In case you haven't heard, multiplayer shooters are undergoing a vibe shift—as PC Gamer's Morgan Park outlined in that article, 2025 met players with a number of games that forego brutal competition in favor of more approachable, chaotic, casual-friendly shooting. It seems like players are eager to embrace the new order, as two decidedly chill games dominated the sales charts around Christmas: Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6.

That stat comes courtesy of SteamDB, which gathered a list of the top ten best-selling games (excluding free-to-play games) from December 23 to today, December 30. There are plenty of familiar faces: the award-guzzling Clair Obscur, the absurdly excellent Baldur's Gate 3, and our favorite game of 2025, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. There's also some games that you just take for granted as always being best sellers: Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced and the latest EA Sports FC, for example.

But at the very top split only by the Steam Deck are Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6, two shooters that offer relatively intense, competitive styles of shooter (extraction and modern military) without all the sweat. There's not so much as a competitive ranked mode of play in BF6, and Arc Raiders is a breakout hit in a genre once known primarily for being niche and hardcore. As Elie Gould put it in their review: "Finally, a less stressful extraction shooter."

You can find the expanded list of 100 games on SteamDB, which includes everything from indie co-op hit RV There Yet? to two different Assassin's Creed games one after another. The biggest surprise for me is that Ubisoft's Avatar game, Frontiers of Pandora, is at number 19 above Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring Nightreign. I guess that's the power of a film series that unfailingly generates hundreds of millions of dollars every time it surfaces.

World of Warcraft finally has player housing and for the last few weeks my social media feeds have been full of people showing off their creations. People are busy making cave systems and palaces that I would never have the patience to put together.

One person is just making Star Wars stuff, because any time you give players the tools to make things, they're always going to make something from Star Wars. This is simply a fact about gamers that we all know is true.

Reddit user Top_Syllabub6619 perfected their craft with some off-brand ships and motorcycles, and then they went full George Lucas.

A day ago they dropped a video showcasing their fully built AT-AT. It's surprisingly accurate given the random objects they had to build it with. Sure, it can't exactly stomp around and shoot lasers, but it looks imposing and that's all that matters.

Darth Vader's AT-AT (STAR WARS) from r/WoWHousing

That same day, Top_Syllabub6619 also delivered their rendition of R2-D2 as a house (and a Millennium Falcon). The little droid isn't so little anymore when constructed out of what looks like curved elven walls. None of this would look right if they didn't nail the color scheme, with blue accents for the droid's top half and other gold-rimmed decals. If you squint, it looks like the real thing.

R2D2 house! from r/WoWHousing

Earlier today, WoW's biggest Star Wars fan built an Imperial Destroyer. And just like their other works, this one looks spot-on. They even have a screenshot of their character in a full Darth Vader outfit. Top_Syllabub6619 is absolutely committed to the bit.

They don't provide any screenshots of the interior, so I'm not exactly sure if it's a ship you can live in, but I sure hope it is. It floats off the ground menacingly, almost to a point where it looks out of place in the pleasant jungle around it. But that's OK, because it's a massive floating ship in a game where you normally have to sleep in cabins—it's cool no matter where it's located.

I hope this series continues and Top_Syllabub6619 creates a whole portfolio of every iconic ship or droid from Star Wars. If you're reading this, Top_Syllabub6619, I would like to request Luthen Rael's Fondor Haulcraft with its totally-not-lightsabers jutting out from the sides.

Bethesda hadn't dealt with guns in a long time when it came time to develop Fallout 3; thankfully, VATS helped close the distance.

Aside from some Terminator games in the 1990s, Bethesda's bread and butter had been fantasy games and all of the fixings that come with it (swordplay, bows and arrows, magic, etc.). However, Fallout took what the studio had been doing with The Elder Scrolls series and sent it into a sci-fi setting where guns, grenades, and anything you can bash an oversized scorpion with are fair play, leading Bethesda's developers to a problem: how do you make a shooter that also works as an RPG.

"The thing that we love most about games is putting you in a world; I think doing that first-person and then we have third-person, is the best way to do it, where you can kind of reach out and touch the world," Todd Howard explains in an interview with GameInformer. "As it came to Fallout 3, that was the big thing: How do we do this role-playing with guns in a way that feels right, but your character can still improve?"

Fallout 3 designer Emil Pagliarulo explains, "Bethesda, as a studio, hadn’t done gun combat since they did the Terminator games back in the day, so creating gun combat was a real challenge." He adds "Most of the combat in Oblivion is melee, and most of the combat in Fallout is ranged, so we knew we were never going to create gun combat that was on par with Call of Duty or Battlefield."

Thankfully, VATS allowed both issues to be sorted with ease, both making up for the somewhat awkward gunplay (that would later be improved in Fallout 4) and retaining the role-playing aspect of previous games and not turning into a straight FPS, all while paying homage to the original games limb-targeting mechanics.

Bethesda's Todd Howard says "we are doing other things with Fallout that we haven’t announced, and there’ll come a time for that"