Overwatch 2’s latest season dramatically changed how the game is played by giving DPS heroes the ability to reduce the healing their enemies receive. The ripple effects from this change left many tanks and support heroes struggling to stay alive.

In a blog post reflecting on the changes, game director Aaron Keller admitted that the amount of power it gave DPS heroes “may be pushed a bit too far.” “There can be moments where it feels a bit too dangerous, even as a tank, to expose yourself, or where your health can burn down quicker than expected while being healed,” he said.

Next week, the mid-season patch will drop the healing reduction caused by DPS heroes from 20% to 15% and additional changes to “makes sure that all heroes feel viable.” 

Those changes will include:

• A boost to Ana’s healing grenade to protect herself while she heals from afar
• Increased healing output from Lifeweaver to make up for his lack of offensive abilities
• A …
  

Idol Showdown bills itself on Steam as “the definitive fan-made hololive fighting game experience,” and that might not be overselling it. Four days after launch, it remains very near the top of Steam’s “new and trending” Fighting and Martial Arts game chart, and has earned a “very positive” rating across nearly 2,500 user reviews. And if you have no idea what a “hololive fighting game experience” is, don’t be alarmed, because I am about to explain.

First things first: VTubers, or Virtual YouTubers, are essentially streamers who use computer-generated avatars in place of their real-world faces and bodies during their streams. Using a webcam and specialized software, these avatars are able to move, speak, and express emotion much as a regular person would—it’s basically like wearing a fully animated mask on stream. There are a lot of very popular VTubers out there, and Japan-based hololive productions—stylized as all lower-case, thus the punctuation on the Steam page…

The new Razer Leviathan V2 Pro soundbar has just been announced at CES 2023, and it’s promising an AI-powered head tracking beamforming audio solution for the desktop. It all sounds pretty techno-forward, but thankfully I’ve had the opportunity to try it out at home over the past few weeks to see if it’s the real deal or not.

If you don’t already know, beamforming is when a signal is directed at something to better improve the signal strength and quality. It’s not just an audio thing, there are loads of uses for beamforming in regards to wireless signals, but that’s what Razer is using it for with the new Leviathan V2 Pro. Basically, the system will determine where you are and, through some neural network computing, beam the audio signal directly at your ears.

To do this, the Leviathan V2 Pro comes with a small infrared sensor array, located in the middle of the unit. The data from which is then fired through a neural network processor to sense where a user is, or more s…

Just two days after delaying Skull and Bones yet again, this time into early 2023-24, Ubisoft has posted a new developer stream showcasing the oft-delayed pirate adventure’s “narrative gameplay.” The video takes players through an “investigation,” described by narrative director Joel Jannise as “a way to tell a story through a series of steps.”

“The player follows a trail of something that they think is going to be interesting and likely going to lead to some kind of treasure or some kind of score,” Janisse explains in the video. “But it also tells a story about our factions and our world, and we do that by finding, for example, messages in bottles, scraps of lost journals, sometimes talking to different characters in the world, and through that we’re able to tell a story.”

The investigation seen in the video is centered on a beef between a brother and sister, both of whom believe they’re the proper heir to the throne of a small kingdom. You, as a pirate, don’t par…

Disney Lorcana’s sure been interesting to follow. Aside from the big, dramatic lawsuit where the words “the legal equivalent of alchemy” were used in a courtroom, it’s also picked up some pretty good steam as a competitive card game.

Which shouldn’t be a surprise, really: When you see an Elsa card going up on eBay for $7,000, things start to click into place. Disney’s branding is potent, and from what I’ve heard, Ravensburger has put together a fun TCG to back the mouse up. It’s honestly surprising that Disney’s own-brand Magic: The Gathering didn’t happen sooner.

And yet all that branding, all those highly marketable characters, even the pristine copyright-extending might of Mickey himself are powerless before the unstoppable force of the metagame, which has placed one of the least iconic Disney characters of all time into a position of godhood.

As spotted by TheGamer: Hiram Flaversham, Toymaker (which honestly sounds like the name of a Dark Souls Boss) i…

At D&D Direct earlier this week, we got an update on the new virtual tabletop system that Wizards of the Coast is developing in Unreal Engine 5, and it’s not looking bad at all. (If only they’d released it in March of 2020, right?)

Like other virtual tabletop gaming programs out there, D&D Virtual Tabletop seeks to emulate the in-person experience while also taking advantage of the properties of a digital playspace.

“We want players to really feel like they are playing together,” wrote game director Kale Stutzman in a blog post, “so we have created various ways to interact with the 3D space, including pointers, pings, simple drawing tools, dice, and minis. All these systems update in real-time so you can see exactly where your friends are and what they are doing.”

DMs will be able to spawn minis and tweak monster stats on the fly, and roll checks (like comparing an attack roll to the target’s armor class) can be done manually or be automated.

Visually…

Back in March 2023, CDPR’s then-CEO Adam Kiciński said the quiet part out loud on an earnings call, and referred to the studio’s Polaris project (a new Witcher trilogy) as The Witcher 4. Naturally the studio went into immediate damage control mode and denied the first Polaris game is The Witcher 4, but here’s what Kiciński said at the time: “We want to release three big Witcher games within six years, starting from the release of Polaris, which is Witcher 4.”

CDPR first announced Polaris in October 2022, and has referenced it a few times since (though the only information about the game comes from fan theorising about the teaser image). It’s started 2024 in the same way, telling Reuters that production on Polaris is going into full swing this year. 

“We’d like to have around 400 people working on [Polaris] by the middle of the year,” said joint CEO Adam Badowski. That’s a lot of developers, but we already know from some recent quarterly results that…

If you’ve been scratching your head at today’s Wordle, you might want to take a peek at our hint, written especially for the March 6 (991) game. Or maybe you’d rather get straight to the best bit and celebrate the latest addition to your win streak instead by clicking through to today’s Wordle answer. However you want to win, we’ve got it covered.

I couldn’t have done worse on my first go today—or much better on my second. As sudden turnarounds go, this was a good one, a full row of grey letters turning into four greens and yellows. My third guess was almost a formality—a nice, easy, win at the end of an extraordinary game.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, March 6

If someone’s eyes are welling up, if they’re feeling so down they could almost cry, or they’ve just been chopping onions, they might be described as looking a bit _____. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in Word…

Endlight comes as close to an embodiment of pure chaos as any game I’ve ever played. It’s a simple concept and very simple to play—navigate freely through twisting, shifting, and bizarre 3D landscapes to find and collect golden hoops—but I found the violent onslaught of lights and noise that envelops the action to be very off-putting at first. The deeper I dug into Endlight, though, the more I found it to be a remarkably engaging, surprising, and unexpectedly funny game—and one that I will (probably) never be able to play again.

Endlight is developed by Jim McGinley, who describes himself (not entirely seriously, I suspect) as “one of the greatest players of TRS-80 action games today,” and it was in many ways influenced by those old-time games. “The best TRS-80 games filled the screen,” McGinley said. “People aren’t doing that anymore, but Endlight is. No matter where you look, there’s NO empty space.”

He’s not kidding. It’s virtually impossible to get …