Folk News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

With the news that Blizzard and ESL FACEIT are preparing to launch a new esports circuit for Overwatch 2, mere months after the death of the Overwatch League, it's a good time to take stock of the entire esports scene. Things are looking slightly frantic, at least in North America. League of Legends and Rocket League are particularly messy, entering their 2024 seasons with lean budgets and major shakeups. Meanwhile, an expansion of the open-qualifiers model should provide more opportunities for everyday players to compete in Valorant, Overwatch 2, Rocket League and all manner of fighting games. Get those fingers ready, folks.

Folks, I have seen some games like Hollow Knight in my day. Until this afternoon, I would've told you that the iconic Metroidvania's closest relative is probably Crowsworn, which proudly blends Hollow Knight's style with action games like Devil May Cry to make something that appears meaningfully different. But Crowsworn has now been dethroned by Deviator, a 2D Metroidvania that looks so uncannily similar that I genuinely thought we'd gotten new Hollow Knight Silksong screenshots for a split-second. 

As I worked on my review for Another Code: Recollection, one concern I kept coming across for the then-upcoming title was whether or not anyone from the original developer, Cing, was involved in the project.

Square Enix is a big name in the video game industry. They have all kinds of incredible IPs that they deliver into the marketplace. The biggest of which is Final Fantasy. However, the company has attempted to bring out some smaller titles. With more players and devices available to enjoy games, the folks at Square Enix have tried to cover all their bases. Some have worked incredibly well, while others fell short of becoming that big blockbuster hit. 

Rebel Wolves, a team of developers composed of CD Project Red veterans, has revealed some tantalizing details about its ongoing project. 

Rebel Wolves, the studio founded by a few of the CD Projekt folk behind The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, have officially titled their forthcoming dark fantasy RPG. That title is… Dawnwalker. They’ve also shared a new teaser image, which I think could depict one of two things: a) a vampiric or otherwise supernaturally-inclined hero flying through the air care of a Dishonored-style Blink teleport, sword raised and clawed fingers stretched towards an unseen foe against a blood-red backdrop. Or b) a man with his trousers aflame swinging through the window of a second floor spa while attempting to use his umbrella as a parachute, having received only half a pedicure before the building caught fire.

Phase 2 of Season of Discovery will launch on February 8, increasing the level cap to level 40, an upgraded Level-Up Raid inside Gnomeregan, new runes, new abilities and a zone wide PvP event in Stranglethorn Vale! Blizzard's announcement video shows the sky turning red over Stranglethorn Vale, is there any lore that might reference this?

In September 2023, the eccentric, larger-than-life folks cast for Season 10 of reality TV show 90 Day Fiancé were revealed. Among them was now-30-year-old Kentucky resident Clayton, matched with 26-year-old Anali of Peru. While it wasn't immediately obvious, it's since become abundantly clear that Clayton is a hardcore Old School RuneScape player – a 20,000-hour type of hardcore player. The MMO's community pounced on the news back in November, and after a new episode which aired on January 7, Clayton's story has once again become a legendary meme factory. 

Our noble outlaws tried to warn them, but the Bloodrock Mining Co. dug too deep and unearthed a portal to Deepholm in the Elemental Plane. As Therazane fights for her domain, new friends and unlikely allies fight for their lives! Get ready to dig in, this is the Delve into Deepholm!

There are few things the internet is hungrier for than news about the Switch successor. With relative silence from Nintendo, folks have been left to grasp at straws and theorize what it will look like, how it will be played, and when it will be released. Today, thanks to Digital Trends, we might have an answer to that last question, and it came from a rather odd place.

As part of another adventure in numbers incomprehensible to the human mind, Microsoft has gained the upper hand in its rivalry with Apple, attaining a market value of $2.87 trillion and becoming the most valuable company on the planet. 

CES is in full swing, and Mario was there in holographic AI form to give folks at the AARP booth advice on how to eat healthy. I wish I was joking.

Baldur's Gate 3 managed to break out of the traditional CRPG demographic and capture the hearts and minds of total newcomers to the genre (like me). This was hugely exciting to see, but it inevitably caused some headaches for folks who found themselves intimidated by the game's unfamiliar rules and systems (again, like me). The cure to this headache, according to Larian senior RPG designer Anna Guxens, is to simply "roll with it" instead of trying to understand and master everything perfectly. 

Ray tracing is officially coming to Diablo 4 in March. Cool! Nvidia recently released a short trailer – and I mean really short, just 40 seconds – showing off the spruced up visuals and, um, well. Reader, why don't you see if you notice a difference, because I am honestly struggling over here. 

As you can probably tell from the name, Expeditions: A MudRunner Game is an extension of MudRunner and SnowRunner’s uniquely slow-paced brand of off-road driving simulation. These open-world trucking sims turn their swampy sandboxes into complex puzzles that will suck your hapless trucks into their boggy bowels if you make a bad decision, or overestimate the capabilities of your vehicle. The core of Expeditions is different – shelving the heavy trucking aspect and focusing instead on navigation and exploration – but the spirit is the same. That is, stay upright, don’t get stuck, and if in doubt, winch your way out.

For 14 grueling years, a single question has dominated the inner machinations of my mind like a black hole in a library. Not a day goes by that I don't wonder, sometimes for hours at a time, how long it would take to climb an Empire State Building-sized ladder in Demon's Souls. So I'm pleased and frankly relieved to report that this important matter can finally be put to rest. 

Steam has hit a new record for concurrent players.

2023 was a good year for both Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, with Microsoft and Sony putting plenty of quality content on both subscription services, but with the year now behind us, which offered the best overall value? Well, the folks at The Loadout actually did the math, tallying up the value of the games added to both Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus this year, with the latter arguably coming out on top.

Starfield was easily one of the more anticipated games that was released last year. For years, Bethesda had slowly teased this new RPG IP being developed. Initially, the game was meant to be a title launch across both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles alongside the PC platform. However, that quickly changed when Microsoft acquired Bethesda when they purchased ZeniMax Media. As a result, we now have an Xbox-exclusive franchise from the folks behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. But being that this is such a massive RPG, there were bound to be some issues fans would uncover.

The folks over at IGN have shared 18 minutes of new Dragon’s Dogma 2 gameplay footage, giving us a closer look at the game’s Fighter, Warrior, Sorcerer, and Thief vocations.

As is often the case, the folks at PlayStation have released a hype video for the new year, showcasing some of the games that will be arriving on PS5 in 2024. In addition to generally being a fun watch, the trailer also essentially confirms 2024 releases for a number of games that hadn’t solidified a release window yet, including Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, the Silent Hill 2 remake, and Firewalk Studios’ mysterious PvP shooter Concord. You can check out the PlayStation 2024 hype trailer, below.

Paradox Interactive's upcoming life simulator, Life By You, might be an upcoming challenger to The Sims, but it shares a similar core ethos with that of a very unexpected board game: chess.

Via a post on Twitter, developer Frogwares has announced that they are now the sole publisher for 2019’s The Sinking City. As a result, they will be updating storefronts with the latest version of the game in the coming weeks.

Embark Studios may have incorrectly banned a selection of The Finals players during the game's first ban wave.

Final Fantasy father Hironobu Sakaguchi is working on a new game, but as per usual, he's playing way too much Final Fantasy 14 to give a concrete update on the new project.

Well, it turns out I wasn't the only person who had a hankering for returning to Monster Hunter: World for the first time in forever this holiday season. The game has seen a resurgence over the last couple of weeks, culminating in a peak concurrent count of 131,964 players on January 1 according to SteamDB. That's the largest number of hunters exploring the New World since October 2020. 

Developer Embark Studios has deployed the first big ban wave on its free-to-play shooter The Finals, but some non-cheating players appear to have been affected too. 

Creator Consumer Softproducts is back, folks, with a creatively upsetting and extremely intriguing idea for another hybrid FPS and Immersive Sim: Psycho Patrol R, a game that has you as a mech-piloting cop with some kind of almost-surely-upsetting superpowers.

Remember 2023? The answer can be no. It was a lot. Between a deluge of major games — Tears of the Kingdom, Diablo IV, Baldur’s Gate 3, Armored Core 6, and Starfield, to name a few — the eclipsing cultural moment of Barbenheimer, the writer and actor strikes, the morphing of Twitter into X, the multi-pronged legal action against the Microsoft-Activision acquisition, and the rise of AI, the year in Culture was a constant drone of milestone moments.

It’s been three weeks and change since Rockstar Games played Santa Claus by giving everyone their first look at Grand Theft Auto 6 ahead of its vague 2025 release date. In that time, thirsty fans have watched the record-setting trailer more than 160 million times, which was apparently more than enough research to recreate the video in just about every game, style, and format under the sun.

Tinyfolks has just gone on sale on the Play Store from £3.49 to 0.99p! This little pixel game features a bunch of, you guessed it, Tiny Folk! In this little pixel experience, you are tasked with training your folks for combat and upgrading your town.

PlayStation Plus subscribers have several games to look forward to in January, with free Essential games including A Plague Tale: Requiem, Evil West, and Nobody Saves the World. Sony Interactive Entertainment announced the lineup on Wednesday. Players can download the trio of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 games beginning Tuesday, Jan. 2.

The folks at Mythwalk Studios are speaking my language. The studio's upcoming Metroidvania, Dewborne Dawn, is pitched on Kickstarter as a 2D search-action adventure inspired by Hollow Knight, Sekiro, the Legend of Zelda, and perhaps most importantly, Dust: An Elysian Tail, one of the best games of 2013. It looks and sounds fantastic, and with an RPG-like companion system thrown in too, it officially has my attention. 

Alan Wake 2 and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 may not have much in common on the surface. One is a dark mystery thriller with a story that unfolds alongside its protagonists minds, while the other is a fast-paced and exhilarating action game about bright and colourful superheroes.

Larian Studios’ CEO Swen Vincke was joined by none other than two Lord of the Rings alums for a hilarious Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough - and it’s the essential Christmas viewing I didn’t know I needed.

Although Patch 10.2 has been released for a few weeks now, secrets are still being discovered! Folks from the WoW Secret Finding Discord poked around the Emerald Dream and found a hidden Warglaive — Alara'shinu, a fel-themed version of the 10.2 World Quest warglaive! Thanks to Starverse, Ryldor, Scarseeker and Saltarith of <The Veiled Glaive> for the tip. If you aren't interested on the appearance, this is also a good starter weapon for any Demon Hunter alts, as it is ilvl441 Veteran 1/8, upgradeable all the way to ilvl463. Learn how to obtain this Warglaive in this post.

After cleaning up the Nintendo Switch 2023 Game of the Year contest (with one of the biggest sweeps of the year), Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is back for the Overall 2023 Game of the Year award here at Destructoid. Act surprised!

While working on first-person shooter Alien Resurrection (2000) for the PlayStation, the folks at Argonaut Games — widely known as the ground-breaking studio behind Star Fox for the Super Nintendo — left in a bit of code that allowed for the booting of backup discs without needing to make any hardware or software modifications to the console.

Without a doubt, it’s been a rough couple of weeks now for Insomniac Games. After releasing their successful sequel to Marvel’s Spider-Man earlier this year, the focus soon shifted towards getting their next game ready. Marvel’s Wolverine was previously teased to the public, but we haven’t seen the game in quite a long time. However, the focus on their work quickly shifted towards dealing with a public cyberattack. A ransomware group managed to hack into Insomniac Games, and with it came a slew of stolen data. 

Video games are not cheap. We probably don’t have to tell you that. However, you can typically find some games dropping down in price over time. Those AAA titles that cost you $69.99 brand new are not easy to keep up with forever. Sometimes, it’s best to let some of those games drop down to a more comfortable entry price. Unfortunately, Nintendo games don’t typically follow that trend. Normally, those games, especially first-party studio releases from Nintendo, will stay at a pretty high premium.

The YouTube algorithm is a truly wretched piece of tech, but just as a broken clock is right twice a day, sometimes YouTube will cough up an absolute gold mine. I would confidently describe the hundreds of Elden Ring videos on veganiele's channel, which I randomly found earlier this week, as one such gold mine. This brave Tarnished has been beating Malenia, renowned as the RPG's hardest boss, with every melee weapon in the game, without taking a single hit and often fighting at level one, for over a year straight. 

There’s just a couple of winners left to announce as Destructoid’s GOTY awards wrap up for the year, and that includes our staff pick for the Best PC Game of 2023.

It’s the time of year, folks. The Steam Winter Sale for 2023 is now live, offering some hefty discounts on thousands of games on the Steam store. For me, it’s usually when I pick up titles I didn’t have a chance to play throughout the year but definitely wanted to at some point. After all, not often is there a better discount than what we see with the Steam Winter Sale, at least anytime soon.

The folks over at Bloober Team are throwing together a new title, but this time, the franchise is through one of the IPs by Skybound Entertainment. It’s been unveiled that the development studio has partnered up with Skybound Entertainment for this next big game release. However, that’s about all we know right now about the game. With Bloober Team known for delivering horror gameplay experiences, it would be hard to see the studio partnered up with an IP not centered around a horror storyline. 

We learned in November that Valve was working on a new feature that will enable Steam users to mark individual games in their games as "private," preventing everyone else in the world from knowing it's there. That feature has now gone live in the latest Steam client beta, which also includes changes to the Steam shopping cart that will make purchasing gifts for other people a whole lot easier.

Something we’re seeing more and more of in recent years is once-established game developers changing on the inside and becoming something that gamers don’t recognize. That might sound very “doom and gloom” but it’s the truth, and Bioware is an excellent example of this concept. They were once an “underdog” developer that made some of the best RPG titles around, with Mass Effect being one of its “crown jewels.” But, over time, they started to lose the people who made the place special. EA bought them, and now they’re a shell of their former selves.

Blizzard is hinting at a pretty massive change to its monetization model, with executive producer Jared Neuss saying on a recent podcast that the "goal" is to make all new heroes free for everyone at the start of new seasons.

Mac Walters amassed an enviable list of credits during his nearly 20-year career at BioWare on games including Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, eventually rising to lead writer of Mass Effect 2 and 3 and creative director on Mass Effect: Andromeda. He then stepped into the role of production director on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, before leaving the studio in January 2023. In a new interview with MinnMax, Walters talked about his reasons for leaving, saying he was prompted to do so in part by the success of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.

When I'm choosing a new headset for myself, there's three main selling points: Comfort, sound quality, and convenience. Comfort is, as one would guess, measuring how comfortable the set is on my ears, and how easy it is to adjust on my head. Sound quality – even more obvious, I know – is how music, game sounds, and more come from the set into my ears. Convenience is marked by how the headset connects to any given device, as well as how easy they are to store when I'm done. The Nacon RIG 900 Max HX hits every one of these requirements and then some, as it offers one of the best audio experiences I've ever had. 

When Overwatch 2 launched back in 2022, the franchise switched to a free-to-play model, and as you might expect, there have been some complaints about how Blizzard has chosen to monetize the game. One sticking point has been the fact that in order to access new Heroes, you either have to buy the premium version of the most recent seasonal battle pass (which costs $10) or complete a number of hero challenges, which takes time. This kind of setup isn’t unheard of in a live-service game, but in a game like Overwatch where character balance is such a major focus, locking some folks who don’t want to pay out of using a new character for a certain amount of time has been a bone of contention.

The Xbox Series X/S is Microsoft’s big console platform they are pushing. With the console just getting into its lifecycle, plenty of players are likely to find themselves receiving this platform. Whether you purchased one yourself or find an Xbox Series X/S nestled under the Christmas tree, Microsoft has a few tips to share. Taking to the official Xbox Wire blog, we have some tips to give players on how to get started with the console. 

Like a lot of folks here at Polygon, I’m a bit of a physical media nerd. I’m not going to extol its virtues here (we have a regular roundup for that), but I’ve recently leveled up my media library game, obsessing over the quality of a given release, learning about the work that goes into a good restoration, being a stickler about packaging and extras. It’s a fun way to engage with art more intentionally, like a pop culture archeologist.

Final Fantasy 7 fans are spreading positivity on Twitter in 'thank you' messages to developers following harassment directed towards one writer.

The Feast of Winter Veil is here once again. While you wait to open your presents under the tree on the 25th, why not pick up You're a Mean One... or You're a Mean One...

We learned during Microsoft’s attempts to acquire Activision Blizzard that a PS5 version of Bethesda and MachineGames’ Indiana Jones adaptation was originally planned – until the Redmond firm renegotiated the terms with intellectual property holder, Disney. Discussing this matter directly, the firm’s head of gaming, Sean Shoptaw, said he doesn’t believe the decision is “overly exclusionary”.

On July 29, 2024, Microsoft will turn off the ability to purchase games on the Xbox 360 Marketplace, effectively killing access to hundreds of digital games. Many of those games will remain available on other platforms, but there are outliers - and one resource has put together a list of the 47 games that will die with the 360 store.

There are very few years that aren’t “winners” for Nintendo. You can set your watch to the publisher putting out at least one Game of the Year nominee annually. Now, it’s time to decide the best of 2023.

I may not put much thought into Christmas lists today, but back when I was a kid they were practically an art form. From the presentation to the content itself, I pulled out all the stops to draw attention to whatever it was I coveted at the time.

The Elden Ring DLC release window might have just been leaked via a controller collaboration.

Fashion is serious business in World of Warcraft; players march off to delve into dungeons and kill bosses wearing the most fantastic fits possible. The game has a transmogrify system, which allows players to wear whatever they’d like. All you have to do is visit an Ethereal in a capital city, and they’ll allow you to overwrite a boring piece of gear with a much prettier piece. Recent additions to World of Warcraft seem to be aimed at the transmogrify crowd, with data miners discovering even more goodies on the way, and fashion fans are excited to see what dolly dress-up gear they’ll be receiving next.

It was highly rumored that we would see something from the folks over at Arkane Lyon during The Game Awards last week. This speculation was split between a new installment to their beloved  Dishonored  franchise and a potentially new game based around  Marvel’s Blade . When the event took place, it was unveiled that  Marvel’s Blade  was actually in the works. Now Microsoft would have their own stab at a potential exclusive like how Sony was able to bring out  Marvel’s Spider-Man  and  Marvel’s Wolverine  to their PlayStation fanbase.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a pretty impressive visual package on PC, with its highest “Unobtanium” settings challenging even the beefiest of GPUs, but how does the game fare on consoles? Thankfully, the answer is “pretty darn well!” I can confirm this from my own play testing, but the folks at Digital Foundry has given the game a full analysis on Xbox Series X/S and PS5, and the results are fairly impressive. You can check out their full video below, provided you have around 20 minutes to spare, or you can scroll on down for our rundown of the salient points.

[UPDATE] Bethesda Game Studios has now responded to the Starfield update 1.8.88 thread on Reddit to reveal plenty of details on the game's patch roadmap for next year.

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're doing so on Chrome. It's the browser I've used daily for over a decade and makes up over 60% of overall browser usage. Trailing way behind is Safari with 18%, followed by Edge and Firefox. I can understand then, why longtime browser contestant Opera has been thinking outside the box to stand out.

Folks, I should've started writing this article about 20 minutes ago, but I physically could not tear myself away from the demo for Die In the Dungeon. This cleverly named turn-based roguelike isn't fully out yet, but the demo alone has proven that its combination of Slay the Spire and Dicey Dungeons is going to consume days of my life.

Disney says it doesn't feel making the upcoming Indiana Jones game an Xbox exclusive is "over exclusionary" as it'll still reach a lot of players. 

Super Nintendo centerpiece Super Mario World is often lauded as not only one of the best Mario games of all time but also one of the greatest video games ever made, hands down. Little did we know that this classic adventure has been deceiving us for over 30 years, at least as it pertains to the abilities of a single enemy.

CD Projekt Red fulfilled a five-year promise last week when it added a fully functional metro system to Cyberpunk 2077. While the feature does wonders to make Night City feel more alive, I was surprised to learn just how little California’s public transportation infrastructure has improved in the game’s alternate-reality future.

Microsoft’s high-profile legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the fate of its $69 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard unearthed a number of explosive revelations, among them the fact Microsoft renegotiated ZeniMax's deal with Disney to make Bethesda's upcoming Indiana Jones game exclusive to Xbox and PC, thus ditching the PlayStation 5 version.

Update, 12/12/23: 

TimeSplitters developer Free Radical Design closed its doors today, staff are now reporting via social media.

It has been four days since the launch of the much, much-aligned zombie shooter The Day Before. Today, the developer, Fntastic, has announced it’s closing its doors.

Update, 12/11/23:

We’re losing two great entries into the TV memes category this week: First up is The Gilded Age, which has taken over X feeds everywhere — or at least in a lot of places — with goofy memes paying homage to the series’ arch language and high society antics. That show will be wrapping up its second season, with a possible season 3 on the horizon.

After much waiting and uncertainty, Baldur’s Gate 3 finally arrived on Xbox Series X/S last week, and plenty of folks are eagerly playing on the platform, but a few have run into a fairly serious issue. Apparently, some Xbox players have experienced crashes that resulted in their save files disappearing, which is obviously a pretty big problem. Thankfully, according to the official BG3 X account, a fix may have arrived…

Greetings, Adventurers!

A new train game is picking up steam in the train game community, with Railroader picking up 97% positive reviews on Steam since its December 7 Early Access launch. A sim of both driving the trains as well as routing them, choosing cargo, and picking passengers, Railroader looks to appeal to both the sim crowd and the less-hardcore folks who enjoy games like Euro and American Truck Simulator—even roping in a few strategy and transport sim types who enjoy games like Transport Fever.