For months I ran the Stratholme dungeon in World of Warcraft, over and over through the burning city, through the big gate towards the corrupted paladin lord Baron Rivendare and his coveted skeletal horse. But all the time I never really knew why. I never really knew the significance of the place, that it was the turning point for famous paladin Arthas on his path to to the dark side, to becoming Lich King. But I would have had I played Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos*.
New Overwatch hero Ashe is available to try on the PC Public Test Region now. To use the PTR, load your Blizzard/Battle.net launcher and select, from the Region/Account dropdown above Overwatch's Play button, the Public Test Region.
When World of Warcraft: Classic launches next summer, the only raids available will be Onyxia and Molten Core. It will be, in other words, as World of Warcraft was circa March 2005.
UPDATE 1AM GMT 4TH NOVEMBER: Wyatt Cheng, the lead designer of Diablo Immortal, just stepped on stage at BlizzCon 2018 and issued a personal message about the brouhaha surrounding the mobile game's announcement and Diablo 4 no-show. It was he who fended off some harsh questions on stage shortly after Immortal's reveal.
Blizzard announced 29th Overwatch hero, Ashe, at BlizzCon 2018 today. She's an old friend of gunslinger McCree, and we saw the pair have an emotionally-charged - and very entertaining - reunion in a gorgeous new animated short. We also saw another hero, called Echo, but learnt nothing more. When will they both be released? Is Echo who we know as Athena, the AI voice in our ears? And is Echo really the character we saw on that piece of art before Overwatch even released?
UPDATE 4PM GMT: Netflix has also confirmed a number of the other actors joining The Witcher cast, including the actress who'll play iconic sorceress Triss Merigold. Taking the role is Anna Shaffer, according to the Hollywood Reporter, who you may remember as Romilda Vane from Harry Potter - the girl who gave Harry a love potion. Shaffer also played Ruby Button in British soap opera Hollyoaks.
A milestone 25th expansion pack has been announced for 19-year-old online game EverQuest. It's called The Burning Lands and will be released 11th December 2018.
There's still not a lot to do in Star Citizen but thankfully there is now ridiculous technology to do it with. Face Over IP, for example - it's like voice chat (voice over IP) but it motion-captures your facial movements using a webcam and recreates them on a character in-game, in real-time. How fancy is that?!
Red Dead Redemption 2 excitement is peaking ahead of the review embargo at (high) noon UK time today and, of course, the game's release tomorrow - and video footage continues to leak.
Digital retailer GOG, which lives under the CD Projekt roof, has found itself in more Twitter hot water after insensitively appropriating the political hashtag #WontBeErased.
The first images of the Overwatch Lego sets have appeared and, goodness, they're alluring.
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, the Gwent-related story spin-off, comes out tomorrow on PC, and it's excellent - I reviewed Thronebreaker and hope my enthusiasm for it comes across.
The tavern: the quintessential hub of a medieval story. The roaring fires, the frothing ale, the boisterous banter - why, a fantasy role-playing game wouldn't be the same without one. But how often have you thought about actually running one?
I had concerns about Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. What worried me most was the story. It's the most important thing; the premise the game is sold on, and a chance to return to the world of The Witcher. How could Thronebreaker possibly follow on from the outstanding The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt? When I first played, I wasn't sure it could. The queen whose royal sabatons I was filling left me cold. I couldn't relate to her stuffy world of advisors and generals, and I didn't like them. Her mission to reclaim gold stolen by bandits? Hardly mutant monster-hunter Geralt pursuing the near-mythical Wild Hunt, is it? But Thronebreaker gets better. It gets so much better.
The Steam-like Discord Store launches its global beta today, so everyone can try it out.
Lucasfilm has shut down Apeiron, the ambitious Unreal Engine 4 remake of BioWare's classic role-playing game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Wound up? Of course you are! But don't worry because here's a game which might calm you down. It's a phone game called Eloh and it's made by the same people responsible for Old Man's Journey, that lovely platform game about aging and facing regrets.
Someone is remaking the single-player campaign from legendary N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 in Unreal Engine 4.
Freshly buried toy-chain Toys R Us is teasing a comeback.
CD Projekt Red has announced a "long-term partnership" with a new Canadian studio called Digital Scapes, which I'd never heard of before now. But it's made up of developers from well-known studios: BioWare, Relic and Radical.
Techland's cowboy game Call of Juarez: Gunslinger could be about to make a comeback - of some kind.
Do you want to be the ghost ship materialising out of the fog with a load of gruesome, rotting zombies on board? What a stupid question. Yes, obviously.
I'm sorry this review arrives late, but The Bard's Tale 4: Barrows Deep is stubborn. Trying to power through it is like trying to solve a great pile of crosswords in one sitting: your brain would turn to mush. You could cheat - The Bard's Tale 4 includes a walkthrough out of the box - but you would rob yourself of the point of the puzzle in the first place. The answer doesn't really matter; it's the process you undergo to get it and the satisfaction you feel when you do that counts. In this way The Bard's Tale 4, one giant collection of puzzles, can be enormously satisfying, but force the issue and you will bang heads with it. It cannot and should not be rushed.
Mike Morhaime, the boss of Blizzard Entertainment, has stepped down.
UPDATE #2 11am BST: It's there - Civ 6 on iPhone has arrived. It's a 3.4GB free download (the first 60 turns are gratis) and then it's £23, which is presumably the 60-per-cent-off price outlined below.
