So far the improvements are mainly visual. A new Colour Grading option has been added that allows players to change to a “gritty” look similar to the 2019 gameplay presentations. Other visual improvements include new screen space ambient occlusion implementation, image clarity improvements including temporal anti-aliasing and texture filtering, and the ability to toggle Chromatic Aberration. Watch on YouTube Dying Light 2 Stay Human: Bloody Ties Announcement Trailer Gameplay changes have also been made....

All that’s before you factor in a back catalogue that stretches back some five years now and takes in all-timers such as The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and so much else besides. So if you’ve just picked up a Switch or perhaps are just looking to expand your library, these are the must-haves for Nintendo’s hybrid console. Buy Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes in the UK from ShopTo, and in the US from GameStop...

This time, we decided our best games through a mix of voting - across our full-time staff and our regular contributors to Eurogamer’s news, guides, features and reviews - and some, ahem, lively debate as we sorted through the results. There will inevitably be a game you loved that’s missing or featured far too low, and a game you loathed sitting far too high. In those cases we can only apologise for our terrible taste....

Unpacking’s success has seen the indie “zen puzzle game” beat a number of big AAA games to several awards (not least Eurogamer’s own Game of the Year last year), and find itself cast as a gentle, queer David to the Goliaths of Returnal, It Takes Two, and Metroid Dread. I caught up with Brier and Dawson before the BAFTAs to discuss the game’s development. One of the most powerful aspects of Unpacking’s narrative is that it’s almost entirely wordless....

Sony games dominate BAFTA’s nominations list, with 10 nods for Ghost of Tsushima, seven for Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, six for Dreams and four for Sackboy: A Big Adventure. Supergiant’s brilliant Hades - Eurogamer’s Game of the Year for 2020 - has eight nominations, while Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Media Molecule’s Fall Guys share five. Other games to get nominations include Airborne Kingdom, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Astro’s Playroom, Call of the Sea, Carrion, Destiny 2: Beyond Light, Deep Rock Galactic, Demon’s Souls, Doom: Eternal, F1 2020, Factorio, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Flight Simulator, Fortnite, Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition, Minecraft Dungeons, No Man’s Sky, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Röki, Sea of Thieves, The Falconeer, The Last Campfire and Valorant....

It follows Marianne, the titled medium, as she’s mysteriously summoned to the abandoned Niwa Hotel. There she must use her powers to uncover the secret history of the hotel and help the spirits trapped within its grounds. Our The Medium story guide lists all the missions you must complete to help you pinpoint exactly where you are in the game and give you an idea about what you’ll have to do next....

With the release of the Eco Living expansion pack across all platforms in June 2020, that wish was granted - and now, The Sims 4 officially has ladders. Even better, a limited but still fully functional selection of ladders has been made available to everyone who owns the base game, via the free update Patch 95. Where can you find ladders in The Sims 4? How do ladders work? What are the benefits to using ladders in your builds, and what are the restrictions on them?...

It’s a privilege to be able to focus on this in my podcast One-to-One which, hey, you should listen to (search “Eurogamer Podcasts” wherever you get them). And I’ve had some wonderful guests. But few struck me the way Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer did - the lead mind behind Pentiment - in the latest episode. Sawyer was not what I expected - and I say this as someone who’s met him a few times....

Cloé Veilleux worked on the game for three and a half years and was promoted to Technical Level Design Director before leaving Eidos a year before the game was released. It follows recent news that some developers on Metroid Dread were not credited in the game after leaving, despite their work appearing in the game. Veilleux’s expectation, by industry standards, was that her name should have been included in Additional Thanks rather than with her specific role - a role that she took over from two predecessors....

Previously she beat FromSoftware’s epic with one hand and then again using a dance pad as a controller. Now she’s playing the game with both hands and feet, simultaneously. Watch on YouTube Elden Ring | Free Colosseum Update trailer That means one game on PS5 with a controller, and another on PC using a dance pad. As part of the challenge, she must kill bosses on both games on the same try....

“We guarantee that players will not need to repurchase the games,” IO said in a tweet. The developer said its solution will be rolled out “in the coming weeks” (Hitman 3 goes on sale on 20th January), and until then, the Hitman 1 Game of the Year access pass will be free to own for all PC Hitman 3 players in the first 10 days after release. Epic issued a statement of its own on Twitter: “We never want players to feel forced to repurchase content on the Epic Game Store that they bought on another PC store so they can access features in a new game....

The update fleshes out Valheim’s snowy mountain biome with new enemies and resources, some of which are buried in those caves. Frost Caves will be similar to Burial Chambers found in the Black Forest and Sunken Crypts seen in the Swamps, developer Iron Gate Studio said today. Expect three new enemies to defeat, and another new armour and weapon set to forge. “The goal was to give Mountains a similar challenge in close quarters to what players can find in the Swamps and the Black Forest, as well as a chance to square off against new feral enemies,” Iron Gate co-founder Henrik Törnqvist said....

In a joint press release, the companies wrote: “[We are] pleased to reveal that Valheim has surpassed ten million copies sold just over one year since its Steam Early Access release.” In addition to this, the companies also revealed that Valheim had an all-time player peak of 502,000 – not too mead-iocre at all. In fact, the player numbers were so good, that in just over two weeks, Valheim sold an astounding 3m units....

The name hints at just how gruelling the Mistlands experience has been for much of the past month - specifically, since the update was released in early December until a patch was released earlier this week. Before the new biome was introduced, progression between Valheim’s regions always felt like a steady increase in challenge, with a small bump in difficulty when moving to a new environment. Progression in the freshly-released Mistlands biome, however, felt like running into a brick wall....

If you hadn’t guessed from that anecdote, my friends (though trying their best) were not the best Dota 2 teachers, and I bounced off the game pretty quickly. But Valve is now attempting to make the game far more beginner-friendly, introducing several significant features to help new players learn the ropes - along with some tools to help returning players. Oh, and it’s cracking down on veterans trying to sneak into beginner pools using smurf accounts....

During an interview with PC Gamer, Newell was asked about the option of creating a subscription service such as Microsoft’s Game Pass for the Steam Deck. In response, Newell said: “I don’t think it’s something that we think we need to do ourselves, building a subscription service at this time. “But for [Microsoft’s] customers it’s clearly a popular option, and we’d be more than happy to work with them to get that on Steam....

Clark will collaborate on a series of classes designed to be played while seated. FitXR is a suite of total body workouts - based on boxing, dancing and HIIT exercises - designed by fitness experts with accessibility in mind. Clark is the Guiness World Record holder as the fastest man on two hands (20m) with a time of 4.78 seconds. He’s also an aspiring qualifier for the 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris, and the subject of the Netflix Original documentary film Zion....

Strangeland, described as a game about “identity, loss, self-doubt, and redemption”, unfolds within a strange carnival, whose “denizens and devices… answer with riddles, puzzles, and warnings of a Dark Thing lurking at the park’s peak”. “Forge a blade from iron stolen from the jaws of a ravenous hound and hone it with wrath and grief;” teases Wormwood on Strangeland’s Steam page, “charm the eye out of a ten-legged teratoma; and ride a giant cicada to the edge of oblivion…....

“It’s been tricky,” says Mats Andersson, lead combat designer at Fatshark, who was speaking to us at Gamescom. He explains it’s something they had to build up to step-by-step, in part because of the game’s hybrid approach that mixes both melee and first-person shooting. “We knew that we wanted to do a hybrid kind of thing,” he said, “as we wanted to keep the melee part, because we wanted to extend it, rather than have a completely separate game mode with ranged combat....

As the dust settled around the battle of the battle royales, Apex Legends was the last one standing for me, and - like many of us with jobs and kids - I simply didn’t have the time to git gud at the rest of them, too. Consequently, although I did enjoy my time with Call of Duty’s initial toe-dip into Battle Royale-flavoured waters, Blackout, I spent just enough time with Warzone to know I didn’t like it quite as much as Apex and left it there....