The first major update for Civilization VI [Official Site] since the release of its second expansion, Gathering Storm, has now been made live. There’s quite a lot to unpack in its extensive patch notes but Civ’s developer, Firaxis, has put up a helpful video summing up the bigger and more noticeable changes that have made it in.

There’s all sorts of changes, ranging from quality-of-life improvements to improved AI and, of course, balance changes. Most interestingly, if you own the latest expansion, the climate change mechanics have been tweaked so that it takes longer to trigger these calamitous effects but they’re now more severe.

One of the things I enjoyed the most about Gathering Storm was its potential to shake up the late game. Making these changes more significant certainly adds plenty of tension and drama.

Geneshift, a top-down GTA-inspired battle royale game that also has a single-player and co-op campaign has a fresh update out with an aim to make it more streamlined to play.

Absolutely loving the direction Nik Nak Studios have been going with the game, it's more accessible than it ever was before and that's great. I also think it's brilliant how when you're dead, you can come back as a Zombie player and if you kill a normal player you're back in the game, clever idea to prevent people getting too frustrated. The super short round times are also a nice change, keeps the action intense.

Firstly, with this huge update skill penalties were removed, so now bigger is actually better! The Skill Tree was also reworked, so you now only have a maximum of three active abilities making it far easier to manage and probably a lot better balanced since people can't unleash everything they have at you.

Unreal Engine 4.22 continues to push the boundaries of photorealism in real-time environments whether you are making immersive and engaging games, broadcasting live television, visualizing groundbreaking products, or creating the next blockbuster film. We don't believe significant advances in technology should result in increases in development time for you to take advantage of them, so we have once again set our sights on making workflows for users from all disciplines even faster and more accessible.

Unreal Engine delivers unbridled power to build realistic worlds with the most accurate real-time lighting and shadowing effects - including dynamic global illumination, pixel perfect reflections and physically accurate refraction - thanks to real-time ray tracing on Nvidia RTX graphics cards. Soft area shadows and ambient occlusion provide the finishing touches to ground your scenes firmly in reality.

Epic Games today released Unreal Engine 4.22 and while they continue to support Vulkan and offer native Linux support, this engine update is more exciting this time around on the Windows side.

Unreal Engine 4.22 most notably introduces experimental real-time ray-tracing support though that's implemented for now just using the Microsoft DirectX 12 ray-tracing capabilities and not yet the Vulkan RTX/ray-tracing support enabled by NVIDIA.