If you happened to have caught the Game Awards trailer for it, Highguard, an upcoming free-to-play hero shooter from ex-developers of Apex Legends and Titanfall, launches next week. You will need to enable Secure Boot if you plan on playing through.

As we've spotted on the Highguard Steam page, the game needs Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, and Easy Anti-Cheat to run. If you're wondering why that's a big deal, it's not to most gamers. If you have a Windows 11 PC with relatively new hardware, you should be able to enable all with little problem.

However, Secure Boot, as shown with the launch of Battlefield 6, tends to draw criticism. That's for three major reasons. The first is that Secure Boot is a kernel-level security measure, and anti-cheat software that uses it will effectively get privileged access to the inner sanctuary of your PC.

Secondly, older machines may not support Secure Boot or might not even have a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which is used to store cryptographic keys. This means older machines are left in the dust.

However, one of the biggest complaints levied at Secure Boot is on behalf of Linux gamers. While Linux does have something called Secure Boot, that's not what game devs are tapping into. They want Windows. There are ways to get around it with virtual machines or streaming, but essentially, there's no casual route to playing these games without Windows.

However, Secure Boot and kernel-level anti-cheats are reportedly an effective way of dealing with cheaters, especially when the cost of entry to a free-to-play game is so low. If someone gets banned from playing Highguard, they simply need to use a different Steam account (and possibly use a VPN) to get around it.

Back in 2022, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney responded to criticism of Easy Anti-Cheat in Fortnite, saying, "We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones."

Still, Highguard seems to be fighting an uphill battle with the amount of distaste it has received since its announcement. Linux gamers only represent a fairly small percentage of total gamers, if Valve's Hardware Survey is accurate, yet Highguard will need all the players it can get if it wants a strong launch.

If you plan on playing Highguard yourself and have a Windows rig, remember to enable TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot for the big day.

While Bethesda juggles a lot of pressure these days, between working on both The Elder Scrolls 6 and whatever's happening in Fallout, it's also a creatively nourishing environment, because the devs get to enjoy two distinct flavors of storytelling.

Flipping between the properties is a challenge, but it gives people much-needed breaks, too, as two creatives recently told the PC Gamer magazine.

"It keeps things fresh. It keeps you from getting bored," Istvan Pely, an artist at Bethesda, says. "You have the opportunity to have some distance from a franchise for a few years, and that's enough time to sort of develop a hunger: 'All right, I want to go again.'"

This kind of relay is incredibly valuable when you're entrenched in an upcoming release the way Bethesda developers have to be. Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallouts 3 and 4 were massive undertakings, and the next installments of each respective series will be bigger again. That's without mentioning Starfield, the latest new IP from the studio. As much as you might love science fiction or fantasy, that kind of work can be tiring.

"You work on the same thing for long enough, sometimes it can become – not boring – but it can become monotonous," Angela Browder, studio and production director at Bethesda, adds. "The transition, to go from Fallout to Elder Scrolls, and then back to Fallout, and then to Starfield, all of these things just get your creativity flowing."

Having such versatility is a rare thing in the industry, especially at Bethesda’s level. While anticipation is sky high, there's a lot of space for the teams to experiment and throw around ideas, because the next Elder Scrolls and Fallout games have colossal assured install bases.

Of course, it would be nice if we knew more about what's going on in either, but that's a different conversation. Todd Howard's been teasing something to do with the wasteland for some time, and it seems like no amount of bottle caps can get us any more information until the company's good and ready. We'll keep you informed.

Fallout 3 "went hard on the gloomy despair of the post-apocalyptic world" to differentiate it from Oblivion, but one dev thinks Bethesda went too far: "We just drained the color out of the world"

Deadlock fans are eating good right now, as Valve released a huge update for the MOBA named Old Gods, New Blood that's still technically in its secret closed beta. But they are not eating as well as the devs at Valve HQ, who may or may not have contributed to a serious Domino's pizza boom just before the update went live.

"Pizza places near Valve HQ in Seattle are experiencing higher than usual activity," Deadlock Intel posted a mere two and a half hours before the new Deadlock update went live. Was this actually a Pentagon pizza moment or just a strange coincidence? We don't know, but Michael Douse, Larian's publishing director, seems to think Valve isn't responsible for the boom: "Bro, they have unlimited boiled eggs on every floor. Nobody is going to Domino's over there." Ah yes, Valve's famous infinite horde of boiled eggs, I forgot about that.

Regardless of whether anyone saw this update coming, it's here now, and it's big. Valve has overhauled the patrons, bases, and troopers. On one side, we now have the Hidden King who "exists in the cracks of the city, waiting for his followers to usher him into the light." He comes with a bunch of candlewick troopers, much like the OGs.

On the other side is the Archmother, "Glass, steel, and stone… Order and power where once there was none… The Archmother has always guided the founders' hands, and now it is time for them to welcome her home." She comes with new blue crystal and glass troopers—very fancy.

Valve has also revamped the post-game pages, adding a new MVP feature and a Key Player for the losing team. Alongside new info screens for you to ignore if you performed badly, or screenshot to send to your friends as evidence you're too good to play with them. There's also some UI improvements, like reactive portraits, kill streaks, damage impact indicators, a mid-boss timer, and a better chat visual, among other new features.

Players who don't want to commit as much time to matches will also be happy to see the integration of a new, shorter mode. Street Brawl is a "quick 4v4 battle for the city over a best-of-five match. Each round takes a couple of minutes." It'll get rid of farming as players start every round with equal resources, and it's also streamlined the shopping system. Hell yeah, I can get on board with all of that.

But the biggest and best news from the Old Gods update is undoubtedly the six new heroes that are ready to be added to the game over the coming weeks. We've got:

• Silver: a "feral hot mess" who can transform into a werewolf.
• Rem: a little guy who can probably send other players to sleep.
• Graves: an edgy necromancer that can perform "area denial".
• Apollo: "a cut above" demon with high mobility.
• Celeste: a dazzling performer who is half unicorn, I think?
• Venator: not the Arc Raiders pistol, but an "arms expert" with a big gun.

All of these heroes are ready to go, but Valve would never be so kind as to release them all at once. Instead, two heroes will be released per week on Mondays and Thursdays starting on January 26. In what order? That is still to be decided, by you, actually.

Deadlock players will be able to vote on what order the heroes should be released in, with votes earned by playing the game. So the more you play, the better say you'll have. "Play a standard match or street brawl to earn votes," the update post says. "Your first win of the day gives you four additional votes. Cast your votes in the ballot box located in the Hideout."

After the first new hero is added, there'll also be priority tokens for players to boost the support of certain heroes. They will also be earned faster the more heroes are in the pool. And for those who are already planning to campaign for a certain hero, Valve suggests using in-game sprays to "demonstrate your support for your favourite upcoming hero."

I have already decided that I'll give my life for Rem, but honestly, any of these other heroes could come in a close second. Like the rest of the roster, all of them look fantastic and will undoubtedly have an excellent kit for players to work with.

Fable gameplay footage debuted at today's Xbox Developer Direct, and despite a long 16-year wait between instalments the presentation felt very on brand. That's maybe a little surprising, given Lionhead Studios closed in 2016. The new game is in the hands of Forza Horizon studio Playground Games, which has very little in common with the old Lionhead except for—perhaps crucially—its Britishness.

In an interview published by Xbox, Fable game director Ralph Fulton discussed how the studio dealt with taking on a storied series from a once-venerated studio. "One of the things I said to the team was, ‘Look, we’re not Lionhead—we can’t try to make a Lionhead game.’ This has to be a Playground game because I’m a really firm believer that the personality and the character of a team is visible in the work they do and the games they make."

Fulton went on: "And I think you can see Lionhead in that original trilogy. It would be pointless, I think, for us to try and ape that. And that’s really at the heart of the reboot question, right? It felt imperative to me that this was a reboot because we’re starting again as Playground Games, and making Playground’s Fable."

One sacrosanct part of the Fable identity is its fairytale setting. It is not a fantasy series, Fulton insists, and that's an important distinction that informed Lionhead's world building right from the start.

"When we started working on this project, we got a treasure trove of documents from Lionhead that had been in storage," Fulton said. "Something that I thought was just brilliantly succinct was one of the documents, which said: ‘Fable is Fairytale, not Fantasy’—which is just super neat."

Another sacrosanct part of Fable's identity is that you're allowed to kick chickens. Today's gameplay teaser featured a booted hen, but there was more to this act of mindless violence than just a quaint little callback: it's a useful case study for the way Playground Games is approaching Fable's morality system.

"Our version of morality isn’t a sliding scale," Fulton says. "We’ve chosen to anchor this around the actions you do, and specifically the things you do in Albion that are witnessed by at least one other person. So, if the things you do are seen by one or more people, you’ll start to earn a reputation for that thing. Obviously, we always use the chicken kicking example, because kicking chickens is classic Fable.

"So if a person sees you kicking a chicken," he continues, "you will start to get a reputation as a ‘Chicken Chaser’—and if enough people see you do it, or you do it a lot, that reputation will become one of the things you’re known for in that settlement. And people will react to you based on what they think about that particular reputation."

That's pretty par for the course when it comes to RPG morality systems, but Fable has a fascinating twist. What if the NPC who witnessed you kicking the chicken actually thinks chickens deserve to be kicked? "Different people will view that reputation in different ways," Fulton says. "Kicking chickens isn’t objectively good or objectively evil in a way everybody will agree on—it comes down to the unique worldview of the NPC, what they think of you because of it."

It's worth reading the full interview on Xbox Wire for more details on morality, especially as it relates to bigamy. Fable is releasing in fall.