I'll be honest right off the bat. As a single player Elder Scroller, the Elder Scrolls Online's never managed to hook me for more than a few hours. I've given it a couple of goes, usually during periods when it's gone free to play, but have always bounced off its vast MMOiness. Might the slew of fresh additions coming across the next couple of years be able to change that and finally convince me to spend significant time with ESO in the same way I have Fallout 76 in the past few years? The answer could be yes, if the naval combat and underwater exploration Zenimax have just revealed are as fun as they sound on paper.

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Ho, wasteland packmules and sticky-fingered ornithologists! Embark have released a sizeable Arc Raiders update. Titled Flashpoint, it introduces a new shotgun, SMG and deployable together with a Close Scrutiny map condition, a fresh breed of Arc enemy, some cosmetic bundles, and a feeding boost for Scrappy the loot chicken, which will cause him to dig up a wider variety of more valuable items. As warned, they've also permitted all those awful Shredder things from Stella Montis to infest the other maps.

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Well, that's certainly a bold strategy. Mark Gerhard, CEO of MindsEye developers Build a Rocket Boy, has said that the studio are indeed planning to add a new mission to the game which will "share some of the evidence of the sabotage". That'd be the sabotage from a malevolent third party which the exec's been alleging MindsEye faced around launch for a while now, with Gerhard also claiming that an investigation into it is currently in the hands of "authorities" in the UK and US.

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With the first few months of its latest target release year drawing to a close, the modders behind Skyblivion are looking to make some "final" and "vital" veteran additions to their team in order to get the ambitious remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine over the line. This comes after a delay late last year, which saw Skyblivion's arrival pushed to 2026, following some accusations from a former dev that it was being rushed out of the door.

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I know exactly who Kliff, the protagonist of Crimson Desert, is. During my romp through the vast expanse of Pywel, he was a distant tower enthusiast with a side interest in lonely locomotives. Aside from those things, he's rather bland. Though, the actor who played him has now outlined that throughout the game's regularly shifting development - which included a name change for its main character - he pushed Pearl Abyss to make the character more than just a stoic line-grumbler.

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Much of the time, using social media is like fondling a wasp's nest, but sometimes, sometimes, social media is Nice. For example, Firaxis narrative director Cat Manning recently started a Bluesky thread "of small practical pieces of advice developers just starting out or unfamiliar with a genre might not know". The replies and quote-posts include thoughts from people with credits on fairly big games.

Inevitably, they run the gamut of approachability. At one end of the spectrum, you have Apex Legends engineer Jay Stevens jauntily observing that "a navmesh is a very handy thing to have, even in a multiplayer game without NPCs", which I maybe half-understand, and sounds like it could be the opening to a Broadway song of some kind. More digestibly, you have former Marvel's Avengers and current Legacy of Orsinium developer Keano Raubun commenting that the "biggest bang for buck in (open world RPG) game writing will always be NPCs having funny ambient conversations amongst themselves".

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Epic Games' mass layoffs led a programmer with terminal brain cancer to lose his life insurance, leaving him and his family struggling to find new coverage. Following news of the situation breaking, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has said the company have reached out to the programmer - Mike Prinke - and that they "will solve the insurance".

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Pearl Abyss' bashing of their massive open-world into a more palatable shape continues, with Crimson Desert's latest patch packing a bunch more tweaks to controls and adding some new animals to ride around on. It also looks to have begun swapping out those AI paintings the studio previously claimed were accidentally left in it on release, though the patch's wording around this change is fairly vague.

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The problem with playtesting is that it is impossible to predict every last thing any given person may do once a game is out in the wild. It's an imperfect science where you do the best you can in the moment. I imagine a live service game like Arc Raiders to be extra difficult, given how many playstyles need to be accounted for. And based on a recent interview, it sounds like some of the team at Embark took an approach that involved a randomiser determining their own playstyle from day to day to make sure they weren't just playing one way.

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There is a significant danger that this article will have aged terribly. You see, I asked everyone what they were playing this weekend on Thursday, rather than the usual post-lunch scramble on a Friday. You see, I took Friday off to travel to Wales to spend a long weekend with my family. Who knows what happened between my polling of the team on Thursday and Friday? Perhaps Valve surprise released Half-Life 3 and everyone is playing that instead. Maybe they all went off videogames in the interim.

I can only hope they thought to go into the CMS and update the article accordingly. Otherwise, I'll look like a right plonker.

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One of the biggest upgrades you can make to a PC setup in my eyes is to switch to an OLED monitor for a much sharper viewing experience. A lot of it is down to the deeper blacks, stronger contrast and excellent colours you can get from modern panels. It is more of a premium upgrade if you've got the cash and the PC needed to drive a high-res and high refresh rate screen, but definitely worth it as someone who made the switch to a 32-inch 4K 240Hz option just like this Samsung Odyssey OLED G8. This screen is down to $849 from Amazon USA in the Spring Sale, marking out a hefty $450 discount on its previous high price - it has been closer to $900 and this exact price in more recent weeks, though.

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Though there are things to love in Crimson Desert if you're open to hobbies like tower ogling or ghost train riding, the mammoth action adventure blob's story is arguably its biggest weakness. Well, aside from those AI paintings which were left in it on release. Developers Pearl Abyss, currently in the midst of trying to patch up a lot of the other holes players and critics have pointed out, have now made clear they're aware that their tale of people witrh grey manes fighting evil bears isn't the best.

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Teyon and Nacon have revealed Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish, a new "semi open world" first-person single-player RPG set in the World of Darkness table-top universe. Where stablemate series Vampire: The Masquerade is about a secret society of bloodsuckers, Hunter is about the humans who stalk and kill those bloodsuckers together with werewolves, ghouls and, well, anything remotely monstrous or supernatural.

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Snap. Up until now, that's been the sort of sound you only hear in Resident Evil Requiem when a spooky monster may or may not be sneaking up on you. Thanks to a new patch from Capcom, though, it could now also signify that you've just taken a cute photo of the spooky monster about to ruin Grace or Leon's day.

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Alien Deathstorm is the new sci-fi FPS from Rebellion, developers of skull-popping shooter series Sniper Elite and the recent, Very English survival game Atomfall. What is Alien Deathstorm about? Why, it's a slice-of-life story about a neurodivergent person growing up in the big city HOHO OF COURSE NOT, it's a game about aliens in which there is a storm that will make you dead, set in another collapsing extra-terrestrial colony full of dependably phat, lived-in 1980s technology. Here's the announcement trailer.

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The appearance of AI in art is nothing new, hell, Mr. Movies himself Steven Spielberg literally made A.I. Artificial Intelligence near the start of the millenia. But that was the Cool AI, where robots could be people, too, if we let them. Now what we have is the Donkey Bollocks AI that produces garbage facsimiles of things we know and actually like. But that doesn't mean it's not worth considering AI, and I really need you to bear with me here, within our art, as that's exactly what the team behind Pragmata did (without touching the stuff).

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I quite like a bit of permanency in games. Well, like might be too positive, I'm more intrigued by it and the friction it provides. It's interesting that if you're silly enough to kill an NPC in Dark Souls, for example, that's it, no take backsies. So despite honestly not caring all that much for zombie games, I'm still a bit interested in Dying Light: The Beast and its new Restored Land update which introduces a mode where if you kill a zombie once, it truly is gone for good.

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STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is getting its first proper expansion this year, titled Cost of Hope, and it looks stuffed to its icky mutant gills with classic STALKER series beats that the base game – while a powerfully engrossing survival FPS – missed out on. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant returns as an explorable, doubtless horrible addition to the game’s open world, and the story concerns the conflict between the rival Freedom and Duty factions that’s been simmering since the original STALKER.

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A new Life is Strange game doesn't always feel particularly odd given its sort of steady turn into a franchise. The last one was only in 2024 with Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, bringing back the original game's Max Caulfield. This wasn't necessarily a welcome return for all, and ended up being somewhat of a mixed bag. And now we come to now with a potentially odd entry, Life is Strange: Reunion, which is out today. As the subtitle suggests, and where the oddness comes in, Reunion reunites Max with the surprising return of Chloe Price. Big spoilers ahead for Double Exposure, by the way!

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Having re-launched Splitgate 2 as Spligate: Arena Reloaded late last year, 1047 Games have now kicked off early work on a new shooter. Details are scarce aside from the fact you'll be able to move around in it and that 1047 CEO Ian Proulx reckons it should appeal to fans of Titanfall and Call of Duty Blops 3. Oh, and that you can sign-up for to playtest it now.

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