In another timeline, Blizzard may have its own version of Valve’s PC-dominating Steam store, but in our timeline it reportedly rejected a pitch back to expand its Battle.net launcher into a broader PC gaming storefront.That’s according to a new report from Bloomberg reporter and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels author Jason Schreier, who, in his new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment (as PC Gamer spotted), writes that former Blizzard programmer Patrick Wyatt proposed a plan “to turn Battle.net into a digital store for a variety of PC games” around 2000, three years before Valve released the Counter-Strike client that grew into the mega-store Steam is today. Mike O’Brien, who’d go on to join Wyatt and Jeff Strain to co-found Guild Wars studio ArenaNet after leaving Blizzard, apparently supported the pitch at the time, but the idea of a Battle.net store never made it past the company’s upper management. You’ve got to wonder if someone in the company’s C-sui…

You can play Palworld multiplayer if you want to explore, build, and collaborate with your friends in co-op. Although, with things like dedicated servers and crossplay limitations to bear in mind, there are many possibilities when it comes to playing Palworld with friends, but the process of joining other players isn’t especially clear. To help you party up, I’ve explained how multiplayer works below, and how you can invite and join friends to go creature collecting together.Palworld’s Multiplayer explained To play Palworld multiplayer with up to three other friends online, players need to do the following:One player creates a world and sets it to multiplayer, either during world creation or in “World Settings” before re-entering.The player can then pause the game and click to reveal the Invite Code in the pause menu.Share this code to other players who wish to join.For those joining players, in the main menu there’ll be an option to “Join Multiplayer Game (Invite Code).Select this an…

Choices in interstellar RPG Exodus won’t just affect your party – they’ll stretch back across space and dilated time to hit your “loved ones.”Exodus is the debut time-hopping RPG from Archetype Entertainment, a studio founded by some absolute industry veterans, including long-time BioWare designers. Studio co-founders Chad Robertson and James Ohlen have now sat down to answer some questions about their mysterious upcoming sci-fi epic.”The choices you make are going to impact story progression in a bunch of different ways,” Ohlen explains in the Q&A below. “Your choices are going to have consequences for your loved ones back home. You’re going to see that impact on those choices in cool ways we unfortunately can’t reveal quite yet, but they’re also going to affect a bunch of other things. Progression options for your character as you advance in the game. Your home world and your civilization overall, and that’s gonna be pretty enormous, we’re super excited about that. There’s a real…

Dragon Age: The Veilguard creative director John Epler has given his thoughts on what he reckons the games industry will look like in 25 years, and he thinks there’ll come a point where developers’ focus will be on giving players freedom.Speaking to Eurogamer, the BioWare veteran says that while there’s a “temptation to say it’s going to be a technological shift,” but when it comes down to it, “at a certain point, we come to the place where we can’t make graphics better.” Could we reach that point in the next 25 years? Of course, we can’t know that for sure at this point, but Epler suggests that priorities will be different in the future. “Ultimately, it’s going to be about finding that balance between player freedom and authored content,” he says. “To me, that’s the most interesting challenge. How do you manage to allow players freedom in your world, freedom in this space?”25 years from now, I’m hoping technology resources will make it easier to build content in ways that allow f…