Steam, the platform responsible for popularizing the first meaning of early access, has had enough. It's now designating the latter scenario, when a developer offers pre-launch access to a completed game, "Advanced Access."

"Unlike Early Access, Advanced Access is not a unique model of development for a game, it's simply an opportunity to play a game before it fully releases on Steam," says the platform.

Is it just the exact same term, but with a synonym for "early" swapped in? Yes. But I don't have a better suggestion, so I'll take it. Please, EA, Ubisoft, and everyone else, do us a favor and play along. (Or, even better, stop it with that annoying preorder incentive altogether!)

I'm sure someone at Valve shares my irritation with the fluctuating meaning of "early access," but the new distinction probably has less to do with that, and more to do with a refund loophole. Apparently, when you got advanced access to a game in the past, your pre-release playtime didn't count toward the two-hour refund window. Now that Steam has formalized advanced access, it does.

Steam's updated refund policy still includes one exception to the two-hour rule, "beta testing," which refers to special beta builds of games that developers can make available for a limited time. So, if you accept an invite to a free playtest on Steam, it won't contribute to your playtime should you later buy the game. But if you pre-purchase a game, and then gain advanced access to it, your playtime will count toward the two-hour limit for automatic refund approval.

The potential for confusion still exists, because sometimes developers call advanced access periods beta periods, even if nobody thinks it's sensible to claim you're "beta testing" a game two days before its wide release. But it's progress.

The new Steam functionality also allows players to write user reviews during the advanced access period. In the past, you'd sometimes see games with thousands of concurrent players but no reviews, because they weren't technically "out" yet. (I still object to the idea that a game isn't "out" if you can pay a deluxe edition fee to play it, but that means rejecting the idea of "advanced access" altogether, and we'd be here all day if I tried to fully work that thought out.)

Lords of the Fallen's final update, version 1.5, gives it what every good action RPG must have: a randomizer mode for the sickos who thrive in the chaos of unpredictable enemies and loot.

A list of new options to modify the normal structure of the game will now be available when you've completed it. You can randomize the loot dropped by enemies and the types of enemies that show up. Other options include pre-upgraded loot drops, weaker healing, more enemies, permadeath, and fewer (or zero) of the game's Dark Souls bonfire-like checkpoints, or "Vestiges".

In our Lords of the Fallen review, Harvey wasn't a fan of its brutal mid-to-late game enemy ambushes, which he said "occasionally feel downright cruel." In the roadmap of updates since its release last October, however, developer Hexworks has pruned the enemy count down and many players say the game is easier now.

The new modifiers might bring the game back to its original state, which I'm sure is great to hear for the kinds of people who regularly mod FromSoftware games to kick their ass. Speedrunner LilAggy randomized Elden Ring and immediately dropped into one of the final areas in the game at level 1. The Lords of the Fallen randomizers aren't that mean, but they're clearly made specifically for the people who love action RPGs a little too much.

Alongside the modifiers, version 1.5 further tweaks the game's difficulty, adds new armor and weapon sets, new quests, and a bunch of new spells. It also has "significant performance, optimization, and stability improvements," that executive producer Saul Gasco promises will nearly eradicate the technical issues the developer has been fixing since its launch. He said creating the game's overlapping "Axiom" and "Umbral" worlds with Unreal Engine 5 had the team "navigating completely uncharted territory from a technical standpoint," and that is why the game had such a rough launch for many players.

The timing of the final update couldn't be better for anyone who needs to fill a soulslike void before Shadow of the Erdtree's June release. With the enemy placement in a better spot, Harvey's praise for the rest of the game—"It might be one of the best non-FromSoftware souls games we've gotten so far"—has me seriously considering if it's time to pick up that freaky lamp once again and give it another shot.

Lords of the Fallen's version 1.5 update is available now. 

"Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down," Facepunch Studios said in a Steam update. "This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.

"Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo's content and what they allow and don't allow is up to them. They don't want you playing with that stuff in Garry's Mod—that's their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can."

The "not a mistake" line may have been prompted in part by earlier DMCA claims against Nintendo-related mods that some Garry's Mod players claimed were fraudulent. It's not clear whether that was actually the case, but it seems to definitely not be the case now.

Nintendo is notoriously protective of its property, and it's not shy about getting heavy with people it thinks are getting out of line. Earlier this year, for instance, it sued the makers of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, forcing a near-immediate halt to its development (and sticking the developers with a $2.4 million bill); more famously, it saddled programmer and hacker Gary Bowser with a $14.5 million financial albatross he'll be paying off for the rest of his life, on top of more than a year spent in a US federal prison, for the crime of making and selling "circumvention devices" for the Switch.

It's the sort of brutal behavior that has a deep, chilling impact, sometimes beyond the obvious targets. In January, for instance, Valve ordered a halt to Portal 64, a popular Portal demake for the Nintendo 64. Portal 64 maker James Labert said he was asked by Valve to take the project down because it "depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries."

"I think Valve didn't want to be tied up in a project involving Nintendo IP," Lambert told PC Gamer at the time. "I don't blame them."

That thinking may also be driving the Garry's Mod housecleaning: The potential for headaches (and significant financial pain) is great enough that it's preferable to just eliminate any possibility of an unpleasant letter from Nintendo's legal department.

There's definitely a lot of Nintendo-related stuff available for Garry's Mod. A search for "Nintendo" in the Garry's Mod Steam Workshop brings up 44 pages of results, while "Mario" delivers a whopping 186 pages of results. Other Nintendo characters, including Bowser, Zelda, Princess Peach, Luigi, and Yoshi also bring up dozens of pages of results. It's a big pile to sort through, and Facepunch turned to the community for some help with the effort.

"This is an ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through," it wrote. "If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot."

Whether it will get that help seems to be an open question. Despite the message, there's still some doubt among Garry's Mod players that the takedown request is real. Some are criticizing the development team for "falling for it," while others are demanding proof that Facepunch verified the takedown requests are legit. A few legal theories about fair use in Japan are being kicked around, and there are also calls for Facepunch to keep the Nintendo content in place as a matter of principle, and damn the consequences. Naturally, there's also a good deal of upset with Nintendo, and occasional predictions of Garry's Mod's imminent demise (not all of them polite) should it knuckle under to the forces of injustice.

None of which is likely to matter—there's nothing in the takedown announcement indicating that this is anything but a done deal. As Facepunch put it, "It's Nintendo. Need more be said?"

I've reached out to Facepunch for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

I've only played about an hour of Rotwood, which released on Steam in early access today, but for $11 (even less right now since it's on sale), I'd already recommend it to my friends. They've invested as much in lesser games just to have something new to play in co-op, and I've even been enjoying Rotwood as a solo game.

Rotwood's roguelite structure is typical of contemporary games: In the first biome, you hop between 2.5D forest glades, bashing away at the enemies in each before moving on to the next, which might contain more enemies, a shopkeeper, or a surprise. After clearing a room, you're sometimes rewarded with a new power. These are minor bonuses at first—move faster when you enter a room, shoot a projectile after every three melee attacks—but as in games like Slay the Spire and Risk of Rain, you get more and more OP as you stack on synergistic powers and upgrade them. By the time I reached the first boss, the first heavy attack I used in a room dealt 500 damage to every enemy. 

To complete an area and unlock the next one, you have to fully traverse it in one life, which includes defeating a miniboss and boss, and you only get one health potion to use along the way (unless you find a way to refill it). It's easy to keep the basic bug-vegetable forest enemies at bay by spamming light and heavy attacks, and they generously telegraph their attacks so you can dodge roll out of their way, but you eat a lot of damage when you're hit. It's not extraordinarily difficult, but it only takes a few lapses of attention before you're cooked, and there are unlockable difficulty levels.

When I started to discover combos, I probably made things harder for myself by going for imaginary style points. There's a great attack called "golf swing" where you dodge roll in one direction, and then immediately spin 180-degrees and swing your hammer (the starting weapon) like you're trying to send whatever was behind you moonward. Chaining 15-plus attacks to clear a room with a single string of button presses feels nice.

Except for the "press F8 to send feedback" message at the bottom of the screen, Rotwood doesn't feel especially early accessey—at no point did I encounter a big under construction sign or placeholder asset. I go back and forth on whether I like the muted colors and rounded cartoon forms of Klei's signature art style, but either way it's distinctive and readable, and I like that the customizable player characters are cute without being cutesy. 

Where it seems like Rotwood's unfinishedness will present itself most acutely is in its length, but it's hardly just a prototype. Rotwood's early access version includes four biomes, with mini-bosses and bosses, and four weapon classes. Klei estimates that mastering those presently available weapons and locations will take "10-25 hours."

More of everything will be added throughout Rotwood's one-to-two year early access period, says Klei, and the developer will also increase Rotwood's price as it makes those additions. Rotwood is currently $11/£9.29, and has been slightly discounted on Steam for the launch. 

I tend not to go in for early access games—why not let everyone else do the beta testing and just get the 1.0 version when it's ready?—but Rotwood is made to be replayed, so it's the sort of game I could see filling up on now, and then coming back to in a year or two when there's more stuff.

After an extended period of wrangling, the US Congress passed a bill calling for TikTok's sale or block in March, sending it to the Senate, which voted to pass the bill on April 22. One day later, US President Joe Biden signed the bill into law. 

Known formally as the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act and rolled into the much larger HR 815, a bill primarily about providing military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, the law essentially forbids the distribution, maintenance, or updating of an application under the control of a "foreign adversary," in this case China, and more specifically ByteDance and TikTok.

In a statement posted to Twitter, TikTok said the new law is unconstitutional and confirmed that it will challenge it in US courts. "The fact is, we have invested billions of dollars to keep US data safe and our platform free from outside influence and manipulation," TikTok said. "This ban would devastate seven million businesses and silence 170 million Americans.

"As we continue to challenge this unconstitutional ban, we will continue investing and innovating to ensure TikTok remains a space where Americans of all walks of life can safely come to share their experiences, find joy, and be inspired."

In a TikTok video, Shou expressed similar sentiments and also claimed that the real goal of some US lawmakers is not to disconnect China from TikTok, but nothing less than an outright ban on the platform, presumably a more alarming potential outcome for people who use it.

"That will take TikTok away from you and 170 million Americans who find community and connection on our platform," Shou said.

"This is actually ironic, because the freedom of expression on TikTok reflects the same American values that make the United States a beacon of freedom. TikTok gives everyday Americans a powerful way to be seen and heard, and that's why so many people have made TikTok part of their daily lives. Rest assured, we aren't going anywhere. We are confident and we will keep fighting for your rights in the courts."

@tiktok

Response to TikTok Ban Bill

♬ original sound - TikTok

It's ironic to hear the CEO of a Chinese company glorifying the virtues of American freedom of expression; it's also ironic that the US presents itself as hellbent on protecting American privacy from the predations of TikTok while allowing Twitter and Facebook to run wild. Privacy concerns are valid but also almost entirely moot in a world where the tendrils of social media have pried into virtually every aspect of our lives, and while I certainly don't consider TikTok a force of pure altruism, efforts to shut it down are clearly driven by politics above all else.

None of which makes Shou wrong: Organizations including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, and PEN America have spoken out against the law, saying it will "violate the First Amendment rights of Americans across the country" and "set an alarming global precedent for excessive government control over social media platforms."

Despite the president signing the bill into law, what happens next remains to be seen. ByteDance has a year to offload TikTok, and assuming it follows through on its promise to take the whole thing to court, that'll delay a resolution even further. The potential election of Donald Trump to the US presidency could also complicate matters: Despite trying to impose his own ban on TikTok in 2020, Trump has now come out strongly against the proposal and might try to undo, or at least weaken, this new law. 

China's government, meanwhile, has expressed strong opposition to a forced sale of TikTok, and more specifically the algorithms that have driven its success. For the moment, that leaves ByteDance little room to maneuver, but it needs to do something: Other Western countries including the UK, Australia, and Canada are considering TikTok bans of their own, and will almost certainly follow along whatever path the US decides to take.

The new armadillos will spawn in the savannah and badlands biomes as we'd been told to expect. The 1.20.8 patch notes also reveal that they can be lured towards players with spider eyes—that seems like a niche snack choice—can be put on leashes, and will roll up into a protective ball when they sense danger like players sprinting nearby, undead enemies, or players riding by on mounts. Importantly, you also don't need to kill them to get their scaley "scute" skins. They'll drop those periodically on their own or you can brush them to get one.

It's no surprise that armadillos are bringing those new wolf variants with them too, since their scute (that's the bony outer hide) is used to craft into wolf armor. Your canine pals no longer need to dive into the mines beside you unprotected. Those new wolf variants (pale, woods, ashen, black, chestnut, rusty, spotted, striped, and snowy) will all spawn in different biomes but appear to be mostly cosmetic variations other than that. 

Mojang does note that different types of wolf tend to spawn in different size packs though, which is neat. All tamed wolves now have 20 hearts, which is double their prior health points, and feeding them will renew twice as many hearts as it used to. So they're definitely getting buffed for battle.

And as if that weren't enough, several other features that are planned for update 1.21 have been added as experimental features that you can toggle on when creating a new world. The new mace weapon, breeze rod item, and trial chambers are among the additions. Those beta features are also available in Minecraft Java edition snapshot 24w13a.

Armadillos have been added because they won the annual Minecraft player mob vote last year, which decides one of the new creatures coming to the game. But typically those player-voted mobs arrive in the next major game update, which should be 1.21 this year. Mojang has definitely released upcoming mobs as experimental features before, but this mid-update drop is unusual.

There was a bit of unrest last year around the mob vote, during which some players went full propaganda mode trying to end the traditional mob vote. They felt that the votes are divisive—which is true, they can be—and that it feels like you're being cheated out of the other two mob concepts by only getting to pick one. Is there any chance that the armadillos came early because Mojang is planning to add the other two mobs in 1.21? I wouldn't count on it. Mojang developers have pushed back on that question in the past.

In either case, another official Minecraft post today suggests that it's likely close to revealing the official name for update 1.21. So hang tight for that after you jump in to try recruiting some new scute-producing pals.

Moon Studios quickly responded to those complaints with an update promising improvements are on the way. "This is early access, so there is plenty you will see improve as we continuously look to optimize and improve the game with your feedback," the studio said.

Even before it came out, some players expressed concerns about No Rest for the Wicked going into early access in the first place—mainly wondering about how "early" the game would be—and post-launch there have been suggestions the game wasn't ready even for an early access release. For the most part, though, players seem to be digging it, as seen in the game's climb from a "mixed" to "mostly positive" rating over the course of a week.

Regardless of all that and whatever anyone else might think about it, Moon Studios CEO and creative director Thomas Mahler has no regrets, calling the early access release "one of the best decisions we could've made."

"I see some people are still irked about why games like Wicked, Hades 2, Larian's new game, etc. launch into early access even if the studio 'should have the funds to finish the game and release it then'," Mahler wrote on Twitter. "But that's looking at a complex problem through a way too simple lens.

"I think as games become more and more complex and sophisticated, we'll see some form of early access happening more and more often. Speaking from our own experience, there is just no way we could have ever shipped [No Rest for the] Wicked 1.0 without being able to see all the data we're seeing now and getting all the feedback from users. And I mean actual users, not a Focus Testing Group. Even if we'd have 2-3 times the staff, it would have been quite simply impossible, the product is just way too complex of a beast to reasonably expect that. 9 women can't make a baby in a month and all that."

Mahler went even further, saying other games that came out before early access existed would've been better if they'd been able to take advantage of it: "Imagine [if] Dark Souls 1 would've been in Early Access—Instead of From rushing to ship a boxed product in a somewhat unfinished state, they probably would've been able to look at the second half of that game and still fully form and polish the less polished areas like Lost Izalith, etc."

Generally speaking, I tend not to play early access games—I'd rather wait for the full, finished product—and I wonder if studios sometimes hurt their future fortunes by releasing a game before it's fully ready: Nightingale is one example of an anticipated and promising game that's currently saddled with a "mixed" rating on Steam because it's still in development. 

But the advantages are also clear. As Mahler said, early access provides a pool of testers that just isn't available any other way, and the success of games like Baldur's Gate 3, which spent nearly three years in early access, is proof that it can work. Conversely, the failure-to-fame arc of Cyberpunk 2077 has led to suggestions that it should've been an early access game (and, in some ways, it was).

The bottom line is that there's clearly a place for early access in the contemporary gaming market, and it's not going away, a point Mahler emphasized. "Even if you dislike the idea of Early Access: It's one way to allow developers to truly perfect a product over time, so please try to understand that there's value in that," he wrote. "I'm confident that we will see games being created through Early Access programs that would've never been made without EA."

Mahler also encouraged Sony and Nintendo to "embrace early access" in a follow-up tweet. "The industry is just changing at a rapid pace and holding on to things that were the norm 5-10 years ago is too restrictive," he wrote.

"Ultimately people just want to play great games. It shouldn't matter how the game was developed, just that it was and if players can't play some great experience on your platform, you're doing your audience a disservice."

For now, work on No Rest for the Wicked is continuing at a good pace. Four hotfixes, focusing primarily on addressing performance and balance issues, have already been released since the game's April 18 launch.

While I say "the community", I think it's important to highlight that I'm talking about its most vocal, galactic-war focused elements here. I'd bet a safe wager that the majority of Helldivers 2 players are content to just gun down bugs. So content, in fact, that a major order to stamp out 2 billion of them passed in the blink of an eye. 

Before I get into the how and why, though, there are two bits of important context to consider. Firstly, most major orders over the past month or so have been automaton-focused. Here's where the last nine have sent us:

1. Operation Swift Disassembly Phase 1 and 2 (Automatons).
2. Liberate Malevelon Creek (Automatons, obviously).
3. Operation Swift Disassembly Phase 3 and 4 (Automatons).
4. Operation Rearing (Terminids).
5. Operation Courageous Defense (Automatons).
6. Operation Menkent Line (Automatons).
7. Operation Cassiopeia (Automatons).
8. Operation Harvest (Terminids).
9. Operation Enduring Bulwark (Automatons and Terminids*).

That asterisk is there since it's best to focus on Automatons for this latest major order. At the time of writing, there's only one defence campaign in Terminid space, and, uh, a lot more in the Automaton's invasion—which has been spreading like wildfire across the galactic map.

So overall, that's 7 out of 9 major orders (or 9 out of 11 if you count phases as their own major orders) that've required us to turn clankers into scrap metal. I'm personally fine with that, since I happen to like doming Hulks with my Anti-Materiel rifle, but I also haven't done any Terminid missions in close to a month. Whenever I've played, it's been Automatons on the menu. So why the larger ennui?

Tow the Menkent Line

Helldivers 2 uses a forgivable amount of sleight-of-hand: Arrowhead Games is still engaging in the lengthy process of hiring new staff to match its success, which is a lot harder than you might think. After all, who trains the new hires if everyone's already busy matching pace? Money can lead a dev to water, but it can't teach them how to drink from your custom-made infrastructure of lakes.

In essence, major orders have a degree of showmanship to them. We needed to liberate Tien Kwan for mechs, but we were probably getting them anyway. We had a massive push to obliterate the Automatons, but somehow, they returned. The Menkent Line, however, feels like the first time this magic trick has spilled over into actual discontent with the man behind the curtain. As Reddit user Renorec lays out in the comments to this excellent image: "Real talk, we fought hard to establish a defensive line and for what?" 

Why was the Menkent Line so horribly ineffective? from r/Helldivers

The aptly-named Dushnila_complainer also notes this in the following thread on the game's subreddit. As they point out, the story conceit behind Operation Menkent was to "allow SEAF Engineers to begin construction of orbital defences on those planets, deterring the advance of the Automaton Fleet and allowing counteroffensive preparations to begin", as per the in-game dispatch.

Dushnila_complainer rightly says, however, that "both planets were attacked once again without taking into account that there is the orbital defence system. There are no buffs for the defence campaign, nothing. The planets are just attacked like there is no orbital defence or anything else."

Was the Menkent Line Major Order pointless, or did I miss something? from r/Helldivers

The issue isn't that the planets were attacked, or even lost. It's that there weren't any real rewards for doing so beyond a batch of medals. Which seems strange, since Arrowhead has been able to deploy unique benefits to certain planets before. 

Even a token of free orbital laser stratagems or something would've gone a long way. As one commenter notes: "I was hoping these Orbital Defences would have given us some kind of edge on the ground …  nope, they're forgotten and we're getting our shit pushed in mercilessly."

Fabrication fatigue

Automatons are just kinda painful to fight, especially when they're the main big bad. I like downing devastators as much as the next patriot, but it's mostly because I'm acclimated at this point, like a hot bath. I'm still far less stressed when I'm chewing through waves of bugs, all cosy in my big mech.

On the other hand, it's not as if the Terminids have gone anywhere. You can go and fight them. They're even technically a part of this latest major order—but I'm certainly not alone in feeling like, well, if I'm playing Helldivers 2, I want to be contributing to the war effort. It's one of the game's main features, after all. You're doing your part!

As Reddit user MyOwnTutor observes in a separate thread discussing the issue, "the bot front is scattered to the winds." Another player writes in a reply: "The majority of the community really came together for the final push to wipe them out, then two days later they came back even stronger, making it feel like our efforts didn't matter at all." 

I'm also far from the only one who has picked up on the recent weighting towards Automaton-focused major orders, and missed the recent bug vacation entirely. As one poor sod notes: "I was either asleep or at work for the entire kill bugs order." You hate to see it. 

Late last month, I wrote about how games like Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 suffer from this kind of gradual decline in goodwill because we love them to death, playing them obsessively until they're ruined for us. I still think that's very much a factor here. You're only in this situation if you've been contributing to every major order going on a full month, now. All signs point to burnout, and there's only one antidote for that: taking a break.

But I do think there's an interesting, two-pronged design issue happening here: In order to tell these large, sweeping narratives, you have to focus on one enemy at a time—which can produce fatigue. To keep players invested in those stories, you also need to make them feel like their choices mattered—and the Menkent Line fell just short of doing that. It's a lot of pressure for Arrowhead Games.

Ultimately, I'm just curious to see how the studio is going to keep the ball rolling. While none of this is a sign that the game is secretly dying or whatever, it is a sign that a playerbase can't run marathons all the time. Something's gotta give.

Launched in 1977, Voyager I was part of a twin spacecraft mission to study the gas planets, flying past Jupiter and then Saturn, before heading off out into the unknown. Powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), it continued to send back data to Earth and in 2012, it crossed the heliopause and officially entered interstellar space.

It's fair to say that nobody really expected the spacecraft to continue functioning for so long but despite a few glitches along the way, it's continued to provide valuable information about the nature of our Solar System.

That was until November 2023, when its Telemetry Modulation Unit (TMU) appeared to have failed, as it just sent a constantly repeating pattern of data. NASA's engineers ultimately discovered that the TMU was working as intended—the issue was one of the ancient memory chips for the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) had failed, either due to a high-energy particle wrecking it or just through over four decades of wear and tear.

Since that chip stored instructions for how the FDS should communicate with the TMU, its loss meant the latter had no way to work properly. The two Voyager spacecraft were some of the first ever to use volatile memory to store data, so it's remarkable that they've lasted as long as they have. But with the problem identified, a solution could be developed and it was about essentially figuring out which code had been lost and then resending it to be stored on another memory chip.

Not that it would be a quick fix. Voyager I is over 15 billion miles away and it takes around 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach it and then another 22.5 hours for any response to return to Earth—imagine clicking on a desktop icon and waiting for nearly two days for it to activate, and you'll get a sense of how challenging it is to work with the spacecraft.

NASA can only send part of the required instructions in any one signal but the first batch was sent on April 18. Two days later, a response was received indicating that the memory relocation had gone as planned and the spacecraft could now correctly report its status.

Over the next few weeks, the engineers will continue to move the code for the FDS into other memory locations and once complete, Voyager I will be able to send scientific data back.

At some point in the next few years, the RTG will no longer have sufficient radioactivity to power the spacecraft's transmitter and it will fall silent for good. By 2036, even if it does somehow continue to work, Voyager I will be too far for NASA's Deep Space Network.

We'll probably never know the ultimate fate of the incredible machine but its discoveries have been an astonishing testament to the skill and ingenuity of NASA scientists and engineers.

Somehow I doubt anything in my current PC will last half as long but if it does start going wonky, I think I know who might be best at fixing it.

You'll be able to jump back into OG Erangel, after live server maintenance, from May 14 to May 28, which leaves plenty of time to walk back down memory lane. A couple of things you can expect to see again include foggy and rainy weather, as well as the bench weapons on the starting island. 

But it doesn't just stop at looks. The old map will also be bringing back the old UI and some mechanics. "Upon entering Erangel Classic, you'll be greeted by the familiar sight of a vintage world map and minimap, the match start timer, and the charmingly tacky font and graphics. It's a nostalgic journey that transports you to the past," the blog post reads. 

There'll also be a slight change to firearms, with the team introducing reduced recoil in an attempt to replicate the old recoil. While this is a cool touch, it probably doesn't make as much sense as changing the UI or the look of Erangel. The recoil was updated for a reason and is what plenty of players are used to now. It probably won't cause too much pain, but it's still a bit of a hassle and one that some players aren't happy to see. 

"I think this is terrible, tbh. The old look and feel, fine. But changing mechanics of recoil and enemy downing from one map to another just completely throws off any skill consistency players have managed to obtain over the years," one player says in reply to the announcement on Twitter. 

Other than this detail, everything else seems to be pretty non-abrasive, with many players happy to see the classic map make a return. If you haven't secured a chicken dinner in a while, then it may be fun to jump back into the map that started it all and see if you still have what it takes.