Lost Ark community now has access to a holiday gift pack, and Amazon is assuring all that there will be some additional gifts to ensure you can get fully geared up for the content ahead.

On December 28th, Lost Ark had downtime for the weekly maintenance, with a gift pack full of items after a successful almost a year in Western release. Those who log in between 12/28-3/15/2023 will be able to claim the gifts. However, some players that claimed their gifts noticed inconsistencies in what they got.
The gift pack consists of a series of items:

• 100 Ancient Platinum Coin (each coin contains 20k silver)

• 10 Collective Battle Item Chest

• A Legendary Card Pack Selection Chest

• 100 Pheons

• 10 Magick Society Special Dye Chest

• A Mokoko Skin Selection Chest with 4 new options

Some that claimed the packs initially noticed that what came out of the random chests was kind of a dud, with various items being less useful. With a big grant of these chests, it was intended to give some real boosts for those that opened them, so when many underdelivered, the community had some feedback on the matter.

Amazon has announced that there will be a make good grant “to ensure all players are fully geared up with Battle Items of all types, we will be distributing an additional 100 "4 Battle Item Chests". Players who have already claimed their gift will also keep the initial items”

The recently-released Lost Ark roadmap for the first half of 2023 revealed some new content on the way, including this month’s The Witcher collaboration, and quality of life updates. February will bring the beans new continent of Rowen, along with new item level requirements and challenges, including the ability to opt into open world PvP.

EA Sports FC 24 will represent a huge change in the annual release of football games, and with EA’s footballing behemoth set to continue, we put forward 5 things that need to change in the game’s Ultimate Team mode moving forward.

Whether it’s called FIFA or EA Sports FC, the fact is that EA will still be producing a football simulation game that is bound to find the top bins like it always does. The strike might not always be pure, but it’s enough to tempt millions of consumers into buying it each and every season.

EA Sports FC 24 will have a different name, but the core of FIFA is still expected to be retained, which means we’re likely to see a whole host of familiar game modes returning – including the money-making Ultimate Team.

With that being said, we’ve drawn up a list of areas we think EA needs to work on when it comes to Ultimate Team, to make it a more fulfilling and engaging game mode.

1. Less promos & SBCs

I’ll just go ahead and say it, the oversaturation of weekly promos and excessive SBCs killed off FIFA 23 long before Christmas.

‘Special’ cards no longer feel special when EA are releasing several new players with amazing stats that also make top-tier Rare Gold cards redundant. In addition, TOTW is a shadow of its former self.

The knock-on effect is a completely dead market in which FIFA 23 only has two Rare Gold Players who sell for over 100K heading into 2023.

It was a bore to see everyone have Haaland spearheading their team by the end of November with a litany of SBCs surrounding him. Endgame teams shouldn’t be a regular sight in December, and it kills all the fun by having every game be an absolute sweatfest.

2. Scrap meaningless consumables

Is there a human being alive who enjoys the concept of Contracts or Healing? Like Fitness cards, they were a tricky yet strategic element of Ultimate Team in years gone by, but the abundance of packs, free packs, and rewards means you’ll simply never run out of them now.

They’ve become a nuisance for the sake of being a nuisance and add nothing to the game. I get that they’re also there to fill up packs as rares, but in that case, find new ways of going about it – as they did with Position Modifier cards.

3. Bring back the Win/Loss system for Division Rivals

The checkpoint system was an attempt to reinvigorate FUT Rivals and give it a shake-up. The only problem was that the classic Promotion/Relegation system across a set number of games wasn’t broken – so they didn’t need to ‘fix’ it.

Now, you can be permanently stuck in limbo in a division that you’re not entirely comfortable with for a whole season. This makes the grind for Weekly Rewards harder (another mistake was changing the total needed to 8 for the Reward Upgrade) and your gameplay more frustrating.

Bring back the old system, please.

4. Increase the challenge of FUT Moments for more rewards

The big concern was that FUT Moments was going to become stale very quickly, and that turned out to be the case as EA didn’t make them worth completing as the Season 1 rewards were tragically woeful.

It’s a novel concept having bitesize segments of gameplay to grind towards rewards, but therein lies the second problem – the gameplay is tedious.

Playing against a team with a guaranteed minimum of 20 in-game minutes left to play and winning by 2 goals on Semi-Pro is not appealing to anyone, let alone challenges that dumb the difficulty down even more.

Give us interesting scenarios where we can choose multiple different difficulty levels, a la Squad Battles, and offer us fun, varied objectives to complete with decent rewards on the line. Otherwise, FUT Moments risks being a great concept that ends up dying – like FUT Draft.

5. Guaranteed rewards for FUT Champions

Unless you’re finishing extremely high up in FUT Champions, then it’s a serious case of Forest Gump syndrome with FUT Champions as you literally have no idea what you’re going to get.

Now, in fairness, big respect has to go to EA as they reduced the original 40 games down to 30 and now to 20, but for lots of people, 20 is still a hefty commitment. So, if you’re going to battle your heart and soul out to try and rack up as many wins as possible, then you want to be rewarded.

Worse still, players who are getting 12-16 wins, sometimes more, are getting amazing rewards on paper, but being shafted when it comes to their actual prizes. It would make sense to implement a system similar to Rivals in that players can pick from two or three rewards, with at least one option guaranteeing you an 86+ player for example.

These are just some of the ways in which we’d go about improving EA’s football game moving forward as we head into the new era of EA Sports FC.

The long-awaited Path Of Exile 2 will be fully unveiled next year, first at Exilecon 2023 before heading to Gamescom in August for European players to check out in the flesh, devs Grinding Gear Games have confirmed. Path Of Exile 2 had been penciled in for a 2022 release, but it's now looking like the sequel could arrive in time for the series' tenth anniversary. A beta is planned, too, and dates for that will be announced when the game is shown at Exilecon.

GGG's CEO Chris Wilson declined to go into detail about what we can expect to see from Path Of Exile 2 at Gamescom during a press preview of today's Forbidden Sanctum expansion stream, but he did say that development on the sequel is going well. time since we last heard much about the game. Path Of Exile 2 was first announced at Exilecon 2019, just a little more than three years ago. It's set to introduce a second, seven-act storyline that's playable alongside the original Path Of Exile camp .

We rated the OG Path Of Exile among the best RPGs to play on PC earlier this year, and plonked it on our list of the best free PC games too. Path Of Exile was released in 2013 but still gets a fresh expansion every three months. This time around GGG are taking the game roguelike with The Forbidden Sanctum, which pits your character against multiple floors of perilous dungeons and chucks all sorts of boons, afflictions and bosses at them.

Read More: Tips For Running Path Of Exile Sanctum League

Path Of Exile 2 doesn’t have a release date yet, as you’d expect. I’ll let you know when I hear more but. For now, Path Of Exile’s The Forbidden Sanctum expansion is in full swing.

2023 marks the 10th anniversary of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and the MMORPG is bigger than it’s ever been. FFXIV is set to get another big drop of post-Endwalker content with Patch 6.3, titled Gods Revel, Lands Tremble. As you might expect there are plenty of new Main Scenario quests for players to dive into, but there’s quite a bit of other content on the way as well, including one major job rework. Here’s everything you need to know about FFXIV’s Patch 6.3

When is the FFXIV Patch 6.3 release date?

Patch 6.3 — Gods Revel, Lands Tremble — will go live on January 10, 2023. As is usual with these patches, you can expect FFXIV to go down the evening of January 9, with maintenance running into the early morning. Although Square Enix hasn’t announced the exact time for maintenance yet, the main patches usually start at roughly 10 p.m. Eastern and run until 6 a.m. Eastern.

Patch 6.3 New Alliance Raid and more additions

Per usual, Patch 6.3 will feature a handful of new Main Scenario Quests, a new dungeon, and a new trial. The dungeon this time around is called Lapis Manalis, and is described as follows “In pursuit of voidsent, you learn of an abandoned village in the mountains of Garlemald where Garleans once practiced the reaper arts. But what will you find there deep in the heart of the mountain?”

The big changes in Patch 6.3, however, is the continuation of the Myths of the Realm Alliance Raid, with Part 2: Euphrosyne. Once again players will come face-to-face with The Twelve, the guardian deities of Eorzea. This is the land of revelry for the gods, and this time around players will be facing Nophica, Althyk, Halone, and Menphina. Of course, keep in mind to access Euphrosyne, you’ll need to be level 90, have a sufficient equipment level, and be up to date with the Myths of the Realm questline.

Treasure Hunt is also getting a bit of an update and will change to a new treasure dungeon “The Shifting Gymnasion Agonon.” You can access the new dungeon through a treasure map that’s usable in Elpis.

Those are the major additions, but there are plenty of other smatterings of content as well, which we’ll cover below.

• New Unreal Trial - Containment Bay P1T6 (Unreal)

• Additional Duty Support for Heavensward - Duty Support added for The Great Gubal Library, Sohr Khai, The Aetherochemical Research Facility, Xelphatol, The Antitwoer, and Baelsar’s Wall.

• New quests for Tataru’s Grand Endeavor

• PvP Season Three Starts as well as Season Five of Crystalline Conflict. A new arena for Crtyalline Conflict “The Clockwork Castletown” will be added.

• Island Sanctuary Update - New ranks, visions, items, materials, crops, animals, and handicrafts.

• New Housing Wards - All housing wards will get 6 new regular wards as well as 6 new subdivisions. (1800 new plots per world)

• Alternate UI Theme - Clear Blue

• Umbrella fashion accessory can be automatically opened when it rains

• New Gear

• New Custom Deliveries for Anden

Additionally, a couple of pieces of content will be added in the sub-patches for the 6.3 series, which we don’t have exact dates for yet.

• (Patch 6.31) Ultimate Duty #5 - The Omega Protocol (Ultimate). This will release two weeks after Patch 6.3, and players need to have completed Abyssos: The Eighth Circle (Savage).

• (Patch 6.35) - Continuation of Somehow Further Hildabrand Adventures questline.

• (Patch 6.35) - Deep Dungeon #3 Eureka Orthos - In order to access players need to have complete MSQ of Endwalker and reached floor 50 of Palace of the Dead.

Patch 6.3 Paladin Bulwark and more changes

Outside of new content, there are some fairly major changes coming to the Paladin job, which fans have been asking for since the launch of Endwalker. Other jobs are only getting minor adjustments to usability. Below you can see an overview of the changes, straight from the latest Live Letter.

• Rotations have been shortened to accommodate high-powered actions.

• Damage over time effect for Goring Blade and Blade of Valor was removed and their potency adjusted.

• Divine Might is now applied after weaponskill combos, allowing an enhanced Holy Spirit to be executed once without casting.

• Holy Sheltron’s effect has been changed to reduce damage taken, thereby enhancing defensive capabilities against damage over time.

• The previously removed Bulwark ability has been revamped and reintroduced, offering increased defensive capability.

• Utility of several other actions and combos have also been adjusted.

Recent Genshin Impact leaks give more information about two new skins for Ayaka and Lisa which are expected to arrive in the upcoming months.

New Genshin Impact leaks reveal the potential appearance of the upcoming costumes for two popular characters, Ayaka and Lisa. Even though the game's characters are the focal point of the game as they are its main source of revenue, HoYoverse does not introduce skins that often.

The last two costumes arrive back in Genshin Impact update 2.8 which introduced the first five-star skin for Diluc named Red Dead of Night. The Electro user Fischl also received a new outfit in the same update which was obtainable for free during the Summertime Odyssey event.

A new post on the Genshin Impact Leaks subreddit reveals the design of the two new skins for Ayaka and Lisa. Both concepts were apparently created based on previous leaks revealed by Team China, a group of credible Genshin Impact leakers. While these leaks should be taken with a grain of salt, almost every previous outfit that was introduced to Genshin Impact went through the same leaking process, meaning that the new skins will probably look very similar to the concepts. There is no information about their rarity, but players expect Ayaka's skin to have a five-star rating which would equip the character with a new set of effects.

While some players in the comment section claim that they like the new skin, especially if it has new SFX effects, others claim that they would not spend over $20 on a costume that has a similar color theme to Ayaka's current outfit.

The Cryo user is one of the most popular characters in the game which is probably one of the reasons why she was chosen to receive a new skin. She even holds the record for most sales within a single Genshin Impact banner cycle, however, it should be noted that her numbers were inflated due to a three-week delay during 2.6.