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Destiny 2 is the new UK chart number one and the biggest game launch of 2017 so far - but physical sales were down by more than half compared to the launch of Destiny 1.

Here at Digital Foundry, we're a little late to the party with Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, but we felt compelled to weigh in on this exceptional title. In addition to being a beautiful, brilliantly designed strategy game, it's also a technological showcase for Nintendo's handheld, designed using Massive Entertainment's Snowdrop Engine - the rendering foundation for Tom Clancy's The Division. It's surely one of gaming's most unlikely engine transitions but according to Ubisoft, a core tenet of its creation hinges on the concept of working smarter - doing things better, not bigger.

There was a time when Digital Foundry would produce bespoke performance videos - and indeed Eurogamer articles - for virtually every major release. With so many games seemingly rushed to market, how well a particular title would run was a crucial factor in any purchasing decision. Thankfully, quality in this area is much improved across the board, but in the case of Ark: Survival Evolved, performance remains a major weakness for the game - even now, after finally emerging from Early Access.

Battlefield games have been wrestling with size for a little while. Mostly, it's worn as a badge of honour - grand battles, giant maps, The Great War - and mostly that's fair. But it does lead to some problems. A death timer is replaced with a long trudge through empty, expansive desert or mud; the front line - quite important in a game based on years of static trench warfare - is often more of a swirling carousel of capture-and-forget control points; and the best work of your crack squad can, at times, feel like a churning, futile struggle to make waves in a 64-man ocean (although that kind of existential doubt is at least fitting for the setting).

Last year, Chris Donlan called the experimental interactive experience Islands: Non-Places the best game he'd played about LA. Given that he wrote the definitive article about games set in LA, I won't argue with him. That said, there's a new contender on the horizon with Ben Esposito's quirky puzzler Donut County.

Destiny 2 is at last in our hands. It's been three years since the original launched, and in that time, developer Bungie has put some serious work into its sequel to create a richer, more beautiful world to explore. It's a game that addresses many of the original's shortcomings - adding a stronger narrative backbone, while improving what already shined in its gameplay and visuals. Evolving from the solid foundation of the first Destiny, does this sequel's revised tech truly satisfy in terms of graphical upgrades? Or is it more the case that the more profound changes have actually happened behind the scenes with Bungie's content creation framework?

Destiny 2 is here! Have you noticed? Oh, I have so many memories of the first one: those huge Romantic skyboxes, that tangle of rusted cars, piled high against a patchwork wall, the roar of the shotgun, the endless hunt for Xur and his bargains.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has passed one million concurrent Steam Players.

Bungie has yet to officially announce Destiny 2's first DLC, but details of it are already visible on Microsoft's Xbox Store.

There's a wonderful moment in Destiny 2, and it happens before the game's even started. A series of loading screens commemorate some of your finest achievements in the first game, collating beautiful ink work that acts as a tribute to you, the player. It's an artful reminder of the magic the original Destiny was able to weave, as well as a personal invitation to reminisce about the delirious fortnight my own band of brothers spent trying and repeatedly failing to smash through the Vault of Glass before Atheon was finally brought to his knees.

Blizzard has announced it will open its own esports arena on 7th October.

Hello dear listeners and welcome back to Arcadia Baes - Eurogamer's podcast for Life is Strange, a game we like to talk a lot about. We're back to chat about the new Before the Storm prequel - so expect full spoilers for episode one.

The Call of Duty Endowment is expanding its support to the UK.

Indie heist game Monaco: What's Yours is Mine is free on Steam until 6pm (BST) this evening.

YouTubers Trevor "TmarTn" Martin and Thomas "Syndicate" Cassell have dodged a fine for their promotion of a gambling site, which they secretly owned.

Started playing Destiny 2? Developer Bungie has now laid down a roadmap for which in-game events will happen next.

This year at Gamescom, I had a remarkable opportunity to sit down and discuss Shenmue 3 with Yu Suzuki himself. As a long-time Sega fan, it was difficult not to be excited by the proposition. After all, during his tenure at Sega, Suzuki and his team at AM2 crafted many of the greatest and most influential arcade games of all time. This was followed with the incredibly ambitious Shenmue - a game I enjoyed so much that it singlehandedly sparked the creation of the DF Retro series.

Ubisoft's comedy RPG South Park: The Fractured but Whole features various levels of difficulty, from easy to very difficult, much like most games. What's different though is the difficulty affects the colour of your character's skin.

UPDATE 9PM BST: CD Projekt Red has since downplayed the "few days" proximity to me. "PS4 Pro and Xbox One X: both technical updates are coming," senior PR manager Radek Adam Grabowski told me. "More details about them, including the exact moment when they will be released, are something we are going to announce when the right time comes." Will it be "just a few days", then, or significantly longer?

Destiny 2, for all its glories, has come under fire from fans upset about how it's changed its customisable armour colours, or "shaders" as Destiny parlance goes, to one-time use consumables. In the first Destiny you could change your shaders to you heart's content, as playing dress-up is one of the core appeals of Bungie's cosmic online shooter.

Nioh's third and final expansion, Bloodshed's End, will arrive on 26th September, developer Team Ninja has announced.

Xbox One users can play Skyrim: Special Edition for free this weekend.

UPDATE 7/9/17: Not content with giving you a chunk of the game free on launch, developer MercurySteam will let you play Raiders of the Broken Planet's opening missions a week early without charge.

Rockstar Games has announced 1940s detective game LA Noire for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and a spin-off virtual reality experience for HTC Vive. All three console games are coming 14th November. There's no date on the VR game.

Back at Gamescom, I got the chance to play around an hour of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Nintendo's big role-playing game exclusive pencilled in for launch on Switch this Christmas. I'm told I was the first person at the show - and apparently the first outside of Nintendo - to go hands-on. Surprisingly little has been seen so far, bearing in mind the game's impending launch, so I'm a little lost when I find myself dropped a dozen or so hours into the game's campaign. I'll be learning its many battle systems on the fly - and I do definitely spend my entire time with the game learning, as layer upon layer of gameplay unfurls itself and things slowly, mostly start to make sense.

The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ is now available on Nintendo Switch in Europe in physical and digital versions.

"The empire on which the sun never sets, and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained," George Macartney wrote of Britain's colonial territories in 1773. In the universe of Sunless Skies, an everlasting Queen Victoria has made this fond pronouncement a literal truth, replacing Earth's sun with a clockwork star, a sun that sets only because her Majesty wills it. The Empire, what's more, has come to reign over not just outer space but the very raw material of time - unearthing minutes like ore from the drifting ruins of the Reach, one of the new game's four discrete regions, and using them to accelerate construction projects or cruelly drag out prison terms, amongst other things. As a budding steamship captain, you too can get in on the trade, shipping wax-sealed casks of unseasoned hours alongside "everyday" commodities like aborted lab experiments or crates of human souls. It's both a parody of how empires construct their own realities, their own, brutal systems of measurement and definition, and something that hits a bit closer to home - a send-up of the energy-based mechanics of freemium social games like Failbetter's original text RPG Fallen London, where time is indeed money, a thing you can stockpile.

It seems there are a number of Destiny 2 players who are unable to log-in to the game today.

I'm nearing the end of Destiny 2's campaign and must say I'm enjoying it a lot. But there's one aspect of Bungie's ultra-hyped shared-world shooter that has gone down like a lead balloon: microtransactions.

If there's one aspect of Xbox One X coverage we've yet to explore in depth so far, it's how enhanced first-party titles compare with existing PC and Xbox One versions of the same game. For example, all marketing of the beautiful Forza Motorsport 7 has been on X hardware, while other titles such as Sea of Thieves have only been demoed thus far running on the Xbox One S. The good news is that at Gamescom, we were given access to an early build of Halo Wars 2 running on Xbox One X, and armed with 4K direct feed capture, we're able to offer an early look at scalability on an established Xbox Play Anywhere title.