Even though it's still in closed beta, Deadlock, the newest shooter from Valve, is still setting records. The shooter just surpassed 228,000 concurrent players, on the back of a massive update focusing on various gameplay elements.

Right off the top, this round of additions, collectively known as City Never Sleeps, brings in no less than six new characters to play as. Among them are Rat King, who's described as "Scrappy, regal, tenacious"; explosives expert Deadman Danny; and my personal favorite, the tea-drinking Baba.

The half-dozen each bring different strategies to the table, which you can use on the rejigged map. There's one central location in Deadlock, a version of New York City, and it's been retooled here to be full of creepy crawlies and other terrors. Just in time for Halloween - I approve.

Meanwhile, there are more objectives now, voting is better, a greater selection of items, and a wealth of other options across various facets of the mysterious, multiplayer release. There's a lot going on here, and the devs addressed the community on their mindset going into this patch.

"After the Old Gods New Blood update, we felt that there was still a good amount of work we wanted to do on the core game itself before we moved onto more polish phases of the game development (like updating older hero artwork)," the team says. "Unlike previous updates where our efforts were more singularly focused on the key parts of that update, this year we've been working on several different things in parallel."

Many of those "several different things are addressed in City Never Sleeps. It's noted that Midboss, Guardians and Walkers are due for changes that just haven't happened yet. "On the other hand, things like hero remodels were in our heads as something we'd get to later, towards the end of early development, after other core aspects of the game were more fleshed out," Valve writes. "That doesn't mean we don't think they are important by any means, just that they are more of a known quantity to us that don't necessarily need to be done earlier than other things."

What the studio is doing is definitely working. Deadlock remains invite-only at present, but if you can get in, it seems worth a look.

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The small details have always been where Rockstar works the most magic, and GTA 6 will be no different. Besides anything else, the weather is going to be something to watch out for, since the whole system's been overhauled from what we saw in Red Dead Redemption 2.

In Game Informer, Owen Shepherd, the vice president of art for lighting and rendering at Rockstar, divulged some of what players can expect when roaming Leonida, and it won't all be sunshine and tans. You can encounter all sorts of conditions, ranging from high temperatures to rain, right through hurricanes, all handled by a system where actual cloud formations will be floating overhead.

The entire weather system's been re-done to allow for more dynamism and unpredictability than we've seen prior. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the closest example, and apparently this iteration goes beyond what you see as Arthur Morgan.

The wind and rain are the biggest examples. You'll see the former through people's hair and ripples in the water and the like - all the minute ways you'd notice a breeze yourself. There'll be updrafts and other more specific effects as well. Extreme conditions are possible too; large-scale storms can and will happen across the area.

For the rain, there are puddles, and realistic, persistent rainbows. The notion that I could be stepping away from a hazardous mission, covered in blood both literally and metaphorically, only to hop into my sports car and drive off toward a big ol' rainbow arching over the horizon is glorious. Pure Rockstar.

As with much of GTA 6, I'll need to see this all in motion to fully appreciate it. But it's starting to sound like the studio's managed to outdo itself here. That's what 13 years of development will do.

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Like many people, I was initially disappointed by Cyberpunk 2077. Also like many people, I think CD Projekt did a superb job fixing it. Post-Phantom Liberty Cyberpunk is one of my favourite games, to the point where I might just love it even more than The Witcher 3.

That said, even in its superior modern form, Cyberpunk isn't quite the game that I wish it was—namely an open world Deus Ex. CD Projekt's early trailers and gameplay demos implied a more immersive sim-like experience, and there are many elements in the final game that are immersive sim-like. The range of abilities it offers, the mixture of stealth and combat, the playful, mischievous hacking skills, the side-missions that often let you infiltrate or attack a compound from multiple angles of approach. It's all the kind of stuff you'd expect to see in a Deus Ex game with the scope blown out.

Ultimately, though, Cyberpunk 2077 isn't that game. Your progress and prowess is far too tightly bound to your character level to make it a functioning immersive sim. Plugging points into skill trees will transform mechanics like stealth from next to useless to being massively overpowered. And those open-ended missions are very much a side dish. Whenever the central storyline rears its head, Cyberpunk becomes as linear and prescribed as a Call of Duty campaign.

To be clear, I'm not complaining—I've come to love Cyberpunk just the way it is. But I would still love to play the Cyberpunk that exists in my head, even if it's just to see whether it would actually work. And that's why I'm so intrigued by No Law, because it looks a whole lot like the Cyberpunk that I erroneously imagined.

No Law is the new game from Neon Giant, creators of the gleefully grimy cyberpunk twin-stick shooter The Ascent. No Law maintains the cyberpunk theme but is otherwise a completely different style of game. Taking place in a city called Port Desire, No Law sees you play as Grey Harker, an archetypal military veteran who is dragged reluctantly away from a newfound life of peace after (and Neon Giant has kept this bit vague) trouble comes knocking at his door.

Neon Giant describes No Law as a "first-person open world shooter RPG". That's often what developers say when they're planning to make an immersive sim, but don't want to use the phrase because nobody under 35 knows what an immersive sim is. However, that's also how CD Projekt described Cyberpunk prior to release, and that turned out not to be an immersive sim, so it's by no means guaranteed.

That said, I've got a good feeling that No Law might be what Cyberpunk wasn't, at least going by Neon Giant have shown of (and said about) the game thus far. No Law's most recent trailer, which debuted at Gamescom's Opening Night Live, went to considerable length to emphasise the variety of approaches that Harker can take during missions.

Inevitably, shooting enemies in the face is one possible approach. But you also see Harker sneaking through vents, stealth-killing guards and using some weird sci-fi abilities. One of these makes enemies' heads explode, while another makes their entire bodies burst like balloons. I'm also impressed by Harker's mighty kick, which he uses to boot doors off hinges and enemies off their mortal coils. It brings back fond memories of punting enemies off ledges and down staircases in Deathloop and Dark Messiah: Might and Magic.

By far my favourite moment in the trailer, however, is when Harker attaches a grenade to a laptop-shaped Roomba, assumes control of it, and then pilots it into a garage filled with guards where it detonates. That's the kind of kooky, indirect solution to a problem any Deus Ex game would be proud to feature.

The broader decision landscape of No Law is also something I'm intrigued by. While Port Desire is openly explorable, Neon Giant has repeatedly emphasised the density of the city—rather than its breadth—in interviews. Sure, a part of that is probably to get ahead of any unfavourable comparisons to Cyberpunk, but by the sounds of things, it's also very much a deliberate design choice. In a recent chat with VGC, Neon Giant said that every apartment in the game has been handcrafted rather than procedurally generated. A whole city of Adam Jensen-style apartments sounds pretty exciting to me.

Such an approach also sounds more appropriate for an immersive sim. One of the great joys of the genre is learning its 3D space intimately, slowly unpicking all its shortcuts and secrets. You can't really do that with Night City. It's just too darned big. But that very much seems to be Neon Giant's intent with No Law. Indeed, the game will apparently ship with a mode, where you can disable UI-based navigational hints, instead using the city's own signage and building numbers to find your way around. Oh, and the name of this mode? "Immersive".

Finally, there's how Neon Giant says your approach to missions will affect No Law's story. Each of the game's missions will have numerous ways to approach it, from using stealth and subterfuge to going in all guns blazing. Last December, Neon Giant explained that your approach will influence how characters in the story react to you—rather than the narrative being affected by branching dialogue choices.

That's something both Deus Ex and Dishonored toyed with (though the former also had dialogue choices), though it sounds like No Law aims to take the concept even further. Also worth noting is that Neon Giant says if you kill a character in the world, they'll remain dead, and if they had a service to offer you, you won't be able to access it.

I do have a couple of reservations. Alongside these more freeform ways to play, No Law will also feature XP and skill trees, so your stats and build will define what you can do.

"You have experience points and skill trees, and you opt into how you want to play the game," Neon Giant's Arcade Berg told us last year. "Do you want to be more into lockpicking, or do you want to be a hacker, or do you want to be a specialist with certain types of weapons … We never tell you which route to take, we say that the player can never play the game wrong."

My other concern is: can Neon Giant actually pull this off? The studio comprises just 24 people, which is a mere fraction of Cyberpunk's team, and fewer people than the original Deus Ex team. While I'd prefer a game that leans closer to Deus Ex than Cyberpunk, what I definitely don't want is a rerun of Cyberpunk's disastrous launch. But if Neon Giant can pull off its ambitions with the team it has, I think No Law could prove to be one of the surprise hits of 2027.