Valve has confirmed it is currently working on a solution for Ukrainian and Russian game developers who are blocked from accessing their Steam income.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, which has resulted in economic sanctions, Valve said that the bank it uses for its business in the region has implemented new regulations–meaning game developers in Ukraine and Russia are unable to access payments.

Hey @valvesoftware @Steam are you okay?
My country was attacked by Russia and because of this you decided to deprive me of a source of income? pic.twitter.com/xkcZMxdzP0

— Ternox Games 🇺🇦 STONKS-9800, Taimumari, Bakumari (@Taimumari) March 17, 2022

Stas Shostak, a Ukrainian developer who has been affected by the sanctions, took to Twitter to share an email he received from the Steam publisher.

“This past week, our bank notified us that they will begin requiring that we provide intermediary bank information for all wire payments to accounts in Russia and Ukraine,” the email reads. “In addition, they will no longer be allowing payments to Belarus.

“We are working to understand all the new requirements, create a path to collect this information from you and send it to the bank. This will take us some time to complete, but will not be available for the payments to the affected accounts due at the end of March.”

Valve confirmed to PC Gamer that the email is legitimate, while also stating that “any outstanding account balances will be paid as soon as they can be sent. We know this is super frustrating for all involved, and are hoping to find a better resolution soon.”

However, two weeks since the initial Twitter post, Shostak isn’t certain his payment will come through for April. “I’m not sure about April,” he said to PC Gamer. “Will they really sort it out between the banks, or will Ukraine still be cut out just in case? All my Ukrainian game dev friends report the same situation. Some (me included) are just waiting for the next month, some decided to open accounts in foreign banks to be completely sure they get the next payment.”

As the Russian invasion escalates, more tech companies and developers have announced how they are seeking to help the people of Ukraine.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

Microsoft has announced that Xbox ray tracing has been removed from the Minecraft Preview version after the prototype code was added by mistake.

After offering Insiders the opportunity to test ray tracing support on Xbox Series X and S consoles earlier this week, the publisher has decided the optimization option will no longer be available on the Minecraft Preview. Microsoft also confirmed that it doesn’t plan on bringing ray tracing to consoles in the future.

“The previous Minecraft Preview build available to Xbox Insiders inadvertently included prototype code for ray tracing support on Xbox consoles,” the Twitter post reads. “This early prototype code has been removed from Preview and doesn’t signal near future plans to bring raytracing support to consoles.”

Although Microsoft has stated that its plans don’t include raytracing on consoles any time soon, it’s entirely possible Minecraft players could see more optimization features be added to the building game in the future, but the developers just aren’t ready yet.

The Verge tested the Minecraft Preview build and found that the ray tracing support was early, unoptimized code that required workarounds to work properly. Ray tracing is only currently available on the Windows PC version of Minecraft.

Minecraft Preview is a new standalone app that’s designed to replace the Bedrock Beta program for testing the game’s beta builds and is only available on iOS, Windows 10/11, and Xbox. It’s also included along with the base game for Xbox Game Pass subscribers.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

The Trials of Osiris returns in Destiny 2 this weekend, with a new Trials Labs version to challenge players in the Crucible. You can also nab some of the best guns in the game, particularly if you manage to go “flawless” in the player-vs.-player competition. Here’s where you’ll fight in this weekend’s Trials of Osiris and what guns you can earn.

The weekend’s Trials tournament kicks off with the daily reset on Friday. We’ll update this article when Trials starts.

Starting this season, Trials weapons are slightly improved, carrying the new Alacrity Origin Trait. It gives you increased aim assist, reload speed, stability, and range on your Trials guns when you’re the last living member of a fireteam or running solo. You can also choose to swap to the Crucible Origin Trail, One Quiet Moment, which greatly enhances your gun’s reload speed when you reload while out of combat.

As always, Trials be available from Friday’s daily reset at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET until the weekly reset at the same time the following Tuesday. During that time, you can also pay a visit to Xur to see what Exotics he’s selling. Make sure to pay a visit to Saint-14 in the Tower to pick up a Trials card, which will dictate certain bonuses (such as whether you get bonus rewards at certain milestones or if a loss will be forgiven).

Trials of Osiris is a weekend PvP mode that runs from the daily reset on Friday until the weekly reset on Tuesday, giving you four days to take part. Your goal in the Trials is for you and the other two players in your fireteam to achieve a “Flawless” run, in which you win seven matches without losing any.

Go Flawless, and you’ll earn a trip to the Lighthouse and receive some special rewards, including the new Adept weapons. These have additional stat bonuses, making them among the most coveted items you can get your hands on.

Thanks to a bunch of changes to Trials this season, though, the mode is a little easier to get into than it has been. The Trials of Osiris now features matchmaking, so you can jump into matches even if you don’t have a full squad of three players to take it on. Your Trials Passage, the card you purchase from Saint-14 that grants you access to the mode and tracks your wins, now does not track your losses–so you can keep playing and earning rewards even if you lose out on a Flawless run. Bungie has also adjusted Trials so that you earn rewards based on the number of rounds, rather than matches, you’ve won during your session, and added a reputation system that’s similar to the Crucible and Gambit, making it easier to earn some of the Trials of Osiris’s unique loot.

Finally, you’ll earn Trials Engrams for participating in the mode, which you can cash in with Saint-14 during the weekend you receive them. Thanks to the new update, you can tune those engrams to yield specific pieces of loot, or take your chances with random drops that will expand what’s available in your loot pool. So even if you’re just jumping into Trials alone, there are plenty of ways you can earn great new gear.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

Hot Drop is GameSpot’s weekly Apex Legends column, in which Jordan Ramée takes a closer look at Respawn’s battle royale to provide additional insight into the game’s evolution, as well as dive deeper into its episodic storytelling and characters.

Anita “Bangalore” Williams took the spotlight this week in Apex Legends with the latest chapter of her story dropping alongside the start of the Warriors Collection Event. It was a touching moment of vulnerability for the character–wonderfully portrayed by the talented Erica Luttrell–and though it may seem to finally tie a bow on Bangalore’s arc, the promise of additional chapters over the coming weeks lets us know that it’s anything but.

To see the story for yourself, log into Apex Legends and you’ll get a notification to start “The Williams Sendoff.” Head into the Firing Range as Bangalore and you’ll notice a G7-Scout prominently displayed front and center. Interacting with it kicks off a stupidly easy challenge to hit 35 targets within a set amount of time. Doing so unlocks a new loading screen that depicts a conversation between Bangalore and Wraith, as well as a radio play between the two characters in which Wraith tells Bangalore that she’s discovered the fate of Jackson Williams, Bangalore’s brother. New challenges to unlock additional chapters will appear in the coming days.

When all is said and done, I think this is Respawn’s way of introducing Newcastle, one of nine Apex Legends characters that were leaked alongside Crypto’s heirloom, the Drop-Off Arenas map, and the Warriors Collection Event cosmetics. Last week, I speculated that Newcastle would be Apex Legends’ next playable character, releasing in Season 13. Now, I’m sure of it, and I’m convinced that he’s Jackson Williams.

Bangalore’s search for her MIA brother has been her core motivation for years now. The former IMC soldier served alongside her brother following the Battle of Typhon, participating in the Battle of Gridiron. Seeing that the battle was a lost cause, Jackson ordered their ship to retreat, and with the help of a strange power source–likely something similar to the Ark, the alien technology that powered the Fold Weapon in Titanfall 2–managed to jump to the Outlands in a year’s time, instead of the normally 20-year journey.

When Bangalore reported to the IMC in hopes of explaining the situation, her brother was condemned for deserting during the battle and marked for execution. Bangalore defended her brother and the two killed an IMC Pilot–Bangalore took his knife, a blade she uses in the Apex Games as her heirloom weapon. The two realized they had to go on the run, but a week later a stray grenade blew out the side of the Williams siblings’ ship and Jackson fell to the planet below. Bangalore has been searching for her brother ever since.

As far as we know, the only people that Bangalore has confided in about this story are Pathfinder and Wraith, the latter of which agreed to help her find Jackson in exchange for assistance in discovering Wraith’s origins. As seen in The Williams Sendoff, Wraith kept her word, discovering that Jackson has been dead for some time now.

Wrong Wraith pic.twitter.com/lD2I3AG4mc

— Apex Legends (@PlayApex) May 28, 2021

But is he truly dead? I’m not convinced. Respawn has developed a habit of using smokescreens and subterfuge to surprise Apex Legends players–in fact, it’s more believable to think that anything we learn about a character isn’t the whole truth. I have a hard time trusting the developer on anything anymore.

Listen to how Wraith describes Jackson’s body: “The body matches Jackson’s age, height, weight–even blood type. And it had his dog tags. I should have found the records sooner, but Solace morgues are…well, morgues on Solace. No regulations, no protocols…and he was found more than five years ago but was just filed as ‘unclaimed.'”

And then when Bangalore tells Wraith that she needs to go see the body, Wraith sadly tells her that she can’t because unclaimed bodies on Solace are buried after two weeks and no one knows where the body is even buried because the records were burned in a fire three years ago.

So all we really know about Jackson’s death is that a body matching his base physical body type–age, height, weight, and blood type–was found with his dog tags. But since the body was unclaimed, that means there was no one available to at least look at the dude’s face and actually say for sure whether it was truly Jackson. And now the only person who can do that–his sister–can’t, because the records of where the body was buried were destroyed. Can’t even do a DNA test.

The IMC kills traitors–they’d execute Jackson on sight if he was discovered.

If I was in Jackson’s shoes and on the run from the IMC, separated from the only person I could trust, faking my death to get the heat off me would be the perfect plan. And this whole situation reads as very fake. I’m honestly surprised that Wraith and Bangalore are buying into it.

And how does this come back around to Newcastle? Well, if Jackson is alive, he’s probably been trying to reconnect with his sister, the only family he’s got in the Outlands. And she’s become a very public figure, having become a legend in the Apex Games. So the easiest way to get to her would be to just join the Apex Games himself.

There are a few ways to join the Apex Games. The most common way is to prove you have what it takes by competing in and winning qualifier matches. But you can technically skip that step by receiving a personal invite from Kuben Blisk or The Syndicate (as Wattson, Revenant, Loba, Rampart, and Valkyrie did), being put into the games as a death sentence (like Mad Maggie), or proving your worth by excelling in a similarly grueling competition (like Octane, Fuse, and Seer). Those last three only work if someone knows who you are, though. If you’re a nobody (or want to be a nobody), you have to take the first route and prove your worth.

In the final days of Season 3, Forge was due to come to the Apex Games as the next would-be legend. However, he was killed by Revenant, who was on a warpath to destroy everything connected to Hammond Robotics, including The Syndicate and their Apex Games. The Syndicate invited Revenant to the games as a means of control, giving him skilled prey to keep him occupied. But in leaked in-universe emails between executives, we learned that upon Forge’s death, the Syndicate was originally going to add the person that won the most recent qualifier match: Newcastle. So this Newcastle guy has been trying to get into the Apex Games for a while. And he’s aiming to get in via the only method that doesn’t involve having some sort of notoriety.

In the leaked videos of Newcastle, he’s wearing a mask to cover most of his face. But we can see that he’s dark skinned and has a fabulous beard, not unlike Jackson. And leaked images of Newcastle’s legendary skins showcase an outfit that looks very IMC, much like Bangalore’s legendary Decorated Line and MIL-SPEC skins.

And to wrap this theory up, there would be a gameplay reason to make Jackson still be alive and a part of the Apex Games. See, Respawn can’t kill off or maim any of the legends–removing them from the Apex Games would mean they’d no longer be playable characters in Apex Legends, and the studio can’t just remove characters like that. Or I guess, it could, but fans would be pissed. So basically, every one of Apex Legends’ storylines needs to conclude in a way where the characters remain in the Apex Games, despite many of the characters actively trying to build lives elsewhere.

In Season 11, Bangalore was approached by Revenant and offered a deal: He’d pool his resources with hers, allowing them to collectively pay for the 20-year journey back to her home planet. She’d be able to see her aging parents before they passed away and he’d be able to find and destroy his source code, allowing him to die after living for centuries. With Jackson dead, there’s nothing keeping Bangalore in the Outlands. So she’s probably going to take the deal. That’s what makes sense.

But Respawn can’t let that happen–allowing this story to take its logical course would cause both Bangalore and Revenant to leave the Apex Games. So the developer needs to create a new reason to keep Bangalore from taking Revenant up on his deal, and what better way than Bangalore discovering her believed-to-be-dead brother is actually still alive. The same brother who can never go home because the IMC would kill him–Bangalore leaving would be abandoning him to live alone in the Outlands.

Plus, if Bangalore sticks around, Respawn can keep pumping out chapters to that ridiculous Bangalore, Loba, and Valkyrie love story. I hate that storyline so much, but Bangalore and Loba working through their misunderstanding and entering into a relationship would sufficiently solidify Bangalore’s reasoning for never wanting to go home and leave the Apex Games. And Newcastle being her brother is a great way to keep Bangalore in the Outlands long enough for that to happen.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News