We've been here before. In 2012, BioWare released Star Wars: The Old Republic, an online role-playing game modelled closely on World of Warcraft. At the time it was the most expensive video game ever made: a mammoth, high-stakes undertaking in a genre BioWare, which specialises in epic storytelling for a solo player, had no experience of and didn't seem entirely comfortable with. Its fully voiced dialogue and multiple branching storylines clashed awkwardly with the streamlined social play of an online world.
Oli Welsh
Editor
Oli is the editor of Eurogamer.net and likes to take things one word at a time. His friends call him The European, but that's just a coincidence. He's still playing Diablo 3.
Featured articles
Our 20th birthday celebrations continue at Rezzed today with a panel on the games of our lifetime
UPDATE: Our Rezzed sessions and live podcast are... live!
The Eurogamer Summer Internship is back
Applications are open, find out more today at Rezzed!
Eurogamer turns 20 this year, and we start celebrating with a panel at PAX East this week
UPDATE: watch the stream here at 6.30pm UK time, 2.30pm Eastern.
Win an Xbox One X or PS4 Pro with the Division 2
Upload Dark Zone gameplay clips from this weekend's beta to win.
If you've pre-ordered The Division 2, you'll already have access to a private beta for Ubisoft Massive's online action game that's running over this weekend. But if you haven't, we can help you out. The Gamer Network collective has 3000 keys for the beta to give away.
Eurogamer is looking for a new guides writer!
For FAQs' sake.
Fancy an opportunity to join us in Brighton? We are looking for a Guides Writer to be part of Eurogamer's growing, award-winning editorial team.
Just a few weeks after Netflix released the Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch - Charlie Brooker's slick, game-literate hybrid of high-end drama and choose-your-own-adventure - its great rival in streaming video, Amazon, is here with a very different vision of the intersection of video games and television.
Feature50 game releases to look forward to in 2019
Plus: listen to our podcast predictions for the year ahead.
It's perhaps a little far into the new year already to be offering you a preview of what's to come - sorry about that - but piecing together a full picture of coming attractions in 2019 hasn't been easy. After a first quarter packed with big releases and dominated by EA's would-be juggernaut Anthem, the picture is quite hazy, with big names being scarce and release dates - even of the very loosest variety - even scarcer.
What a strange year for video games. A hastily-assembled, bandwagon-jumping mode for a failing game, Fortnite, became a cultural sensation that dominated the conversation in playgrounds and newsrooms. Rockstar returned from five years away with another vast and meticulous undertaking, no doubt expecting the plaudits and massive sales Red Dead Redemption 2 received, but perhaps unprepared for the pillorying it took for the working conditions under which the game was made. Bethesda Game Studios certainly seemed unprepared when it attempted to wrestle its already creaking and disobedient gaming framework into the online future with Fallout 76, and the resulting empty and malfunctioning game was met with flat-out rejection. EA rolled out another slick, warlike megaproduction, but had to hastily scale back Battlefield 5's marketing when it became apparent that nobody cared much.
FeatureThe 10 best game reissues of 2018
Remasters, remakes, re-releases and more.
Between the popularity of Nintendo Switch (a powerful portable that is easy to adapt old console games to), Xbox's backward compatibility initiative striving to turn console generations into a thing of the past, and publishers' enthusiasm for remastering hits of yore to tap into the nostalgia market - especially after the enormous success of last year's Crash Bandicoot release - it feels like we're spending more time than ever playing and thinking about old games. Or games that aren't brand new, anyway.
FeatureWith Fortune Island, Forza Horizon 4 remains generous to a fault
XOXOX marks the spot.
Across several reviews, I've praised Playground Games' wonderful Forza Horizon series of open-world racing games for their free-spirited generosity. But this is getting ridiculous now.
Win a Smash Bros. edition Switch in Nintendo Life's Smash Battles Live tournament
UPDATE: Streaming live tonight!
Update: Today's the day! Nintendo Life's Alex and Arekkz will do battle, live on YouTube and Twitch at 7PM. Don't forget to tune in to see who picks Kirby, therefore automatically making them Sakurai's favourite to win.
Below finally has a release date - and it's next week
Up from the depths.
Below, the long-in-development dungeon crawler from Canadian indie studio Capybara, finally has a release date, and it's very soon. The game will be released on Xbox One and PC (on Steam) in just over a week's time, on Friday 14th December.
FeatureThe Water Temple isn't as difficult as we remember
Reentering Zelda: Ocarina of Time's infamous dungeon, 20 years on.
It's a bit like going back to visit your school as an adult: everything seems smaller than you remember.
When I booted up the World of Warcraft Classic demo for the first time a couple of weeks ago - while BlizzCon was still in full swing, and the servers were busy - the general chat channel was flooded with nostalgic longing. People were loving this recreation of the great massively multiplayer game's early days and lamenting what WOW had become in the 14 years since. Someone celebrated freedom from the tyranny of item levels. Someone mentioned the hushed sound design, noting that they could hear every footstep and clink of their chainmail. Someone else remembered how the community was so much friendlier back then, in so much less of a rush.
Digital FoundryThe evolution of Tetris - and why Tetris Effect is "the perfect game"
UPDATE: New video with real arcade hardware and more games!
UPDATE 14/11/18 9:20am: We've updated the original video with two additional games and made changes in accordance to Arika's posted guidelines on The Grand Master series. The video is now more accurate than ever with footage capture from original arcade hardware bringing it inline with the rest of the content featured.
Forza Horizon 4's first expansion goes off-shore
Fortune Island is out in December.
Playground Games has announced that the first of Forza Horizon 4's two expansions is called Fortune Island and will be released on 13th December.
It's hard to know where to start with this misbegotten game, a short interactive drama with a deaf protagonist and live-action sequences that succeeds only in replicating the experience of flicking between the Starz channel and a substandard PS2 brawler with the TV on mute. It is a terrible idea, poorly executed, which is insulting to the hard of hearing as well as the time of everyone who plays it.
Blizzard has announced an all-new Diablo game for mobile phones called Diablo Immortal, developed in partnership with the Chinese company NetEase.
Blizzard is remastering Warcraft 3 at last
And it's out next year.
Blizzard has announced the long-rumoured and much wished-for remaster of its classic real-time strategy game, Warcraft 3.
WOW Classic will be released in summer 2019
Subscribe to WOW to access it.
Blizzard has announced that World of Warcraft Classic - a version of the game that restores it to how it was 14 years ago, before any of the expansions were released - will be released in summer 2019.
Destiny 2 is free on PC until 18th November
Download it and you can keep it forever.
Bungie has made the PC version of Destiny 2 free to download on Blizzard's Battle.net launcher, starting now, to celebrate the first anniversary of its launch.
Grip: Combat Racing review - unrefined tribute to cult racer Rollcage
Tyred and emotional.
It's a marvel of modern video game economics that 'spiritual successors' have gone from game-forum daydreams to a viable cottage industry. Fuelled by crowdfunding and early access schemes and by an ageing gaming population with strong nostalgic yearnings, this industry is ready to honour any dormant title that still stirs fond memories, no matter how obscure. Rather sweetly, it also sometimes brings the games' original creators back into game development after decades away.
FeatureDiablo 3's classes - ranked
On the Switching hour.
Diablo 3 launches on Nintendo Switch this week, and good Lord it is a lovely thing. Blizzard's opulent action RPG has been on a long journey since a difficult launch on PC in 2012, but it has been a genuine classic since 2014's Reaper of Souls expansion blew the doors off the original game's stodgy structure and balancing and introduced the endless Adventure Mode. Some of the groundwork for Reaper of Souls was laid by an impeccable console conversion in 2013, which had a generous feature set, a crisp interface and cleverly adapted controls. This console game has gathered up all Diablo 3's expansions and content updates since as it has rolled from one console generation to the next, and arrives on Switch with one hell of an added bonus: you can now play Diablo on the train, which is one of the better inventions of my lifetime.
How to unlock Zelda bonuses, including Ganondorf armour and a Cucco, on Diablo 3 for Switch.
Diablo 3 Zelda outfits are Nintendo bonuses exclusive to the Nintendo Switch version of the Eternal Collection.
Every week, Forza Horizon 4 features a new Forzathon weekly challenge. These charge you with owning a particular car and using it to complete a series of challenges. This past week's challenge has been called Horizon Anniversary and marks the release, six years ago this week, of the first Forza Horizon. To complete it, you need to own a 1995 Volkswagen Corrado VR6, rack up two million skill score with it, win a race in it, and carry on racing to earn a few clean racing skills.
Forza Horizon 4 brings the long-awaited route creator to the series this week
Plus a new story, bug fixes and more.
A route creator has been one of the most requested features for Forza Horizon since the open-world racing game series launched in 2012. Those requests are finally answered this week: Forza Horizon 4's route creator is added in a patch this Thursday, 25th October (as previously announced by Playground Games and confirmed in fresh patch notes today).
FeatureGoogle and Xbox just started the next platform war
And this one will be different.
Game streaming is coming. It's been coming since before we all laughed at OnLive and ignored PlayStation Now, and those too-little-too-soon gambits did nothing to impede its inevitable arrival. It is the future, in the sense that a credible and widely-used iteration of game streaming technology is around the corner and is something everyone reading this will probably end up using. Whether this future will prove mutually exclusive with other futures - those of games consoles and of digital platforms like Steam - is much more debatable. But it's coming regardless.