At the moment Bioware are slowly drip feeding the Internet information about the upcoming Mass Effect game, Mass Effect: Andromeda. We recently had a trailer come out, and that was huge. Now something’s been revealed which isn’t quite as huge, but welcome none the less – Andromeda will have native controller support for its PC version.

The news was revealed via a tweet sent out by Andromeda’s lead designer, Ian S. Frazier yesterday:

In case it wasn’t clear: yes, we now support controllers on PC. 🙂 But personally? I’m looking forward to showing off m&kb controls! #space

— Ian S. Frazier (@tibermoon) January 5, 2017

Neither Mass Effect 2 or 3 had controller support for PC, so this is a step up from those games and welcome to people who prefer to use a controller for their gaming. Further, you will apparently also be able to switch between controller and mouse and keyboard control seamlessly. That means if you prefer using controller for one thing and mouse and keyboard for something else, Andromeda should be able to allow you to do that with little problem. Hopefully.

There’s plenty more news to come about the game before it finally releases on March 21 in North America and on March 23 in Europe, so stay tuned.

As Overwatch continues to be played by many and new updates are applied to rebalance the meta and introduce new characters, as well as add content for events, so will bugs also slip in every now and then. Some become known as exploits to allow people to do things they shouldn’t.

A new one has come to light in the last few weeks, in which players found a way to use Mei’s ice wall ability to push players through walls into areas designated as out-of-bounds. Obviously this allowed for hiding players to attack enemies without much danger to themselves, and that sort of ruins the match for everyone. Now Blizzard have located and apparently squashed the bug, and have promised that those found to have been intentionally using the exploit to give themselves an advantage will see punishment.

“This bug was surprisingly tricky for us to track down but we believe we have identified a fix.” wrote game director Jeff Kaplan on the game’s forums. “Our hope is to have it fixed… but there is always the chance that our fix could fail. We’re currently testing to verify the fix. This bug is clearly an exploit and we consider this cheating. Do not attempt to reproduce this bug. We will be taking action against those who abused this exploit… exploiting game mechanics like this comes at a cost to those you are competing against. We take aggressive action against people who abuse game mechanics, hack or cheat. This case is no different.”

Already people are reporting that they’ve found their accounts suspended for having used the exploit, and one Reddit user has reported that they’re on a week long ban for it.

Just as they said when they launched the game and have proved time after time, Blizzard take a hard line on people cheating in their PvP shooter game.

We might be in 2017 right now, but there’s no doubt that the last year left its mark – especially in the way that a good number of famous ‘idols’ passed on in 2016. One such idol who recently left us was Carrie Fisher, most famously known for her role as Princess and then General Leia in the Star Wars films; although she was also known for her writing and script doctor skills, being a mental health advocate and much more.

Now, like others before her, Carrie Fisher is due to get a tribute to her added into the virtual space universe of Elite: Dangerous. Posting on the Frontier Forums about the passing, executive producer Michael Brookes wrote: “Sad news indeed. A ‘Fisher’s Rest’ outpost will be added to the game in the 2.3 release.”

As mentioned, Fisher is not the first to be given a tribute in the game, with Leonard Nimoy giving his name to a space station that was orbiting the game’s equivalent of the planet Vulcan in the year of 2015. Later that year upon the passing of author Terry Pratchett, a starport known as ‘Pratchett’s Disc’ was added into the game making reference to Pratchett’s most popular and well-known book series.

Update 2.3 will be coming to the game sometime in the early part of this year.

While the majority of things that have come in the Winter Wonderland event for Overwatch have been well received by the community (seriously, the amount of love I’ve seen on Tumblr for Junkrat and Roadhog’s matching sprays is immense), one particular piece has been widely criticised by fans.

While most of the skins like Yeti Winston and Nutcracker Zenyatta have been quite popular, a lot of people are disappointed with Mei’s new skin. In fact, the negative reaction has been so drastic that Overwatch’s director Jeff Kaplan has felt the need to actually apologise for it on the Overwatch forums.

“We don’t have a specific rule for what makes something Legendary or Epic. We just sort of make a gut call based off of what we think is cool.” Kaplan wrote. “Coolness is very subjective, and based off of the community reaction it seems like our gauge was off on this one. Our reasoning for it being Legendary was that we completely redid the visual effects for Cryo-Freeze (we turned the ice block into a snowman).”

For those who haven’t seen the skin, it looks fairly similar to Mei’s ordinary winter coat skin if in Christmassy colours, with added hat and (as Kaplan says in his post) the ice block ability making Mei a snowman instead. Given that skins that are usually given Legendary status (which this one has been) are usually drastic changes from the norm, this is the main bone of contention.

For those disappointed though, Kaplan says that Mei is due to get something awesome in the early part of 2017.

“Apologies that our “cool meter” was off from yours on this one. We’ll try to align better on future content.”