During this morning’s Xbox and Bethesda Games Conference, Riot Games revealed that many of their titles will be joining Game Pass on both PC and mobile devices. Players in various games will earn rewards that are otherwise difficult to obtain simply for playing the titles through Game Pass. Joe Hixson, director of corporate communications at Riot Games, revealed that all content earned in these accounts with Game Pass, such as skins, will remain after the subscription ends, while the bonus content through Game Pass will be removed from players’ accounts.

Blizzard confirmed today that some of its servers are experiencing issues because of a DDoS attack against the company.  This attack is causing high latency and disconnections, specifically when trying to play World of Warcraft.  [#Warcraft] We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players. We are actively working to mitigate this issue. — Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) January 7, 2021 The game has been experiencing bouts of high latency for several days, according to Blizzard’s customer support page.

A new variant of shiny Pokémon has been added in Sword and Shield and it’s incredibly hard to get. Dubbed by the community as square shiny or super square shiny Pokémon, this is a new variant of shiny creatures with square particles in the background of its appearance animation instead of stars. It doesn’t change what the shiny Pokémon looks like at all other than the particle effect. This variant was first discovered by a Reddit user and data miners across the world.

Respawn Entertainment released an update for Apex Legends today that addressed several issues in the game, including a bug that affected Bloodhound’s new Prestige skin and a penalty for players who leave Control mode matches early. Last week, Bloodhound’s new Prestige skin was bugged, making it impossible for some players to log the kills necessary to make progress toward unlocking the second and third tiers of the cool, but expensive new outfit for the Technological Tracker.

The next Pokémon TCG set Fusion Strike is set to release on Nov. 12 in the West, but Japanese players have already started getting their hands on the original version, Fusion Arts.  Fusion Arts will be available in Japan starting on Sept. 24, and thanks to some early products hitting the shelves, everyone is getting a look at the Secret Rare cards that are included in the set.  The chase cards for this set mostly revolve around Mew, Hoopa, and Genesect, which are all featured as Secret Rare cards and include the new Fusion Strike Style battle style.

With Episode Three of VALORANT beginning on June 22, a plethora of changes are coming to the ranked competitive mode. Competitive designer Jon “EvrMoar” Walker joined caster Rivington Bisland III on a developer livestream today to discuss the impending changes, including a rank reset and adjustments to how rankings are determined. During the livestream, Walker said that when the game launched, the devs had a system that adjusted matchmaking rating (MMR) based on the number of games played to get players into their correct ranks as quickly as possible.

The 2022 League of Legends preseason is aiming to make the game’s champions and items more diverse by bringing along some major changes to a relatively unfocused area of the game throughout 2021: rune choices. Riot previously revealed that various rune changes are coming in the 2022 preseason. And as a part of today’s game update delving into the general preseason changes, two major keystone rune changes were revealed, as well as the addition of a new rune.

Riot Games has shipped out a customized VALORANT spike that comes with a set of three special knifes to some content creators and personalities, to celebrate the tactical FPS’ first anniversary. People like the worldwide famous Russian DJ Anton Zaslavsk, known professionally as Zedd, and content creator QuarterJade shared the goodies on social media. It comes with a personalized Spike, the object used in plant/defuse game modes, a glitchpop dagger, a prime karambit, and a singularity knife.

League of Legends Patch 11.23 went live this week, which means this year’s preseason also made its debut. Every year, fans get to observe some grotesque plays that are the result of new, unbalanced items, runes, or other aspects of the game. And this year is no different. In the 2022 preseason, two new drakes were added to League: the Hextech and Chemtech Dragon. Each of them has fresh bonuses and some of them may seem broken.

A new event is coming to Final Fantasy XIV called All Saints’ Wake, bringing thrill to the lands of Eorzea. Players will be able to dress up as clowns by earning new cosmetic items brought by the event and place pumpkins in their gardens. The 2022 All Saints’ Wake event is scheduled for Jan. 20, at 2am CT. It will last for just two weeks, so the players will have to be quick to earn the items it has to offer this time around.