The Hullcracker, a fan-favorite Arc Raiders weapon, got nerfed in the latest patch from Embark Studios. Players are already missing the gun so much that they've taken to mourning what once was, while discussing replacement strategies for its firepower.

An grenade launcher, the Hullcracker packs a serious punch in the right circumstances. That used to mean taking on a Bastion, the six-legged monstrosity, but now it's nowhere near as effective thanks to the explosive damage taking a dent in a recent Arc Raiders patch, forcing some ingenuity.

"I had to spend 20 mins trying to kill one Bastion to get nothing out of it," one player writes on Reddit. "It took so long that I had to kill one dude trying to rat me, go back and continue shooting it, only to get completely shredded in my back by ANOTHER guy who decided to wait until I killed and started to loot the Bastion."

They state that while there were always other ways to take out a Bastion, the Hullcracker has gone from "being a top option with risk to an almost non-viable option in solos." Others share in the disappointment.

"The change to explosive damage ruined the Hullcracker against enemies you actually want to use it against, really sad adjustment," another user adds. In a separate thread, a player questions the thought process since this was one of the gen guns that seemed specifically tuned for taking out Arcs instead of people.

"Couldn't use it against other players, was strong but still took accuracy and multiple shots to down any Arc other than a Wasp. No idea why they'd do this," writes a Redditor, who brings up a nerf to Venator that didn’t change that gun much at all. The Hullcracker seems to have been disproportionately toned down compared to how other weapons are changed.

Embark mentioned in the patch notes that the idea was to make it less effective in scenarios against Arcs. "We noticed that explosives dealt damage to more parts at once than intended, allowing weapons like the Hullcracker to kill larger drones too quickly," the post reads. "We've adjusted explosive damage to make it more consistent across the board, and we’ve re-balanced the damage of the Hullcracker to account for that change."

There's always a chance the Hullcracker's damage will be turned back up slightly. But in the meantime, find other ways of handling Arcs if you're playing on your own.

Among millions of Arc Raiders, Embark says 117 legendary players "somehow downed themselves" with rocks in the Breaking New Ground community event

In 2023, ArenaNet switched to an annual expansion plan for Guild Wars 2—smaller, but more frequent expansions that rolled out in stages across an entire year. The benefit has been a more consistent release schedule. But there are downsides too. The first of these expansions, Secrets of the Obscure, felt like it was trying to pack too much into its limited development schedule—its ambition in terms of story far outstripping what ArenaNet had the time to make. Despite plenty of positives, it ultimately felt rushed and underdeveloped.

Last year's Janthir Wilds was more assured, taking valuable lessons from SotO in terms of its scope. It launched with one of the best maps in recent memory (alongside a second that was simply OK), and brought a handful of features that made for a promising first impression. It put its best foot forward, but then ran out of steam. What followed in the subsequent updates was… fine, mostly, but paled in comparison to the expansion's opening salvo, and didn't make the most of the concepts the story was teasing.

Visions of Eternity, then, is another shot at proving this annual expansion plan has the juice. It's the best opening act of an annual expansion yet—nicely building upon what worked in Janthir Wilds with two dense new maps and a major addition to buildcrafting.

A low-key opening sequence sets up the basic premise: the Inquest—an outfit of evil asuran scientists—have set sail for the fabled island of Castora. The player, alongside an almost comically mismatched selection of former allies, follow along, figuring that whatever they're doing is probably worth stopping.

It's a refreshingly small start for Guild Wars 2's tropical island adventure. Where previous expansions let themselves get bogged down in the tectonic shifts of political allegiances—the discovery of the Wizards Court, the forming of the Tyrian Alliance—and the lengthy conversations they require, Visions gets to the point relatively quickly. Inquest bad. Hey, Rytlock's here too. More than some big expansion-sized threat, it feels like the start of an old Living World season, which is no bad thing given the quality of some of those releases.

The first map, Shipwreck Strand, is lush; a beautiful landscape full of sand, sea and shipwrecks. Quickly you stumble upon a village of castaways—Tyrian explorers who set out to discover the lost lands of Castora, but who failed to successfully navigate the magically-infused fog that surrounds the island. Lacking a means to return to the central continent, they've built a society here. Multiple, in fact, with the more civilised Hullgardeners at war with the pirate freebooters.

It lends the map a natural flow that parallels Janthir's Lowland Shores. To the east is civilisation, a village built out of ships like a mini version of the original Lion's Arch and a pub that acts as Canach's new business venture. To the west, danger—the Inquest and their new pirate allies.

Each recent expansion has picked out one of Guild Wars 2's mounts for extra attention, with a new mastery line that expands its skillset. SotO had the Skyscale, Janthir Wilds the Warclaw, and Visions of Eternity focuses on the Skimmer—the game's underwater mount. As a result, Shipwreck Strand also has plenty going on under the sea. The underwater sections of the map are built for exploration rather than events or combat, with a sprawling tunnel system that connects hidden coves.

It lends the map an exploration focus that, ever since the introduction of mounts back in Path of Fire, has often felt missing from the game. So far I've only found about half of the coves scattered underneath the map. And sure, I could just go look them up on GW2's exhaustive official wiki, but it's been nice to know there are still secrets lurking in this half of the expansion.

The second map, Starlit Weald, trades tropical beaches for dense, vibrant jungle. It's a well-worn biome for Guild Wars, sure, but Castora's more mystical focus helps it stand out from Heart of Thorns' Maguuma region. Here we battle more of the Inquest's cybernetically altered fauna, and push towards the ancient Seer ruins that house the island's deeper mysteries. It's big and it looks nice, but the real triumph is simply that it feels dense with stuff—frequent events and activities triggering as you explore. It's a marked improvement over Janthir Wilds' second map, which was big, sure, but did relatively little with the space—sparse open landscapes that offered little but the chance to kill elementals and titans.

Basically, ArenaNet has got something here. The story—never my main reason for playing this game—has been decent enough, and does a good job of getting out of its own way. The exploration has felt meaningful, and the events plentiful and varied. More crucially, there's a satisfying reward loop in both maps. As you complete events, you earn key charges that can be spent on hidden chests around the map, earning decent rewards for actually participating across the map.

Even more notable, the new elite specs make a massive difference to how impactful this expansion feels. After previous annual expansions simply added a new weapon for each profession, having a full new elite spec is a much more meaningful change. New profession mechanics means new ways to play, and that does a lot to make this expansion feel like a major overhaul to the combat sandbox.

I've spent most of my time with the new Thief spec, the Antiquary. The beta test earlier this year had me worried—it was a spec that, at the time, felt like a barely upgraded version of core Thief, just with randomly acquired 'artifact' skills that barely made a difference to play. The release version gets around the problem by making a fairly simple change; each artifact now gets an additional unique buff that can be situationally game changing. It's a more complex spec that feels rewarding, although based on its current DPS benchmarks, it will no doubt catch a nerf or two in the coming months.

Generally it feels like most elite specs landed well—at least outside of some usability and performance requests. If there's a clear winner in terms of what you'll likely encounter in the open world, it's probably the new Ritualist spec for Necromancers. Good damage, low-APM, and it supports the summoner class fantasy better than other Necro elite specs. The downside is that it's by far the most visually noisy spec. If you thought it was a bit much when Engineers got mechs back in End of Dragons, good luck seeing what's going on when every Necro rocks up and places down three large ghosts around an arena.

In so many ways, Visions of Eternity is a small-scale triumph. But it's also hard to say what the ultimate legacy of this expansion will be. With the two previous expansions limping towards their finish, it's more important than ever that VoE's major updates deliver. If the pattern repeats—a strong start squandered by scant updates that underdeliver—it's going to be really difficult for ArenaNet to continue to insist that this annual cadence is viable.

The plan this time is to focus the next major update on quality of life features, giving the development team more time to cook on the story and maps of the final two updates. If it works—if this expansion can actually stick the landing—then great. But even then the risk is the annual expansion cycle becomes too formulaic each release. In terms of what's been delivered here, the parallels between Janthir Wilds and Visions of Eternity are pretty stark. In terms of the quality, we're looking at small refinements and degrees of quality that separate them. The risk is maps start to feel samey in a game that once revelled in more experimental rolling event maps like Drizzlewood Coast or Dragonfall.

One step at a time though. For now, Visions is off to a strong start—another fun collection of activities dropped into an MMO that, thanks to its horizontal progression, keeps every new release relevant throughout the lifetime of the game. Now it's on ArenaNet to finish strong as the expansion continues to roll out across the next year.

Hytale is saved, yes, but there's still a long way to go. The ambitious Minecraft-inspired sandbox RPG was canceled by Riot after developers "couldn’t bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise," , and its new goal is to deliver "the original vision for Hytale," from before it turned into a sprawling seven-year project. Hypixel founder Simon Collins-Laflamme said in a post on X that original vision comes with a relatively humble price tag: $20, or "as aggressively low as possible."

As Laflamme notes in his post, the game effectively lost four years of development as the build the new team is working with is quite old. But the restart is also an opportunity to cultivate good will for a project that's mostly languished in the public eye for the better part of a decade: "Charging more didn’t feel right. I don’t think the game is good yet. My team and I will push hard to make it good, then great. The vision is clear and progress is fast."

Really fast, in fact. The new team released 16 minutes of new footage a single day after reclaiming the old build from Riot, and despite some hand-wringing about it being "raw and broken" it seems quite good for a game that had every right to look pretty busted, given the messy context leading up to its impending release.

Granted, there will be the increasingly standard suite of special editions for those who want to show a little extra support, but $20 is still a pretty agreeable price point; it's about as much as Vintage Story, the other snazzy Minecraft-like turning heads these days. As for when early access will begin, a recent blog post from the dev team states it's "coming in the next few days."

I'm just happy to see the game might actually release one of these days. Hytale isn't the first voxel-based RPG to win me over with a tantalizing concept, and let me tell you, that story doesn't always end well.

I'm afraid it's that time again when I have to break out a bowl of genre word salad. Brace yourself.

Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road is a survival, resource-gathering, tower defence, roguelike, city-builder, Vampire Survivors-like. Phew.

Ok, now that's out of the way, we can break down what that actually means. Basically, in each run you are the custodian of a city on wheels, as it rolls along pursued by ever-escalating hordes of monsters. Your character has auto-firing weapons, like in Vampire Survivors, but so does the city. Instead of adding to your arsenal, level ups allow you to add more buildings, from towers to farmland to factories, all feeding into your defence.

If your hero dies, you simply place a grave in your city and spawn a new one—but if your city takes too many hits, it crumbles, and the run is over.

So guarding your home as it trundles along is vital… but you're also encouraged to risk breaking away to explore. Out at the edges of the 'road' can be found trees, rocks, and gold ore, all useful in your quest. Feed wood into the city and the attack speed of all towers gradually increases, while stone is used to repair any damage, and gold can buy more buildings at intermittent merchants.

It makes for an interesting push and pull as you balance keeping the city safe with nipping off to punch some trees—risky as it is, those extra resources make all the difference as the journey gets more dangerous. Though it never stops being a panic-inducing moment when a warning flashes up letting you know that in your absence, the city's gotten stuck on a boulder or a root and stopped rolling while the hordes descend on it.

The real meat of the game, though, is in the building. With only a limited grid of tiles to play with, clever town planning is key—but with three random buildings to choose from each level up, you're also forced to adapt and chase whatever synergies present themselves.

Finding strong combinations isn't exactly complicated, but it is satisfying—whether you're using laborers to increase the area of effect of your mortar explosions to absurd levels of mass destruction, or summoning unending armies of undead minions buffed by crypts and reliquaries.

Interestingly, you also have to consider the resulting shape of your city. Extending to your maximum width is great for covering a large area with your towers, but it also makes the city a bigger target for enemies, and more likely to snag on trees and boulders you forgot to clear. And whether you prioritise damage at the front, back, or sides, or try to spread your defences thinly across your whole border, dictates where you'll need to focus your hero's efforts during massed attacks.

Different city types, unlockable as you progress, offer unique challenges suited to different playstyles. The Mirror City, for example, is perfect for those who crave perfect order—place a building on one side of it, and it gets duplicated on the other, so you're always symmetrical. But those buildings are debuffed to make up for it, and you'll find you run out of space far quicker than other cities, so the trick is working out which things benefit most from being doubled and which will fall behind.

With 10 city types to dig into and a ton of different buildings, I've been really enjoying exploring all the different combos so far. Progression is a little more awkward than I'd like—a lot of stuff is locked behind completing fairly awkward challenges, and the best way to keep earning new stuff is often unclear. But so far that hasn't stopped me coming back again and again with my latest ideas for new deadly architectural abominations.

Monsters Are Coming is available on Steam now, and 10% off until December 4.