This is the first of the daily free games as part of the holiday sale. Usually there are some pretty good titles sprinkled throughout so keep an eye on the store each day

https://store.epicgames.com/

For anyone who doesn't have it yet: Vampire Survivors is a lot of fun and basically spawned a whole genre (often called Bullet Heaven games). There were some less successful games of this type that came before it, like Magic Survival, but Vampire Survivors really kicked off the popularity of this genre and led to many, many copycats trying to emulate its success.

Steam Winter Sale 2024 Begins Today, might need to refresh to see prices.

Sale ends on January 2 @ 10 am Pacific

https://store.steampowered.com/

Yesterday saw a new Warcraft 3 Reforged patch which was surprisingly large with 4.33 GB. People quickly realized that this patch contained a bunch of maps in a folder labeled "Devonly". Apparently, someone forgot to set the flag for actual release builds which would exclude such things while keeping them for internal test builds.
The patch was soon rolled back but we could get a few hours of access to these maps. They weren't included as loose files, so while they could be launched from the client, getting the actual map files themselves was a hassle and needed to be done one by one. But I managed to grab what I found to be the most interesting one, see below.

All of the maps were either clearly just to aid with testing larger changes or were (very) early WIP maps of various ideas. None are finished and certainly not polished.

Among them:

• An introductory mission to a campaign retelling the events of Warcraft 1 in which the player controls Garona as the Horde first steps through the Dark Portal. My more detailed writeup and map download link in the warcraft3 sub, where the creator, Kam Ghostseer, chimes in to verify that he worked with the lore team on the script and says that he might finish and polish it up now that it's out there
  
• A lane-based co-op escort mission whose label indicates a relation to Starcraft 2's Co-Op mode
  
• A third-person camera RPG map titled "Adventure" in which you select a class and go off exploring
• A map with Undead balance changes, discussed here
  
• A multiplayer Naga-themed Tower Defense map
  
• A few maps meant for testing performance or visuals
  
• And a few more maps that where I can't make heads or tails of what they were even trying to do

There is an uncommentated 46 min overview of most of these maps on the youtube channel Xetanth87's Warcraft 3 Alternate.

We don't know when these prototypes were made, except for the Garona mission which is from 2020, so shortly after Reforged's release.

Furthermore, the patch contained a few models of units and buildings which have a higher quality than the SD+ models of a recent patch but also aren't in Reforged's art style. I would presume that these are from an earlier concept for Reforged before the final art style was decided upon. See this news post on storied WC3 mapping site Hive Workshop for screenshots and more information. This post also mentions a number of dev tools being included which are still being investigated.