CD Projekt Red currently has more irons in the fire than Geralt of Rivia's favourite blacksmith. There's The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2, which on their own are enough to keep the studio busy for the next decade. But there's also the mysterious Project Hadar, which we know very little about despite it being in the works for years.

A few details have emerged over that duration. It's a new IP rather than a licensed game, one that CD Projekt had "established the foundation of" as of March 2026. Now though we have some idea of what those foundations are, thanks to a new job listing posted to CDPR's open positions page.

The listing (via Eurogamer) is for an engineering director—someone who will oversee the game's architecture and technical strategy. "In this position, together with the rest of the team, you will help push the envelope for the next, immersive game in the Hadar world, creating an emotional, open world experience that will stay with gamers."

From a developer that specialises in emotional open-world games, it's hardly a revelation. But I suppose it tells us that CDP is sticking to what it knows with Hadar rather than trying something radically different—at least as far as the structure of the game is concerned—and it's more likely to be defined by its world and theme than by offering a completely new type of game experience.

I had a recce around the rest of the jobs page to see if the listings revealed any further details, but the best I could come up with is that Hadar will have quests and NPCs, which is a bit like saying "this book will have nouns and verbs in it". Another job posting from last year suggested Hadar will feature melee combat, which is a bit more specific, but not much.

Given that the Hadar team is still small—26 people at last count—I expect it will be some time before the game properly breaks cover. In other CD Projekt-related news, what did break cover was the heavily rumoured third expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It's called Songs of the Past, is being developed by Fool's Theory—the team behind the (currently postponed) Witcher 1 remake—and will be "closer to Blood & Wine in scope"—in other words, massive.

We're a few days into the nonstop livestreams of Summer Game Fest 2026, and still have a couple of shows left to close out the weekend. The Xbox Games Showcase takes today's first slot, then a Gears of War: E-Day Direct follows up immediately after with a closer look at the Marcus Fenix origin story.

When is the Xbox Games Showcase for SGF 2026?

The Xbox Games Showcase airs Sunday, June 7, at 10 am Pacific. You can check this full list of timezone conversions for calculating what time that is in your region, but here are a few for quick reference:

• 10 am PDT, June 5 (Los Angeles)
• 1 pm EDT (New York)
• 2 pm ART (Buenos Aires)
• 6 pm BST (London)
• 7 pm CEST (Berlin)
• 3 am AEST, June 6 (Sydney)

While Xbox hasn't confirmed today's exact runtime, previous Xbox livestreams were around two hours long. Developer Directs, like today's Gears feature, are included in that and average around 45 minutes long.

How to watch the Xbox Games Showcase

Today's Xbox livestream already has a placeholder on YouTube, so you can pop in now and wait for the show to start, or just visit one of its official channels directly:

• YouTube
• YouTube (BSL)
• Twitch
• Twitch (ASL)

What to expect from the Xbox Games Showcase

Xbox is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, so Summer Game Fest seems like the perfect place to make some noise around the occasion. We know Gears is there, and the recently announced Halo: Campaign Evolved seems like a safe bet, but what else is there?

State of Decay 3, probably. The apocalyptic survival crafting game just wrapped up a round of alpha testing in May. I'm assuming Fable 4 will show a little something too, considering it was just delayed into 2027. Then there's The Elder Scrolls 6, which I figure won't be there, but I do foresee a million "Elder Scrolls 6??" comments in every livestream chat for the next several years.

We've also put together a longer list of Summer Game Fest predictions, so maybe you'll find something to look forward to there if you haven't seen your most anticipated game yet.

While I generally dislike describing games as being lazily designed, since they are tremendously hard to make, laziness does seem to be a running theme with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Its single-player campaign felt decidedly slapped together when it launched in October last year, while the post-launch support for its unambitious multiplayer has mostly focussed on playing the hits like Safeguard rather than trying anything radically new.

But Season 4 of Black Ops 7 takes things one step further, bringing the FPS equivalent of an easy chair into the game itself. Not only does it introduce a mode that removes the most interesting new feature added to Call of Duty in the last few years, but it also introduces a gun that essentially aims for you.

Season 4 bolsters Black Ops 7's arsenal with several new weapons, including the rapid-fire VX Compact Assault Rifle, and the battle pass exclusive CBRS-3 SMG and KRS-7.62 Marksman Rifle. But it's Grimhawk that stands out. Available as a weekly challenge reward, this fully automatic rifle fires low-velocity rounds that home in on targets firing at you. Activision stresses that these are "light" homing rounds, so they won't do all the work for you. Nonetheless, supercharged aim assist is a pretty big advantage in a multiplayer FPS.

Alongside this, Season 4 adds a new mode called 'Black Ops Classic' which removes the Omnimovement system first added in Black Ops 6 while also featuring "streamlined" loadouts and a "throwback" map roster. That means no wall jumping, no sliding, no acrobatics of any kind.

Basically, it's Black Ops for FPS pensioners—old fashioned, sensible deathmatch with no larking about. You don't even have to aim properly if you've got the Grimhawk equipped. Given Black Ops 7's current trajectory, Season 5 will presumably bring a slippers perk and a hot-water bottle scorestreak.

On the subject of scorestreaks, season 4 adds a new one called "Iron Rain", basically a big drone that lets you track enemies on the ground and then pummel them with aerial artillery. It also adds a new 6v6 map called Primetime, brings back another Black Ops 2 map called Vertigo, and sees the return of the Gunfight game mode in 6v6 form.

Black Ops 7, Season 4 is available to play now. Personally though, my eyes have turned to the next entry in Call of Duty. Microsoft has formally raised the curtain on Modern Warfare 4, which heralds the return of Infinity Ward and has been cooking for four years—a long time in Call of Duty terms. Morgan Park got hands on with it last month, and while he wasn't sold on its map roster, he thought the gunplay was sublime. "In terms of raw FPS craft, this is immediately head and shoulders above the previous pair of Black Ops—games that look and sound fine. It really does matter who makes Call of Duty."

It's been a long, dry year since Satisfactory last received a major update. Version 1.1 of Coffee Stain's hugely popular factory sim launched almost exactly twelve months ago, bringing proper controller support, an improved photo mode, better resource transportation, and more. Yet outside of a few hotfixes, that's been it for fans of building enormously convoluted assembly lines.

Now though, Coffee Stain is back. Update 1.2 is even more substantial than 1.1, adding one major new feature, one major returning feature, and a massive overhaul to an existing system.

The headline addition is rain, which was already added to Satisfactory once with Update 6 during early access. However, Coffee Stain has folded in a new, more advanced rain system that will now give buildings and characters a proper wet look. According to Coffee Stain, rain will also be occluded by "most" buildings, meaning you should see effects clipping through your factory walls and ceilings far less often.

As for new stuff, 1.2 adds fluid stations and fluid trucks, giving players an alternative to pipes for transporting liquids across your factory. These come bundled with a vehicle pathing system that has been "completely remade from the ground up". This basically lets players build vehicle paths in the same way they'd build railways, plotting out the route and then plonking the vehicle on top of it.

Other additions include a selfie mode in photo mode, a buildable Portaloo that acts as spawn point, a T-junction piece for pipelines, and a crossbeam.

It's a sizeable update. But there's one thing to be wary of if you play Satisfactory on a Steam Deck: Other Steam Deck players have reported that the new weather effects cause significant slowdown on the device. Fortunately, the effects can be adjusted or switched off entirely.

If you're yet to check out Satisfactory—which you absolutely should as it's one of the best games on PC, as explained by Jonathan Bolding in PC Gamer's Satisfactory Review —it's currently on a 30% discount at $28 (£25.45). The discount ends tomorrow.

Polish horror developer Bloober Team is keeping busy. Coming off Cronos: The New Dawn and with a remake of the original Silent Hill in the works as well as Layers of Fear 3, the studio has now announced it's working on a sci-fi psychological horror game set in the Star Trek universe.

In Star Trek: Shadow Frontier we'll play Ro Laren, a Bajoran officer introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation who came back for Picard, played by Michelle Forbes. She returns to the role here, which isn't her first time in videogames—among her game credits is Dr. Judith Mossman from Half-Life 2.

Shadow Frontier sends her on a rescue mission to a planet that's been taken over by an alien entity. "In true Star Trek fashion," the Steam description says, "Ro's mission is driven by duty and purpose. But here, discovery comes at a terrible cost. The more she uncovers, the deeper she is pulled into a corrupted labyrinth where her memories twist and the planet threatens to sever her connection to reality."

Apparently we'll get to use Ro's tricorder to analyze objects and her phaser to both solve puzzles and zap some enemies, though I'm curious to see how much it relies on shooting aliens—something Star Trek videogames tend to emphasize a wee bit more than the shows. The store page promises a blend of "exploration, puzzles, combat and cinematic set-pieces" but that's a vague enough description it could apply to every prestige action-adventure game released in the last 30 years.

Star Trek: Shadow Frontier doesn't have a precise release date yet, but apparently the plan is for a 2027 release. When it does come out, it'll be available on Steam.

The original Sinking City was a touch too ambitious for its own good, spreading its supernatural horror mystery across an open world that left it feeling thin. When I played a preview build of the sequel earlier this year, it seemed more focused, the kind of survival horror game with room for exploration within its levels but not an entire town to free-roam around—more like H. P. Lovecraft's Resident Evil than a budget Grand Theft Cthulhu.

But you don't have to take my word for it. During the Future Games Show, developer Frogwares released a one-hour demo of The Sinking City 2, which you can try right now on Steam.

Frogwares also announced a release date of August 18, which will give you time to play it ahead of September's horror games, Silent Hill: Townfall and vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker. Saving your horror game for October is probably a bit passé these days.

There's also a new trailer, introducing the sequel's setting of Arkham. (Which the asylum from the Batman comics was named after.) It's been flooded so you can motorboat around it, as in the first game, and filled with Mythos monstrosities, including zombies with bulging fleshy weak spots to shoot. And, er, a sultry mermaid? Well, I guess all those grotesque fish-human hybrids came from somewhere. (Yes, I have read The Shadow Over Innsmouth.)

Asymmetrical PvP is all the rage these days, especially among licensed horror games for some reason—a new 3v1 Saw game just got revealed yesterday—but what if I want to pick up my knife and carve up some innocent people without the social pressures of online competition?

I never thought I'd say this, but Michael Myers has the solution I'm looking for.

A trailer was shown at today's Future Games Show teasing the upcoming Halloween game's solo campaign, a mode untethered to the online PvP. Unlike, say, a Halloween movie, it seems like players will follow the POV of Myers himself, stabbing and stalking to their heart's content as weary narrators recount how scary you are.

There are only brief clips of gameplay, but it looks the way you might expect a game with Michael Myers as the star to look: lots of stabbing and walking forward menacingly. If developer IllFonic pulls it off, I imagine it'll touch on a similar appeal to reverse-horror gorefests like Carrion and Manhunt: tense action games all about playing with your food, so to speak.

I'm curious to see how long and narrative-heavy it will be, given that it's set to cover Myers' "origin story." (I always thought his origin story was just that he was an evil baby who grew up to be an evil, scary man).

Dead by Daylight and this game's predecessor, IllFonic's Friday the 13th game, had no substantive single-player modes to speak of, but the slashing in these sorts of games is satisfying, albeit a bit simple. I can't imagine it'll beget much comparison to more traditional horror games given that you play as the killer, so we could be in for something novel here.

Halloween: The Game releases Sep. 8 later this year, and is available to wishlist on Steam.

Exodus, the sci-fi action RPG in development at Archetype Entertainment, dropped an extended gameplay video today at the Future Games Show. It delivers the most up-close look at the game yet—and for better or worse, it's not shaking the allegations that it looks a lot like Mass Effect.

The hero in Exodus is Jun Aslan, who, unlike the highly trained and experienced military operative Commander Shepard, is a deep space salvager and all-around nobody. Kind of a loser, really—but they also just so happen to possess a genetic trait that allows them to wield uniquely powerful technology, including an upgradeable gauntlet that enables all sorts of special abilities.

As Jun progresses along their adventure, they'll be confronted with various moral choices, like 'fight through enemy forces and spare the lives of innocent bystanders, or blow the airlock, get it over with quickly and safely, and kill everyone'—decisions which will put them on the path of the Paladin (good) or the Immortal (somewhat more self-interested, let's say). Character progression and abilities will be impacted by the character's alignment, as will interactions with the world and the characters in it.

If all that sounds familiar, so will the companions introduced in the trailer. Renowned xeno-archaeologist Phaedra Nath looks to be set up as Exodus' take on Liara T'Soni but with far more nervous energy, which I assume will smooth out as the character grows and matures over the course of the game and possible romantic entanglement. Tom Vargas is a steady, mature hand with a tendency to caution, who strikes me very much as a Kaidan Alenko type; the mech pilot Elise Charrous is basically Jack with hair; Salt, the Awakened octopus, is Mordin Solus with a quick detour into KotOR for a dash of HK-47; and Houston, the Awakened wolf, is Wrex. Your mileage may vary on these comparisons, but that's how I see them line up.

The one wild card is CC Orlev, "the mysterious space cowboy" voiced by Matthew McConaughey. I'm not sure how he fits into the supporting cast puzzle—he looks like kind of a Ben Kenobi type, but that's the wrong space opera. Maybe he's your Garrus?

The video also shows a bit of the hub city of Persepolis, where humans and Awakened hang out during their downtime, and touches on the concept of time dilation—a few hours here is a few years (or decades) there—which will apparently play a significant role in the game's narrative.

It all looks perfectly fine, and as much as a call on it can be made at this still-early point, I'm sure Exodus will work out to be a good third-person sci-fi action game. I just can't shake the feeling that I've seen this all before, and not just as a distant, indistinct sense of familiarity: Some of this stuff is pretty spot-on.

In a slightly altered timeline, this could be a Mass Effect: Andromeda screenshot:

A few more new screens:

One of the big points of frustration I'm feeling is that Exodus has gone from the 2024 Mara Yama teaser, which was great, to this fairly generic-looking third-person ARPG. I said the same thing a few months ago, when snippets of Exodus gameplay first started to drop: They look fine, but not nearly as good as those early teasers about alien horrors who want to eat our minds, or humanity's eagerness to exploit the weak when the going gets tough.

That's interesting and meaty; this is, well, a lot like Mass Effect, isn't it?

This of course is not the final word on the whole thing: Exodus isn't set to arrive until early 2027, which leaves plenty of time to show us how it will stand apart from the crowd. Hopefully it will.

At the Future Games Show today, Vampire Survivors creator Luca Galante talked about making more Vampire Survivors spin-offs—noting the success of Vampire Crawlers as a motivator—some of which he's calling "Survivatons."

It's a "stupid" name that is "short for survive-a-ton," the masked Poncle head said in the interview.

The Survivaton label "encompasses internally developed games that build on the foundation of the studio's flagship title, Vampire Survivors, in collaboration with selected content partners," Poncle said in a press release. "Each project will aim to introduce major gameplay changes, content expansions, or genre twists exploring ideas substantial enough to stand as their own games."

The first Survivaton will be revealed "very soon," and Vampire Survivors itself will be renamed "Vampire Survivors - First Survivaton."

Galante also revealed Vampire Survivors: Legacy of the Blood Moon, a small add-on for the original. It'll feature "eight-plus characters, eight-plus weapons, plus evolutions," and will be cheap: around 80 pence (a little over $1 USD), Galante said.

Even as Poncle works on Survivatons, there'll be more to come for the original Vampire Survivors in the future. Patch 1.15 just dropped on Steam with "a new stage, new characters, new weapons, and new Darkanas."

"I'm not planning to let go of Vampire Survivors anytime soon," said the creator.

The genre spawned by Vampire Survivors has a couple of popular names. Steam has settled on "bullet heaven," though some prefer "survivors-like." It doesn't sound like Galante is pitching "Survivaton" as a replacement for either, just a name for official Vampire Survivors spin-offs—but who knows, maybe it'll catch on.

The final announcement is the establishment of Poncle Japan, "a dedicated Japanese subsidiary focused on deepening the studio's presence in one of the world's most important gaming markets." The new studio will be run by Sawaki Takeyasu, known for his work on Devil May Cry and El Shaddai.

Gothic is no walk in the park, and the remake didn't move the needle on that too much—PC Gamer weekend editor Jody Macgregor called it "an RPG for people who think Daggerfall was the last good Bethesda game" in his review. One thing the remake did overhaul was the lockpicking system, though players are still finding it a bit of a headscratcher.

Reddit user ConferenceWarm171 posted a thread yesterday joking about the system-induced mass confusion. One reply from user Salvator-Mundi- reads, "It is a classic puzzle. Moving one plate actually moves multiple plates. Plates at different levels move different other plates. You have to find the order of moving the plates." That breakdown only hurts my head as a Gothic greenhorn, but Salvator-Mundi- conceded in their post that "they could add easier locks at the start of the game."

PC Gamer online editor Fraser Brown had some gentle critiques of the game's lockpicking minigame in today's Dungeon Master column, where he said the system "has broken me and I can no longer experience joy … I guzzled down one of my favourite beers last night and could only taste disappointment." He also said it's better than what's in the original game, which makes me a little glad I never played it.

Developer Alkimia published a community blog on Steam yesterday addressing the issue. "We are monitoring the sentiment about lockpicking which seems very mixed; we cannot stress enough how much easier this gets when you start adding skill points into it," the post said. "We will ofc continue to monitor and communicate as soon as we have solutions or timelines for when fixes will be deployed." (The post also states that some crash bugs are being worked on with a fix due by Monday, in case you don't care about all this lockpicking drama.)

It's funny to see all this backlash. I always thought lockpicking minigames were the penance you have to suffer to get a good RPG in return—the bitterness that brings out the deeper flavors in that black coffee. Do I like picking locks in Oblivion? No, I'm not a dunce. But would I trade that jank for the world? Of course not.

Wardogs, we learned from the new trailer that dropped during today's Future Games Show, is not a battle royale. It is also not an extraction shooter. So... what is it? The video does eventually get to that part: It's an "all-out warfare" FPS for up to 100 players.

The trailer looks pretty straightforward as these things go, with chaotic first-person gameplay and light vehicle simulation that evokes thoughts of Call of Duty or Battlefield. The big difference is that Wardogs is built around a single game mode inspired by King of the Hill that pits three teams against each other for control of randomized zones within a larger-scale map. Each zone has varying conditions and challenges, so every match—in theory at least—is different.

Wardogs also aims to actively encourage teamplay by offering in-game monetary rewards for specific actions—not just controlling objectives (although you're definitely getting paid for doing that) but also things like reviving teammates or transporting friendlies. The cash you earn can be spent on a range of loadouts and vehicles with each new life, and it also persists from match to match, meaning you can save up for a big spend at a crucial moment—and that you might be a little stuck if you're having a bad run.

The big hook, though, is that Wardogs is "100% player driven," with an emphasis on letting players do what they want within the confines of the map. "There's no one way to play, earn and progress," the Steam page says. "Instead, Wardogs gives players the freedom to take on the Control Zone in any number of ways. Whether you're a lone wolf helping out your team or part of a dedicated squad, how you approach the battlefield is entirely up to you.

"There are no set rules of engagement. It's ultimately your choice how you want to approach the battlefield."

It looks pretty good: I enjoy modern military shooters as much as the next guy but tend not to play them online because, frankly, I suck. Being able to come at it in a more open-ended setting and maybe find an approach that fits my aging reflexes has appeal.

Wardogs is set to launch into early access later this year. If you want to jump into playtesting ahead of that, you can sign up at wardogs.com.

Another month goes by, another highly-anticipated survival game is poised for a big launch. But Solarpunk, which has over 1.2 million wishlists on Steam, has issued a warning to players before they buy it on June 8: make sure you know what you're actually getting.

"Is Solarpunk for you?" developer Cyberwave asked in a post on Steam. Because if you were expecting a massive, sprawling survival game like recent hits Windrose or Subnautica 2, this might not be the game for you.

"We've been developing the game as a two-person team for the most part, and with 1.2 million people on the wishlist, the pressure is incredibly high, we're worried that some people might be expecting a AAA title," Cyberwave said.

"We know that some players might look at the wishlist number and expect a huge survival game made by dozens or hundreds of developers. That is not what Solarpunk is. Solarpunk is not a giant studio production. It is not trying to compete with the biggest survival games in scope, content amount, or system depth.

"Solarpunk is a calm, cozy, focused survival craft sandbox made by a tiny team with a lot of love," the developer said. "So before release, we want to be very clear about what Solarpunk is, and what it is not."

The dev went on to set expectations for Solarpunk, promising "a calm survival craft experience focused on peace, creativity, and slow progression" and noting that "after around 20 hours, most of the main content is explored and the game then switches the focus to your home base, farm, decoration, and personal goals."

If you're looking for PvP, there is none. The game doesn't have a huge open world, but rather "a limited set of handcrafted islands and two biomes." And don't expect a story driven experience: "Solarpunk has no story campaign and no narrative quest progression."

There's more, lots more, the developers would like you to know before you start playing, and there's even a nearly 10-minute long video explaining what the game is and, just as importantly, what it isn't.

"We do not want anyone to buy Solarpunk for the wrong reasons," Cyberwave said. "We want you to buy it if you are excited about a peaceful survival craft game where you build a cozy home base, farm, decorate, explore handcrafted islands, and spend relaxed time alone or with friends.

"And if you expected PvP, a big story campaign, endless exploration, deep combat, huge public servers, or hundreds of hours of main progression, that is totally okay too. In that case, Solarpunk might simply not be the right game for you."

At the same time, the small studio is grateful to have gotten so many fans and followers. "Thank you for giving this tiny project so much attention," Cyberwave said. "Thank you for wishlisting, playing the demo, backing us, watching videos, sharing feedback, and believing in Solarpunk. It means more to us than we can properly put into words."

As MMOs have continued to adjust themselves for a more modern (and aging) audience with pesky things like 9-5 jobs, children, and—heaven forbid—other social responsibilities, they've tilted towards more solo-friendly content. Most of Final Fantasy 14's main story quest can be played without grouping with a single living person—World of Warcraft now has solo-friendly endgame options like Delves or Prey to keep you busy, and so on.

Not to mention the wider design—on the whole, casual content requires less coordination and classes are more self-sufficient. It's entirely possible to log into an MMO, play for a few hours, and dip without having ever said a single thing to anybody beyond a wave when you enter a dungeon, or a "ty4p" at the end of it.

Heck, I've been guilty of this, occasionally. I get most of my socialisation in MMOs out during roleplay, but when it comes to actually playing the game and running content, I'm a bit of a lone wolf. I'm polite, sure, but I don't tend to stick around to chat with strangers. I've got my cosy little bubble and I'm sticking in it.

As a matter of fact, while I'm very sociable within the gaming communities I'm a part of, I'm a little bit standoffish and nonverbal when it comes to the wider gaming public. Not for any fear or anxiety, mind, I just have a limited social battery and choose to spend it on the nice folks I've already got in my Discord.

Which had me thinking—how social are you, Terminally Online reader? Do you make time to chat to strangers in cities? Do you dig into player housing nightclubs and strike up a conversation with somebody, or flag someone down while they're levelling? Or do you just play MMOs to have a little bit of company in the background during your gaming time?

Thanks to the power of magic (and also our poll system), we can find out. Fill in the poll below—and if I've not covered your unique social interaction style, feel free to hop into the comments and discuss.

In a video blog published today, ArenaNet said that Guild Wars 3 won't mean the end of development for Guild Wars 2. It and even GW1 will be getting new updates "for the foreseeable future."

"We are not replacing your favorite games. We'll be supporting them," said ArenaNet head Colin Johanson in the video. "We know this is not the norm, but it's something our studio has been preparing for."

Johanson pointed back to Guild Wars 2's release, when the final Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North, set up the sequel's events and the game was essentially replaced, at least in terms of active support in the form of new patches.

He explained that if the studio were going that route a second time, "we would have stopped development on Guild Wars 2 over a year ago." Not only is the current expansion not quite wrapped up yet, but the original Guild Wars has started to get new dungeons after years of relative silence, so it's clear this approach has been in motion for some time now.

In the short-term, this will mean that Guild Wars 2 will slow down for a bit. The video notes that a few smaller things are on the way while GW3 prepares for release—an optimization pass, a reprise of the Hall of Monuments system where players can earn GW3 rewards in GW2, and an updated version of the Zhaitan fight in base GW2—though GW2 will continue to get more expansions once GW3 is out.

It will be interesting to see if these plans change if GW3 turns out to be a runaway success, or the opposite. There are some parallels to be drawn with Final Fantasy, which has two active MMOs in 11 and 14, RuneScape, which has Old School and modern versions, and World of Warcraft, which is split between all sorts of different era-locked servers.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Guild Wars 2 review - PC Gamer issue #245 (UK, November 2012)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and newly taken screenshots. By Chris Thursten

Players gather on the staircase leading down to the Ascalonian catacombs, filling local chat with group requests. A few run about, periodically charging up a nearby hill to repel another assault by harpies on a Durmand Priory dig site. Others dance, or run a sleep emote. A significant number are crammed in underneath the waypoint that links this part of the plains of Ashford to the rest of the world of Tyria.

Within the Catacombs, a norn ranger—Eir Stegalkin—searches for an ancient weapon that could help reforge her old guild, Destiny's Edge. These heroes are the key to defeating Zhaitan, the Elder Dragon threatening the world. They also serve as mentors for each of the game's five races, accompanying you on personal story missions. Another Destiny's Edge member, Rytlock, has followed Eir into the catacombs, angry that she's trespassing on his people's land. We're here to stop them from killing each other.

I'm grouped with an asura warrior, a tiny sword-wielding gremlin in red and gold armour—Pinky and the Brain in platemail. He's telling me about his build. He has stacked an array of slottable utility skills—passive bonuses, in this case—and combined them with an advanced character trait that grants an extra boost for having several abilities of the same type. This is one of many builds that are possible across Guild Wars 2's eight professions and dozens of weapon combinations. He's proud of it: his critical hit chance, he tells me, is very high.

This is what waiting to do a dungeon has looked like since World of Warcraft first placed a swirling portal between five players and the rest of the world. That slight disconnection between theory and heroism, that tension between action and boredom. The moment stands out now because it's the first time in over 30 hours with this character that I've found myself in it.

Long story

As a human, I began my journey in Queensdale—rolling farmland ransacked by centaur warbands during a time of political discord, a symptom of a once-dominant race now in decline. If I had been an asura, I would have come from the jungles of the southwest, via a science fiction-fantasy story that drags in everything from mind-controlled golems to time travel. Tyria's youngest race, the sylvari, are plant-people inspired by celtic folklore and Arthurian myth, making their home among the branches of a big tree.

The bestial charr, Guild Wars' former villains, have been reintroduced Klingon style: Ashford is their homeland now, but the fragility of their warrior culture creates tension both within and without their race. The gigantic norn, who spend their early levels working their way down from the frozen mountain where they spend their exile, struggle the most to stand out: their Norse-derived society, which values individual glory above all else, is a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for what most MMORPG players spend their time doing.

Whatever choices you make at character creation, the result is a breathless charge into this new world, and it's only when the game delivers its first instance at level 30 that the brakes are applied.

I'm not disappointed, exactly.

MMO downtime produces friendships—even marriages, from time to time. It's just that the journey to this point has been about anything but waiting. I've charged off into the countryside and fought bandits. I've intervened to defend towns from centaurs and disguised myself as a pirate to win a drinking competition.

I've painstakingly customised a suit of armour—from stats to colouring—and warped sideways into a wholly different game, a sprawling fantasy conquest mode where whole servers crash into each other in the phenomenal, punch-the-air return of Dark Age of Camelot's much missed factional PvP. Theorycrafting while waiting for groupmate number five is like getting the bus to work on Monday morning after a spectacular lost weekend.

It's easy to make flash judgements at moments like this. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is one of your massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. We queue and talk shop: we sit on the bus and wait patiently for the next fun thing. Look closer, though, and every aspect of this picture has been made strange by ArenaNet's bottom-up recalibration of the genre.

Those group requests? They're not class-dependent: Guild Wars 2 has no healers or tanks, and therefore no roles that must be filled before fun can be had.

Those players charging up the hill? They range from level eight to eighty, with more powerful characters downscaled to match the encounter, the elite player rubbing winged pauldrons with Jimmy Leatherjerkin.

That waypoint? It links to every part of the game I've previously visited, allowing me to instantly go off and do something else if I want to.

These are the innovations and conveniences that make the game so enjoyable, that make it a viable prospect for players traditionally unwilling to step onto the MMORPG treadmill.

Old habits

Fast-forward 25 minutes, and our group is falling apart. We've died multiple times while trying to crack basic enemy encounters. We're making progress, thanks to instant in-dungeon respawns—but it's slow, frustrating, and we're racking up a debilitating repair bill. The asura warrior rushes back into the fray, and allows a hammer-wielding ghost to smash him in the face. Our ranged companions—a necromancer and a ranger—stand still and pour on damage from the sidelines. When one of them is wounded, they're left to bleed out: after all, a wipe is a wipe, right?

The asura starts talking again, this time to complain. These monsters hit too hard, and have too much health. The maths is wrong, and this encounter is impossible. You can't even level up or get better gear, because everyone in the Catacombs is functionally level 30 and there's no core power differential between equipment of a certain level, regardless of rarity. You can't beat this MMORPG encounter by making your numbers bigger: therefore, the logic goes, this encounter is broken.

"Then get out of the way," I snap, before feeling bad and clarifying. "Dodge or block. Wait for the tell—that hammer attack is slow."

Guild Wars 2 isn't a game where a melee attack will connect because the server determined that it would three seconds earlier. It's not a game where a fireball will turn in mid-air to hit you. A clever build might save you, but planning isn't enough—you need to react, pay attention, and improvise. It's not even that prior MMORPGs downplayed these things: most actively discourage them. The worst thing a traditional raider can do is disrupt the status quo. Once upon a time, Leeroy Jenkins was the model of the bad groupmate—a view that ignores the fact that he's the most compelling person in that video. He's the one charging in, odds be damned. He's the hero.

Guild Wars 2 isn't Leeroy's MMO—its tougher fights certainly demand coordination—but it is the MMO that figured out that Leeroys have all the fun. Its combat mechanics allow for accidents to be wrestled into victories, be that by heroically intercepting a killing blow in PvP or using a knockback strike to punt an annoying NPC down some stairs in a dungeon. The funny thing about learning these systems is that it's a case of remembering how things would work in any other type of game.

It's a case of thinking past tanking and healing and DPS—abstractions that have been piled on by the need for successive MMOs to refine and codify the experience of beating up a ghost. If someone was trying to batter you with a giant hammer in an FPS, you wouldn't just stand there: you'd duck.

How much of a hands-on role you take depends on your profession. Warriors spend a lot of time in the middle of melees, and as such will either learn quickly to counter or avoid damage, or get used to life as a fine paste. Guardians match heavy armour with magic, setting up shields and flinging out bolts of damaging energy. Thieves specialise in quickly disengaging, leaping and vanishing across the battlefield to subdue enemies. Mesmers create duplicates of themselves, necromancers use pets and status effects to manage the flow of battle and elementalists flip between four elemental attunements to reduce foes to ash. Engineers and rangers control battles from the sidelines, using turrets and gadgets or pets and traps to maintain a position of ranged dominance.

Mix and mash

Without traditional class roles, you're free to create the character you have in your head—the rifle- wielding warrior, the pistol duellist mesmer, the engineer with a flamethrower—without worrying that you'll lock yourself out of a group further down the line. Best of all, you can jump into eight-on-eight PvP at any time and be instantly levelled up to 80 and handed your entire profession to play with.

Completing a linear 10-minute tutorial with any class allows you to try them out at the high end straight away. With a little experimentation, it's very difficult to create a character you won't ultimately like.

ArenaNet have taken MMORPG combat, disassembled it, and put it back together with some of the original promise of having a fantasy adventure with your friends restored. To my mind, it's a resounding success, but one that doesn't play its hand until you've committed time and thought to figuring it out. That process takes longer the more experience you have with other MMORPGs, and it's not until level 30 and beyond that the game forces you to really learn the ways in which it is different. It's substantially innovative, but quietly so, and in trying to keep the game's first few hours quick and painless ArenaNet have set themselves up for a fall in the eyes of players like my asura groupmate, who was playing an entirely different game until the hammer came quite literally crashing down upon him.

This is the model for Guild Wars 2 across the board. It's also true of the events system, where static questing areas known as renown hearts are accompanied by dynamic happenings that act as a breadcrumb trail of adventure to lead players through the world. Chasing these events from place to place is what the game wants you to do, and the large experience bonuses for exploration make rambling the quickest way to level up.

Exploration has other rewards, too: Tyria is a beautifully designed and masterfully executed world. The game's hub, Lion's Arch, is a multi- tiered pirate city made of ships repurposed into bridges and houses.

The charr live in a steampunk Death Star built into a crater. Wander south-east in the human area of Kessex Hills and you'll find a village in the shadow of a massive floating fortress patrolled by trained elementals. This isn't an emergent online world, but it does have a tremendous sense of life and it's a wonderful place to level a character.

Chasing down points of interest and panoramic views not only earns you experience but can lead to entire adventures. In one case, I followed a player who had offered to show me the way up to a particular vista: this lead to a precipitous dive down a water-slide built into a cave, a chase through a magic maze, corridors full of traps, and a jumping puzzle that takes place in total darkness before emerging into the throne room of a ghostly pirate. Why is this here?

Seemingly, because it can be, because it's fun. The knowledge that these secrets can be stumbled into at any time makes the whole game a more compelling prospect.

Fools rush on

ArenaNet have built a cooperative model that superficially reflects what has come before—you're still filling progress bars—but reworked it to support a different psychology of play. More adventure, fewer boxes to tick—and it works! Unfortunately, it isn't enough to stop many players from wanting to stay in one place to tick boxes, and a lack of participation can leave those players feeling underleveled, particularly if they're determined to endlessly rush on to the next step in their ongoing personal story chain.

At this point it usually falls to local chat to point out that you could be crafting, or playing world vs world PvP, or just climbing that hill over there, and that any of these things will earn you the experience you need by the dopamine trigger-load. The game desperately tries to teach these things, but it uses dismissible tool-tips and mouse-over explanations that no one in the history of computers has ever actually read. The experience can be overwhelming, both for players who don't get it and for those who do and don't understand why other players keep complaining. There are features in place to solve these problems, but the game could do more to tackle them.

These issues are defensible because they result from innovations that make the MMORPG fresh and enjoyable in a way that it hasn't been for years. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they come from an attitude to game-making that seems to think more of its players than other games do. Guild Wars 2 expects you to want to charge off and help a villager—or to discover new items in its experimentation-based crafting system, or to leap into player vs player—because it assumes that you've got an active interest in playing and an inherent ability to excel. Its core design casts you in a flattering light, and as such it stands in stark contrast with MMOs that'll crown you God-Emperor of the Universe if that'll get you to shut up and get back into the machine.

This is why the lack of a subscription fee is such a masterstroke. Just as Guild Wars 2 takes apart the mechanical absurdities of its genre, it strikes a killing blow to the old business model. Players have come to expect that you need to pick a pocket or two if you're going to finance a game like this, and Guild Wars 2's rejection of that assumption should be the moment that we finally see the idea for the anachronism it is. By being free beyond an initial purchase—which frankly makes it one of the best value propositions in gaming at the moment—Guild Wars 2 suggests, quietly, that you should rethink your policy vis-à-vis recurring hammer blows to the face.

There have been a few teething problems at launch. The game's overflow server system means you can almost always get into the game, but you may find yourself in a separate shard to your friends, and it can be difficult to group up. Support systems such as guild chat, the auction-house-style trading post, and the in-game store are sometimes down. World vs world PvP queues can be lengthy.

These are the chief frustrations in a game that is otherwise remarkable in its comprehensive attention to the player's urges, and when they're solved then there'll be very little that Guild Wars 2 does not do as well if not better than its contemporaries. PvP on both large and small scales, freeform cooperative roaming and tight, focused group play. Branching storylines for each race that never stray far from the fantasy wheelhouse but manage to be packed with enjoyable characters and variously funny and dramatic set- pieces. It's all here, on day one.

Altogether now

ArenaNet seem to have wilfully ignored the fact that gamers have, over the last decade, segregated themselves into camps: PvPers and PvEers, hardcore and casual. GW2 wants you to be a generalist.

Overcommit to a single part and the experience suffers: you'll either burn out on chasing down vistas, grow weary of competing over the same four PvP maps, or lag behind the levelling curve of your personal story. The experience suffers when the pace falters, but it's a solvable problem. You can always do something else.

Whether you consider Guild Wars 2 revolutionary depends and, appropriately, it depends on you. If you'll accept nothing less than the fall of the house of Warcraft, then no. If you'll accept nothing less than EVE's green light, the player-driven persistent world that seems to get further away every year—then no.

Guild Wars 2 isn't chasing a single vision. It's pluralistic and the pointed critical thought apparent in each of its component parts belies a whole that is smooth to the touch. Trying to impress upon someone why Guild Wars 2 is important is like trying to stab them with the sharp end of a ball. The temptation is to bludgeon.

It's important, ultimately, because of that pluralism, the collective egoless talent on display. In losing the monthly fee ArenaNet have given themselves the freedom to excise the MMORPG's accreted dross: the subscription-prolonging treadmill, the trickle-down economics of fun that says that only your elites have paid enough to get to see the cool dragon. Then, that spirit of change has passed through every other assumption that MMOs make about themselves and their players and touched each in turn. Nothing is ever so fixed that it shouldn't be broken and remade. It's not perfect, but it is ideologically and structurally sound in a way that few MMORPGs manage at launch, if ever.

Guild Wars 2 is not a revolution, but it is a call to arms. Tomorrow's MMORPGs will be held to account against its standards: generosity, variety, and respect for the player's ability and time. Of course, by that point, it won't be Guild Wars 2 waving the banner. It's not a revolution. It just quietly suggests that we start one.

It's easy to think about the development of videogame graphics as a linear progression sequence, where rendering techniques have incrementally, inextricably improved along time's arrow. 8-bit to 16-bit, 2D to 3D, baked lighting to dynamic lighting, real-time ray-tracing to DLSS.

But this is to trim history's tree of the many branches which have grown from that central trunk, to discount the alternatives, experiments, and evolutionary dead ends like voxels and vector graphics. One of the most unique examples appeared in the early '90s, when developers were still figuring out exactly how 3D graphics rendering could work. Between the 2.5D corridors of Doom and the 3D verticality of Quake, one British studio posited that the future of 3D graphics lay not in triangles, but balls.

That developer was Andrew Spencer. A UK programmer who cut his teeth in the Britsoft era making sports games for the Commodore 64, Spencer eventually founded his own studio (creatively named Andrew Spencer Studio) at the tail end of the '80s. Together with a small team, Spencer spent five years making his most famous game, the fantasy survival horror Ecstatica.

Ecstatica was built in a bespoke engine that was different from pretty much any game technology made before or since. Rather than using polygons to render the characters in its world, it used ellipsoids, letting developers build models out of spheres, ovals, and balls.

At the time, Spencer explained the logic of the system in an interview with Next Generation, stating that the goal was to create more "organic looking" characters. "Triangles tend to make hard, robotic-looking figures, whereas ellipsoids can be used to create more rounded, human alternatives. Ellipsoids can also be more efficient because you can make a much better-looking character out of fewer shapes."

But it wasn't just Spencer who was responsible for how Ecstatica looked. Credit is equally due to French animator Alain Maindron. In an interview with Time Extension, Maindron explained that Spencer's ellipsoid technology enabled smoother animation transitions than polygon-based techniques. "Andrew had created a 3D editor where I could work the 3D without much code knowledge," Maindron explained. "I could create backgrounds and characters and animate them pretty easily. Then he improved the engine, and I could even code the behaviour of characters."

Looking at screenshots of Esctatica today makes this idea seem ridiculous, especially given the game is supposed to be a grimdark survival horror. But you need to put yourself in the mindset of a player encountering this in 1994. Doom has been out for less than a year, and here Esctatica is showing players characters whose sprites don't spin around when you do.

Even so, Spencer himself stated that Ecstatica was merely a testing ground for the technology, a baseline upon which to build something more ambitious. This eventually coalesced into the studio's next project—Urban Decay.

Like Ecstatica, Urban Decay combined Spencer's ellipsoid tech with a dark, mature videogame setting. This time, however, that setting wasn't a medieval fantasy world, but a modern-day urban scenario, with players blasting goons and gangsters in a violent US ghetto.

Interestingly, Urban Decay's tech paralleled the progression of traditional polygon rendering. Urban Decay used double the number of ellipsoids in its character models, while also supporting SVGA graphics and featuring advanced face and hand animations. According to composer Mike Clarke, Urban Decay even featured a very early version of rag-doll physics, with enemies that "would fall down stairs after you shot [them]."

The available screenshots of Urban Decay show a game with a more consistent, confident art style than Ecstatica, even if, to modern eyes, the characters still look like they would burst if you pricked them with a pin.

Unfortunately, Urban Decay never saw the light of day. According to programmer Ken Doyle, the game went through "endless requests for design and style changes" which included abandoning the ellipsoid style for "a more regular poly look". This ultimately led to the departure of the game's primary creative force, animator Eamonn Butler, and the project was put on hold.

With Urban Decay in limbo, Andrew Spencer Studio turned to building a sequel to Ecstatica. This basically took the technological innovations the team had pursued with Urban Decay, then incorporated them in a straightforward follow-up to Ecstatica. Straightforward in concept, anyway. Structurally, Ecstatica is infamous for its baffling puzzle design, though this didn't stop it from reviewing well on its launch in 1997.

By this point, though, the fate of ellipsoid graphics had already been sealed. The ingenuity of Spencer's tech was that it relied wholly on software rendering, but games were increasingly relying on hardware to boost the power of triangles. In an interview with Edge prior to Ecstatica 2's launch, Spencer lamented the challenges of porting the sequel to PlayStation, stating that the console was "geared toward triangles, not ellipsoids" and that "ellipsoids are mostly software-driven, which the PlayStation doesn't like."

This isn't to suggest that we somehow missed out due to the death of ellipsoid graphics, though I am curious to know what games would look like if you scaled the number of balls to modern polygon counts. Rather, the point is that not every technological innovation is indicative of progress, the next step in an unstoppable march toward the future. Sometimes new tech is complete balls, destined to be left behind.

I'm not sure when exactly I got hooked on collecting videogame and anime soundtrack vinyl, but I can remember the exact record that finally convinced me to really open my wallet: the Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice boxset. This four disc collection has some of the most gorgeous interior art I've ever seen.

Welp, after that I was doomed. I had Sekiro, so of course it made sense to collect the Dark Souls 3 (my fav) and Bloodborne soundtracks, oh and the Demon's Souls Remake OST, ahh and don't forget the Elden Ring official vinyl collection boxset. I graduated from Soulslikes onto other genres, too.

I collected soundtracks for my strategy darlings like Total War: Three Kingdoms and Frostpunk, plus my beloved indies like The Banner Saga, Outer Wilds, Rain World, Transistor, and Hollow Knight. Even my love of Warhammer 40k wasn't immune as I acquired Mechanicus, Vermintide, and Darktide (also the Hitman: Contracts OST, because it's my fav Hitman one, and god bless Jesper Kyd). And that's not mentioning the big collections I grabbed, like Baldur's Gate 3, Dishonored, and Persona 5.

Having so many games whose soundtracks I love has led me to accumulate a whole heap of random records from across various genres, but I also have some really cool bits. Why do I buy OST vinyl instead of just listening online? I really enjoy slotting in a record while doing chores and how it lets me relive a game. It turns the act of listening into its own little ritual—something slightly more mindful than just skipping through some vast mix or playlist. They are also enjoyable objects to own and display.

But it can definitely be an expensive hobby. I've grown my collection over about six years, and though I've grabbed records cheap where I can, and have learned when to say no, especially when something is just too expensive, it has been relatively costly. It's also a difficult hobby depending on your region, considering postage can exponentially increase even a relatively cheap record's cost.

I personally keep an eye on Black Screen Records, iam8bit, and Laced, but this is mainly so I can see what's coming out. I rarely buy from Black Screen, for example, because their postage is quite expensive for me, so when I know something is up for pre-orders, I'll look elsewhere and find another trusted site with what I want available at a lower cost.

You also, of course, need a record player and space to fit it. I really rate audio technica's quality and while I used to have an audio technica turntable, I eventually swapped it for their re-release of the comically-named Sound Burger—a portable record player originally released in the 1980s. I fell in love with how compact, but also fun-looking it is. It even connects to certain bluetooth headphones. Again, though, expensive.

I think one thing that also tripped me up with videogame vinyl soundtracks, is you should never buy an OST of a game you've played a lot just because you love it. I made this mistake with Elden Ring, a game I adore, but that I've put 850 hours into. It means that while it's a nice object to collect and own to memorialise my love of it, the actual soundtrack (besides the boss themes) isn't that enjoyable to listen to because I know it too well.

I'm sure Warhammer fans come across the same problem, but storage is also an issue if you're planning to collect loads of records. I personally use the bottom shelf of a big bookcase, but you can also buy fancier storage solutions like crates, or even those portable cases on wheels that DJs use. Still, as with any collection, it can be a pain if you have to move it and you want to keep it secure.

My conclusion after years of collecting? Videogame vinyl isn't worth it for most people, not when it's so easy to just listen to your fav game soundtracks online and in a less cumbersome way than using a record player. Vinyl isn't necessarily a better sound quality than digital, after all. I personally like it and I also enjoy owning a record collection and the ritual of listening to them, but it has been somewhat costly over the years. I don't earn that much, but I don't have loads of expensive hobbies or pastimes beyond games, which has made it viable for me.

If it's something you're interested in regardless, a better bet might be picking your battles and collecting vinyl soundtracks for your few favorites for if you ever acquire a record player in future. One thing I have realised about videogame vinyl soundtracks is that many of them become more expensive and effectively unobtainable collector items because of the limited number of pressings they receive. Despite its massive price, the one record I really regret never being able to acquire is Supergiant's 10th anniversary collection.

While some big games just keep re-pressing and releasing their soundtracks, it can be massively frustrating if you only just missed out on one of your favourite games for it never to appear again. If there are any videogame vinyl collectors in chat, what's your favorite record that you own? Or better yet, what soundtrack would you love to own on vinyl? Mine's currently Silksong, but sadly there's no word of a vinyl release yet.

The latest Steam store redesign is here, and while the majority of you have "no strong feelings" about it so far according to our poll, it's a different story on social media—some indie developers are worried that the new "Popular Upcoming" page, which prioritizes games with more buzz than it did previously, will hurt indie visibility.

One particularly viral post on X from publisher of the indie game Skyshard, RegisKillbin, says that the page used to list games in release order, "as long as you had enough wishlists to make the cut (~6k to 7k)," but now favors "far more large games from major companies … the lowest wishlist count on there right now is 80k."

You can still select "release date" as the sorting criteria from a drop-down menu, but the page is turning up lots of heavy hitters right now by default—The Adventures of Elliot, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, and NBA The Run are all in the top 10 when sorted by relevance, and none of those games remain when you sort by release date.

The section was "updated in response to player feedback in order to better capture the most anticipated releases of the coming month," Valve said of the change.

The worry is that this change may funnel players toward a smaller slice of games than they're already being shown. It's challenging to be noticed on Steam: Of the over 19,000 games that launched on Steam last year, nearly half have fewer than 10 user reviews. More than 10% of the games that launched in 2025 have no reviews at all.

The issue is compounded if you are entering a crowded dev space or making a game in a niche genre: RPG Maker games, visual novels, etc. "Indie visibility was already tough, unfortunately it is now much tougher," said Ryan T. Brown, head of Lost In Cult's publishing label, on X.

Not all indie devs are so sour on the redesign, however. Valve also added a new "Personal Calendar" feature "for more niche upcoming releases," and some say that it has more than offset the Popular Upcoming change.

The calendar is "heavily weighed towards smaller games, in fact way smaller than the 'popular upcoming' panel" said the X account for indie dungeon crawler Fight Knight. Another game account, for the metroidvania Maseylia, said in a post that the new release calendar helped them get over a thousand new wishlists yesterday alone.

Visit a waterpark and you've gotta assume someone has peed in the pool. Lots of someones, actually. Soaking in anonymous wee is just the price you pay for an afternoon of waterslides and river rafting.

But at Water Station One, billed as "the galaxy's most unregulated waterpark," a little bit of pee had some major consequences.

"Since the waterpark is on a space station they can only use special space water," Lazy River creator Mike Boxleiter explained at Day of the Devs. "Because of the special properties of space water you should not pee in the pool. If you do pee in the pool, the pee will go back up into you and turn you and everyone else in the water into zombies."

Everyone get that? No follow-up questions? Good. It's basic space water science, people.

In Lazy River, everyone in the park has been turned into zombies by pee except you and your friends, who now need to escape the outbreak by rafting down the park's river ride. That means building your own raft from scavenged resources, arming yourself with weapons like water cannons and pool noodles, and fighting your way through the park's automated defenses.

It looks like a silly good time: cartoony Left 4 Dead vibes mixed with survival crafting and ragdoll physics. Cobble together a raft from inner tubes, arm yourselves with water pistols, cook some hot dogs on the grill to keep your health up, and gather what you can find on land before scurrying back to your mobile base as the zeds swarm you again.

Even on your raft, you're not completely safe. "You're gonna get hop-ons," Boxleiter said gravely. As you travel down the river you'll eventually build your humble raft up into a floating fortress, and you'll need it: the park's robotic defenses want to contain the zombie outbreak—and you and your friends with it.

It looks like a lot of fun, but don't put your swimsuit on just yet: Lazy River isn't coming to early access until 2027. In the meantime, here's its page on Steam.

Some of you may have had your fill of farming sims, but I swear it's impossible for me to grow tired of them. As you can imagine, shows like the Wholesome Direct are often a treat for me, and today did not disappoint with a new look at another life sim, Fourleaf Fields.

Well, it being a farming sim is what pulled me in, at least. The gossip mechanic is what really got my attention though—I love mess.

As part of the Summer Game Fest 2026 lineup, the Wholesome Direct put the spotlight on this tiny farming sim from Behemutt, an indie studio based in Brazil. In Fourleaf Fields, you're a polly pocket-sized farmer growing gargantuan crops, and their massive size impacts the way you care for them. You don't just pull giant carrots up; you slice them into a bunch of normal-sized veggies. And instead of using a watering can, you shoot big dew drops at your thirsty plants.

It's all pretty dang cute, but I can't get over how clever a town gossip system sounds. I love not minding my business in these games—I'm in everyone's house at all hours of the morning and night, so of course I know all of the town tea. We don't get a very long look at how exactly it all works in Fourleaf Fields, but Behemutt says you'll collect stories from around town to uncover your neighbors' secrets with its "tech tree fueled by hearsay."

Aside from peddling in the rumor mill, Fourleaf Fields has some of the other farm sim staples you've come to expect too, like maintaining your relationship with other villagers, upgrading structures around town, and caring for your livestock. Oh, and the livestock are all bugs, by the way. Your little Thumbelina farmer can't handle normal animals like chickens and cows, so they'll care for moths, butterflies, and bees.

It's also multiplayer, so between the adorable sprites and Honey-I-Shrunk-The-Kids aesthetic, I reckon I'll have no trouble cornering a few of my cozy gaming friends to play with me. As for when I can do that, it's still up in the air. Fourleaf Fields doesn't have a release date yet, but it's available to wishlist now on Steam.

Vampire life sim Moonlight Peaks is creeping near but if you can't wait for launch day to play, well, you don't have to: there's a new demo over on Steam right now. My fellow farmlife sim players have been looking forward to this dark but cute twist on the genre for a few years now and with the release date scheduled for July, now's a great time to take a quick look on a handy 'try before you buy' basis.

Moonlight Peaks has had a couple demos over the past few years since its reveal and, as announced at the Wholesome Games showcase today, it's swapped in yet another bigger, better version for you. Past demos haven't had much story content or the character creator and were focused on smaller bits of decorating or farming in short bursts.

A rep for the game told PC Gamer that this demo will be largely similar to the one I played 6 hours of last month, though you'll start with a partially upgraded farm instead of from scratch. It will "cover the same content" though, they say, so presumably that means you get to see the start of the story where the werewolves, witches, vampires, and seers in town are all at odds with each other slinging spells and insults equally liberally. You'll be able to meet most of the cast, begin farming, and learn how to cast spells and shapeshift.

Based on my experience playing, that should be the bulk of what farmlife simming fans need to decide whether you're into Moonlight Peaks enough to buy it at launch. I found all the basics plenty competent—snappy tool animations, easy menus, and cute character designs—so it's down to whether the comically toxic bantering and the directed main quest (rather than open-ended goals as in Stardew Valley) are to your taste.

Do be aware: Moonlight Peaks strongly advises that you use a gamepad to play, though I tried a bit of keyboard & mouse and didn't find it played poorly that way.

You can find the Moonlight Peaks demo on Steam, which is also where you'll be able to buy it when it launches on July 7.

Summer weddings are back in, babes. I am not waiting a day longer than necessary for my nuptials, so you'll find me at the altar on August 5 when Fields of Mistria launches its 1.0 update. The full launch will finally bring marriage and babies and a whole lot of other awaited changes to the magical girl farm sim. Who's going to be standing beside me saying "I do?" I don't know yet. I'm still deciding.

Mistria delivered its save the date in a new trailer at the Wholesome Direct showcase today, with a cheeky little peek at some of the parts that are going to have me kicking my feet giggling. There's a marriage ceremony with the blacksmith March (you're taking his breath away) and domestic life with Juniper (your baby's name is rune). I still really enjoy the special details Mistria packs in for its characters like seasonal outfits, including wedding outfit portraits now, and an alternate sprite for Juniper holding your baby, which I assume other spouses will have too.

In its announcement post NPC Studio broke down lots of what's coming in this 1.0 update. Of course there's the 10 heart friendship events with villagers, marriage, and children, as mentioned. There are new Saturday Market vendors, one of which you can spot in the trailer named Stillwell. You'll also be able to raise your town renown level to 100 and complete the town repair quest line, which is likely related to the cutscene featuring Adeline and Eiland's mother Baroness Linnet there's a little teaser for at the end. Oh, and a giant, rideable chicken?

For a farm sim lover, my 50 hours in Mistria so far are actually pretty pitiful, but I took a break after the early access launch to wait for more character heart events and town quests. Knowing 1.0 was planned for sometime this year, I booted it back up this spring to start advancing through the friendship stories that have been added but got nowhere near finished. I've got a deadline now—time to hit eight hearts with everyone by August so I can drop into relationship endgame on the 5th.

My only question now is: with who? I lamented right at launch two years ago that I couldn't decide who to date because all of Mistria's residents are so charming and all the writing is so well done. I still haven't decided, so I've got my work cut out for me there too, oops.

Getting notice about the full release now is actually quite nice. The yearly Steam Summer Sale is coming up this month, so it's worth watching to see if Mistria goes on discount at all. Its current $14 price is extremely cheap compared to other farmlife sims, though, and NPC Studio confirmed to me this week that it will not be raising the price for the full launch.

The Fields of Mistria 1.0 update launches on August 5 and NPC Studio has said that "early access is just the beginning" so it's clearly preparing for more updates even after the main game story is complete.

Gothic Remake is a sandbox-shaped RPG, which naturally means that you will probably encounter some locks that need to be picked, requiring you to fiddle with a terrible minigame. All lockpicking minigames are fun-sapping chores, but Gothic's is especially egregious.

Essentially you're just trying to line up a series of sliders by moving them up and down. Except most of the sliders will also move other sliders, but you don't know which ones until you try. If you attempt to move a slider too far, you damage your lockpick. It's quite possible, then, to break your lockpick when you're still trying to figure out how the sliders move.

I was irritated by this system straight away, even though I had to acknowledge that it's better than what the original Gothic gave us, where you're blindly trying different combinations and hoping to luck out.

But it was one specific shack, filled with chests, that broke me. I am now a broken man. There is no joy in my life anymore. I guzzled down one of my favourite beers last night and could only taste disappointment.

The shack in question belonged to a shady merchant in Gothic's Old Camp, Fisk. He'd already tried to swindle me, so I decided I would get some sweet, sweet revenge by robbing him blind. I waited until everyone had gone to bed and broke in. The lock on his front door was a pretty simple one and I only had to do a tiny bit of save-scumming.

Everything fell apart after that.

Attempt #1

Optimism level: High | Frustration level: Low

Four chests greeted me inside. I picked one at random, my confidence bolstered by the fact that I'd unlocked the front door in just two attempts. A new record!

I was quickly punished for my confidence. Most of the sliders were set as far as they could go, and every one I tried to move caused others to move in the wrong direction, damaging my lockpick. I'm pretty sure I failed to move a single slider before it broke—and this was with the lockpicking specialisation, which increased the durability of my tools.

This was not my first rodeo, though. I'd saved right before attempting to break into the chest. What a clever thief.

Attempt #2

Optimism level: Flagging | Frustration level: Irate

After my first failure I decided to give up on that chest and its nightmare lock. I'd try a different one. But first I had some bullshit to deal with.

The moment I loaded in, Fisk woke up. There was no logical reason for this. I was sneaking when I saved, and I was still crouched when I loaded in—except I immediately and automatically stood up at the exact same time as Fisk. Given that these events happened simultaneously, I don't think standing up woke the merchant. And why would silently standing break someone's slumber anyway?

I can only assume, then, that the simple act of loading up a save in Gothic is loud. Maybe I was dropped from the sky or something? I imagine that makes a racket.

Regardless, Fisk was not pleased to discover me (or my companion) looming over his bed. He chased us out with his weapon in hand.

Attempt #3

Optimism level: The pits | Frustration level: Audibly swearing

I didn't even get near the lock in my last attempt, so the bar had hit rock bottom. At least that's what I thought. I was about to be proved wrong.

Fisk was back in his bed, finally, and I went to the furthest chest from him. This one wasn't quite as evil, and I just had one more slider to line up. I could just feel the treasures inside, beckoning me. This was going to be it! My greatest moment.

That's when Fisk woke up again. I wasn't making a noise or moving. Even the sliders were still. Maybe he needed to pee? As a man of a certain vintage, I get it.

Anyway! Fisk had already warned me before, so this time he just started attacking straight away. Which made it the perfect time for my companion—a feckless buffoon called Mud—to lock me into a brief conversation. While Fisk was murdering me.

Naturally, I died.

Attempt #4

Optimism level: Abyssal | Frustration level: I need to strangle someone

I loaded up a save, Fisk woke up and raised his weapon, and I just started swinging. I had no armour and just an old sword, but I did not care. At one point, I hit Mud, and it felt so good I did it again. He fled. I prayed that he'd bleed out. I hate him so much.

I tried to escape, but three more dudes charged at me. Fisk alone could have easily killed me, but with four of them it was like watching a baby trying to fight some MMA superstars. It ended badly for me. The baby.

Dead again.

Attempt #5

Optimism level: I am dead inside | Frustration level: I do not care any more

The game crashed.

I wish I could say I just gave up at this point. I no longer even wanted whatever was in those chests. But I couldn't let Fisk win. I couldn't even recall why I wanted revenge. But I kept at it. And eventually I did it. I bloody well did it. I opened a stupid chest, to discover… some junk and a bit of ore.

And that's when I finally called it a day. No more lockpicking for me. No more crimes. I have learned my lesson.

Bonus round

OK, so maybe I like crime too much. Because I did go back for more. I even opened a second chest, which contained my first bow. Of course, things still didn't go to plan. This time it was during the day, with Fisk outside, with his back to me. But his spidey-senses must have been tingling because he caught me red handed.

And that's when I discovered something very, very interesting. And by interesting I mean extremely janky. Because neither Fisk or his pals would come inside. They unsheathed their weapons and threatened me, but would never cross the threshold, even as I started filling them with arrows from my stolen bow.

It was a bloodbath. A glorious bloodbath.

So I might not be a great thief, but I'm an excellent murderer.

"We actually made a proper DMZ this time," said Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer creative director Geoff Smith to a room of press in May.

Last month I visited Infinity Ward to play Modern Warfare 4, the first Call of Duty in four years made by the studio that started it all. I had a fun time with what could be the best Call of Duty multiplayer this decade, but what I really wanted to try was DMZ, the new extraction mode that Infinity Ward talked up a lot throughout the day.

This is the studio's second try at extraction. The first DMZ, a mode within Modern Warfare 2 (2022), was an accessible but shallow take on the Escape From Tarkov-style extraction loop. It received updates throughout 2023 before getting placed on a shelf with innumerable other Call of Duty experiments. Now DMZ is back, and Infinity Ward ain't calling this one a beta.

DMZ quick facts:

• The map: Haijin, a war-torn nuclear exclusion zone on the border of North and South Korea with several towns and settlements
• You play as an off-the-books CIA asset, self-funded and tasked with finding valuable military technology
• Persistent gear: Loot extracted from Haijin can be sold or used for upgrades and crafting
• FOB: A hub that players upgrade over time with work stations and benches
• Story missions: DMZ will have story missions that take place during live matches
• Dynamic operations & Free roam: The other two ways to play DMZ. These sounded like repeatable missions with randomized steps that you can either commit to before a match or pick up during free roam.
• Loadouts: Gunsmith designs can be carried over from Multiplayer, but attachments have be purchased

"We've learned a lot about what resonates with players and what we were lacking in our beta. All of that knowledge and those action items became this foundation for us as we're shaping this new vision of DMZ from the ground up," Smith said.

"DMZ offers a rich standbox with escalating AI threats, dangerous bosses, environmental puzzles, raid-like operations, and narrative-driven story missions. It's really more than just a third mode. It's a full-featured game inside Modern Warfare."

To that end, DMZ has its own progression systems and inventories that don't touch 6v6 multiplayer. Operators that function purely as skins within 6v6 have distinct inventories in DMZ. Your Gunsmith setups do carry over, but you have to buy the necessary attachments to actually build them.

Another interesting tidbit from the presentation: DMZ will have a bounty system that takes your reputation into account. Killing a lot of players over time will eventually place a bounty on your head that other players within your match can take on. Global leaderboards will memorialize the top 50 killers and top 50 bounty hunters each week.

It sounds pretty substantial for what will likely be the third option on Modern Warfare 4's main menu. I didn't get to play DMZ, sadly, so jury's out on if it can find a place within my diet of Arc Raiders and Marathon.

DMZ will launch as part of Modern Warfare 4 on October 23. It will not be free-to-play.

Someone has overdosed, so said the panicked man running down the street towards the infirmary. I follow, pushing through the red swing doors into the hospital reception area, and find a family huddled together in the adjacent waiting room. What happened, I ask. And I'm politely, but no less promptly, told to mind my own business.

They're right, of course. Because if this scenario were to unfold in real life, despite my best intentions, random strangers are indeed entitled to privacy. I should admire their manners in such a moment of distress, truth be told. Herein lies my first distinction that separates hyper-serious text-only Grand Theft Auto roleplay, and the fast-paced, voice-based servers I'm otherwise familiar with.

New world order

I've spent years cooking up off-the-wall roleplay encounters in the voice-based GTA 5 roleplay platform FiveM, and have revelled in the breakneck speed in which most of these encounters unfold. From robbing banks while posing as a journalist to running a nightclub as an active vampire, FiveM, in my opinion, is at its very best in its immediate experiences, where spontaneity and on-the-fly exchanges make and/or break each set-piece.

With speed comes variety—roleplayers definitely take themselves seriously in the throes of VOIP-only spaces, but if something goes awry or doesn't quite go to plan, the next tale is never far from the horizon. This is true of FiveM, alt:v, NoPixel, New Day, and the wealth of RP platforms whose servers tend towards all of the above, and while there definitely are players in it for the long haul, there is a strong element of pick-up-and-play to the majority of sessions I've ever experienced.

The opposite is true in text-only servers. I've long been intimidated by the seriousness of these spectrums, to the point where I've pretty much avoided them entirely. And while I've barely dipped my toes into the narrative-heavy scene at this stage, I've nevertheless been blown away by what I've seen so far. Stepping away from FiveM et al's action-oriented roleplay, what I've found has been more thoughtful, more precise and more longer-form; where stories gradually develop and actions have genuine consequences.

The hospital example above is but one pretty superficial example, but I've played in enough VOIP servers to confidently suggest the same scenario would have unfolded like a high-drama soap opera.

As a plumber who recently moved to Los Santos following the death of his family, I'm currently pursuing an honest life. The allure of the city's criminal underbelly is there bubbling away under the surface—this is GTA, after all—but my most enjoyable RP experience last week was installing a bathroom suite for a young student couple in Vinewood. It was a nice evening by the time I'd sealed the last fitting, so I decided to walk home. I chatted to a man busking on the edge of Union Square about the stock market. I went home and had an early night. It was lovely.

And so here I am, pausing the monotony of real life in the city of Glasgow to lose myself in the monotony of pretend life in the city of Los Santos. Perhaps it's an age thing. Perhaps it's getting older and realising that the unbridled chaos of vanilla GTA Online—where it's sometimes difficult to walk 10 paces without being sniped or stabbed or blown to pieces by a flying motorcycle equipped with homing missiles—is sometimes too much. Perhaps it's realising that the meme-inspiring, TikTok-fueling, fast-pace-favouring RP scene is fun but exhausting.

And perhaps it's realising that there's something endearing about being content just existing in a quieter slant on San Andreas—where today it's about fitting toilets, and in six months it could be about owning my own plumbing firm and treating someone else to the pleasure of working for me.

In GTA Online I have an arsenal of guns and umpteen illicit businesses. In FiveM I have an unhinged personality and a thousand faces. In GTA World I have a backstory and a civilian's dream.

Amid all the chatter about when Star Citizen will launch and how much money it has raised in player funding, what you can actually do in Cloud Imperium Games' space MMO often gets lost. Star Citizen may not be finished, but it is playable in an alpha that gets updated relatively regularly. Only last month, patch 4.8 added a massive new mission type that involved players embarking on a combined space and ground assault on a heavily fortified asteroid.

Alpha 4.8.1 continues with the asteroid theme, as a fleet of mysterious raiders besiege mining stations through the systems of Stanton and Pyro. As such, the law-abiding security group Foxwell Enforcement, alongside the criminal organisation Headhunters, are both enlisting pilots to help defend the beleaguered mining operations.

According to the patch notes, there are 385 missions in total. These missions will see players "defend asteroid bases throughout the systems, prevent the attackers from destroying key resources, and escort escaping workers to safety as needed". Successful completion of missions will earn participating pilots "credits, reputation gains, and unique blueprints available here for the first time"—though CIG doesn't specify what these new blueprints might be.

They sound fun enough, although players over on the Star Citizen subreddit are reporting some slight teething problems with the missions. "Failed every one so far because the pilot you're supposed to escort flies into the hangar and the doors never open so he just explodes," writes Zealousideal-Ad2695. Poordutchguy points out that this is not a new issue: "That happened when these missions were active in the past. I did 13 missions. 1 succeeded."

Obviously, Star Citizen is still heavily in alpha. But after 14 years and $1 billion in funding, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to expect a mission type that has apparently been in the game before to be playable when re-added to the experience.

Then again, if reports are accurate, the bulk of CIG's attention may currently be on the single-player campaign Squadron 42. Chris Roberts recently said that CIG's solo space adventure was in the "closing stages" of development, and there's rumours that Squadron 42 may show up at Summer Games Fest, albeit with the possible announcement of yet another delay.

Games and tech products can leak in all manner of strange ways. But the curious case of the Pixel Watch 5 is by far the weirdest I've heard about. The accidental unveiling of what appears to be Google's next smartwatch involves scuba diving, Caribbean idylls, and Gearbox CEO/walking headline generator Randy Pitchford.

For once, Pitchford isn't the main character of the story. Instead, he's the narrator. Earlier this week, Pitchford posted on X that "a friend" of his had inadvertently stumbled upon what appears to be a Pixel Watch 5, which Google has yet to announce. The twist? The watch was underwater when it was found by Pitchford's pal, who was scuba diving at the time.

"A friend of mine found this watch a few days ago ~underwater~ when he was scuba diving near the island of St. Martin," Pitchford wrote. "He noted that the reverse of the watch indicates that it is a Google Pixel 5, which has not yet been released."

Continuing, Pitchford wrote that the watch "seems to be fine" aside from having an empty battery, and that he was sharing the information because his friend "seems to believe I am connected in the tech industry." The post also includes images of both the front and reverse of the watch, which does appear to have "Google Pixel Watch 5" written around the underside.

I hope it doesn't need to be pointed out that finding an unannounced smartwatch in the ocean off a Caribbean island is an extremely unlikely event. Inevitably, some people have accused Pitchford of making the whole thing up. But if he is, it's a pretty elaborate prank.

As noted by GSMArena (via Kotaku), the image of the watch reveals numerous specs consistent with a Pixel Watch, such as IP68 ingress protection, a heart rate sensor, UWB chip, pulse sensor, spO2 and skin temperature tracking.

My instinct is that the watch is real and that whoever dropped it was either a Google employee on vacation or someone testing out the water-resistant capabilities of the watch. Why you'd fly all the way out to Saint Martin to do that is a mystery to me, but Google isn't exactly short on funds to do so.

Pitchford followed up his initial post with an update saying he is "now in touch with the owner" and he and his friend have "arranged for its return." He signs off by saying "If you find something that isn't yours, pay it forward and try to return it to its rightful owner." Thanks for the advice, Randy!

One concept was continually repeated by Nvidia at Computex 2026, and it's this idea of "reinventing the PC." The phrase has been used in reference to the company's RTX Spark SoC—powering "the world’s first Windows PCs purpose-built for personal agents"—and from a hardware perspective, it's an interesting bit of kit.

However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went further into the "reinvention" of the PC at a Q&A session later in the show. "Your personal computer is really the world's largest edge device, and it's 40 years old," said the Nvidia chief. "And [it] has to be reinvented for agentic systems…. just like we have to reinvent the car."

Huang then used an example of modern autonomous cars as edge devices, while satellites "put intelligence in the sky." Later, the Nvidia chief had this to say about the future of the PC platform as a whole:

"Our computer sits at our desk waiting for us to use it. In the future, when we leave it… we're talking with it all the time," said Huang.

"I'll be chatting in WhatsApp with my agent, and it's doing stuff... and my agents are going to have names, and they're on my WhatsApp, and we're just chatting all the time. I'll be talking to it, and it's going to be talking back. It'll call me."

"That is the personal computer future. Tell me that's not R2-D2. Tell me that's not robotics. Tell me that's not cool," Huang continued. "I believe that many, many people will have this at home, just like they have a car at home. Soon, the agent is going to be so valuable to you, you want it to be sitting in a nice box, sitting in a nice computer, secure, performant, something you could carry with you, something you would use for a long period of time."

That's a nice sci-fi-style piece of imagery. Who among us hasn't imagined the idea of the ever-present "computer" (summoned with a cut-glass British accent, of course), working away in the background to not just respond to our commands, but to intelligently work with us to satisfy our needs, even at great distances?

The problem, however, is when that thinking runs into the cold, hard wall of reality—and all the extra consequences that entails. As things stand, our PCs are enablers of our own intelligence in a relatively direct way. We input commands, the computer responds. We control the machine, to a considerable degree. We are the agent.

But transforming our PCs into something with more agency, more AI-handled tasks, strikes me as risky business. It's putting the user further away from the machine, and letting AI do much of the heavy lifting instead. And in a world where concerns around the wider scope of the tech are well-publicised, this sort of AI-first thinking seems like a misread of the public perception surrounding it.

It reminds me of a joke/meme I read a long time ago, which I'll reprint here:

"Tech enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart house is Bluetooth-enabled, and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!

Programmers/Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004, and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."

AI is far from perfect. And while it continually improves, the level of public trust around it seems shaky at best. We continually read stories of AI deleting work, breaking existing systems, and hallucinating. It can also be manipulated, sometimes with surprising ease. In this upcoming agentic AI PC world, can we really trust it to integrate itself so smoothly into our digital lives? And more crucially, do we want it to?

Looking at the wider picture of public perspective around AI, the temperature seems to be rising. Students are actively booing speakers who tell them about the wonderful AI future they're walking into.

Microsoft's head of AI, meanwhile, has expressed puzzlement around negative reactions towards the tech, while the company itself is in the process of scaling back AI integration into Windows 11 features, after complaints that the operating system wasn't focusing on the fundamentals. Which are, of course, the traditional functions of your PC.

Personally, I like the fact that my PC is a box that I control directly, not an AI agent platform I work with from afar. It makes me feel empowered. And while there are already lots of unseen processes running under the hood to make that happen for me, I'm not sure a swarm of AI agents will improve the experience.

"We're now reinventing the computer. It's an agentic computer. It's an agent now, it's an assistant, not a tool. And that's the big idea," says Huang. That's a shame. I like tools. They enable me, a human being, to directly express myself. Agentic AI assistants handling many tasks for me, reducing my primary role to some sort of bizarre conductor, though? Is this really what we, the end users, want?

Nevertheless, the artificial intelligence beast continues to spread its tentacles into our daily lives, and we're often told that if we don't get on board with the tech, we're going to be left behind. Don't worry, though. It's a good thing. Agentic AI will make our lives better, and soon we'll all… I don't know. Have more time to go to the beach, or something.

I guess I'll believe it when I see it. But it's difficult not to feel that, as end consumers, we don't really have much of a choice as to how our technological future develops. Our brave new AI-dominated world looks to be coming for us whether we like it or not, and we'd better hope it's everything that was promised. Will I be writing about how awesome my new agentic AI PC is in future? Will I even, thanks to AI, be writing about anything at all?

I've no idea, but it doesn't feel great. How about you?

After nearly 10 years, Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2's long and convoluted development is finally approaching its end. Its second and final DLC—The Flower and the Flame, releases next week, concluding one of the more dramatic industry sagas witnessed in the last few years.

Announced in 2019 after several years of development, Bloodlines 2 promised to be a full-blooded sequel to Troika's beautiful, if broken 2004 RPG. But a challenging initial development led to original developers Hardsuit Labs being booted off the project in 2021. The baton was picked up by The Chinese Room, which rebuilt the game from the ground up and released it last year.

The result offered an enjoyable enough slice of gothic detective fiction, as Fraser Brown explained in his Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 review. But it didn't really deliver on the whole 'RPG' of it all, lacking many of the systems and ideas featured in Troika's original.

The subsequent expansions have been adding some of that stuff back in—sort of. April's Loose Cannon DLC reintroduced the ability for players to wield guns and melee weapons by hand, albeit only for the DLC and within the constraints of playing as a specific character—the base game's rogue sheriff Benny.

The Flower and the Flame adopts a similar approach, only this time you play as Ysabella, the glamorous Toreador who runs the Atrium nightclub. The DLC's story is difficult to summarise without spoiling it, but the four quests it adds explore Ysabella's relationships with some other key characters in the base game, while revealing the reasons why she, uh, does the things she does in the main story.

As for how it plays, Ysabella's combat is based around the Toreador abilities in vanilla Bloodlines 2, but with a few DLC-specific flourishes. For starters, Ysabella gets a new gizmo called Razor Wire. This is a hook attack a-la Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, with Ysabella lassoing enemies with barbed wire before yanking them toward her, stunning them in the process. She also fights with a rapier in melee combat rather than using her fists, and can dual-wield any guns she picks up in a fight, from pistols to sniper rifles.

It certainly sounds more involved than the base game. It is worth pointing out, however, that the first DLC didn't go down all that well. Loose Cannon has a 'Mixed' rating on Steam with just 43% positive reviews. It certainly sounds more involved than the base game. It is worth pointing out, however, that the first DLC didn't go down all that well. Loose Cannon has a Mixed rating on Steam with just 43% positive reviews. I haven't played the DLC myself, but PC Gamer's news editor Andy Chalk has, and as someone who enjoyed the base game, he described the DLC to me as "pure garbola", elaborating thusly:

Half of it is just a replay of the boring endgame level, there's no real insight into the character or why he went nuts, the implementation of guns is extremely clumsy to the point that they're not worth the effort, the awful crossover from Bloodlines 1 is back and somehow even more pointless and annoying, and wow, it turns out that Bloodlines 2 was actually heavily dependent on its characters and when you strip them out there's not a hell of a lot left.

It doesn't exactly sound riveting. I'll also say that, while I didn't particularly like Benny as a character, he was more interesting than Ysabella, and I'm not especially convinced by Paradox's summary of the latest DLC's plot.

Bloodlines 2: The Flower and The Flame launches on June 10. There's no price listed for it yet, but since Loose Cannon cost $15 (£13), I imagine you'll pay the same for Bloodlines 2's swansong.

A possible social media ban for children in the UK could be expanded to games, the government's online safety minister has suggested.

Speaking to The Sunday Times (via Game Developer) Kanishka Narayan said that a ban on social media for teenagers—which is being considered by the UK following a social media ban being implemented in Australia—could include restrictions for online video game platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, an area that Australia's social media ban does not extend to.

Narayan didn't cite any specific games in his conversation with The Sunday Times, but he said that, following a recent visit to Australia, his primary concern regarding children's use of the Internet was over "stranger pairing", between children and adults they don't know.

Apparently, this issue was discussed, "mostly in the context of gaming platforms" rather than conventional social media like Tiktok, Instagram etc. "That will weigh quite significantly in my mind as we think about how we stop some of the most egregious harms for young people," Narayan added.

Narayan's statements were recently echoed on Sky News by Rachel De Souza, the Children's Commissioner for England. Speaking on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, De Souza said that young boys in particular are vulnerable to being exploited on gaming platforms.

"Boys often aren't on social media," De Souza said. "They're often spending three or four hours a day gaming. And these games often have features that allow a 55-year-old in Arizona to come in and speak to a nine-year-old."

Roblox in particular has been repeatedly called out for its failures to adequately protect its player-base—which is largely composed of children. The platform has been subject to numerous lawsuits over child safety concerns, while there have been "at least two dozen" people arrested in the US and accused of "abducting or abusing victims" they'd met on Roblox.

Roblox's responses to these lawsuits and allegations have varied in quality, but this month, the company will introduce new age-based account categories as it strives to "more closely align content access, communication settings and parental controls with a user's age." These are much-needed and long overdue features, though it's worth noting that this is only one reason why Roblox has been accused of putting its audience at risk of exploitation.

But is a wider social media ban that incorporates games the answer? Well, in March, the BBC reported that the effectiveness of Australia's social media ban had been questioned, with the country's Internet regulator saying that social media companies were not doing enough to comply with it. In response, a spokesperson for Meta said that the company was "committed to complying" with the ban, while claiming that accurate age determination was "a challenge for the whole industry."

Personally, I think a social media ban wrongly implies that children accessing social media is the problem, rather than vastly profitable tech giants failing to dedicate adequate resources to get their houses in order—an issue that affects adults as much as it does children in various ways. Whether or not a UK social media ban will actually come into force, and what form it will ultimately take, remains to be seen.

At today's Summer Game Fest showcase, we learned that a pair of new Cuphead games are in development. One is a "hand-animated" successor to the original 2017 sidescroller, which emulates golden age cartoons. The other is retro in a different way: "an 8-bit action platformer named Mighty Cuphead Adventure."

The really notable thing about Mighty Cuphead Adventure is that it's being developed in assembly—a low-level programming language—to the specifications of the Sega Master System, an 8-bit console released in the mid-'80s.

"While the game will absolutely be compatible with modern consoles and PC," developer Studio MDHR said in a press release, "players who want a true blast from the past will be able to experience it on a physical cartridge on the Sega Master System home gaming console."

The commitment to developing Mighty Cuphead Adventure with techniques from the '80s mirrors the commitment to using hand-drawn, 1930s-style animations in the main Cuphead series. The developer will share more details about the game "in the months ahead."

The Wolf Among Us was one of Telltale's most loved games, and when the studio returned to life under new management in 2019, one of the first things it did was announce that The Wolf Among Us 2 is happening.

And then we waited, and waited, and waited some more: A 2024 promise that yes, the game is still in development, was the most recent update on the situation—until now.

A new trailer for The Wolf Among Us 2 appeared at today's Summer Game Fest showcase, giving us a slight but pleasantly fresh look at Bigby's upcoming adventure, and some of the characters (and headaches) he'll face as he investigates a new mystery: "Homicide. Six total so far. Each case husband and wife found shredded. People are dying. Some monster is out there. Word around the precinct is you're the guy to call."

The wait for The Wolf Among Us 2 has been unexpectedly long. and occasionally peppered with rumors that the whole thing had been cancelled. As PC Gamer's Harvey Randall noted in 2024, "to say that The Wolf Among Us 2 has had a troubled development would be like saying that a highway pile up has had a mild impact on traffic." It was actually meant to be out in 2018, a full eight years ago, but Telltale's closure later that same year obviously had an impact on that.

Telltale has also finally committed to a release target, albeit one that's not very specific: 2027! Yeah, that's it. The good news for fans is that there's something closer to the moment: The Wolf Among Us Remastered is also in the pipe, and it's set to come out for the 2026 holiday season.

One of the most puzzling trailers from today's Summer Game Fest was the one for Haex, the debut game from developer Dead Astronauts. It opens with some pretty normal-looking guns pointed at some pretty normal-looking sci-fi monsters, but my mind keeps coming back to that cube. That damn cube.

It looks like a Rubik's cube adorned with glowing alien sigils, and in the trailer it's used to trigger sweeping changes in the environment—the player jams it into a socket on the forest floor, a huge wall of rectangular spikes swallows up all the surrounding nature, and then it disappears to reveal a strange, featureless structure.

I don't know how this makes the game meaningfully different from other shooters, but I do know most of 'em don't have cubes! The Steam page piqued my interest further by revealing that the cube is sentient, and that it can teach me how to double-jump.

As for the game itself, it's a 1-4 player co-op survival shooter that'll have you tracking temperature and starvation as you explore an open world. "Alien seeds" will let you open access to new areas and uncover new gadgets and crafting recipes, which you can then take into your friends' saves. It seems more narrative-driven than other survival games, but the Steam page teases some procedural generation and an emphasis on hopping from game to game: "Every world keeps its own story. Every character keeps its own progression."

No release date was announced and the trailer was light on raw gameplay footage, but the concept is intriguing. Abiotic Factor certainly proved that survival games with rich sci-fi mysteries have a ravenous audience, and while this game looks to be more shooter than survival-craft, it might be going for a similar vibe sans the Half-Life homage. I'm interested! Mostly because of that cube.

Cubes: they're really in right now.

N Plus Infinity Times Two is the newly announced follow-up to Metanet's beloved N++. The latter had a killer soundtrack, especially for those among us who scour Hardwax and Boomkat daily for blink-and-you'll-miss-it vinyl pressings of austere techno. In a medium where many studios opt for chiptune or generic filmic string orchestras, it was a welcome deviation from the norm: N++ both looked and sounded like the future.

The soundtrack for N Plus Infinity Times Two will shift gears a tad. "Instead of Berlin techno," Metanet's Raigan Burns said during a presentation last week, "this time our main reference was UK Garage, and all the sub genres that it birthed, which [are] generally melodic, colorful, and mostly broken beat, rather than the claustrophobic, tension-laden 4/4 techno of N++".

UK garage is an antecedent to British dubstep, whose most famous example is probably Burial or Kode9 (the later US manifestation of dubstep, i.e. stuff that sounds like Skrillex, is a whole different beast). Countless other genres have sprouted from UK garage including grime, bassline house, and future garage. To summarise: without having seen the tracklist, the soundtrack to N Plus Infinity Times Two promises to be much more sonically diverse than its predecessor.

Metanet has spent a lot of time getting it right too, especially because they've refused to lean on recommendation algorithms to connect stylistic dots. "Another big change is that with N++, we used recommendation algorithms on SoundCloud and YouTube to help us find new music," Burns said. "But after 10 years of living in an increasingly algorithmically driven society, we can't stand it anymore. So for this game we kind of went full organic, free range, and just kind of brute forced it by hand."

He goes on: "So in the end, we spent almost 1,500 hours curating the soundtrack, which is basically two hours every evening for two entire years, listening to a few seconds each of almost half a million different songs, exploring like every back alley and sub-genre that we could find on Bandcamp to find the perfect music. The end product is something that we think is going to be truly unique in video games, with about 60 different songs from half a dozen completely different styles of modern electronic music, and it's all exclusively from the 2020s."

Burns promises the soundtrack will range from "flowy dreamscapes" to "intense bangers". Representing the latter is Zorza, a producer from Metanet's hometown of Toronto.

While we wait for N Plus Infinity Times Two's 2027 release date, here's the N++ playlist to provide some shelter from the foul post-Suno slopscape:

GOG has apologized for a "Slavic adventure" newsletter sent out today that featured a number of very distinct Nazi runes in its subject line.

To be clear, this is not a misunderstanding, or images that look kind of alike, or a misinterpretation of an ambiguous situation: That's a Sonnenrad, a kolovrat, and the extremely unmistakable double Siegrune of the SS—quite possibly second only to the swastika as the most distinctive emblem of the Nazi regime. From my own email:

This is not a small mistake. As PC Gamer's Kara Philips put it, "There's messing up, and then there's whatever this is." So, the obvious question: how the hell did this happen?

"We are sorry for today's newsletter," GOG wrote in an apology on X. "We made a series of mistakes: We created an unfortunate visual association by placing the runes incorrectly, we used the wrong logo for The End of the Sun, we did not check the display of the newsletter on mobile devices—which came out worse—and we didn't port the feedback from our German QA to other languages."

The apology doesn't substantially address how the symbols wound up in the email in the first place. The problem with the runes isn't their placement, it's that they are explicitly and indelibly associated with Nazis and white supremacists. Just as with the swastika, their meaning prior to the Third Reich is irrelevant: The Nazi links are too clear and prevalent to pretend that any other connection is equally meaningful.

GOG said it stopped the mailout when it noticed the error, and is "revising our review process to enforce more checks and catch these mistakes earlier."

As a fan of fishing in games, my ears perked up at the sound of a rod and reel during Summer Games Fest. It was the trailer for Last Harbor, where the fishing quickly turned from a peaceful pastime to a struggle for survival.

That's because this isn't just a fishing game, it's a co-op and PvP zombie shooter, and to make things even more interesting: according to developer and publisher tinyBuild, it's based on a true story.

No, obviously, there weren't actually zombies running around attacking people. Last Harbor is "inspired by true events of spending the lockdown of 2020 on a boat stuck in the beautiful San Juan Islands of Washington state," says tinyBuild.

"Fishing, exploration, the feeling of dread while surrounded by beauty, and walking around quaint, seemingly abandoned town centers while trying to avoid other people. We aspire to replicate this feeling of isolation as you navigate the abandoned remains of a cluster of islands off the US coast, teeming with the undead."

Not a bad origin story for a game, really. And it sounds like an interesting concept, too, because there's a lot at stake as you pilot your boat around hunting for resources.

"The undead roam the land and the few remaining survivors have taken to the sea in search of refuge. To survive, they must maintain and upgrade their boats, venturing back to the land they once called home in search of resources, loot and sustenance. But every expedition could be their last and it’s not just the zombies that are out for blood," says tinyBuild.

"Anchor next to an unexplored island, launch your dinghy and venture ashore. Stay alert of your surroundings, as other players won’t hesitate to part you with your hard earned loot if they stumble upon an unmanned boat."

You aren't in constant peril, however:

"Find safe harbors where guards keep the peace and the people safe. Socialize with other players and rent anchorage to keep your boat safe," tinyBuild says.

Sort of Sea of Thieves-y, but with safe harbors and zombies? Plus, fishing? I could be into that. There's no release date announced for Last Harbor, but we'll keep our eyes peeled for more information.

At today's Summer Game Fest, one reveal in particular had me leaning forward with great interest: a follow-up to Guild Wars 2, a game I have well over a thousand hours in.

It's where I experienced one of my most treasured MMO thrills ever: completing the mapwide boss encounter Dragon's Stand for the first time. It's also where I sat through an equally unforgettable disappointment: the conclusion to the Icebrood Saga, which sped through a lore event that had been hyped up for years beforehand only to deliver a notoriously flat anticlimax.

Being a Guild Wars 2 player has always meant putting up with inconsistency only occasionally matched by the MMO's contemporaries. This is best embodied by its update and expansion schedule, which has seen overhaul after overhaul from year to year.

Developer ArenaNet switched focus frequently between seasonal "living world" updates, big expansions like Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire, and most recently, an annual schedule for smaller, more focused expansions. Even the endgame setup never quite sat still: the game originally did away with traditional raid instances entirely, until they showed up anyway, and then those got replaced with smaller-scale "strikes," until the two merged and became the same thing.

At any given moment, it was hard to know what to expect for the future—even the reveal of a new game arguably continues this trend of constantly switching gears. Compare that to a game like World of Warcraft, which has such a predictable patch cadence that it went and announced three expansions in advance just a few years ago.

PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage wrote at length last year about how ArenaNet struggled to deliver satisfying conclusions with its current annual expansion strategy, saying that both Secrets of the Obscure and Janthir Wilds "[limped] towards their finish." While I have fuzzy memories of the game's biggest expansions from back in the day, that model had its problems too: long waits between updates, and living world follow-ups that varied in quality.

I don't think MMOs, or any live service games for that matter, bear the responsibility to go on forever. It's okay for games to wind down or move on to sequels. But Guild Wars 2, despite its casual-friendly flat progression and lack of subscription fee, encouraged the player to invest countless hours into Tyria. It's easier to feel like that's worth the time with a surefire future ahead, especially if you're in it for the game's story—which, as is typical for MMOs, moved from beat to beat at a glacial pace.

Guild Wars 3 is a fresh start for the aging fantasy series, and while we don't know all the ways it will be different from the games that came before it just yet, I hope I can rope in my friends using the same ease with which I'm able to recommend MMOs like Final Fantasy 14, WoW, and even Final Fantasy 11.

A sequel to horny action game Stellar Blade was announced at Summer Game Fest, and my first reaction upon seeing it was that I'm not sure GPU is up to the task. That futuristic city looks cool, but phew, even the trailer seems to struggle in moments. I don't know if I'd be able to hear the game over my fans.

The footage is, of course, "from a game currently in development and is subject to change," developer Shift Up says. The action looks pretty smooth in interiors, as does the new protagonist's vacuum-sealed bodysuit.

Blood Rain will take us "beyond the events of the first game, introducing new protagonist Evie and expanding the world in a bold new direction," the studio says.

We weren't the biggest of fans of the original Stellar Blade—it's "Nier: Automata on horny steroids," we joked in our review—but it delivered something a lot of people want, and I have a feeling Blood Rain will, too. (I'm gonna have a hard time not thinking of BloodRayne whenever I read the title, though—remember the Uwe Boll movie?)

The original Stellar Blade was published by Sony, and didn't come to PC right away. Blood Rain will be self published, and given that the trailer was captured on PC, I expect it'll launch on Steam.

No release date or platforms have been announced yet, though.

"While the project is still in early development, Shift Up has made incredible progress and is looking forward to sharing more details when ready," the studio said in a press release. "The team is hard focused on building upon the stylish action, world-building, and core elements that fans have adored from Stellar Blade, while evolving the universe in ambitious new ways."

More than a decade after the release of one of the best action platformers ever made, N Plus Infinity Times Two is the next ninja parkour movement sim from Canada's Metanet Software.

If you love N++ I know what you're probably thinking: decade old or not, that game has over 4,000 levels, and it got a massive free expansion just last year. Why does N Plus Infinity Times Two need to exist? Well, because the Metanet duo of Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard have kinda turned N into Smash Brothers. And also, kinda, Rocket League. Other games mentioned during a presentation last week include Counter-Strike, Towerfall, and It Takes Two.

"We don't think we can substantially improve upon [N++] in terms of being a hardcore single player platformer," Burns said. "So for this new project we're trying to go a bit perpendicular, and we're trying to apply the same basic process [we did] to N+."

To recap: N released in 2004 as browser-based freeware. In 2008, N+ released as an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive, and like all XBLA games it needed to have an online component. Thus, N+ added some neat multiplayer modes to a format that had previously been entirely singleplayer focused.

In other words, N Plus Infinity Times Two is to N++ what N+ was to N.

"For N Plus Infinity Times Two, we're kind of setting out to make the ultimate version of that initial foray into multiplayer platforming," Burns said, "this time bringing to bear two decades of learning and knowledge and development of our craft to help us make a significantly better experience for everyone."

Enthusiasts and pedants will point out that N++ did have multiplayer, but it only supported local play. N Plus Infinity Times Two will support both online and local multiplayer for up to four players, and it'll boast five main game modes across cooperative and competitive. You can play it by yourself, but multiplayer is very much baked into N Plus Infinity Times Two's design.

Of the five modes, Metanet showed two: Racing is, as the name implies, a race to the exit, with each character collecting as much gold as possible on the way and setting off traps to hinder opponents. Whoever reaches the exit is automatically equipped with a rocket launcher, all the better to slay dawdling opponents. One nice visual touch here is that each player leaves behind a color-coded trail, making it much easier—in theory—to follow the movement of your stick thin avatar on a busy screen.

Tag Team was also shown: Sheppard said "It plays kinda like if you turned Counter-Strike surfing into melee only deathmatch", though here is where Rocket League was a major inspiration too. It pits two ninjas against two hunters:the former must survive while the latter hunts them with traps and contact damage. Oh, and the hunters can turn into rockets. Anyone who knows N games knows how dangerous rockets are.

Other modes include co-op, one-up, and trials.

Burns said that part of the motive for making N Plus Infinity Times Two was to try to explore possibilities in the 2D platformer that aren't done (to death) elsewhere. "A big source of inspiration for N Plus Infinity Times Two was to go back to the source," he said. "[Shigeru] Miyamoto himself never referred to the original Mario games as platformers, he used the term athletic games.

"We've always thought that that's a very inspiring way to think about platforming as a sort of virtual athletics," he went on. "So the concept for the new game is basically just that soccer is more fun than track and field, and in the context of platforming, there's an entire world of new possibilities once you change the core conversation from the single-player context of, like, it's a level designer and a player conversing, to a multiplayer context where it's players conversing together, and the level design becomes more of a conversation starter rather than the focus."

But, for those who are averse to the concept of a multiplayer focused N game and have also finished the thousands of levels in N++, there will be a full singleplayer campaign, and the multiplayer modes will each have a solo practice component.

"We recognize [singleplayer] is what people love and what they will be expecting," Sheppard said. "And we love it too, even if we are maybe ever so slightly bored of that. We think we've done it really well up to this point and there are still lots of ideas to explore."

N Plus Infinity Times Two will release in 2027.

The Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy will soon come to an end with next year's third and final entry, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation. The Square Enix RPG was the last big announcement for today's Summer Game Fest live show, and one you can play on PC when it launches next year.

Director Naoki Hamaguchi joined Geoff Keighley on stage for the reveal, which included a trailer packed with FF7 iconography you'll recognize in a heartbeat, like the Highwind, monstrous Weapons, and footage of Vincent and Cid in battle. You can check it all out for yourself in the not one, but two trailers that debuted during the show.

Shortly after the first cinematic aired, Hamaguchi invited Matt Mercer—the voice of Vincent Valentine—to the stage to talk us through an even longer gameplay reveal. The battle system is the same real-time tactical hybrid from the first two, but now you have the additional party members that weren't playable in Rebirth along for the ride.

Both Final Fantasy 7 Revelation trailers throw a lot at you, so here's what stood out to me at a glance:

• Ability to fly around the open world in the Highwind
• You'll also jump out of the Highwind and parachute to your destination
• Brief looks around the Wutai and Mideel regions
• Playable Vincent Valentine, your gunslinging ally that also transforms into a beast
• Playable Cid Highwind, the party's resident Dragoon
• New FITS system for playing dress up and learning new movesets, very classic Final Fantasy (and X-2) of them
• A showdown against the Weapons, FF7's kaiju-like monstrosities, and some of the hardest fights in the original

Square Enix didn't provide a specific date just yet, but Final Fantasy 7 Revelation launches in spring 2027 and will be available through the Epic Games Store and Steam.

In February 2026, Monster Hunter series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto confirmed that a "large scale expansion similar to Monster Hunter World: Iceborne and Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak" was in the works for Wilds. In a reveal at tonight's SGF showcase, Capcom pinned a name on its next hunting expedition: It's called Ascendance, and it's coming to Wilds in 2027.

Based on what was shown in the trailer, Ascendance—a "massive" expansion, in Capcom's words—will have hunters leaving the now-familiar regions of the Forbidden Lands and heading skyward into the floating ruins of the Wyverian civilization. That journey will seemingly entail a notable risk of aerial lizard bombardment. You've been warned.

As is typical for Monster Hunter expansions, we can expect new creatures to clash with, new zones for questing, and expanded weapon movesets for facing the elevated challenge of Master Rank hunts. Based on the gameplay footage shown, hunters will be able to bolster their weapon movesets with jet-propelled mechanisms embedded in their forearm-mounted slingers: A great sword hunter was able to launch themselves into a string of strikes that—for the heavy weapon—were surprisingly nimble.

Most exciting for veteran MonHun sickos is the glimpse of a long-absent silhouette at the end of the teaser. Lao-Shan Lung? Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

Ascension will be Wilds' best chance at securing a salvaged reputation, as Capcom only managed to substantially alleviate the PC release's dire performance issues in a January 2026 update—almost a year after its February 2025 launch. Ascension has the potential to be a crowning conclusion to the Wilds redemption arc, or a backslide into dysfunction.

Looking at Iceborne and Sunbreak as a track record, however, there's plenty of reason to hope.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascension launches in 2027.

Well now look at what the cat dragged in—1666: Amsterdam is still happening. During today's Summer Game Fest livestream, Assassin's Creed creator Patrice Désilets took to the stage to reveal the debut trailer for his long-awaited adventure game starring a witchy lady I can't help but root for.

The dark, third-person action game launches in early access this year, but you can play a short 30-minute demo now on both Steam and the Epic Games Store. It's not very often I get a game about the kind of broody, intimidating cat lady I aspire to be, so of course I'm mid-download as I write this.

It serves as a standalone narrative teaser, introducing us to the world and leading lady, the witch Noa Brooklyn. We saw some of that in the SGF reveal trailer, which also included plenty of ominous black cats, dark cuts to Noa in witch garb, and very brief clips of her swinging a staff around. No shots of anyone trying to toss her on a pyre. I'm assuming they all know better than to try.

This isn't the first we've heard of 1666: Amsterdam, but it's taken a lot to get it to the SGF stage. The game originally started as a project Désilets worked on while at THQ Montreal, which was later bought out by Ubisoft in 2013. He was fired shortly after, and then sued Ubisoft for the rights to 1666. That's obviously all worked out now, and Désilets was finally able to share those results today.

Everything in the trailer looks cool as hell, though I'm hoping Noa's intimidating presence hits in all the same ways when there's actual gameplay involved. As for how that shapes up, the team at Panache Digital says your journey as Noa will take place across multiple timelines. The first unfolds in 1666, then it moves into 1999, and then the present day. You'll piece together the world's mysteries across timelines and eventually reveal "fragments of a larger truth."

No word on an exact date just yet, but you'll be able to play 1666: Amsterdam in early access sometime this year.

At the 2026 Summer Game Fest, we got a new trailer for Star Wars: Zero Company, the Star Wars squad tactics game from the XCOM veterans at new studio Bit Reactor. The trailer revealed that Zero Company will launch on August 27, and Anakin Skywalker himself will feature in the story.

This new trailer had a similar balance of gameplay to cinematics as Zero Company's reveal last year, with an emphasis on juicy Star Wars aesthetics and fan service. Nothing wrong with that—Bit Reactor has a great handle on Star Wars art.

One new thing I clocked from the trailer is a wider degree of options for custom characters than I had gleaned at my hands on with the game in February: The trailer included custom-built clone troopers alongside the alien mercenaries we already knew were coming.

The trailer ends with, what else, a surprise cameo from Star Wars' #1 problematic fav, the infamous youngling-hater, Anakin Skywalker. It's unclear as yet how much of a presence Skywalker will have in the game overall, but hey, always nice to see the guy.

I had the opportunity to try Zero Company for myself at Bit Reactor HQ in February, and it immediately shot to the top of my personal most wanted list. As you can see from the trailer, it is basically Star Wars XCOM, but it's not just Star Wars XCOM.

Zero Company has a large number of RPG elements, like Mass Effect-style story squad mates with loyalty missions, conversations, and the like, alongside some punishing permadeath. It also has a commitment to cinematic storytelling that really has to be seen firsthand, with console-style cinematic exploration in-between crunchy tactics battles.

Based on my hands-on, Zero Company is well-positioned to hit that August 27 release date. You can wishlist Star Wars Zero Company on Steam.

The first story trailer for Star Wars: Galactic Racer sped onto Summer Game Fest today, giving us a glimpse of characters like Sebulba, that four-armed alien that looks vaguely familiar, a human with a moustache that's probably from one of the cartoons or comics or something, and a whole bunch of other Glup Shittos.

As you can probably tell, I'm a bit of a lapsed Star Wars fan so I don't have any idea who most of those characters are, and the story trailer mainly left me with one reaction: Oh, there's a story? I was hoping it would just be racing.

Lest you come away from those two paragraphs thinking I'm not excited for Star Wars: Galactic Racer: I actually am! I loved Star Wars Episode I: Racer (I had it for the N64) and whenever I fast-forward through the first Star Wars prequel I always watch the podracing segment (that and the Duel of the Fates battle are about the only reasons to watch the movie at all.)

So yes, I am pumped to see the racing gameplay, and decidedly less pumped to see a bunch of aliens talking about whatever the heck the story is about. But no matter. I will happily sit through all the dialogue (or smash the "Skip" button) in order to get behind the controls of a racer again.

The release date leaked a couple of months ago, but it's now definitely official: Star Wars: Galactic Racer launches on October 6. I'll see all you Glup Shittos at the starting line.

I've got a serious case of Gundam disease. It's bad enough that I willingly spend my time playing Gundam: Battle Operation 2—a game that most of the world rightfully thinks is irredeemable. I'm starved enough for new Gundam stuff to play, that at this point I'll take whatever Bandai Namco is willing to put in front of me.

I didn't expect "whatever" to entail Gundams battling giant monsters, however, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. At tonight's Summer Game Fest, Bandai Namco revealed Gundam Rogue Orbit, an action game where mobile suits are fighting a meatier class of enemy than they usually face.

Still, even in the brief announcement trailer embedded above, there's plenty of recognizable Gundam material: A hapless grunt suit gets hopelessly outmatched by a superior tier of foe. There's a white robot with a V-fin. There's the profound sorrow that comes with the dashed hopes of a lasting peace for the space colonies.

I'll admit that I'm a little skeptical about how much it'll feel like Gundam when so much of what makes Gundam work is rooted in the emotional, psychological, and political tensions that emerge from human conflict. But Gundams facing kaiju isn't entirely unprecedented: That's the premise of the Mobile Suit Gundam Eight manga that kicked off in 2025.

And hey, when a beam sword looks as respectable as it does in that gameplay footage, I'm willing to give it a chance.

Gundam Rogue Orbit launches on Steam in 2027.

ArenaNet teased earlier this week that something Guild Wars related would be at the Summer Game Fest showcase. Naturally, we wondered if it could be Guild Wars 3, but fans of the MMO series tried not to get their hopes up.

Turns out high hopes were justified: It is Guild Wars 3! There's even a Steam page up now.

"The MMORPG genre has millions of players worldwide eager for new, modern experiences, and the opportunity to harness that excitement is immense," Guild Wars 3 game director and ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson said in a press release. "Our approach with Guild Wars 3 is to push MMORPGs forward, to create an online game world that feels believable, rewarding, responsive, and innovative while at the same time respecting players’ time and providing a positive, supportive space to build community and enjoy new stories in our universe."

ArenaNet tells us that Guild Wars 3 is set over a thousand years before the events of Guild Wars, and takes place in the Tyrian region of Orr, "a vast wilderness frontier imbued with the world's magic."

Speaking on-stage at Summer Game Fest for Guild Wars 3's reveal, Johanson said the prequel-threequel will offer "usher in an entirely new type of MMO experience."

The trailer doesn't show much that you could call gameplay, but it does illustrate a core aspect of the MMO: Each player will have a Seeker, a spirit which serves "as a connection to the spirits of Orr and a mount that will carry them on their journeys through the game's open world."

In other words, it's—you know—a cool horse. A really cool horse.

Guild Wars 3's movement system is particularly emphasized on the Steam page: "Run, slide, leap, and bound across Orr with a one-of-a-kind movement system that transfers your momentum between modes of travel, providing a free-form joy of movement through a world alive with adventure."

And that sounds great and all, but both Johanson and the Steam description overlook the most promising thing shown in the teaser: There's a bear guy sitting there. Barely any MMOs let you make a bear guy. That's the kind of innovation I'm looking for.

In all seriousness, while ArenaNet is making some pretty massive promises, it's tempting to hear that a studio is investing some serious thought into experimenting with the MMO form in 2026, years after most of the industry has left the genre behind. We take it for granted now, but in their heyday, MMOs celebrated the magic of a exploring and coexisting in a shared, online world. If ArenaNet can find a way to recapture that magic, I'll eagerly give it my attention.

No release date for Guild Wars 3 has been announced, but a beta is planned for fall 2027.

Paramount Skydance unveiled a new game studio earlier today, creatively called Paramount Games Studio, and promised to reveal its first game during tonight's Summer Game Fest showcase. And now we know—it's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin.

The Last Ronin is set in a future New York City, ruled by the grandson of the infamous villain Shredder, where a lone turtle fights to avenge the deaths of his brothers. The limited series is grim stuff, of course, but also critically and commercially acclaimed, and a game based on the property being developed by Embracer-owned Black Forest Games was announced in 2023.

I'm not sure about the status of that game, although I'd assume it's fallen by the wayside—there's no mention of it on the Black Forest website—but this one is being developed by PlatinumGames, known for Bayonetta, Nier: Automata, Ninja Gaiden 4, and—since we're on the topic—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan.

The Last Ronin will be published by Paramount Games Studio, a new Paramount division that's essentially a combination of the company's two existing studios, Skydance Interactive and Skydance New Media, according to a Variety report. The previously announced games in development at Skydance Interactive—Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and an untitled Star Wars game headed up by Amy Hennig—are still in development at the newly-formed outfit. Paramount Games Studio will be headed up by Tony Driscoll, the head of corporate strategy and development at Paramount.

"This isn't just about creating a new gaming division," Driscoll posted on LinkedIn. "It's about recognizing that games have become one of the most powerful forms of storytelling and community-building in the world.

"At Paramount, we're building games as a core content pillar alongside film, television, and streaming. That means investing in original worlds, deepening fan relationships, and creating experiences that can grow into the next generation of franchises."

The Last Ronin doesn't have a release target yet or a Steam page, but Paramount confirmed that it will be released on PC as well as console. For now, you can find ever so slightly more—and, naturally, throw money at some merchandise—at thelastronin.com.

There's a good chance you haven't heard of That's No Moon. The Los Angeles-based studio is one of many that cropped up amidst the Covid-fueled videogames gold rush of the early 2020s, and up until now it's been working in total silence. The South Korean publisher backing the startup, Smilegate, is known for free-to-play shooters and MMOs, but much of the top brass at That's No Moon cut their teeth at Naughty Dog making Uncharted and The Last of Us.

It's an odd pairing, but it has produced a genuinely intriguing debut game. What if I told you:

1. It's called Crossfire, the same name as Smilegate's long-running FPS colloquially known as "Korean Counter-Strike"
2. But it's not an FPS, or competitive, or even multiplayer at all. This Crossfire is a singleplayer, third-person, "stealth-forward" tactical shooter
3. The main character is voiced and performed by Claudia Doumit, known for her roles in The Boys TV show and the Modern Warfare 2019 reboot
4. It's mashing the cinematic stylings of a prestige console game with the systemic friction of a milsim—high lethality, limited healing, manual magazine reloading, etc.

Weird! But also: Cool!

That's No Moon is drawing from the world of the competitive FPS—particularly its factions—but this is an original story with new characters. CCO Taylor Kurosaki is well aware that most of the West doesn't know the first thing about Crossfire, let alone its fiction, and you don't have to. During a visit to the That's No Moon studio in Los Angeles, Kurosaki called Crossfire a canvas.

The world had lore, but not much in the way of stories, until now.

This Crossfire takes place in a militaristic theatre, but its story won't take the shape of a Call of Duty-style global conflict. The game centers on the relationship between protagonist Layla Qassem, an idealistic gun-for-hire, and Delroy Cross, a mercenary who "fights for institutions." Kurosaki danced around the specifics of their meeting and the conflict that brings them together, but in an interview with PC Gamer he compared Layla and Delroy's relationship to classic "unlikely duo" cinema like Midnight Run.

As I watched Crossfire played live by game director Jacob Minkoff, my eyes widened with surprise. The behind-the-back camera angle, cinematic cutscenes, and believable exchanges between Layla and Delroy had all the markings of The Last of Us (on which Minkoff was lead designer), but when action broke out, we quickly left PlayStation prestige behind.

Firefights were loud, scrappy, and brief. Minkoff fired in controlled bursts, as full-auto recoil seemed difficult to control at distance. Tanking just a few shots would tear through Layla's ceramic plates, triggering a bleed that he had to mend within seconds or pass out. There was no first-person view as far as I saw, but in its place was one of the coolest on-screen reticles I've ever seen: a projection of what your current gun's sights would look like in first-person, instead of a traditional cross or dot. What a neat way to convey an experiential difference in FPS guns (preferring one gun's iron sights over another's) that third-person shooters are usually left out of.

That's just one of the ways Crossfire is pulling from milsims like Escape From Tarkov, Arma, Squad, or what have you. After stealth-killing a soldier, Minkoff looted the body and revealed an elaborate, Tarkov-style modular inventory with slots for backpacks, vests, and ammo belts. At one point he replaced Layla's busted helmet with a fresh one, then looted ammo from a pack, which required the extra steps of loading bullets individually into magazines.

Covered

None of these mechanics are wholly unique on their own, but it's the context they exist within that excites me. This isn't a battle royale, an extraction shooter, or an Arma scenario—it's a linear, authored campaign. We just don't get singleplayer shooters with characters and stories that you (ideally) care about and this level of simulation. The closest analog is Ubisoft's recent run of Ghost Recon, though to call those sims is a long stretch.

Minkoff's vision for Crossfire is to bridge the gap between a milsim and an accessible action game. The third-person camera certainly helps in that way, but so does one feature that Kurosaki and Minkoff were endlessly excited to show off: adaptive cover.

Essentially, Crossfire's cover system isn't a binary state of standing or crouching. Cover comes in all shapes and sizes (not just waist-high boxes), and so Crossfire's cover system automatically adjusts Layla's stance to obscure her behind whatever cover is available. Minkoff said the system is based on how real-life soldiers use cover—ducking and lurking behind shallow rock croppings at whatever height and stance is necessary to break line-of-sight.

"I love milsim, but I recognize that the experience is somewhat niche," Minkoff told PC Gamer. "When I play those games for my own enjoyment, I'm always thinking about how I can make this more accessible to a wider audience, so that was the vision for adaptive cover from the start."

Stance management is, again, not a new concept for the Arma crowd, but it will be for most people, and the way Crossfire automates a stance through the blending of hundreds of animations is impressive. That doesn't mean the game will always automatically hide you—it's still up to the player to survey the area for adequate cover and avoid patrols. After watching Minkoff fail twice in an encounter he's likely played a hundred times, I was reminded of how I like to play stealth action games: taking risks in the pursuit of doing something cool, getting curbstomped, then trying a new route the next time. Crossfire will be hard by default, but the full game will have a range of difficulty settings.

"If I can give somebody an experience where they can learn the controls in just a few minutes, but they have all the challenge and tactical freedom that would get from a lighter milsim, then they get to unlock this flavor of game that I love so much," said Minkoff.

Minkoff also talked about how this one-of-a-kind system allowed the team to make more fluid and organic levels that were "completely illegal" in this type of game 20 years ago, sharing screenshots of his own "rectilinear cover" in Uncharted 4 with the same grimace of someone looking back at their questionable hairstyle from high school. Minkoff seemed genuinely giddy to leave behind rooms full of waist-high walls and boxes that prompted players to snidely ask "I wonder if a fight is about to break out in here?"

Throughout my day at That's No Moon touring its pleasant West Hollywood studio and visiting its on-site performance capture volume, I kept looking for a catch. It's rare enough these days to get a narrative-focused action game with a significant budget at all, let alone one that isn't pressured to have a live-service plan to extract money for years to come. Why the heck is Smilegate placing a bet like this?

To hear Kurosaki recount how the studio formed back in 2021, it's pretty simple.

"When we met the folks from Smilegate, they were very clear. They said 'Smilegate wants to be associated with high-quality games, so the only goal for you guys is to make the game of your careers.' That's it." Kurosaki told PC Gamer. "They did not micromanage us."

I had assumed that part of the offer included working within the Crossfire franchise, but Kurosaki says there was no such mandate. It was actually That's No Moon that pushed to use the name.

"We did a deep dive into the Crossfire lore and said hey, we can actually tell the story that we want to tell in the Crossfire IP. We asked them if that'd be OK. I actually loved that name, Crossfire, because it's what Delroy and Layla are going through."

Nothing but surprises from these guys. Crossfire was the first of a dozen-plus new games I'll see in Los Angeles throughout June, but even on the other side of that gauntlet I expect it'll be the one I can't stop thinking about. As a fan of both extremes that Crossfire is harnessing, That's No Moon has identified a bullseye I didn't know I had.

As up and down as I can be with Remedy games, I maintain that it's a studio to be treasured. Nobody is taking creative swings at its scale outside of Kojima, and Control Resonant may be its hardest swing ever. It takes guts to ditch the one throughline that all Remedy games shared—prominet primary pistols—and telekinetically chuck it out the window.

Resonant is, indeed, a character action game. It's got hot-swappable weapons, combos, air juggles, and a dizzying collection of skill trees. Dylan Faden's melee moveset—powered by a shapeshifting weapon called the Abberant—falls somewhere on the Devil May Cry or Platinum spectrum. It plays nothing like the first Control, a fact that somewhat worried me going into a hands-on demo in Los Angeles earlier this week. The new direction is fun, but will it still feel like Control?

For a while, not so much.

The 2-hour demo opened in the first act, with Dylan waking up to an unmitigated disaster—the Oldest House lockdown has broken and chaos has spilled onto the streets of Manhattan. He meets an FBC contact, Zoe, who initially wants to put him in cuffs and haul him back to his cell. But he proves his worth, and soon Zoe is directing Dylan to problems that need solving. There's a nice symmetry to Dylan's point of view compared to his sister Jesse (who is a larger part of this game than I anticipated): The first Control is all about Jesse leaving our world behind to accept her place in the Oldest House, while Dylan is venturing out into a world he hasn't seen since childhood. To him, the FBC is his captor—one that he's willing to form an alliance with if it means saving New York.

It's a great setup, but that first hour is bland to actually play. It's a lot of slicing through basic Hiss grunts, dead simple platforming, and getting acquainted with upgrade currencies, but not a lot of intrigue. It's a tutorial, so that's to be expected, but Resonant picks up a pulse once its larger, actually dangerous enemies show up. Encounters are set up almost like Doom 2016—grunts won't ever stop spawning until the big guys are gone, so it's about prioritizing the biggest threats and avoiding the little guys until you need an HP piñata to smash.

Dylan's weapon forms are excellent. I started with a combo of:

• A scythe that can cleave through everything in a 90-degree radius
• And drill that deals pointed, single-target damage in bursts

The Aberrant is Remedy tech indulgence reaching new heights—with every attack, the staff transforms and extends into the chosen weapon before snapping off at the hilt and flinging a dozen physics objects in every direction. There's a Sekiro-like stagger mechanic that plays a huge role in weapon choice, too. Some weapons, like the drill, put up weak damage but high stagger.

I wandered around an open Manhattan area checking off little side tasks. Getting around is cool—Dylan's double jump, air lift, and generous glide reminded me a bit of Infamous—but the activities present in the demo were mostly grindy combat arenas. Remedy emphasized that this won't be the case in the final game, as it removed most of the stuff that fills these open areas for the demo.

Still, it gave me an impression that Resonant's focus on larger areas and busier action might leave less room for aspects of the first game I loved, like combing over the notes of FBC scientists or learning new skills from a fiberglass merry-go-round horse recovered from an amusement park in 1998.

I finally got what I asked for with the Sinkhole, a story mission from later in the game that filled the last 40 minutes of my demo. We weren't given much context for why Dylan had to jump down a hole into a dimension of endless bedrooms not unlike the ending of Interstellar, but I think I was there to scan some weird stuff at the bottom. This whole episode was fantastic—I rode down a research probe approximately one billion miles underground, fighting off waves of Hiss while gaining the ability to shift gravity to any plane.

At the bottom was the second boss fight of the demo—a flying, spectral Hiss bastard with chest lasers that killed me twice. The difficulty jumped pretty dramatically here, though I think my weapon choice of axe and hammer were just a bad fit for fighting something airborne. Still, I eventually figured out a simple game plan: meet it in the air, blast it with my fire ability to boost stagger damage, then hit it with a heavy hammer slam.

Notably, Resonant doesn't have a deep combo or scoring system that I noticed. It's more about chaining abilities and cooldowns into stagger opportunities than memorizing dextrous button sequences. For that reason, I have a hunch that Resonant's combat will feel pedestrian to those who actually know ball with this genre, but I'm not one of them, so I appreciate the approachability.

The mission concluded with a sequence that gave me hope that Control's quieter moments will have a place in Resonant. With the beast slain and Dylan stranded at the bottom of the Sinkhole, he began a futile climb through a dizzying maze of living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms. Dylan was presumed dead by the FBC, but Zoe hadn't given up yet. She began playing music, lighting a trail of TVs for Dylan to follow. Remedy's mastery of seamless geometry loading became the main character of the moment as the new rooms appeared and disappeared impossibility fast between camera pans.

As the distant music got further away, the gravity shift ability returned, allowing Dylan to turn walls into platforms and finally climb high enough to reach Zoe on the radio. "Let's never do that again," she said.

It was the longest stretch of the demo where I didn't kill anything, and it turned out to be the highlight. Control Resonant is out September 24.

A new trailer for Yakuza prequel game Stranger Than Heaven premiered at Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest. It ended with a perplexing announcement: Tupac is in it.

That's Tupac, as in Shakur, as in the legendary rapper who has been dead since 1996. His likeness is the last thing we see in the trailer with zero explanation. The character doesn't speak, but his actor is simply credited as Tupac.

Game director Masayoshi Yokoyama took the stage alongside rapper Snoop Dogg, an actual living and breathing person also appearing in Stranger Than Heaven, to talk about the creative...uh...choice.

Snoop's elaboration was not illuminating.

"The Tupac estate and my son and myself, we work very closely together. It just made sense to put him in this game because his likeness and his spirit still lives on, and I feel like it was so connected to what we're doing. What do y'all think?"

Snoop then gestured to the crowed, which responded with medium applause. In a follow-up press release, Sega expanded on how the character will be used and depicted.

"Tupac’s portrayal of the character Amaru in STRANGER THAN HEAVEN is made possible with the permission and ongoing supervision of his estate, Amaru Entertainment. RGG Studio is treating this integration with the utmost respect for his legacy, crafting every aspect in the close collaboration and without the use of AI, including his character design based on archival footage and photographs. More details regarding his role will be shared at a later date."

Sega also announced the release date for Stranger Than Heaven: January 15, 2027.