Valorant studio head Anna Donlon says Riot Games is taking new steps to address toxic behavior in the game, and delivered a pointed message to the most egregious offenders: “If you need to make truly evil statements under the guise of regular shit talk to enjoy gaming, then please play something else.”

The video message (via Kotaku) comes after several recent instances of abusive conduct were shared on social media: In one clip that recently went viral, a player was repeatedly threatened with rape. In the video, Donlon said addressing that kind of behavior is a priority for Riot, and “one of the most challenging issues” it faces, and that Riot’s systems and technologies “have been making a lot of progress” in reducing toxicity.

At the same time, she acknowledged that those systems cannot catch everything: “At the end of the day, there are still some people in this world who want to take out their insecurity or their bad day or their hate or their whatever on some strange…

A patch for the open world survival game Valheim went live on the public test server back in June that, among other things, added world modifiers that enable players to change the game’s difficulty in various ways. With that update, called Hildir’s Request, now fully live, developer Iron Gate is celebrating in an appropriately viking-ish fashion with the Trial of Tyr, a speedrun competition that challenges players to race through the entire game—in hard mode—on their own.

Details on the competition are available in the full rules, but the basics are pretty simple:

• You play the full game, by yourself, from start to finish without dying.
• No dev commands or other forms of “external help” allowed.
• You must play in the official Trial of Tyr world seed: MX7L9GYcf2
• “Hard” preset in the world modifier settings must be used.
• Runs must be either livestreamed on Twitch or YouTube, or recorded “…
  

There is quite a lot of Starfield. A gajillion planets. A crafting system I still haven’t unlocked all of. An embarrassment of cowboys. But there’s one thing it’s relatively sparse on: voice acting, specifically for the game’s main character. Starfield opted for an unvoiced player character for its space-based antics, possibly because everyone made fun of the Fallout 4 dialogue wheel, but it turns out that wasn’t always going to be the case.

In a post on Twitter, voice actor Elias Toufexis (Starfield’s Sam Coe and Deus Ex’s Adam Jensen) confirmed that, once upon a time, Starfield’s main character was going to be decidedly chattier. In fact, he and fellow actor Cissy Jones (Starfield’s Andreja) worked on voicing the male and female version of the protagonist “for months” before Bethesda decided to toss the idea completely.

Not to worry though, because the studio clearly didn’t decide to cut the actors loose. Instead, they assigned them to Sam Coe…