The first title update for Monster Hunter Wilds has been announced by Capcom, and comes with a brand-new area, new monsters, and time-ranked Arena Quests.

The Monster Hunter Wilds update release date is April 3, 2025, and is free for all players. A new event, Festival of Accord: Blossomdance, is also on the way soon.

The Grand HubThe Grand Hub

The Grand Hub, which can be unlocked after Hunter Rank 16, is a gathering place packed with more activities and socializing for Hunters to do. Capcom promises Hunters will be able to interact with each other in new ways, including arm-wrestling competitions and the new Barrel Bowling minigame. Hunters will have to roll barrels into targets, with varying rewards available for higher scores. To start the game, you'll need Barrel Bowling vouchers, which can be earned in various ways including login bonuses.

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A fun myth to hear about relates to a friend's uncle working at Nintendo to get the scoop on secrets. But what if your buddy's aunt actually did work at Valve, and his CD-burning gifts to you sparked Valve's utilization of DRM decades ago? That's apparently what happened, according to former Valve chief marketing officer Monica Harrington.

PC Gamer reports that Harrington told the unlikely Valve DRM origin story featuring her 19-year-old nephew at the Game Developers Conference. "At the time, consumer-level piracy was just becoming a real issue," Harrington said. "My own nephew had just used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator, so he sent me a lovely thank you note essentially saying how happy he was to copy and share games with his friends."

Keep in mind that CDs were the distribution model for PC games decades ago, before digital storefronts existed. So the fact someone could easily rip a game and share unlimited copies with friends was a threat to companies. As such, Harrington credits her nephew's antics for sparking Valve to act with a DRM strategy.

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Season 2 of The Last of Us introduces a new character created for the show, Gail, who is a therapist based in Jackson, Wyoming. Played by Catherine O'Hara, Gail was originally envisioned to appear in Season 1, but it didn't work out for a variety of reasons. In Season 2, viewers will see Pedro Pascal's Joel go to therapy--and he might not always tell her the truth.

"Now that Joel and Ellie have settled into Jackson, we really wanted to make Jackson a character," writer Neil Druckmann told The Hollywood Reporter at the Season 2 premiere. "This sense of community. It felt like, 'Oh, a therapist could be part of Jackson.' It's something everyone would need in the apocalypse after the trauma they've experienced."

Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO

Druckmann also teased that the team found a way to weave Gail into the narrative, being that she is the wife of Eugene, who is played by The Matrix actor Joe Pantoliano. Eugene was referenced in The Last of Us: Part II the game, but never seen.

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The GTA modder and superfan who goes by the handle Dark Space caught the attention of fans by recently releasing a playable recreation of the Grand Theft Auto 6 map in Grand Theft Auto 5. However, he has announced that he has ceased all work on the project after being struck by a takedown from Rockstar owner Take–Two.

Dark Space created the free-to-download map solely based on the official trailer shots of GTA 6 and some unverified leaks, then uploaded gameplay footage to his YouTube channel. GTA fans who have been feeling deprived of any new information about the upcoming game downloaded the modded map off FiveM en masse. That's when he noticed messages from YouTube about his videos being taken down due to a copyright strike.

In an explanation video, the creator says that Take-Two requested that his videos be removed, resulting in his first copyright strike. Multiple strikes can result in the termination of an entire channel.

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The Last of Us Season 2 has seven episodes, compared to nine for Season 1. Why is Season 1 shorter? And how many seasons will the show have overall? The key creatives behind the series have now weighed in to share some insight on both topics.

Speaking at the Season 2 premiere, showrunner Craig Mazin said it was clear early on that the story of The Last of Us: Part II the game would not have fit nicely in one season, so the decision was made to break it into at least two seasons. "We just sort of thought, 'How would we want to lay this out going forward all the way to the end, and where is an interesting point to end a season?,'" he said.

"It could have been nine episodes; it could have been six. It happened to be seven because that's where the story went to for this season," Mazin added. "Next season? We're not actually sure how many it might be because we have to lay it out again."

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The undead walkers of The Walking Dead are invading the islands of Fortnite Creative, and they're bringing with them the first new Walking Dead item shop skin since 2021: Negan, who lands in the shop on April 4.

The Walking Dead Universe is the latest franchise to pitch its tent in Fortnite's metaverse by adding assets that can be used in Fortnite islands made using Unreal Editor for Fortnite, the big ones being the walker NPCs, and a prison island template based on that prison that TWD's protagonists had to live in early on in the series. And starting with the next patch, on April 8, Negan will be usable as a Creative NPC as well.

There are some goodies for all of Fortnite Creative as well, like Lucille--Negan's barbed wire-wrapped bat--and a Shiva Shotgun inspired by King Ezekiel's tiger BFF. To really give your island a despairing vibe, creators can make use of the Heavy Linework post-processing effect to make the whole place look like it popped out of the pages of the black-and-white Walking Dead comics themselves.

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Just a week after launch, Assassin's Creed Shadows appears to be the success story that Ubisoft is in need of right now. Just hours after it arrived, Ubisoft confirmed that 1 million people were playing the game, and after the crucial first weekend, that figure jumped to 2 million players. One of the big metrics that the game has been judged by is its concurrent players on Steam, and while it hasn't yet surpassed the numbers set by 2020's Assassin's Creed Valhalla, that might be an unfair comparison to make.

Speaking to IGN, a Ubisoft source revealed that Shadows was responsible for the second-highest day-one sales revenue in the Assassin's Creed franchise, while Valhalla held onto its top spot. According to the internal email shown to IGN, 27% of Shadows' total "activations" were on PC--covering various distribution channels on that platform--with Steam playing a major role as this was the first Assassin's Creed game in several years to launch day-one through that storefront.

On console, Shadows was Ubisoft's best ever day-one launch on the PlayStation Store. Ubisoft also noted that player engagement is at "record levels" and feedback across "moderated, verified platforms" remains very positive.

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Over five years ago, Paradox Interactive announced Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, the long-awaited sequel to 2004's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. As the game faced multiple delays and switched developers, fans had to wait even longer. But now, the World of Darkness looks a little brighter and Bloodlines 2 may be arriving soon.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board has given Bloodlines 2 an M rating, which could mean that a release date announcement will come soon. The only details about the story from the ESRB's description are that players will be tasked with helping two vampires regain their memories and lost powers while facing an uprising among the undead.

Bloodlines 2's Mature rating appears to largely be due to the game's combat, which allows players to violently dispatch enemies using physical and vampiric powers. Beheadings, claw-slashing, and snapping necks are all options, and player-characters will be able to feed on human NPCs to sustain themselves. Somewhat humorously, the ESRB also shared a few samples of the game's sexually suggestive dialogue.

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A Nintendo Direct is reportedly set to air sometime this week, right before the scheduled Switch 2 Nintendo Direct on April 2.

According to insider NateTheHate2, the Direct will be on or around Thursday, but but he is not sure if it will be formatted like a traditional Nintendo Direct or something like an Indie World Showcase. Another Chinese leaker, who revealed the entirety of the June 2024 Nintendo Direct, said that there will be a show focusing on the original Nintendo Switch "in three days."

It's possible that Nintendo would want to showcase what's still coming to Switch this year before showing off the Switch 2. Not everyone will be early adopters of Switch 2, and analysts predict that it won't sell as well as its predecessor. Having two separate Directs lets Nintendo focus entirely on its upcoming system during its April 2 show.

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Perhaps the biggest addition to the cast of HBO's The Last of Us for its second season is Kaitlyn Dever in the role of Abby. One person who is particularly excited to see Dever play the role is Halley Gross, the co-writer of The Last of Us: Part II the game.

Speaking at the Season 2 premiere, Gross sang Dever's praises, saying she predicts her performance as Abby will raise the bar for women on TV.

"We're all curious to see how people are going to react to Abby. Kaitlyn Dever is a profoundly magnetic actress. She brings so much to Abby," Gross told Variety. "I think she's an incredible, complex depiction of female rage. But also just female passion. She is this dimensional female character that I think is going to broaden our idea of what women can do in TV."

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Pedro Pascal, who plays Joel in HBO's The Last of Us, has discussed the "sometimes sick pleasure" of working on the post-apocalyptic series and how "storytelling is cathartic" when the real world is undergoing change and upheaval as it is today.

"There's a very healthy and sometimes sick pleasure in that kind of catharsis and a safe space to see human relationships under crisis and in pain and intelligently draw a political allegory, societal allegory, and base it off of the world that we're living in," he said, as reported by Variety.

Also during the call with reporters, Pascal discussed why he's excited to see The Last of Us come back for its second season, after the first was such a hit.

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Develop a village colony on Mars, using various resources and bringing the unique flavor of Russian culture to the distant space. The game features the various activities that characterize life in a village colony on Mars, as well as the dangers you will have to overcome in the form of Artificial Intelligence preventing you from rebuilding the village.