The YA dystopia craze died because it didn’t evolve

The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted is here to spotlight our most anticipated games of 2024 and beyond, but not everything in the show today is far off. A new multiplayer shooter promising to be «the most accessible extraction shooter» to date, Hawked, launches today in early access. It's free-to-play, sports a massive map out of the gate, and seems more focused on quick, simple fun than laborious looting.

The Sandman season 2 has begun filming – and we can't wait.

It’s been a busy year for Taika Waititi. As an in-demand producer, he’s had a lot of projects hit screens in 2023, including season 2 of Our Flag Means Death (which he starred in as well as producing), season 3 of Reservation Dogs, season 5 of What We Do in the Shadows, and the indie films Frybread Face and Me and Red, White & Brass. As a writer and director, he’s midstream on Apple TV Plus’ reboot of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, with irons in the fire on everything from a Star Wars movie to a series adaptation of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. And on top of it all, he has a new movie in theaters: Next Goal Wins, a sports comedy adapting the documentary of the same name about the real-life comeback of the American Samoa soccer team, after a record-breaking 31-0 World Cup qualifier loss.

I hope you've had your fill of cyberpunk, because we're heading back to Rivia, baby. Almost half of CD Projekt's development staff - around 330 people - are now working on the next Witcher game, the mysterious project Polaris.

Acer Predator Helios 16 | GeForce RTX 4070 | Core i7 13700HX | 16-inch | 1600p | 240Hz IPS | 16GB DDR5-5600 | 1TB SSD | $1,899.99$1,299.99 at B&H Photo (save $600)We're big fans of the latest Acer Predator laptop (read our review of the RTX 4080 version) and this RTX 4070 machine has got a lot about it, too. The Core i7 13700HX CPU is ostensibly an eight-core chip with E-core benefits. That means you get 16 full power processing threads, and a further eight cores to take it up to a total of 24 threads. For a $1,300 laptop that's pretty tasty. It's also sporting some speedy DDR5 memory, a full 1TB SSD and a 500nit IPS display with a 2560 x 1600 native resolution. Sadly, it's not the Mini-LED version in the top Helios 16 models, but it's still a bright, colorful screen. 

Cutesy cult-management roguelite Cult of the Lamb is sharpening its ritual dagger as it prepares to lay out its next big free content update next year.

With the holiday season now in full swing, there's a pretty nice freebie available on the Epic Games Store: Deliver Us Mars. The sci-fi adventure game is a direct sequel to 2018's Deliver Us the Moon, taking place around ten years after the events that unfolded in the original game. Humans are closer than ever to extinction on Earth, and only a daring mission to the Red Planet to recover the ARK colony ships can change the fate of humankind.

Activision has claimed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is seeing record engagement levels compared to its predecessors.

Fade is an action RPG billed as a mix of Dark Souls' combat and Fable's narrative direction, and after shopping it around to publishers while self-publishing in extended Steam Early Access (which included a bit of a hiatus), solo creator Knight by Night has doubled down on independent work because they can't find a publisher deal that works for them. 

League of Legends Worlds is a prestigious yearly tournament that wrapped up its 2023 run recently. The victors, T1 from Korea, took home $445,000 along with the gold. In a sad twist of fate—one that belongs in some Greek tragedy—a member of the winning team still didn't get what he wanted.

Xbox Series sales in Europe have dropped considerably compared to last year, while PS5 sales experienced a major boost year-on-year.

By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.