Update: This piece has been updated to clarify that AOE 1’s civs will remain separate from AOE 2’s roster.

Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is set to go back in time with its next DLC, but, like, in a different way than usual. Return of Rome is a “completely new type of expansion pack” that will bring AOE 1 into AOE 2 when it releases on May 16, adding all 16 civilisations from the first game and its Rise of Rome expansion pack to the second game (but in their own separate section, so you can’t mix AOE 2’s factions with AOE 1’s).

That means you’ll soon be able to play the (take a deep breath, get a glass of water) Assyrians, Babylonians, Carthaginians, Choson, Egyptians, Greeks, Hittites, Macedonians, Minoans, Palmyrans, Persians, Phoenicians, Romans…

A new narrative sci-fi adventure RPG called Sky of Tides will release later this year, having players explore a world called Numen where a looming war threatens to upend protagonist Rin’s life. It’s an atmospheric, isometric viewpoint world that seems to rely on both the tropes of classic isometric RPGs and the language of branching visual novels.

To me, though, Sky of Tides looks a bit like a visual novel got real high on Disco Elysium. Which is pretty welcome—I’m interested in seeing if the gameplay formula pioneered by Disco Elysium carries something interesting forward when divorced from its wildly original setting.

You’ll play as Rin D’Lorah, the daughter of a missing researcher who discovers a conspiracy. She’ll then go on an adventure to find her father and meet…

In case the headline didn’t clue you in—this article will feature spoilers for Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3, specifically, a set of twists regarding the Dream Guardian and the Emperor.

The Dream Guardian that you design at the start of the game is, as I hope you know after that warning, secretly the Emperor—a mind flayer broken free from his colony who rebels against the Absolute’s design. That’s only the first twist, though. A second turn of the narrative knife happens when you go to confront Ansur underneath the game’s titular city of Baldur’s Gate. Turns out, the Emperor founded the damn thing.

Your squid friend is, in truth, Balduran, the city’s father. A while back, some far more observant players than I realised that the entire twist is spelled…

Guilty Gear Strive somewhat-surprised fans late last week when it announced its first crossover character, Lucy from the excellent anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, a show based on CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 (and, consequently, the OG Cyberpunk TTRPG).

I say “somewhat”, because crossover characters (or ‘guest’ fighters) aren’t at all uncommon in fighting games—they’re practically tradition. However, Guilty Gear Strive came out in 2021—making it three years without so much as a multiversal cough in its direction, so the sudden debut of Lucy was at least enough to raise my eyebrows and make me say ‘huh, neat!’

In an interview with IGN, though, producer Ken Miyauchi has hinted that there may very well be more guest fighters coming: “We’ve been doing this work since…

At last year’s Game Awards, actor Christopher Judge won the Best Performance award for his role as Kratos in God of War Ragnarök, and gave an acceptance speech so long it became a highlight of the show. Judge returned as a presenter at this year’s Game Awards, and of course cracked a joke about his verbose speech—at the expense of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

Immediately after Judge started speaking at this year’s awards, music began to play him off.  

“Alright, alright, I get it. I’m not gonna stand up here making long speeches, I’m going to stick to the script. No eight minute speech like last year,” said Judge. “But fun fact: my speech was actually longer than this year’s Call of Duty campaign.”

The audience seemed genuinely surprised by the joke,…

Mojang and Blackbird Interactive shared a proper look at the PvP mode in their upcoming spinoff strategy game Minecraft Legends today, along with an April 18 launch date. Ahead of the reveal at Microsoft’s showcase, Mojang executive producer Dennis Ries and Blackbird executive producer Lee McKinnon Pederson spoke to me about what it actually feels like to play a round of head-to-head Legends.

Mojang and Blackbird have been describing Minecraft Legends as an “action strategy” game rather than an RTS, given that you’ll have your own player character galloping about the map on a mount to direct troops and building from the ground. Like standard Minecraft, Legends also uses procedurally generated maps, which extends to PvP as well.

“Every world is different so you never know whe…

Back when it was first revealed, the hope was that Cyberpunk 2077 would revolutionize the genre, and maybe even gaming as a whole. That’s not quite what happened, in part because the launch had more bugs than Starship Troopers. Performance issues, cars running into stuff, getting softlocked in the tutorial, weird children. It was a mess.

Thankfully, the redemption arc for Cyberpunk is real. With multitudes of bug fixes, content updates, and the transformative patch 1.6 behind us, as well as the massive success of the Cyberpunk anime, it seems as though things are finally getting in order for the game. So it’s with a certain amount of tentative excitement I look toward CD Projekt’s only planned DLC, Phantom Liberty.

We haven’t heard much since a pretty sick trailer at the Gam…

Ubisoft pulled the plug on The Crew this month, rendering the 10-year-old racing game unplayable due, it said, to “server infrastructure and licensing constraints.” It’s hardly the first time an online game has been sent to a farm upstate by a publisher that neither wants to continue supporting it nor offer players a way to play it offline or on private servers, but rather than accept the status quo, YouTuber Ross Scott is putting up a fight.

Scott has launched a new website, Stop Killing Games, to rally opposition to the games industry’s “assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media,” as he puts it.

With The Crew as its prime example, the campaign directs consumers from around the world to sign petitions and submit complaints to regulatory bodies such as the DG…

If you want your shiny new Intel Core UItra laptop to come with an equally shiny Arc Graphics badge, then you’re going to need to make sure you have at least 16GB of memory inside your machine and that it’s configured in dual-channel mode, too.

One of the exciting things about the new Meteor Lake chips Intel has announced today is their graphics prowess. Now, I’m not going to pretend they’re going to give your RTX 4090 a run for its money, not with at most eight Xe LPG cores at their heart, but you are going to get some decent 1080p gaming performance out of them.

Think about the sort of performance on offer with the top handheld gaming PCs we’ve seen this year, and you’ll be in the right ball-park. Intel is even promising to be, on average, 10% faster than the AMD …

“That’s a very interesting, uh, Chun Li costume.”

Such are the immortal words of a Street Fighter co-commentator upon seeing that Chun Li, in fact, is not wearing a costume. As a match between Chun Li and Kimberley began at a recent Corner2Corner Street Fighter 6 tournament, a weekly online throwdown featuring some of Europe’s finest players, it was immediately obvious that Chun Li was naked.

Suffice to say that the RE Engine’s physics simulation was being put through its paces, and the reaction of the commentators is about as professional as you could hope for. The mod was installed on the tournament host’s machine being used for the match and broadcast, meaning none of the figures in the clip were responsible for this absurdity: they just had to handle the fallout. After s…