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Yet like a newly minted Wretch squaring up to Margit the Fell Omen for the first time, I am prepared to plough on despite the pain that awaits. Below you’ll find a comprehensive ranking of Elden Ring’s major regions and legacy dungeons, based on the admittedly woolly criteria of how fun and interesting each location is to explore. So grab your map, put on your boots, and update your life insurance policy as we embark upon a grand tour of From Software’s magnificent fantasy realm....

As part of this phase of the test, Frontier say that the “new starting system and ship ownership should alleviate long travel times,” an inconvenience that players took issue with during the first phase of the alpha. As for worries about player Commanders being a bit too eager to test out their new guns on fellow alpha players, perhaps the Conflict Zones will help redirect that excitement. You can catch a look at some of Frontier’s alpha footage for Conflict Zones here, in which they explain the 12 on 12 matches which include a mix of live players and NPCs....

Can’t very much mosey into town from behind the controls of a Sidewinder, now, can you? As with the space game, you’ll have a breadth of options to dive into on foot. Want to hike from one dustbowl settlement to another selling desperately-needed resources? Hunt down bandits in battered old outposts? Scavenge a crashed Anaconda up in alien hills? It’s all there, and likely has a special space-suit best suited to said activity....

Sweeney gave the opening keynote speech yesterday at DICE, the annual conference organised by the Academy Of Interactive Arts & Sciences. In the speech, titled The Times They Are A-Changin’, he pontificated about present problems and future directions for the industry. He touched on ideas like improving cross-platform games, loot boxes being too much like gambling, and platform holders like Google and Apple being irresponsible with the personal data they profit off, as Shacknews reported....

“When developing our games we try to be as apolitical as possible, in a way shielding the global player audience from everyday controversies. We quite like the idea that our shared passion, for a truck simulation, allows people to connect, to pay a virtual visit to a neighbouring country in peace, and to enjoy a hobby that we commonly share, rather than allowing anything divisive to set us apart,” wrote SCS in a blog post announcing the decision....

In Evercore Heroes, you’ve got four teams of four competing with each other simultaneously in what’s dubbed a “session”, but is more like a dungeon run. After players have chosen their heroes, they’ll compete to charge their Evercore (a big crystal that lies in every team’s base) the fastest. Now, the presentation went at pace, with quite a few time-skips, so I found it a bit tricky to keep up....

As readers may know, my lockdown hobby was and is learning to crochet, to the extent that making things out of yarn is now just a thing I do. If you cut me, do I not bleed? No: yards and yards of wool spools out of my veins. Quickly, we must wind it up and pack it back in, or else make a scarf! My digital game interests and my physical craft interests collide with surprising regularity, though....

The PC Gaming Show at notE3 is done and dusted for another year, and boy howdy were there a lot of new PC games to inhale. From Persona 4 Golden to new trailers (and early access release dates) for Ooblets, Torchlight 3 and loads more, there’s a lot of ground to cover. If you missed the show or need a refresher of what’s coming out and when, then help is at hand, as here’s a big list of everything announced at The PC Gaming Show 2020....

Nvidia Ampere GPUs will be 7nm One of the key points from Nvidia’s nine-part GTC keynote today is that they’ll use a 7nm manufacturing process much like AMD’s existing crop of Radeon RX 5000 GPUs. The A100, for example, has 54 billion transistors on it, making it the world’s largest 7nm processor. Previously, Nvidia’s Turing-based RTX cards used a 12nm manufacturing process, so shifting down to 7nm should bring with it quite the leap in performance....

Following a long drip-feed of announcements, Fall Guys’s long-awaited second season arrives today - lowering the drawbridge on a range of swords ’n’ sorcery themed rounds and cosmetics. So, what’s new in Season 2? Four new stages, is what, including the torturous Knight Fever teased earlier this week. Besides their “hardest gauntlet level yet”, though, there’s also the castle-climbing Wall Guys, Egg Seige and Hoopsie Legend. A new Show Selector will now give you a little more control over what you play, with time-limited modes exclusively featuring certain categories of game....

If you’d not heard yet, Ubi say that Far Cry 6 “plunges players into the heart of a modern-day guerrilla revolution set in Yara, a tropical paradise frozen in time under the oppressive rule of President Antón Castillo. As he vows to restore his nation to its former glory while grooming his son Diego to follow in his footsteps, players will embody Dani Rojas, a local military dropout turned guerrilla fighter in their quest to overthrow the tyrant and unite the nation....

Squeenix started making ugly versions of classic Final Fantasy games for mobile, then brought those ugly versions to PC too. But people didn’t really want ugly versions of classic Final Fantasy games. As Katharine said of FF6’s PC port when she and Brendy ranked the best Final Fantasy games on PC, the “ickily prettified sprites and nasty fonts [. . .] really spoil what’s otherwise considered a very good game indeed....

All of the information was detailed in a livestream, which you can watch the archive of below: Endwalker, the MMO’s last expansion, brought a cose to the game’s Hydaelyn adn Zodiark saga. MMOs don’t end, though, so 6.1 promises “the start of a new chapter for Warriors of Light,” with new main scenario quests. The patch will also bring a new role quest, updates to PvP, a new housing area, a new dungeon and more....

It’s not just ray tracing support that’s coming to Fortnite, either. It’s also getting DLSS support, as well as Nvidia’s new super low latency tech, Nvidia Reflex, which they also unveiled during their RTX 3000 live stream. To see it all in action, take a peek at Nvidia’s RTX teaser trailer below. Starting with the ray tracing, Nvidia have confirmed that Fortnite will be getting the full works, including ray traced reflections, ray traced shadows, ray traced ambient occlusion and ray traced global illumination....

Bloodhunt is set in the World Of Darkness universe, which means its vampires are technically the same sort as from beloved singleplayer RPG Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. But instead of hanging around nightclubs, giving twenty-something men cause to write clumsy articles about sexual politics, here the vampires are running up buildings and firing machineguns at each other. So far, Bloodhunt has a ‘Mixed’ score on Steam, though the reasons why are similarly mixed....

Those really are some cool mechs. All shapes and sizes, bristling with greebles and gadgets and pistons and flaps and spinning bits and gatling guns. I like to think those “feed the fire” and “let the last cinders burn” cards were intentional fakeouts for viewers expecting the surprise announcement to be a new Dark Souls game. Although, in the extremely unlikely event that these are hints connecting Armored Core to Dark Souls in some wild Drakengard/Nier-style history, I will lose my chuffing mind....

A new Humble Bundle, a donation from the makers of Warframe, and a charity initiative run by Eve Online players are just three more ways the games industry is raising money, and you can get involved to show your support too. Humble’s Australia Fire Relief Bundle is chock-full of great games, including a load made by Aussie devs. My favourites of the bunch are Hollow Knight by Team Cherry, Void Bastards by Blue Manchu, Crawl by Powerhoof, and The Gardens Between by The Voxel Agents....

The offer runs from now until July 30th, giving you plenty of time to sign up - which is more than can be said for the last time Humble shaved 40% off their Humble Choice Premium subscription, which was only available for 48 hours. As before, though, this 40% off deal is only available to those who have never subscribed to Humble Choice before, so lapsed subscribers sadly won’t be able to take advantage of it....

Get the Asus Tuf Gaming VG27AQ for $340 (with code EMC2Z2AZ6A5Z24) So, what makes this monitor worth recommending in the first place? Well, it hits that popular 2560x1440 resolution and 165Hz refresh rate spec, giving you an upgrade in two dimensions over a standard 1920x1080 60Hz monitor. This offers a noticeable improvement to image fidelity and fluidity, while still being achievable with a mid-range gaming PC. The monitor also sports FreeSync and G-Sync, which eliminates screen tearing and judder without the input lag penalty of traditional v-sync....

Running from now until July 21st, the Summer Adventure Games bundle is split into three different tiers. Pay just £1 / $1 and you’ll get Oxenfree, the first season of The Walking Dead plus its 400 Days DLC add-on, and Batman: The Enemy Within (which is, bizarrely, the second season of Telltale’s Batman series). Get the Humble Summer Adventure Bundle from £1 / $1 Then, if you pay more than the average, which is £6....