A crew. A job. A plan. Toss those ingredients together, and you’ve got yourself a classic heist - but with a few twists. Your crew members are everyday citizens (from different countries in Africa) with pretty normal careers. The job is to liberate African artifacts from Western museums. And the plan? Well, that’s up to you to create. Plan ahead to lay the groundwork for a beautiful masterpiece of an escape. Check the getaway route, fiddle with puzzles and obstacles, and find spots to recruit the help of the right teammates. Once you’ve set the stage carefully and the artifact is sitting all pretty - looking quite not-stolen, but no worries, you’re gonna fix that ASAP - this is the moment to perform. Plucking an artifact from its resting spot starts the countdown timer, and with Nomali’s flow-based parkour abilities, escape should feel like you’re in the fun, montage part of a heist movie. But if you slacked on the planning phase, you’re gonna pay for it!

Amid criticism that new Overwatch hero Anran looks too much like other female heroes and not enough like her own previous appearance in an animated short, Blizzard has committed to updating the hero's appearance during Season 1.

Overwatch game director Aaron Keller announced the upcoming change in a video on social media, saying that the team is currently planning how to make Anran "look and feel more like the fierce older sister that we all envision her to be." While he says the team is proud of the work that has gone into the hero, "we agree that she can be even better if we get this aspect of her right in game."

Keller adds that this change has been in discussion internally since last week, but that the team "wanted to wait until we had confirmation of exactly what we can do." For now, there are few details on what changes will be made and when they will be live in game, though Keller says that the studio hopes to be able to make this update during Season 1.

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Last year, a No ICE in California bundle raised over $105,000 for the LA-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Now, the person behind that fundraiser has launched a new one for No ICE In Minnesota that offers players over 1,400 indie games, which is a dramatic increase from the 500 plus offered in the previous bundle.

JesstheHuman launched the No ICE in Minnesota on Itch.io bundle with contributions from 651 creators. So far, almost $30,000 has been raised for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. This organization offers free legal representation to low-income immigrants and refugees in both Minnesota and North Dakota. The ILCM also offers outreach to its local communities to share information about immigration laws while advocating for policy changes that recognize universal human rights.

Some of the PC games included in this bundle are listed below:

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Late last year, indie horror game Horses was banned by Epic Games Store just ahead of its debut. Because Horses had already been banned by Steam in 2023, this gave studio developer Santa Ragione a greatly reduced chance to break even. Santa Ragione has since called out Epic over the cancellation, and now Epic has responded to the former's claims.

While speaking with Game File, Epic vice president Steve Allison said, "We love [Horses'] studio," but reiterated that the game's adult content warranted its removal. Santa Ragione responded on social media, and wrote, "Epic made provably incorrect statements about the game's content, refused to provide details supporting their claims, and has not shared their claimed AO IARC certificate, which normally includes a link for the developer to appeal ... They do not 'love that studio,' they have effectively ghosted us."

Brian Sharon, Epic Games' senior communications manager, subsequently told IGN that Horses was flagged for violating the Epic Games Store's policy guidelines about inappropriate, hateful, or abusive content.

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Riot Games has confirmed that it is laying off 80 2XKO developers fewer than three weeks after the fighting game's console launch. For the time being, a smaller team will work on "key improvements to the game," and its 2026 Competitive Series will go on as planned.

2XKO is a League of Legends spin-off fighting game that has been in the works at Riot Games for about a decade. It's a tag-team fighter built for co-op play. After years of behind-closed-doors testing and several betas, it entered early access on PC in November 2025. On January 20 of this year, 2XKO launched on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Unfortunately, a new blog post from Riot Games indicated that 2XKO hasn't been as successful as the studio hoped for. "As we expanded from PC to console, we saw consistent trends in how players were engaging with 2XKO," executive producer Tom Cannon wrote. "The game has resonated with a passionate core audience, but overall momentum hasn’t reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term."

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World of Warcraft's current big bad Xal'atath has been shrouded in shadow for years, but a new animated short is giving fans their best look yet at her origins and motivations--if she's telling the truth.

Titled Supremacy, the animated short shows Xal'atath confronting Nexus King Salhadaar, leader of the Ethereals. Salhadaar is reluctant to join Xal'atath and her army of the Void, at first fighting back. But once Xal'atath appears in person to make her case, Salhadaar can't help but listen.

Rather than using brute force alone, Xal'atath instead tries a different tactic to convince Salhadaar to join her. She offers to tell him "the truth no one living has heard." That truth is that Xal'atath was once, long ago, mortal. As the short flashes back to show a young, bald girl being consumed by the Void, she recounts how she lost her world to the Void, just like Salhadaar's world of K'aresh was destroyed by the Void Lord Dimensius.

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A new State of Play livestream has been confirmed for February 12, but just minutes before Sony made the announcement, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach game director Hideo Kojima also teased… something. The veteran game developer has been busy in his editing studio lately, putting together a trailer for the first time in eight months.

While he didn't have time to finish his work, he did post a photo of his desktop setup, including a close-up of his display.

Granted, "a Hideo Kojima" screen doesn't say much, but people are already speculating that a PC port of Death Stranding 2 is being prepped for a reveal this month. The game has been a PS5 exclusive since June 26, 2025, and in the wake of an ESRB rating for a PC version that was later deleted, it looks likely that an announcement is on the way, given Kojima's close relationship with PlayStation.

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Since its release back in 2014, fans of the World of Warcraft-inspired card game Hearthstone have eagerly awaited the day it might make the jump from digital platforms to their tabletops. However, if my conversation with Hearthstone director Tyler Bielman and executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith is any indication, that won't be happening anytime soon.

During Blizzard's Hearthstone Spotlight event, I spoke to the pair about the future of Hearthstone and its upcoming expansion, Cataclysm. Among the questions I asked was if--in light of an ongoing trading card game renaissance--the team was considering developing a physical version of the card game. Though Bielman initially said, "I'll start with we have nothing to announce today," what followed seemed to indicate that we're still a long way out from that being a possibility.

According to Bielman, bringing Hearthstone to the physical trading card game arena would require "sacrificing a lot of things," many of which the team find fundamental to the game's overall experience.

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Hearthstone is preparing to launch its 12th year with a new Core Set and new expansion, this time based on one of World of Warcraft's most iconic events. The expansion is called Cataclysm, named after the WoW expansion of the same name, but as usual Hearthstone is delivering a twist on what we've come to expect from the Warcraft lore. This time, the apocalyptic dragon aspect Deathwing wins. It will release on March 17.

In this story, Murozond pulled the victorious Deathwing into the Hearthstone universe, leaving its heroes to defeat the dragon. That effort will be led by Chromie and her Dragonflights, the dragon associated with protecting the timeline, who will pull heroes from across history to defeat this new version of Deathwing.

Appropriately, this expansion will bring Colossal minions back to Hearthstone. First introduced in 2022's Voyage to the Sunken City, these minions spread out their effects across multiple bodies with huge effects. Each class will get its own Colossal minion, and six of them are designated as Deathwing's lieutenants. Meanwhile, two new keywords will be introduced: Herald used by those allied with Deathwing with effects that stack the more Herald cards you play; and Shatter for the Dragonflights, which split into two halves to give you flexibility or the ability to combine them. There will also be powerful class-based Triumph and Last Stand spells associated with each class's hero.

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Embark Studios is very intentional about the cosmetics it adds to its multiplayer shooter Arc Raiders, with the developer's CEO saying that any skins introduced to the game have to fit within its highly curated universe.

In a February 6 IGN interview, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund explained that while games like Embark's previous game, The Finals, and Fortnite can add whatever character cosmetics they want, Arc Raiders is a bit different. The difference, for Söderlund, is the game’s lore and world, which he described as being "more curated." This curation is what prevents Arc Raiders from putting, say, The Grinch or Sonic the Hedgehog in the game.

"First and foremost, we want to make sure that everything fits the fiction of Arc Raiders, and that it's something that sits well within the Arc Raiders universe," Söderlund said. "I mean, there are other games, very successful games out there--The Finals being one of them--in which the IP is designed so it basically happens to be very elastic. You can do whatever the hell you want, and people are like, 'That makes sense. It's completely plausible.' I can be a pink banana, and you can be whatever, and everyone's like, 'That makes sense. It fits the universe. No problem.' Arc Raiders has a more curated lore, curated world, so we have to stick within boundaries slightly to a different extent than maybe The Finals or Fortnite or another game in which Batman can shoot Bart Simpson."

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