I suck at Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord's sword combat, but nailing dudes with arrows and javelins I can do. Like in Tribes: Ascend and its predecessors, predicting where the arc of a missile will intersect with the face of a moving target can make you feel like you've tapped into some superhuman intuition. Plus, if they're on a horse, you get to watch them flop off of it, which makes Bannerlord's ranged combat even more fun.
If it's dense strategy you're after, this Humble Stardock Strategy Bundle is well worth a look. For a solitary dollar ($1.50 in Australia) you can get fantasy 4X Sorcerer King: Rivals, which is worth it by itself — but you'll also get Dead Man's Draw, which is a strategy game with pirates. Quite the rarity.
The next Elder Scrolls Online expansion will roll out "about a week" after its confirmed May 18 release date, ZeniMax Online Studios has announced. It's a fairly small delay, and it's for a good reason: the studio is adapting to remote work in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Hearthstone's Ashes of Outland expansion went live Tuesday, bringing with it the Demon Hunter, the first new class to be added to the game since it debuted in 2014. Today, senior designer Dean Ayala said that Illidan Stormrage's newcomers are bringing a little too much heat, and so nerfs are on the way.
With its flagrant exploration of sexual violence, drug use, and scathing critique of different political ideologies, Disco Elysium is a game that would never get the greenlight from Chinese government censors. But that hasn't stopped this detective RPG from becoming a surprise hit with Chinese gamers who use Steam as a loophole to access unregulated and uncensored games.
The third season of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is now underway, with a new battle pass, a new hero, and a new Quads mode for the free-to-play battle royale Warzone. As the name suggests, Quads groups players up in teams of four rather than three, which has been the norm so far. The new mode hasn't gone over very well with a lot of fans, though, because it's not being offered alongside three-player squads, it's replacing them entirely.
Newegg has a flash deal on a cheap gaming laptop for under $1,000. You can grab this Asus TUF gaming laptop for $989, $310 off its listing price, and its lowest price ever. Recently, we've seen it show up at other retailers for around $1,250, so this is a pretty good deal on a gaming laptop that can take a hit or two. We just wouldn't recommend purposely hitting it.
The Valorant closed beta got underway yesterday, and it was a huge hit: Riot announced today that it attracted more than 1.7 million peak concurrent viewers on Twitch, setting a new record for single-day hours watched in a single game category. That's good news for Riot, but it also presents some challenges, as the studio acknowledged today that the demand "overwhelmed us (a little)," and said that it's going to proceed cautiously—and hand out closed beta access judiciously—in order to avoid crushing its servers.
The coronavirus outbreak has knocked a lot of plans off track: Conferences have been cancelled, hardware has grown more scarce and expensive, and games and updates have been delayed. But one company that's staying the course, for now at least, is CD Projekt, which said in a 2019 overview released today that despite the shift to working from home, the scheduled September release date for Cyberpunk 2077 remains on target.
Newegg is selling MSI's Optix G27C2 gaming monitor for $209.99 right now, which is $40 below its list price. On top of that, you can cash in a $20 mail-in-rebate, so in the long run you only end up paying $189.99.