Valve is beta testing Steam Achievement Sets, a feature that lets developers group a game's achievements into collections.
In an announcement, the company said that games "live longer than ever, continuing to receive updates through new DLC, expansions, and seasons", but that achievements added with new content "can be hard to discover and can accidentally break the completion status of players who have already finished the game".
Sink your teeth into apocalyptic tales and twisted romance
In vampire stories, the immortal creatures of the night often trace their lineage back centuries. The authors of these stories are themselves part of a creative bloodline that took myths about blood-sucking monsters and turned them into timeless stories of horror. The genre’s foundations were laid by Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, but Anne Rice is the undisputed master of the modern vampire story. By shifting the focus of the narrative from the vampire’s victims to the creatures themselves, Rice made vampires more sympathetic monsters. She penned 13 books in The Vampire Chronicles, inspiring multiple adaptations and a host of imitators. If you’ve already read the genre’s classics, we’ve put together a chronological list of the 8 best vampire books to read this spooky season.
Image: Jim Norman / Nintendo LifeAs we tiptoe ever closer to the Ocarina of Time Switch 2 release date, my playthrough of the N64 original continues. Indeed, this week tips me past the halfway point, so there's no turning back.
If you missed weeks one through four, I'm revisiting OoT, one dungeon a week, and sharing all the things I loved (and the things I didn't) on my replay.
Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft is less than a month away, and it already looks like it's going to be a massive expansion to the tabletop game. But there are still a lot of questions about whether this new expansion is going to lean more towards the combat-oriented approach of the MMO or just be a traditional D&D game on Azeroth. At New York Comic Con, I got a chance to sit down with Wizards of the Coast principal game designer James Wyatt to talk about the first Universes Beyond expansion for D&D. From how he was talking about the expansion, it really does sound more like a D&D game taking place on Azeroth than trying to shove WoW's complicated mechanics and combat focus on the TTRPG. IGN: I know that there are a lot of people who play both WoW and D&D, and I've heard some WoW players say that this is going to get them into D&D. Does the Expansion have a good on-ramp for those players? James Wyatt: That is not its purpose, but I think it is a fantastic on-ramp in terms of someone who's a WoW player. Sitting down to make a D&D character, you're like, "Okay, what's a Tiefling? What's a Dragonborn? And what do these classes mean?
We’ve seen Square Enix set all sorts of trends with its games, from introducing sorts of JRPG and turn-based staples to really being the companyto cement job systems as a fixture. We’ve seen it happen repeatedly, and the Octopath Traveler series is one of the more influential ones in recent years. With the Switch 2 versions and the GOG release now available, not to mention the 10 year anniversary of the original game within sight, it feels we should be acknowledging how it’s influenced the gaming landscape over the last few years. Recommended Videos First, as a quick refresher, both Octopath Traveler and its follow-ups’ trademark is the fact these are the stories of multiple characters. In the two mainline entries, we follow eight heroes on their own stories. Each has their own job tied to them, bring back that Square Enix class system staple. The original game didn’t offer overlap between characters and stories really, but we did see it in the sequel. A prequel later appeared, first as the mobile game Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent and later as the offline console and PC self-contained adaptation Octopath Traveler 0.
Footage of a reportedly cancelled Assassin's Creed game set in ancient China has emerged online, including stealth kills, the series' leap of faith, and a spinning umbrella weapon.
Called Assassin's Creed Destiny, it was reportedly being made for current platforms at Tencent-owned TiMi Studio Group, which also worked on mobile game Assassin's Creed Jade.
Sam Hill is a news writer at Polygon covering gaming and entertainment. He's a Portland, Oregon–based journalist known for covering gaming, the outdoors, national parks, tech, food, and internet culture. He has written for a range of publications including Outside Magazine, Boston Magazine, Vice, the Seattle Times and Digital Trends.
Expected in 2027, Dealies will bring the Common Side Effects co-creator’s brand of weirdness to a big-box store
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 isn’t technically out until October 23, but the single-player campaign went live today for anyone who pre-ordered the digital version and a small batch of early reviews have already weighed in on what players can expect. The TL;DR is that it sounds like MW4 gets back to the meat and potatoes of what the franchise’s campaigns do best, even if it might not ultimately rank among the best of them. There are no scored reviews yet because everyone is waiting for more extensive hands-on time with the multiplayer, including DMZ, before making a final assessment. The in-progress reviews and impressions, however, are much better than the reception last year’s Black Ops 7 got at launch. While that surreal, always-online co-op campaign left many critics genuinely perplexed and disappointed, it sounds like MW4‘s six-hour, 16-mission campaign does exactly what you’d expect from a subseries that now spans seven separate games.
By the time Grand Theft Auto 4 launched in 2008, Rockstar had carved itself an unassailable niche and a reputation for innovation. And yet for all that praise, it was pretty easy to guess what a new GTA game would be like. The formula changed little from the time the series went 3D. Some vaguely sympathetic character would encounter hardship and then embrace a life of crime as a little treat. That life might look different from game to game, but the general idea remained the same. GTA 4 defied that pattern, and it's one of the reasons it's still an excellent game.
GTA 4 follows Niko Bellic, a former soldier traveling to America both for a better life and to find the man who betrayed his unit in the past. One of GTA 4's biggest surprises at the time was how small Rockstar made this version of Liberty City, a barely disguised post-September 11 New York City. (One of the plot reasons why you can't explore further is that the bridges are up following terrorist threats.) Where the settings of previous mainline games kept getting bigger, Liberty City was comparatively small. And yet it felt more alive than Vice City and Los Santos.
Image: Digital Foundry / Nintendo LifeOur impressions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's campaign went live yesterday alongside early access for anyone who pre-ordered the game. The full launch comes on Friday 23rd October, but buying now unlocks access to the full campaign before the multiplayer modes.
As you may know if you've played the Switch 2 version already, buried in the Graphics settings are two different upscaling options. One is Nvidia's AI-powered DLSS upscaler, and the other is Infinity Ward's in-house anti-aliasing solution, labelled "Filmic SMAA T2X".
Michael McWhertor is a New York-based journalist and editor with more than 20 years of experience covering games, industry events, technology, movies, and TV.
We are seriously asking, 'What's going on?'
Update 1.1 for The Blood of Dawnwalker will add a new Story mode with additional combat assist, a potion that lets you forget your abilities and master new ones, and the ability to pet dogs and cats.
Expected to roll out next week, the patch also brings changes to combat targeting, the camera and traversal, a FrameGen update, uncensored blood and gore in the Japanese version on Steam, and more than 1,100 other improvements and fixes.
The single-player is just OK, but according to the players, that doesn’t matter.
Neverwinter Nights is deeply nostalgic for me. There's something about this era of PC game graphics.
Image: CapcomWe finally made it to the weekend — well done, everyone!
After the silence of last week, things started to pick up in Nintendo news this week. The big hitter was previews going live for Ocarina of Time on Switch 2, which seems to be really rather wonderful. We also got a new overview trailer and shared over 20 minutes of gameplay footage from Link's latest.
Image credit: Eurogamer/Funselektor Labs Inc.
I'd nearly forgotten Over the Hill's predecessor, Art of Rally, was a racing game. But that's not meant as a slight. It's just that, for all the happy hours I poured into it, I don't recall doing a single race. Instead, it was the aimless meandering, the soothing rhythms of exploration and absent-minded collectible hunting in its free-roam mode that held me transfixed. So the fact Over the Hill completely jettisons the racing stuff and leans entirely into the meditative bit - it even starts with a golden Buddha statue running you through the basics, which probably tells you everything you need to know - is exactly my kind of thing.
It comes at the end of an episode that, for all intents and purposes, is pure setup. Spike (James Marsters) lounges morosely in his crypt, harmless after having a chip installed in his brain that prevents him from hurting humans. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) kicks down his door and announces that she’s done with him. She’s killing him once and for all. “Do it,” Spike says. “End my torment.” It’s standard Spike melodrama. As Buffy gears up to stake him, she holds back, and Spike kisses her. They stare at each other in shock, and Buffy does the unthinkable. She kisses him again and tells him that she wants him. Spike says that he’s in love with her. And then he wakes up, horrified. “Oh God, no. Please, no.” Roll credits. It’s a dream sequence that foreshadows much of Spike and Buffy’s dynamic, which goes to some of the darkest places in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and rarely runs both ways. 26 years ago, “Out of My Mind” aired on The WB. Written by Rebecca Rand Kirshner and directed by David Grossman, it’s the fourth episode of the fifth season, and it lays the groundwork for many plot threads explored in the coming episodes.
Despite the Spike and Buffy kicker, the episode is about
