Hunt Showdown is currently celebrating its five-year anniversary with a big sale and a new DLC hunter. While there’s much to look back on, Crytek’s eyes are fixed on the future with plans to update Hunt from an aging 5.6 legacy version of CryEngine to the latest 5.11 build. 

“The game currently runs on a legacy version of CryEngine from four years ago,” David Fifield, general manager at Crytek, explained to PC Gamer. “So one of our major talking points across 2023 is gonna be about updating to the latest 5.11 version of CryEngine which is four years newer.”  

Upgrading an engine from one decimal to a slightly higher decimal doesn’t sound like a significant change, but it’s a much larger undertaking than updating the firmware on your phone. It’s exceedingly rare for a years-old game with an established development pipeline to replace the base on which it sits—it’s the game dev equivalent of swapping out your car’s chassis for a new one that’s theoret…

Fallout: London, a full conversion mod for Fallout 4 that transports players across the pond to the capital of the UK, has been delayed. Instead of releasing in Q3 of this year—that’s the Q after this one, if you’re not sure—it will now release sometime in Q4, meaning October or after.

“Now you might be wondering, ‘Why so late?'” said Fallout: London project lead Prilladog, “well, initially, we had hoped for it to be in the third quarter … however, a certain space game got delayed and is now scheduled to come out around the same time we had planned”.

That game, of course, is Starfield. Bethesda’s RPG has, appropriately enough, become a bit of a black hole lurking at the heart of September, prompting all sorts of studios to scramble out of its orbit. “This not only gives you all more time to play Starfield,” said Prilladog, “but also allows us more time for playtesting and bug fixing, so it’s a win/win situation”.

Generally, the projects that want…

It’s official: Barbarians and sorcerers won’t rule Sanctuary in Diablo 4’s next season, at least not using the same builds that absolutely crushed season 2. On a developer stream today, Blizzard said tomorrow’s patch notes will include fixes to the bugs that fuel the strongest builds in the game, as well as changes that elevate the weakest ones.

Barbarians who spent the Season 2 in Diablo 4 bonking bosses to death with a single hammer blow were actually benefiting from a skill upgrade whether or not they put a point in it. Any brbarian using Hammer of the Ancients had a big 30% multiplicative damage boost for free. That will be fixed when season 3 launches on January 23, which might dethrone HotA as the best skill in the game. Likewise, the orbiting lighting balls of destruction that almost every sorcerer abused this season won’t tear through enemies quite as fast when Blizzard fixes a bug related to the attack speed bonus from the Enhanced Ball Lightning skill upgrade.

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Last weekend the North American finals of the Apex Legends Global Series was abruptly called off after two players suffered mid-match hacks that enabled cheating software. The word is that this was down to a remote code execution (RCE) exploit, a particularly nasty form of intrusion that’s such bad news that Easy Anti Cheat (used in Apex) was stung to issue its own rebuttal asserting “there is no RCE vulnerability” in its software.

Easy Anti-Cheat got out of the gate before EA and Respawn, but the Apex developer has finally commented on the incident. Not that it’s saying much.

“On Sunday, a few professional Apex Legends player accounts were hacked during an ALGS event, ” says a Respawn statement. “Game and player security are our highest priorities, which is why we paused the competition to address the issue immediately.

“Our teams have deployed the first of a layered series of updates to protect the Apex Legends player community and create a s…

Starfield will have over 1,000 planets to explore but only four souls to romance. Harvey noted this amusing discrepancy last week, following Todd Howard’s announcement that only the four main Constellation companions—basically the optional sidekicks in Starfield who will presumably fight alongside you but, more importantly, carry your excess loot—will be romanceable. 

This, alongside Baldur’s Gate 3’s extremely long runtime, has triggered another round of discourse about “quality versus quantity”. One qualified voice to join that discussion is David Gaider, a former BioWare narrative designer who has worked on the Dragon Age and Baldur’s Gate series, as well as Knights of the Old Republic. He’s especially reputable, given how romance-heavy Dragon Age is, for example, and how fondly the series’ bonds are remembered.

“I’d say this is a good thing,” Gaider tweeted, referring to the four romance options, “and hopefully speaks of a ‘quali…

Fans of giant shoulder pads and yelling rejoice: Games Workshop’s Skulls event is back for another year on May 23, with the promise of plenty of new reveals for Warhammer videogames. A showing for the upcoming Space Marine 2 and something new for Boltgun seem to be the focus, but we’re also promised news on Rogue Trader, Total War: Warhammer, Blood Bowl 3, Tacticus, Battlesector, Warpforge, and Darktide. I’m sure there’ll be at least one or two surprises we’ve not been let in on yet too. 

Actor Rahul Kohli (known for TV shows Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Bly Manor) will be hosting the announcements. He did the same last year, as well as voice acting for the game Boltgun—all part of his endearing ongoing campaign to replace Henry Cavill as the internet’s favourite handsome celebrity nerd. You certainly can’t knock his credentials, my man’s out here priming his Orks on Instagram between shoots.  

We’ve not tended to see huge news out of these shows in …

Right on the heels of other announcements this week, The Sims 4 has also revealed its next expansion: Growing Together. Compared with recent expansions like High School Years and Cottage Living, this sounds like a much more conceptual collection of features in which you’ll “strengthen family bonds, make friends or enemies, and discover your Sims’ truest selves.” It will launch on March 16, just two days after the free base game infants update.

In the reveal video above you can spot new activities for kids of all ages like bikes, losing teeth, and full family activities like working on a treehouse. It’s a bit tough to grasp the specifics of the features list from the trailer, but Maxis has it all laid out in its store page.

“Unlock and change personality traits throughout your Sims’ lives as they cope with midlife crises, respond to family requests to move in, and more,” it says, which sounds like a list of existential threats to me. 

“Your Sim will now h…

In another Behind the Sims livestream, which also announced the much-awaited babies update, Maxis got to talking about The Sims 5 (codenamed “Project Rene”). Maxis is still very clear that Project Rene is years away, but did want to set the record straight on multiplayer. The Sims 5 will have multiplayer, as it’s teased already, but it’s definitely not an MMO. Sorry, Sims Online hopefuls.

It’s not an unwarranted clarification, given that we’d been told the next Sims game would include some kind of multiplayer but no details beyond that. Whether you considered the possibility of a Sims Online revival a threat or a wish, you can put it to bed. Maxis brought out game director Grant Rodiek to talk a bit about the next game, including the scope of multiplayer.

“One thing to keep in mind is that Project Rene is not an MMO,” Rodiek says. “It is not this public, shared space where everything you do is always with other people.”

Rodiek explains that Project Rene is t…

Developer Alexandre Spindler and Studio Drama recently revealed Unrecord, a first-person shooter with a striking bodycam perspective which frequently sells the illusion of being real camera footage.

It’s so convincing that some questioned whether they were looking at a pre-rendered, on-rails game, or perhaps actual video footage. A few hours after the announcement, Spindler responded: “It’s not a rail shooter or an FMV, it is indeed an FPS and these images are from real-time gameplay, not pre-rendered.”

Today, Spindler went further, uploading a new video of the game (embedded above and in the tweet below) which includes the Unreal Engine user interface. Near the end of the video, he frees up the camera, no-clipping through the level to prove that it’s genuinely an FPS with free movement. “For those who thought Unrecord was fake or a video, sorry,” Spindler wrote.

A lot contributes to the believability of Unrecord’s “bodycam footage,” and it isn’t all raw graphical …