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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There is always a risk with a live service game, or any game with only competitive elements, that it enters the Cool For Some Zone. This is a space that exists within a given game and also around it, a place where you can pull off Sick Tricks as a result of movement tech not purposefully included in the game, but born as an incidental result of mashing buttons in just the right way. And until today, Marathon found itself in said zone, but Bungie have made the call to patch out the offending issue.

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A capacious and speedy power bank is a tech essential in my book for keeping all your stuff charged, be it a phone, headphones or a handheld games console such as a Steam Deck. This Anker Zolo option provides up to 30W of power for speedy charging, and has a hefty 20,000mAh capacity in a compact size. At the moment, this power bank is at the lower part of its price cycle on Amazon judging by price tracking graphs, working out to £25 on Amazon UK and $34 on Amazon USA. The latter deal is part of the final day of the US Amazon Spring Sale, too. That's an excellent price on such a powerful unit, giving you a compact and powerful option that's a surefire hit for when you're taking on your travels.

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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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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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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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Up until Bethesda's announcement that it'll be getting some robot army DLC next month and the yassification of its faces by Nvidia's DLSS 5 tech, I'd not thought about seeing how Starfield's modding scene is getting on for a little while. That's now changed, because they've finally gotten seamless custom animations working.

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Perhaps sensing competition in the field of Japan-flavoured arcade racing games, Forza Horizon 6 devs Playground Games have revealed the open-world vroomer’s system requirements. Agreeably, they’re a sensible balance of attainable low-end fare – at 1080p, a GTX 1650 and 16GB of RAM are apparently all that’s needed for 60fps – and the kind of hulking graphics bricks that you’d expect for 4K ray tracing. Only the most baby-oiled of hypercars for the RX 9070 XT owners, you understand, though support for lil’ handhelds like the Steam Deck is confirmed as well.

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Following Epic Games' mass layoffs, a Fortnite producer has said that the devs left behind "cannot even fully understand" the sort of impact the job cuts will have on the game during this year and into the future.

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Like many people at companies preoccupied with discovering the next "goose that lays the golden egg", Half-Life 2 and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw has been "poking around" with generative AI. He and a small team at Valve have been testing out different applications, in what Wolpaw assures us isn't a "concerted" effort at implementing the soul-regurgitating, workforce-abrading gadgetry in any particular new game.

Wolpaw's current feeling is that generative AI isn't very good at anything "creative", like cracking jokes. But he does think Large Language Models could make for entertaining NPC voice reactions in games such as Grand Theft Auto and, indeed, Wolpaw's own Left 4 Dead, because AI is marvellous at being a fawning little gopher. It is fantastic at "going along with whatever insane thing you say and kind of adjusting to the flow of that".

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Around the turn of the new year, Fallout: London developers Team FOLON teased plans to drop the second of the brilliantly British Fallout 4 mod's second DLC in early 2026, assuming no hiccups got in the way of those plans. Sadly, it seems that's exactly what's happened, necessitating the "skeletal crew" still working on the mod to push Last Orders beyond a projected April release window.

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Let's travel back in time, roughly to the late 2000s and early 2010s. It was a time where indie games were becoming more of a defined Separate Thing from blockbuster games. It certainly wasn't the birth of indie games, but with the release of certain notable games like Fez, it did mark a change in who got to make money from them at the very least. But to me personally, there is no more quintessential indie game from that era than Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP, which against my wishes has turned 15 today.

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Epic Games have announced that they're laying off over 1000 staff today, March 24th. In the wake of that news, the publishers have announced that three Fortnite modes are being permanently sunsetted. Meanwhile, one of the studios Epic own - Horizon Chase developers Aquiris - have announced plans to pull downloads for the first two games in their arcade racing series offline later this year.

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Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, have announced plans to lay off more than 1000 staff. In a company-wide letter, CEO Tim Sweeney blamed both "industry-wide challenges" and "challenges unique to Epic", including a downturn in Fortnite's popularity.

In addition to the layoffs, the company have made more than $500m in cuts by reducing contracting, marketing, and closing open roles. Sweenet says this puts the company "in a more stable place."

Sweeney, a strong advocate of AI, says the layoffs "aren't related to AI".

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has decided to try something a bit different in his latest defense of the company's recently revealed DLSS 5 neural rendering tech. No longer does he throw cold coffee in the faces of critics and bellow 'you're dead wrong, and you better give me something on this guy or you're toast'. Instead, he sits on the desk like a teacher playing it casual - saying that he understands where critics are coming from, but still insisting that the tech's benign.

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That sound you can hear in the distance is someone mumbling in-teh-grih-teh, because a key bit of RuneScape's in-teh-grih-teh-focused 2026 additions has gone live today, March 23rd. It's part one of the Havenhythe expansion, which Jagex are touting as the MMORPG's largest area embiggening yet.

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Diablo-ish Minecraft spin-off Minecraft Dungeons has a sequel, and said sequel's coming out at some point in 2026. What's it about? Well, Mojang say, "all was well until it wasn't". Wait, lads, that's pretty much the setup for every sequel and arguably story humanity's ever produced. Aye, Mojang say, but the mild-mannered villagers are on fire, so you'd better get your diamond sword polished.

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Nexon and Embark aren’t letting ARC Raiders go long without new stuff: The Flashpoint Update droppped today with a new challenge to tackle: “Raiders will encounter the new Close Scrutiny ARC Operation map condition, introducing high-risk engagements and high-value targets centered around the ARC Assessor—a heavily guarded unit carrying rare components tied to player progression.” Players […]