Since the beginning of its lifetime, many of the players of the huge spacefaring game Elite: Dangerous have been wondering and asking where the series’ antagonistic alien race the Thargoids were. Back in January one player might have had first contact, with his ship being yanked out of jump only to be approached and scanned by a weird flower-shaped ship before it vanished. A few other players have had similar encounters now, but so far nothing much has happened although players had a feeling that this wasn’t going to be all they’d be doing.

Now Frontier have shown off a new, short trailer (the “Unknown Trailer” that features one of the strange alien vessels and the atmosphere is distinctly unsettling. The trailer shows a few human ships landing on a planet and exploring the surface before the alien ship comes up behind them and the ‘signal’ is lost. Of course, anything could have happened after that but the overall tone and ambient noise makes it seem that whatever happened, it wasn’t good for the human crews.

Interesting times ahead for Elite: Dangerous players ahead it seems. Hopefully Frontier will release more information or someone will have a much more interesting encounter with a flower ship soon in-game.

So by now you’ve probably heard that id Software and Bethesda are bringing about a new game in the Quake series called Quake Champions. We’ve already had a few trailers and some details about it, but now we know how much the game will cost.

Esssentially Quake Champions will be free-to-play, with one of the titular Champions available for free – a Champion called Ranger. However, the other Champions will not be free and you’ll need to pay for them. Creative Director Tim Willits told Polygon that in order to get access to the other champions, players will need to buy a Champion Pack to the roster if they don’t want to spend time grinding up to unlock them.

“At its core, it’s a free-to-play game with the option to buy the Champion Pack and just get in and play with all the Champions. There are a number of Quake players that just want to play their Quake, right? And they are familiar with the business model of our previous games, and they are totally fine. ‘I want to buy the game. I want to start playing. I want to have access to all the Champions.’ But then we also understand that we want to get as many people into the game as possible, especially outside of North America and Western Europe, where we have a massive fan base. So we want to have the flexibility to have a free-to-play option for those people.”

If you don’t want to make a payment, it will be possible to unlock the other Champions with the in-game currency (called Favour) for a set amount of time. However paid and free players will be sharing the same games, so it remains to be seen if the players who can afford to purchase the Champion Pack will have an advantage or not.

Quake Champions will be running a closed beta in the coming weeks.

Twitch is fast trying to establish itself as the go-to place for all a gamer’s needs. Most famous for its streaming platform, two weeks ago Twitch revealed its plan to start selling games with some of the money made going back to their partner streamers, and now they’re planning to tackle the voicechat world.

Currently with Discord as one of the big players in that field, Twitch acquired Curse, another big player, last summer. Now they’ve announced that Curse is going to be enhanced, rebranded and then relaunched as the Twitch Desktop App. This means that as well as containing the features that Curse had before, screen sharing, voice and video calling, and community server creation; the Twitch Desktop App will contain features from Twitch. These will include whispers, activity sharing and eventually a game library filled with games purchased through Twitch which will only be accessed through this new Desktop App rather than the Twitch launcher that already exists as had been previously thought.

Seems that Twitch are planning to emulate Discord and indeed that’s their plan; they want to make sure that a stream’s community “can thrive even when the streamer is offline.” The Twitch Desktop App will enter into public beta testing on March 16th and will be available for download at twitch.tv.

For more information, check out the post on the subject made over on Twitch’s blog.