Fallout doesn't really have a Bloody Baron. Which is to say, it's not a series defined by its quests. The steadfast dynasty of post-apocalyptic RPGs is more about places than people. Locations over loquaciousness. Its best stories are typically buried under five feet of rubble, and dug out with archeological care through terminals and holotapes.

Nonetheless, over almost three decades of irradiated exploration, some standout missions have emerged. Most are potent displays of the genre's potential for reactivity—tales which allow for creative approaches, and multiple outcomes you'd never uncover without a spot of wiki-diving. Others are memorable simply because they're odd: creepy, daft or moving, written in a distinct tone that stands out against the green-grey backdrop of wasteland America.

Either way, they stick in the head like a Bing Crosby number played on a tinny radio. So, if the release of Fallout Season 2 has got you in the mood for some wasteland wandering, let's ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive and highlight the finest quests Fallout has to offer.

9. The Silver Shroud (Fallout 4)

In a series where you carry your choices on your shoulders, there's freedom to be found in slipping out of your jumpsuit and becoming someone else for a bit. In this case, the Silver Shroud: fictional star of a comically earnest radio serial.

With a ghoul in a porkpie hat as your Lucius Fox, you get to run around dispensing vigilante justice: speaking in a silly voice, carrying a silver submachine gun, and leaving calling cards on the corpses of your enemies. Of course, things get out of hand and the criminal underworld strikes back. But it all ends with the finest-ever use of VATS: putting down a villain right before he plants a bullet in Kent Connolly's head. "Death has come for you, evildoer. And I am its Shroud."

8. Find out what happened to Karl (Fallout 2)

The stakes are high. The town of Modoc is ready to murder a community of cave farmers, which it blames for the disappearance of a local named Karl. The farmers claim Karl ran off, in a direction vaguely to the north-west.

You're given a month to prove the man's still alive. That's only just enough time to hike across the desert to the Den, dig up Karl from a drink-induced stupor, and return to Modoc with his testimony. The desperation is palpable, as is the relief when war is averted. Unless it isn't. Of course, it all goes a lot faster if you're rolling across the dunes in a Chrysalis Highwayman, the series' only functional car.

7. Wastelanders (Fallout 76)

When Bethesda returned NPCs to the West Virginia wasteland, it did so in style. It was surreal to not only meet the Overseer we'd been hankering after on holotapes for so long, but to hear her audacious new plan: to secure the US gold reserve hidden in Vault 79, and use it to establish a bullion-backed currency in Appalachia. A new economy would pave the way for taxes, laws and government. Or so she argues.

While you ponder whether capitalism is really what post-apocalyptic America has been missing, you'll recruit either the Settlers or Raiders to pull off the heist. Then, once you're inside the vault, decide what to do with the gold: give some to your allies, split it between the factions, or keep the entirety for yourself. What? Jetpack blueprints are expensive. And as a ghoul named Gordon of Gecko once told me: greed is good.

6. Take it Back! (Fallout 3)

“It's not ready for field tests, let alone live fire situations. The weapons haven't been calibrated, the navigation detection system is offline…” Shut up, boffins! It's the closing stage of Fallout 3's campaign and we've earned some bombast. That comes in the form of Liberty Prime, a commie-hating "giant tin can" salvaged by the Brotherhood. You'll accompany it to Washington DC's water purifier and seize Project Purity from an ill-intentioned US president, if you can imagine such a thing.

This is Fallout's answer to a tank support mission—all clumsy pomp and detonating vertibirds in the name of honouring Papa Neeson. And honestly, it's deserved. What's the point of going first-person if you can't embrace the FPS genre when the mood is right? The dozens of hours of quiet and contemplative RPG exploration that precede this moment makes the juxtaposition all the more powerful. A final, heightened shootout hits like a tall drink of H20 on a hot day.

"When we're done with this, everyone can have a nice cold glass of water on me," deadpans Sentinel Lyons. "Let's move."

5. Come Fly With Me (Fallout: New Vegas)

For some Fallout fans, there'll only ever be one brotherhood: the Bright Brotherhood. The ghouls holed up in the REPCONN test facility are preparing for a rocket launch, and need your help to requisition parts and clear the place of hostiles. Come Fly With Me is remembered for the goofy payoff, in which the ghouls haphazardly leave orbit to the accompaniment of the Ride of the Valkyries.

But much of the quest's magic lies in its wrinkles: the basement full of invisible Nightkin who can be handled kindly if you're patient enough; the option to sabotage the engines with Sugar Bombs. And most poignantly, the confused human engineer who thinks he's a ghoul and is doomed to be left behind by his adopted family.

Still: it's hard not to root for the ghouls, determined to achieve escape velocity and find somewhere free from sand and bigotry.

4. Become an Initiate (Fallout 1)

Nasty, brutish, and short. That's the nature of your first ever encounter with the Brotherhood of Steel. Their bunker is an awesome sight against the backdrop of SoCal's desert—the tip of a technologically advanced iceberg you desperately want in on. Ask to join, though, and they'll fob you off with a mission that straddles the line between holy crusade and schoolyard prank. "You have to go to the ruins of the Ancient Order," says Initiate Cabbot, puffing out his cheeks apologetically. "Uh, you've gotta go inside and bring back something that proves that you were there. You'll do it? You will?"

The ruins, it transpires, are The Glow—the most heavily irradiated crater on Fallout's map. Entering the former military research facility is a death sentence to all but the most prepared of players. It's a quest that cements the values of the OG Brotherhood upfront. On matters of preservation, they'll prioritise technological relics over human life every time.

3. Hole in the Wall (Fallout 4)

The makers of the Fallout TV show must have been taking notes as they played through this sinister, slow burn vault drama. A young boy slips behind the walls of Vault 81, where he's bitten by a diseased mole rat.

To find the cure, you must explore a crawlspace lab where hidden scientists subjected the adjacent citizens to airborne illnesses pumped through the vents. Or would have done, had an Overseer not disobeyed her orders, allowing 81's residents to live in oblivious peace for generations. It's a quietly moving story told mainly through vignettes.

If you've been bitten by the rats yourself, you'll have to make a final choice: leave the boy to die, or live with a permanent reduction to your HP. For once, it's not easy to play the hero.

2. That Lucky Old Sun (Fallout: New Vegas)

A microcosm of everything New Vegas fans are into, packed into a single location. Helios One is a power plant that's on the fritz, and the New California Republic wants its energy directed to their home states. Unfortunately for them, the physicist they've assigned to the job is a frazzled fraud in sunglasses, and his assistant is a mole for a radical humanitarian group called the Followers of the Apocalypse.

Your options for getting inside are a smorgasbord of skill checks for speech, science and lockpicking, plus the potential to disguise yourself as an NCR trooper. From there, you can gain the trust of the mole, or simply pickpocket their terminal password, according to taste.

In the process, you'll learn about the Brotherhood of Steel's doomed attempt to defend the plant—a disaster that's left them on the backfoot in the Mojave ever since. Then, having studied the past, you'll determine the future. The quest climaxes with a region-shaking decision about where to send the power. Would madam care to wipe out the surrounding NCR soldiers with an orbital strike for dessert?

1. Find the Water Chip (Fallout 1)

You're booted out of Vault 13 with an aqua-clear objective: find a replacement chip for the water purification system, and do it quickly. "Simply put, we're running out of drinking water," sighs the Overseer. "No water, no vault."

Fallout's first ever main quest is a controversial one, since it puts a hard timer on a genre that traditionally moves at the player's own pace. But it's also a masterstroke, introducing a note of panic that pushes you towards imperfect solutions. In the Hub, you might stave off the inevitable by paying the local water merchants to send a caravan to Vault 13, extending your deadline by 100 days. And if you're desperate enough, you could steal a water chip from a nearby ghoul settlement without figuring out an alternate supply for the locals. One definition of evil, Fallout suggests, is simply a good deed done for your community at the expense of another.

In a final twist, original Fallout designer Tim Cain has suggested that the water chip quest is a joke at your expense. All three of the game's pre-made player characters are troublemakers that the vault would be glad to see the back of. And out in the wasteland, you're met by the corpse of Ed, a skeletal vault dweller who made it fewer than ten feet from the door before succumbing to the surface. Perhaps nobody ever expected you to make it home. There's little more Fallout than a bitterly ironic laugh, coughed up from the dusty lungs of an irradiated vault reject.

World of Warcraft, as you might've heard, is taking combat mods (addons) to task—the philosophy being that combat addons shouldn't provide a competitive advantage in WoW anymore. That means no more WeakAuras, no more programmable boss-fight mechanics, and no more addons that can straight-up if>then entire parts of your class for you.

Well. Kinda. In recent beta builds, Blizzard has been loosening up some of these restrictions for select spells—or "whitelisting" them, as Blizzard puts it. That's per a dev post to the WoWUIDev Discord, shared here by WoWhead.

In the "currently being worked on" section of the post, Blizzard stated it's "Adding numerous spells to the whitelists for cooldown/aura secrecy: Skyriding spells, the GCD spell, Maelstrom Weapon, Devourer DH resource spells, Combat Res spells." Simply put, there'll be certain spells whose data will be available to AddOn creators, allowing them to make UI mods for them.

In particular, the mention of Maelstrom Weapon and the demon hunter's Soul Fragment abilities is interesting. Here we have two class resources that are important to track and, more to the point, making it easier to track them absolutely is a competitive advantage over non-UI authors, because there's no way to really track them outside of keeping an eye pinned to your teeny-tiny buffs.

Blizzard adds that players should "continue to call out spells that you think should be whitelisted, we will evaluate each of them individually." So, alright, what's going on here? There are a few options:

1. Blizzard's gone all soft from its previous hardline stances.
2. This is a beta, and Blizzard's just exploring its options.
3. Blizzard is only whitelisting options it'll be adding to the base UI in the future.

If I were a betting man—I'm not, Christmas is expensive this year—I'd say it's a mixture of two and three. Two because, well, one should never read too deeply into choices made during a beta. But three because, as game director Ion Hazzikostas said late November:

"If you think the default UI is ugly, or you prefer your secondary resources displayed in a certain way, that's entirely your prerogative, and we want there to be as many possible AddOn options to allow you to change the size, shape, color, texture, and location of every element (as long as those changes aren't driven by real-time combat logic) in Midnight and beyond."

Unless the plan has changed—and I would be surprised if it did—I reckon these spell whitelists are just step one of a plan to also include better resource tracking for those spells as part of the game's base UI, either through class-specific UI elements ala FF14's job gauges, or working in improvements to the cooldown manager.

It's just simpler for Blizzard to, when given pain-points, whitelist those specific spells while it works on a solution, which I'm broadly in favour of. It'd be petty to keep glaring holes in its class/UI open without letting AddOn creators fix them, all because it hasn't gotten around to patching them up itself yet.

Sandfall Entertainment celebrated winning Game of the Year at The Game Awards by making extra hard versions of several Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 bosses and a new area. Less than a week later, something's already been nerfed, indirectly creating an achievement for anyone who managed to complete the challenge before now.

In the latest Clair Obscur patch, there's a change to part of Verso's Drafts. "Nerfed the hardest boss in Verso's Drafts (red lifebuoy) by moving it slightly to make a quest easier," state the patch notes. This is a colorful area full of puzzles and battles that give you some neat rewards if you feel up to the task.

Among the activities is a diving board; if you jump off it, there's a minigame that involves landing in some colored buoys. The final one - you guessed it, red - is tricky. And by tricky, I mean infuriatingly so. Players were spending ages trying to get it right.

"Took me two damn hours," says one commenter on Reddit. "My issue was not landing in the red circle, it was that the splash never happened so it would not complete. Ready to be done with it!" says another.

Now that it's been made easier, those who've done it would like some recognition. "Finally, I can brag about beating it pre-nerf," one Redditor states. "Glad I did it before but honestly it was fine and perfectly infuriating the way it was!” another adds. “Can we get a Red Lifebuoy medal to immortalize our achievement?" someone valiantly comments.

Honestly, people should be able to brag about these things. The update fixes various other small bugs and issues, but none resonate quite as much as making some diving a little more pleasurable.

Phantom Blade Zero lead says the advice he's taking from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leads is to "cut things" from the kung fu action RPG and "polish the rest."

Look—it's great that paladins have finally made it into Diablo 4, but it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to play them without the massive shakeup to loot in the latest season. A good action RPG needs exciting items to chase and Blizzard has finally cracked how to do that in a game with piles and piles of loot.

I can't imagine playing Diablo 4 without sanctification, a new crafting system that is technically exclusive to the season but shouldn't be because it's almost perfect. It is responsible for dramatically improving the core loop of the game in ways I wasn't really expecting after playing with an unfinished version on the test server a few months ago.

Sanctification is essentially a way to gamble with items for a chance at extraordinary outcomes. You take a piece of gear to a special forge and roll the dice to see what new bonuses are added to them. And those bonuses aren't always some extra strength or maximum life; they can add effects from the best items in the game. A forgettable pair of gloves can become the most powerful gloves you've ever worn, if you're lucky enough.

This means every piece of loot is an opportunity for something amazing. Diablo 4 has previously failed to keep loot exciting once you've found the right pieces for your build: Unlike other action RPGs, upgrades quickly become too inconsequential to matter much. The root of the problem was that items had almost no variance, with most having the same handful of stats and only varying by the legendary effect you imprint on them. Two players running similar builds would basically have identical gear without even trying.

Now, everyone has something different and gets to build their characters differently as a result, and it's all thanks to sanctification. The very first item I ever sanctified was a low-level shield that randomly got the same bonus as an amulet you can't even wear until you're far into the endgame. Suddenly I was leveling my paladin up with the power of a mythic item that swaps your mana (or faith for paladins) into your health. Later on, sanctifying my gloves granted them a second legendary effect that I was already using on another piece of gear, which freed up a slot for one I wanted to use but didn't previously have room for.

There aren't really any bad outcomes other than a rare chance for sanctification to replace an existing stat with something else. Blizzard designed it so there's really no fear of using it. The only downside is that you can't modify an item in any way after, which just means you gotta find new items in order to keep trying. And given the variety of bonuses you can get, it's always worth doing no matter how perfect your character is.

Players have been showing off their most impressive sanctification outcomes all over the Diablo subreddit and official Discord. One person managed to duplicate the effect on the best helmet in the game, giving them not just four but eight free points in every skill. When I finally pick one up myself, you can bet I'll be standing over that heavenly forge and praying for the same result.

Instead of trashing inventories full of loot, I'm actually looking at the most valuable pieces and saving them to sanctify. Maybe that's why Blizzard included an extra stash tab when you pre-order the Lord of Hatred expansion. I've turned into a loot hoarder because the sanctification slot machine isn't going to pull itself.

New sanctification can have some wild outcomes! from r/diablo4

I'd argue that sanctification—and to a lesser extent the reworks to tempering and masterworking—is a far more important change to Diablo 4 than introducing paladins. Don't get me wrong, I am having a blast crashing down on enemies from the heavens with a tornado of holy hammers on my paladin, but I'm having a lot more fun picking up loot that I actually care about a week into the season.

Gearing up your character is actually a journey with unexpected steps to work around now. Diablo 4 was in desperate need of giving you that kind of ownership over your character, especially when games like Path of Exile have had this figured out for decades. It took a few years for Diablo 4 to get here, but all the reworks are finally starting to pay off.

This bodes well for what's coming in the expansion next year. Blizzard has already teased that Diablo 2's Horadric Cube will make a return, bringing with it traditional recipe-based item crafting. If it keeps sanctification around, you might be able to create a piece of gear entirely from scratch that competes with the best items in the game. This season is already a taste of what it's like to have items that feel entirely your own and I think it's only going to get better next year.