But let’s forget my itchy body and look in more detail at New World’s, starting with its heart. As you’d expect, it has those familiar MMO beats: an XP bar at the bottom of the screen that fills up as you complete quests and an open world populated by other players. This is conveniently dished up on a clean slate that says you’re an adventurer who’s shipwrecked on the isle of Aeternum, a place flowing with mysterious magic that does nice magic things and bad magic things....

All the Ni no Kuni games are about players from our-ish world being drawn into a fantasy land, and so it is in Cross Worlds. You’re a player of a new virtual reality game called Soul Divers, who quickly realises that the world you’re connecting to isn’t virtual. Adventure ensues. Much of what follows seems familiar from the previous games in the series. There are splashy battles, an anime world to explore, and too-cute familiars to make fight on your behalf....

The name appears in a notification to the European Commission, whose permission Microsoft have requested to proceed with their planned $7.5 billion purchase of ZeniMax and its subsidiaries including Bethesda Game Studios, iD Software, Arkane, and others. “The concentration is accomplished by way of a merger pursuant to which a newly created Microsoft subsidiary (‘Vault’) will be merged with and into ZeniMax,” reads the relevant part of the notice. However, in the middle of today’s hubbub, the folks of UESP pointed out that another filing from January makes clear that name won’t stick....

The game’s an auto-battler where you gather a small trio from the original 150 Pokéfolks, level them up, and then tackle trickier and trickier stages. After a frankly disgusting number of hours, I’d finished all the stages. So, I thought, “Yes, of course they will add the 2nd generation of Pokéfolks with a bunch of new stages. This is its natural evolution, if you will”. It still hasn’t happened and probably never will....

While not every server will have aliens warring, they do seem increasingly common. It’s the sort of shenanigans where a handful of players larking about can encourage many more to join in. When I dropped into a random server today and suited up (green, because the purple wars hadn’t started when I bought mine and I already spent $358,000 on this), a street brawl was already raging. I died a whole lot, and did not care one jot....

As Kotaku’s Zack Zweizen discovered, THPS1’s School remake has been updated with a live bulletin board explaining the notable absence of, well, schoolkids in the playground. No, it’s not the weekend or a public holiday - instead, it looks like fake California is setting a good example by keeping their schools closed. While the virus is never named, banners wish students and their families “good health and safety during this difficult time”....

Ori And The Will Of The Wisps Mora guide Before you even start this boss fight, there are a couple of shards and skills that I highly recommend you equip. These are Sticky ability unlocked early on in the game for use in the chase sequence, and the Light skill found in the local area for the final part of the fight. Find out where to get them in our Ori And The Will Of The Wisps Spirit Shard locations guide....

Contents What are side quests? Ori And The Will Of The Wisps quests What are side quests? New to Ori And The Will Of The Wisps are side quests that you can complete to earn extra rewards. These range from everything from items to help you complete other quests, to collectable items such as Gorlek Ores. It’s unclear if there are any other rewards such as life or energy cell fragments, or any other big upgrades that you should know about....

Ori And The Will Of The Wisps Regrowing The Glades guide Picking up the first seed will cause Tuley to appear outside his hut to the far right of Wellspring Glades. You’ll need to double jump and dash to get there. Giving him the first seed will start the side quest to find all the seeds. There are six of them in total and each one will give you a new way to explore the Wellspring Glades, perhaps uncovering some hidden areas along the way....

“Previously, rewards for Expeditions were granted based on how quickly you could complete an Expedition,” the devs explain. “For most players, this meant forcing themselves into a specific DPS meta that stifled build diversity. We want players to play Outriders the way they’d prefer to, without needing to be worried that their playstyle would be punished by a timer.” But the real endgame of any looty game is fashion, so it’s good that Outriders is adding transmog....

Moira’s legendary mime skin bundle popped up in the Overwatch 2 store earlier this week for 3200 coins, and soon became caught in an invisible prison of its own making. Bear in mind, that you’d need to fork out just slightly more than £25, and slightly less than $28, to buy the coins for this skin. The skin’s 1900 coins by itself (£17/$20 for 2000 coins), but the bundle’s currently on sale for 1700 coins until November 29th....

Blizzard revealed that Overwatch 2 was going free-to-play at the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase in June. They described the game as an “always-evolving live service”, but didn’t explain at the time what players would have to fork out for. There’s been speculation since that access to new characters would be locked behind a paywall, similar to Fortnite. In response to a question about players potentially missing out on heroes if they weren’t unlocked during a given season, Spector clarified that more opportunities to obtain heroes will come up....

It’s a daunting proposition for new players, but I had a chat with lead designer Chris Wilson about the new expansion and all the new stuff available, as well as where ideas keep coming from almost seven years after launch. Heist will be one of the larger expansions Path Of Exile has added in quite some time. To take on a Heist, you have to reach the Rogue Harbour, a new area populated by thieves and misfits....

Phasmophobia has been working towards smarter ghosts for a while now. Kinetic Games have made regular, incremental changes over on the beta branch for a few months. Now, quite a lot of those changes and bug fixes have all been rolled together and released onto the game’s main early access version. In the realm of ghost AI, Kinetic Games have made a heck of a lot of changes to make angry ghosts much better at tracking you down....

Get the Akko 3108 (full-size) keyboard for £64 (was £80) Get the Akko 3087 (TKL, no numpad) keyboard for £61 (was £77) The reason I love these keyboards so much is that as well as looking a bit different from the plague of black gaming keyboards with RGB lighting emitting from every orifice, they also feel substantially better than your average gaming keyboard. That’s down to the switches used - Akko’s own pink silent linear switches, or alternatively, their orange tactile switches - but also critically the keycaps, which are made from tougher and rougher PBT instead of the more common ABS....

The gifts this time around is a single new puzzle, which is nice, and a downloadable copy of a Flash game the same developer created in 2009. The Flash game is, no surprise, another Picross game. It was made in a few days a short while after its creator first discovered Picross DS, and features 15 levels and a level editor. It’s a nice bit of history if you’re already a fan of Picross - and particularly since Flash was killed off for good at the end of 2020....

That’s right - smashing cartoon people face down into the ground so they die, and drop their golden coins. Then, when tired, come in and do the same on your computer. See? See what I did there? You thought it was one thing, but then it was something else! Secret of comedy, right there. Pillage The Village is a really impressively crafted Flash game, that involves little more than throwing innocent people in the air, or viciously slamming them against the ground, in order that they die....

Karakin is a Morocco-y, Algeria-ish, Tunisia-like sort of place with a few small towns, some farms, a dock, and plenty of palm trees. Though it is small, it does have plenty of cover between the knobbly landscape and gert big rocks littering it. Cover is less reliable on Karakin than other maps, mind. The most dramatic threat of Karakin is its random Black Zone bombings, which are similar to ye olde Red Zone bombings but only last a few seconds and can actually destroy buildings and kill people inside....

You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. You can find the RSS feed here, and you can discuss the episode on our Discord channel, which has a dedicated room for podcast chat. Music is by Jack de Quidt. Links We talked about a lot of Roman games, but mostly Caesar 3, which we haven’t written about much unfortunately (although we have mentioned Zeus: Master Of Olympus and Pharaoh before)....