One crisp spring evening, the Wasteland Theatre Company gathered to rehearse Romeo and Juliet. Jonathan "Bram" Thomas was playing Romeo. A self-confessed Shakespeare geek, he'd graduated with a BA in theatre, and this wasn't his first time playing one half of the star-crossed lovers. But it was the first time a mutant scorpion the size of a Jeep had rampaged on to his stage. Panicking, the show's crew rained bullets down on its blackened shell, but not before Juliet fell to its sting.

As it turns out, not every game needs a battle royale mode after all. Almost two years to the day after announcing Nuclear Winter, Fallout 76 's take on the genre, Bethesda Game Studios says it's shutting down the mode in September due to dwindling player interest. Although many players dove into Nuclear Winter in the mode's early days, since then, "we've seen the vast majority of players prefer to explore other aspects of the game," the development team wrote in a blog post. "It has also become tougher to put full Nuclear Winter lobbies together without also making sacrifices on match wait times." Bethesda has also found it challenging to keep working on "meaningful updates" for the mode while developing updates for Adventure Mode at the same time.

When you've got a discography like Todd Howard's, full of critically acclaimed games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, it must be hard to pick a favourite. But there is one game he remembers more fondly than anyone else does: the first he ever worked on. "Terminator: Future Shock," he says. "When [Bethesda] came to Fallout, people were saying, oh, you're doing a post-apocalyptic open world! But we already did that in Terminator. It's an underrated game that not a lot of people played. I think Quake came out right afterwards, that might have had something to do with it, and understandably so … Future Shock was made with eight or 10 people and it did a lot of things that no game had done. I remember it got critiqued at the time, which annoyed me to be honest. But now the things it did are commonplace."

Amazon's foray into the games industry is proof nobody can shortcut their way to a hit. It's been fully five years since the online retailer, worth more than most (if not all) of the major video game publishers combined, announced it was going to start making video games. And it started so well! Amazon forked CryEngine into its own proprietary engine, Lumberyard. It hired Clint Hocking, hired Kim Swift--hired the sorts of people, in other words, that you'd want to see making games.

The holiday season is here, and Christmas is in sight. There will be a lot of last-minute deals in the days before the big ... day. This weekend we decided to highlight some of the best video game deals and sales we're seeing. Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Microsoft, and GameStop are all having Christmas sales on consoles and games. Most of these deals should go through Christmas, and some may continue as the rush of after-Christmas sales hits.

I'm not sure if I should be feeling so comfortable in the apocalypse. That's the thought that keeps working its way through my mind as I play the first hours of Fallout 76 and its now-foundational rituals. As I leave the nuclear war refuge of the Vault. As I find ugly leather armor. As I get into a series of siege fights against giant mole rats. And as I begin to hoard anything and everything I suspect might be useful later.

There are about a million games releasing, Gamescom is next week, PAX in two weeks--it's starting to get pretty damn busy around here again. Both Brad Chacos and I will be in Germany for Gamescom next week, so keep an eye out for previews, announcements, and maybe even a video or two. It's mostly QuakeCon news this week, including 25 minutes of Doom talk, but you'll also find a smattering of early Gamescom trailers below, a tease for Vermintide II's first DLC, and a surprise TimeSplitters acquisition by Deep Silver. This is gaming news for August 13 to 17. As I said, Gamescom is still four or five days away--but not for everyone, evidently. Tropico 6 got out ahead of the competition and dropped this so-called "Gamescom Trailer" this week.

While billionaires buy up property in New Zealand and pay technologists huge sums of money for advice on how to keep their staff in check after "the event" – that is, whatever it is that wipes out enough of the planet to justify living in bunkers – the rest of us are left to deal with the looming threat of catastrophe by playing video games. Bethesda Game Studios' Fallout series offers a very American take on the post-apocalypse: humans, ghouls and mutants protect their respective corners of the wasteland with big guns and power armour, in a retro future with sci-fi technology and a 1950s aesthetic. The games present a ravaged, irradiated all-American picket-fence fantasy with classic cars, suburban homes and US landmarks devastated by nuclear bombs. Fallouts 3 and 4 are explorative role-playing games that cast the player as a survivor emerging from a vault after more than 100 years into a world they don't recognise – though, after a few hours, they have significantly more weapons and resources than the average pitiable remnant of humanity. The games offer the player 100 or more hours exploring the wasteland and meeting its dogged inhabitants.

Eight years ago, those were some of the examples of games I called out for contributing to a serious case of video game industry sequelitis, leading to a lack of originality across all the different game platforms. And what did I see at E3 2018? Fallout 76 goes online in a new twist. Clearly, originality is still not in fashion. It's appropriate, then, to go back to how I explained this problem back in 2010: It's overly simplistic to blame a conceptual lack of originality for the deficit of new ideas, stories and characters.

At annual game convention E3, columnist Marc Saltzman picks out the action game he thinks you'll want to buy in the next year. Such is the dilemma at E3 – short for the Electronic Entertainment Expo -- the world's biggest video gaming convention held each June in Los Angeles, which drew more than 60,000 attendees. There's a lot to see and play on the showroom floor, behind closed doors, and at parties -- and only three days in which to do it. These are the upcoming action games that stood out during this year's show. Note: Be sure to read the recommended age rating when these games become available.