Overwatch 1’s transition to Overwatch 2 has been anything but graceful for longtime fans. Players who’d grown accustomed to a steady drip of free heroes and loot boxes over six years felt betrayed by Blizzard’s stingier free-to-play model—heroes were locked behind the battle pass, free loot boxes were no more, and legendary skins that’d been around for years ballooned in price overnight. At the same time, Blizzard retired the free Overwatch Credits currency, eliminating one of the only paths to earn cosmetics just for playing the game.

After months of negative feedback about Overwatch 2’s underwhelming battle passes and prohibitively expensive microtransactions, Blizzard is budging again. Overwatch Credits (previously retitled to Legacy Credits) are making a return in season 3 as a free reward on the battle pass. Players on the free track can earn up to 1,500 credits by completing the pass, while those on the premium track earn an additional 500.

To coincide with t…

Call of Duty has a new shortcut for mouse and keyboard users trying to activate aim assist: Alt + F4. According to a tweet posted to the official Call of Duty Updates Twitter account Tuesday, the game has buffed up its security systems to automatically kill your game—as in MW3.exe itself—if it catches you using a tool to turn on the game’s assist while using a mouse. The new measure works across Modern Warfare 2, 3, and Warzone.

“Our security detection systems now target players using tools to activate aim assist while using a mouse and keyboard,” reads the tweet, “The Call of Duty application will close if detected.” It gets worse if you keep trying it: “Repeated use of these tools may lead to further account action,” says COD Updates.

Aim assist is, of course, a tricky topic in multiplayer shooters. Time was, having a mouse in your hand was a straightforward advantage over anyone foolish enough to use a gamepad in FPSes of yore, but the implementation of te…

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Metro: Last Light, the intensely atmospheric shooter about life above and below ground in badly-nuked Moscow, developer 4A Games is making it free for the week on Steam.

Metro: Last Light is incredibly grim. One of the most interesting (and honestly surprising) things about the game is that it establishes the “bad ending” of its predecessor, Metro 2033, as canon—because that’s how it goes in a Russian post-apocalypse. (And believe me, it was a bad ending.) But all that relentless darkness works remarkably well: The game world lacks the jokiness and knowing irony of Bethesda’s Fallout games, but feels much more human and filled with characters rather than caricatures.

Fair enough to say that it’s not for everyone, but at this price, it’s a perfect time to find out if it’s for you. Note that this is the Complete Edition, which includes various bonus content packs, but not the newer Last Light Redux—although that’s on sale fo…

John Hanke—CEO of Niantic Inc.—announced a new round of layoffs in a company email, which was then posted on the official Niantic website yesterday.

“I have made the decision to narrow our focus for mobile game investments, concentrating on first party games that most strongly embody our core values of location and local social communities,” wrote John Hanke, shortly before laying off one fourth of the company. “This means we are laying off around 230 Niantics.”

As for the reasons why, Hanke writes: “The answer is straightforward – we have allowed our expenses to grow faster than revenue,” citing a surge of revenue during the Covid-19 pandemic which prompted them to “pursue growth more aggressively.” 

The decline of that revenue to pre-pandemic levels is mainly because its “new projects in games and platform have not delivered revenues commensurate with those investments,” said Hanke.

Those stabs at new projects have included Harry Pott…

I’ve been eager to play survival MMO Dune: Awakening since I first saw it back in March. It all looks pretty great so far: the crafting, building, exploring, even the mundane stuff like water gathering and rock breaking looks fun. 

It’s even converted a few of us who aren’t normally into this kind of thing. Wes doesn’t like survival and Josh doesn’t like MMOs, but even they’re keen to play it. And now we know roughly when we’ll get the chance—on PC, at least. 

“Funcom are thrilled to announce that Dune: Awakening, the Open World Survival MMO, will release in early 2025, with the console release planned for a later date,” Funcom said today at Gamescom. That’s probably not as specific as we’d like, but it’s something. The announcement came along with five minutes of new gameplay footage, which you can see below.

Watch On

The gameplay trailer shows how a rando dumped on Arrakis can become a spice tycoon, building a base, crafting gear and vehicles, and…

The launch of its new Epic Rewards program isn’t the only big thing the Epic Games Store has going on today. It’s also kicking off the 2023 Mega Sale with discounts of up to 75%, the return of the never-ending Epic Coupon, and a free copy of Death Stranding for everyone.

Death Stranding is this week’s Epic Store giveaway game, and it’s definitely one of the biggest games that Epic has thrown on that particular pile. But this isn’t the first time it’s been free: It was previously Epic’s giveaway game on December 25, 2022, which—without wanting to go too deep down the symbolism rabbit hole—I think very nicely illustrates its significance in the free games pantheon.

Death Stranding is free until May 25, which means you’ve got one week, no more and no less, to make it yours if you missed it the first time around. Next week’s freebie is a mystery for now, but I anticipate that it will be another big one, because it too will arrive while the Epic Store’s Mega Sale …

The Walking Dead: Betrayal is a third-person survival-and-murder sim in which a group of eight people must work together to survive a zombie outbreak somewhere in rural Canada. It sounds, and looks, a lot like the outstanding 2019 survival-deception game Project Winter—which makes sense, it’s being developed by the same studio—but with one intriguing twist: Roaming hordes of zombies means there’s not always time to think about your next move.

Complicating matters further is the fact that while most of the people in your group are doing their best to stay alive and get away, there are one or two who—for reasons I don’t entirely understand—are determined to sabotage the effort and get everyone killed. Maybe they’re worshippers of some secret brain-eating cult, or maybe they’re just nihilistic jerks: Either way, they’re trouble, and on top of everything else you’ve got on your plate, it’s really important to suss out who’s trying to gum up the works and de…

Ubisoft says Division 2 players who are “exploiting a bug” in the Descent game mode to gain “unfair amounts of XP” will be hit with two-week bans for their efforts, and could end up permanently banned if they persist in taking advantage of it.

The roguelike Descent mode went live in The Division 2 earlier this year, enabling 1-4 players to square off against multiple waves of enemies in a guns-blazing quest for skills, talents, and weapons. In the context of The Division’s story, it’s a training simulation for agents; in more practical gameplay terms, it serves as kind of a test bed for character builds because you begin the mode with no gear, perks, or specializations, and build out as you go.

But some players have been taking advantage of a glitch that lets them join others already in Descent mode in order to gain experience and SHD (Strategic Homeland Division) levels they’re not properly entitled to. Ubisoft said today that it is aware of the problem, and more import…

Skull and Bones! Ubisoft’s pirate sim wasn’t great when I tried it: A hodge-podge of not particularly thrilling systems that were anyway obscured by all sorts of live-service stuff. Our Shaun Prescott scored it 68% in his Skull and Bones review, while Tyler Wilde found that it just made him really want to see what was going on in Sea of Thieves. Not glowing recommendations, in general.

And yet, to its credit, Ubisoft keeps trying. In the wake of a free week and the game’s second season, the company has announced that Skull and Bones will finally be making the long voyage over to Steam, where it’ll launch on August 22. The Steam page is live now, in case you’d like to go and marvel at it.

It probably won’t be enough to turn me into a die-hard Skull and Bones stan, but releasing on a platform I don’t quietly resent having to launch every time I want to play a game on it surely won’t hurt the game. Then again, you’ll likely just be launching Ubisoft Conn…

You’re stressed out at work, which means, naturally, you wanna throw a stapler off the roof and tell your boss exactly what you think of them. Then you see a calming montage of your family, vacation photos, and an inspirational picture of a cat hanging on a washing line, set to calming music, and the rage quietly fades away. Yes, everything is fine again, back to generating value for the shareholders. All is well.

How weird would that be in your actual day-to-day? Well, it’s real, and a bank in the United States is rolling out this sort of system to its customer call centres, as American Banker’s Penny Crosman reports.

First Horizon Bank is opting for this system as a way to keep its call centre agents relaxed over long shifts of dealing with the public—I get it, people can be horrible. The bank hopes the system could help deal with burnout among agents.

It all relies on Cisco’s AI model for call centres, Webex Contact Center—after all, only AI could ma…