The Communications Workers of America (CWA) has dropped its request for a union vote at Activision Blizzard’s Proletariat studio after accusing CEO Seth Sivak of “making a free and fair election impossible”. In a statement released yesterday, the CWA accused Sivak of responding to the union push with “confrontational tactics” that “demoralized and disempowered the group,” so the vote won’t go ahead at all.

Dustin Yost, a software engineer at Proletariat and a member of the union organising committee, said in a statement that, although “the overwhelming majority” of his colleagues at the studio had signed cards in support of unionisation, the process “took its toll” on workers. Meetings in which the CWA claims Sivak “framed the conversation as a personal betrayal” apparently made the process too hard-going for employees to continue with.

Both Yost and the CWA negatively compared Proletariat to Microsoft Zenimax, asking why it was not possible for the Activision Blizzard-o…

The nominees for The Game Awards 2023 have been announced and Alan Wake 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 are tied for the most nominations, with eight each from 31 total categories. They’re both up for the main Game of the Year award, but are also competing for Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, Best Score and Music, among others.

Right behind them in award-winning potential is Spider-Man 2 with seven nominations. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Bros Wonder, and Hi-Fi Rush are all up for five awards each, while Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy 16 are each up for four. Triple-nominees Resident Evil 4 and Street Fighter 6 round out the main multi-nominations pack.

The big contest in any year is of course the main Game of the Year award, with six nominees—all sequels or parts of an established series, interestingly

• Alan Wake 2
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Resident Evil 4
• Supe…
  

A World of Warcraft player racing to be one of the first in the world to clear the MMO’s latest raid quietly used a bug to squeeze out a tiny bit more damage on the Nexus-Princess Ky’veza boss. It only gave him around a 4% damage increase, but it could’ve been enough to finish a fight his guild had been attempting for days in the world first Nerub-ar Palace race.

The bug could be called an exploit depending on who you ask because it takes a very deliberate method to use it. Team Liquid raider Imfiredup used a spell called Splinterstorm that is normally supposed to automatically shoot towards your current target. If you didn’t have a valid enemy target, however, the spell simply wouldn’t work properly and continue building up the debuff until you did.

By targeting his own character and using WoW’s alternative ‘focus’ targeting system to cast his other spells (using macros) at the boss, Imfiredup could build up over 200 stacks of the debuff without Splinterstorm au…

Throughout all the buffs and nerfs that’ve rolled through Helldivers 2 as of late, the Autocannon has remained—for the most part—beloved. 

It’s not the best anti-tank weapon in the world, meeting a wall against more heavily-armoured Terminids, but it can deal nicely with most enemies the Automatons have to throw at you. It also fires pretty dang rapidly, meaning you don’t need to have great aim to use it unlike comparable options such as the Anti-Materiel Rifle. 

Arrowhead Games has clearly reasoned, then, that what red-blooded Super Earth patriots really want is a mech with not one, but two Autocannons strapped to the sides. I am not immune to intergalactic propaganda because yes, yes I do want that.

As announced on the game’s official Twitter, the latest major order sees players headed to Varylia 5 to receive the new bit of bot-smashing kit.

“This automaton ‘petafactory'” on Varylia 5, reads an in-game transmission, serves the purpose …

Is the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake a new Skull and Bones? I’m starting to think it might be. After multiple delays, a complete reboot, and a warning to fans not to expect to hear more about the game in 2023, Ubisoft has dropped a brief message reassuring everyone that it’s coming along nicely, and we’ll be hearing more about it at some undefined point in the future.

Look, I get it, making games isn’t easy—if it was, I’d be doing it. But even so, the Sands of Time remake seems to be a surprisingly tough struggle for Ubisoft. A planned release in early 2021 got bumped, and then bumped again, and then pretty much fell off the radar completely until a speculative 2023 launch came and then went. 

Amidst all that, work was moved to a completely different studio, and then the whole thing was scrapped and started over. It’s been quite a journey, and at this point nobody knows when the remake might see the light of day.

In an update posted to mark …

Something like two and a half years after I first saw the concept and thought “that looks neat” we’re finally gonna get it. We’re finally gonna get a game where you use a mech to plow a field grow and plant some seeds and water them and then harvest a big weird alien fruit.

Videogames, hell yeah.

Following a new trailer earlier his week, Lightyear Frontier developers Frame Break have announced that it’ll release into Early Access in March 2024. First teased quite some time ago, it’s a game about homesteading on an alien world with mechs and up to four players, cooperatively. It’s very exciting, because frankly, that’s a very exciting idea.

The new trailer has the very geared up farmers of the frontier stomping about in their mechs, tossing treats to birds, and otherwise doing farming tasks—and farming game tasks—as you’d expect them to. A mech buzzsaws down a tree while another stomps about plowing a field and a third whacks rocks with a comedically ove…

With only a few weeks left until the Steam Summer Sale, you might think Valve would ease off the gas on its near-constant festival sales. You’d be wrong. The latest in Steam’s onslaught of genre fests is a celebration of simple joys like scrounging, avoiding starvation, and sprinting pantsless through the woods until you learn how to turn plant fiber into clothes.

While the name might not have the best mouthfeel, the Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest is offering discounts all week long on survival classics. Terraria‘s at half price for $5, Rust is up for grabs at $20, and No Man’s Sky is down to $30—the cheapest all three have been in the last two years.

Recent survival crafting favorites are getting their share of sales, too. February’s supernatural survival driver Pacific Drive is 20% off for $24. If you want more of a fantasy flavor for your crafting, January’s early access banger Enshrouded has a matching 20% di…

Pack it up, modders, we’re done. We’ve scaled the peak, ascended the summit, and hit the outer limit. All previous mods were just a prelude to this, the culmination of the artform: Auto Drop for Fallout: New Vegas from Sweet6Shooter weighs in at about 4 kilobytes, and I think it could save me enough time to write the next great American novel.

We’ve all spent many, many hours of our lives with Gamebryo, the weird and wobbly engine that’s underpinned everything Bethesda has made since The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, so you’ll know that it can sometimes be a little imprecise. Specifically, it’s incredibly easy to waggle your crosshair over a burned book, a rusty iron sword, or some other piece of ephemeral junk while you’re trying to pick up something actually cool and valuable. 

It’s never a big problem until you realise you’ve somehow accumulated 20 kilograms of erlenmeyer flasks and cheese wheels, and you have to laboriously pick through your inventory to d…

 If you thought every variation on Wordle had already been done, well you didn’t have enough faith in the internet or videogames because there’s now a Wordle-like for Stardew Valley. Specifically, it’s Pufferdle, in which you guess the fish in Stardew Valley. Oh, and it makes you actually play Stardew’s fishing minigame too.

Stardew Valley developer Eric Barone shared a link to Pufferdle himself this week, crediting Stardew forum user Sircactupus for creating it. You start off by attempting to catch a fish the same way you would in Stardew Valley: by clicking and holding to raise and lower a bar while following a bouncing fish icon. You can turn that part off in the settings, but the difficulty of the catch is itself a hint for those who spend way more time fishing than I do.

You’ll then start guessing fish, seeing whether they partially or perfectly match the correct answer in categories of season, weather condition, location, and time of day when they can b…

Just in time for Steamboat Willie’s upcoming induction into public domain is a new indie FPS inspired by ’30s-era Disney animation: Mouse. Developed by Polish studio Fumi Games, you might have caught a first glimpse at Mouse on TikTok, where short clips of early gameplay have earned millions of views since late April.

It’s easy to see why—Mouse’s art and animations are immediately striking in the same ways that Cuphead dazzled us with its meticulous hand-drawn look years ago. Except where Cuphead largely stayed within the bounds of its family-friendly source material, Mouse dives headfirst into hard-boiled noir darkness and ’90s FPS gore. Seeing the Disney vintage look applied to machineguns and exploding headshots feels a little wrong, but also very right.

With its blending of 3D geometry and 2D animation, Fumi Games doesn’t seem to adhere to the animation aesthetic as strictly as Studio MDHR, but its early prototypes look great nonetheless. There’s a satisfying b…

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority says that if Microsoft is serious about acquiring Activision Blizzard, there’s one sure way to make it happen: Break up Activision Blizzard.

The bold suggestion came in a new “notice of possible remedies” update, a procedural document that lays out the CMA’s concerns, and the various possible ways that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard might address them.

There are two types of “remedies” available in situations like this, the CMA said: Structural, which changes the conditions of the proposed deal, and behavioral, in which the parties involved effectively promise to be good in exchange for getting permission to do what they want. In merger situations, the CMA prefers structural remedies because they “rarely require monitoring and enforcement”—once they’re done, there’s no going back, so you don’t have to worry about getting screwed three or four years down the road.

In the case of the Activision Blizzard acquisition,…

However you’d like to play today’s Wordle, you’ll find hints and tips below designed to help. We’ve got general advice for newcomers looking to improve their daily game, today’s answer in big, bold letters if you’re struggling, and a helpful clue written just for the March 27 (646) game.

For a few guesses, today’s Wordle looked like it might be unsalvageable, just a messy scramble of yellows and one green that made no sense—until it all did. It was something of a relief to see the Wordle answer pop up immediately after that classic “lightbulb” moment. 

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, March 27

You might not want to think about animal excrement while solving your Wordle, but I’m afraid you’ll have to today. This particular term is used specifically for bird and bat poo, and contains three different vowels. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

No letters are used twice in…

As we noted in our preview of Shadow of the Erdtree last week, the expansion’s new map is notably different from the Lands Between, which we explored in Elden Ring. It’s smaller, yes, but also denser with enemies, activities, and notable locations, and not quite so simple to navigate. You’ll find more cliffs, valleys, and bridges blocking off new areas you may have first thought you’d be able to gallop to. 

FromSoftware boss Hidetaka Miyazaki said that the team planned for this expansion to be big from the start, because they wanted players “to experience that sense of discovery, and that sense of wonder and exploration again,” and they needed a large scale map “to uphold and bolster that.”

But how did the more intricate design of the new world map come about? When we spoke for PC Gamer’s cover story on Shadow of the Erdtree, I asked Miyazaki if there was a bit more DNA from Dark Souls’ tightly interconnected map here, this time. 

“There was a sense of th…

Spend some time reading through our helpful Wordle tips, guides, and archives, take a quick peek at today’s clue, or skip straight to the part where you win Wordle by scrolling or clicking to the April 1 (651) answer. Whatever you need, we’re here to help with the daily puzzle.

I’ll admit I didn’t really think about my opener today, choosing to plough straight on in there with the first word that popped into my head—and luckily for me, this turned out to be a great start. The answer came quickly, although I did worry when I turned over four greens, thinking I was about to be stuck playing hunt-the-consonant before I found today’s Wordle answer. 

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, April 1

Today’s answer is the word used to describe an organised group walking together or a military troop’s steady, measured pace. It’s also the name of one month of the year too. There’s just one vowel to find today. 

ViewViewViewV…

The next patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to be “a big one” according to a recent tweet from Larian Studios, but sadly we’ll have to wait one whole day longer than we expected. The release of Patch 3 will be pushed from September 21st to September 22nd giving them time to “ensure thorough testing”.

Full Mac support is coming at last and we just learned that it’ll include an appearance-changing mirror, but otherwise it’s unknown what changes the patch will bring. The fact that it is going to be a pretty substantial patch has me holding my eyelids open in anticipation of what else is on the way.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a monumental success so far and the continued patches, fixes, and support from Larian are just fuelling the internal (engine) fire we all hold for this game. Despite still having so much to discover myself, the idea of even more to come is making my mouth water.

The consistent updates and mod support provides it with a strong founda…

Remember how Warner Bros. was fixing to permanently send Adult Swim Games’ entire catalogue of indies to the Shadow Realm because it would have been too much of a pain to keep processing the devs’ royalty checks? Well it looks like that fate’s been averted, with the games remaining up on Steam and their creators saying that they’ve been handed back full control.

“Duck Game is safe,” Creator Landon Podbielski wrote on Twitter. “More details soon but the email from Warner finally came. The game is being returned to Corptron along with its store pages on all platforms, it’s not going anywhere.

“Thank you everyone… Hoping everyone else got the same email.”

It certainly looks like they did: as reported by Game Developer, Small Radios Big Televisions developer Owen Deery tweeted that he had similarly gotten back ownership and store listing control from WB. A perusal of Adult Swim Games’ publisher page shows its catalogue alive and well, despite it having reached t…