Remember Command & Conquer: Renegade? It took the classic RTS series and transformed it into a shooter, letting you play as one of those all-action commando units—you know, the "I've got a present for ya!" guys. Now Petroglyph, a studio made up of ex-Westwood devs responsible for games like 8-Bit Invaders, Forged Battalion, and Grey Goo, are working on a game called Earthbreakers that could easily be a spiritual sequel to it.

Earthbreakers is a multiplayer game where teams of infantry fight over a resource called Vilothyte crystals, which they use to construct and upgrade bases, vehicles, upgrades, and new infantry classes. It's basically an RTS as seen from the ground level of individual units who are out there protecting harvesters while they munch up fields of glowing resource rock. 

It's got six driveable vehicles, 12 infantry classes, and 11 structures to build. Up to 32 players can be on each team, depending on map size, and it'll support bots as well as player-run servers. Earthbreakers is due out next year on Steam.

Coteries of New York is a World of Darkness game that sounds like it's part visual novel, part RPG, and all about navigating the politics of the undead. As a members of a vampiric bloodline, you have to choose sides between the two factions of the Camarilla and the Anarchs. While previously it was announced for a December 4 release, it's now been pushed back a week and will be out on PC on December 11.

"The reason behind the release delay of Coteries of New York is simple", developers Draw Distance explain, "we decided to give ourselves more time to get rid of bugs and further polish the visual side of our game."

You can check out some of those visuals in the new trailer above, which introduced the four NPC companions you'll be meeting in New York by night: Tamika the Gangrel, Agathon the Tremere, D'angelo the Nosferatu, and Hope the Malkavian. Since you can choose which clan you're a member of, presumably they'll have different reactions to you based on that.

Vampire: The Masquerade—Coteries of New York will be out on Steam, Humble, and GOG.

Triangular base building parts were recently added to the free-flying sci-fi sim No Man's Sky as part of the big Synthesis Update. Compared to other new features, like starship upgrades and a new terrain editing system and a first-person exocraft, new floor tiles don't sound like a very big deal. But those three-sided bits are actually what enabled this very cool recreation of Doom's famed E1M1 map on a distant, dusty, radioactive world.

The map comes courtesy of JP LeBreton, a developer whose previous credits include BioShock, The Cave, Broken Age, and the OG Doom mod Mr. Friendly. Naturally, it's not an exact duplicate of the original: There are no explosive barrels, for instance, doors are kind of a compromise design that operate via separate switches connected to the power system, and the textures are obviously quite a bit different too, although the wall surfaces are a pretty good match overall. 

There are also no demons running around, waiting to be blown into Mephistophelian paste: There are a few creatures roaming around outside that you might want to stay away from, but otherwise this is strictly a sightseeing trip. There's no mistaking where you are, though. Even the planet is right: Red, radioactive, and rocky. 

If you'd like to see this No Man's E1M1 in action (and why wouldn't you?), enter the glyphs listed on LeBreton's NMS Bases page (he's made several) into a portal, then hop into your ship and fly to the marker—or just keep your eyes peeled for the big Doom logo carved into the hillside.

Riot Games says Aphelios, the "big brain, sad moon boi" who's now making his way to League of Legends, is "the most complex champion" it's ever created. That complexity is the result of his unique kit, which is so different from those of other characters in the game that Riot created a unique HUD for Aphelios to support it.

Aphelios carries five weapons, each with a unique basic attack. He attacks with the one in his main hand (Q), and carries another in his offhand (R) that he can swap to at any time with W. The catch is that he can't choose which weapons he's packing: Each of them has 50 ammo, and when it runs dry it's automatically swapped out for the next weapon in line that's not currently equipped, while the empty weapon goes to the end of the line to "recharge." And because the swap bypasses the offhand, the order in which they cycle will change throughout the game.

His ultimate, Moonlight Vigil, will also vary depending on the weapon equipped. It begins the same for all of them, with a "moon bomb" that explodes on contact with the first enemy it hits, doing area-of-effect damage to nearby enemies. But after the detonation, he follows up with "enhanced basic attacks" from his main-hand weapon against all enemies caught in the explosion.

His arsenal:

Calibrum, the Rifle

• Calibrum is a poke/harass weapon. Its basic attacks have extra range. When abilities deal damage with Calibrum, they mark enemies hit. Aphelios can right-click marked enemies anywhere on the map to follow up with a basic attack from his off-hand weapon (or his non-Calibrum weapon, in cases where he swaps Calibrum to his off-hand before firing). This attack detonates other nearby marks for bonus damage against the marked targets.
• Q: Moonshot - Fire a skillshot that damages the first unit hit and marks them.
• R: Moonlight Vigil's follow-up attacks mark all enemies hit. These marks deal higher damage when consumed.

Severum, the Scythe Pistol

• Severum is a sustain weapon that heals Aphelios for a portion of the damage it deals. Overhealing from Severum is converted into a small shield.
• Q: Onslaught - Gain movement speed and rapidly fire your main-hand and off-hand weapons at the nearest enemy, prioritizing champions. Onslaught shots behave like basic attacks but deal reduced damage.
• R: Moonlight Vigil grants Aphelios a flat heal.

Gravitum, the Cannon

• Gravitum is a utility weapon that applies a decaying slow to enemies.
• Q: Eclipse - Damage and root all enemies on the map affected by Gravitum's slow. Eclipse doesn't use Aphelios' off-hand weapon.
• R: Moonlight Vigil's follow-up attacks apply a massively increased slow.

Infernum, the Flamethrower

• Infernum is an AoE/waveclear weapon. It deals increased basic attack and ability damage and creates a damage cone behind enemies hit.
• Q: Duskwave - Spout a wave of flame, damaging enemies. Then basic attack all enemies hit with your off-hand weapon.
• R: Moonlight Vigil's follow-up attacks create damage circles around enemies hit instead of damage cones behind them.

Crescendum, the Chakram

• Crescendum is a close-range DPS weapon that behaves like a boomerang. Once Aphelios basic attacks with Crescendum he can't attack again until it returns to him, but his attack resets when it does. Attack speed increases Crescendum's travel speed instead. The closer Aphelios is to his target, the less distance Crescendum has to travel—and the faster Aphelios can attack. When abilities or their follow-up attacks deal damage with Crescendum, they create temporary copies of it for each enemy hit that increase the strength of Crescendum's basic attack.
• Q: Sentry - Deploy a turret that shoots the nearest target with your off-hand weapon.
• R: If Moonlight Vigil hits fewer than three enemies, its follow up attacks still increase the damage of Crescendum's basic attacks as if at least three enemies were hit.

Aphelios' custom HUD indicates the equipped weapons and remaining ammo, and any time remaining on a Q cooldown. It also indicates basic attacks and effects, has an ammo tracker (once ammo in the current weapon is down to ten shots), and indicates which weapon will come up next once the main hand runs dry.

Aphelios is currently in testing on the League of Legends PBE and expected to move to the live servers with the 9.24 patch coming in December. You can get a more detailed look at the character at leagueoflegends.com, or of lore is your thing, dive into the story of The Weapon of the Faithful.

Racing publisher Codemasters has picked up Project Cars developer Slightly Mad Studios in a £23 million/$30 million deal that will see the entire 150-person studio join the company.

Codemasters has been developing and publishing games for more than 30 years and continues to churn out racers, from the annual F1 series to the off-road Dirt Rally 2.0. Slightly Mad Studios, meanwhile, released its first game, Need for Speed: Shift in 2009, eventually starting its own racing series, Project Cars, in 2015.

Its last game, Project Cars 2, is the "apex of apex-hitting sims," according to Phil Iwaniuk's Project Cars 2 review, "but leaves casuals behind." Though it might take racing so seriously that it puts off novice racers, Phil still found it a very convincing sim and gave it an 89. 

The deal includes Project Cars and an "unannounced Hollywood blockbuster," according to the announcement. Slightly Mad Studios was already working on the third Project Cars game and is also developing a mobile spin-off, Project Cars Go. 

The biggest racing publisher acquiring one of the best racing developers around sounds like pretty good news, especially if it means more Project Cars. The Hollywood blockbuster is likely Fast & Furious, which CEO Ian Bell teased in a livestream with SpotTheOzzie. 

It's been just over a week since Valve announced Half-Life: Alyx, its long-awaited 'flagship VR game' and while there have been some mixed reactions to the Half-Life prequel, it seems that the hype is real—so much so that 'most packages of Index, Valve’s high-end VR headset released earlier this year, were sold out,' according to a post from RoadtoVR. 

The shortage appears to be mainly affecting most packages on the US and Canadian stores, with the UK currently unaffected (at the time of writing). Half-Life: Alyx will retail at full price but will be free to owners of the Valve Index VR headset, so it's perhaps not surprising that there's a shortage, especially if those on the VR fence have been pushed by Valve's reveal.

While the announcement for Half-Life: Alyx certainly wasn't the Half-Life 3 that a lot of players were hoping for, it's still a pretty big deal and something that Valve is taking seriously, not least because of all the work that's going into it.

"Half-Life: Alyx is the largest game team we've had yet. About a third of the people on the project have worked on previous Half-Life games, some all the way back to the first Half-Life." says Valve designer Greg Coomer. 

The VR project didn't start out as a Half-Life game but apparently it seemed to suit the technology Valve was working with. Just don't mention the arms to Chris and James, whatever you do!

It’s not easy being one of the six most powerful women in the galaxy. As an eridium-fueled Siren in the Borderlands games, Lilith wields deadly abilities—but bears a heavy burden. Recent games have placed her front-and-centre as a straight-talking leader, but she didn’t begin life that way. We spoke with Borderlands 3’s co-lead writer Sam Winkler about how she’s changed—and what she means to the popular series. 

In the original Borderlands, Lilith was one of the four playable vault hunters and didn’t have much approaching a personality. When it came time to take the original cast and turn them into story characters, that meant retro-fitting each with a sense of self. "All of the Borderlands player characters have distinct voices and personalities," Winkler says. "But there always needs to be some wiggle room for the players themselves to fit in. When you transition them to NPC status, you have to backfill those gaps in ways that are both rewarding and not jarring to the people who played as them. You have to find the throughlines." 

For Lilith, that throughline is her confidence and attitude. She doesn’t do anything cautiously or at half measure. She fights hard, parties harder, and runs headlong into danger throughout the series. "One of the cool things about writing for Borderlands is that the heroes aren’t always right and they don’t always make the best decisions," Winkler says. "Lilith has royally screwed up several times in the franchise, and those moments have shaped who she is in Borderlands 3." 

This is the same woman who decided, in the heat of battle, to juice herself up with eridium and use her Siren ‘phaseshift’ ability to move the entire town of Sanctuary along with her in Borderlands 2. And that’s exactly the sort of reckless last resort that defines her character.

"Lilith is one of the most powerful and dangerous people in the universe," Winkler says. “And she knows it.” That confidence was a natural part of playing Borderlands as Lilith and became the cornerstone of her personality as an NPC in the games that followed. 

What don’t we know about Lilith that we may never see in a game? Winkler is hesitant to give away anything in his hand that may still be of use, but he does reveal one detail that helps inform her story in the new sequel, "One line that ended up getting cut from the Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary DLC was a confirmation that she was born with her tattoos, while some other Sirens, like Angel, were not. Borderlands 3 blows up some pre-conceptions of Siren powers and how they find their way to people."

It takes two

Another important throughline for Lilith is her relationship with Roland, known in Borderlands as ‘the Soldier’. The two both began as playable characters in Borderlands. By the time of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, we meet the two vacationing together in Moxxi’s bar, a getaway plan that I suspected wasn’t Roland’s first choice. “Roland wasn’t exactly the most unbuttoned guy on Pandora, so it’s hard to imagine a vacation being his idea,” Winkler confirms. “But if one of the six legendary Sirens asks you to come dancing with her, you go.”

Throughout Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel, Roland takes on the role of the ‘man with a plan’ while Lilith bulls forward on the path he sets for the vault hunters. After being separated at the beginning of Borderlands 2, Lilith takes up the alias ‘Firehawk’ as the leader of a group of psychos. Despite that tenure as bandit legend prior to meeting back up with Roland and the crew, Winkler says, “Lilith never intended to become the leader of anything.” 

Now, (Borderlands 2 spoilers) after Roland has been killed by Handsome Jack, Lilith is left to pick up the pieces of the Crimson Raiders that he once led. In the wake of his death, someone has to step up and take charge, a role that Lilith initially struggles with. Years later in Borderlands 3, Winkler says, “She’s a confident, driven commander who is laser-focused on finding the map to the Vaults.” 

Lilith ultimately fills Roland’s shoes as a commander, but I had to wonder: will anyone else take his place as her partner? 

“Lilith is a deeply private person. She struggles with letting down her guard and showing weakness,” Winkler says. “How the hell do you meet new people in the Borderlands? I wouldn’t use a Hyperion dating app, for sure.” Sounds like if there’s another person in Lilith’s life it will have to be another on-the-job introduction. 

Despite Gearbox’s fondness for a certain dubstepping toaster, Lilith has evolved into the perfect face for the series. Brash, powerful, yet oddly human—she’s come a long way from just being the support class.

Cyberpunk 2077 is probably going to be the biggest game release of the first half of 2020. It's the big dog, the gorilla with a shotgun, the Classy Freddie Blassie in a room full of pencil-neck geeks, and nobody's going to mess with it. Or so it seemed, until earlier this month, when Valve announced Half-Life: Alyx—an actual new Half-Life game—and set it to come out in March, just a month (and possibly less) ahead of Cyberpunk.

The insertion of Alyx definitely makes the upcoming spring more crowded, but CD Projekt said in a recent earnings call (via Yahoo! Finance) that it's not worried about the competition. In response to a question about the possible impact of a new Half-Life on Cyberpunk 2077, vice president of business development Michal Nowakowski said that VR is "an extremely nichey niche [part] of the market," and he doesn't think Valve is really looking to make Alyx a big hit anyway.

"The only reason I can think of why has Valve has decided to actually put this title in the market is because they actually have a corporation on the hardware side of the things," he said. "This is probably a big effort for them to sort of try to expand that. That niche is very, very, very—and I could add a few 'verys' here—small."

"So from the market perspective, are we afraid? No, because it's a very different niche. It's—this is an endeavor to sort of try to push the hardware while we are really targeting the mass markets where it is, which is major consoles and the PCs without the need to have the VR gear."

Nowakowski added that even if Half-Life: Alyx lives up to its billing, no other developers have committed to VR to a comparable extent, so the likelihood of a sudden rush to it in the immediate future is very slim.

"Perhaps Half-Life will be this first stone that is going to turn into something larger as we go, but that's definitely not going to be the case come first half of the next year. I daresay it's probably not going to be next year," he said. "Even—I don't actually know even further because things may change. And at some point, VR may be a mass-market entertainment that will validate the business model behind it, but it is not the case, at least not for us right now."

As for the possibility of CD Projekt's previous games getting the VR treatment, president and joint CEO Adam Kiciński suggested that it's not likely to happen: VR games need to be designed as such from the start in order to be any good, he said—The Witcher games obviously are not—and besides, "we are rather for delivering new games than working on old titles."

Impostor Factory, the next game coming from To the Moon studio Freebird Games, sounded quite a bit different from its predecessors when it was announced earlier this year. While To the Moon and its sequel Finding Paradise are tear-jerkers about regret and final wishes, Impostor Factory, Freebird said, is "a time-resetting thriller-mystery that involves a series of bloody murders."

Now we've got a little bit of a closer look at what's coming, sort of, through a new trailer, a website, and a Steam listing. I say "sort of" because it's still not at all clear what's happening here. Freebird refers to the game as "To the Moon 3" in the announcement, and says explicitly that it's part of the To the Moon (Sigmund Corp.) series; but it's also labeled as Episode X, rather than Episode 3 as you might expect, and "the topic of how it is connected is suspiciously avoided."

"Impostor Factory is a bonkers time-loop tragicomedy murder mystery sci-fi thriller with multiple casualties and a suspicious cat, from the creator of To the Moon," Freebird founder Kan Gao said, which sounds like fun but doesn't really clarify how it connects with the prior games. 

The description on Steam is similarly baffling. It makes specific reference to Dr. Rosalene and Dr. Watts from the first two games, but then says that "this isn't their story. Probably." Instead, it's about a man named Quincy, who was invited to a very fancy party at an oddly secluded mansion with a time machine in its bathroom.

"Quincy could wash his hands and time-travel while he was at it. Talk about a time-saver!" the Steam page says. "But of course, then people start dying, because that's what they do. And somewhere along the way, things get a little Lovecraftian and tentacles are involved. Anyway, that's around 1/3 of what the game is really about."

The FAQ section isn't any more helpful, saying that Impostor Factory may or may not be a sequel to To the Moon and Finding Paradise, or might be a prequel, or could possibly even both, maybe through the whole time travel thing. Whatever it turns out to be, Freebird emphasized that it's a standalone game, so there's no need to play the other two first.

Whatever it turns out to be, Freebird said—as it did in the original announcement—that it "will likely mark the end of an era" for the studio and the To the Moon series. It's expected to be out in late 2020.

The Euro Truck Simulator 2: Road to the Black Sea DLC that was announced in May will hit the highway on December 5, developer SCS Software said today. To commemorate the looming launch it also dropped a trailer that puts a whole new twist on the idea of "highway hypnosis."

Maybe it's just me, but that constant roll of trucks and cars and trains and boats, all going about their business at a leisurely pace across the highways and byways of Eastern Europe, is legitimately mesmerizing. Even the upbeat music contributes to the effect: It's like I'm sitting in the back seat of my grandfather's Yugo, slowly falling asleep as we amble down the I-5 on the way to Gabrova. If you extended this into a ten-hour loop it'd probably be a hit on YouTube's ASMR section.

Back to the matter at hand: Road to the Black Sea will add more than 10,000 kilometers of roads to drive on through Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, with 20 new major cities (including Istanbul) and numerous smaller towns, settlements, and famous landmarks to see. AI-controlled cars, trains, and trams local to the region will be joined by horse carts in the countryside, there will be 11 new companies, docks, and industries to do business with, a ferry will carry you and your rig the Danube, and there will be new Black Sea region achievements to collect.

Despite the release date announcement, the Road to the Black Sea Steam page hasn't been updated just yet so there's currently no listed price, but based on previously DLC releases I'd expect something in the $20-$25 range. It'll no doubt be updated soon enough—while we wait, let's take a minute to kick back, relax, and enjoy that trailer again.