Grant St. Clair Profile - Dot Esports

The Elder Scrolls Online remains one of the top-played MMORPGs in 2024, garnering millions of players. While the game has recovered gracefully from its rocky start, that doesn’t mean some hiccups don’t still occur—the game’s servers can often go down without any warning.

As with any online-only game, the servers are required to be functional if you want to connect and play ESO. The developers usually do a terrific job at ensuring the servers stay online a majority of the time, but there’s still scheduled maintenance and other times when the servers aren’t working properly as the game has to handle millions of players, especially in the wake of its yearly expansion releases. When these happen, you need to know how to check the server status of ESO so you know when they come back online.

It’s never too early to celebrate! That seems to be the rationale behind The Elder Scrolls Online‘s latest update, which sees the experimental Golden Pursuit system return for round two. If you don’t want to wait for the New Life event to earn festive rewards, look no further.

Golden Pursuits are a bit of an odd feature, but certainly not an unwelcome one; any avenue to earn rewards for free is a good thing, after all. They are, in essence, limited-time optional objectives that any player can compete to earn unique rewards, a little bit like a battle pass but mercifully without having to put money down up front. You’re automatically opted in and probably even earning rewards without realizing it! To check the current list of Golden Pursuits or claim any rewards you’ve accrued, simply open up your group menu (which will be colored gold to clue you in).

After what felt like an endless drought, it’s hard to believe that Monster Hunter Wilds is just around the corner. While the game isn’t out until next year, Capcom is extending an opportunity to certain lucky players to start hunting as early as next week.

This upcoming open beta is immensely exciting for longtime fans, especially since you’ll be able to carry over your character and a few special rewards (more on those later) into the main game when it does finally release. Read on to learn just how to get into the beta—because of course there are a few strings attached.

With more games including early access as bonuses for purchasing the Deluxe Edition, it can be immensely frustrating when this advanced release date seemingly chooses to simply not work. In this case, time is literally money, and every minute you can’t get in is money wasted.

This is, unfortunately, a risk regardless of the platform you play on, but Steam’s version—aptly named Steam Advanced Access—seems to face these issues more often than most. If you’ve been facing issues with your Advanced Access period for a game you’ve been hotly anticipating, trying a few of these troubleshooting tips should get you playing in no time.

Halls of Torment‘s 1.0 update is finally here. It’s expanded the titular Halls significantly with a new stage and endgame content, but it might be a bit hard to get around everything by yourself.

Although new dangers await, so too do new rewards and new tools to fight them with. If you’re looking to fine-tune your build, look no further than list of every item and equipment piece in Halls of Torment.

Hideo Kojima has always walked the line between cringe and creative, but whichever side he occupies, the fact that gaming still has auteurs should be celebrated. Death Stranding 2‘s TGS presentation was decidedly a mix of the two, showing off no gameplay in favor of a puppet dance routine.

Kojima has always been tight-lipped about his projects in progress, going all the way back to Metal Gear Solid 2‘s Raiden bait and switch, so to hear that he’d be giving a full-length stage presentation to tell all about Death Stranding 2: On The Beach was nothing short of revelatory for many fans, myself included.

Is it just me, or is retro having a renaissance? Roguelite dungeon crawler Halls of Torment uses a nostalgic, pre-rendered aesthetic to great effect, but if you want to stay alive long enough to admire it, you’re going to want to reach for a potion.

Halls of Torment unabashedly leans into sword-and-sorcery tropes, and the elaborate potion bottle full of mysterious glowing liquid is right up there with the beefy barbarians as far as iconic images go. You’ll have to put some work into unlocking potions in the first place, but the effects are more than worth it.

Ubisoft has not been having a good time lately. Amidst tanking stock prices, underperforming games, significant delays, and internal investigations, the embattled company has openly added one more problem to its list of them, which surely must be approaching 99 by now: XDefiant and its financial failure.

XDefiant is Ubisoft’s answer to the hero shooter, and like many post-Overwatch entries in the genre, lacks much in the way of unique selling points to attract those beyond Ubisoft’s dedicated fanbase. The Smash Bros. approach of using factions from all over Ubisoft’s Ubiverse likely contributed to this, as your average gamer will have no idea who the Highwaymen are supposed to be.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has turned out to be a pleasant surprise, resembling a 2D Breath of the Wild in many ways. One of those ways is the in-depth cooking system, with one ingredient proving particularly rare: the coveted Golden Egg.

While the Eggs are rare, and for good reason, there are a few places a particularly resourceful princess can find them if she knows where to look. Never again will you run out of Golden Smoothies!

Some of the most pervasive images of our time are Twitch emotes—who among us hasn’t said “poggers” in real life? A decade-old icon of streaming is now on its way out, however, as the BibleThump emote reaches the end of its licensing period and Twitch searches for a replacement.

The news that BibleThump would soon be disappearing broke just yesterday. It was, perhaps, unavoidable: While the crying, cartoonish face has grown synonymous with expressing sadness in your favorite streamer’s Twitch chat, it in fact originates from roguelike indie darling The Binding of Isaac. As such, Twitch originally agreed to use it through a limited licensing agreement, and now that agreement is ending, it’s time to find something to take its place. No statement about their plans to replace BibleThump was included with that initial announcement, but now Twitch has turned to the community for help.