“Here is what may be the final edition of Blood Bowl,” read the opening page of that community manual. “This is the rulebook designed to send Blood Bowl into a perpetual format. The Games Workshop is no longer interested in providing true support for this game.” Yet in 2009, Games Workshop backed Cyanide in its attempt to recreate Blood Bowl on the PC. That first game was faithful, if unadorned, and a sequel in 2015 finally delivered the audio-visual crunch to match the mental image of a beastman forcibly lifting an elf into the air with a single punch....

It all kicked off when streamer “CaseyExplosion” offered to donate $100 to a racial justice charity if someone would leak some “juicy details” about any upcoming Bloodborne news. And it seems like someone actually did take her up on that offer, because the next tweet was a screenshot of said money being donated, followed by a thread “confirming” that Bloodborne would indeed be making its way to PC. “Yes Bloodborne will be coming to PC,” she wrote....

I’m going to make the declaration: games are far too nice now. I’d like some more offensive games please. Don’t worry, I haven’t taken leave of my senses. This is not some alt-right appeal for gaming to return to the cesspit of sexism and racism that it once was. I didn’t spend the last twenty years raging against that sort of drivel because I was a fan. I just want them to be rude again....

This news is all very map-oriented it seems, as Warzone’s Verdansk looks as though a satellite has crashed, taking a few buildings down with it, and leaving parts of Verdansk covered in debris. Then there’s Cold War’s ocean-bound map, Hijacked. I’ve always been a fan of shooters being set on boats, although it makes me sad that most of the time you can’t just throw yourself overboard for a swim....

Call Of Duty: Vanguard Season 1 introduced the Gorenko Anti-Tank Rifle, which is a new Sniper that you unlock at tier 31 in the current battle pass. We’ve updated this list to include the Gorenko and will continue to add any future Sniper Rifles that come in future seasons. Make sure to check back regularly to see how balance patches and meta shifts affect our list of the best Vanguard Snipers....

One thing’s for sure, boot technology clearly hasn’t changed between WWII and modern day. Movement feels incredibly similar to Modern Warfare: slides, crouches, sprints, I’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart if you stripped both sets of soldiers down and entered them into Tough Mudder. This isn’t detrimental, though. If anything, steering your soldier through Vanguard’s maps feels like a glorious return to peak physical fitness, where Black Ops Cold War suffers from an unshakeable stiffness in its joints....

An update that went live on 10th December has “drastically reduced the amount of bloom on all base Vanguard weapons”. Raven Software say they plan on “removing bloom from Vanguard weapons entirely”, but it’s a more complex issue that can’t be fixed with one or two quick tweaks. “This process will take time, as we will need to determine adequate downsides to counterbalance the removal of Bloom, which will vary based on each individual Weapon and the type of Attachment they are attributed to,” they explain....

I’ve done my own bit of sleuthing, and determined that I can’t find the classic card collapse effect anywhere in this so-called “Solitaire” game. What d’you think you’re playing at, Mike? The Solitaire Conspiracy is the classic card game with the stakes ramped up. Each card is an agent under your control, each with their own set of skills that’ll shake up the deck depending on when and where they’re played....

Senior UI artist Edd Coates of Double Eleven has put together the Game UI Database website where you can search for images of various menus and interfaces from all sorts of games. The database went up earlier this month but was briefly slain by an abundance of traffic. Apparently it’s more than just the two of us interested in these things. Imagine! It’s now returned for you to peruse at will....

The announcment was posted to the game’s Twitter account, where the team wrote that “Arc Raiders is an ambitious game, and we will be using this extra time to expand the experience, and allow it to reach its fullest potential.” So it goes! When a game needs a bit longer in development, it’s good that it should get that time. Arc Raiders was originally announced at The Game Awards in 2021, so you’d be forgiven for missing it among the absolute deluge of trailers that make up any of Geoff Keighley’s advertise ’em ups....

Kalypso’s attempt to explain the bitmap alterations has probably riled more purchasers than it has placated: “We have consciously decided to release only one global version of Commandos 2 HD Remaster, one which as far as possible avoids the use of political symbols such as Swastika or SS-runes. We do not want to encourage racism, discrimination or exclusion with our games. As a cosmopolitan but German company, we see it as our duty to refrain from any kind of radical symbolism....

The live action reveal trailer below doesn’t give much away, but it does hint at one of the new mechanics for Company Of Heroes 3’s North African Operation campaign: tank riding. Here, you’ll be able to pack your army lads onto the back of your tanks for some rapid-fire assault tactics. The stream, hosted by cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer, also showed off its new side armour additions, enemy vehicle recovery, vehicle towing and more....

Valve president and co-founder Gabe Newell is no stranger to making some additions. Valve famously hired the student developers of Narbacular Drop to work on what eventually became Portal, and acquired Firewatch developers Campo Santo in 2018. In our recent interview, I asked him whether he thought consolidation could be a problem for the industry going forwards. “Any sort of acquisition or consolidation has to actually answer the question: how are you creating more value for customers, at the end of the day?...

Get 16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum for £77.79 (was £123) In terms of raw performance, 3200MHz CL16 is quite a standard specification. Faster RAM does provide an advantage in CPU-limited scenarios, such as esports titles that run in the hundreds of fps or media transcoding, but generally the advantage from 3200MHz to 3600MHz, 4000MHz and beyond into DDR5 territory is only a few percentage points. Given that many PC gamers are now using 1440p and 4K screens, where CPU bottlenecks are less likely, there’s really not much point investing in super fast memory unless you have a very particular scenario in mind....

Thankfully, it looks like it was a mistake, and it’s back now. Aptly named Twitter account Gabe Follower spotted the store page’s disappearance earlier today, and unofficial website SteamDB seems to confirm the removal at 6:20am GMT this morning and its restoration three hours later. At the time of writing, everything seems to be back to normal. There has been no official confirmation from Valve of what happened, though they did make this good GIF tweet: I’ve emailed Valve to ask for confirmation of what happened....

The statfans at SteamDB noted yesterday that Valve’s public data had shared the big news. The previous record, recorded in April 2016, was for 850,485 folks in-game. That also counts people idly in menus or doing weird things but it’s a pretty clear boost to the ol’ big numbers. After that high in 2016, CS started to slowly dwindle. In November 2018, just before the free-to-play switch, the month’s peak was 546,192....

Basically, Crossfire: Legion blends Starcraft-style RTS skirmishes with a sort-of deckbuilding minigame where you unlock new units for your faction by playing matches against other players or bots. It’s designed to get players engaged with the competitive multiplayer element of Crossfire, but the framing of this around an in-game currency appears to have backfired. Some players have interpreted Legion as a pay-to-win microtransaction affair (which it isn’t) while others have simply turned their noses up at the prospect of playing a multiplayer RTS with arbitrary limitations on what units you can field....

Here’s how to raise and replenish your levies and armies in Crusader Kings 3. How to increase your levies in Crusader Kings 3 It’s a bit of a pain to get your levies increased in Crusader Kings 3. There isn’t just a button that says ‘recruit peasants and give them pitchforks’. You’ll have to be more organised than that. There are a few factors that impact your levies in Crusader Kings 3....

And if that doesn’t do it for you, there’s an extended bit where Keanu talks about motorcycles for like 10 minutes. What a lad. Tonight’s stream kicked off with a showroom demonstration of Cyberpunk’s cars. Naturally, there’s a whole range of high-performance sportscars, hyper-expensive hypercars and heavily armoured brutes, but I’m entirely here for the clunkers - the family sedans and dumpy little compacts in the economy class. Kit them out in classy cardboard bodywork and you’ve got the ride for me....