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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.

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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…

After several years of semi-public development, life simulation game Paralives is ready to nail down a release year. But it’s not this year. Though some of the other upcoming competition for The Sims is expected to arrive in 2024, Paralives has revealed in a new trailer that it’s targeting 2025 for its early access release. 

Paralives has already done a lot to entice me with its building features like resizable windows and furniture and curved walls, but it’s now showing off what the life simulation side of the game will look like.

To start with, Paralives demonstrates parts of its Paramaker character creation with personality stats that you can level up as you play, talents, perks, and a “vibe” selection with choices like energetic, gloomy, or serious. Paras can also have customized sleeping habits and cleaning habits, which is interesting to see separated out from the personality types.

The new trailer spends a lot of time focused on group activities …

Just $10 separates these two great graphics cards, so which one is worth splashing out $500 on? Well, the good news is that no matter which one you go with, you’re getting the latest generation of GPU from AMD and Nvidia, both packed with all the features you expect in a modern graphics card.

The cheaper of the two is Gigabyte’s take on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070. It has higher clocks than the reference design (2,565 vs 2,475 MHz) but a 4% overclock is barely going to be noticeable in games. It sports a pretty large heatsink and cooler, so you’ll need to make sure you’ve got plenty of room inside your PC case for it.

Rather than using the 12VHPWR power connector that many RTX 40-series cards sport, Gigabyte has fitted a standard 8-pin PCIe connector, which means you won’t need to use adapter cables if you’re upgrading from an older GPU. Ada Lovelace chips are also very power efficient, so you won’t need to buy a new power supply unit unless it’s a very old and basic one.<…

Whether or not action RPG Dungeons of Hinterberg can be considered a cozy game is definitional. The traditional cozy game is relaxing, pastel-hued, and likely centered around quaint, repetitive gameplay that reassures and calms the player. Stardew Valley for farming; A Short Hike for strolling; Dorfromantik for tile-laying.

Hinterberg’s dungeon delving and monster slaying do break the mold a bit, but you’ll be doing both with a gentle, cartoonish art style swaddling you. And with a significant amount of the game dedicated to solving puzzles in picturesque environments, the comparison inevitably presents itself.

There’s no gore in Dungeons of Hinterberg, and the violence is stylized, taking place against gooey, inhuman mobs that feel more like the creatures from Jeff Smith’s Bone than wild animals. Protagonist Luisa spends her evenings making friends, shopping, and wandering the village. It is many ways exactly what it says on the tin: a vacation sim, where Lu…