It takes a lot for a Minecraft mod to impress me these days, such is the abundance of third-party addons and expansions for Mojang's digital LEGO set. So it says a lot that the trailer for the recently released Create Aeronautics mod made me catch my breath a little bit. This huge addon lets players build and pilot fully functional vehicles across the game's angular landscapes, allowing you to construct anything from offroad vehicles to enormous airships.

An addon for Minecraft's already substantial Create mod, Create Aeronautics has three key strands that facilitate its vehicular construction. The first is what the modders refer to as "Simulated", the fundamentals of the mod that facilitate vehicular construction. These include new block types, redstone components and other necessary tools, like the ability to use slime to stick different components together. It basically gives Minecraft the kind of contraption-building tools you'd see in a game like Besiege.

The second element is the eponymous aeronautics section, which introduces the key components necessary for creating flying machines. These include propellor bearings that let you create prop planes and helicopters, burners for building hot air balloons, and special floating blocks designed to create lift. Alongside aerial vehicles, tools like propellers will also let you build powered boats and ships, meaning you're no longer restricted to using that implausibly fast wooden rowboat.

Finally, there's the "Offroad" section dedicated to creating terrestrial vehicles. This allows you to build engines, suspensions, and that rarest of phenomena in Minecraft's world, round(ish) wheels. As the name suggests, the main purpose of these tools is for creating all-terrain vehicles, but as shown in the trailer, you could also use them to build combine harvesters to mechanise your crop farming.

Create Aeronautics is available to download now. As the title suggests, you'll need the broader Create mod installed to play it, as well as Sable, a mod that adds a physics pipeline to Minecraft and allows groups of blocks to interact with one another.

Since Marathon launched, one gun has dominated both the battlefield and the discourse. No, I don't mean the Biotoxic Disinjector, which while ferociously powerful, is unlikely to appear outside of Cryo Archive due to its rarity. I'm instead referring to the almighty WSTR shotgun, by far the best weapon to carry in your back pocket as you explore Tau Ceti IV

Marathon's double-barrelled delete key is so powerful that it has already been nerfed once, with a dramatic reduction in range making it virtually useless outside of close encounters. But it remains the most effective solution to any encounter where you can see the decals beneath an enemy runner's eyes.

Indeed, the WSTR's dominance of the secondary weapon slot has become a source of concern for Bungie, and as such they're planning to nerf the shotgun a second time. Come Tuesday, WSTR-wielding players will need to work a bit harder against players equipped with strong shields.

"We're gonna take a shot at bringing the WSTR more in line," Marathon's game director Joe Ziegler wrote in a Steam post on Saturday. "Right now, it's become a dominant option and is eclipsing a lot of the other short range options that exist in the game."

As such, Tuesday's update will tweak the WSTR so that it can no longer down an enemy runner equipped with a blue shield (or above) in two shots. Ziegler explained his reasoning: "The ideal is that in the majority of cases this will force a reload in scenarios where the target has a blue shield, allowing for more counterplay in these scenarios."

Ziegler notes that the WSTR will still be able to knock down players equipped with green shields in two shots, meaning it will remain a powerful option for players exploring the earlier maps where green shields are most common. Frankly, I think this is the right call. The WSTR a great weapon for leveling the playing field as a newer player, and a real treat when you get one. But you shouldn't be relying on it by the time you're exploring places like Outpost. You need to be able to adapt.

Bungie has shown it isn't afraid to take big swings with Marathon's meta, and I'm enjoying watching it shift and evolve enormously. Its ongoing sponsored kits only experiment has been a ton of fun so far, limiting all players to a free loadout for a more carefree extraction experience. It's also grimly amusing how its recently added Mercy Kits—designed to let players revive downed rivals—are instead being used to murder players twice. That's Marathon, folks.

"This may be one of the longest running secrets in the history of The Elder Scrolls we are about to reveal," says the holy repository of knowledge that is the Ultimate Elder Scrolls Portal, "this has seemingly stayed hidden for 28 years from general knowledge."

In 1998, Bethesda released a third-person action-adventure set in the realm of Hammerfell called The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard. It's a bit Tomb Raider, a bit Sid Meier's Pirates, and a whole lot janky. With its pre-set fully voiced protagonist, Redguard's quite different to the Elder Scrolls RPGs, and still quite divisive.

Its got followers though, enough that there's a Redguard Unity project working to port it to the Unity engine, just like Daggerfall before it. And it's thanks to the Redguard Unity project that the UESP was able to learn what happens if you try to upskirt an NPC in Redguard using the free camera.

You see a smiley face. Someone at Bethesda knew we'd try this, and almost 28 years later we got laughed at for trying to see up the dress of a Hammerfell lady trying to go about her Hammerfell business. Frankly, it's what we deserve.

Redguard Unity aims to make the crash-happy Redguard more stable on modern systems, as well as update it with a more modern control scheme, improved visuals, and mod support. I was never that put off by the control scheme, which was at least a step up from the frankly unforgivable controls the Tomb Raider series suffered with for years, but a version of Redguard that doesn't crash just because I tried to screenshot a cutscene would be ace.

Owlcat's RPGs have a history of launching in a terrible state but improving significantly over time. When I replayed Rogue Trader last year, with the benefit of a bunch of patches and a couple of expansions, I had a much better time than I did when it was brand new and I hit a progress-blocking bug that meant I had to replay all of act one. But even then, when I told people it was finally a good time to jump in, the most vocal response was from people who would rather keep waiting.

And fair enough. Because we knew there would be even more to come, and that's what Owlcat is promoting now, with a character trailer revealing the companion being added in The Infinite Museion DLC. It's Eogann Februs, a tech-priest.

Which is a bit underwhelming if you were expecting something a bit more exotic. There's already a tech-priest among Rogue Trader's crew of companions, and although the Adeptus Mechanicus certainly do contain multitudes—Bulwark's tactics game Mechanicus was a great example of that—if you thought we were getting Trazyn the Infinite or an ork or a tau or something mad like that, this must be a bit of a letdown.

At the same time, Owlcat's just released a trailer showcasing a companion you can recruit in the playable alpha for Dark Heresy. Haymar Devos is a guardsman from the infamous death world of Catachan, which is basically the jungle from Predator stretched over an entire planet. Every single trooper recruited on Catachan is an '80s action-movie hero, including a Rambo analogue called Sly Marbo. Which is pretty rad.

Fraser's been playing the Dark Heresy alpha and he's impressed so far, saying it has everything he wants from a CRPG. It's still labeled as "coming soon" on Steam, as is the Infinite Museion DLC for Rogue Trader.

Monitors are kind of important. Like, you need them to see the games you play, man. But on a deeper level, picking the right one to see your games as intended actually is important—be that going up to 4K for those beautifully rendered textures or OLED for true blacks. Monitor manufacturer AOC seems to agree, and it has a whole new range for you to pick from.

In a press conference I attended in Croatia today, Cesar Reyes Acosta, European commercial leader for AOC, showed off said new monitors, and asked questions as 'food for thought'. These were a series of prodding inquiries intended to explain why one might want a new monitor right now (or, I suppose, in a few months, with some of them out in June and July).

The first and most important question was "Is it smart to buy an OLED monitor today?" Effectively, with the memory crisis continuing to rage, taking GPU prices up with it, Acosta argues that swapping to OLED will feel more monumental than paying all that cash for quicker memory or an upgraded GPU.

Following up, he pointed to how things have changed in five years, showing that the AOC 24G2SPU launched for €239 with a 23.8 HD 165 Hz screen and 4 ms response time. Inversely, the AOC 127G4ZR is a 27-inch 1440p 260 Hz panel, with a 1 ms response time and HDR 400, and it comes in at the same price.

After showing this comparison, Acosta asked: "Are monitors anti-inflation?"

When compared to what has happened to the price of memory? Monitors are certainly in a better situation. When we consider the normal passage of time and the development of tech? Absolutely not. But the point is taken, even if presented playfully. Monitors are getting better-priced and higher-specced with time, and it is becoming much easier to buy monitors for less money.

But not all of AOC's new monitor announcements are about getting more monitor for less money. On the OLED front, AOC is releasing the AGP346UCSD, which uses the 5th-generation QD-OLED tech (bye bye, font fringe) and offers a 34-inch HDR 500 TrueBlack panel with a 1440p resolution, for €999. It is also launching a 4th-generation W-OLED 1440p 27-inch 540 Hz monitor called the AGP277QCKD for €899 in June.

Its sister company Philips has also unveiled the Evnia 27M2K5901A, which is a €799 5K (165 Hz) monitor with a dual-mode to swap to 1440p (at 330 Hz).

I stand by the fact that swapping to OLED is arguably one of the most monumental changes I've made in my gaming setup, but it's definitely strange to think of a monitor as being a good buy for your rig because you can't afford memory or a graphics card. That's perhaps made a little weirder by the fact that it's coming from the company selling the monitor to you. Even if the monitors seem pretty great.

A few weeks ago, Philips announced the Evnia 27M2G5800, a poetically-named, 27-inch, 5K dual-mode gaming monitor for sale in China, and today, the company has announced a western counterpart—the 27M2D5901A (yeah, monitor names are like that). I managed to get hands-on experience with the screen at a press event in Croatia, and dual-mode works as well as I'd want it to.

The all-white panel is capable of swapping between 5120 x 2880 (165 Hz) and 2560 x 1440 (330 Hz). The use case here is putting one game on its highest possible resolution for those pretty, immersive games, and swapping to 1440p for competitive play in another. 330 Hz is certainly on the high-end in that regard, while 5K is more or less wasted on the likes of Counter-Strike 2.

Also, if your rig is a tad lacking and you plan on upgrading in the future, you can focus on 1440p for the time being, then swap when you finally have the power to justify 5K—though there's very little out there with the power to justify 5K at the moment.

Cesar Reyes Acosta, the European Commercial Leader for Philips' sister company AOC, tells me "ours is the same [as the 27M2G5800], but ours is more equipped."

The 27M2D5901A, as well as having that all-white look, has Philips Ambilight built in. That means it has lights on the back which you can sync up to your games. As part of this, Philips' new 5,000-8,000 series (the mid to top-end) all come with Philips' own AI lighting system and Matter compatibility. This means you can hook up your monitor to your smart lights and blast your entire room with light when you get a flashbang hurled at you… theoretically.

It also comes with a 65 W USB Type-C in the back, so you can charge your laptop from it while it's plugged in, or use it to power a USB hub in a pinch.

The 27M2D5901A will be available in July this year, and comes in at a recommended price of €799. Roughly exchanged, that works out to $940 at the time of writing, but I'm told there aren't yet any plans to launch the monitor in the US. Hopefully, that will change in the future.

On paper, it's rather similar to the Asus ROG Strix XG27JCG. Both monitors offer 5K dual-mode, and they're the same size. AOC's offering, if it launches in the US, will likely come in at north of $900, but Asus's is available for $849. Both are IPS, and AOC's comes in at 50 nits brighter. That means there's a slight upgrade in brightness, a neat look, and some flashy lights in exchange for the extra cash.

In testing, I managed to swap between the resolutions mostly easily (thanks to the new OSD), and it happened in just a few seconds. The little bit of gaming I managed to get on the monitor was certainly pretty , and that 5K resolution is killer. €799 is an eye-watering fee for an IPS panel, but not out of the norm for 5K, especially with dual-mode.

But my eyes have become so accustomed to OLED at this point that I'm not entirely convinced I can go back, and 5K is a budding field, so whether or not you want to get in on the ground floor is a tough decision. You are getting a relatively low brightness here, and 5K is likely only due to get better with time, but I can't say I wasn't impressed by the panel, the monitor, and the pretty lights nonetheless.

Last week, popular World of Warcraft private server Turtle WoW got hit with a cease and desist from Blizzard after a judge ruled in the studio's favor regarding a copyright infringement suit filed last September. Court documents revealed that the two parties reached a settlement that hinged on "certain actions that are required to be taken by certain parties," and today, the other shoe dropped for anyone still playing the modded MMO: a forum post announced a complete shutdown of the project.

"Working on Turtle WoW has been the highlight of our lives," said Turtle WoW developer Torta in the post. "The adventures you had, the battles you fought, and the friends you met are what made it all worthwhile. We hope you will cherish those moments. What we leave behind are fond memories of an 8-year-long journey, and we hope you'll remember it every now and then."

The servers will close on May 14, and all servers have been shot forward to the final patch "for those who want to see the new raids before the project's sunset." All associated social media channels, including the forum site, will close later this year on Oct. 16.

Fans of the server saying their farewells on the subreddit and forum. "Wish I ended up playing more and dinging 60 in the end, but the time I did spend was fun. Thanks for the game and wishing everyone all the best," wrote forum user Zeran. Reddit user ElChuppolaca wrote, "This is genuinely heartbreaking but I figured it would come seeing as they delayed any response for so long."

If you're unfamiliar with the server, it takes an Old School RuneScape approach to World of Warcraft's pre-expansion era, back before you could roll a paladin on the Horde or get an epic mount without grinding for hours. There are new raids, zones, playable races, and dungeons, but nothing that raises the max level or incorporates lore from recent story arcs.

The server aimed to deliver the "Classic Plus" experience fans of vanilla WoW have clamored for since official pre-expansion servers landed, and with Blizzard teasing its own take on the idea following the end of the game's Season of Discovery, it's hard not to see parallels with the shutdown of Nostalrius (which came just a year before World of Warcraft Classic was announced).

Regrettably, it seems that publisher-approved fan servers like EverQuest's Project 1999 and City of Heroes's Homecoming are the exception and not the rule, as in the end, the Turtle WoW team's open plea for a fan server licensing framework proved fruitless.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, RPG veteran and Fallout Designer Tim Cain talked about the first time he was ever exposed to Dungeons & Dragons, a pivotal influence on the developer: Some of his mother's coworkers showed him the ropes all the way back in the Carter administration. Oh, and they happened to be high-ranking US naval officers.

"If you started playing D&D on a computer, where there's no DM, the computer handles it all, … you don't have to learn how to run the rules," Cain said, contrasting his experience of learning D&D from first principles with how the game now informs so many assumptions about gaming and role playing.

Cain's mother worked at a Judge Advocate General (JAG) office, a division of the US military dedicated to legal affairs. "She came home one day and said, 'The boys at work are playing a game, we've been invited over this weekend to play,'" Cain recalled. The "boys," as Cain's mother put it, "were some captains, I think one admiral in the Navy," according to the developer. "We drove over on a Saturday and spent I think four to five hours at their house."

The seamen were playing sans-miniatures, something which surprised Cain at the time. "A good first two hours were just making a character," said Cain, who had played computer and board games before, but had never encountered anything like 1st Edition Advanced D&D's snarl of classes, rules, and contingencies.

Cain's first character? Unable to decide on just one class, he multiclassed right out of the gate with an elf Fighter/Cleric/Magic User⁠—a little bit of everything. "There wasn't really a limit to what kind of questions I could ask and what actions I could specify I was doing," said Cain. "Stuff was written on my character sheet, and I wanted to do it all.

"Everything that day was new. I wonder if you've had a day like this too, where you're sitting down, and you're playing this crazy game unlike anything you've ever played … The polyhedral dice were new, I'd never seen anything like that."

Cain said he was "absolutely enthralled" by the new game. "On the way home, I was super-excited. I was talking to my mom all about the game." While she eventually withdrew from the play session itself to trade chili recipes with one of the officers' wives, Cain's mother was supportive of his interest: "My mom just turned to me and said, 'Do you want to stop at the game store on the way home and see what they have?'"

The rest, as they say, was history. Cain got the AD&D Monster Manual and a boxed set⁠—presumably the 1977 version of the Basic Set, given the timing? He and his friends would voraciously play D&D in the coming years. In addition to eventually leading development on one of the great D&D games, The Temple of Elemental Evil, Cain has said that his deep understanding of 2E AD&D's THAC0 system helped secure his job at Interplay.

While it's certainly possible that Cain could have discovered the game somewhere else, it sounds like that fateful afternoon and the tutelage of the DM, who Cain called "Captain Dave," were the perfect introduction to tabletop roleplaying. So I feel pretty good saying a hearty "thank you" to Captain Dave for Fallout, Arcanum, and all the other games Cain has worked on or influenced⁠—there are a lot of them.

Portal 2 is one of the easiest-to-recommend games in the entire medium, and part of that is down to the custom levels scene it's inspired for over a decade now. There are around a million on the game's Steam Workshop entry alone—and if you've ever tried modding it yourself and chafed at the game's limitations, you'll be pleased to learn about Portal 2: Community Edition, which released into open beta yesterday.

The announcement video is careful to clarify that this isn't a remake or an overhaul of Portal 2's core action or campaign, nor is it a campaign itself. Instead, it's a "community-maintained" build which adds new lighting tech, volumetrics, support for more detailed textures, custom campaign support with built-in UI, expanded scripting capabilities, and an overhaul to the Hammer map editor.

These things are possible thanks to Strata Source, a fork of the CS:GO engine, which P2:CE is built on and was used to make mind-bending Portal 2 mods like Portal: Revolution. You can find a breakdown of the changes in the announcement video, as well as a showcase of what people have done with it so far. The Steam page casually shows a custom level which squeezes all of Portal 1 into a singlemap, so I'm curious to see what modders cook up now that CE is available to everyone.

You can peruse the projects people have already made on the mod's workshop page (not Portal 2's, mind you, but Community Edition's). That includes Half-Life 2 maps now accessible from the custom campaign menu, a gallery of assets recreated with higher quality textures, and an original puzzle called Lesbian Kissing.

There may not be a ton of new playable goodies to pick through just yet, but it sounds like the team behind CE are working on an original campaign to go with the mod itself. Give modders some time, and I'm sure it won't be long before we're seeing custom maps that look like they're from a completely different game.

Ever since Godzilla first battled Mechagodzilla all the way back in 1974, it's been clear to everyone that nothing exists which cannot be made cooler by the inclusion of giant robots. This axiom is self-evident, so there's no need to ask a question like, "Would Doom be cooler if you could pilot a mech in it?" Thankfully, someone did anyway.

The proof is in the pudding, the pudding in this case being Redxone's MechDoomer: Rebooted—a souped-up take on a mod which gleefully jams Doom and MechWarrior together. It adjusts the UI, adds "mech-assault styled movement," and gives you a full suite of customizable weapon slots so you can stomp a round in the legendary FPS Battletech style.

The new 1.0 release features a whopping 28 mechs you can pilot, all of which are split among light, medium, heavy, and assault classes. The iconic Atlas is included alongside stuff like the Crab and Kit Fox, and it's impressive just how different the game looks through the lens of a swaying cockpit.

Some third-person gameplay is shown in the release trailer, and while the low-poly mechs are a little uncanny in Doom's sprite-filled labyrinths, seeing a Tarantula squash a horde of demons by goomba-stomping them into a torrent of gore is a joyous sight indeed. The description states the scale of these bots is "fully customizable," making the mod "compatible with all sorts of different level geometry."

Since you can, as Redxone clarified on the Doomworld forums, exit your mech "whenever you please," it seems like it should play nice with a variety of other mods. A post on X from the team behind the Halo Doom mod reveals the two are compatible, along with "almost any weapon and monster mod you like to normally run." As always, it's never too late to warp Doom beyond recognition before your next playthrough.

Monitors are a flashy 'ol business: If you want to shop for one, you have to consider your dream resolution, size, and panel technology. That's before mentioning refresh rate, response time, and a whole host of other specs. But manufacturer AOC's gaming monitors have caught flack for something more prosaic: Their on-screen display (OSD), the interface you have to mess with should you want to adjust the settings.

But the company's aware of this problem, and working on a solution. At a press event in Croatia today, Cesar Reyes Acosta, the European Commercial Leader for AOC, told us, "I've read your reviews", and that AOC's software is "one of the most highlighted cons in reviews."

To fix this, all of the latest and upcoming monitors from the brand will come with a new OSD. I've tested it out myself, and found it mostly pretty easy to understand.

When you first open it up, it shows you basic information like the game mode, resolution, shadows and brightness, allowing you to adjust these light settings without going into any new menus.

If you want more control, you can then open up a second wave of more in-depth options, which give you more granular control. The point here seems to be finding what settings work for you and mostly swapping between those on the fly, then getting more granular should you want that.

The OSD will also highlight the type of AOC monitor you have. AOC Gaming is the more value-oriented end of AOC's offerings, and it has an orange UI. The mid-range Agon has a red UI, and the Agon Pro has a purple UI. This unified UI will be brought across to any new AOC monitors.

Though a bad UI is not the end of the world, AOC is continuing to add new dual-mode monitors to its lineup, and that is something that benefits from a good OSD. Effectively, dual-mode monitors can swap between different resolutions (and refresh rates) on the go, so being able to navigate its software better is certainly a boon.

Still, I was a little surprised to hear that the OSD took such a beating from users prior to now. Other than maybe looking through OLED settings or swapping refresh rate, I almost never touch my settings. I certainly think I would more, if I had my hands on one of those tasty dual-mode monitors, though.

Silver Script Games founder Alyx Jones had planned to roll out a trailer for her studio's new game, The Quiet Things, at last night's BAFTA awards—but as Jones shared in a LinkedIn post yesterday, she received a phone call the night before telling her the trailer had been pulled due to sensitive content.

"It was meant to be shown during the awards show and reveal our release date," Jones posted. "For the last two weeks I’d been working hard to cut this trailer together while already badly burned out, because I believed this was the biggest opportunity we were ever likely to get."

This wasn't the first time concerns had been raised about the trailer, which introduces the game's themes of childhood trauma, but Jones said she believed the issue was resolved to BAFTA's satisfaction.

"To have that pulled from under our feet the night before the show was devastating, especially after revising the trailer to remove imagery BAFTA flagged as potentially reading as 'weapons and violence' (an object inspection of a craft knife and a statue breaking out of a mirror), and being thanked for my speed and the quality of the trailer."

She continued that she offered to revise the trailer even further, but "was ignored," with BAFTA allegedly maintaining that "there wasn’t enough time to put the appropriate warnings in place for the audience."

In a statement to Kotaku, BAFTA responded to Jones' post. "We made a compliance decision not to show a trailer of an unreleased game that contains themes that may be a trigger for some, in consideration of our guests as we were not in a position to sufficiently warn them," the organization said. "We fully support games that engage with difficult subjects, and we made the decision in relation to our event only and with the wellbeing of all guests as our priority."

You can check out the new trailer on YouTube, and while it clearly evokes themes of abuse and trauma (mostly through dialogue and nonviolent, abstract visuals), it's certainly less shocking than, I don't know, any Larian trailer in recent memory. It's hard not to think of Horses, a game banned from multiple major digital storefronts for visuals and themes that, while perhaps uncommon in the videogame space, seem no more shocking than what you'd see in a mildly transgressive horror flick.

"Art should make people feel something," Jones continued in her post. "The Quiet Things is deeply personal to me. It’s my story. It’s about trauma, abuse, survival, and giving survivors a voice. It’s about people being shut down and silenced, and what that does to them. So there is something deeply painful about reliving that again now."

It may have taken 13 years, but you can finally explore a brand new slice of Grand Theft Auto. No, Grand Theft Auto 6 hasn't launched early. I'm referring to GTA: Carcer City, a new total conversion mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

GTA: Carcer City replaces San Andreas' massive map with a single metropolis, one that is inspired by (and shares the same name as) the city seen in 2003's Manhunt. Rockstar's grisly slaughter-fest is set in the same universe as Grand Theft Auto, which is one of those facts that I distantly recall learning at some point, but had for all intents and purposes forgotten in the years since.

In the context of Rockstar's alt-USA, Carcer City is located in its northeastern Rust Belt, taking visual cues from urban centres like Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh—the metropolitan flavour of the month courtesy of a certain wildly popular medical drama. Its various districts include a skyscraper-strewn downtown area, a shipping port, an airport, and a more historic old town. According to its ModDB page, Carcer City also includes "all of the locations from the levels featured in Manhunt", which is a neat touch.

As for what kind of GTA experience Carcer City aims to deliver, the mod is set in 2001 and introduces a "brand new storyline" that aims for a "dark, immersive tone". That suggests that it'll be a little different from the caustic satire Rockstar has become known for, perhaps bridging the gap between GTA and Manhunt.

The video above shows some of Carcer City in action. It seems to play much as you'd expect a PS2 GTA to, a mixture of arcade-style open-world driving and getting into somewhat ropey gunfights. That's entirely on Rockstar though, and not a dig at the mod, which is clearly an impressive piece of work.

The version of Carcer City currently available to download is a demo, offering the full city to explore as well as "a taste of the storyline". There's no mention of when the mod might be finished, but given how long ambitious mod projects like this tend to take, I certainly wouldn't expect to see it before Grand Theft Auto 6 releases on November 19.

Welcome to the jungle. Guns N' Roses' 1987 hit may have been written following a chance exchange with a territorial New York City native some 40 years ago, but its hedonistic tone, themes and lyrics fit well within the Grand Theft Auto universe. The song itself even featured in GTA: San Andreas' in-game radio station, Radio X, and provided the soundtrack for one of SA's real-world promotional trailers on its road to release in the early 2000s.

Fast forward two decades and PauloJz has applied welcome to the jungle very literally to GTA 6. Because as we approach the console release of Rockstar's next criminal empire simulator—and continue to wistfully await concrete PC details—PauloJz and a dedicated crew of hobbyist digital nature observers have meticulously dissected every trailer, screenshot and piece of official artwork in their bid to catalogue all confirmed animal species in the game.

Posted on GTAForums, the GTA VI - Animals / Fauna Analysis thread is a veritable hivemind of research, educated guesses and speculation about the wildlife set for the upcoming iteration of Vice City and beyond.

"When I created the topic, based on the first trailer released, I had already identified some prominent animals, such as the sea turtles seen in the first frame of the 'Rockstar Presents' scene," explains PauloJz. "The main point of speculation was which group that species and genus belonged to, although I had already done some preliminary research."

As seen on screen

All of the above manifests in a delightfully intriguing, visually-led chronicle of all the bugs, bears and beasts set for the sunkissed shores of Leonida state. From the opening seconds of that first GTA 6 trailer, PauloJz and the wealth of thread contributors have highlighted each animal or creature's presence in any given scene, and have then posted their real-world likeness, time stamp where necessary and reasoning for inclusion.

You should obviously check out the thread in its entirety itself, but here's how some of that looks in practice:

Herring Gull (Larus Argentatus)

"Seen at the opening of the trailer, this species is quite prominent in the northern hemisphere. As it is a very common bird, we can find it on coasts, ports, islands, seas and landfills, looking for food, such as fish, garbage and carrion."

Loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta)

"In the extreme bottom corner at 0:11, we can see her heading towards the beach. Very common in Palm Beach, it is the largest turtle in the region, reaching an incredible 2.13m in length. Their diet is limited to invertebrates, such as jellyfish, for example."

Miniature Pincher (cross between Schnauzer, Molossoids, Mountain Dogs and Swiss Cattle Dogs)

"Seen on the beach running with its owner, at 0:22, the miniature pincher comes from Germany. There's not much to say, it's just common in North and South America."

One thing I love about this precise level of comparing and contrasting is that each of PauloJz and the contributors' musings involves research and reasoning, despite the fact the thing they're analysing can appear on-screen for seconds, sometimes milliseconds, at a time. Naturally, these margins can create scope for error, but the openness of the community means that consensus is never far from their grasp.

PauloJz adds: "In my case, it's simpler to identify an animal in the scene. Unlike other topics, such as 'Mapping Vice City', where the community uses coordinate systems to identify and trace buildings, I only use visual information from the scene and, of course, a little research.

"But we don't always get it right the first time. There was a time when it was believed that there was a bear in the upper right corner of the Mount Kalaga screenshot, generating some minor debate about the image. Looking at the image today, it's noticeable that it's just a rock, and this becomes evident upon closer inspection.

"So far there haven't been any discoveries that have surprised the community, although I believe many interesting things may still emerge, it's just a matter of time."

After a string of high-profile delays, GTA 6's console variation is on course to arrive on November 19 of this year. At the time of writing that gives Rockstar just under eight months to drop some more footage and/or screens that may satisfy PauloJz's "many interesting things" prediction. Through the grapevine, he's heard that Rockstar developers have visited his GTAForums thread and is of the view those in charge of piecing the trailers together do so with one eye on delivering a state-of-the-art showcase, and another on sprinkling breadcrumbs with speculating communities like his in mind.

In any event, whether PauloJz and his crew of intrepid nature watchers get another pre-release trailer or not, once GTA 6 officially lands, their database is bound to blow up with every beauty and beast wandering the Leonida landscape photographed, filmed and filed.

"That's why I created the topic about wildlife and so many others, precisely so that, in the future, they can be revisited and visited by new people," says PauloJz. "Maybe by then I won't be here anymore to follow and update my topics, but I'm sure they will continue to exist, as part of this long journey.

"Perhaps by then I won't be here anymore to follow and update my topics, but I'm sure they will continue to exist as part of this long journey."

In The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror X segment 'Life's a Glitch, Then you Die', Homer fails to fix the Y2K problem in the computers of Springfield's Nuclear Power Plant, triggering the apocalypse. The segment features some of my favourite Simpsons gags, like Krusty's pacemaker getting stuck on hummingbird mode, and Homer's plaintive cry of "Oh no, Rosie O'Donnell!" inside the rocket ship full of B-listers as it cruises toward immolation in the sun.

Incredibly, Life's a Glitch is not the only work of fiction in which Homer's voice actor Dan Castellenetta grapples with the Y2K problem. There is another, and some might say more culturally significant, artwork featuring both the world's most famous voice actor and narrowly averted digital Armageddon. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Y2K: The Game, the greatest and, indeed, only game specifically about the Millennium Bug ever made.

Why am I digging up this PC gaming fossil? Well, I've been thinking a lot about the Millennium bug lately. This is partly because I am 38 years old, and the idea of being 13 years old again grows more appealing with every passing day. But it's also because the Y2K problem represents a time when computer experts worked to save the world, rather than going out of their way to make it worse as today's tech magnates seem hellbent on doing.

Anyway, I was curious whether the tech anxieties of the late nineties had been addressed directly in video game form. Turns out the answer is "not really", but Y2K: The Game wins by default.

Y2K: The Game sees you play as Buster, a sentient white pudding squeezed into a university lecturer's jacket who, prior to the game's commencement, just so happens to have won the lottery. With his winnings, he buys a mansion which just so happens to have been owned by a recently deceased robotics genius, who just so happens to have filled his mansion with all manner of computer gizmos and talking automata. Oh, and Buster just so happens to move into his new digs on New Year's Eve, 1999.

Any story premise that involves this many layers of happenstance probably needs a rework, by which I mean setting fire to the script and starting again. But developer Runecraft sallies boldly forth with this bizarre jumble of nonsense. As Buster collapses onto his bed in a stupor induced by a $100 bottle of wine, the clock strikes midnight. Immediately, Buster's freshly acquired smart house loses 500 IQ points and turns evil. The game represents this through the computer's voice switching from a cool, detached HAL 9000 intonation to an aggressive caricature of a Noo Yoik dialect.

Your sole objective in Y2K is to patch out the Millennium Bug from the supercomputer that runs the house. The challenge in achieving this derives from the fact that Buster's house makes no sense whatsoever. Imagine if the island from Myst was lifted out of the ocean by a gigantic tsunami, then driven into the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil at a speed so fast the two instantly fused together.

If you think I'm exaggerating, here's a brief rundown of spaces you can explore in Y2K: The Game.

• A room filled with ancient relics
• An elevator with the score for three blind mice etched into the wall, and elevator music that is not three-blind mice
• A dining room with three AI-powered stuffed animal heads who speak in British accents (including a rhinoceros referred to as 'The Colonel')
• A basement housing a recycling robot that gets so angry at Buster for not bringing trash for it to recycle that it tries to kill him (this robot also has a New York accent)
• A dungeon prowled by a murderous robotic executioner, which is somehow less aggressive than the recycling robot (accent not specified)

I will say that the pre-rendered backgrounds and robot animations are quite detailed for 1999, even if it is all wholly incoherent. Unfortunately, the thing you look at the most—Buster—is also the least visually appealing part in the game, a slouching, shuffling blob so offputtingly pasty he looks like he stepped out of a Softmints advert.

In fact, calling it "shuffling" is probably generous. Even if everything else about Y2K: The Game was brilliant, it would still be interminable simply because Buster is so. Goddamn. Slow. He's such a tortoise that, if a solution to a puzzle suddenly clicks into place for you, you should write it down, because there is a non-zero chance you will have forgotten it by the time Buster arrives at his destination.

There are two things I like about Y2K: The Game, the first is, obviously, the voice acting. Castellaneta puts the effort in, and he isn't the only heavy-hitting voice actor in Y2K either. Candace is played by Grey DeLisle—only a year into her career at this point—with other actors including Danny Mann and John Mariano. Unfortunately, they are all let down by a weak script riddled with non-liners such as "I'm glad I'm smart enough to use the extension cord" and "Like Candace says, you'll never know when you'll need some batteries!"

Comfortably the best thing in the game, though, is the music. Every room has its own specific theme, each of which is so much more artistically accomplished than anything contained in the room itself. The antiques room, for example, is accompanied by a sitar-led melody that's quintessentially adventure game. One corridor theme wouldn't be out of place on a Pure Moods CD, while Corridor 3 starts like Laura Palmer's theme and slides into some Tangerine Dream. And then there's the music for the dining room, which could happily accompany a boss fight in a Souls game. I repeat, this is for a dining room.

Even the elevator music sucks in exactly the way elevator music is supposed to suck. I was going to suggest that composers Craig Beattie and Matt Sugden deserve more credit for their work here. But to be honest, what they really deserve is for Y2K: The Game to be much better than it actually is.

At the same time, it's hard to get mad at Y2K. It completely wastes its premise, but it's so absurd and goofy that it stumbles inadvertently into being oddly charming. It's also short enough that even Buster's ponderous gait doesn't extend the running time that much.

It also makes me wonder what the developers of today would do with the Y2K premise if it was in any way marketable. I imagine we'd end up with some kind of Sam Barlow-esque detective game where you're chasing the bug through a labyrinth of computer files, stumbling upon narratively enlightening notes and documents as you go. It's either that or a hero shooter. This is the games industry, after all.

For over two decades, EVE Online has been famous for two things: the astonishing player-driven stories it generates, and the cutthroat universe that acts as a foundation for those stories. PvP is as fundamental a part of EVE's universe as hydrogen is in our own, and whether you're the head of one of its megacorps or a newbie just starting out, buying into the game has been to accept the possibility that someone in the great beyond might make it their personal mission to ruin your day.

Yet modern EVE is not as forbidding as its reputation suggests. The MMO includes numerous "starter systems" where PvP against new players is generally discouraged and "Rookie griefing" outright prohibited. But it seems this esoteric mixture of rules and customs is not definitive enough for developer CCP. As such, EVE's next expansion will do what once seemed unthinkable, add a non PvP zone to the game.

Revealed by CCP in a blog post, this new region is called Exordium, and it's specifically designed to give new players a friendlier onramp into the MMO. "We have had many discussions and brainstorming sessions over the years about improving the new player experience, both internally and externally, with many of you," CCP writes. "An idea that has cropped up regularly is adding a 'starter Zone' to New Eden, where rookies can begin their journey together in a space designed specifically for them."

Exordium's arrival will represent a reorganisation of EVE's universe. Currently, EVE's starter systems are dispersed across space, which means new players are scattered all over the place, making it harder for them to find each other. When Exordium lands, it will be placed squarely in the centre of EVE's universe. The region's primary hub, a system called Manifest, will be surrounded by a constellation of 12 empire-agnostic starter systems.

Unlike the previous starter systems, PvP will not just be discouraged or prohibited, but systemically prevented. CCP hopes this will disperse the "cloud of anxiety" that hitherto loomed over new players who had heard the stories about EVE's notoriety. CCP also says that Exordium will help introduce players to EVE's mechanics and opportunities more broadly, allowing them to experience a "wide variety of activities" New Eden offers, albeit with lower rewards than those offered in the more dangerous regions of space.

It's a move that CCP believes will benefit everyone, not just people trying EVE for the first time. "As most veterans know, getting more new players benefits New Eden as a whole," the developer writes. "It means more recruits for your corporations and alliances, more customers for your market orders, more good fights in the warzones, and more new friends to meet at the Fanfest pub crawl."

I also think it reflects changing times in the industry more broadly. The massive influx of cooperative games over the past decade means competitive play is becoming a harder sell, as new players across the board are raised on friendlier experiences. This is partly why many new multiplayer shooters, from Highguard to Marathon, have struggled to find a large audience. Basically, the kids want to make friends, not enemies.

I highly doubt that EVE Online will ever become fully cooperative. But introducing new players to the concept of PvP more gradually makes sense in these friendlier times. Exordium will initially open for players to explore prior to EVE Fanfest in May, with the full rollout happening at some point over the summer.

Like all of Capcom's modern action games, Pragmata is a highly polished experience befitting the legendary developer's reputation: There are hours of motion-captured performances to enjoy, detailed ray (even path) traced environments to admire, and enormous things to blow up in a variety of spectacular ways. There's also a generous selection of post-credits modes to play and extras to unlock—exactly the sort of thing anyone would hope to find in a shiny new game that clocks in around a dozen hours.

But there's a "secret" side to Capcom games that often goes underappreciated, one that I've been powerless to resist since the original Resident Evil: Speedrunning.

When I'm speedrunning a Capcom game I politely put all of that business about plot and lore-soaked emails to the side and treat a new release like one of their old arcade hits, something to replay and practice until I can tear through it at the speed of light. While there may not be a formal 'time attack' mode to select in Pragmata, this is more than some self-imposed entertainment for nerds. The games themselves quietly support this behaviour, so long as you know what to look out for.

The clear time listed on a completed save file.

The occasional "Would you like to skip the playable intro and get straight to the real game?" messages on later runs.

The freedom to skip those expensively made cutscenes entirely, ensuring I get back to the action as quickly as possible.

Everything that appears on my monitor is something I can learn from: Pragmata's deliberately artificial sci-fi setting makes it easy for a UI full of time-saving information to feel natural and welcome. Status effects are clearly labelled and displayed, scanned weak points are marked with targeting reticles, pixel-accurate AoE markers allow me to dodge and weave through a particle shower of deadly attacks. My entire arsenal is conveniently divided into clearly defined, colour-coded roles. The tools needed to lock into a flow state and blast through the game are all there—I just have to want to try.

But why bother when all of this self-inflicted stress doesn't actually "count" for anything, not even so much as an achievement?

The short answer is "Because it's fun." The longer answer is "Because playing in this way changes Pragmata so much it feels brand new again."

Although the end result is a faster finish time (if I'm lucky), speedrunning isn't about superficially skimming through a great game and choosing to miss all the best bits; when I'm speedrunning I'm engaging with the game so deeply I'm using dashes to cancel lengthy recovery animations, refusing to heal until I absolutely have to because (as in Monster Hunter) it's a slow, vulnerable act, and generally getting myself into lots of otherwise avoidable trouble that, again, is fun. It changes the entire tempo of the game, and introduces new challenges in what would otherwise be safe and straightforward places.

When I'm speedrunning I rush towards a robot the size of a house and try to dodge every close-range attack it throws at me instead of tactically picking it off from a safe distance. I allow a dangerous enemy to give chase as I boost towards my current objective, rather than carefully disabling it before moving on. A swarm of missiles approach my position and I calmly hack them while they're en route to my face, sending them back to whatever fired them for free additional damage instead of merely shooting them out of the air.

With practice, towering robots that used to stomp me into a fine paste are quickly prioritised and then left so confused they attack their allies, making it easy to walk up to them and unload exactly the right kind of weapon on weak points I no longer even have to think to look for.

Much like Capcom's Devil May Cry, it's not the upgrades to my guns or the extensions to my health bar in Pragmata that make the biggest difference when I'm replaying an old level. It's how I'm using everything I've always had in more skilful ways, learning to anticipate enemy behaviour and how they interact with their environment. I'll move through the game faster if I remember which enemy groups I can completely ignore, which weapon I should hang on to for an upcoming fight, and the best way to tackle a room full of laser beams—and I can prove this is more than hollow theory by attempting to speedrun the unlockable "Lunatic" mode.

This difficulty makes enemies hit incredibly hard and also forces me to reacquire all upgrades from scratch, every run initially as fresh and weak as my first. The inescapable difficulty, coupled with a speedrunner's mindset, leave me with little choice but to play smart and try to find some life-saving synergy in the options available.

When's the best time to use a gun that increases the presence of helpful hacking nodes? How can I work a particular position-activated mod into my usual combat routine?

Do I want to knock enemies down, temporarily stun-lock them in place, or should I focus on triggering the overheat state instead, leaving robots on their knees and open for a powerful special attack?

I managed to shave a little over two hours off my initial 6 hour, 18 minute clear time on my second Standard difficulty run thanks to these questions and some practice, and after that I tried on Casual and got it down to about 2hr30m. That means I'm already dashing through Pragmata fast enough to comfortably clear it twice in one working day, long lunch breaks included.

That sounds like a terrible thing to say about a brand new release, doesn't it? But here's the thing: This is a game I want to clear twice in a day, even now, even though I already know how it plays from beginning to end to unlockable bonus stages. Repeat runs are more exciting, not less, because I'm constantly getting myself into scrapes I didn't before, and I'm thrilled when things go wrong because it's an explosion-filled chance to prove I have the skills to get myself out of this unplanned mess. There's always some new trick to learn, some way I can refine my run—and that means there's always plenty to look forward to, both in Pragmata and almost certainly in whatever under the radar speedrunning challenge Capcom decides to create next.

I've been out of the office this week on dad-duty, hanging out with my boy while school's out for the Easter holidays. And honestly, it's a pleasure, because he's a little legend anyways, but also because he's now at the point where it's genuinely fun playing co-op games with him. Mostly.

I'm using that Newt-inspired caveat purely because of platform issues. Platform issues with Linux and the PC. Well. Microsoft specifically, but not exclusively.

I have been excitedly diving deep in the Linux waters over the past few months, having been a far more casual swimmer over my long PC gaming history. I have wholeheartedly flipped my main laptop, a prepper-themed Blade 14 machine, over to PopOS, and it's been a genuine joy. I've enjoyed the extra control I have over full-stack customisation, the ease of use now that I can simply shut the lid and be sure that it will go to sleep and not just randomly suck the battery dry for no discernible reason (why Windows, why?), and the fact that gaming is now super easy on Linux, thanks to solid GPU drivers—even on Nvidia—and all the work Valve has put into Proton, building on those Wine foundations.

I've even now switched my main gaming rig with its high-end hardware—something I'd always found an issue with many a Linux distribution—over to Nobara. And that's been largely a fantastic experience, too. Though, given this is where I do most of my serious PC gaming, I have hit some definite Linux-based stumbling blocks. Late to the party as ever, I've been jamming through The Last of Us Part 1, having bounced off it hard on PlayStation many years back. But as good as the PC port now is, after a lot of updates, it still is not a happy camper on Linux.

But that's not really an issue for playing games with my little boy. He's not really at an age where zombies can be anything other than a funny cartoon character on the TV, or the disguise of some disgruntled arcade owner in Scooby Doo. So, The Last of Us Part 1 has not been something we've been playing together.

I did, however, want to introduce him to the Lego Star Wars franchise, and with the Skywalker Saga installed on my laptop, with every character DLC going, I was excited for us to snuggle down on the sofa and stick it up on the big-screen projector in my front room. He's thoroughly resistant to movies, and so has rejected every attempt to indoctrinate him with the actual Lucasfilms, so I was hoping the games might be a worthy entry point for us.

Y'know, dad goals. Except…

"What's wrong, dad?" he asks for the fifth time as I sit there, crosslegged on the floor, quietly cursing the little laptop at my feet.

"I honestly don't know," I say, exasperated, looking at yet another forum post suggesting commands to enter into the terminal to try and get PopOS to give me access to the Bluetooth-enabled Xbox wireless controller in my hand.

"It's okay, dad, we don't have to play," the disappointment in his voice is cutting real deep into my heart after I'd foolishly hyped up the Star Wars experience without first making sure both the game and hardware would actually play ball with the setup I was trying out.

The flashing Xbox logo indicates we're still in pairing mode, while the PC says we're connected, and yet neither is really talking to the other. I know deep down it's a fixable issue. Nearly all of the gaming issues I've come across in the time I've been maining Linux have been, you just need a little patience, the right answer on the right forum, or a smart LLM having done the digging for you. In short, it's a time game.

(For a quick post script to that, I got the controllers fully set up in the half-time period of a Champions League match that night. I just needed 15 minutes and an Xbox console to sort out the firmware and get them to a state where the low latency Bluetooth handshake of PopOS was now being recognised.)

But one thing you do not have as the father of a small boy is the luxury of time. I cannot sit there troubleshooting the controller connection issue (and I am wilfully ignoring the fact the game itself is stuck 'synchronising cloud' despite there not being any cloud saves to speak of) when he's sat there getting increasingly fidgety about not being personally entertained and concerned about his dad's obvious growing frustration at technology just being a total *&%t.

So I turn my back on Linux and local gaming and turn to the tried and true gaming platform we've enjoyed together in the past—GeForce Now. Cloud gaming has been a super simple way for the two of us to play games together on the shared family big-screens. With the app running on the Nvidia Shield, and controllers easily connected to the li'l Android cylinder, he's had a blast on games from BeamNG, Forza Horizon 5, and Goat Simulator 3 to Moving Out and Overcooked. And this year we started Minecraft Dungeons because my brother and I were obsessed with Gauntlet on the Spectrum when we were kids, and he is already obsessed with Minecraft.

And we've had a great time, so I wasn't really that bothered in the end if we were just going to spend a few hours bouncing between that and San Angora. I was not, however, expecting to find my blood pressure spiking to dangerous levels again with Microsoft login issues keeping us away from our blocky goal.

With GeForce Now the constant need to login into your Microsoft account every time we want to play an Xbox Studios games has been a definite irritant, especially having to navigate the login screens with a controller and on-screen keyboard. But it's been surmountable, and forgotten once you're past it and actually into the game proper.

Not so this time, as despite logging in with my 100% correct credentials, which are accepted on my PC and email logins for my phone, Minecraft Dungeons tells me instantly I've logged in too many times with an incorrect username or password. There's no other way in, because it also won't send a code to my phone, either, and no amount of digging around online is coming up with a quick solution.

He sidles up close and puts his little arms around me as I ignore the futility of my actions and once more enter the password I know is correct. "It's okay, dad."

It's an uncomfortable reminder that PC gaming still has accessibility issues, and Linux doubly so. And that no matter how much we might think we own our games, we are still very much only playing them while the good graces of the controlling platform owners allow.

So many of our games, even if you've not picked them up on Steam—and often especially because you have—rely on separate launchers and validation layers and hoops to jump through just to play a game. And if something fails in that chain of store platform and publisher launchers and separate publisher accounts, well, then you're poop out of luck.

Squeezing him tightly, I shut off the TV and, smiling, I suggest we do something far more wholesome and go bake some cakes instead. Now, neither of us are natural bakers, and we learn some hard lessons about ingredient suitability that afternoon, too. But we at least end up with something to show for our efforts, even if the Yoda atop our Victoria Sponge does look a lot like it was made with pesto.

Before Call of Duty, there was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and before Allied Assault, there was plain old Medal of Honor. Although EA's World War 2 shooter had its heyday storming the beaches of Normandy on PC, it was originally a PlayStation exclusive series, preceding Halo's popularisation of the genre on console by a whole two years.

I remember Medal of Honor being both clunky as hell and like nothing else I'd ever played when I first encountered it at the age of 11, and those memories came flooding back thanks to Medal of Honor: Retro Remake. Created by developer Elber88 and released for free on itch, it’s a ground-up rebuild of the 1999 original that finally brings the FPS to PC.

"I am an old fan of an [sic] original MOH 1999 and in the end of 2024 decided to 'restore' this game on PC platform with current-gen engine," writes Elber88 on the remake's itch page. In building the remake, Elber says that "all game logic [was] made from scratch", but the enemies and some core mechanical elements were taken from Allied Assault "to avoid extremely low-poly characters, animations etc."

I played through the opening level of Elber's remake, and it largely captures the specific feel of Dreamworks Interactive's games. The early entries were mostly absent of the cinematic spectacle introduced in Allied Assault. Instead, they played more like survival horror games (admittedly not very scary ones), with a slower pace and a smaller scale. You're generally alone and behind enemy lines, plodding through hedgerows or ruined towns, with Wehrmacht soldiers ambushing you from around corners either alone or in groups of two or three.

While Elber's remake runs much smoother than the PlayStation version, it retains that lo-fi, slightly watery look to the textures. The audio seems to have been ported over wholesale, everything from the bombastic orchestral score to the distinctive weapon sounds. Shooting the M1 Garand in this game sounds like striking a giant match. Pt-chooo!

The only misstep, in my opinion, is using Allied Assault's animations, simply because the original's animations were so particular to Medal of Honor. Enemies had very dramatic reactions to being shot, falling onto their behinds or hunching over as if they'd just finished running a marathon. They were a big part of what made the shooter work on console, not just because they looked cool, but because they compensated for the lack of responsiveness in the controls. At least enemy helmets still ping off in ridiculously over-the-top fashion.

In short, it's not a bad way to experience the early history of World War 2 shooters, especially given how hard it is to acquire that game now. You can download Medal of Honor Retro Remake via its itch page, and the installation process is as straightforward as it gets.

If 2026 has taught us anything, it's that convincing people to play your new multiplayer shooter is hard. The ill-fated Highguard came and went within the space of three months after initially strong player counts dropped off a cliff. And while Marathon appears to have more staying power—which is a mercy because it is superb—all signs suggest it hasn't been the roaring success needed to recoup its alleged $200 million budget.

Things are so tough that even being the lead singer of a world famous band can't guarantee your game an audience, as demonstrated by the release of Last Flag. Developed by Night Street Games—an indie studio founded by Dan and Mac Reynolds, the lead singer and manager of Imagine Dragons— Last Flag is a 5v5 multiplayer shooter themed around the classic capture-flag-game mode.

Last Flag seemingly had everything going for it. It was revealed in a splashy trailer at last year's Summer Games Fest, and as noted by Kotaku, was marketed on the band's social media accounts, advertised to 10 million followers on Instagram. It was also released at a very reasonable price point ($15 in the US/£12 in the UK, with a 20% launch discount on top) and has no microtransactions.

Moreover, far from being clueless celebrities dabbling in an artform they know nothing about, Dan and Mac are by all accounts passionate and engaged game designers, wanting to enter the industry before Imagine Dragons took off. In that same article, PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde mentions that Last Flag is decent beneath the fingers too. "I've played a handful of Last Flag rounds at different stages of development, and I've found the format fun so far," he wrote. "If Last Flag winds up being popular enough for a meta to develop, I can foresee some clever mind games being played."

Sadly, that last point now seems unlikely to happen. When Last Flag launched on April 14, it attracted fewer than 600 concurrent players at its peak, according to SteamDB. That number has now dropped to just under 400 concurrent players in the last 24 hours. Overall player numbers will be higher than this, of course, but that isn't to say that they are high. The main complaint in Last Flag's (mostly positive) Steam reviews is that matches are heavily populated by bots, another sign the game is struggling to find an audience.

In a statement to Bloomberg (via Kotaku) a spokesperson for Night Street Games said that the studio was happy with the reviews it had received. But they wouldn't comment on sales, instead hoping to "build a sustainable community and nurture and grow it over time."

It's hard to identify where Night Street went wrong. The only thing I can point to is Last Flag's visual style, which is very Fortnite coded in a way that only seems to work for Fortnite nowadays (and even then, diminishingly so). Players seem generally weary of that pseudo-animated aesthetic, and a big reason why Marathon has seen what success it has is simply because it doesn't look like any other shooter in this space.

Hopefully, Night Street will have sufficient resources to give Last Flag a shot at longer-term success, although Mac Reynolds said to Bloomberg that "Raising money is one of the hardest and worst things to be doing in 2026 for any studio" meaning that "runway is going to be a challenge for everybody." The game is currently having a free weekend to celebrate its launch, so if all of this has made you curious, you can grab the timed demo over on Steam.

Like any survival crafting adventure, Windrose has a ton of new materials and recipes to unlock upon reaching a new area. There are three distinct biomes in the early access build, each with their own Discovery section in your character menu, and a few items from every region can be a bit of a pain to find.

That's why I've gone ahead and found them all for you, then compiled them into this nice Windrose Discovery list below. I've sorted them each by region, plus noted any boss and questing requirements you'll need to complete to proceed.

Coastal Jungle

The Coastal Jungle is Windrose's first zone, and the only one you'll need to complete several main quests for before moving on. The process starts with I Need a Bigger Boat and Rescuing the Crew, so finish those up while you do the tutorial quests, and you'll eventually move on to unlock the Foothills after a fight with Thomas Richards.

Three Discoveries in this region are a bit of a pain—the Crab Shell, Palm Seeds, and Ficus Seeds—but I swear they're real.

For the Crab Shell, keep picking up those little red crabs running along the beach (not the hostile Thorn Fiddlers). For the Palm and Ficus Seeds, just keep chopping those trees down. I swear they'll drop eventually.

Coastal Jungle quest and boss

🔑 Key discoveries

💎 Major discoveries

🪵 Other resources

Foothills

Your journey grows a little harder upon venturing into the Foothills, as it's filled with hostile pirates, wolves, and goats that hit like a truck. This region takes a while to conquer, so take your time, upgrade your ship, and make sure you craft an Iron Pickaxe and Axe ASAP.

Most items in the Foothills were pretty easy to find, though it did take me a while to find Corn. I had to visit three different islands before finally finding a batch growing near a large statue and the Ancient Village landmark.

Foothills quest and boss

🔑 Key discoveries

💎 Major discoveries

🪵 Other resources

Cursed Swamps

The Cursed Swamps make up the last region available in Windrose's current early access build, and it's awfully tough to survive when you're entering fresh from the Foothills. Try and pace yourself, it's not like there's anything after this (for now), and be careful when you see patches of glowing pink forest—lest you catch the plague.

The Beans were the only Discovery I struggled to find, so if you're stuck there too, just keep exploring and searching every 'Ruin with a Flowerbed' landmark you come upon. They're usually brimming with Leeks, but you'll dig up Beans eventually.

Cursed Swamp quest and boss

🔑 Key discoveries

💎 Major discoveries

🪵 Other resources

Slay the Spire 2 has quietly been one of the most-played games on Steam since it launched in March. Even in early access, it's a bigger game than the original (both in terms of popularity and content), but it's far from done. Among the incoming additions teased in developer Mega Crit's latest update are:

• Alternate versions of Acts 2 and 3 (the first act already has two forms, Overgrowth and Underdocks)
• Steam Workshop support
• "Experimental game modes"
• A new character
• New "cards, events, relics, and potions"
• And, eventually, "true victory" and "everything that comes with it"

That's on top of the expected bug fixes, refined audio and artwork, balance tweaks, additional languages, and more. The only things missing from the roadmap are dates, which the studio says are just not its style.

"You might see this and think, but where are the dates! Why can't you promise dates??" writes Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano. "My response is: It's not what works for us.

"Mega Crit is a small team where each member understands their responsibilities, knows everyone else, and I try my best to ensure that we work at a healthy pace. We evaluate our tasks each week and work on what feels most impactful. It's not the most organized method, but this allows spontaneous experimentation like the dialogues you have with the Ancients or the existence of a Room Full of Cheese. We won't massively expand the size of the studio to finish the game faster. Exacting deadlines produce sloppy uninspired work and I don't want Sloppy Spire 2, I want Slay the Spire 2."

I also don't want Sloppy Spire 2, so I will patiently wait for Slay the Spire 2. Yano notes, however, that players can opt into the game's beta branch to try out experimental changes early and provide feedback—something they got a lot of recently after some controversial balance changes.

Those balance changes made it to the main Slay the Spire 2 branch yesterday in the game's first "Major Update." (Something I had not noticed when I wondered when they were coming in an earlier version of this article!)

In that Q&A section, Yano also reveals the one thing Slay The Spire 2's developers refuse to compromise on above all: "There must be whimsy." You can read the full newsletter on Steam.

After battling pirates and braving the seas of pirate survival game Windrose for a few hours, you'll eventually make your way to the island of Tortuga. By now you've probably found lots of crates of provisions and medicine, which can only be sold to the People of Tortuga faction. And once you set foot on the island and find the People of Tortuga's bounty agent and provisioner, you probably also scoured the town from one end to the other trying to find the faction's buyer. I sure did!

No, you're not overlooking something obvious. The buyer for the People of Tortuga is not actually on Tortuga. He's on a different island altogether. I cannot explain this odd bit of pirate logic: all I can do is help you find him.

How to find the People of Tortuga's buyer

Unfortunately, I can't just show you a map with a big X on the island you need, pirate-style, because Windrose's maps are procedurally generated. You can try sailing around near Tortuga, of course: if your map shows you're in the "Brethren of the Coast Waters," you should be pretty close to the buyer's island.

But there's a more reliable way to find the People of Tortuga's buyer without just setting sail and hoping you run into it. Early on in Windrose you'll come across a quest called "Glorious Hunters" where you find the abandoned camp of some missing boar hunters.

Following that questline will take you to the head of the Buccaneers, pinpointing their island location on your map if you haven't happened to find it yet. Once there, you can talk to a guy named Henri who will give you another quest aptly named "Buccaneers."

The first part of that quest is to deliver 50 bags of gunpowder, and since you probably can't craft that yourself yet, you may need to start clearing camps and ruins and other points of interest where it can be commonly found in chests. I'd also recommend sticking to melee combat until you've saved up enough gunpowder to deliver to Henri.

Once you've given Henri the gunpowder, he'll ask you to deliver a shipment of tanned hides to someone named Charlie Sharpe. That'll add another marker to your map, and that marker will show you where the People of Tortuga's buyer is—not on Tortuga, but on another island.

Once you've reached it, you'll be able to sell your medicine and provisions to the buyer there. There's another bounty agent, like the one in Tortuga, if you want to raise your rep with the faction. You'll also find a pirate named Black Axel, a cook you can can hire to work at your base for 500 coins, who has a 30% chance to craft an extra potion.

We've been digging back through the archives at PCG, and one particular hands-on experience and Q&A reached its icy hand out of the mists of time and grabbed me by the throat: Now-Strategic Director Evan Lahti's preview of Dragon Age: Origins, and an accompanying interview with BioWare cofounders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk in 2009.

Neither of those men have been part of the beloved RPG studio for more than a decade: Zeschuk appears to be something of a restaurateur these days, while Muzyka is quite the poker player. Reading coverage of the studio only partway through its golden age bummed me the hell out.

After a legendary hot streak beginning with the OG Mass Effect in 2007 (or, arguably, the OG Baldur's Gate in 1998), BioWare struggled to find its footing in the 2010s: Longtime staff left or were forced out, it released three disappointments in seven years vs. nearly a dozen bangers in the previous decade. A new Mass Effect is supposedly still coming, but by all accounts the studio is a fraction of its former size following Anthem, The Veilguard, and multiple rounds of layoffs.

But nobody knew all that was coming down the pike in March 2009. Evan sat down for a hands-on of the Dwarf Noble origin sequence, a world's first look at a slice of RPG that many players could reenact from memory at this point. (Not me—I'm a City Elf man.)

In a Q&A with Zeschuk and Muzyka, the founders were optimistic about the series' and company's future, with Dragon Age sequels already in the planning phases.

"It is a franchise," Muzyka said of Dragon Age. "You can be sure that means more than one game and a whole bunch of other cool stuff on the side. It would make sense that players will get to continue to experience or feel like they've been progressing in some way between products in the franchise, too."

He seems to have already been alluding to the save transfer feature Dragon Age would crib from its sister series, Mass Effect, then ultimately pursue to more ambitious ends.

Dragon Age: Inquisition had to keep track of dozens of setting-spanning variables impacting the politics of the world and which characters would even be alive for you to see in the game, with its rarest world states still the stuff of RPG legend.

It was also a funny man-out-of-time moment to remember the different flavor of controversy and backlash BioWare faced at this time. "It's an artform," Muzyka asserted in response to a question about RPG romance and media pressure. "We're not changing how we make our games based on, well…"

"On Fox News?" Zeschuk cheekily interjected. Before there was Mass Effect 3 ending angst or anti-woke rage against gay companions, there was the whole news cycle about the PG-13 implied sex and nudity in Mass Effect 1. If only someone could go back and warn them about Baldur's Gate 3 penis physics.

Here's the full Q&A with the BioWare docs, whose absence is still felt all these years after their exit from making RPGs.

Dragon Age: Origins interview - PC Gamer #198 (UK, March 2009)

More on Dragon Age from the archives

• Looking back on 15 years of Dragon Age reviews—including that Dragon Age 2 score we've never stopped defending
• EA has learned all the wrong lessons from Dragon Age: The Veilguard
• It was nuts that BioWare based Dragon Age: Inquisition's story on a DLC nobody played, but that DLC also proved just how close Dragon Age 2 was to perfection
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard is my third-favorite game of the year, and I don't care who knows
• Looking back at Dragon Age: Inquisition
• Great moments in PC gaming: Choosing your origin in Dragon Age Origins

It was another big awards show for French RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which beat out some very big names to claim the coveted Best Game award at the 2026 BAFTA Games Awards. But it wasn't the big sweep we've seen in past events: The game was nominated in 10 categories but ultimately came away with just three wins, a haul matched by superhero adventure Dispatch—and it even gave one up to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

Three BAFTA wins is absolutely nothing to sneeze at, especially when one of them is the Best Game biggie, but it does come up a little short when compared to Clair Obscur's domination of past awards shows. Sandfall Interactive's first-ever game won seven awards at the 2025 Golden Joysticks, matching the record set by Baldur's Gate 3, and then surpassed the master with nine wins at The Game Awards the following month. It followed that up with eight wins out of nine nominations at the Game Developers Choice Awards in January.

At the BAFTAs, it beat Arc Raiders, Blue Prince, Dispatch, Ghost of Yotei, and Indiana Jones at the Great Circle for the title of Best Game; it also came out on top for Best Debut Game, and Jennifer English won the Best Performer in a Leading Role category for her portrayal of Maelle.

But Death Stranding 2 beat Clair Obscur out for Artistic Achievement, which frankly I'm a little iffy on, and it also lost out on Best Game Design to Blue Prince, which I think is actually very fair. Clair Obscur was also nominated for Best New Intellectual Property, which went to South of Midnight, and in the Best Narrative category it was beaten out by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2—a little bit of turnabout after Clair Obscur beat out KCD2 in every category at The Game Awards.

Dispatch was the night's other big BAFTA winner, taking the gold in the Animation, Audio Achievement, and Performer in a Support Role, for Jeffrey Wright. The PlayStation-exclusive Ghost of Yotei won two awards, for Music and Technical Animation, and Atomfall won for Best British Game, which I'm happy about because Atomfall was also my personal favorite British game of the year.

The full list of 2026 BAFTA Games Awards winners is below:

• Animation - Dispatch
• Artistic Achievement - Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Audio Achievement - Dispatch
• Best Game - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• British Game - Atomfall
• Debut Game - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Evolving Game - No Man's Sky
• Family - Lego Party
• Fellowship - Ilkka Paananen
• Game Beyond Entertainment - Despelote
• Game Designer - Blue Prince
• Multiplayer - Arc Raiders
• Music - Ghost of Yotei
• Narrative - Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
• New Intellectual Property - South of Midnight
• Performer in a Leading Role - Jennifer English (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
• Performer in a Supporting Role - Jeffrey Wright (Dispatch)
• Technical Achievement - Ghost of Yotei

As reported by Gaming on Linux, a new bill brought before the US House would require operating systems like Windows, Linux, and MacOS to verify users' age for installation and, seemingly, regular use. The "Parents Decide Act" has been referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and is cosponsored by New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer and New York Republican Elise Stefanik.

The bill would "require any user of the operating system" to enter their date of birth to both "set up an account on the operating system and use the operating system."

OS providers would also have to "develop a system to allow an app developer to access any information as is necessary, collected by the operating system to carry out this section and any regulation promulgated under this section, to verify the date of birth of a user of an app of the app developer." In other words, any program on your PC would have access to the date you entered, which I don't like at all.

The method of age verification is probably the most critical information here in terms of privacy and data security, but that's being left to the Energy and Commerce Committee to decide after the bill has been passed⁠

It's not exactly clear if the law would simply require us to enter a date—just like how we all say we were born on 1/1/1900 when we want to look at an M-rated game—or if an actual verification step will be required. Some of the language in the bill heavily implies the latter, and, worryingly, that detail is seemingly one of a few that would only be figured out after the bill is passed—if it is passed.

"Not later than 180 days" after enacting the Parents Decide Act, the committee would determine the following:

• "How an operating system provider can verify the date of birth of a parent or legal guardian"—or, unmentioned in this entry but implied later, an adult user acting on their own behalf.
• "Data protection standards related to how an operating system provider shall ensure a date of birth collected by the operating system provider from a user, or the parent or legal guardian of the user … is collected in a secure manner to maintain the privacy of the user or the parent or legal guardian of the user; and is not stolen or breached."
• "Ensure an app developer can access information collected by the operating system provider to carry out this section …, to verify the date of birth of a user of an app of the app developer."

Now I'm just a simple country games journalist, but this certainly sounds like a vaguely-worded privacy nightmare that would require OSes to not only store sensitive personal information, but share it with whoever⁠—and you'll forgive me for not trusting some hastily drawn-up data protection scheme when these things always seem to fail, whether it's Discord immediately compromising IDs used in its own age verification, or some bush league people finder in Florida losing everyone's Social Security number.

That's not to mention that this bill seems to just assume that all operating systems are of corporate origin⁠—how is an open-source fork of Linux supposed to securely process personal information at installation, startup, and, seemingly, every time it interacts with a third-party application?

The simple answer would seem to be that it's not, and this bill would blithely wipe out an entire mode of personal computing in order to project the appearance that Congress cares about children's wellbeing. A further wrinkle pointed out by PCG US editor-in-chief Tyler Wilde: Would this also require internet access just to use a computer?

OS-level age verification is the latest development in the generalized first world drive to wipe out what little remains of digital privacy in a panicked response to parents letting their children fry their brains on the internet. The government of California has already passed a similar law, and it's driving open source software developers to the brink.

Videogames have given me more opportunities to blow up titanic scifi battleships than I could ever hope to count. But I've rarely gotten the opportunity to experience the other side of that equation as the guy commanding the fleet's worth of cannons, laser batteries, and missile bays bristling across a single massive floating monolith.

One solo dev, however, is looking to provide us all a taste of scifi navy excess with Dreadnought Tartarus, a "semi-automated strategic simulation game centered around a single, colossal battleship," which is another way of saying "you get to play that part from anime space operas and mecha series where the space cruisers fill the screen with the wildest barrage of weapons fire that the visual arts can imagine."

I caught my first glimpse of Dreadnought Tartarus a few months ago, and since then I've always spared a few seconds to watch the spectacle whenever another one of developer Benkimchi's clips crosses my timeline. As the titular warship Tartarus carves slow, inexorable paths through wartorn cityscapes and orbital battle lines, it's operating on a striking visual scale providing an overhead showcase for the absurd density of firepower it's putting under the player's command.

The best part of its presentation is how leisurely the Tartarus moves. It's brutally, menacingly slow on the screen—and that pace only makes it more terrifying. It's a bad sign when a battleship doesn't feel a need to rush.

Dreadnought Tartarus describes itself as being somewhere between realtime wargame and roaming tower defense. Rather than a sequence of missions, it "unfolds as a continuous campaign across a strategic map," with players charting the Tartarus' route between its military objectives and weathering the storm of hostile forces that attempt to impede its progress.

To do so, players can gain intel from defeated enemies that can be reverse engineered into additional upgrades and armaments for the Tartarus. After selecting your loadout of weaponry for the warship's hardpoints, weapons systems can be toggled between automatic fire modes, manual control, and a focus fire mode that empties all weapons in one direction in a nightmarish broadside.

And in case you thought there were limits on Dreadnought Tartarus' willingness to indulge in the full range of anime military scifi tropes, it even allows you to launch and pilot a combat mech from the warship's hangar bay for smaller-scale confrontations. Benkimchi knows their business.

Dreadnought Tartarus currently has a tentative Q3 2026 release window on Steam. You can wishlist it now. If you want to follow its development more closely, Benkimchi regularly posts progress updates on X.

It's amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they're no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.

The whole thing is a bit dry, as parliamentary committees tend to be, but the conversation is interesting. Consultant Daniel Ondruška, for instance, said the Stop Killing Games movement "is not trying to be unreasonable," and isn't seeking eternal online support or retro reactivation for games that have already been shut down—just requirements to keep it from happening in the future.

"Games that were developed 20 years ago still function," Ondruška said. "Games that were developed three years ago, as it was mentioned before, don't. It's a design decision. It's a business decision."

After laying out in detail how game shutdowns actually occur, Scott, the Stop Killing Games founder, also weighed in on the business side of it, saying that when end-of-life planning is included in a game's development budget, the impact is "very small." He added that some estimates for end-of-life costs by game studios are "faulty," because they factor in features that are no longer needed in an offline game.

This is an edited version of the hearing provided by EU politics news channel Europe Echo; the full, unedited hearing is linked above.

At the end of the hearing, MEP [Member of European Parliament] Anna Cavazzini, chair of the Committees on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection thanked and congratulated the speakers "for the great work you have done," and said she'd "heard a lot of support from basically all the political groups for your initiative." MEP Ilhan Kyuchyuk shared similar sentiments, reiterating "the broad support" from the relevant committees.

The mood during a post-hearing press conference on Twitch was clearly upbeat: "Absolutely incredible," Katzner responded when asked by Scott how he thought it went. "I think that everyone that watched it might have noticed that there was no MEP that wasn't responding positively. Even the commission was pretty positive, I'd say."

Katzner also said it's important to understand that this hearing "was our first step into the public, into the legislative process," and that the committee is still reviewing Stop Killing Games' submission. But, he continued, "every single MEP" present for the hearing expressed support for the initiative, and that for the purposes of the hearing, it was "mission achieved."

Scott concurred: "I feel like if things had gone off absolutely perfectly on our end, the results actually might not have been that much different. If there'd been a little more prep time it might have gone a little smoother, but then, for the end result? I think it would've been the same."

The discussion with other relevant parties, hosted by Katzner, goes on for a good bit after that, but it seems quite positive overall. The mood is probably best summed up, though, by a meme shared by Katzner on X:

"There's a long road ahead," Katzner wrote, "but the momentum is real."

The appearance before the EU committee caps off a strong start to 2026 for Stop Killing Games: In February the org announced that it's launching NGOs in the EU and US "to do long-term counter lobbying" on the issue of game shutdowns, and in March it backed a lawsuit against Ubisoft, filed by France's "leading consumer association," over the shutdown of The Crew.

A videogame is a product of combined expertise across dozens of disciplines. But in a recently-published Youtube video titled "Have an Idiot at the Table," former BioWare producer Mark Darrah said it's valuable during a game's development to have someone with only a layman's understanding present in discussions about design and direction—provided they understand when and where their feedback is useful.

Darrah, who worked as executive producer on the Dragon Age games and the ill-fated Anthem, said he's spent more than half his career as just that kind of "professional non-expert." During the projects he worked on, he said discussions about game design, art direction, and audio—disciplines he isn't trained in—benefited from the presence of a layman's perspective, because it helps ground the ambitions and impulses of the project's experts.

"It's because disciplines can become quite inward looking," Darrah said.

According to Darrah, it's common for a conversation between experts in a discipline "to start to eat its own tail" as those experts become fixated on the subtleties of their craft, whether it's game design, art, or his own field of expertise as a programmer. Left to themselves, designers can produce systems of escalating arcane complexity; writers and worldbuilders can coax each other deep into the weeds of proper nouns and fabricated timelines; artists can become preoccupied with "discussions around minor bits of white space in ways that are obvious to them, but may not come across to the layman."

"The very subtle things may not be coming across. And that can be okay," Darrah said. "But if [your game is] trying to make your point entirely out of subtle things, that point may get lost."

Having a layman in the room to raise their hand and say they're not picking up on the nuances that might be plain to the experts is a helpful indicator that things have gone too sicko mode—not so those nuances can all be tossed out, but so the developers can ideally ensure they're accessible for the game's audience to appreciate.

For the non-expert's input to be useful, however, Darrah says they need to be proficient in a critical skill: Knowing when to leave people to their work when you don't have anything to say.

"If you're this external voice, one thing to really guard against is to not fall into the trap of feeling that you need to provide as much feedback as the other people at the table," Darrah said. "You aren't equipped to do that."

Otherwise, Darrah says the team "starts to dread your involvement," because it means they'll have to spend their discussions navigating the contributions of someone whose suggestions and opinions aren't anchored by practical understanding.

"It's good to have that external voice," Darrah said, "but that external voice needs to know that they shouldn't be doing most of the talking in the room."

Arc Raiders has many wonderful qualities that make it the most popular extraction shooter around, but its current Expeditions grind isn't one of them. Serving as Arc's take on the season wipe, Expeditions give players the option to reset their progress in exchange for permanent upgrades, like extra stash size and skill points.

Up until now, that process was a major resource grind that involved hoarding mountains of scrap to reach an arbitrary goal. For the next one, Embark is shaking things up.

"For the third Expedition, we're doing things a little differently—the big news being that Skill Points will be earned by dealing damage over the five day window, NOT stash value," the developer said in a blog post published today.

And here's how that will work:

• Instead of gathering stash value and coins, players will now have to deal damage to get all five skill points (regardless if it's your first, second or third expedition). All players who have completed their Caravan will get the challenge (no need to sign up to see it).
• You can complete the challenge by dealing damage with any weapon or gadget against any target (except practice range).
• Players will have five days to complete the damage challenge (Tuesday to Sunday).

"We know that grinding for monetary value isn't the most exciting experience. By introducing damage-based objectives and trials instead of stash value, we're providing more freedom and variety in how you can complete the Expedition, encouraging the use of loot rather than hoarding it throughout the five-day window," Embark said.

"Above all, we want expeditions to be fun and not an endless grind. We believe these changes create a fair and engaging challenge that keeps everyone active across the full five days."

Speaking as an Arc player who may never do an Expedition, a five-day bot purge does still sound like quite the grind, but at least it's better than hoarding. As these players are ultimately opting into deleting all of their gear, it only makes sense to incentivize cutting loose with the shiny guns and shields they've been too scared to take out of the vault. Plus it should result in fewer matches where the quickest, most experienced players clear out every compound of even the most basic scrap before I get there. Save some rags for me!

If you've already completed the previous two Expeditions, finishing the third will net you the final piece of the Patchwork outfit. Congrats to our most dedicated raiders.

Just over a year after laying off 66 employees in what the studio said was was a "last resort" effort to "enable our long term survival," Iron Galaxy, the developer of games including Killer Instinct seasons 2 and 3, Rumbleverse, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4, has announced that it is once again "reducing our company size."

"A number of teammates and friends are losing their jobs as we adjust to a new company structure," the studio wrote in a message on LinkedIn. "We are terribly sorry to lose them as we take steps to adapt to the climate of the video game industry. It’s time for us to evolve again."

Iron Galaxy pointed to changes in the videogame industry that began in 2020 as the driving force behind this round of cuts, saying that after years of waiting for things "to get back to normal"—an attitude that's been held by the business at large, not just Iron Galaxy—"we’re adopting a new posture to accept these current market conditions as permanent."

"As Iron Galaxy adapts, we must make painful decisions about what we can be as a company," the studio wrote. "It’s impossible for us to sustain the team size that we’ve carried this past year, even after our downsizing from last year."

That's alarming, given the dire situation portrayed by Iron Galaxy when those layoffs happened. "This was a means of last resort for us," the studio said at the time. "It’s a measure we do not take lightly to enable our long-term survival." Yet clearly it was not enough.

Iron Galaxy didn't say how many people were let go, but included among them is former communications lead David Dague, well known to gamers for his long tenure as "Deej," Bungie's community manager and communications. Dague left Bungie in 2020, and joined Iron Galaxy shortly after.

"It has been a pleasure to work for Iron Galaxy for more than five years," Dague wrote in his own layoff message. "I’d like to thank the leadership and my now former colleagues for providing an amazing professional experience. We did some things together I’ll always be proud of and remember fondly. This is a company that has always lived their values out loud. That will continue. I wish them well, and I have a sneaking suspicion we’ll work together again someday."

Iron Galaxy caused a stir in March when it posted a social media message containing the "please stand by" screen from Fallout: New Vegas, leading fans (well, me, anyway) to speculate that it might be working on a long-awaited New Vegas remaster. The studio later shot down that speculation, saying it uses that slide for its meetings every month.

Without fail, any time I see a horse in a game I immediately stop, cheerfully yell, "horse!" and rush the majestic beast with no sense of danger. That's not how I was raised to approach wild animals, but unless it's an enemy steed, can you really blame me?

I reckon most people have the same can-I-ride-that-horse reaction when finding a stallion out in the wild. It's second only to 'Can I pet that dog?', but easily more rewarding if you can bring the horse along for utility and pet it. And since we already have a quiz on videogame dogs, I've decided it's time to honor the faithful steeds of PC gaming with their own trivia quiz.

While drafting this, I also realized two very important things. First being that most of these horses don't have canonical names, and second, Sony's PC porting spree should've included Shadow of the Colossus. I'm not counting emulation, so no, you won't see Agro or Epona here. Please don't come for me.

Anyway, it's time to put your inner horse girl to the test. Can you identify what videogame these horses are from? Or even better, tell us the name of the horse if they have one.

I can't give you bonus points for both, but you do get bragging rights in the comments. You've got 10 minutes to identify 19 horses, so giddy up.

This week is the most excited I've been about Battlefield 6 since it launched. EA announced that seven more maps are coming this year, and several of them are legitimately huge. Naval warfare is making a comeback, filling in a blank that's very much felt in its current pool of samey, landlocked locales. A remake of the fan-favorite Wake Island will even reintroduce asymmetrical beach invasions with functional aircraft carriers.

Taking in the 8-month roadmap as a whole, I can see a Battlefield 6 that I want to play a lot more of. But when can I actually play that game? Your guess is as good as mine.

This is one of the problems with roadmaps, or more specifically, the trajectory of live service updates. Not only do developers treat exact release dates like they're state secrets until days before they come around, but seasons themselves are now chopped up into smaller pieces, and the average player doesn't know which pieces to expect soon and which fall under a nebulous "mid-season" umbrella.

It's especially bad in Battlefield 6, which has so far split its seasons into three monthlong mini seasons. Each mini season gets a new gun, an event, and sometimes a map. The idea behind splitting the pie up this way is to create the impression that Battlefield always has something new and exciting going on, when in practice all they've done is demonstrate that individual Battlefield updates aren't worth showing up for.

Season 4, for instance, is hyping up the grand return of naval warfare, but on the day it begins, that grand return will amount to a single map. More are coming, but when? Don't worry about it, says EA.

Allow me to describe what I suspect is a common experience:

1. Player reads about Battlefield 6 getting two new maps, new features, a handful of guns, new modes—they get excited
2. Weeks later they hear the new season starts tomorrow, so they reinstall/update the game
3. The season begins, and they boot up Battlefield 6 to find just one third of the stuff they read about is actually there: a map, a mode, and two guns locked behind battle pass grinding
4. They try the new map for a while, but decide to wait until the season is actually feature-complete
5. They forget to check back in with Battlefield 6 until the next roadmap comes around, and the cycle repeats

EA seems to operate under the assumption that everyone who enjoys Battlefield 6 is hopelessly addicted to it—that by drip-feeding morsels of roadmap content every four weeks, our thirst is quenched right as our mouths are getting dry. That doesn't reflect how I play Battlefield at all, and the player numbers we can see suggest I'm not the only one.

Battlefield has never been my forever game. Its brand of casual competition, static classes, and joyous chaos make it the perfect FPS to get obsessed with for days or weeks at a time before I put it back on the shelf for a while. Even in a live service age where developers pin their hopes on constant engagement, a lot of people don't have one "forever" game as much as they have a rotation of "sometimes" games.

At its best, the FPS "season" is really just an expansion (or "map pack" if you're in your 30s) that you don't have to pay for. Seasons are fun when they feel like a true event—a significant milestone that signals to lapsed players that it's a good time to check back in.

The only "right" time to jump back into a Battlefield season is, paradoxically, right before it ends. It's really a baffling setup to continue on with, in no small part because it hasn't worked.

You could argue that Battlefield's problem is one of volume—that what it truly needs are more maps each "full" season to fill out the mini ones. That brute force strategy does work for Call of Duty, but personally, simply releasing what's promised in a season when it begins would go a long way. Make the occasion actually mean something!

After 80+ hours of Battlefield 6 I'm only coming back in bursts—I'm not a caged hamster that will eagerly appear when DICE refills my bottle every four weeks. The cage is wide open, and I can always go gorge on the dozen other shooters I could be catching up on.

Here at PCG towers we've recently been unearthing a bunch of classic interview material from our publishing company Future's decades-long history in print media. Earlier today I wrote about a 2014 interview in which the design lead on the first Elder Scrolls fondly recalled the days when Bethesda would finish a game, then the team would "assemble boxes, inserts and use the heat gun" to get it shipped.

This led me down a rabbit hole towards an even older interview with designer and Daggerfall lead Ted Peterson, conducted with GameSpy in 2001, in which he answers a question I'd never thought to ask—why's it called The Elder Scrolls: Arena anyway?

"I was one of two designers on it, the other being Vijay Lakshman, who along with Julian LeFay really spearheaded the initial development of the series," says Peterson. "Up to that time, Bethesda had never done a roleplaying game, only action games like the Terminator series and sports titles like Wayne Gretzky Hockey. I remember talking to the guys at SirTech who were doing Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant at the time, and them literally laughing at us for thinking we could do it."

We'll get to the name, but the context behind it is how Arena changed over the course of its development from a combat-oriented game to more of an RPG.

"Julian, Vijay, and I were all longtime pen-and-paper roleplayers, and fans of the Looking Glass Ultima Underworld series, which was certainly our main inspiration," says Peterson, who also cites a "completely forgotten" contemporary title called Legends of Valour: "It got pretty pitiful reviews and not many people bought it, but I really had fun with it."

Arena was always meant to have a "little bit" of an RPG element to it, but over the course of development this changed from a side-bonus to the game's main focus.

"The initial idea was that there was a series of tournaments in an arena, and your character fought in a team to win the coveted title against other teams," says Peterson. "A story developed that there was an evil wizard named Jagar Tharn who you could only fight once you made it to the final tournament in the Imperial City. Along the way you could do sidequests which were more roleplaying in nature.

"Eventually during the development, the tournaments became less important and the sidequests became more important. We eventually dropped the whole tournament idea altogether, and just focused on the quests and the dungeon-delving."

Which led to a realisation: Arena wasn't really a game about an arena any more.

"In the end, we had a game that almost didn't resemble our original idea at all," says Peterson. "It was really a hardcore roleplaying game, but we had already done the advertising and printed up boxes with the name 'Arena.' Someone came up with the idea that the Empire of Tamriel, because it was so violent, had been nicknamed the Arena. That explained, kinda awkwardly I guess, why there was no arena combat in a game named Arena.

"I think Vijay [Lakshman] was the guy who tacked on the subtitle 'The Elder Scrolls.' I don't think he knew what the hell it meant any more than we did, but the opening voiceover was changed to "It has been foretold in the Elder Scrolls..."

To be clear, this is not new news: it's coming from an archived interview that's 25 years old, and yes I'm sure some of you already knew this piece of trivia. But I'm always fascinated by moments of serendipity like this, where a pre-printed box and a change in the project's nature led Bethesda's developers to come up with the name of the series that the company would be built upon.

I'm aware all you pirates are busily scouring the Caribbean for Blackbeard and booty in survival game Windrose this week, but if I could just get your attention for a brief moment, perhaps by shouting something like "Avast!" and then pointing to a nearby island that has just appeared above the glimmering waves.

On that island is maybe the coolest pirate hideout I've ever seen, courtesy of the new pirate-themed city builder, Corsair Cove, announced today by Limbic Entertainment and publisher Hooded Horse. Lift your eyepatch and take a good look at the trailer:

In Corsair Cove, "players will manage complex production chains and govern a rowdy crew in a city-builder that’s all about building tall and overcoming the challenges of limited building space," says Hooded Horse. "Use the cliffs and hill tops to build factories that manufacture everything from spyglasses to cannons to meet the needs of your population."

As the trailer shows, going vertical is a must on your craggy little island, so you'll build rope bridges, ziplines, elevators, and perches from the remains of your once great galleon. Manage production chains of "over 50 types of goods," grow your settlement by attracting new pirate residents, and turn the remains of a shipwreck into a busting society.

If you're worried that spending all your time on an island doesn't feel all that piratey, bury those fears in Davey Jones' Locker. You'll still get a chance to set sail again as "players will also need to equip mighty ships of war that can take to the high seas and fight back against pirate hunters, resist agents of the Crown, and uncover mysterious dangers that lurk in uncharted waters."

Pigs will also play a part in your pirate colony, and I think they may be more than simply livestock. If you watch the trailer closely you can see pigs in a few of the buildings. One appears to be using a teeter-totter, though I don't know why: can you harness pig power in your hideout?

One of the screenshots PC Gamer was sent (you can see it in the gallery above) also shows a pirate riding on a pig's back as it jumps through the air. They both appear to be drunk. I don't understand it, but I'm interested.

Thank you for your attention, pirates. You can go back to Windrose now. Corsair Cove will set sail on Steam, Epic, the Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass on day one. It's due out in 2026.

Alexander Morton, the voice of Geralt's stout, stalwart pal Zoltan Chivay in The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3, has died. Morton's death was reported in a tribute to the actor shared on social media by The Witcher developer CD Projekt.

"We're deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Alexander Morton, the voice of beloved Zoltan Chivay in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," the studio wrote. "Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Thank you for bringing Zoltan to life. The Continent is already missing you."

We're deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Alexander Morton, the voice of beloved Zoltan Chivay in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Thank you for bringing Zoltan to life. The Continent is already missing you 💔

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-04-17T16:42:20.495Z

Morton had a few other videogame credits to his name, including Fable 2, Age of Conan, Heavenly Sword, Killzone 2, and Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. But his portrayal of Zoltan is surely his best-known work among gamers: Gravel-voiced and foul-mouthed, Zoltan is nonetheless a relatively cool head among dwarves, although quite capable of spilling over into violent rage when the moment calls for it. Morton deftly captured that complexity in his portrayal of the character, making him one of the game's most memorable NPCs.

But while his videogame credits are relatively slim, Morton was an acclaimed actor in the UK. He was best known for playing the role of Golly Mackenzie in the series Monarch of the Glen, but appeared in numerous other series in a career stretching back to the 1970s.

"We're saddened to hear the news about Alexander Morton who made a significant contribution to Scottish television and theatre. His portrayal of Golly Mackenzie in Monarch of the Glen was a key part of the long-running drama's success," BBC Scotland commissioning head Louise Thornton said in a BBC report. "He will be remembered fondly for the depth and authenticity he brought to one of BBC Scotland's most cherished dramas."

Noted film and television actor Robert Carlyle also paid tribute to Morton in an Instagram post, saying he was "not only a brilliant actor, but one of the kindest men I ever knew."

Alexander Morton was 81.

I know that, for a lot of you, the obvious best climbing game of 2025 was Peak, the absurd going-up sim from Landfall that took the world by storm. But it's not my choice. Why? I have no friends preferred White Knuckle, the early access horror-climber from Dark Machine that tasked you with climbing out of a grimy, industrial environment really fast.

It's a good time, and I praised it back around when it got its early access release for "mechanics that are complex enough to feel rewarding when you nail it but simple enough that you don't trip over yourself (too much)." Well, we're now one year out from that time, and to celebrate, the game is getting a big honkin' anniversary update, out today.

The headline item is that you can now customise your run with the use of trinkets and bindings, which for all the world (and maybe because I've been playing a bunch of Arkane classics lately) remind me of Dishonored's bonecharms in how they're described. "Trinkets provide buffs to player Stats & Abilities, while Bindings grant additional Trinket slots and increase score multipliers—at the cost of a severe debuff."

You've got trinkets that buff jumps, trinkets that add a flashlight you don't need to crank (but which has a more limited range), and bindings that shut all the game's shops, or mix in a hunger mechanic.

Which sounds like quite a change. Dark Machine is also switching up White Knuckle's metaprogression system that lets you add buffs and cosmetics to the game's safe rooms—the bits you get to cool off in between runs—and, of course, a new map. Oh, and there's a competitive mode in there now too, for those of you who can't bear to leave your pals behind in Peak.

Silent Hill f isn't the first of the series to include a female protagonist, it's not even the second really, what with the likes of Heather Mason and Cybil Bennet having graced our screen decades ago. But Silent Hill f did still manage to deliver one of the best performances and narratives with a female protagonist I've seen in a very long time.

The story follows Shimizu Hinako, a young woman at a crossroads in her life. Set in 1960s Japan, Hinako is forced to choose between what is expected from her traditionally and what could be possible in an emerging world where women have more rights. But the catch is in both instances someone else is choosing her future for her, and each holds its own terrors.

There is no one right answer or 'good' ending, that's for the player to decide. The truth is the future can be scary no matter what path you take, and, especially for women, all tracks of life come with its own pressures and fears.

The fears Hinako faces are genuine. Ok, maybe not literally, but figuratively speaking. A truth that's undoubtedly achieved by the team at NeoBards looking towards female staff members for insights, instead of just guessing at it.

"The main theme is women's rights, or how that was perceived in that time," director Al Yang told PC Gamer's senior editor Wes Fenlon at GDC. "We have a lot of female members on our team, and you'd always ask them questions regarding the fears Hinako had, and the monsters that represent them.

"Some of them are married, some of them have kids, some are right out of school. So you get different perspectives from different age ranges. I am not qualified to tell you how women should feel or what the pressures [they face]. I can try to understand, but that's not on me. The most I can do is to talk to people and get feedback and try to translate that as much as possible."

Hinako faces many fears throughout Silent Hill f, for the uninitiated that's pretty much Silent Hill's whole shtick, such as the fear of marriage, of turning out like her mother, of growing apart from her friends, and of staying too reliant on the small town where she grew up just to name a few. These plague Hinako throughout the game, some coming in form of flashbacks and other in horrific apparitions, which were also designed by the female staff.

"So with the monster that [represents] Hinako's fear of pregnancy and whatnot, there was a lot of feedback from our team members, and it was drawn by one of our female concept artists too. So there's a lot of details, this is your own personal nightmares, or the nightmares of people who've had children. And again, talking to our younger staff members, if they're afraid, what are they afraid of?"

There's no better way to create realistic fears in a game than by actually including what those working on it are afraid the most by. In the end it seems like the most effective tool NeoBards utilised was just good old fashioned feedback and communication—asking the right people the right questions.

RPGs have the blursed task of catering to many a different type of player. You've got your huge story nerds who'll go around reading every book, journal entry, and notice stuck to those little wooden boards they can. Then there's your good old-fashioned battle-brained gamers who love all of the skills, levelling, and combat flexibility that the genre can offer. Or maybe your reasons for loving an RPG are a little less obvious, like the characters who populate a world or even the music that plays as you explore it.

But most of you, it seems, just want a sick-ass world that's a blast to explore.

Last week, I asked you what the most important thing in an RPG was to you. As someone who is also a complete sucker for a world I can accidentally spend an entire day walking, galloping, and flying around (while picking up every item I see like the loot goblin I am), it came as no surprise to me that you lot also tend to favour a map plush with things to do and see.

In fact, 43% of you chose that as your most important RPG element, absolutely sweeping every other option. The following four were pretty close together, though—a lot of you also really value good story and choices that actually impact the outcome of the game you're playing. I've personally never been too fussed about choice-making in my RPGs, though I'll certainly never turn down the option.

Next up, it seems like combat and characters are the next biggies. I'm sure a whole load of us have become incredibly attached to the cast of Baldur's Gate 3, for example, which is by far my favourite part of that particular RPG.

A surprise dud for me, however, was how few of you actually care about an abundance of side quests. Sure they're usually a lot of padding and fetch quests, but they're something to do, right? I was sure more of you would put them pretty high on the priority list, but I was most certainly proven wrong here.

And yeah, I had to add in music as a videogame soundtrack sicko, but unsurprisingly it is only the most important thing for a measly 12 of you. But still, I can now use this poll as definitive proof that there are dozens of us! Well, a dozen anyway. I like to think that my weekly yapping about videogame music might have had a little influence here, wink-wink.

If you voted on the poll, now's your chance to get into the comments and defend your stance. And if you missed out on the initial voting, why not share your thoughts down below anyway? Maybe there's a secret eighth vital RPG ingredient I somehow managed to miss.

Ever since Forza's first foray into open-world racing back with Horizon in 2012, it's gone on to define the series, outpacing the original mainline Motorsport series. That's certainly not slowing down with Forza Horizon 6, which takes the racing festival to Japan after over a decade of fan requests. I was already on board when Playground Games revealed FH6 would return to the wristband career mode, but when PC Gamer's Shaun Prescott gave it a test drive earlier this month, describing its Japan map as the "series' best yet", I'm more hyped than ever.

And I'm not alone in that, clearly, as gaming market data firm Alinea Analytics suggests that Forza Horizon 6 has already sold over 500,000 copies on Steam alone so far—and it's still a month away from launch. That equates to nearly $30 million in gross revenue before considering console sales, according to their data. As for launch day on May 19, it suggests that it'll race past two million sales on Steam within its first 24 hours. For context, Forza Horizon 5 bagged over 10 million players in its first week, a record for Xbox Game Studios, so it's already making headway.

One interesting tidbit is that over 50,000 players pre-ordered the game the very day it became available on Steam. The Horizon series has earned its reputation over the years, so I'm actually not too surprised to see so many pre-order it right away, no questions asked.

Then there's the question of Japan, which Xbox has historically struggled to reach. Despite being set in Japan, currently only about 6% of Steam wishlists come from the region, and ironically, that's a big improvement for the series. That's in large part because it's now available on PlayStation—Forza Horizon 5 released on PS5 nearly four years later, and it's sold over five million copies already. You can question Xbox's recent multiplatform publishing approach all you want, but there's certainly an argument that it works.

The point is, Forza Horizon 6 is going to be a huge hit—and seemingly already is. Meanwhile, the mainline track racing series, the latest being 2023's Forza Motorsport, is running on fumes. In fact, last year, a former developer claimed the Motorsport series died in Microsoft's cuts where up to 50% of Turn 10's staff had been let go.

In other words, it seems like the more successful spinoff is now the future of the series. As much as I love Horizon and its consistent improvement with each game, I can't help but feel bitter that Motorsport is more or less gone. But hey, racing around Japan in a kei truck is undeniably awesome.

The Elder Scrolls Arena launched in 1994 and, with the benefit of hindsight, you can see the beginnings of much that would come to define the series: here's PC Gamer's own 1994 review. It was the first game in a series that would go on to become Bethesda's golden goose, and make the studio one of the most prominent in the industry. But at the time, Bethesda was a much smaller operation, and everyone involved in the game had to get hands-on with every aspect of it.

"We had a great team of hardworking developers who truly put in their best effort," Vijay Lakshman, lead designer of Elder Scrolls Arena, told the magazine GamesTM in 2014 (an interview recently exhumed by PCG sister site GR+). "No-one wore only one hat, and we were all familiar with what everyone did."

This was of course long before the days of widespread digital distribution, when PC games were shipped in those lovely big cardboard boxes and had to sell themselves to players on store shelves. And because Bethesda self-published Arena, it had to take care of that whole physical side itself.

"We even spent time shrink-wrapping the games ourselves, as Bethesda was the publisher and developer," says Lakshman. "We were in the loading dock and we learned how to assemble boxes, inserts and use the heat gun. Talk about seeing a product through from concept to box wrap! We did it all."

Arena was also late, thanks to the initial idea of an action game based around a tournament morphing over development into more of an RPG. "Eventually during the development, the tournaments became less important," recalled writer and designer Ted Peterson in 2001. "We eventually dropped the whole tournament idea altogether, and just focused on the quests and the dungeon-delving.

"At the end of development, we missed our Christmas deadline, which is really serious for a small developer/publisher like Bethesda Softworks. We released in the doldrums of March, which is disastrous. That, coupled with the fact that the distributors discovered we had essentially not made the arena combat game we said we were making, meant we initially shipped something like 3,000 units of the game."

Which was not the number of copies that Bethesda needed to sell to keep afloat. "We were sure we had screwed the company and we'd go out of business," Peterson said. "Month by month, though, people kept buying it, hearing about it word of mouth, and after a while, it turned out we had a minor 'cult' hit."

That's a modest way of putting it: a 1996 industry estimate put the total copies sold at the time at 120,000 copies in the runup to the release of Daggerfall (and the very fact of it having a sequel speaks volumes).

"The folks at Bethesda kept the franchise alive, poured their resources into it and turned it into a winner," says Lakshman. "They deserve it. I’m proud that my team could’ve done so much with so little, but I’m really awed at how much more complex the storylines, technology and adventures have grown, and how artfully woven the franchise has become. I take my hat off to the entire team at Bethesda today."

Odds are that you didn't just stumble across this story via the PC Gamer homepage—it's way more likely that Google had something to do with it. Maybe Google Discover served you this story, or maybe you dove into Google search in a bid to collate all of the news you can find about various government bodies attempting to challenge the search giant's crown. The European Commission is the latest to propose such measures.

Specifically, the European Commission is proposing that Google share its search data with third party search engines. The data would include "ranking, query, click and view data" and ideally be presented "on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" according to the European Commission.

The hope is that by sharing this data, "third party online search engines, or ‘data beneficiaries', [would be able to] optimise their search services and contest Google Search's position."

These proposed measures are in a bid to comply with the Digital Markets Act, which came into effect throughout the European Union in late 2022. The act targets 'gatekeepers,' or "large digital platforms providing so-called core platform services, such as online search engines, app stores, [and] messenger services," in an attempt to regulate the multimillion dollar companies that now shape how we interact with one another and the world around us.

Teresa Ribera, the Executive Vice-President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, explained, "Data is a key input for online search and for developing new services, including AI.

"Access to this data should not be restricted in ways that could harm competition. In fast-moving markets, small changes can quickly have a big impact. We will not allow practices that risk closing markets or limiting choice."

This isn't the first time the sharing of Google's search data with its rivals has been proposed. You'll remember that a US judge ruled that Google had violated antitrust laws back in 2024, resulting in a number of proposed remedies. These included the suggested divestment of the Chrome browser, though ultimately that did not come to pass.

In September 2025, the US Department of Justice also ordered Google to "make certain search index and user-interaction data available to rivals and potential rivals." Vice president of regulatory affairs at Google, Lee-Anne Mulholland, claimed that data sharing would "risk Americans’ privacy and discourage competitors from building their own products—ultimately stifling the innovation that keeps the US at the forefront of global technology."

So, in January of this year, Google requested to delay data sharing while it appealed the 2024 antitrust ruling.

In other words, Google has shown a lot of resistance to data sharing proposals in the past. So, what does that mean for the European Commission's latest move? That remains to be seen, as both interested parties, as well as Google, have until May 1 to submit their views on the proposed measure.

Taking all of that feedback into account, the European commission will then come to a final, binding decision that Google must then adopt by July 27. Whether that decision knocks the corporation from its search pedestal, or only gives Google a wee nudge, time can only tell.

Earlier this week, Intel's bean counters were buoyed by a spot of good news: Its market capitalization had pushed well past $300 billion for the first time since October 2000. Now it's AMD's turn to celebrate because its cap is now the highest it has ever been, since the chip giant went public back in 1972.

As I don't make a habit of keeping one eye on market news every day, I have to thank our chums at Tom's Hardware for spotting this. Though having just written that, I'll probably have an editor glaring at me and asking, 'Why don't you do that?' Well, truth be told, market cap figures are really only of interest to investors and stock market wheeler-dealers.

For tech nerds such as myself, it doesn't actually tell me anything about how well a company is doing in terms of revenue and profits. But as someone once said, business isn't necessarily about how much cash you make, but how much cash people think you can make.

And that's probably why, if you look at CompaniesMarketCap's chart for AMD, the line is doing a sterling job of heading ever upwards. The question to ask here, of course, is why AMD's share price is constantly increasing right now.

In part, it will be down to the fact that AMD is actually doing rather well at the moment, in financial terms. In 2025, Team Red achieved a total revenue of $34.6 billion, an increase of 34% compared to the previous year, and its operating income grew by a similar amount (a 27% climb from $1.9 billion in 2024).

But as I said, investors aren't necessarily all that concerned about how much money AMD is actually making right now. It's about the potential that the company has, and given that it is one of the few companies that is in a position to mass-produce the enormous accelerators required for AI data centers, that potential is very high.

Investors will be looking for companies that can tap into the seemingly endless stream of money that AI is able to accrue, while Nvidia is currently filling its buckets to the brim from the gushing cash taps, AMD and Intel are next in line.

This is why Team Red are so heavily invested in AI at the moment, and just about every product it releases is rubberstamped with TOPS. Only its desktop Ryzen chips are free of such labels, but with the Zen 6 architecture expected to appear at some point this year, I wouldn't be surprised if they follow suit.

Many years ago, I had a handful of AMD shares, but it was during the time when it was at its lowest point, so I rapidly got rid of them. Ah, if only I had a crystal ball then.

Proton—Valve's Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer that makes so much of your Steam library work on Steam Deck and Linux desktops—got a new big number today, in the form of the first Proton 11 beta release.

This one incorporates goodies from (the also recently released) Wine 11, on which Proton is based, and you might already have seen that it marks the first glimpse of an Arm64 version of Proton that Valve intends to put to use in the Steam Frame.

But it's also, well, a new Proton version, one that you can put to use right now on your nearest Linux thing, and it brings with it a whole bunch of newly playable games. Games like the recently-Steamified original versions of Resident Evil 1 and 2, Shogun: Total War, and—this is the big one for me—Deadly Premonition.

Deadly Premonition is one of five games that Valve has marked as entirely "Newly playable" on this latest iteration of Proton (I'll include the full list down below), while the others are part of a 13-strong list of games that have previously been playable via Proton's experimental branch but are now safely ensconced in a—relatively, this is still a beta—more stable version.

Aside from the playable games, Proton 11 also includes fixes for yet another busted EA App release that prevented a lot of EA games being playable (and makes the Steam overlay work with them, to boot), fixed Crimson Desert's intro video, repaired a glitch that made Metal Gear Solid 2 hang after the end credits, and plenty more.

I'm always rather impressed by how varied the spread of games are that get fixed, tweaked, or made playable in Proton updates. It's not just the new hotness; if you were desperately hanging around waiting for someone to fix alt-tabbing in the original Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Proton 11's beta finally grants that wish.

But like I said, for me the big one is Deadly Premonition. It's a kind of Resident-Evil-meets-Twin-Peaks thing, it's Swery's magnum opus, and its PC port has always been utter dogwater—a game I was prevented from 100%ing by the fact that reloading an old save to tick off my last couple of side quests invariably crashed it, and which has long required a mod called DPFix to enter a state of semi-stability. I'm very curious to see if it joins those ranks of Windows games that somehow run better on Linux. Early reports are positive.

Here's the full list of changes.

Proton 11 beta 1 patch notes

• Now playable (previously worked with Proton Experimental):
  • Universe Generator: The Golden Sword
  • DCS World Steam Edition
  • Resident Evil (1996)
  • Resident Evil 2 (1998)
  • Dino Crisis
  • Dino Crisis 2
  • From Dust
  • Blaite
  • Don't Die Dateless, Dummy!
  • METAL GEAR SURVIVE
  • Warhammer: Vermintide 2
  • Metal Fatigue
  • SHOGUN: Total War.
• Newly playable:
  • Unknown Faces
  • Gothic 1 Classic
  • X-Plane 12
  • Breath of Fire IV
  • Deadly Premonition
• Fixed video playback in She Sees Red.
• Fixed rendering of certain symbols with Ukranian language option in Chambers.
• Enabled text-to-speech accessibility feature in Pentiment and Grounded.
• Fixed voice chat in Phasmophobia lobby for desktop players.
• Improved rendering of Rockstar Launcher popups.
• Fixed Sea of Solitude showing black screen on Proton.
• Fixed many EA games being unplayable after a recent EA Desktop update.
• Added support for SteamWorks SDK 1.64.
• Fixed Steam Overlay not working correctly with many EA games.
• Improved emoji support in Idle Trillionaire.
• Fixed intro video playback in Crimson Desert.
• Fixed Rei and the Floating City not being playable with gamescope.
• Fixed mouse movement behavior in Call of Duty 2.
• Fixed rendering issue in launcher of DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH.
• Fixed a crash in HELLDIVERS 2 happening in high enemy-count missions.
• Fixed random hangs in Killer Inn.
• Fixed Killer Inn not launching on Steam Decks and other machines with /tmp sizes lower than 10GB.
• Fixed Killer Inn not being able to connect to Square Enix account.
• Fixed graphical gliches in Duck Game that happen with newer Wine Mono versions.
• Fixed REDLauncher (e.g. as seen with Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3) taking a long time to exit.
• Fixed Hollow Knight Beta update wrongly registering Steam Deck's Steam button as a left trigger.
• Fixed controller hotplug not working for 8BitDo Ultimate 2C and other controllers that expose multiple HID devices.
• Fixed Xalia intermittently failing to start when game is launched.
• Fixed small memory leak with The King of Fighters XIII Global Match video playback.
• Improved timezone detection.
• Fixed video playback in 我打不过漂亮的她们.
• Fixed lag spikes caused by Steam overlay being opened for prolonged time.
• Fixed VR controller tracking in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
• Improved VR support so that No Man's Sky VR mode is playable again.
• Fixed black blocks in dialog windows created by ARC Raiders and The Finals.
• Fixed glitchy video playback in Satisfactory.
• Fixed Rec Room not being playable after a recent game update.
• Fixed The King of Fighters XIII Global Match freezing when playing videos from the gallery.
• Fixed intro video not looping in Blazblue Centralfiction.
• Made more games using MonoGame playable.
• Improved support for Kodi media player.
• Added System Voice support for multiple languages in Phasmophobia.
• Fixed KDE window maximization support.
• Fixed Brighter Shores window resizing support.
• Improved Space Engineers dual monitor support
• Fixed scaling issue with Arma: Reforger when changing window modes.
• Fixed Dungeon Siege tools showing up at character's feet.
• Improved focus loss behavior with RoBoRumble.
• Fixed rendering issue in Hellsinker. launcher.
• Fixed stutter from keyboard input in Titanfall 2.
• Fixed audio playback when playing intro videos in BIRDCAGE.
• Fixed hang after METAL GEAR SOLID 2: Sons of Liberty end credits.
• Fixed Disintegration getting stuck on the first loading screen.
• Fixed CHRONO TRIGGER flickering in windowed mode with certain resolutions when using Gamescope.
• RAGE no longer has focus issues when Alt-Tabbing on KDE Wayland.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition (2009) no longer has problems minimizing after Alt-Tabbing.
• Resident Evil 2 should no longer have issues when changing resolutions on GNOME.
• Call of Duty: WWII should no longer fail to render properly in fullscreen native resolution on setups with dual monitors.
• Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition no longer has issues with keyboard registration after refocusing the game.
• Updated Xalia to 0.4.8:
  • Added controller support for the MC Visual C++ 2010 redistributable installer.
  • Improved gamepad binding support for Graze Counter.
  • Added controller support for launchers of the following games: Red Faction®: Armageddon™, Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 - Episode II, Hellsinker., Disney Bolt, STAR WARS™ Starfighter™.
  • Fixed Xalia wrongly selecting option from unfocused tabs in Rayman: Raving Rabbids.
  • Added controller support for DirectX Runtime Components installer when launching BioShock for the first time.
  • Added controller support for launchers of the following games: Rocket Knight, Puddle, Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, Metal Slug XX, Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition, Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY, LocoCycle, Ys SEVEN, Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Resident Evil 3 Nemesis (1999), Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2.
• Rebased on top of Wine 11.0.
• Added FEX-2604 for ARM64EC builds.
• Updated vkd3d to vkd3d-1.19-139-g30b93dcea8b0.
• Updated dxvk to v2.7.1-467-g83e503b4ae6d from Proton 11 support branch.
• Updated dxvk-nvapi to v0.9.1.
• Updated Wine Mono to 11.0.0.
• Updated vkd3d-proton to proton-20260410

Every time I think Skyrim modders can't show me any more, they deliver something new. Take a bow daubuoi, whose Unique Jarl Throne Sitting Animation mod fixes a problem I'd honestly never even noticed: in vanilla Skyrim, you see, there is one throne-sitting animation that is used for all jarls.

Quick jargon reminder: the jarls are the ones in charge of the nine holds in Skyrim, governing their cities and answerable only to the High King. They're the mini-kings and queens of Skyrim, in other words, and each have their own fiefdom.

And "every jarl now has a unique throne sitting animation reflecting their personality, authority, and the type of throne they occupy, replacing the single generic pose from vanilla."

The one exception to this is the character Kraldar, a Nord who can become jarl of Winterhold, who keeps the vanilla version as a unique animation "since I feel it suits him quite well."

I have to be honest here and say I can't quite recall the differences in personality between various jarls, except that Korir is a whiny douchebag. But a quick flick through the mod's new poses shows that daubuoi clearly has very firm ideas on how they would comport themselves, and the new poses definitely add a new layer of personality.

"Every ruler now carries themselves differently, as true jarls should," says our modding hero in their sign-off, and this is another in the long list of reasons that the Skyrim mod scene cannot be beaten. It's not so much the spectacular full conversions like the "biblically accurate Skyrim" mod that blow me away, but the ones that fixate on tiny details like how jarls sit: modders have meticulously tackled things like door textures, book spines, how clouds look, and even given some of the incidental flora a tune-up. All of these and more can be found in our guide to the best Skyrim mods.

Bungie released Marathon's big mid-season update just a few days ago, and it's packed full of heavily-requested changes (plus a bunch of new things we didn't even know we wanted). There are more unique weapons to find outside of Cryo Archive, the CARRI event designed to incentivise cooperation, an experimental pseudo-battle royale mode that's a real treat, and a new item: the Mercy Kit.

In Bungie's own words, "sometimes you shoot first and ask questions later," so the Mercy Kit is intended to, y'know, let you show your enemies some mercy if there's a chance you could be buddies after all. All Rooks spawn with a Mercy kit, and there's a chance to find one while looting in your non-Rook matches.

Despite having the best intentions in mind, you can always count on players to do exactly the opposite of what you want. Mercy Kits aren't being used to "extend a helping hand to rival Runners", as creative director Julia Nardin hoped; they're being used to grief. Content creator FalloutPlays is bang on the money when he describes it as the "most troll-friendly item imaginable."

Why show mercy when you could revive them and kill them again for bonus XP? That's the Arachne way. I've even seen a few clips where players revive a fellow Runner, butter them up by giving them free items for redemption, and then shoot them in the head with a WSTR. It's a cruel world out there.

While it's a nice idea to create a tool to encourage some cooperation and riff on Arc Raiders' social sim 'friendly matches' phenomenon, situations like that are a lot more rare on Tau Ceti. I've only met a few friendly players so far, but I have seen a few cases of friendly lobbies and even a cooperative Cryo Archive match.

All teams working together in Cryo from r/Marathon

Generally though, Marathon is shoot first and probably skip the questions entirely so you can pick their corpse clean, so it only makes sense that Mercy Kits would be twisted towards more PvP. It begs the question of what feasibly could be done to encourage more cooperation, or whether Marathon players simply are too far gone. I reckon it's the latter, since I'm relatively peaceful in Arc Raiders and a gunslinger in Marathon, and that's just how I like it.

From the moment it launched, Crimson Desert has been a big hit with PC gamers with AMD or Nvidia graphics cards. For those with Intel GPUs, it's been a completely different story. But there's now a little more light at the end of the tunnel, as the newly released drivers claim to solve flickering problems in the game, though only for Battlemage B-series chips.

Intel's B570 is currently the most affordable graphics card out of all the current generation of GPUs, but while its low price has endeared it to budget-conscious PC gamers, it's not been the card of choice for Crimson Desert fans. The game released with a clear message for Arc owners: They weren't supported, and you should probably get a refund.

Developer and publisher Pearl Abyss later said it would do something about this, and Intel itself chipped in with a fresh set of drivers that would let you at least run the game, even if the resulting visuals weren't worth it.

In the release notes of its v32.0.101.8724 drivers, Intel says that for B-series (or Battlemage) graphics cards and equivalent integrated GPUs, the update set fixes "flickering corruption on plants during gameplay." Alas, for Intel's first generation of Arc cards, such as the A770, the issue still remains.

Interestingly, similar "corruption" problems have apparently been resolved for No Man's Sky using the Vulkan API, though if you've been experiencing said problems in Dune: Awakening or Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, then I'm sorry to tell you that Intel hasn't fixed those bugs just yet.

Drivers can only do so much to sort out issues with incorrect shader code, and in the case of Crimson Desert, it looks like Arc owners will have to wait until Pearl Abyss releases a patch for its game that adds full support for Intel's GPUs before diving in. Let's hope that this isn't too far off in the future.

It's been seven and a half years since Valve first released Proton, a software compatibility layer that allows games developed for Windows to run on Linux-based operating systems, such as SteamOS. Since that time, Proton has been regularly updated, and the latest v11.0 beta release packs a whole host of fixes for games. However, Valve has also quietly dropped another version, exclusively for PCs with an Arm64 processor.

One sharp-eyed Redditor spotted this and gave it a go, with mixed success, but if you head over to SteamDB, you can see the update for yourself. It's worth noting that this is very much a test build, and it's reportedly quite wonky donkey, but with a label of Proton 11.0 (ARM64), it's blatantly obvious what device this version is for.

linux_gaming from r/linux_gaming/comments/1snjr0r/valve_kinda_released_arm64_proton_lol_works_on_my

No, not Apple MacBooks or laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors, though at least one of these can run this new Proton, as the Redditor discovered. This Arm-flavoured piece of software exists because Valve itself is using a chip with such an architecture, and it's the one that powers the Steam Frame.

The eagerly anticipated VR headset uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650) processor, which houses a total of eight little Arm Cortex CPU cores. If you're using your gaming PC to run games through the headset, then Proton isn't required, but for anything directly hosted on the Frame itself, the compatibility layer will kick in if the game is Windows-based.

It's worth noting that Proton itself is for the operating system side of things. To get x86 code working on Arm hardware, a translation layer called FEX is used, and as things currently stand, there's a fair-sized performance hit involved.

Since this is a beta update of Proton, and coupled with the fact that Valve hasn't officially announced the Arm version, it suggests that the retail release of Steam Frame isn't quite ready yet. But it's surely not far off, and out of the trio of new products Valve has announced (Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller), this is the one that I'm most interested in.

I currently use a Meta Quest 3S for VR gaming on my main PC, and the one thing I don't like about the whole experience is the fact that I need to use a hefty optical fibre USB cable to get the best experience. Over Wi-Fi, it's just not the same, as the increased latency and reduced bandwidth are quite noticeable.

The Steam Frame uses a dedicated 6 GHz wireless dongle to basically stream games from your PC to the headset, and our Jacob came away very impressed by the Frame's wireless nature when he tried it himself. No cables, no lag: just pure, untethered VR gaming.

If I do eventually swap my Quest 3S for a Steam Frame, I probably won't be leaning on Proton very much, but I'm mightily impressed that Valve is at least giving me the option to enjoy a bit of Windows-based gaming, without the need to fire up my big ol' PC. And if the future of PC gaming is going to shift away from being almost entirely x86-focused, then it looks like Valve is already prepped for it.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was our game of the year for 2025, and I personally hailed it as a "New RPG classic" in our KCD2 review. Why? Because you can kiss Hans. There's some stuff about emergent, systemic gameplay; an uncompromising design vision; and a well-told, politically complex story in a setting no one else is working in, but make no mistake: I'm just here to hold Hans' hans. Hand. Hands.

I kid (mostly), but the development of Henry and Hans' romantic relationship—if you choose to pursue it—and the pair attempting to interpret their feelings for one another through contemporary chivalric traditions, was really well done. It's a big jewel in the game's crown.

It was so well done, in fact, that KCD2 has nabbed two nominations for Gayming Magazine's 2026 Gayming Awards: KCD2 itself is in the running for "Gayming fan favorite award," while Hans is up for the "Best LGBTQ+ Character Award."

KCD2's creative director Daniel Vávra—who has since departed that role to focus on a Kingdom Come movie—welcomed the nomination on X, writing that he was "really proud" of the Hans/Henry relationship. And then, well, he wrote a whole bunch of other stuff, like a long-winded and less amusing riff on the famous Hideo Kojima "not a gay" tweet.

"I absolutely stand by the fact that the way we did it is exactly how something like this should be done," said Vávra "Non-coercively, naturally, and educationally (because we show how things really were in the Middle Ages without idealizing them)."

You can probably see where this is heading. Vávra wrote that KCD2 did gay romance right where so many others, apparently, do it wrong: "without shoving it down anyone’s throat or trying to re-educate them like so many titles that are rightfully called 'woke' these days.

"We made the gay community happy and gave them the CHOICE to be themselves, just like we did for others in other choices and quests, and anyone who isn’t interested probably didn’t even notice."

By way of conclusion, Vávra would like you to know that—though the inclusion of gay romances in KCD2 "was my idea, my decision and my responsibility and I had to convince others to do it"—it does not mean that he doesn't "find the abundance of forced 'woke' nonsense in the entertainment industry annoying at the same time."

Vávra is a peculiar figure. In the time of KCD1, his vocal support of the far-right Gamergate movement made him, and the game he directed, something of a saint of right-wing gamers, who perceived him and Warhorse as some sort of bulwark against a scourge of "woke" content they perceived to be laying waste to the games industry.

As someone who plays a lot of RPGs, I don't recall any of them forcing me to kiss anyone of the same gender or indeed, to be "woke," for whatever definition of that word its opponents are using today. Perhaps I'm just playing the wrong ones.

It's worth noting that this precise same contingent of rabidly conservative gamers promptly turned against Vávra and Warhorse the second they put a prominent person of colour—and, of course, a gay relationship—into KCD2, which suggests they were never really as concerned about this kind of content being done "the right way" as they were about it being present in any capacity whatsoever. For its part, the wider Warhorse studio has said it's "fed up" with being dragged into culture wars.

Personally, I've never gotten the impression Vávra has a particularly cogent or well-considered politics; rather he just seems like a very sensitive person who reacted badly to criticism of the first Kingdom Come and has kept up that tradition in the second game, too.

But regardless of its director's tweets, KCD2 is a very good and very well-written videogame, and I think it fully deserves the plaudits it earned for its depiction of Henry and Hans' romance, whether that makes it woke or not.

Do you ever see the word imposter or sus and cold shivers run down your spine? Well same, and we all have Among Us and its astoundingly large reach to thank for that. It seemed like everyone was playing the social dedication party game back when it released, and especially during Covid, but it seems like the hype hasn't died down just yet.

Among Us' devs recently announced the impressive feat of over 1 billion downloads: "Yooooooooooooooo we recently hit 1 billion downloads on the Google Play Store??? That's so many Crewmates, thank you for playing. I'm gonna barf in a vent, this is so cool."

This means Among us has more downloads on the Google Play Store than Minecraft, Stardew Valley, and Terraria. Honestly, it's more than almost all of the games available. I'm not surprised though, as I said before, Among Us has had an incredibly large reach for over half a decade now.

That being said, I'd doubt if these are all individual downloads. It's probably more likely that in the hundreds of millions of people who have Among Us, some have downloaded it more than once. Or as the devs posit: "One person downloaded it a billion times" or else "1/8 of the world are Crewmates or Imposters, hard to say."

Recently, we've seen more people watch concurrent player counts on sites like SteamDB like a hawk, using these numbers to justify whatever prior opinion is held. Just talking about a game's concurrents, however, isn't the best way to uncover how good a game really is or how impactful it'll be long term. But over 1 billion downloads and counting after eight years is certainly an impressive feat and one which is also backed up by the fact that Among Us catapulted the social deduction game into the limelight: as well as the fact that it's managed to invade so much of our vernacular. Well played, Among Us, well played.