Call of Duty: Mobile has a royal battle mode. Activision thinks that's not enough, so it's working on another stand-alone CoD for mobile. The company confirmed the existence of the game in March, and now told a little about the alpha test. 

The weekly Exotic item merchant, Xur, hangs out in random locations around the world of Destiny. In Destiny 2, he can appear all over the map, as well as inside the Tower. This week, you can find Xur in the EDZ, standing on a bluff overlooking the Winding Cove.

If you’re a placid, peaceful player, it may be easy to pass on Outlaws, the new No Man’s Sky update targeted toward the rogues and rascals of the galaxy. Hello Games will allow you to continue exploring the planets and building bases, or searching for lore fragments. But Outlaws enables a whole new style of play, which turns the player’s Traveller into an under-the-radar smuggler who can pick up dangerous missions and carry illegal supplies across monitored borders in the galaxy.

Elden Ring ‘s bosses can be as creative as they are frightening. But how do they stack up against one another in scale? Modder and Garden of Eyes YouTuber made a video in which Eldenring ‘ showed the terrifying, numerous bosses. The two are neatly lined up beside each other, in an environment that is meant to be fought — Rennala’s second phase, Queen of Full Moon’s boss fight.

Here’s something we didn’t expect to write: Elden Ring is the United States’ best selling video game of the past 12 months, according to the NPD Group, beating out a Call of Duty franchise that typically dominates the calendar year after year. Remember that Elden Ring was launched on February. 25.

Hoyoverse, the company behind Genshin Impact and the Honkai series, has a new action RPG on the way. The game is called Zenless Zone Zero, and it’s an urban-setting fantasy with plenty of colorful characters. Hoyoverse announced the game on Friday with its first trailer. Zenless Zone Zero doesn’t have a release date yet, but Hoyoverse is letting players sign up for the closed beta on the game’s website.

Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has a bold prediction for the future of the Apple TV. Kuo claims that Apple will release a lower-priced Apple TV in the second half this year, according to a report. The focus of this new model will be on improving the “cost structure” of the Apple TV.

Game delays happen all the time, and they’re always disappointing. But this week’s announcement of delays to two Bethesda titles and Xbox console exclusives — Starfield, from Bethesda Game Studios, and Redfall, from Arkane — has hit particularly hard.

Critical Role will launch a third actual play mini-series on May 26th featuring guest stars from Dimension 20. Exandria Unlimited: Calamity will be lead by Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan, and include the talents of Marisha Ray, Aabria Iyengar, and more. The storyline takes place over 1,000 years before the events of the troupe’s first campaign, and requires no previous knowledge of existing characters or previous events according to a news release.

One of Kirby’s older adventures will soon become playable on Nintendo Switch. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards is coming to Nintendo Switch Online plus Expansion Pack next week, Nintendo said on Friday.

The Elon Musk Twitter deal is now ‘temporarily on hold,’ says the billionaire, in a tweet today. Twitter had told him that spam and fake accounts represent fewer than 5% of users, and Musk now says he wants to see the evidence for this.

Elden Ring‘s skeletons have a grand tradition to live up to; FromSoftware has been making excellent skellies going back to 2009’s Demon’s Souls, and the bone boys in the subsequent Dark Souls franchise are some of video gaming’s best. To get a better sense of what makes an excellent video game skeleton, I took a deep dive into the history of games’ greatest mindless minions.

Last year Meta started building its Presence Platform on the Quest VR headset, which has limited mixed reality capabilities. It can, for example, show your real keyboard in your virtual work environment. Or it can anchor virtual objects to real life places, e.g. if you put a virtual chess board on your coffee table, it will stay there between sessions.

It seems scarcely a week goes by without a new antitrust threat to Apple, and the latest is a proposed federal Digital Platform Commission. The Commission’s mandate would be to address anti-competitive behavior by digital shops, including the App Store.