzy, but it is too late to unlearn this awful knowledge. Anyway, stop screaming so I can treat you to another morsel of insight from Battlefield 6 design director Shashank Uchil. I promise this one won't hurt quite as much.

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...And so the thick snow feels like a sweet variant of obscuration: an invitation to go make my own footprints. The signs are blanketed to invisibility or missing entirely, though I wouldn't know the difference in weather this insistent. But: Easy Delivery Co.'s map is very good. And by very good, I mean it tells me slightly less than what I want to know at all times.

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