Europa Universalis 4 is an outstanding grand strategy game: Huge, deep, complex, but still accessible, as least as much as these things can be. Still, the genre is inherently intimidating, and you may not be entirely taken by the idea of throwing $40 at a game you’re going to immediately bounce off of. If you find yourself caught in that admittedly very specific bind, the new Humble Bundle is here to help. At the top end, for $17, you’ll cap things off with Golden Century, Dharma, and Rule Brita

Two new heroes were added to Hearthstone Battlegrounds yesterday: Tirion Fordring, who seems pretty good, and Millhouse Manastorm, who seems kind of bad. For comparison, Queen Wagtoggle can give a Mech, Demon, Murloc, and Beast +2 attack, and Pyramad gives a random minion +3 health, and neither of those heroes are ever my first pick. A +1/+1 gift for the few Battlegrounds minions with no type isn’t immediately appealing. I’ve had a chance to try Millhouse Manastorm for myself, and his ability is

(Image credit: HeR Interactive, inc)Valve has posted a list of the most successful Steam releases in December, and as usual, it’s a mix of the expected (Halo, Red Dead Redemption 2) and the surprising (Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem, VR Paradise: Gentlemen’s Club). The list isn’t ordered – so we don’t know which among these sold best – but it’s testament to the wide range of games available on the platform. The list is determined by the amount of revenue generated during the first fortnight of ea

Legends of Runeterra heads to open beta on Friday (or tomorrow, if you meet certain restrictions), but Riot Games has gone ahead and dropped the patch notes for the new release a few days early. One of the biggest highlights, though, is that players who participate in the beta won’t have to fear losing their cards, rank, or saved currencies. Once Legends of Runeterra is live, Riot won’t be wiping player accounts for the full launch later this year. So when you reach a tier in Legends of Runeterr

Gearbox Publishing revealed at PAX West last year that Blackbird Interactive, the developer of the 2016 RTS Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak—and founded by veterans of original Homeworld studio Relic Entertainment—was working on a new, back-into-space Homeworld game. A very successful Fig campaign followed, and a little over a month ago the studio laid out its plans for the game. But that’s apparently not the only thing Blackbird is working on. Publisher Focus Home Interactive announced on its forum

If you love a gaming mouse with a ton of programmable buttons, Amazon has Corsair’s weighty Scimitar Pro RGB MMO on sale for $50—the lowest price we’ve seen recently. Weighing in at 147g, it’s heavier than your typical gaming mouse, and is suited for MMOs over FPSes. The Scimitar also allows for on-board storage for up to three profiles, which means you can save macros on the mouse itself and never worry about losing your favorite skill rotations. If you don’t regularly use an MMO gaming mouse,

I’m always skeptical of discounts on Dell systems, because a lot of times the reduced price just brings parity with other desktops on the market. In this case, however, you can score an actual bargain on a Dell G5 gaming PC with some serious hardware for ray-traced gaming. At that price, it’s a better buy than some of the other cheap gaming PC deals we recently highlighted in the $1,000+ category. This setup packs a Core i7-9700 processor (8 cores/8 threads, 3GHz to 4.7GHz, 12MB L3 cache), GeFor

The Witcher on Netflix is big—maybe its biggest season-one series ever—and so it’s no surprise that a second season is already in the works. But that’s not all: A Writers Guild of America West listing, spotted by Witcher fan site Redanian Intelligence, indicates that Netflix is also working on a standalone animated film called The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf. Shortly after that WGA listing was found, Netflix confirmed the existence of an “anime film” from the live-action show’s creator and th

Do you have questions about Half-Life: Alyx—like, maybe, when are we going to get a proper release date? If yes, you’ll want to tune into Reddit tomorrow at 9 am PT/12 pm ET for an AMA with the development team. The Half-Life: Alyx team will be doing an AMA on https://t.co/y6aHejwwHE tomorrow at 9am Pacific Time. It’s not known who from Valve will be attending the AMA, but the moderators are clearly anticipating trouble: They warned that the AMA will be focused on Half-Life: Alyx, and asked all

For context, 3D XPoint is the technology behind Intel’s Optane memory, which is a form of non-volatile memory. (If you’d like a deeper look into Intel Optane Memory, you can read all about it here.) In a joint press release, Intel and Micron first announced it was working on the 3D XPoint technology on July 28, 2015. Micron bought Intel’s stake in 3D XPoint and released its X100 SSD in October 2019. However, when EDC went bankrupt, Micron acquired the rights to 3D XPoint; EDC sold its Ovonyx sto

You can try out Disintegration before release, which is scheduled for sometime in the first half of 2020, because it’s about to undergo some technical closed beta testing—and we’ve got 500 Steam beta keys to give away in the raffle below. There’s a twist: We’re actually giving away two Steam keys to each winner so you can try the closed beta with a friend. (Image credit: Private Division)The Disintegration closed beta will run on January 28 (8 am PT to 11:59 pm PT) and again on January 29 during

The Elder Scrolls Online, the MMO set 1,000 years before the events of The Elder Scrolls V, is dedicating its next year of updates to the frigid homeland of the Nords, starting with a major new update called Greymoor. That’s exactly what The Elder Scrolls Online wants to avoid. Image 1 of 5 (Image credit: Zenimax Online Studios) Image 2 of 5 (Image credit: Zenimax Online Studios) Image 3 of 5 (Image credit: Zenimax Online Studios) Image 4 of 5 (Image credit: Zenimax Online Studios) Image 5 of 5

I thought I knew the Doom Slayer. So, in the interest of learning more about the man stuffed into that armour, let’s take a closer look at the Doom Slayer’s bedroom. This makes perfect sense: the Doom Slayer is absolutely a man who would own multiple swords. Of course the Doom Slayer has guitars displayed on his wall: of course he does. Obviously Doom would be on there if he didn’t currently exist within the Doom universe.

There are a lot ways for your citizens to die in survival sim Frostpunk: The Last Autumn, the follow-up to one of 2018’s best games. Don’t get me wrong: I love my little Frostpunk citizens, too. It’s a more palpable hate than I’ve experienced for tiny AI-controlled people in pretty much any other game I’ve ever played. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)As in the original Frostpunk, in The Last Autumn I pretty quickly slide into fascism. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)I pass a law that there must be a

If you’re not keen on spending big bucks on gaming peripherals, you might find yourself interested in what SteelSeries just rolled out. The company announced a trio of new items, including a $30 gaming mouse, a $50 water-resistant keyboard, and a $100 keyboard with “hybrid” key switches. SteelSeries said it wanted to expand the options for gamers who are “stuck using boring, traditional office peripherals for gaming.” There are six buttons in all, with the main clickers outfitted with mechanical

The first chapter of Galakrond’s Awakening, the new solo adventure in in the Year of the Dragon-concluding Hearthstone: Descent of Dragons, is now live. The adventure features two separate story campaigns, one for the League of Explorers and the other for the League of E.V.I.L., and the first chapter of the E.V.I.L. campaign, with four card rewards to earn, is free for all players. The adventure begins with the League of E.V.I.L. To get a good start on the action, don’t miss our guide to conquer

Today’s gaming laptops are better than ever, as it goes in the hardware space, but they’re also more affordable. To wit, MSI’s excellent GF63 is marked down to $639 right now, and it’s running a faster GPU than what was in the model we reviewed just two months ago. MSI makes some of the best gaming laptops, and at this price, the GF63 is right up there. It’s a 15.6-inch machine that’s been outfitted with a Core i5-9500H processor, GeForce GTX 1650 GPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD. The model

It’s amazing how much the cost of SSDs, even high-end NVMe drives, has fallen in price over the past year. Now you can get a 1TB NVMe SSD from XPG for $130, $20 below the usual MSRP, and you get a $20 Newegg gift card on top of that. The XPG SX8100 offers read speeds of up to 3500 MB/s, and write speeds of up to 3000 MB/s. You will need a PC capable of using NVMe SSDs, which basically means a Ryzen build or anything with 6th Gen or later Intel Core. This is already cheaper than most other 1TB NV

It turns out that ‘Pokémon, but an MMO on PC’ is an attractive pitch: At the time of writing, I’m around 14,000th in the queue to connect to monster battling MMO Temtem, which launched in Early Access today. The queue was much smaller right after launch, but it quickly became clear why spots were freeing up: frequent server disconnects. Getting lots of attention from streamers would normally be great for a launch, but in Temtem’s case they all appear to be suffering from the same server disconne

Doom Eternal was scheduled to be out in November 2019, until id Software pumped the brakes and pushed it into March 2020. Stratton said that Doom Eternal was complete last year, and that no new content has been added since the delay was announced. “We were crunching pretty hard most of last year. According to Stratton, the delay and effort has led to the best game the studio has ever made. Doom Eternal is scheduled to come out on March 20.