I've been trying to convert Grand Theft Auto 5 into GTA 6 using mods for about a week now, and I've learnt a lot. For instance, most things will die if hit by a car at more than the speed of sound.

But I've also learned this: Los Santos is a lonely city. GTA 6's core is the Bonnie-and-Clyde love story of its protagonists, but Franklin, Michael and Trevor are insular men. They cruise the sun-drenched highways with no one in the passenger seat. I needed to change that. I needed to give them companions. I needed them to be the very best, like no one ever was.

I installed Pokémon Go GTA Edition.

Pokémon Go GTA Edition turns (stay with me) GTA 5 into Pokémon Go. The streets become denuded of people and filled with Geodudes, Charmandi, and Pikachu. Maybe. I never actually saw Pikachu. There was a Squirtle, though.

I'm fairly certain that only Trevor can do the Poke-hunting, or it is possible that some previously installed mod has broken this one. Either way, out he went on Franklin's motorbike, on the prowl for new best friends. In what news reporters might call 'drive-bys' I captured for myself a Geodude and a Squirtle.

But some Pokémon resist friendship. For instance, Charmander, who broke free of my pokeball and began to curse at me in a thick eastern European accent, just like in the anime. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that my encounter with Charmander was not a happy one. We came to blows in the road, and the last I left him he was burbling face-down in the tarmac having taken a powerful yet precise right hook to his snout. Don't worry everyone, he's just fainted.

We've pulled lots of interesting little details out of the purported Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay clips being posted by "Cyberleek" this week. In the first couple we saw a possible morality system and stamina meter, and in the next two we got a better look at combat and spied some other Red Dead Redemption 2-like features.

My takeaway was that Grand Theft Auto 6 won't necessarily be a revolutionary new kind of game, but will be impressive for the same reason Rockstar games typically are: The absurd amount of effort and money the studio puts into making them as big and detailed as the mainstream hardware of the day can manage.

After seeing the latest leaked clip, which shows a biplane surveying the fictional state of Leonida and cruising over Vice City, my perspective hasn't really changed, but I'm definitely a lot more wowed than I was after seeing a bit of typical GTA carjacking.

The city, which is only a portion of GTA 6's full map, looks enormous from the air, and densely packed with detail. Across a couple minutes of video, we see what looks like a military base, small farms, dozens of mid- and high-rise apartments and office buildings, an arena, a construction site, grimier looking commercial districts, a huge marina and waterways running through the city, bridges, and tangled freeway interchanges. Phew.

Similar reactions are being shared in the Gaming Leaks and Rumors subreddit: "Yea this is the first clip out of all of these leaks that actually made me go 'holy shit,'" said one commenter.

The legitimacy of the footage is still an open question, but like the other videos, it is highly believable. It could be from an old or limited build of the game, but it does appear that the leaker is capturing the clips themselves: they concluded this latest clip with a video in which they write "LEEK" on a wall with bullet holes.

If you've been following this week's GTA 6 leaks saga, how are you feeling about the footage? (Of course, none of it changes the frustrating issue that Rockstar has not yet announced a PC release date. I'd like to see how it looks on one of our hardware team's test rigs.)

On August 18, an unidentified person or group going by the name "Cyberleek" began sharing what appeared to be Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay clips on the internet.

The internet was naturally skeptical, but the footage was hard to fault: It looked authentic, showing mundane GTA 6 gameplay featuring its male protagonist, Jason. In one clip the player shot a basketball outside of the same house we've seen in the trailers, and in another he did some typical GTA random-civilian-murdering.

A day later, Cyberleek dropped two more videos, both of which also looked legit. At the same time, the clips were being stricken from social media on copyright grounds—the only public response from Take-Two and Rockstar so far.

The fifth video Cyberleek released ended with a twist: the player writing the word "LEEK" into the side of a building with bullet holes. These are not, it turns out, clips taken by GTA 6 testers and found on an unsecured server, as many assumed. Cyberleek has (or had) access to a build of GTA 6, or a portion of it.

Here's what we know about the leaker who goes by Cyberleek.

The GTA 6 build they are using may not be complete, but is probably recent

We don't know exactly how Cyberleek is getting their clips. The footage of them shooting "LEEK" into a wall indicates they have or had access to a playable build, but it is not necessarily the full game. It's notable that GTA 6's other protagonist, Lucia, has not shown up in the clips.

It does seem that these clips are from a relatively recent build, however. In one of the clips, the in-game radio is playing "Sports Car" by Tate McRae, which released in January 2025.

They've got a manifesto

Cyberleek has made common consumer rights complaints their justification for the leaks: "Publishers sell licenses and call them purchases. They ship unfinished games and call them living services. They lock content on discs and call it DLC. They kill games and keep the money. Every year anti-consumerism tightens its grip, and every year gamers get less for what they pay."

Their demands for game publishers are a little odd

At a glance, Cyberleek's complaints seem typical, but two of the three demands they've put forward strike me as slightly strange choices.

The demands are: no more digital preorders, no more selling DLC already contained in the base game files, and mandatory "offline fallback states" for the singleplayer components of games.

The third demand is the most expected, and is similar though not identical to the demand of the Stop Killing Games movement (which has disavowed the leaker).

The other two, however, don't seem like the kind of core issues most people would choose if they were putting forward their three biggest gripes about the games industry in 2026.

On-disc DLC—where add-on content is included in the base game's files, but inaccessible without paying extra—was a big controversy around 10-15 years ago, but is much less relevant in today's mostly discless world.

The complaint that preorders don't really mean anything when you're not preordering an actual physical disc is also valid, but seems like a roundabout way to complain about the heart of the issue: The end of physical media, which has been a hot button topic following Sony's announcement that it will cease disc production.

I'm not sure you can rally a movement behind ending digital preorder bonuses and preloading: GTA 6 itself has already enjoyed an "unprecedented" number of preorders. You can definitely rally a movement behind seeing more GTA 6 leaks, though.

They're selling a crypto token

The leaker is promoting the $Cyberleek token alongside the leaks—the market cap is $1.1M at the time of writing—and claims that the funds will go toward "a secret project."

For now, the tokens are being used to vote in polls that determine the next clip to be released. The most recent clip, a flyover of Vice City, was the winner of a vote.

The timing of the leaks could suggest a European origin

The leaks have been dropping at around 9 am my time, in California, except for the most recent one which was posted in the vicinity of 2:30 am Pacific.

There's a good chance that Cyberleek does not keep a typical sleep schedule, so this speculation is a bit tenuous, but the timing could point to Europe. For someone nine hours ahead of me, the leaks would be dropping late morning or late afternoon, which seem like respectable hours for leaking videogame footage.

The reference to "living service" games in the manifesto may also point to someone who speaks English as a second language or is using machine translation, unless it was just a creative turn of phrase.

Some are pointing to old posts on a German cybersecurity forum

2018 posts from the user "Cyberleek" on German-language forum szenebox.org, which includes cybersecurity-related boards, as well as other archived internet evidence, suggest that the leaker could be a German or Swiss individual in their 30s. A detailed breakdown of that evidence can be found on this Github page created by software developer Zyre.

The leaker's website and two of its mirrors are also hosted by a German provider.

A little more speculation

Based on the above, I would wager that Cyberleek is not a Rockstar employee or contractor, and that their manifesto was written after they acquired the GTA 6 build or footage as a post-facto justification and framework for the $Cyberleek token.

The complaint about on-disc DLC sticks out to me as a suggestion that this isn't a teenager, but someone who was active in gaming discourse a decade ago.

Cyberleek could face serious repercussions if caught. The hacker responsible for the massive 2022 data dump that first revealed GTA 6 to the world certainly has, and the crypto token adds another vector by which authorities may track Cyberleek down.

That fact hasn't slowed them down: So far they've released six videos, and while fans are obviously excited to pore over the gameplay details, there's some concern that the leaker will resort to posting story spoilers if attention wanes.

Rockstar's official GTA 6 gameplay reveal is still scheduled for Thursday, August 27.

You ever think about how weird cars are, as a concept? It's like sharing public space with enormous bullets piloted by random members of the public. If our car-centric urban world did not exist and you tried to pitch it, whole-cloth, you'd probably be laughed out of the room. You want to give people their own ballistic missiles, are you mad?

This is what I thought as I pulled the trigger on a pump-action shotgun and sent a mid-size family sedan careening into the side of a police helicopter.

Today's GTA 5 mod—installed in an attempt to either turn the game into a PC version of GTA 6 or break it entirely—is Vehicle Cannon, which turns whatever gun you are wielding into a horrible nozzle of limitless automobiles. In place of bullets, guns now emit vehicles at speed, bringing great devastation to the land and possibly crashing your PC.

Combined with a mod menu that I forget the provenance of, which lets me float from location to location like a militarised Christmas spirit, it makes you, more or less, god. There's probably a part in the Bible where god shoots cars at people. I don't know.

I'll be honest, I'm still working on justifying how this will make GTA 5 more like GTA 6.

But you gotta give me this: it's very fun. The unparalleled chaos of launching a freeway's-worth of cars into the streets of Los Santos is tremendous. It also makes you something like a single-person artillery unit wreaking havoc on your foes at great distance. It makes me a little nostalgic for the days when Rockstar leant deeper into the potential for havoc that its open worlds embodied. Alas, now its protagonists are all egos and emotions.

Good news everyone: we've got even more Silent Hill: Townfall to help fill the void until its release. But instead of a short story or teaser trailer, we have 18 minutes of poor old Simon Ordell wandering around the abandoned (and increasingly hostile) town of St. Amelia.

It's the first extended cut of playthrough we've seen for Townfall, and it did not disappoint. The vibes, setting, and grotesque monsters all seem on point for a Silent Hill game, with the small exception of the game's firearms.

I don't think Simon's handling of the revolver was particularly disastrous. But after enjoying Silent Hill f, which had no guns, seeing Simon execute monsters in seconds reminded me why I prefer good old-fashioned melee fights.

I like suffering in Silent Hill games. I like being pushed to my limits, being put in almost impossible situations, and having to get up close and personal with the disgusting things I find wandering around in the fog. While there are never usually a lot of guns to be found, I still think they give players an easy way out of combat that can ruin the tension and fear from being constantly on the backfoot.

I can only think of one horror game that manages to stay terrifying while also giving its protagonist access to a gun—Amnesia: The Bunker—and even then I felt infinitely more confident when I managed to scrounge up more ammo. That doesn't mean games can't still be stressful. There's few things worse than firing at an enemy which is getting closer, only to run out of bullets before you manage to down it, but it's a different kind of fear, one that I'm more used to seeing in series like Resident Evil rather than Silent Hill.

It'll also be interesting to see how Simon gets his hands on firearms in Townfall. While the game is set a year before the handgun ban, St. Amelia is still just a small town in Scotland, there won't just be a guns lying around in a random appartments—this isn't the U.S. Hopefully, there'll only be minimal firearms and more melee combat and stealth for players to torment themselves with.

Guns aside, the rest of the trailer looked very good. I try to not get my hopes up too high before I've played a game, but I am truly morbidly excited to explore the town of St. Amelia, especially after seeing its blood red fog and strangely nostalgic streets.

Grab a bucket, because GTA 6 is springing leaks in every direction. A group (individual?) called Cyberleek has been publishing seemingly genuine clips from Rockstar's latest for two days now, giving us our first glimpses of gameplay a week ahead of the big Netflix reveal happening on August 27.

There's electricity in the air around GTA 6—easily the most anticipated game in history—but I wasn't actually excited to play it until yesterday, when one of the leaked clips (which we won't be linking here, but isn't difficult to find) showed Jason, one of the game's dual protagonists, climbing into a car.

As he takes control, the UI shows what seems to be status symbols for the vehicle: its HP and its current gas.

Heeeelllllll yea. I hope you actually have to pull up to a gas pump and remember which side the tank is on. I hope you can stash a spare canister in the trunk, and I hope that canister will violently explode if it eats a bullet.

Systems. Simulations! This is exactly the stuff that GTA needs to meaningfully evolve.

I loved all the crunchy little details of Red Dead Redemption 2 that inched it toward a proper life sim—eating, drinking, bathing, and camping under the stars. I was worried Rockstar would pull away from this kind of thinking after some folks complained endlessly about crafting bullets one at a time, only holding two guns, or how long it took to loot bodies.

The point was to introduce meaningful choices to Rockstar's low-friction power fantasies: Do I have time to loot bodies before the law shows up? How badly do I want better ammo? It doesn't seem like GTA 6 will be nearly as methodical, but I'm glad to recognize some of Arthur Morgan in Jason Duval.

Elsewhere in the leaks, we see options to "greet" or "taunt" locals. When the cops are called, we're told how much information they actually have about the player: face, clothes, and vehicle. That's interesting: Will cop chases amount to more than outrunning slower cars and avoiding vision cones? Maybe if you're in a personal vehicle (like Aruthur's horse), you can swap outfits, ditch the car, then lose the cops in plain sight. That would instantly become the coolest thing I've done in a GTA game.

It's about time GTA's worlds are as reactive as they are visually convincing. Rockstar's lavishly-crafted distractions tend to ring hollow—it's nice that GTA 5 lets you play golf and run a triathlon, but how many times did you actually do that?

If the point is to be immersed, I want reasons to live a convincing life in Vice City. Give me a hunger meter, make me better at punching if I work out (San Andreas-style), add stakes to my crime fantasy with debts to manage and a mortgage to pay monthly. Give me relationships to nurture and meaningful choices to make—preferably ones other than "kill this guy or don't."

My strongest memories of the week I locked myself in a room to play RDR2 were the quiet moments between shootouts: helping strangers on a trail, getting sidetracked by rabbit hunts, browsing for horse treats in a general store. Getting from A to B in Rockstar's Old West generated stories, and for all its good qualities, GTA has never been good at this. The story of a journey in GTA is usually "I beelined to a waypoint in a very fast car, maybe buying a new gun on the way."

The flip side of introducing complexity to GTA is that some folks will be caught off guard (or put off) by new points of friction. I can see the "Why the hell do I need to worry about gas in GTA?!" posts coming from a mile away, but ya know, Rockstar is capable of accomodation. Maybe a batch of good ol' cheats will let folks put up all the guardrails, if that's their thing. Or wait for the inevitable PC version and mod it up.

Grand Theft Auto 6 will, I am assured, have the greatest NPCs of all time. They will be perfect human simulacra, indistinguishable from the meaty lifeforms behind the controller.

My goal: to make GTA 5's barely-living NPCs an approximation of that. So I installed two mods: NPC Check On Player and NPCs Get Wanted Stars. The former makes the citizens of Los Santos more polite—they will get out of their cars and check you are okay if they run you over. The latter makes them punishable when they are impolite—when they commit crimes, they will earn their own wanted stars, and find themselves pursued by cops.

I'll be honest, I mostly installed the NPC Check mod because I hoped it would compel them to stand still when they got wanted stars from hurting me, but hey, it does what it says on the tin. Get pancaked by a car and the driver will screech to a halt, get out, and walk over to check if you're okay.

The problem is that you can only say 'Yes, I'm fine,' which is not really what I want to say to a guy who has just run me over. Plus, the key to say you are fine is Y, which is also the key to go to sleep in my already-installed Roleplay Alone mod. I am constantly getting hit by cars, then falling asleep in the middle of the road as I try to convince the drivers I am okay, which I guess is good enough for them, as they immediately hop back in their rides and drive off.

NPCs Get Wanted Stars, though, is a bit more dramatic. Admittedly, GTA 5's non-playable inhabitants aren't exactly prone to random criminal acts, so you do have to bait them into it.

My advice? Run into them at a full sprint over and over again, until they (unreasonably) get mad enough to throw a punch at you. Ideally, do this in front of a police station, then sit back and smirk as the 5-0 chase down their perp, cuff them, and stand around rather confused about what, exactly, to do next, as if they've not been trained for outcomes that don't involve a bullet-riddled suspect.

The realism is off the charts.

Overwatch season 4 introduced a rank reset and you know what that means, it's every cat, hog, and retired sniper for themselves as players desperately try to claw back to where they finished last season. As if that isn't stressful enough, we've also got a new rank on our hands.

Slotted between ranks Platinum and Diamond you can now find Emerald, the answer to the growing skill disparity between Plat and Diamond players. "As we've shown in the past, the majority of our players are in Gold and Platinum," the patch notes read. "So adding a new rank closer to the middle of the skill curve gives many players a better sense of rank identity, a new goal to achieve, and increases fidelity in assessing skill for many players."

Season 4 is full of really smart changes, and this new rank is one of them. I completely agree that there needed to be a buffer between Plat and Diamond, as high plat and low diamond increasingly became a frantic free-for-all with players who had vastly different skills far too frequently grouped together. But the tradeoff seems to be that all this chaos is now neatly packed into Emerald.

I only played in a few Emerald games when I was placing all my roles, as I soon pushed past into Diamond and above, and all I can say is: thank god. Because I wouldn't have wanted to spend any more time there.

The games felt frantic, with players on both sides oscillating between making smart plays and really basic mistakes—I could never predict which way a team fight was going to go. Now, this makes sense when you think about the kind of players meant to be in Emerald: better than average but perhaps not quite equipped for the kind of teamwork and restraint you find in higher elos. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating. If I had a nickel for every unnecessary flank, panic ult, or repeated stagger I saw in those games, I wouldn't have to write about them anymore.

Then there's the people.

This could just be my bad luck, but I saw a noticeable drop off in toxicity once I cleared Emerald. Now, this isn't everyone in a game, but there'd often be one person who just complained and whined the whole time, blaming everyone for their misfortunes instead of looking in the mirror.

I get that sometimes you can play the best game of your life and still not win, because at the end of the day Overwatch is a team game. If your team isn't up to it, there's only so far you can carry them, and that can be annoying. But also, the only person you have control over is yourself, and knowing that is half the battle in Overwatch.

Let's say you have a tank who is constantly in the enemy backline despite not having a dive team, for example. It's definitely frustrating, especially when they have no clue about any line of sight angles, but you gotta work with what you have. So if I have a tank like that, you best believe I'm switching to dive, and more often than not changing to better fit the team around you instead of just whining will lead to a win.

It seems simple, but I was surprised to see how few people were willing to make that change, compromise, or admit that perhaps they're just not as good at a particular hero than they think they are.

Emerald has certainly made a name for itself in just a short time since its addition. Hopefully, the rank will mellow out as the season goes on, a rank reset always ushers in at least a little disorder, but that doesn't mean I don't feel bad for the players who are stuck in Emerald. From my experience, and from what I've heard from friends, it's a pretty dicey place to be right now, so god speed to anyone still in those mines. But rest assured, it's only up (or down) from there.

The exciting thing about Rockstar games is not that they have the most advanced technology behind them, the best stories, or the most avant-garde game systems. It's the extraordinary amount of work the studio invests into the little details that make up its big worlds. Red Dead Redemption's dynamic horse testicles (they shrink when it's cold) are a frequently-cited example of that commitment to the particulars.

A pair of videos purported to be leaked GTA 6 gameplay surfaced online today, and if they are legit (the immediate copyright takedowns suggest as much), they seem to confirm that GTA 6 is more of the same. The short clips obviously can't express the full scope of Rockstar's designs—and we don't know how recent they are—but there's nothing in them to indicate that GTA 6 will reinvent the open-world crime spree.

In one, the player shoots some hoops as protagonist Jason. It's cool that a basketball on the ground and a hoop nailed to the side of your house are not just static props. There's a system in place for shooting accurately, and the game tracks the number of shots made.

The other clip is a very typical GTA scene: The player makes a reckless turn in a car, gets clipped by a delivery truck, beats the delivery truck driver to death, and then goes on the run from incoming police.

It's possible that Rockstar has an ace up its sleeve, some new innovation that it's managed to keep a secret all these years. We still don't know what's going on with GTA Online or what the GTA roleplaying mod creators that Rockstar hired have been up to.

For now, though, my expectation is that GTA 6's appeal will again be the scale and concentration of detail that only budgets and timelines like Rockstar's can achieve: A bigger, higher-fidelity city with more possibilities, more consequences, more simulation.

That's enough to make me curious, but I wonder how next week's official GTA 6 gameplay reveal will be received if that's the case. This is the most anticipated game of all time. If it isn't transformative in some heretofore unknown way that is somehow both radically new and familiar to GTA fans, will it register as a disappointment to the "unprecedented" number of people who've already preordered it?

If you've peeped that leaked footage, what's your take on it? And if you haven't seen the footage, which has been removed on copyright grounds everywhere we've seen it, here are 15 details we noticed.

It's a frustrating thing to watch good games disappear. We've seen it happen time and time and time again: studios spend years on a cool multiplayer thing, bank on it being popular enough to become a live-service hit, then toss the entire project into the trash when that doesn't happen.

That could have been the fate of Deceive Inc, a 2023 'PvP Hitman' shooter that has attracted a passionate, but small community. Developer Sweet Bandits supported the game with substantial updates and microtransactions for over a year, but unfortunately shut down in 2024, leaving fans to assume Deceive Inc would one day disappear, too. Then last month, the unexpected happened: an update on its Steam page announced that not only would Deceive Inc not be going offline, but work is underway on community server tools and mod support that will essentially give the game to the community, and keep it playable forever.

The update is not the work of Sweet Bandits, but an initiative of Deceive Inc's publisher, Tripwire Interactive. In an interview with PC Gamer, publishing director Bryan West explained why Tripwire—which also publishes the Chivalry games and makes the Killing Floor series—is going to such lengths to maintain a game that only a few people are playing.

"The core message is that Tripwire wants players to be able to enjoy our games for as long as they want to enjoy them. So we fight and claw to find a way to make that happen," West said.

"We don't want to leave our games in a broken state. It's a mandate from our leadership, and it's part of the reason why I'm happy to be with Tripwire."

Custom server tools and community browsers were once the norm for PC games, but in the age of matchmaking algorithms and expected cross-play functionality, multiplayer games are built around closed networking and dedicated servers. Undoing that process for Deceive Inc is not a small task, as West explains:

"It's several months of work for a very high-level engineer. It's not inconsequential, but in terms of the gains, I would say it's very important for Tripwire as a business that relies on its reputation with gamers. It's important for us to look at the long term and not the short term of how this is impacting our bottom line.

"We feel like being able to continue to sell Deceive, and not shut it down, is going to be a net win over the long haul," West said. "Plus, we get to look gamers in the eye, metaphorically, and say this is important to us. That when we sell you a game, you're able to continue playing it for as long as you want to."

Or to put it simply: "We have a lot of belief in Deceive Inc as a game, and we know that there's a community. We want to be able to continue selling it, to have it out there, to have people enjoy it."

The live service problem

West described Deceive Inc as a learning experience for Tripwire. The publisher signed the game amidst the Covid boom, when folks were staying home playing games and investment was easier to come by.

"We poured our hearts and souls into it right alongside Sweet Bandits," West recounted. "Launch went well, but it obviously didn't blow up the way we had hoped. It presents itself as a more friendly game on the surface, but when you get into it, it's a very hardcore shooter at its core."

The conceit of Deceive Inc is spies versus spies: squads of three don civilian disguises and act like NPCs (similar to the old Assassin's Creed multiplayer modes) while completing tasks. When a match really comes together, it's one of the most unique competitive games I've ever played—channeling Hitman, SpyParty, and hero shooters all at once.

"Our hope was that an 'Among Us' perspective of hiding in plain sight and trying to use stealth would have been more of the meta," West said, "but when it got to the actual audience, it was apparent the shooter aspects took over."

That hardcore meta made the game less broadly accessible and matchmaking increasingly sweaty, but it "resonated with the people that figured out how to play, and three-plus years later, there's still a core community that gets together and runs sessions."

Before the studio's closure, Sweet Bandits and Tripwire made changes to aid new players, like bot matches and rules that discourage open combat, but "by that time it's really hard to recover."

"It's got that window, and unless you get extremely lucky, it's hard to ever recapture [momentum]," said West. "We love the game, and it has done well for us as a whole, but it was not enough to sustain a studio, even a small studio, in the live ops framework. That was a huge lesson for me."

The experience changed Tripwire's perspective on live-service games. What worked for Chivalry 2 won't work for other games, and as a decision maker, West is now more interested in products built to last.

"As a publishing director reviewing stuff regularly, I'd say any small team that's looking to do that live-service model is a red flag for us," he said. "We are looking for and prioritizing games that either have peer-to-peer setups, or something like what we're doing with Deceive Inc right now, where it's more community server-run."

West calls it the "Valheim approach, where you can hook up however you want, and there's not that crazy ongoing cost. There will be big games and certain franchises where [live-service] makes sense, but on the whole, that's where we've pivoted our thinking."

Sounds like music to my ears. The old ways really do feel like the only way for inherently niche multiplayer games. For Deceive Inc—a complex, crunchy social stealth game—West reckons that firing up a custom server with friends will be not only a good option, but the best one.

"Call it its second life. The 'friend game night' type of game seems to be really coming into its own, and I think that is just a perfect way to experience Deceive, with a handful of friends on Discord giving each other grief," he said. "You might play it only once a month or something, but you've got your rotation of games you're playing, and it just fits in there. I think that's perfect."

Deceive Inc is still up on Steam and very much alive. The beta for its custom server tools is coming sometime soon.

A pair of clips purportedly showing Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay footage have appeared online, along with several images of an in-game map of Leonida, the Florida-inspired state where GTA 6 takes place.

Rockstar has not confirmed whether or not the clips are genuine, but they look legit to our eyes, with the caveat that even if they are, they could come from an outdated build of the game. Both clips look like the kind of thing a tester would capture, in that they're relatively mundane gameplay scenes, not the type of stuff you'd see in a trailer.

In both clips, the player is controlling Jason, one of GTA 6's two protagonists. In one clip, the player shoots a basketball outside Jason's dilapidated waterfront home. In the other, their car gets clipped by a delivery truck, and then they go full road rage homicide on the poor delivery driver before scrambling to get away from incoming police. The clip ends just as the player drives up to a helicopter that looks ripe for stealing.

The clips are circulating through the usual social media channels, and some reuploads have already been taken down. We're not posting them here, but they're out there for the curious to find.

With the caveat again that we don't know the exact provenance or recency of these clips—a group called "Cyberleek" has taken credit for posting them—we've picked out the most notable details here. Our first official look at GTA 6 gameplay is scheduled to arrive next week, first on Netflix.

Wanted level

The wanted level can reach six stars: that's one more than in GTA 5! It appears beating a delivery driver to death with a pipe wrench will get you a mere two stars.

Police ID

When you commit a crime and the cops are after you, they ID you with three categories, as seen in the top right corner of the screen: your clothing (an icon shows a hanger), possibly your face or hair color (shown with a blank face icon), and your car (a car icon). Presumably changing your clothing or car (or repainting it as in other GTA games) while wanted can help you escape.

Stamina

From the moment Jason starts throwing punches at that angry delivery driver what appears to be a stamina meter starts depleting. When he starts beating him to death with a wrench, the stamina depletes all the way to zero. The edges of the screen start to vignette, and I'd wager no stamina means some sort of movement penalty.

Stealth

The cops pull up after Jason beats the Scoop driver to death, and we see something new to GTA here: a blue stealth indicator arrow that tracks how close the cops are to noticing the player. Based on how brazen the player is being, the time it takes to fully alert law enforcement seems pretty generous—maybe you can play GTA 6 stealthily, if you choose?

Focus

It looks like we'll be improving the traits of Jason and Lucia just like we did with Arthur Morgan in RDR2. We see Jason sink a basketball and gain +2% Focus. Called shot, but I'm guessing that trait has something to do with slo-mo bullet time.

Hoops

Speaking of basketball, when Jason is shooting hoops in his driveway, he uses a simple "press the button when the rings overlap" system.

Negative karma

GTA 6 might judge you for your actions in a similar way to Red Dead Redemption 2's karma system. As Jason pummels the delivery driver, we see a little devil icon on the right with a minus symbol. Sure looks like the evil side of a karma system. Interestingly, the symbol doesn't appear until he starts beating the unconscious man—perhaps the game won't judge you for starting fights with locals, but it will for senseless murder?

Cars have a gas and engine meter

Fill 'er up! Looks like you'll need to monitor your vehicle's gas level (a popular mod for GTA 5 lets you do this, so I guess Rockstar incorporated it fully into GTA 6) and engine condition. The trunk and bed of the car also shows "loadout" and "storage 0/4" menu options.

Money and budget

In the hoops clip, we see Jason has two dollar amounts shown in the upper right corner: $39 (presumably his cash on hand) and $1,643 next to a house icon. The circle around the house is filled only a tiny bit, so that could indicate that he's got rent due, or perhaps that's how much money he's got stashed in the bank (similar to how it works in GTA Online).

Fake brands spotted

Sea Shark (jetski), Scoop (delivery company), 24/7 Supermarket, Arrow (gas station), Hamilton Private Health Clinic (last word is blurry, but "clinic" fits), Fast Pass EMS (on an ambulance).

Tunes

The song in the second clip is Impact by SG Lewis, Robin, and Channel Tres—pretty apropos for slamming a car into a delivery truck. You can listen to it on YouTube.

Player character locations shown

The map image leak shows a car icon with a "J" over it. It appears this image was taken while the player was inhabiting Lucia (the arrow indicating the player location is over the water, so Lucia might be on a boat or aircraft), and the map shows the location of Jason elsewhere in Leonida. This is a change from GTA 5, where you didn't know where the other playable characters were on the map unless you swapped into them or happened to run into them.

Racetracks

The map leak shows what looks like several small race tracks across Leonida: racing cars could be an activity or a way to make money.

Jason's house location

Jason's house is shown on the map, too: it's in southern Leonida on one of the islands of the Keys.

Military base

I'm wondering if the airport shown at the very end of the Keys is the military base. There's a large airport shown in Vice City, so this smaller airport could be the place to steal fighter jets: though it'd be quite a long drive if you wanted to take a tank into downtown Vice City.

Grand Theft Auto 6 will, I'm assured, be the most immersive videogame of all time. You simply won't be able to discern reality from fiction anymore. Your gaze will drift from your television, to outside, to the television, to outside, and the sheer fidelity of Rockstar's opus will be such that you can no longer tell the slightest difference between the two. You will utterly lose your mind. It's gonna be great.

GTA 5, though? Hardly immersive at all by comparison. If I'm going to successfully mod this game into GTA 6, I'm going to need to rectify that. So I did.

I have installed Roleplay Alone, a mod which turns Rockstar's crime sandbox into a sort of pseudo life sim, filled with all manner of strange little jobs for Michael, Franklin, and Trevor to get up to. Thrill as you mine various ores! Marvel as you package and distribute cannabis! Be amazed as you smelt things at a cement mixer somehow!

I immediately set about my new labours. Franklin, in a $3000 cashmere jumper, manifested a two-handed mattock and began chipping away at some rocks. He did this with one hand for reasons of either incredible strength or limited animations.

This took some time. So long, in fact, that Franklin got a little bit tired according to Roleplay Alone's newly-added energy meter. I found a rhythm: convert a few boulders to ore, then tap Y to crumple to the floor, fully clothed—as if struck down by an assassin's bullet—to regain my depleted energy. Fortunately, the various hard-hatted men in the quarry did not mind that A) I was mining all their rocks or B) sleeping on the floor.

Is GTA 5 rendered uncannily immersive by Roleplay Alone? Well. No. But it is very entertaining to set the game's protagonists to blue-collar tasks like mining and ore-smelting, and even more entertaining when you're doing something completely different, forget what the Y key does now, and find yourself collapsed asleep in the road like the world's most narcoleptic crime lord.

I do not think I will spend a lot of time mining—if for no other reason than doing it for about 15 minutes netted me only enough fake currency to buy a burger—but it's good to know I could. Just like I could in real life. Maybe.

And besides, I can fish now.

PC gaming has a problem: high prices for a key component, due to an unforeseen surge of interest. We're in the thick of it, with no light at the end of the tunnel just yet, as supply will take a very long time to catch up to the outsized demand.

Wait, haven't we been here before?!

Sure we have, lots of times. We're likely to get here again, too, as politicians around the globe have turned the semiconductor biz hewn of globalisation into something to be controlled and influenced by newly-minted factions with names you'd expect to see in a new Command & Conquer game: Pax Silica and WAICO.

Hey, when are they making another of those games? Anyways, global silicon gangs. They're a thing now.

So, why is PC gaming so susceptible to the whims of global politics and trade? You don't have to go far back through the annals of PC Gamer to find the last time we spoke of some huge problem in PC gaming that sounds awfully similar to the memory crisis we're in today. Most recently, the closure and subsequent disruption of the Strait of Hormuz.

Our Jacob Fox recently spoke to various supply chain experts to gauge the impact of the US attack on Iran and subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz. He summarises it having an impact on Helium, sulphuric acid, PPE resin, aluminium, and naphtha. Each one used in some part of the semiconductor manufacturing process, affecting both chips and PCBs.

"You could see, in a worst case, allocation, scarcity-of-supply scenario where we're going to be choosing to focus on AI infrastructure versus consumer needs," Exiger SVP of Product Level Intelligence Derek Lemke told Jacob in May.

Prior to this action by US President Donald Trump, he imposed tariffs on a range of countries and goods, which in turn increased prices for the companies producing them and leading to higher sticker prices. That is, before being roundly rebuked by US Supreme Court and the funds returned.

Before that, the covid-19 pandemic. As the world came to a standstill and people moved away from offices and into their homes, demand for computers, consoles, standing desks, and exercise bikes erupted. Moreover, semiconductors were finally seen as a hot commodity by governments, and any weak links in supply chains were being interrogated, leading to the Biden administration and EU both announcing legislation to bring more cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing to home soil.

Cutting-edge semiconductors that PC gaming is dependent on for many meaningful performance leaps over the years. PC gaming companies are some of the first to make the leap to bleeding-edge technologies, such as AMD when it rushed to utilise TSMC's 7 nm process for a competitive advantage for its CPUs and GPUs.

Neither US or EU legislation seemed to do much alone, by the way. Trump renegotiated the CHIPS Act and EU member states called for a second spin on the EU Chips Act, with the first attempt now deemed by European Court auditors to be "overly ambitious." Though both have played a part in refamiliarising politicians with semiconductor supply chains in a way that has led to some big and strange developments more recently. We'll get to those shortly.

While that crisis was developing, PC gaming was in a more acute pickle due to outsized demand for graphics cards for cryptocurrency. At-home cryptocurrency mining had already had an effect on PC gaming with the first GPU shortage of 2017-18, though it was really from 2020 that things got bad.

This continued through to 2022, when ethereum, the most popular cryptocurrency that could be mined on consumer-grade hardware (GPUs, rather than ASICs) shifted away from mining and turned to what's known as 'proof-of-stake'. Thus ending one of the worst periods in PC gaming that I covered personally—until today, anyways.

"If you break down to the DNA level of what goes into a chip, and you can look at the silicon that goes into the wafer, you can look at the metals and minerals that go into the circuitry, to some extent, every single one of those inputs has been hamstrung in some way," said Dr. Goldsby, a supply chain expert.

"So here we've got demand, on the one hand, that's just off the charts. And we've got the supply chain that is handicapped by virtue of getting access to materials, very constrained production capacity, and then slow transportation connecting the dots. You add it all up, and that's where we are right now."

Sound familiar? I'm not talking talking to Dr. Goldsby about the current memory crisis; this is from an article I wrote back in 2021 on why it was so difficult to buy a graphics card at that time. It's about the increase in demand from cryptocurrency miners at the same time as covid-19 supply issues. These are similar forces, the same patterns, that lead us to the mess we're back in again today.

I'm preaching to the choir. PC gamers having a solid understanding of the importance of supply chains and semiconductor technologies, it seems even exceeding many politicians, because it directly affects them. These things have an impact on their hobby, both good and bad, from better-performing processors to today's inflated prices.

Back to the present day, and we're looking at increased demand from AI, datacentres built out on an enormous scale (that's very unpopular, for good reason), and a reliance on three (excluding the latest Chinese wildcard, CXMT) major memory companies that have often appeared to resist large-scale plans for new facilities for producing and packaging memory chips to counter sudden increased demand due to fears of an oversupply and crashing prices.

Despite some amount of unpopularity with the public for how AI models are trained, run, and their output, governments are betting their countries' economic growth on AI. Datacentres are seen to be of an outsized import to a country's national interests. Take the UK government, for example, which is labelling these 'Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) and rolling out new legislation to avoid parts of the otherwise lengthy planning process. You don't want a datacentre whirring by your house all hours of the day? Well, tough.

All leading to political action on supply chains that spans continents, not countries. As I've been looking into the forces that manipulate the global semiconductor industry, I've stumbled across one recently formed organisation that hopes to have an impact on that very same thing: Pax Silica.

Yeah, it's really called that. They even have a motto: "Securing the silicon supply chain."

Where else could a name as lofty and Roman come from other than the United States? Organised by the US Department of State, but signed by 24 countries, many of whom joined in December, 2025, the Pax Silica is an organisation that intends to secure "AI and supply chain security" and to advance "new economic security consensus among allies and trusted partners."

Of the many countries involved in the agreement—including the US, EU, South Korea, India, Israel, UK, Singapore, Philippines, Netherlands, Japan, and Qatar—the powerhouse of global semiconductor manufacturing, Taiwan, is only a "non-signatory participant".

"If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it," says Jacob Helberg, US Under Secretary for Economic Affairs. "This historic declaration hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow—from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing and models."

The idea being that frontier foundation AI models, semiconductors, infrastructure, manufacturing facilities, minerals, and the energy to run the lot are to be shared between signatories, and signatories are expected to collaborate on the next big thing.

There's a strong sense of addressing national security and righting wrongs in the name of "fair competition" throughout its founding documents. Nations are expected to coordinate responses to "overcapacity and dumping so that supply chains remain secure, resilient, and innovative over time" and "protect sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure from undue access or control by countries of concern."

You start to see where there's some tension coming in, right? It's not all about building fiber-optic cables to connect the world together in one big livestreamed kumbaya singalong.

There's more tension bubbling around Pax Silica, too. What of the countries that didn't sign up to it? On July 19, 2026, some of them announced their own organisation with a very similar sounding brief: The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, or WAICO, stationed in Shanghai.

WAICO aims to be a cooperative agreement on AI, computing, and sharing frontier AI models among members that may have limited access to their own or other key players', such as those made by large US companies. WAICO was originally floated by China, and counts Russia among its backers, but says it is operating in the interests of the 'Global South', which includes many developing nations, and BRICS, though India is a BRICS member and a signatory of Pax Silica, not WAICO. Kazakhstan is oddly in both groups.

Essentially, you have the US-backed faction on one side and the China-backed faction on the other. Two rival factions trying to control the flow of chips and advancement of AI models across the globe. Both sides want to play a pivotal role in shaping AI and tussling with one another over whose vision for the future is best.

It's been reported in the past couple of days that the US is preparing to tell countries they must pick a side in this, too, with Reuters reporting countries could be barred from the US-led faction after having joined the one in Shanghai. Someone better tell Kazakhstan, then.

It's all politics at the end of the day, but politics that play a role in how viable our own hobby remains. Trump's tariffs are a prime example of when politics interfere with PCs, as are efforts to build more chips on US soil, even if costs to produce said chips are subsequently higher as a result.

PC gaming is a tiny speck being blown this way and that by these gargantuan powers, riding the global semiconductor trade that operates on talent and resources moving across the globe. When it comes to the affordability or availability of cutting-edge semiconductors, it's clear that nations are thinking plenty about AI capacity and a lot less about everyday consumers.

Neither group's messaging appears to take much heed of arguments against another technological arms race, which is sure to further damage the environment and use even more energy than it does already today. These are two groups that feel they can't take their foot off the gas and let the other 'win', but as a result will lead to us all losing to climate change in the long run.

So, if you're hoping the pressures that led to the memory crisis would ease as more capacity came online, that may offer short-term relief, but we're not out of the woods yet. It looks like we're only just kicking into a new gear when it comes to resource guarding semiconductors, fabs, and rare earth minerals—and all in the name of AI. Ugh.

I had the pleasure of playing Star Wars: Galactic Racer recently—it's an upcoming racing game by Fuse Games, a studio filled with Burnout alumni, and while I was intrigued by the roguelike elements of its singleplayer campaign, the real standout to me is its online multiplayer, which is doing something that I would otherwise call ill-advised: Making it a MOBA. Sort of.

When I say the mode's been spliced with a MOBA, I mean that a ton of elements—buildcrafting, match-specific progression, and personal player economy (the more credits you get, the faster you'll scale over the competition)—are similar. It's a little like Overwatch's Stadium mode, which used a lot of familiar MOBA itemisation without the inclusion of lanes or towers.

Now, to be clear, there will be online modes without any of these elements—but given it was the mode Fuse had me playing, the "tour" mode was clearly the one Fuse Games is the most eager to show off. And I can see why, it's genuinely unique.

Here's how it works: 12 players (or eight, if you're doing podracing) fight across six planets. The comparisons start in the character select screen—the racers. These are starting kits that have different loadouts. For instance, characters with a Survivor loadout start with a shield, a bonus to their speed that gets lost the first time you crash in a race, and a boost whenever that shield breaks.

But it filters into the actual round-by-round structure, too. After the end of each race in the tour, players get to upgrade their ride's base stats, as well as choose from a selection of parts—borrowed from the roguelike nature of the singleplayer campaign—that can let them cobble together a build throughout a race.

For instance, I had a decent amount of luck speccing into a ramjet (a long-lasting boost that makes your ride hard to control) build with abilities that synergised with each other. In one race, I had one ability where my ramjet's cooldown was significantly reduced, and another where my non-ramjet boost was instantly refilled whenever I spent it, allowing me to bounce back and forth.

You can also snag abilities, like the aforementioned shield, on this screen. These really vary, from torpedoes to flamethrowers—as well as parts that give you elemental resistances, which might factor in based on the planets you'll be visiting during the tour—more on those, later.

To buy any of these, though, you need credits, which can be earned from one of two ways. Just placing in a race gets you a payout, but you can also snag them by betting on yourself—calling whether you'll place within one of three brackets. In a 12-person race, these are top nine, top six, and top three.

But there are also bounties present in the pod racing version of tours, which give you bonuses for playing in certain ways. For instance, in one round, I went heavy on abilities that could give me eliminations—and snagged an appropriate bounty to match.

This is all part of creative director Kieran Crimmins' vision of a game that balances both player agency and depth. He tells me: "Player agency [means] every choice that you make, whether it be the vehicle that you pick, the upgrade that you pick, the permanent bump to your stats, the parts that you pick, the character that you pick in multiplayer, or the play style that you pick—all those things have to make an actual difference to whether you can win or lose.

"That's what creates that agency to feel like, if you make a mistake, it's your fault, and the game isn't doing something to sabotage you. But also, it lets you strategize and be competitive in a kind of a way that you wouldn't necessarily have been able to do in other racing games out there."

In terms of systems depth, he notes that "the game needs to be easy to pick up so that you can play and enjoy yourself straight away. But then all those systems have to have a physical depth, a mechanical depth." And given the absolute feast of modifiers and parts on display, I think there'll be plenty of opportunity for mastery.

Though none of that's mandatory if you'd like to hop in and play, says Lucasfilm Games executive producer Craig Derrick: "I think some people want to come in and just play with their friends," he says. "It's inherent in the DNA of the game, and so I think that's just as important as just being able to have a fun experience against one another and see who comes out the winner."

The result is, to be clear, incredibly chaotic, but it's a heck of a lot of fun. The only real complaint, other than getting absolutely trashed, were the environmental factors—certain races had, for instance, acid pits which would ruin your day if you even squeaked a pixel of your ride into them.

In another planet, a building cold status effect could be shucked off by dipping through a narrow heat vent. Which often led to pod racer pile-ups—hilarious, but not exactly great-feeling if you want to win.

Which, as someone who was spending an embarrassing amount of time at the back (skill issue, I know) felt a little at-odds with the design at play. The destructive, fast-paced, arcade racer feeling often bumped its head against the other elements that were urging me to be competitive.

The game's also missing a catch-up mechanic and, again, I only know this because I was getting my butt handed to me. However, in a racer where you can get instagibbed without warning, some way to nudge back into the runnings would be nice—plenty (some would argue most) of my destructions were my fault, but there were a few that I couldn't have reasonably seen coming without eyes in the back of my head.

These are all problems of balance, though, and balance can always be fixed when the full game comes out October 6. The tour mode itself felt slapshot, chaotic, but also deeply engaging—and I'll be thirsty to dig my claws into its systems even more.

Blizzard principal artist and lead designer Jay Huang used to make his living creating the "props" that make up World of Warcraft's living spaces. Now he designs the systems that allow players to do the same thing with WoW's new player housing feature.

The game's recent patch 12.1, The Curse of Ula'tek, added a huge pile of new housing decor and features for players to create with. For example, it added the ability to use "blueprints," saved rooms or house interiors or exteriors, to allow novices to copy the work of player designers to use in their own spaces.

But getting started as a new creator can be intimidating when people are making literal works of art in WoW housing. Below, Huang offers his best tips for getting started as a newbie.

1. Start by finding a reference image

"Even artists like to know what something looks like," Huang says. "What exactly do you want to make? Find an example of it. Even spaceships have structures, and reasons why they're built that way." The image will help you figure out what pieces of decor you might be able to use to replicate what you see.

2. Don't judge yourself based on others' work

Blizzard's housing team has an internal sharing channel where they pass around people's amazing work, he says.

"Daily, minute-ly, people are just dropping, 'Did you see this??' We see tutorials. We see posts we can't even read, because they're in a different language. It's just awesome, and we love it," he says. It's also sometimes intimidating.

"I see a lot of TikToks where it's like, 'I liked my own build, until I saw this build. Now I feel like I want to throw my build out.' Or people are saying, 'I don't even know where to start.' Just look at a building or something that you like the vibe of, then just start trying to copy, then add your own flair to it."

Some of the rooms provided in housing are enormous, Huang says.

"Break up the space. Don't just go, 'It's a square, thusly, I need to decorate it as a square.' That's not necessarily true," he says. "Decorating an empty concept is harder than a room that's already got all these nooks and crannies that you can just put something in. It doesn't feel like you're starting from square one, a blank slate."

Some of the new artisan rooms for sale for neighborhood endeavor-task coupons in patch 12.1 help that problem by providing rooms with smaller niches to decorate. Creators have also been sharing blueprint codes usable by other players, which launched as a feature in 12.1, to create the bare bones of rooms that are already divided up or styled in a particular way.

3. Pick smaller rooms to start, and break bigger ones into smaller spaces

"Use partitions and pillars and platforms," he says. "It's thinking like Lincoln Logs or Legos—how do I use these things to break up that open-concept space? There's no wrong way to decorate, but I think sometimes it makes it harder if you go straight to the details right off the bat."

Picking smaller rooms definitely helps. "It's hard to slap in a big room and go, 'It just feels empty.' Well yeah, because you put in an auditorium, and you put one bed in there," he says.

4. Look at your reference image and figure out proportions

"If you're building a gnome house, things shouldn't feel all crazy, bulky and huge, with large open spaces. It should feel like it fits a gnome." Your image and those proportions can also help you figure out the right lighting, he says.

5. Add layers easily with repetition

"Repeating elements are a really quick way to add detail without overthinking," Huang says. "When you think of cathedrals, is it a giant empty space? No, they have pillars, and those pillars repeat, and repeat, and repeat. Where are the patterns, what are the proportions, how is it lit to get that vibe, and then what are the general colors?"

6. Limit your color palette

Speaking of colors, Huang recommends 2-4 colors maximum.

"It's really easy to just rainbow vomit all over the place, and then be like, 'Hey, why doesn't it feel cohesive?' It's because you're probably using too many colors at first. It's better to get two or three or four colors working. Then you kind of sprinkle in some of the other rainbow colors to add in that variety."

7. Even as you limit the colors, don't be scared of variety in style

"When you decorate your own house, you're not buying all your furniture from Crate and Barrel. Something's from IKEA, and it's not all the same style," he says. "They don't need to be. When you're building, they don't need to be all of the same culture. When you're decorating a Kobold space, throw a Naga thing in that Kobold thing."

8. Turn your decor upside-down

One way advanced housing players create their masterworks is by kitbashing, or combining different pieces of decor together to make new things. In Advanced Mode, you can embed objects within objects to use just the bits you need. Huang uses a statue he once created as a prop designer, now available as decor, as an example. It's a statue of a pandaren on a turtle, with a fountain.

"Somebody might go, 'Okay, this is what it is,' and they'll just slap it down as a statue," he says. "But somebody might scale it or shrink it, flip it upside down to just use the water. Look at every prop for not what it is, but what it could be. You can clip things. We gave that to you on purpose. Something clipped into something else, looks like something else."

The easiest way to start seeing what the possibilities might be are to turn decor items over and look at them from all angles.

"Use the backs of things, the bottoms, flip things upside down," Huang says. Kitbashing gives player-creators more freedom than even the game's own designers have. If designers smash things together, it's considered an "art crime"—something that takes away from the intended vibe of an object, he says.

"But our players, they can do whatever they want, because honestly—I mean, just look at the stuff they've made! It speaks for itself," Huang says.

Sneak peek: He says that developers have seen how often players like to use water effects in their creations, and they're looking for ways to make that easier.

9. Use dyes

Using the dye system lets you change the color of objects, and as a bonus, they mostly work on cheaper neighborhood-vendor items.

"Dying adds an extra element to the props, changing how they look," he says. "I've seen people take doors, mass dye them all the same color, and they turn them into wall panels or stoves."

Sneak peek: Huang says developers are looking into a way for players to turn off the interactable qualities of items like doors, so that people can make them static for uses like these.

10. When you're ready, think about turning housing into an art medium

Huang says he's incredibly impressed by the mural work that creators have made, turning WoW housing into a literal canvas featuring everything from South Park to KPop Demon Hunters, Michael Jordan to villain Xal'atath's feet.

"They're literally using it to paint things. I saw a Van Gogh. I saw the Mona Lisa. Very awesome," he says, and he encourages people to break things. Past bugs that players have exploited went on to become housing features. "We're lucky enough that this feature is not player-power driven, so we don't have to be the fun police. We're trying to always remain open."

One last sneak peek: More holiday decor is coming, he says. "We know that it is awesome to see you guys make the Christmas trees, but we have one. It's coming."

Well, we've been hornswoggled again. They did it. They're doing it. Rockstar is, as we speak, putting the finishing touches on Grand Theft Auto 6, the Final Videogame, but icing you and me out entirely. No Xbox or PlayStation? Enjoy pressing your nose against the glass of your console-owning neighbours as they find themselves delighted and transformed by the world's first $500,000,000,000,000 entertainment product.

I say: no. Not today, Sam (or maybe Dan) Houser. Every day, I am going to add a new mod to Grand Theft Auto 5, until it either becomes GTA 6 or collapses under its own terrible weight. If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad will slowly alter a separate, but nearer mountain until it's indistinguishable from the one he wanted.

Today, day one, is mostly about learning. I have plenty of experience modding, but only really in games designed for it. I get the impression Rockstar would prefer no one change its babies, and so modding GTA 5 feels iffy and ramshackle: a process of gathering .asi files and hacky tools and crowbarring your way into the game's guts. Also, all the mods' instructions consist of a .txt file that says 'put mods'. Great. Excellent. Thank you.

It's a learning experience. So, to learn, and to start slow, I figured I would begin with something simple: a new vehicle. A fresh set of wheels to cruise the hot tarmac of Los Santos. It needed to be fast, stylish, fashionable, and stand out at least a little from the usual bric-a-brac of sedans and sports cars that litter Rockstar's fake-LA.

I settled on the HQ-16 (simplified Chinese: 红旗-16; traditional Chinese: 紅旗-16; pinyin: Hóng Qí-16; lit. 'Red Banner-16'; NATO reporting name: CH-SA-16) Chinese medium-range surface-to-air missile (SAM), developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology*.

I mostly did this because I wanted to familiarise myself with tools like OpenIV and make sure I could configure a mod and a few dependencies without everything blowing up in my face. I partly did it because I wanted to expose the people of Beverly Hills to the full might of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and the military of Pakistan. They've been coddled for too long.

Even more partly, I did it because a mod that was meant to change Franklin into Chester Bennington from Linkin Park kept making the game crash.

It worked. Before long, Los Santos was engulfed in waves of Shanghai Academic fire. Celebrity homes? Gone. Celebrity cars? Gone. Cops? Immolated. Their helicopters? Destroying those is literally what this vehicle is for. I was a one-man army in the truck of a regular several-men army, and the cops could do nothing to stop me. At least, until one of them attempted to pull me from my car—placing them right next to the driver's door when one of my many missiles found its way home to the small of his back.

I bet this never happened when the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology and China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation were testing this thing.

But my lessons are complete. I can mod GTA 5 without destroying anything. Today, a destructive truck. Tomorrow? Something more. Tune in to find out what.

*Thank you Wikipedia.

Of all the other professions I never quite saw myself as a hairdresser, I'm simply not creative enough and my small talk leaves a lot to be desired. But I was still willing to give it a go (within the safe confines of a game) because Beastfolk Barber just looked too cute to pass up on.

The premise is simple: you play as Freddie, the owner of a small hair salon in Starfish City, where beastfolk now outnumber humans. So to keep up with the changing clientele Freddie rebrands her shop for beastfolk and snags herself a magical mirror in hopes to beat out the competition who have more money and employees at their disposal.

Any time a client sits down ready to get their haircut you can use the mirror to show them up to three hairstyles they might like. This way they can get a feel for a hairdo before any hair is chopped off. But the catch is that they won't always tell you out right which one they prefer.

It's up to you to keep track of the options you present them with and their reactions to them and come to a decision of which one is best for them all on your own. You are a professional hairdresser after all.

Luckily, it's not too hard to suss people out, I managed to please every customer who walked through my doors, except for the owl. But he was really grumpy to begin with, and looking back on our interaction I think he may have been a really shady criminal. You see Beastfolk Barber has more going on than just cutting people's hair with little minigames, there's actually more to these beastfolk than just looks.

Everyone who sits in your chair has something going on in their personal life and they really want to talk to you about it. Whether it be chasing the guy of their dreams, getting ready for a tough family reunion, or trying to push legislation through the senate to try and adjust age limits for various beastfolk.

It was the two headed dragon, Luca and Varo, who brought this issue to my attention. Apparently every beastfolk has to go by human rules and regulations. For example, bees don't live long enough to access their government pension (which is 65 in this world; we should all be so lucky) and mice have to wait over half their lifespan for a chance to vote. But Luca and Varo are trying to change this, and apparently needed the help of a good haircut to get their confidence up to do so.

On top of all the civil unrest and shady business Freddie also has to deal with a demonic presence called Edi who's also in need of a haircut. But being a demon, their request is not exactly straight forward. First off, they won't pay in cash, instead opting to grant you one re-do, magically erasing or changing whatever thing you wish for. Secondly, in order to get a chance to cut your hair you need to prove your skill by acquiring 10 regulars.

Sadly, the demo ended before I could make any real headway with the task, but I think I did a good enough job for at least three clients to return to my salon. I guess the proof will be in the pudding once the full game releases in the future, hopefully we won't have to wait too long.

Lord of Undead is a "grim" third-person RPG about building an army of vicious zombies in order to maliciously raze the villages of mortals. The goal is to defeat peace and innocence, all the better for evil to prevail. You also get to build houses. It sounds pretty fun and, as far as I can tell, it's the second most popular game releasing on November 19 behind GTA 6.

Lord of Undead does have some advantages. The most obvious is that GTA 6 isn't coming to PC. It also has the most "Follows" of all Steam games releasing that day. Follows are different to wishlists: to follow a game is to see news and announcements about it in your news and updates feed, but you won't receive a notification when it releases. Wishlist data isn't public, but follows, for some reason, is.

Lord of Undead has a fairly impressive 2,649 follows right now, slightly more than Parry Survivor, which enjoys 2,062. Parry Survivor stars a school-uniformed anime character who must fend off waves of masked boys. It's from the creator of Kunkun League, Black Gunner Wukong and Evolve or Die, all of which have between 150 and 450 "very positive" reviews.

We have other games to look forward to as well: at least 30 more. Cute Country has 736 follows and is described on its Steam page as "super cute cure simulation operation single machine masterpiece" (I think it's basically a city builder with mobile game RPG elements). Then, with 123 follows is Phantom Vice Auto, which Chris Livingston has already written about.

Looking further afield, Man Simulator has a modest 9 follows. It's a "comedy simulator" where you get to be a slobbish middle-aged man: there's lawnmowing, fishing, hammering, wood chopping, barbequing, beer drinking, and it promises "meme-style presentation and humor".

And it wouldn't be a day on Steam, let alone GTA 6 launch day, without yet another first-person horror game. Flick is "a first-person body-cam horror game scientifically engineered to spike feelings of dread", which may help to alleviate our feelings of FOMO.

What else? Let's just list 'em shall we:

• Lord of Undead
• Parry Survivor
• Cute Country
• Phantom Vice Auto
• Flick
• Moba Team Manager
• Astro Industry Wars
• The Creator: Live Together
• Dig! Dig! Dino!
• Iona's Island
• Blyte
• Boom Rush: Desert OPS
• Core Logistics
• Sokobomb
• 树人：中国班主任
• Veil Breach: Raven County
• Neo Light
• Man Simulator
• Desert Island Time
• Utopium
• Cats and Pillos
• Anomaly Corp.
• Dungeon Cooking
• Divine Move
• Maximum Security Boyfriend
• G.E.M. Grab & Exit
• Sweet KOL (extremely NSFW!)
• Black Market Space Station Shop Simulator
• Crowns & Tiles
• Space Tenacity
• Ship Shape Slam!!!
• Pavel Repin's #tacticalunderground (DLC)

Curiously, there are actually more games releasing on November 19 than the day before and after (six on the 18th and 12 on the 20th). The same is true the Thursday before (27) and the Thursday after (5).

Will major publishers release anything close to GTA 6? And I'm talking, through the entirety of November? So far, according to our list of upcoming 2026 PC games, not really, though Devolver keeps promising it will.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 4 - 11)

Soulslike extraction RPG Mistfall Hunter disappeared from the top 10 after debuting in at number 3 last week (it ranked 12th, so almost).

Another interesting fact gleaned from just outside the top 10 is that Gears of War: E-Day came in at number 11, which is—as far as I can tell—the highest its reached since Steam pre-orders started on June 7. By contrast, Forza Horizon 6 hit number 4 on the revenue charts during the week pre-orders commenced.

I don't mean to seem like I'm ragging on Microsoft—I'm happy to do so for more important reasons—but Halo: Campaign Evolved has dropped pretty severely, coming in at 69 after enjoying 5th place last week. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, by contrast, is dropping much more slowly.

It's neat to see Big Walk rank so highly, and it was overall a big week for niche Steam indies: Iron Nest is a heavy turret simulator and ReStory is about fixing old electronics.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"EA didn't finish the game so I'm not finishing this revi"

Phantom, on the new Madden game, which is copping an absolute flogging by Steam users.

At the finale of Deus Ex: Human Revolution you choose which button to press to trigger one of its endings while an AI explains the differences between them. It was not a well-liked way to wrap up the game, and when just over six months later Mass Effect 3 came along with a remarkably similar structure for its ending we were all a bit baffled it came down to this. Three games' worth of agonizing decisions would all be resolved by the simple mechanistic choice of a button press?

It wasn't the only thing about Mass Effect 3 people found worth complaining about, but it was right up there. It remained a pain point even after the free extended cut DLC expanded the endings to make them a little more satisfying, and a fourth option where you refuse to choose was added to satisfy players who got to the end and wanted to flip a middle finger at the whole arbitrary concept.

The other three options were to destroy the Reapers, with the downside that all synthetic life including the geth and EDI would also be wiped out, to control the Reapers, with the downside that Shepard would have to become one, and to synthesize all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy, with the downside that it worked by baffling space magic.

It's been over a decade now since Mass Effect 3 came out and our blood has dropped below boiling point, so hopefully we can look back on it without cartoon smoke coming out of our ears and have a sensible discussion about what we chose and why. I've finished the trilogy three times now and pressed all three buttons, but which did you choose—or did you refuse to choose at all—and were you satisfied by the ending you got?

David Brevik's gaming history began before the arrival of the IBM PC. The veteran designer grew up playing games like Lode Runner and The Oregon Trail on the Apple II. "One that comes to mind right away is the original Wizardry," Brevik says. "That had a huge impact on me. That was on the Apple II Plus, and I loved that game."

Studying computer science at college, Brevik worked at numerous software and games companies before cofounding Condor, where he designed games like NFL Quarterback Club and Justice League Task Force. It was with Condor that Brevik pitched Diablo to then-publishers Blizzard Entertainment. After Blizzard acquired Condor and the studio was renamed Blizzard North, Diablo was released with the expectation of modest sales. Instead, the ARPG would become one of the most influential games of all time.

Brevik left Blizzard in 2003 and has since designed games like Marvel Heroes and It Lurks Below. Today, Brevik is President of Skystone Games, which has published games such as Tiny Bookshop and Mistfall Hunter. But he took a break from searching for the next big hit to guide me through the isometric dungeon of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

Strangely, a game that I'm playing the most recently is an old game of mine. I made this game called Marvel Heroes, which was in the 2010-12 range, and it's an ARPG with the Marvel superheroes. I originally went to that company to be the creative director, but over a period of a few years I became the CEO of the company, so I barely worked on the game for a while. I had to hire another replacement creative director, but I was still very involved in the project.

Eventually I left the company. Being a CEO was basically raising money. I like making games. The point was, not long after I left, the company went out of business and the game shut down. It was a game that I spent many years of my career working on, and nobody could ever play it again.

Along came some die-hard fans who ended up making their own server for the client, and they resurrected the game. So I've been playing this resurrected version of Marvel Heroes on this fan-made server. That's been really fun. Mainly I've been doing it a lot with the community. I was very involved with the community when I was playing. Made a lot of great friends, and I would stream the game almost every night.

It was a little weird because, after I left, they changed the game. They had one more giant update that changed Marvel Heroes [from] the way it was originally designed. They released it on console and made an update to the PC version and changed it to Marvel Heroes Omega …. A lot of the characters changed when they made this Omega update. They changed away from skill-tree builds to a more modern more casual version of the skill trees.

It's just been a real treat. It definitely has problems. I would I would prefer that there were more things to do, a deeper endgame besides just grind[ing] for a couple special items. But I think that overall, that it's still just really fun, even if you just play a couple of the characters. There's like 60 something different characters you can play.

Some of the characters that I really enjoyed originally, I didn't enjoy as much in the new version. Some of the Omega version characters I like a lot more, and probably the character I've been playing most is Thing. But I really enjoy Iron Fist and Deadpool and Elektra and Thor.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I had been on yet another Minecraft kick. We were starting a new server and, I often play Minecraft with my family and friends. All my kids are grown up. In fact, my very youngest goes off to college in about a month [and] my second eldest kid has a kid of her own, so I'm a grandpa.

But we get together and we make a server from scratch and play as a family. And we've been playing for a very long time, so when there's an update or the moment hits us, we'll end up starting a new server. I'm definitely the most hardcore of people. I love making all the different machines you can make and making giant contraptions for the server.

It's also changed a little bit. It's been this weird, almost cyclical thing where at first we were playing together and I had to guide them through the game a lot, and then they were too cool for school and wanted to do their own thing but really needed my help a lot. And then it was like 'Oh, we can play together again'.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I loved Eye of the Beholder. I mean I love/hate Eye of the Beholder. I hadn't played it in a long time, and there was some other came recently that I was that reminded me of it. I was like 'Oh, I should go back and try it again'.

Eye of the Beholder was, in 1991, one of the best games that I'd ever played. I was super into it. The graphics, the immersion. This is pre-Wolfenstein [3D], so 3D stuff was not really a thing. But this had some fake 3D-style graphics that you were taking a party through a dungeon, and it was turn-based and grid-based.

I had mapped out all the levels on graph paper. I was really into it. And then at the end, I killed the final boss, and a little dialogue box pops up and says "Congratulations, you win!" or whatever. Then quits to desktop.

So that's the worst ending of any game I've ever played. But I really love the game. It's amazing.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

It turns out that [in] Marvel Heroes I have 540 hours, but there's a bunch of others. Right behind that is my other game It Lurks Below. I have 529 hours in that. And No Man's Sky, I have 400-something hours in that.

I like space games, so they kind of had me at hello, and I just found it fascinating. I loved going around the galaxy, exploring planets, finding things, building bases all over the universe, hunting for special ships, and they've had so many updates. I keep coming back for all of thee updates when they add new content.

It's just been something I've really enjoyed. I enjoyed the combat in the game, the dogfighting-style combat …. I didn't really like the story very much. It's kind of out there too. It was supposed to be maybe a highbrow thing or something, but I just couldn't really understand what it was. I couldn't relate to the story in any way.

I got it right on launch or whatever and I played it, and then would put it away, and then a new update would come and I'd play it some more, and every time an update comes, I play another 25-50 hours.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I have EverQuest still installed, and that's something I go back and play every now and then. And I played so many hours. Of all the games, that's by far and away—even though it's not part of the Steam library—the game that I put the most hours into. Maybe that or World of Warcraft. But both of them I spent many years of my life playing, and my wife and I would play together, so we'd play every day for years and years. I forget my playtime, but it was years of playtime. I have thousands of hours in EverQuest.

I even play the EQ '99, which is the old version of the game, the original game plus maybe the one expansion. Some of the [servers] are two expansions. I still go back and play that quite a bit. Level up characters now and then.

Even though it's maybe the ugliest game in the world at this point, I still really love that game. It was such a unique experience. It's like trying to explain Star Wars to somebody that wasn't there in the theatre for the first time. We'd never seen anything like Star Wars, and it was the same with EverQuest.

Even though it was totally painful, a total nightmare, and everybody's got like the most horrific stories from playing EverQuest…. I had done a dragon run with my necromancer, and I had bound myself right near where the entrance [to] the dragon was, so that when I died in the dragon run, I could just run back.

But the dragon run was a total disaster and there were these giants that you had to clear to the to get to the dragon first. I died fighting the dragon, and it turned out that it had taken so long that the giants respawned and I [had] bound myself right where the giants were. So I would respawn and a giant would kill me, and I would respawn, and the giant would kill me. I didn't know what to do. I ended up unplugging my internet.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

Visual Studio. I still do a lot of programming. I still make a lot of prototypes. I still dream of someday making games again. So that is something that's still installed.

I still program almost every single day … I work on lots of different prototypes for game ideas that I have, and someday maybe I'll have the time to actually work on one. But right now, I'm so busy that I don't have the time to dedicate to making a project.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

It's a complete mess. I have icons for games in one corner. I have tools I use for game development and other things in the middle. Other things that I have. I have the Adobe Creative Suite and other things that I can't live without. I've got all the Microsoft tools. And then I have some mobile games that I play, I'll have PC versions of those.

I have notes that are all over my desktop of different projects that are going on. Notes, feedback, all sorts of stuff. I give feedback on a lot of games and lot of ideas that people have. They ask me to give them feedback on stuff, and so I'll write up lots of notes.

I probably have 300 icons on my desktop. It's a mess.

Videogame music is ridiculously good, a behemoth that encompasses just about every damn genre out there. Orchestral, rock, metal, pop, hip-hop—you name it, there's absolutely a composer out there who has penned something absolutely fire within that genre.

But despite the stellar bangers that so many videogames are putting out, it still feels like they're mostly contained within the gaming zeitgeist. Which means that whenever I end up hearing tracks in the real world, I get some of the most insane whiplash imaginable.

I remember a helluva long time ago watching some random British television show with my Mum—maybe some kind of home improvement show, it was a long time ago okay? My memory is terrible—and being completely bamboozled by the inclusion of music from The Sims 2. Turns out I'm not the only one who's had that experience, as a Reddit post from six years ago shows that The Sims music appears in all kinds of random television shows. America's Next Top Model, German home improvement shows, kids baking shows. It's everywhere!

For me, the absolute weirdest place I've heard videogame music, though, is my local pub of all places. I'd popped in for a chill Sunday afternoon pint and a bite to eat, only to get to the bar, turn to my partner and ask: "Wait a second, is this L.A. Noire??" Sure enough, the buttery-smooth jazz number was the main theme for L.A. Noire. Which is an excellent choice for a low-key weekend vibe, don't get me wrong. But it was also the last place I ever expected to hear anything like it.

What about you though? Where's the weirdest place your ears have bore witness to a videogame track? A hospital? It would definitely be weird to hear it in a hospital, I reckon. Make sure to drop a comment and let me know.

Who knew that all I needed to be interested in maths was the command of a five-thousand-tonne artillery battery? If only my secondary school teacher had known. Turns out that the ticking clock of exam pressure is a hell of a lot less motivating than the boom of artillery shells growing ever closer, as enemy gunners zero in on your position, trying to blast your colossal cannon to kingdom come before you blast them.

But Iron Nest is a similar test of mental endurance. You hustle and bustle around your one-man gun emplacement, triangulating degrees and distances, praying that your next shell won't sail clear over the target, leaving you scratching your head as to which vital calculation you somehow messed up. It's an addictive challenge, bolstered by an array of wonderfully tactile gadgets and gizmos.

Sure, it's an artillery simulator of sorts, but it's more like one of the best versions of Battleship you'll ever play. It's about employing what you know and learn through each shot, to track down enemy positions and destroy them, often before they destroy you. And it's hard to overstate how satisfying it is when you land a shell squarely on-target, especially when it's the payoff for 10 minutes spent messing about with machines and the map table.

So who are you shooting? Iron Nest is set in an alternate-history version of 1920s Spain in which the Kingdom of Castille somehow got their mitts on a gigantic, city-levelling artillery piece, and is using it to maintain their grip on power. That's your job: shoot what they tell you, or don't. As the lone denizen of the Iron Nest—save for one presumably very deaf cat—your job is operating the battery by yourself.

You have to read the teleprinter and note vital info on your clipboard. Use the map table and its elaborate array of markers, coloured pencils, and measuring devices to triangulate enemy positions. You're inputting distance into a machine to calculate barrel elevation—which prints off a cute little firing solution ticket—and wheeling the gun on its axis to the correct bearing. And when all is prepared, you're flipping switches as if arming a nuke, and pulling the handle to take your shot.

There's just so much gravity to Iron Nest, in fiddling with its tactile machines and gadgets, but also in the methodical step-by-step that plays out before each firing. Despite its initial learning curve, before long the pre-shot preparation becomes a bit of a ritual, a process you refine through repetition and gain mastery with. It's strangely relaxing for a game about obliterating enemies with explosive ordinance.

And as you gain mastery, Iron Nest unfurls even more. You unlock a requisition station that lets you satisfyingly stamp cards to buy recon plane flyovers and different shell types, but it adds a new challenge element as you try to spend the bare minimum possible, relying on your smarts to bridge the gap.

You unlock a second barrel, letting you hit two targets in quick succession. That is, if you're able to juggle the calculations and tweaks you have to make between each firing without your brain melting. And thanks to its procedurally-generated objectives, with enemy positions changing even when you replay a mission, plus medals for performance, Iron Nest has a lot of replayability.

The only thing Iron Nest is lacking is co-op. It would be ridiculously fun to run around the gun with a friend, but the game is already a pretty incredible achievement considering it was built by one guy. It'd also be a great candidate for a Battleship-style head-to-head mode, where two Iron Nests try to triangulate and destroy each other, but multiplayer is listed on Iron Nest's roadmap, so maybe we can look forward to that.

While I'm still very excited for next year's PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant (*gasps for breath*) which sees you commanding an orbital defense cannon, Iron Nest is the best artillery game I've tried. Its playground of tactile tools and machines makes it appealing to simulation fans of all stripes, while its smart yet addictive gun-prep formula feels almost endlessly repeatable, as you strive for that elusive yet satisfying sense of mastery.

The humble combo trial is a time-honoured tradition in fighting games. It's a quick and relatively easy way of trying out a new character, feeling out their general flow and kit in a low-pressure environment.

They are, also, fundamentally useless. The combos in question are rarely optimal, and often devolve into simply playing Simon Says a dozen times before throwing yourself to the wolves of online matchmaking and hoping for the best. I can't speak for anyone else, but I rarely retain any of the stuff I pick up during combo trials, and usually end up defaulting to the likes of Dustloop or trusted YouTube tutorials to figure out how to actually play a character.

That doesn't exactly change in Marvel Tōkon. It still presents you with basic moves, combos, and assist combos that you'll do once and move on from, the likelihood of carrying them over into real scenarios next to zero. But Tōkon also includes something that I really like, and sincerely wish other fighting games included: a series of challenges that force you to think about the tools you've been given, and how best to implement them.

Each character trial in Tōkon wraps up with five "Level-Up Missions". Instead of laying out all the inputs for you, the missions instead present you with a handful of criteria and leave you to cook up the combos yourself. Maybe you need to start or end with a certain string, or ensure you're throwing in a particular move or hitting a certain damage threshold during the combo.

In reality, it's something you can probably just go ahead and look up if you really don't want to bother with it. But I like the fact that, even with the inclusion of basic combo trials, the Level-Up Mission is something that tries to challenge you to cook something up yourself. It's arguably one of the best parts about a fighting game–even if everybody ends up using the same BnBs and optimal combos in the end, figuring things out and playing around with a character's kit is a great way to understand their fundamentals even if you don't come to the most min-maxxed conclusion.

And the best part is, these Level-Up Missions are genuinely tough. While the early stages mostly require you to start with a string, add one move, and end with a certain damage number, the later ones stack far more requirements on you. That's when you really have to start thinking about things like your meter, assists, jump cancels, and damage scaling to squeeze the absolute most you can out of these challenges.

Again, are these Level-Up Missions going to have much impact once you get out there against real players? Probably not, but they at least require you to interact with the systems that Tōkon throws at you. Especially in a fighting game, where tutorialisation is still kinda rubbish and mostly consists of multiple text boxes bombarding your brain all at once, sitting down and puzzling out how to really maximise my damage in one combo—including whatever parameters Tōkon wants from me—at least helped stuff stick a helluva lot more than it would have otherwise.

Having a relatively open-ended goal and then handing you the entire toolkit to accomplish it instead of simply following a piece of paper feels much closer to how fighting games actually shake out in real time. Tōkon's Level-Up Missions are such a simple yet smart way to navigate it, I hope it's a feature more fighting games crib from in the future.

They called me mad. They called me a fool. They said it would never work—my plan to build a business empire on the back of a single department store that sold three products and a silica mine. 'You'll bankrupt us!' yelled red-faced advisors. They saw no wisdom in my schemes at all.

And, frankly, they were correct. Fair play to those guys. We are very bankrupt now.

In 1995, PC Gamer—a monthly journal about computer videogames—issued a challenge to me directly. In the back-most pages of its 22nd issue, it tucked away an ad for a then-new game called Capitalism. "Good enough to make a convert out of Karl Marx himself," declared an included testimonial from, yes, PC Gamer.

I was too busy being two years old to issue a response at the time, but I'm here now. As one of surely very few people who have reviewed The Communist Manifesto for a major gaming publication, I want to know: can it convert me? And more than that, can it offer a way forward? Can I find, in Capitalism's thicket of spreadsheets and input/output graphs, a solution to our current economic and social malaise? I accept your challenge, PC Gamer from 31 years ago.

Business 101

Capitalism—the game—does not work how you expect it to. For one thing, it is not on Earth. It happens on a procedurally generated pseudo-region of an Earth-like planet that you can spin up with every new game. Want to build the free market on a vast archipelago? By all means. A single, contiguous mega-landmass? Absolutely. The only guarantee is that, wherever you end, it will look nothing like anywhere that exists on our actual planet. Also, cities like Lisbon and Chicago will end up a short walk from each other, much like they are in real life.

I admit it, my first forays into the world of business were jazz capitalism. I was hitting buttons and trying things out without much regard for structure or logic. I built a department store in central Jakarta (next to Tehran) and filled it literally, exclusively with laundry detergent.

This was not just an idle whim. Capitalism is big on the supply chain, strangely, which means all the goods you sell have to come from somewhere. The wares I flogged in my department store were sourced from Jakarta's nearest seaport, and the things Jakarta's nearest seaport had to offer were: cookies, leather shoes, and detergent.

Were the people of Jakarta buying my suds? Absolutely the hell not. They could not have been less interested, even as the industrious worker-bees in the department store's purchasing unit accumulated more and more boxes of the stuff, gradually entombing my sales team like soapy pharaohs. Supply outstripped demand by a gazillion to one. I was making negative $80,000 a year.

I asked myself what Warren Buffett would do and decided the answer was probably 'keep digging'. I added the cookies and leather shoes to my department store's roster of goods, turning it into one of those malls—you know the ones—that occupies an entire city block and sells three unrelated products. If this didn't work, the game was broken.

There was, happily, more demand for shoes and cookies than laundry detergent, which is to say I was selling literally any of the former at all. Nevertheless, my expansion into the footwear and baked goods sectors had taken its toll. In spite of the new products' relative success, I was now making negative $300,000 a year. I added an advertising unit to my department store and partnered with a TV station.

This either helped or, more likely, coincided with an entirely unrelated change in my fortunes, because my annual profit suddenly skyrocketed to an incredible negative $3,000 a year. I went mad. I built an R&D Centre, a silica mine, and a new department store—this one selling CPUs, silica (a lot of silica about) and raw tobacco. Had I maybe started trying to sell directly to consumers raw materials I was meant to use in my own factories? Perhaps! Was I nevertheless now making an utterly inexplicable $400,000 a year? Yes!

I could only ride the high for so long. Eventually, my objectively boneheaded business decisions ricocheted back on me. The people of Bombay (where my second store was) were not interested in bulk-purchasing silica or computer chips, the fools, and even adding another advertising department didn't help. Though I did partner that advertising department with a newspaper rather than a TV station, and we all know traditional media is dead.

It wasn't long before the game told me I was out of cash in a Nickelodeon font.

Visions of the past

Here is the serious part of the article: Capitalism is genuinely rather fascinating. It is the crystallised end of history—that moment of triumphalism that marked the end of the Cold War and the seemingly final victory of liberal capitalism over all its foes. Its pregenerated scenarios, which you can play if you don't want to generate a random world for yourself, have names like The Fall Of The Berlin Wall and The Emerging Dragon (yes, it's about China).

It presents a vision of the world where consciously-held ideology is dead. In its place, ranks of men with big phones and suits chasing ever-greater numbers on ever-bigger spreadsheets—the "dog-eat-dog" world of capitalism. Was it good? No. Was it bad? No.

Capitalism, the game, does not sing the praises of capitalism the concept, nor does it criticise it. In this way, it reflects its era: good and bad were outdated—relics of a past where people deluded themselves by believing in things rather than chasing stuff that is concrete and consumable. Humanity had outgrown the distractions of faith and ideology. Now it could focus on reality, and the accumulation of CPUs and silica.

And air conditioners.

The aircon king of Guangzhou

My attempts to grow fat from detergent sales had run aground, but I did learn some things in that first run. Mostly, what I learnt—right there at the end—was 'hey, there's a button here to change the price of the things I sell'.

So I tried again, and a little bit slower this time. In Guangzhou (near Adelaide), I erected a department store, sourcing a thick gush of shampoo from the nearby port and selling it to anyone with hair. Crucially, this time I paid attention to things like 'product quality' and 'price'. The shampoo I was sourcing was a fair bit better than what Guangzhou already had access to, and by fidgeting with the price-per-bottle I could establish a neat equilibrium between supply and demand. Before long, I was making a stable $500,000 in annual profit.

What else did the port have to offer? Air conditioners and jumpers ('sweaters,' to our American readers). Guangzhou was hot; I suspected aircon demand would be high. I funnelled them into my department store.

It turned out I could charge essentially whatever the hell I wanted and get away with it. Demand was too strong to deter. I was charging people double what I was paying for them and raking it in. Before long, I got the jumpers on the shelves too, which inscrutably sold like hot cakes at the same time as the aircon units did—though, in credit to Capitalism's simulation, I am fairly sure the aircons sold better in summer, and vice versa for jumpers.

I was making $5,000,000 a year. I built factories, invented the video camera, purchased my competitors' jeans and sold them at a mark-up. I even started mining silica again, just for old times' sake. Pretty quickly, I hit $12 million a year. Which is kind of where I left it, since it rapidly became apparent I was simply too good at Capitalism for anything funny to happen ever again.

I'll say this, though: I like Capitalism (the game) a lot. The depth of its simulation is impressive, and not even 'for a game from 1995'. It just is. Here is a toy free market that consistently surprised me with the things it took into account and the things it asked me to take into account, from climate and environment to the nitty-gritty of the supply chain to the precise number and arrangement of business units in each of my outlets. It's a good time, if you are also the kind of person who gets excited by a nice spreadsheet.

Total conversion

Am I converted? Well, apparently I could be making $12 million a year in shampoo sales, which is only slightly less than I make writing about videogames, so maybe. I'm certainly into the game itself, which is probably the most I can reasonably ask of an entertainment product from three decades ago.

Does Capitalism, with its sepia snapshot of a period of post-Cold War triumphalism, represent a way forward for our current period of deep societal stagnation? Well, not quite. Capitalism captures not so much actual things that happened so much as it captures a vibe that existed in a select few places during a vanishingly small period of time.

You couldn't return to it if you wanted to—it was a product of a historical juncture, and no amount of nostalgia for an era when things felt better (whether they actually were is perhaps debatable) will change that.

Unless, of course, you start selling air conditioners.

An electrician once told me that turning your computer off and then on again uses more electricity than just leaving it on for hours, an oversimplification if not an outright lie that I believed for years. While it is true that turning your PC off and on puts wear and tear on the components, so does leaving it on for hours and hours.

Now that turning a PC on takes an amount of time so miniscule you don't even have a chance to get a drink before it's ready to go, there's no good excuse for adding to your power bill by leaving it on. Of course, we do things we have no good excuse for all the time, like starting another campaign as Karl Franz in Total War: Warhammer despite all the other campaigns we haven't even tried yet.

Where do you stand on this, the most divisive issue in PC gaming this side of Dragon Age 2's relative position in the series tier list? Our strategic director Evan Lahti is team turn if off, because any more hours his PC is on are hours dust is being sucked into the system. Meanwhile, our US news lead Andy Chalk got into the habit of leaving his on back when he ran a BBS and still does. Our former hardware editor Jarred Walton used to turn his desktop PC off because its RGB lights were too bright, but would leave his laptop on, necessitating the addition of a third option to my otherwise neat poll.

When I first played Half-Life at the tender age of 11, I found it a terrifying experience. Admittedly, I was scared of pretty much everything at 11. Wasps, heights, loud noises, football (or more specifically, everyone finding out how bad I was at football). I was an anxious child all around. Hence, playing an interactive disaster movie filled with weird aliens was an intense experience and lashings of violence was an intense experience.

Now I'm rapidly approaching 40, the idea of Half-Life being in any way scary seems ridiculous, especially when you compare it to modern horror games and actual real-life terrors like tax returns. But there is one part of Half-Life that still frightens me, and it appears right at the start of the game. Midway through the introductory tram ride, five words and a number appear on the screen:

SUBJECT: Gordon Freeman. Male, Age 27.

Every time I see this caption, it seems wrong, like it must be a typo. Surely Gordon Freeman is older than 27. I mean look at this man. That’s a fella in his mid-thirties at the youngest.

To be clear, this isn't a notion I've developed recently. I've always believed this. I must have seen the caption countless times, but it never really sank in, because I was busy watching all the scenery and cool scripted sequences that you get during that tram ride.

Basically, Freeman's youthfulness weirds me out. It also led me to wonder: how old are all the other '90s FPS protagonists? Is DoomGuy actually DoomBoy? Is B.J. Blazkowicz short for 'Baby Junior Blazkowicz?'. Is Duke Nukem even allowed to enter a strip club?

Riddled with doubt, I decided to try to find out the age of as many '90s shooter heroes as I could. The answers proved pretty surprising, and in some cases, instructive about game design.

B.J Blazkowicz (Wolfenstein 3-D)

Let's start with an easy one. William Joseph Blazkowicz has surprisingly extensive lore for a video game character created in the eighties. According to the Wolfenstein Wiki, Blazkowicz was born on August 11, 1911. Canonically, the events of Wolfenstein 3-D take place in 1943, meaning that Blazkowicz is 32-33 when he takes down MechaHitler.

The Wiki also states that B.J. is canonically the grandfather of Commander Keen and an ancestor of DoomGuy, which is a fun bit of trivia.

Kyle Katarn (Star Wars: Dark Forces)

I'm gonna skip Doom and Duke for the moment and deal with another straightforward case. Kyle Katarn is the protagonist of Star Wars: Dark Forces and Star Wars: Jedi Knight—Dark Forces 2. (And also Jedi Outcast and, in a secondary role, Jedi Academy, but those are noughties games). Because Katarn is a Star Wars character, and because Star Wars fans are, shall we say, fastidious, it's straightforward enough to find out Katarn's age.

According to Wookiepedia, Katarn was born in 23 BBY (That's before the Battle of Yavin—the concluding act of the OG Star Wars—for non-Star Wars heads). Before Rogue One changed the canon, Katarn was the original thief of the Death Star plans which occurred in the same year as the Battle of Yavin. That makes him 23 at the outset of Dark Forces. He was 28 in Jedi Knight, and 35 in Jedi Outcast. Each of these facts is like a needle being pushed into my ageing body.

Cate Archer (The Operative: No One Lives Forever)

Strictly speaking, No One Lives Forever is a noughties shooter, releasing in 2000. But spiritually it is 100% a nineties FPS, and for that reason I'm going to include it.

Like Katarn, finding out Archer's age is easy enough, as Monolith gave her a detailed backstory. The NOLF Fandom Wiki says she was born in 1942. The events of the original NOLF take place in 1967, making her 25 when she becomes a superspy for UNITY. Like James Bond, Archer is apparently also natively Scottish, born in Glasgow.

Prisoner 426 (Unreal)

Another easy one, albeit for different reasons. Unreal's nameless protagonist is also an ageless protagonist. Since Unreal's player character can be customised both in character model and gender, Epic never specified an age for them either. In short, Prisoner 426 is as old as you want them to be (so for me, 57).

Caleb (Blood, Blood 2: The Chosen)

The age of Blood's revenant protagonist is somewhat dependent on perspective. According to the Blood wiki, Caleb was born in 1847 (in Texas, apparently). Since the events of Blood take place in 1928, this would make him a sprightly 81 years old by chronology.

However, Caleb is murdered by his demonic master Tchernobog at some point between 1871 and 1928, so biologically he's likely significantly younger than his chronological age. Amusingly, Blood 2 takes place in 2028, which means Caleb would be 181 years old during the events of that game.

DoomGuy: (Doom)

Here's where things start to get tricky. Unlike his (alleged) ancestor B.J. Blazkowicz, DoomGuy does not have a specified age. It's generally assumed he's somewhere in his mid-thirties—mainly because the face at the bottom of the screen looks like it's seen some shit.

But I took a punt and reached out to John Romero, Doom's co-creator, and asked him whether, either publicly or privately, id Software ever determined a specific age for DoomGuy?

Romero quickly got back to me with a reply. Unfortunately, it appears id never officially pinned it down. "No, we didn’t invent Doomguy’s age, or Ranger’s," Romero wrote in response. "I think it’s assumed they are mid-to-late 20s."

If you're wondering who the hell Ranger is, well, spoilers for the next entry.

Ranger (Quake, Quake 3)

As Romero mentions above, id Software never specified an age for Quake's protagonist as they didn't with Doom. That would seem to be the end of that rabbit hole. However, Ranger also appears in 1999's Quake 3 and 2022's Quake Champions.

Quake 3 isn't all that helpful in determining Ranger's age. But Quake Champions is. According to the lore added by QC, Ranger is actually a Vietnam veteran, having served in the US military up to 1975.

According to the Quake timeline, the events of Quake are concurrent with the game's release—1996, which means 21 years elapse between Ranger's return from Vietnam and the events of Quake.

Unfortunately, the timeline doesn't specify when Ranger signed up to fight, or how old he was when he did. But the youngest he could (legally) have been to sign up was 17. The US began active combat operations in 1965, so it's unlikely that he would have served before then, and the implication seems to be that Ranger did his tour(s) of 'Nam in the early '70s. Quake Champions also includes a photograph of Ranger and his family taken in 1978, in which he looks to be in his mid-to-late twenties—though he could be older.

All of which suggests that Ranger is either a mid fortysomething or an early fiftysomething during the events of Quake, which would make him the oldest still-living protagonist on this list.

Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem 3D)

I've saved the most interesting case until last. There are a couple of ages banded about for Duke Nukem online. But most of those are for Duke Nukem Forever, and they suggest he's somewhere between 45 and 47 during the events of that game. The source for those isn't clear, however, and in any case, we really want the age Duke was during the events of Duke Nukem 3D.

To try to pin it down, I sent an email to Scott Miller, the founder of Apogee Software (later 3D Realms) the developer of Duke Nukem's 3D. He quickly responded with this:

"When I and Todd Replogle first came up with the Duke Nukem character, there were two things I decided to never reveal: what year the game took place in, and how old Duke was," Miller wrote. "I never wanted to say, for example, that the game took place in 2004, because whenever you nail down a date it often comes back to haunt you when you pass that calendar date in real life (eg. 2001: A Space Odyssey).

"So never in the Duke storyverse is a date mentioned. As for his age it was the same thinking—if we had mentioned his age in a game, would we need to keep aging him for every succeeding game? So, I just wanted to fully avoid these issues. But, in my mind, Duke was in his mid-30s".

In short, Duke is forever a man in his prime, which is only fitting for the character.

Here are my memories of EverQuest in the year 1999. Me, six years old, pondering race and class options as my father offered guidance over my shoulder. His character was a gnome magician; I did not like the idea of being short. I settled on a half-elf, possibly because they looked the most like me, and named him Karokan. Dad, perhaps, chose my class and god for me, as I remember neither.

Then West Freeport. Then paralysing, all-consuming fear. The videogame worlds I had experienced before all felt finite. EverQuest, by contrast, felt incomprehensibly vast. I was scared of dying, sure—of the dreaded corpse run—but I was more scared of simply getting lost. I felt certain that if I strayed far from the city I would plunge into a fathomless ocean of map and never return. So I spent hours fighting rats and orc centurions outside the gates, dad's efforts to coax me out further than the East Commonlands confounded. I stayed home. I loved every second (hey, I was six).

The promise of EverQuest Legends, which released late last month, is simple: you can go home again. EverQuest in its infancy has been lovingly reconstructed. Its graphics are bright and rigid, its mechanics slow-going. Its UI does not feel contiguous or, really, designed. It sits scattered across your monitor as if surprised by a gust of wind. It's EverQuest (mostly) as the old-heads remember it, not as it endures, heroically, in the year 2026.

I used to live here

The weird thing is that this has already been done. In fact, it's still being done. Project 1999 is a fantastic free-to-play version of classic EverQuest that operates with Daybreak's explicit permission. If you want to nose around the game as it was back in the day, you can do it for free. Why fork out the $20 and recurring $10 sub for Legends?

Because for most people, these are fundamentally different propositions. Project 1999 has its check-in-daily stalwarts, no doubt, but for most people it is something you sign into once, get your shot of nostalgia, and stop thinking about until you want another one about five to seven years later. For those who never touched OG EverQuest, it's a historical curiosity. You can visit home, but you probably won't stay.

Legends, meanwhile, aims to keep you there. It's original EverQuest, yes, but only mostly as you know it. No more corpse runs, a tweaked and soloable MMO experience, in-game maps(!?)—all these things and more exist to fan your nostalgic curiosity into a full-blown dedication to this revitalized 27-year-old game.

Does it work? I think so. Make no mistake: the list of people for whom EverQuest Legends is not will forever be longer than the list of people for whom it is, but Game Jawn, a new studio comprised of EverQuest fans-turned-developers, has been smart in what cruft it's cut out and what it's left in place. This EverQuest has grown kinder in its dotage—it is more prone to hand out the candy pellet of a level up and forgive your mistakes in combat.

It's a game I've found myself dipping into at lunchtimes and on idle evenings. I can take a wander, marvel at some places, think 'hey I remember that,' and slaughter enough helpless creatures to net myself a level up. It is a satisfying, undemanding loop, despite the classic MMO trappings.

At the same time, it's still crusty as hell in ways that will charm you, if you're a certain sort of person. Your walk speed is glacial, you have approximately 4,600 distinct equipment slots on your body, and the game's MUD roots are still visible right there on its face—in the way you CONSIDER potential enemies, run WHO commands to check if pals are online, and play the entire game with one eye on the chat window. It feels sometimes inscrutable but never, at least in my time with it, cruel, where the rigorously old-school experience of Project 1999 is perfectly happy to send you scuttling off naked on a corpse run.

It is an MMO for MUD enjoyers and Morrowind perverts—no longer hard, but still authentically idiosyncratic. It is for people who can't truly enjoy something that doesn't demand you wrap your mind around it first. It is a charming struggle. It is the Linux of MMOs.

There are people for whom that paragraph is practically engineered in a lab to repulse them. We call those people 'most people'. But for the rest of us? For me? Legends is probably the only kind of MMO that stands a chance of hooking me in 2026. My six-year-old self would be delighted.

In my Honour Mode playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, I romanced Gale—you can see my full thoughts on our under-appreciated wizard boy here. What solidified him as one of my all-time RPG romances, however, wasn't his wit or his very nice hair. It was a conversation in which he acted like a petty little bastard.

After your first amorous night together, Gale—like any self-conscious bloke might do—asks you how he performed in the bedroom. If you respond: "It was fine," he fully has a sulk, stopping just short of making a thread on r/AITA.

"Nobody weeps because the weather is fine," he says while his voice actor, Tim Downie, puts as much quiet, brooding petulance as he can into his words. "No monarchs were overthrown because their ruling was fine. No artworks were burned because they were masterpieces, but merely fine."

Then he threatens to blow himself up, calling himself "a fragile vessel in which to place potentially world-ending power. Perhaps it would be better to not shake such a vessel."

I want to point out, Gale sucks for this—it's an absolutely toxic, unpleasant, and thorny response to being told you were just acceptable in the bedroom, so much so that it horseshoes around to being meme-able. But it also cemented why I liked his romance, why I liked him—because it makes him three-dimensional, fleshed-out.

It helps that it works for his character, too. Gale was essentially groomed by the god of magic. In his first relationship since trying to impress someone who has complete and utter power over him, he's going to be sensitive to criticism. Especially after his ex told him to blow himself up—his insecurity is believably petty, because he's measuring himself to perfection.

It's this willingness for companion characters to be unpleasant that makes BG3's cast fly off the screen. Larian's writers weren't afraid of people hating or disliking their characters—many of them are actively hostile to you, or have moments where they can turn against you entirely. And the more I thought about it, the more I've come to realise that that is, in fact, the point.

Hate-love relationships

The strength of any RPG's structure, story-wise, is in its genre conventions. Simply put, most RPGs have the following set of circumstances:

• There is a world-ending threat (or at least, something that will muck stuff up on the regional/continent level).
• You have companions who'll accompany you on all your adventures.

Now, if you're a writer, you might think to yourself: Well, I better make these people bearable to get along with. If you're going to be spending 50-100 hours with somebody, they need to be pleasant to be around. And while that has to be true of some of your party members—an RPG cast benefits from having a Karlach, Minsc, Tali, or Wynne in it—it's a terrible assumption to make for your entire crew.

It's throwing away gold, for one: You have a reason to put the most eclectic, weird mix of strangers into a huge 'get along or the world ends' t-shirt. Characters who'd otherwise have absolutely zero reason to so much as look at each other, who would otherwise hate each other, must interact for the greater good.

This friction is the fuel for any great RPG—no, more than that. It's why they work in the first place. The grinding of flaw against flaw is the mill that makes the bread of some of the genre's best banter. Take Alistair and Morrigan for instance. On paper, these characters would be the worst two to form a party with. But you should put them next to each other, because Morrigan's dry cynicism and Alistair's cheerful wit is extraordinarily entertaining when they're inches from ripping each other's throats out.

And listen, I hate to harp on Dragon Age: The Veilguard more than I already have—especially since, given the development hell it went through, its writers may have wanted to do more with its cast, but simply couldn't. But it's unfortunately a good illustrative example of where this goes wrong.

As our own Lauren Morton pointed out, the cast doesn't argue with you, they don't bicker with each other, they don't have conflicting or impactful beliefs that dent the narrative (or your opinion of them) in any way.

They are all just blandly kind of likeable—or if they are unpleasant, they're unpleasant in ways that are vaguely-defined and blurry around the edges. Taash comes the closest to having an abrasive personality, and at the end of everything, they're really just sort of headstrong and opinionated in a way that'll make some people annoyed. And because of the story's resistance towards engaging in darker themes, they just come across as immature.

In a way, Veilguard's characters feel like empty vessels designed for the indistinct glob of fandom to project onto. Large fanfiction nets built to trawl for as many diehards as possible—and don't get me wrong, I've nothing against fanfiction. On the contrary, I think if your game has the sauce, you're going to have a smut-happy fandom whipped into an eager frenzy.

But there's a level of insecurity that radiates off characters who are built this way, a Netflix-esque, focus-tested glazed-over look in their eyes. And it's why I just can't love them.

It's all about bias, baby

Human beings are weird creatures. We'll project emotions and feelings onto inanimate objects if we have to—slap a pair of googly eyes on a roomba, and guarantee you'll come up with a nickname for it within the week, if not the next hour.

This affection for imperfection applies to how we form social relationships, as well. There's a name for it—the "Halo effect". Basically, if you form a positive opinion of someone, you're more likely to rationalise or dismiss their less pleasant behaviour further down the line.

The dark side of this is that we sometimes overlook awful behaviour from the people we love—but it's not an inherently terrible thing. Human beings are messy, we're flawed, we make mistakes, and if we didn't have a little softness for the people we care about, we probably wouldn't get much done. Giving grace to those closest to us is natural.

And I think this is why RPG characters that are thorny, unpleasant, and flawed tend to be treated with more affection than ones that are written to be frictionless—they map to a more accurate experience of what it's like to actually be friends with somebody.

You form an initial impression of them, negative or positive, and then when you get to know them better—when you're all socially bonded—the emotional systems we've developed for group cohesion kick in and give you the same chemical punt. Without those flaws to challenge our impressions of that NPC, they don't feel "real" in the same way.

There's even some science backing this up. Studies have shown that oxytocin, a chemical responsible for social bonding, kicks in when we read stories. Much of the same neurological processes we use to form connections in real life apply to a stellar narrative, too—it's why people get so attached, and why a good yarn can bring you to tears.

Which, I think, is why frictionless RPGs characters just don't work. If you don't create the same feeling of growing attached to someone—a strong first impression, later counterbalanced by discovering flaws or virtues—then there's an uncanniness to it that forces us to disconnect.

The term "immersion" gets bandied around a lot, but it really applies here. The success of a good story, particularly a character-focused one, is in how it pulls you in—and if I don't feel like I'm playing an RPG with real, vivid characters who I might dislike on occasion, I'm going to start tuning out.

You need to add scenes that rub people the wrong way—actions that are genuinely questionable, beliefs that are genuinely unpleasant. Not for every character, and not to every harsh extent, but that variety is still mandatory. In other words, in order for them to be loved, you need to be okay with your RPG characters being hated.

As I sit here, watching Saber Interactive's CEO have a normal one about how generative AI dialogue can totally improve videogames, I can't help but grit my teeth in the same, enamel-grinding fashion I have ever since companies like Ubisoft started promising a future with AI-powered "neo-NPCs."

If you'd believe the hype, these things are potentially good on paper, right? We live in a development environment where the ambitions of big-budget open world games are far outstripping their cost—wouldn't it simply be marvellous if you could populate a world with infinite dialogue chains and storylines?

In practice, the result is… pretty middling. While yes, some of the isolated tech demos we've seen have been impressive, the actual implementation of those we've seen in videogames, such as the life sim Seed, or Inzoi, which tried to pilot "smart Zois", fell flat.

Even when they're a source of entertainment, that fun is mostly found in the process of making them believe they're pregnant—and listen, I love toys. Putting aside my general distaste for generative AI, I don't think that every single videogame that comes out has to be a work of art. Toys are fine, you can smash action figures together and have a lovely time.

But that's not been the pitch, has it? Convai, an AI NPC start-up, wants to avoid a world without games where background "characters are given one line and repeat that one line over and over again, maybe two lines at best."

Ubisoft wants "fully personalised and immersive experiences", where its neo-NPCs make games "more alive and richer," whatever that means. Meaning Machine, a company that's pioneering reactive battle banter, is pushing for narrative-based games which are entirely powered by the tech. The dream is, in a lot of places, to use AI to try and tell stories.

The problem is, this pipe dream fails at the conceptual level, because this just isn't how good storytelling works. These people don't get it. And if they do get it? They think you're dumb. They think you're dumb as bricks.

In defense of miscellany

The main lie to the idea is the implication that background details, specifically what NPCs in said background say, aren't of any great importance. This couldn't be further from the truth.

One of videogames' biggest strengths is the ability to divorce themselves from pacing. Not entirely, mind—a singleplayer game with a linear narrative is still going to care about pacing a great deal. But an open-world game can take the time to establish, create, and put forward background details that would otherwise bog a story in any other medium down.

There are more obvious examples. Say, a town crier in a fantasy RPG telling you about some far-flung event you'll likely be dealing with—but there are more subtle instances of this sort of thing working brilliantly. My favourite example by far are Cyberpunk 2077's adverts, which are tailor-made to invoke the exact right amount of corporate overstimulation and dread in you as you muddle around Night City.

In a game with a stand-out story, all of these hundreds of little opportunities will be leveraged powerfully to draw you in—they can do more than just hand you information about the plot, they can create a sense of scale or place. Combat barks can characterise an enemy faction, journal entries can flesh out a culture, and so on.

The perception that these qualities in a game's overarching script are somehow "less important" is just completely backwards—they're the backbone on which the rest of the story lies. And even when they're not exactly award-winning, this background chatter still creates a game's sense of character.

Imagine a world in which lines like "Do you get up to the cloud district very often? Oh what am I saying, of course you don't " or "I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee" had been scraped out and replaced with the ability to, like, make them think you're Abraham Lincoln reincarnated, or something.

Heck, the fact that you're probably summoning to mind videogames with hilarious or immersion-breaking background natter proves my point, right? You're already able to tell when it's gone wrong.

Starfield's setting feels bland and dull when compared to something like New Vegas not just because of its main yarn, but because in the latter, its locations and background babble are hand-crafted and designed to surprise you, and in the former, procedurally-generated planets lie next to grey and perfunctory cities with all the rough edges sanded off.

Even just being placed next to a bunch of crap that wasn't hand-made causes Starfield to feel shallower as a result. Now imagine if all of those cities had AI-generated NPCs with disconnected, jilted, random stories to tell you—stories you couldn't even have a shared laugh at with your mate when they were bad. Does that sound better?

In this sense, the idea that AI-generated NPCs are some miracle fix that will give smaller studios the ability to tell stories in bigger worlds just completely falls apart, because those worlds are only made to feel big and textured because of thousands of little scripts that are laboriously written out by hand.

At the risk of stating the obvious, you can't just skip over that hard work and expect the same results! There's far more creativity in all the smaller choices a team of writers makes than the broad, conceptual idea that started them off. Background chatter, combat barks, NPC dialogue, side-quests, it all matters.

They think you can't tell the difference

The reason these bigwigs think they can get this crap past you has a lot to do with the same, broader, executive misunderstandings of what makes good art: People. It's a sentiment that was echoed by id Software's baffled Chris Hays, who has been watching Microsoft push statement after statement that the studio was still the same id Software, even after half of its staff were laid off.

Or take EA's head honchos, who Dragon Age creator David Gaider said believed "you made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG." It's no coincidence that Gaider, ostensibly responsible for one of gaming's best fantasy settings, was pre-emptively exhausted at the idea of AI-generated story back in 2023.

Nor is it a coincidence that Cyberpunk's quest director was unimpressed by the technology, or Larian's head writer, who called its output worse than their worst drafts. People who know what actually makes a story good aren't cringing at generative AI because they're luddites whose jobs are being threatened—if it was able to put something compelling together, they'd spot it.

They think it's garbage because it's garbage, and they don't want to have a hand in feeding you garbage. It's really that simple.

The biggest insult of suits peddling this crap is the idea that you just don't care. That you don't care if the music you're listening to is crap, you don't care if their games look hideous, and that you don't care if a game's story leaves you confused and hollow. They believe that you will merrily accept the substitute of a bunch of keys being jangled in front of your face over something that was carefully hand-crafted to make you feel something.

To those people, videogames are products. Hasbro thinks it can spit out another Baldur's Gate just by throwing the same amount of money at a different studio, Amazon's then-boss of games blithely said, in 2024, that videogames don't have acting. This is the prevailing attitude—a row of artless suits who are trying to sell you a bridge. Don't buy the damn bridge, I beg you. It won't make your games better.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer feature provided by:

Grand Theft Auto 4 multiplayer: Why everyone should try the 32-player massacre - PC Gamer #197 (UK, February 2009)

By Kieron Gillen

What am I supposed to do? The only response I manage is blinking, laughing loudly and then trying to work out how to activate the firehose. Some bright spark decided that the next game should be a race with trucks. 32 trucks. Of which about 25 or so turn out to be fire engines.

As you may expect, the result is chaos. Glorious chaos. Glorious never-had-anything- like-that-before chaos.

It’s one of those dark secrets of videogaming: if you want to play a GTA game and you’re willing to wait a few months, the PC version is always the best way to go. Always. Back in the day of GTA3, the PC’s generally more potent hardware led to a game that dealt with the cities better, included custom soundtracks and even worked as a shooter. And now, as the next-gen consoles start to get long in the tooth, the PC is building towards something else. Two relevant points here. First, that there’s a degree of future-proofing in GTA’s hardware settings, with options that will only become practical to turn on when PCs catch up. Secondly, the upping of the multiplayer limit from 16 players on the consoles to a 32 on the PC.

While it’s easy to dwell on increased scale of the multiplayer and how that impacts the experience, it shouldn’t overshadow how the addition of multiplayer to the GTA series is—in and of itself—a major step forward. Previously, to experience such a thing you had to turn to mod projects such as Multitheft Auto. Now, it’s just in there, and accessible.

The addition of multiple players changes GTA4's character. In singleplayer, it leans away from the inspired clownish stupidity that characterised the series up to this point—it’s simply a more serious game. But when you’ve got friends with you... well, that all goes out the window.

Other players turn the stupid up to a frankly awesome degree simply by acting like people. And if they won’t act stupid without encouragement, you can twist the rules to make it more likely they’ll go proper mental.

While there are a mass of free-for-all, team-based and cooperative game modes available, each of them is also tweakable with easily selectable options. For example, while playing the objective-control Turf War game, we limit the weapons to rocket-launchers only. This changes things, in a similar way that arming every knife-toting dangerous youth in London with an RPG would. It also brings out the subtleties in the control system: while the rockets are powerful, they’re also slow moving and require careful aiming.

That said, driving a car into a crossfire of half a dozen explosive projectiles and the resulting—here’s that word again—chaos is a less considered and more visceral thrill.

The options are what it’s all about. While you’re able to play multiplayer games across the three islands of Liberty City, in practice you’ll select one of the closed-off areas. These can be as intensely small as one of the peninsulas of the central island. Much depends on the game mode you’ve selected—for example, Mafiya modes have you trying to complete organised crime contracts to get the most rewards. Even straight deathmatch can be tuned to be more than just counting heads by racing to get the cash: suddenly scavenging from fallen bodies plays as much a part as just offing everyone.

There are also world options such as pedestrians and traffic, which are probably best left off to make larger games playable (the framerate was wincing when those 32 fire trucks lined up on the start-line). Actually, the race modes highlights much of what’s best in competitive GTA4 multiplayer.

Specifically, the GTA race. If only they added the ability to hit people physically when you’re riding alongside them, this would be Road Rash for the late noughties. Essentially it’s a race mode with added violence.

While you all start in vehicles of the same class, it’s unlikely you’re going to finish in them. While there’s health to pick up to patch your charge together, it’s more likely you’re going to die and come back on the moped (I finished the aforementioned fire-truck race on one, overtaking a truck on the inside, firing an Uzi into it while it tried—and failed—to sideswipe me. And if that sentence doesn’t make you want to play videogames, I fear for you).

Inevitably, as the lower placed racers decide they can’t win and turn to fighting among themselves or making road blocks of debris, you turn a race game into a desperate Max-Max survival simulator.

It is hilarious.

GTA4 as a multiplayer game works well on this axis. Even when it’s at its most standard, in its team-deatmatch modes, you have a fascinating collision between characters who move and fight like extras from Michael Mann’s Heat, and moments that are straight out of a gangster-take on the Keystone Cops: cars full of thugs leaning out of the window of their stolen car and opening up optimistically before crashing off a bridge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is what fellow humans add to GTA4: humanity.

I’m supposed to be stealing keys from several merchants in Leyawiin, but things haven’t exactly gone to plan. I accidentally wore my Grey Fox mask, a piece of armour that immediately marks me as a wanted criminal to every guard I pass. Even after finally sorting out my armour situation and making my way into Southern Books, the shopkeeper Bugak gro-Bol isn’t in bed when I enter and won’t stop following me around and trying to kick me out of his shop, because it’s midnight and I look like exactly the kind of shady character who might be breaking in to steal from him.

These are the same hapless adventures that I remember going on in Oblivion, but this time my Khajiit character isn’t out thieving at the behest of Cyrodiil’s Thieves Guild. I’ve already worked my way to the top of that organisation and become the Grey Fox myself. I’m back at the bottom of the totem pole now, working for a brand-new guild based in the modded territory of Elsweyr.

Meet the Khajiit

Wherever game developers leave loose lore on the ground, modders are always sure to pick it up and incorporate it. Khajiit lore in the Elder Scrolls games is varied and colourful, but has almost always been relegated to tomes and dialogue from cat-like merchants. Although the Khajiit homeland did appear in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, it didn’t show up again in a proper Elder Scrolls game until an expansion to The Elder Scrolls Online in 2019. In the meantime, modders have soaked up all the spare Khajiit facts available and designed the territory themselves.

One of the earliest fan-made forays into the Khajiit homeland is Elsweyr The Deserts of Anequina, originally published in June of 2009 by a Nexus Mods user called Iliana and including the work of dozens of other modders. I didn’t play Oblivion in 2006 when it released, but even 13 years later I can still intensely feel the awe that its opening fanfare and drawn-out 3D pan around the Imperial City must have inspired. In the same way I can appreciate how great a feat Elsweyr Anequina’s giant open expanse and huge cast of NPCs and quests are, despite playing through them 10 years later.

Anequina begins with a book, as plenty of mods do. It appears in my inventory to describe all the cities and quests available to me in the new territory. I also have to make sure I’ve turned off Oblivion’s default in-game borders that prevent me from exploring beyond the normal bounds of Cyrodiil. With that done, I’m able to wander across the southern border of the world and directly into Elsweyr over a bridge west of Bravil.

The first town I travel through is Riverhold, just over the southern border. It’s not immediately different from Cyrodiil—still lots of green, with bushes and waterfalls like other areas of Oblivion’s base game. Inside town though, I’m quickly face to face with all the various ‘furstocks’ of Khajiit. Most had never been seen in an Elder Scrolls game before, only described, and were left up to the imagination and resourcefulness of modders involved with Anequina.

Riverhold is full of Khajiit that lore-buffs will recognise, though they can’t possibly compare with the renditions from Bethesda’s own creations in The Elder Scrolls Online. Cathay, one of the playable races of most Elder Scrolls games, mingle with Ohmes, which have physical and facial features of Bosmer elves, just with fur on top. The house cat-like Alfiq and big cat Senche both seem to be based on the same cougar-esque large cat model, but scaled down and up respectively.

Whether by design choice or technical concern, neither Alfiq nor Senche can be spoken to. Other Khajiit speak plenty, though of course their voiced lines are only greetings like “Hello there!” and other small phrases that already existed in Oblivion’s base game for its Khajiit characters. Their more specific lines for quest giving are all text only. Elder Scrolls lore suggests that the scholarly Alfiq dislike speaking in front of outsiders, creating rumours that they are actually mute. I suppose my Khajiit thief is an outsider to them after all.

Local Color

Other mods that pair well with this dish

Beyond Riverhold, green shrubbery gives way to the arid desert that the northern region of Elsweyr—Anequina, as the mod is named after—is known for. Grassy hills quickly turn into steep sand dunes ringed with narrow walking paths that, to Anequina’s credit, feel as if they belong with the rest of Oblivion’s topology. Thanks to its notoriously floaty physics, it’s easy to break a leg stumbling down a dune while pursued by one of the many new monsters added in the mod.

The desert is dangerous, it turns out. In true Oblivion fashion, I learn the region’s fauna by running away from them at full tilt, turning back every so often to fire arrows into their knees. The desert is swamped with giant tarantulas, aggressive Alfiq, elephants that seem majestic and calm but absolutely are not when you get close enough, orc bandits, and many other things that want to kill me. It brings back fond memories of being chased by two very persistent wolves all the way from Bruma to Skingrad. Even a few remote villages of tribal Khajiit are hostile as soon as I got near their gates.

In between running from oversized arachnids, Anequina’s fully featured towns each have their own distinct design. In Dune there are camels for sale, and giant golden towers that look like a mosque on a postcard presiding over the open market in the lower half of the city. Riverhold is a treetop city of wooden homes all climbing the same waterfall topped with a modest lodge that calls itself a palace. Corinthe is a small town maze of back streets all branching from a central market, and its mostly single-story architecture crisscrossed with makeshift plank bridges between rooftops is the perfect hunting ground for the local Thieves Guild.

Compared with the Elsweyr I know from The Elder Scrolls Online, Anequina offers something a bit different. ESO’s wide-open world and detailed cities are beautiful, but all give me architectural fatigue. The steeply curved roofs that I’ve come to associate with the Khajiit thanks to that game are a constant presence in all of its cities in Northern Elsweyr.

Anequina features so much more contrast and more varied sources of inspiration thanks to all the different modders contributing to the buildings and city designs of the area.

Khajiit has quests

It isn’t all just exploration, of course. There are two dozen new quests and a few guilds to join. As in Oblivion, not all quests are of grand scale. In Riverhold my first encounter is with a man looking for his lost child. Solving this small mystery involves asking around town and using Oblivion’s odd speechcraft minigame to increase residents’ disposition towards me to eventually pry information out of them.

Outside town is a Khajiit highwayman not so committed to his task who simply gives up when I refuse to hand over the 400 gold coins he demands. Further into the desert I stumble over the dead body of a Khajiit lying next to a golden lamp. Having learned no lessons from pop culture whatsoever, I pick up the lamp and a dremora genie pops out to offer me a wish. Apparently I’m not averse to deals with demons because I wish, of all things, for love. I’m granted a random NPC friend for my trouble and the genie, now contractually freed from caring about my wants or needs, proceeds to attack.

With that problem behind me, I pull out my Anequina guide book again, the tome that started it all. I seem to remember seeing mention of the Thieves Guild. As the Grey Fox of Cyrodiil I find it only right that I should visit the local chapter and see what dark work needs doing. That’s where my great struggle lifting keys from the pockets of merchants in Leyawiin begins. In all my time traipsing about Elsweyr I’ve entirely forgotten how to be a proper thief. I do eventually manage to steal all three requested keys and return them to my new dispatcher Jinsiraga in Corinthe. After that I’m off to steal some horses, naturally.

These are only the beginning of my adventures in the Oblivion version of Elsweyr. Anequina understands Oblivion’s playfulness with its lazy highwaymen and desert genies. If not for having to install Anequina, I’d have never known it wasn’t part of Oblivion in the first place.

Back in June, RuneScape studio Jagex held its first live event outside the UK (and its biggest to date): Deadman All Stars, an Old School RuneScape PvP tournament. I had the chance to talk to OSRS creative director Kieren Charles at the event, and he explained his philosophy on running the 13 year-old fork of the 25 year-old MMO amid its new lease on life.

"The game's bigger now than it was in 2007," Charles said of RuneScape's overall health, while OSRS is now older than RuneScape was when Old School began in 2013. Last August, Old School hit an all-time player count record eclipsing any era or version of the game, and Charles estimated upwards of one million active subscribers just for Old School.

Charles himself was part of the original RuneScape phenomenon, but as a player, one of the core mid-to-late millennial cohort that made the game ubiquitous in middle schools during the golden age of MMOs. "I grew up with the game," Charles told me. "I was 14 in the school library playing RuneScape. I was just the one who never quit."

But why choose the 2007 iteration of RuneScape as a starting point? The game first launched in 2001, and had already undergone major revisions like the "RuneScape 2" update in 2004. Charles joined the OSRS team a few years after it started, but looking back, he characterized the choice as "kind of arbitrary, but based on what players deemed the sort of golden [age]."

"Players actually wanted the 2006 version, but we didn't have a copy of that version of the game," revealed Jagex senior communications manager Danni Amos. "A [Jagex employee] found the 2007 server in their desk drawer, and we had to boot it up, see if it works."

Wisdom of the crowd

Old School is, as best as I can tell, the first instance of officially-supported 'classic' servers for an MMO. The first fan servers running preserved versions of transformed or discontinued MMOs preceded it, but the likes of WoW Classic were following Jagex's lead. Charles believes that Old School's community engagement leaves it the best of both worlds when it comes to fan-managed versus official throwback MMOs.

OSRS regularly gets new content, including full-scale expansions like 2024's Varlamore. Those udpates need to match the Old School vibe, and Charles said one of the best compliments he gets is that the new stuff feels like it could have come out in '06 or '07. But all potential new additions are also put to a community vote before getting implemented, and if a feature or addition doesn't meet the 70% approval minimum, it gets scrapped.

"We are already running an MMO that's entirely decided by fans, but it's backed by a huge development team who could still do things that are at scale," said Charles. "With fan server versions, it's never going to be at the same scale. It's hard to imagine it having the number of players like you can have with an official version, nor the development support."

It's an approach he doesn't necessarily recommend to every MMO developer, and the team has had stuff rejected which "really does suck in the moment," according to Charles.

But they've reached a point where they don't bring a feature to vote unless they're confident players will dig it. Besides, Charles said he'd still rather have a proposed addition get rejected than "spend six months or a year of development time to then launch it and find out people hate it."

While many great games come about from singular, forceful artistic visions, Charles described himself and his colleagues more as caretakers. "With Old School RuneScape, it's what the community wants. We're making it for them and looking after it for them," he told me.

"I'm fortunate as a creative director to be able to inherit such a good foundation for what we do going forward. I was part of the community directly before I joined the studio. I know what that feeling is, and I want to make sure that we look after that and keep it going."

From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #326 (UK, January 2019).

Something I miss when I play digital games is the tactile side of play. It’s why videogames and board games coexist in my life so beautifully. One allows for complexity beyond what a pen-and-paper can track, and the other offers tokens to hold, boards to construct, people to physically turn to as you play. Somewhere in the middle are a wonderful selection of videogames where you feel compelled to take notes.

I’m not talking about games which demand you fetch a sheet of paper as part of the experience. These are games where my experience just happens to spill over into the real world as drawings and words. The ones where I decide to keep my thoughts straight by idly jotting down words, phrases, the location of a treasure to come back to or an area to investigate more thoroughly.

After a while the odd word or two becomes a page, perhaps even a map. Arrows allow paragraphs to put out little runners, setting down roots in blank spaces and fruiting whole new clusters of notes.

Playing detective

Her Story is one such game. The interface allows you to store a certain amount of information—you can add tags for each video clip, and keep a handful saved for reference. What it doesn’t offer is a way to note all the different potential search terms a new clip throws up and which you want to work through when you’re constantly being sidetracked.

To stop myself forgetting, I reached for my notebook. A record of the victim started to accumulate on one page while the local pub formed another hub. The left side filled up with keywords. One cluster of notes tried to follow outfit changes but it got hemmed in by a lost baby, a widowed midwife, mushrooms, mirrors and a forensic entomologist.

I had enough for a basic solution to the crime after a couple of hours so that’s tangled in there, too. But so many words remained uninvestigated and I wanted to check my working, so I kept going. The result is a section of notebook brimming with curiosity. I like it not so much because it’s a useful record of information—my notes are as baffling to me as to a stranger once the game has faded from memory—but because the volume of writing, and the energetic connections make visible parts of the process of playing a game.

My Return of the Obra Dinn notes take on a different form, but the affection I feel is the same. Having spent the majority of the game keeping all the information in my head or using the map and crew documents as reference points, I reached for my notepad. I needed to cross reference a lot of objects and a lot of names to make progress.

Instead of evidence swelling into lumps of story on the page like it did in Her Story, that part happened in my head and my notebook was about ruling out possibilities. Numbers and names have circles round them, grouping them in ways which are already fading from my mind. These pages feel more like a code because of the shorthand and abstractions.

Different again are my esports notes. For Dota, League and Smite I’m in the habit of recording each match at an event in my book. Every match starts with the list of players and which characters they’ve picked as well as who got banned. It’s a ritual that helps me settle in for a game as much as a journalistic reference. After all, I could just check VODs or a wiki for that data if I forget.

Match report

Writing character names over and over helps me absorb trends in the game—it gives them an analogue feel as well as their digital flavour. Sometimes I write out skillsets for characters I haven’t played in a while. And then it’s just whatever feels noteworthy from the match. Key kills, maybe, and big fights, weird decisions, unusual item choices.

But I also add scrappy sketches and during a tense game the breathlessness and excitement on the screen leaves a mark in my book. The writing gets faster, harder to read apart from upper case explosions of record- keeping, and it’s smothered in ellipses and exclamation marks.

The notes I make around games—scrawled maps to remind me of a route, gold marker pen spiders nudging up against swearwords, lists of murder suspects that span double page spreads—are some of my fondest possessions. They allow a digital pursuit to spill over into the physical world and express so much time, excitement and mental energy.

Just don’t ask me what they mean!

In a few months, Nintendo will release a shiny remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Switch 2. Given its reputation as one of Nintendo's crown jewels, I imagine it will be remarkably faithful to the original, but with new graphics, some tweaks to the controls, and a few other modern touches—like the kinds we've been able to play Ocarina of Time with on PC since 2022.

Ocarina of Time's unofficial PC port Ship of Harkinian, developed by a group dedicated to reverse-engineering the Nintendo 64 game and painstakingly rewriting its code, has a built-in randomizer, accessibility options like text-to-speech, and literally hundreds of enhancements, from autosaving to tunable difficulty to ultrawide to high framerate support. There are options as granular as letting Link unsheathe his sword without attacking and disabling certain graphical effects so that they can be replaced with mods.

Speaking of mods: There are hundreds of those, too, letting you use the character models from the 2011 3DS port, make the UI HD, or play as Wario if you're freaky like that. OOT's unofficial port was a rarity back in 2022, but today it's part of a bustling corner of the hobby game development scene, where hundreds of fans are reverse-engineering old games to make them playable on modern hardware (primarily PC and Android).

There are both PC ports based on fully rewritten games like OOT, but there are also new frameworks for bypassing a lot of that time-consuming work, including N64 Recompiled, ReXGlue for the Xbox 360 and RecompOne for the original PlayStation. Developing a recompilation is still a major undertaking, done for free by skilled developers on their personal time, but it's far more approachable now than it's ever been.

This scene has its challenges—namely an influx of low-effort, AI vibe coded slop that frustrates the developers who've put years of time and sweat into the tools that make these projects possible. And there are, of course, hype-at-all-costs YouTube channels that rush to make videos on each new announcement without investigating whether or not they're AI rush jobs that will never be fully faithful to the original games.

But even with those problems, I'm still going to plant a flag in the ground right here and declare that static recompilation, the go-to technique for porting retro console games to modern systems, is the most exciting thing going on in videogames here in 2026.

As my colleague Morgan Park recently pointed out in his editorial Embrace the great Tech Pause, the timing couldn't be better. Because the games are old and the process of converting the code to a modern language your PC understands is much more efficient than emulating the entire console, recompiled games can run extremely well on really modest hardware.

Morgan called out the "magical experience" of playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess port Dusklight, which runs at 90 fps on the Steam Deck:

"It's an amazing package—both a remaster and a community update bundle—that outclasses Nintendo's own preservation work with modern resolution support, high framerates, and quality-of-life toggles. Within minutes I had Dusklight recognizing the gyro of my Steam controller, enabling bow motion aiming that's better than a Wiimote… Not only are these hand-crafted ports a huge win for preservation, but they inject new life into out-of-print classics while also making them more accessible."

Just this year we've seen notable recompilations for more games than I can keep track of (though filtering out the questionably coded ones narrows the list a bit).

Here are a handful of notable ones—many of which have only ever been playable on one console:

• Jak 3
• Twilight Princess
• Banjo Kazooie and Nuts & Bolts
• Harvest Moon 64
• Pokémon Crystal
• Bomberman 64 and Bomberman Hero
• Snowboard Kids 2

Those are in addition to fan ports released in the last couple years, some of which really go above and beyond in their treatment of the original game. Like sm64coopdx, which adds four-player co-op to Super Mario 64. Or Dinosaur Planet: Recompiled, which is painstakingly restoring the unfinished, never-released N64 version of the Rare game that eventually became Star Fox Adventures on the GameCube.

There are tons more porting projects in the early stages, and hundreds of games being decompiled, though that doesn't mean they'll all end up playable on PC. But there are some other exciting recomp ports I expect in the coming months that are already public:

And there are some

• Donkey Kong 64
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• Blue Dragon
• Animal Crossing
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
• Fatal Frame

And that's just what's on my radar right now—without mentioning a few for beloved games that are heavily using AI. We'll keep writing about the most exciting recompilations on PC Gamer, but if you want to follow along more closely, check out this thread on Resetera, where members are doing the hard work of weeding out the vibe coded projects from the real deals.

Causality Chain is a series at PC Gamer exploring the unlikely links between history, culture, and videogames.

Humanity has witnessed countless tragedies—but occasionally, through the alchemy of passing time, moments of singular woe can serve as a foundation for future wonders. Depending, in this case, on how broad your definition of wonder is.

Today, we once again chart the curious contours of cause and effect, tracing how a haunting moment in an American horrormeister's early years can ultimately lead to an internationally renowned actor participating in an unconventional form of simulated equine combat.

Join us, as we tip the dominoes once again:

Stephen King witnessing a childhood tragedy 🔗 Kiefer Sutherland's combat horseshit command

A tragic early chapter

1951: At "barely four" years old, Stephen King experiences a harrowing episode he'd later share in his 1981 non-fiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre¹—an episode he himself doesn't remember, but which was later related to him by his mother. One day, he suddenly returned home from playing with a neighbor who lived near the railroad line. He was "white as a ghost," his mother said, and refused to speak until the next day.

"It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks," King writes.

He goes on to insist in the book that, however horrifying it might have been, the incident had no bearing on his interests or habits as an author, as becoming a writer is "a direct result of conscious will" and not something "born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma."

However…

Phantom pains

1982: Viking Press publishes Different Seasons², a Stephen King collection consisting of four novellas. In the third story, The Body, narrator Gordon Lachance—a fiction author—recalls the conflict he and his childhood friends once entered with a gang of greasers over the discovery of the dead body of a neighborhood boy who'd been hit by a train.

Any resemblance to real events is purely coincidental, I'm sure.

Adaptation

August 22, 1986: Stand by Me³, a coming-of-age drama based on The Body, releases in American theaters. A critical and commercial success, the film cast Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell as its four lead boys.

It will also contribute to the rising fame of a young Kiefer Sutherland, who plays antagonist gang leader Ace Merrill.

Proliferation

April 18, 1987: Stand by Me is released in theaters in Japan, where it goes on to become a beloved classic. It's referenced in Mother (renamed Earthbound Beginnings in the US) and the Gen 1 Pokémon games⁴. Stand By Me receives VHS editions intended to help viewers learn English⁵. It will still be rebroadcast on Japanese TV to sate viewer demand⁶ almost 40 years after release.

Every year it draws Japanese tourists⁷ on a pilgrimage to the Oregon town where it was filmed.

Tactical espionage action, of a sort

November 6, 2001: 25 years after the release of Stand by Me, the first episode of Fox's action thriller 24 airs on American television, starring Kiefer Sutherland in the lead role as counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer. The show is a massive success—and, as the quintessential post-9/11 program, often a controversial one—drawing more than 17 million viewers⁸ for the premiere of its fifth season.

During its nine-season run, 24 also achieves international popularity, thanks in part to the successful distribution of its seasonal DVD box sets.

Militaires sans frontières

2005: Kiefer Sutherland appears as Jack Bauer in a series of 24-themed Japanese commercials for CalorieMate energy products⁹. Aided by a massive marketing campaign for the 2003 Japanese release VHS and DVD releases of the show's first season, 24 quickly became a huge phenomenon in Japan¹⁰—particularly among binge-watching rental store patrons, who contribute to an initial word-of-mouth reputation for being in such high demand it's impossible to find.

24 even sees a Japanese remake in 2020¹¹, though it only achieves a middling reception. Sutherland, meanwhile, gains lasting recognition in Japan: At a 2012 press conference¹² in Tokyo, Sutherland says "I am where I am today thanks to everyone in Japan."

Snake eater

June 2013: Infamous action thriller enthusiast Hideo Kojima announces that, in place of the expected performance from David Hayter, Kiefer Sutherland has been cast¹³ to provide facial capture and English voice acting for Snake in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Kojima says he was seeking a "more subdued performance" to match the "much darker tone" of MGS5, and his Hollywood producer friend Avi Arad suggested Sutherland. "I was like, 'Why didn't I think of that?'" Kojima recalls saying.

While Kojima hasn't mentioned 24 as an inspiration in interviews, a surviving fan transcription¹⁴ of a director commentary track included in the Japan-exclusive Metal Gear Solid 3: Extreme DVD Box Set has Kojima directly citing 24 as the model for some of the game's presentational flourishes. The game was released in 24's prime.

Do it

September 1, 2015: Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain releases worldwide on PC and both PlayStation and Xbox. MGS5 features systems allowing the player to research and unlock combat equipment and additional skills for Snake and his companion characters.

One skill, unlocked by reaching a 50% bond rating with D-Horse, lets Snake—as performed by the peerless vocal talent of Kiefer Sutherland—order his combat steed to "do it," causing D-Horse to defecate at the player's current location¹⁵.

If an enemy light vehicle drives over the horseshit, it loses control and incapacitates its driver and passengers.

Videogames.

Sources and further reading

1. Danse Macabre, StephenKing.com
2. Different Seasons, StephenKing.com
3. Stand by Me, IMDB
4. The famous Stand by Me reference in Pokémon, Legends of Localization
5. Entry for Stand by Me (CINEX : Cinema English exercise), CiNii database
6. What are the highlights of "Stand by Me" according to comedian Kogaken, a huge movie fan?, Kin'yō Road Show (machine translated)
7. Japanese superfans flock to this small city in Oregon because of ‘Stand by Me’, Thrillist
8. Television program viewership ranking from 01/09/06 through 01/15/06, ABC (archived July 7, 2011)
9. Kiefer Sutherland's first Calorie Mate commercial, YouTube
10. Re-emerging with a remake: The legendary '24' that captivated the entire nation, leaving them unable to sleep, Oricon News (machine translated)
11. 24 Japan, Wikipedia
12. Kiefer Sutherland visits Japan for the third time: "I am where I am today thanks to everyone in Japan", Oricon News (machine translated)
13. Kiefer Sutherland confirmed as Snake in Metal Gear Solid 5, GameSpot
14. Hideo Kojima Metal Gear Solid 3 commentary transcription (Ocelot Battle ～ The Fear Battle), Muni Shinobu's Metal Gear Solid fansite
15. MGSV - DO IT D-HORSE, YouTube

Read more on PC Gamer

• After 10 years, there's a functioning Metal Gear Solid 5 co-op mod so you and a friend can be played like a damn fiddle together
• He once said playing Metal Gear Solid 5 would be '60 hours of humiliation,' but Snake actor David Hayter finally played the game: 'All is forgiven'
• Crapshoot: The Stephen King 'game' that will take you to a dark place

This month, PC Gamer gets world-exclusive access to Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Capcom's much-anticipated new action sword-fighting game. For our awesome lead feature, PC Gamer travels to Osaka, Japan, to go inside Capcom's headquarters and play plenty of Way of the Sword as well as interview seven of the key developers who have brought the game to life. And, from what we've seen already, this is looking like one of the games of the year, delivering visceral, kinetic, intense swordfights unlike any we've seen to date. Get the inside scoop in this issue of PC Gamer magazine.

This special issue also comes with two great gifts, too. First, we have PC Gamer's Top 100 supplement. This is a 32-page mini mag that details the top 100 games we think PC gamers should play today in 2026. It is the result of weeks of voting, debating and, naturally, PC gaming here at PC Gamer Towers, and the result is our definitive recommendations for our favourite games, both new and old.

And, secondly, to celebrate our world-exclusive Onimusha: Way of the Sword cover feature, we've also included a huge A1 Onimusha: Way of the Sword poster in this issue, too. This is another exclusive for PC Gamer magazine, so if you fancy a kick-ass poster on your wall, then pick up this issue today.

There's another fantastic feature in this issue of PC Gamer, too. Co-op games are having a moment right now, with more great options to play with your friends available than ever before. As such, here the PC Gamer team gets together to decide upon our favourites, with everything from social hangouts through to competitive madcap romps included.

In terms of previews this issue, PC Gamer goes hands-on with The Blood of Dawnwalker, the incredibly exciting new dark fantasy action-RPG from the director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In addition, we preview Star Wars: Galactic Racer, Wardogs, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, Flask, Carcass Clad, and Brigador Killers.

Meanwhile, over in reviews, the PC Gamer team passes judgment on a selection of new games, including Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Moonlight Peaks, Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations, Meccha Cameleon, Denshattack!, Granblue Fantasy: Relink - Endless Ragnarok, among others.

Cover feature: Onimusha: Way of the Sword

Written by: Robert Jones

Magazine exclusive: Until September 26th, 2026

What's in this month's cover story: PC Gamer travels to Capcom's HQ in Osaka, Japan, to play its ripping new action game, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, as well as interview seven of its key developers. The result is the definitive all-you-need-to-know preview for Way of the Sword, with exclusive behind-the-scenes information about how the game was made and what PC gamers should expect when it releases this September.

Secondary feature

Additional content in this month's issue

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When I really think about how I spend my time writing here on PC Gamer, there’s actually not all that much of it that goes into straightforward recommendations. Between interviews, editorials about the games industry, features about PC gaming history and a spot of news here and there, it’s not all that often I just get to say: “Hey, here’s something I really like. Check it out!”

Considering how noisy the internet can be, it’s inevitable that when we do share these bits of our lives they’re quickly buried and forgotten. This is a permanent home for my favorites: Games, movies, gadgets, recipes, maybe even life tips? Before we get to what I like, though, a bit more on what I’m like:

Stuff I recommend

Here's a good video from 2026

PC Gamer reads I recommend

2026

• I ran 45 idle game demos from Steam Next Fest all at once for a desktop companion battle royale by Andrea Shearon
• I played the Halo: Campaign Evolved remake and original Halo back-to-back, here's my review by Morgan Park
• 'It nearly killed me': Why studio head James Ohlen left sci-fi RPG Exodus mid-development—and why EA crushing his Star Wars: The Old Republic reboot was the 'beginning of the end' at BioWare by Samuel Horti
• It's time to set the record straight: Doomguy's armor does not have a tummy window, his shirt just got ripped by Ted Litchfield
• From ancient Buddhism, to iconic manga hair, to Keanu Reeves: a PC Gamer Causality Chain™ by me
• How do you put a price tag on a legacy like id Software's? by me

Oldies but goodies

• Promise Mascot Agency review by Maddi Chilton
• 'A good idea, infinite drive, and lots of Diet Pepsi': How YouTube essayist Majuular's life changed course telling the story of Ultima across 2 years and more than 20 hours of documentaries by Justin Wagner
• The rise of the Chinese action RPG by Kerry Brunskill
• Mail trucks and millions of dollars: how shareware transformed PC gaming forever by Jeremy Peel
• How a bunch of art school grads made putrid, brilliant horror adventure Sanitarium by Alexis Ong
• ​Murder Incorporated: ten months of deception for one kill in Eve Online by Tom Francis
• Life in Vana'diel: 19 years in, Final Fantasy 11 is still an MMO unlike any other by James Mielke
• The story of the bizarre Mega Man DOS games by Tyler Wilde
• Breaking the internet: The story of EverQuest, the MMO that changed everything by Steven Messner
• The ethics of smurfing by Nicole Carpenter
• Ubisoft, please put my dad in Far Cry 5 by James Davenport
• I put 'Gamer Goo' on my hands, and god help me I actually liked it by Andy Chalk
• It's time for cyberpunk games to remember how to be punk by Jody Macgregor
• The '80s and '90s PC games unbelievably still being updated today by Chris Livingston and I
• The 50 most important PC games of all time by me (and many contributors)
• The race to save Japan's incredible '80s PC gaming history before it's gone by me

I'm seated on the edge of a transport helicopter, legs dangling in the breeze, when our pilot flips on the radio to Flight of the Valkyries. "Duh duh duh duh, duh, duh duh duh duh, duh" three passengers sing in non-unison, their VOIP lagging two seconds behind the actual song. The pilot interrupts the performance with an announcement: "Jump quick once you see grass, because we're headed to the hot zone. How many of you bought a parachute?" The chopper goes silent. "Well then."

I realize this is the same pilot who taxied me to the frontline at the very beginning of the match over 40 minutes ago. He's been doing this the whole time, has zero kills, and according to his top five position on the scoreboard, has made over $35,000 of in-game currency. Bullets immediately start whizzing past the chopper as we reach the middle of the gigantic map. Our pilot descends toward an LZ with a practiced corkscrew maneuver that, from the inside, could've been mistaken for crashing.

But we land with zero casualties. I touch grass, tip the pilot $25, then get shot in the head about six seconds later. I lay there, bullet in brain, weighing my options: give up and lose the $2,600 I spent on this loadout, or wait for a revive. Were this Battlefield, I'd get impatient and respawn after the first samaritan passed me by. But in this game, money talks: I press F1 to "bribe" anyone in the vicinity. Now, whoever risks their life to save mine gets $100. Ok maybe $150. $300? Yes. At $300 someone took notice, dragged my body to safety, and brought me back.

That is Wardogs, the upcoming milsim FPS from the team behind Battalion 1944 that's entering early access in September. I entered the closed playtest held this past weekend with no expectations—I'm a fan of similar games like Squad, but haven't regularly played a milsim in years. I jumped in because Wardogs has slowly built up a lot of buzz, and five hours of playtime later, I can see why.

Wardogs is PvP only and supports 100-player servers. The main mode in the playtest is three teams (still not sure how they're dividing 100 players in three) fighting over the same circle of territory on a gigantic map. The team with the most bodies in the zone scores, but you can make your body count as two by occupying the "hot zone" within the circle—that's where the most killing happens. The format is directly inspired by a popular Arma 3 mod, Arma: King of the Hill.

Money talks

On the spectrum between "hardcore Arma stuff" and "basically Battlefield," Wardogs finds an exact middle ground. Weapons are snappy and the gunplay is approachable. At a basic level, all you really need to know to contribute is to stand in the capture zone and shoot the other teams—if you get Battlefield, Wardogs won't be a huge leap.

Peeling back another layer reveals a logistical metagame familiar to milsims: building FOBs (forward operating bases), constructing defenses, transporting supplies, and controlling strategic locations.

Where Wardogs differs most is its economy. Players earn account-level money for doing anything productive—getting kills, standing in a capture zone, healing teammates, driving folks from A to B—and you spend that cash to gear up. As mentioned, you can also throw around your cash in the form of tips and bribes.

Cash is how Wardogs (like Arma mod before it) harnesses a bit of extraction shooter juice. You fill a shopping cart with thousands of dollars in guns, helmets, vests, magazines, gadgets, and bandages, and then put that gear on the line. You have a personal stake in surviving, and the best chance of doing that is sticking near teammates.

It's a really smart incentive structure that goes beyond the Battlefield idea of simply rewarding XP for teamplay (Wardogs does that too). It also scratches the part of my brain that enjoys putting together a loadout in extraction shooters. A single life does sort of play out like a raid: you gear up, head out, then try to make more money than you lost. But cash handouts are generous enough that you don't need to obsess over your wallet: I made a profit in 9/10 lives by simply standing on the objective, healing, and getting the occasional kill. I suspect that'll change as I unlock more expensive gear and develop a finer taste in helmets.

I'm impressed by the ways Wardogs is both individualistic and team-focused, but developer Bulkhead might need to adjust the numbers throughout early access. The main thrust of the progression is unlocking more guns and vehicles. That gets expensive fast, so I can see some players adopting an overly safe playstyle to maximise their profit per match.

The weekend playtest saw the beginnings of this: My matches had a lot of teammates camping towers with scoped rifles instead of pushing toward the objective. FOB defense is important and all, but I think they just wanted to farm kills from a safe spot.

Class rules

Similarly, I don't think Wardogs' loosey-goosey class roles set teams up for success. There are no formal classes, just tools that anyone can buy like rockets, defibrillators, and hammers. A class-based game like Squad ensures that a full squad has a balance of every role, but in Wardogs, it was hard to find somebody who'd gone to the trouble of buying a crowbar to break into enemy FOBs, or who had extra bandages for teammates, or who had even unlocked a rocket launcher at all yet (I still haven't).

The flip side is that Wardogs is less prescriptive, and freeing: I'm never locked out of sniping because people with quicker load times grabbed those roles first, or boxed into the medic role nobody else wanted. This is an inherently less organized game than its closest comparisons, but that's also the appeal. There's work to be done, but Bulkhead has done a decent job of making collaboration natural through establishing an extremely clear objective, simplifying logistics, and setting low prices for the most crucial gear.

Wardogs gives a very confident first impression. It's entering a two-year early access period with a robust core mode, strong fundamentals, and a distinctive twist. It's got problems, but it's the type of shooter that's immediately attracting dedicated fans with constructive feedback—this thread is pretty spot-on. I really want to play more.

Out of game, Bulkhead is saying all the right things for a savvy studio confident in what it's making: preorders are open at $40, but Bulkhead encourages buyers to refund if they don't like the beta that begins on August 21. The studio has also committed to zero monetization throughout early access, and said skins will always be earned, not bought (with the exception of a supporter pack). It's also worth noting that Wardogs is a PC-first FPS that'll support community servers. They're really speaking my language here.

Wardogs is out September 10 in early access.

Star Wars Zero Company is giving the people what they want. And that is: more XCOM. The turn-based shootouts, perishable soldiers and those beautiful moments where you survive by the skin of your teeth because of judicious use of overwatch—it all unapologetically calls to mind the two games that have defined the modern tactics genre. It's what we've been waiting for.

I've played through 18 cycles of a preview build, and there were moments where it felt like I was checking out a Star Wars-themed XCOM 2 mod, but with huge production values. It is, at times, incredibly familiar. Which isn't surprising, of course. Developer Bit Reactor was founded by Greg Foertsch, former Firaxis art director, and a bunch of Firaxis veterans followed him to this new venture.

Risky business

But inviting comparisons with XCOM, especially XCOM 2, is risky. Look at what happened to XCOM: Chimera Squad. It was a genuinely compelling twist on XCOM 2, but the ways in which it wasn't quite as good as its predecessor were massively amplified by its association. After dabbling in Zero Company's early game, I can't help but wonder if this is happening again. It is very XCOM, but it isn't XCOM.

When it works, oh boy it works. In one mission, my squad was surrounded and outnumbered. My troops were in good positions, though, so I thought I'd be able to chip away at the enemy numbers. And then a series of shots with 80-90% chances to hit missed. All of them.

I was screaming at the RNG gods. Why would they do me dirty like this? After the enemy turn, every member of my squad had taken a battering. But it wasn't over. I had tricks up my sleeve, most notably some abilities that gave my squad extra action points and free shots. My next turn was going to be my time to shine.

Once I was in control again, I activated a backup ability, so when my clone buddy Trick fired at a Separatist, one of his comrades followed it up with a free attack of their own. Some deft repositioning also allowed one of my crew to get behind the enemy frontline, so he didn't have to worry about shooting goons hiding behind cover. But then I had a better idea in the form of a cover-destroying, bone-crushing grenade. Things were looking up.

My leader ability also meant I could dole out an extra action point to someone—which I gifted to the beefiest member of the crew, who then charged at a Separatist and beat him to death.

I'd prepared for the next enemy turn, too, by holding back one member of my squad in the previous turn. Instead of attacking, I taunted a big group of enemies and activated his retaliation ability—this meant that four enemies would exclusively target him, and every time they shot at him, he'd immediately shoot back.

By the time enemy reinforcements arrived, we'd cleaned up. They walked through a door into the combat arena, only to be greeted by three overwatch cones. Zero Company eschews XCOM's omni-directional overwatch, which feels restrictive, but appropriately tactical. Anyway, the Separatists were goners.

Damn did it feel good. I got that XCOM 2 buzz, but there were also some Zero Company-specific tricks in there too—particularly the flexibility and even greater emphasis on teamwork. That this is so present even in the early game, when the bag of tricks is at its emptiest, is reassuring.

The astromech droid class is a prime example of Zero Company's slightly different approach. These little droids aren't frontline glory hounds, instead filling a support role. It's another way to get extra AP, or revel in some squad-wide buffs, and their self-heals mean that, while they are vulnerable, they don't need to be constantly protected.

This class is made all the more interesting because Zero Company, like XCOM, makes each one of your crew matter, because you're only ever going to be fielding a handful of troops. So that astromech might be a lifesaver, but can you afford to go into a fight one gun down?

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm is tempered by all the times the fights feel like a lesser example of the XCOM 2 model. One where fog of war, patrolling units and surprise attacks are replaced by regular enemy reinforcements spawning in clearly defined areas, which has a devastating impact on the tension that's normally inherent in tactics games, and especially XCOM.

I confess I'm also getting pretty bored of the combat arenas, which tend to be small, mostly open spaces littered with crates. Zero Company has an entire galaxy to play with, but while there's a variety of tilesets with some cosmetic differences, most of the locations have already started to blend together.

This issue is exacerbated by the range of foes—people with guns, and droids with guns. There's the odd exception, and I know more exotic enemy types appear later on with greater frequency, but it still feels comparatively conservative for a galaxy where space wizards exist.

Then there are the problems with clarity and precision—which Zero Company is a bit lacking in. I've made far too many positioning mistakes because of this, and I've been disappointed to discover that Bit Reactor is clearly expecting us to use a gamepad. Zero Company is just unpleasant to play with a mouse and keyboard. In a tactics game, this is wild.

Midnight Snack

While the battles feel comfortably XCOM-adjacent, a lot of the most novel and forward facing elements draw from Midnight Suns, which Foertsch was working on at Firaxis before he left to set up Bit Reactor. The more concentrated theme of camaraderie, the pre-battle conversations with your squad inside a base you can freely explore—on top of some pre-mission exploration in the combat levels themselves—and the mid-fight team-ups all evoke Firaxis's heroic tactics game.

Some of these elements have a mechanical payoff, like the bonuses individual members of your squad receive from working together. But even the arguably fluffier parts, like the aforementioned conversations, or those brief moments where you get to explore an area prior to a fight, walking around as if you're in a third-person action game, make a significant impact.

The cinematic presentation and subtle nods to RPGs elevate the workmanlike tactical gameplay, ensuring that the whole feels richer. Zero Company has character and panache—of the kind you don't often see in a tactics game.

In most cases, though, it doesn't go as hard as Midnight Suns. The Den is so much smaller than the Abbey, the conversations are brief and the team-up mechanics—though extremely handy—are restrained.

There is one place where it goes harder, however, combining both XCOM and Midnight Suns in a way that makes the stakes feel so much higher. While Marvel's heroes could not be killed, any member of your squad, even the full-fledged bespoke characters, can die. We cared about our very mortal XCOM squads despite their lack of identity, filling in the gaps ourselves. But we don't need to do that here, and the risk of losing a member of the team feels so much more pronounced.

If permadeath isn't your bag, though, you can simply turn it off.

I've been a bit more down on Zero Company than I expected, but 18 cycles only lets you explore the tip of the iceberg, and I still think there's a lot to like here. Squad management and progression is really strong, for instance, and I've already had plenty of fun mucking around with builds, using different combinations of classes and weapons to create potent killers.

At the moment I'm really digging my pistol-wielding gunslinger. Pistols are pretty weak, but you can fire them more often. To take advantage of this and shore up the weapon's weaknesses, I've turned him into a crit hit monster—basically a sniper with a pistol. He's a bit soft, though, and I've been having just as much of a lark building indomitable tanks who soak up damage and dish it back out again to devastating effect.

So I've been having a pretty good time, then. Just not as much as I expected. And a big part of that is probably because I was expecting Zero Company to push the blockbuster tactics game forward a bit more. XCOM 2 is a decade old but has yet to be shoved off its throne—and to do that will require a boldness that I've not really seen here. Little of it feels like evolution, and in some cases it feels like a step back—albeit an enjoyable one all the same.

Hopefully it takes bigger swings later in the campaign. Otherwise, I think it might leave me pining for XCOM and Midnight Suns again.

I recently had a chance to play a healthy chunk of the upcoming Star Wars: Galactic Racer, a—you guessed it—racing game where you can hop behind the seat of a handful of different vehicles: Landspeeders, a skim speeder, and speeder-bikes. There's also, naturally, podracing.

Each of these vehicles handles differently—landspeeders are the most consistent (they're basically just a car) and drift well, skim speeders are similar to land speeders, except they have a "knife's edge" mode that lets them tilt sideways to narrow their profile and dodge obstacles, and speeder-bikes are quicker with less control in the turns and, owing to being bikes, are more fragile.

I don't know the specifics of how podracers are tuned compared to landspeeders—but based on my experience, they're capable of both agile turns and breakneck speed, and you'll usually only be racing them against each other in specific arcade modes or multiplayer, though they do apparently pop up in the singleplayer campaign down the road.

I can't yet speak to the multiplayer, but I can talk about the game's singleplayer campaign, which has pleasantly surprised me in that hey, it's a roguelike, and I like those! Now, to those of you with roguelike fatigue, that might pull a groan from your weary chests—I am not one of those people. I am a wretched creature who loves meta-progression and repeat runs and incremental mastery, and I was having a ball.

The broad strokes: You play as Shade, a mysterious racer who has been called in to knock the socks off snooty nepo-baby Kestar Bool—bringing along your delightfully-accented mechanic, a four-armed lady named Hibi, and your ride. Which in true roguelike fashion starts out as a piece of junk.

To put Bool in his place, you're gonna need to complete galactic tours, and if you've played any roguelike before in your life, you know what's going on here. There are branching paths and you get a choice of three upgrades on occasion—the build variety of which is actually pretty in-depth.

Developer Fuse Games has done a bang-up job of stretching the game's core mechanics—drifting, boosting, a ramjet (a more aggro boost that can blow your speeder up if you're not careful), takedowns, and abilities like shields, flamethrowers, and so on—and finding ways to create builds around them.

For example, in one run, I focused on fleshing out my ramjet's functionality, lowering its cooldown and combining that with an upgrade that instantly recharged my normal boost whenever my ramjet came online. But I also saw potential builds based around scoring takedowns and "redlining", which means existing in the danger zone of your ramjet's overheated state.

The nodes themselves are decently varied, too. You've got little challenges peppered between the actual races, and those races themselves have some variety—for example, most races just need you to place within the upper echelons, but there are riskier elimination races where the lowest-ranking pilots are punted out of the running for crimes against speed (namely, their lack of it).

If you bungle one of these races, you lose one of your tokens—which serve as your lives for that run, and can also be collected as a reward to keep your races rolling, too. And if you do crash out, you get a bundle of credits for your trouble, which can be spent to increase your base stats—or buy cosmetics, once you've got your vehicle of choice upgraded.

It reminds me a lot of a high-budget, more arcade-racer version of RageSquid's Descenders, which is no bad thing. I've spent a couple dozen delightful hours in that game tearing up the dirt and trying to do cool flips, and I can easily imagine losing a similar amount of time to the rinse & repeat nature of Star Wars: Galactic Racer's singleplayer strategy.

Balance is, of course, an issue—SW:GR is in part an arcade racer, meaning that you're mostly going to get wrecked by other racers slamming into you or messing you up with their abilities. And even in the singleplayer version where the AI isn't mean-spirited, it's very easy to get instagibbed by some schmuck you didn't see coming.

Which, in a lower-stakes racing mode, would be less frustrating. But I can absolutely see this becoming infuriating in a mode where your deaths might scupper an entire run—however, that's a numbers game. As long as Fuse Games keeps a fine hand on the dial of difficulty, everything'll be just fine.

It helps that the vibes are immaculate. I've always maintained that the most fun you can have in Star Wars is on some dustbowl planet, far away from the galaxy-saving Jedi and Sith, slumming it with all the little freaks. And Galactic Racer is full of little freaks almost as a point of pride, which it shows off by letting you have a walk around and natter with your rival racers in between runs.

It's an appropriately low-stakes racing story that's crammed full of charming enemy racers, both original and returning, and there are lots of neat little touches. For example, pre-race, you need to complete a quicktime event to activate all of your speeder's subsystems—made to emulate the clicky-clacky cassette futurism machine interiors from the franchise.

It's all downright clever. While racing games with solid campaigns aren't impossible, the focus of games like SW:GR is often (and should be) on the multiplayer, and this roguelike mode is a solid compromise, providing a meaty campaign that's built on top of assets and systems that can all be reused elsewhere.

But I can't talk about that, yet—you'll be hearing more about the game's multiplayer from me on this very website soon.

I can think of little else cooler than flying above the streets of 17th Century Amsterdam, in the dead of night, on a broom stick, with a black cat. Looking down on the amber glow of the oil-lit streetlamps is my lasting positive memory of 1666: Amsterdam's preview, but I can't say I had the same fondness for it once I got up close and personal with what was on the ground.

1666: Amsterdam is over a decade old now, the brainchild of Patrice Désilets, director and creative lead of Assassin's Creed and co-founder of Panache. He had to fight for the game, suing his former employer Ubisoft for the rights to it. Now, he's working on it at Montreal indie-based studio Panache Digital Games.

"We do between 15 to 20 builds a day," Désilets explains. "So it always has to be playable, it's an iterative process at Panache. Progression is more important than perfection." A lot of progression has clearly been made in 1666: Amsterdam, what with its impressive map, interesting story, and smart exploration ideas. Even just during the preview its world felt impossibly big, but the real question is whether all these grand ideas will be polished enough for an early access release on August 25.

Witchful thinking

The preview picked up from where the demo left off with the protagonist Noa. I'd just picked my cat—who has the soul of a man named Aaron from the 1990s trapped inside it—and was promptly given the unenviable task of uncovering the demonic Originals and taking their unholy power back for my witchy self. But before I could even say goodbye to my fellow spellcasters before setting out on this journey, my coven was rudely interrupted by a group of witch hunters. From here on out there was a lot of running, fighting, and flying over the streets of Amsterdam to evade capture.

I couldn't wait to get stuck into a fight, against mere humans no less, I could turn them into frogs, replace their skeletons with jello, anything felt possible. I decided to start out simple with a good old wack around the noggin with my broomstick, and then another hit, and another, and that's when I realised that Noa was limited to dodging and brawling like a street sweeper.

This was what the combat was like for the rest of the preview, although the dodging did get slightly harder as a new kind of enemy was introduced (a soldier with a pike) I didn't find any of it particularly challenging, which is not what I wanted, especially since 1666: Amsterdam has no different difficulty settings as of writing this although the team is apparently "thinking about it".

It also didn't help that my boss battle ended in disappointment as a tech mishap meant that the fight was bugged out for the entire session. After locating the Original alongside the seal they used to sign the contract which granted them great power, you force it to transform into its demonic self and fight it to the death. Unfortunately, the Original I encountered got half way through shifting and then got distracted by something and walked off. My experience of this seemed like the exception and not the rule, so while it shouldn't be held against 1666: Amsterdam, this was unfortunately my only firsthand experience of the boss fight.

Aside from getting stood up by a demon I did manage to see a bit more of what the combat has to offer later on in the game via a hands-off walkthough. One surprise was that 1666: Amsterdam will have roguelite features in that you'll come across chances to pick an ability out of three random ones after defeating Originals, or just by getting lucky when searching through houses. If you die then the abilities you gained during a section will reset and you'll have to pick new ones.

This is where I think the combat will really come into its own. With abilities that let you cast a shield of vines, attack with a swarm of crows, or just turn you into a beefy tank the combat will hopefully become more interesting as you grow Noa into the witch you want to fight with.

Abilities can also come in handy when it comes to traversing the town. Whether that be infiltrating houses or warping onto the roof tops so you can glide through the city without being interrupted by pesky humans.

Because the Originals are very private, you'll have to uncover their identities by snooping around, asking the right questions and getting into the right buildings. One fun way to get into a building or sneak into a meeting that would otherwise be a no-go is by using your cat to scare someone so badly you possess them. Once they're locked into a trance you can take them by the arm and lead them to wherever you want to go so they can let you in. You can also go the other way and use your cat as a distraction tactic for NPCs as the cat lures them from their guard post so you can sneak through undetected.

The exploration and infiltration is what I'm most excited to try out for myself. The level designers at Panache thought "of different ways to approach the puzzle" of getting into houses, which means there's no one answer to it. You can break into places with brute force, witchy powers, or just by being smart and sly. Désilets promises that you, the player, will get to "decide how you want to play it."

Spell it out

But even with all these promising features, after rewatching the capture and b-roll, thinking about my experience over and over while writing this preview I can't help but keep coming back to: "Progression is more important than perfection." In some ways it is, I've always valued experimentation over polish, I'd rather play something interesting than smooth, but I don't know if the same can be said for your average player who'll have to pay for the experience.

I would have wanted to see for myself how the roguelike elements felt and played out, because as is that first portion of fighting seems pretty stale. Then there's it's expansive world which seemed big but didn't quite feel full. I came away thinking that its real gems are hidden later on in the game, or perhaps better experience with a less bugs.

If 1666: Amsterdam can convince players that everything it has in the pipeline is worth the wait through early access and it gains some traction, then I think Panache could have something really great on its hands. I had an unfortunate playthrough—what with the boss bugging out and walking off before we could fight—but what I saw in that playthrough wasn't quite enough to convince me that this game is a dead cert. With early access release so close I have a bad feeling it may have a rocky start, but I'd be very happy to be proven wrong.

Games about cleaning are all the rage. The recent success of House Flipper, Power Wash Simulator and Unpacking demonstrates there's a mainstream-sized appetite among PC gamers for making messy places neat and tidy.

But the micro-genre goes back way further than that. The 1982 arcade game Bubbles was about using a bubble to clean a filthy sink. Cosy foundational text Harvest Moon—like its descendant Stardew Valley—has you gradually transforming a forgotten ruin into a quaint and personalised space. Then there's stuff like Chibi-Robo and Katamari Damacy.

Not all cleaning games are cosy or sim-oriented. Viscera Cleanup Detail is about cleaning blood 'n' guts and The Gunk is a 3D platformer about eliminating space gunk in order to, I'm not sure, probably save the world. And the recent wave of retail simulators have lots of cleaning and sorting.

But the cleaning or tidying game has evolved once again. Its newest manifestation may clock as either a living nightmare or the height of blissful stimulation, depending on your temperament.

To demonstrate, here's the trailer for Toy Shop Tidy Up, which launched on August 7:

With all due respect to both the creators Shiftmoon and those enthusiastic about this new virtual-tidying frontier, this trailer gives me a panic attack. But it's far from the only recent PC game focused entirely on sorting through a massive pile of objects all the better to place them on shelves.

Toy Shop Tidy Up has only been a very modest success so far, but the Steam user reviews so far offer some insight into the appeal of this microgenre.

"Although it’s a relaxing game, it’s missing that satisfying feeling of placing every item exactly where it belongs," writes Sosich. Another user, Joker, agrees. "Great base game, but the one thing I wish it had, would be that the toys had their own spot to put them in, rather than just being able to place them anywhere in the area."

For a more demanding experience, these users have a number of games to choose from, all released in 2026. Cellar Keeper, also released on August 7, plonks the player in a wine cellar and tasks them with returning exactly 2,448 wine bottles to their "proper" shelf. In other words, critics of Toy Shop Tidy Up will be pleased, because every bottle must be sorted by their variety and stacked exactly where it belongs.

"Watching disorder disappear is its own reward," promises the store description.

Many user reviews of Cellar Keeper refer back to what is clearly considered the high watermark of this burgeoning orthodoxy: Released in April, Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! has players inhabit a cosy oaken library strewn with 3,072 books. These must all go back on shelves, and in the right order. Among the key features of Librarian are listed "visual satisfaction" and "strategic efficiency".

Librarian is by far the most successful sorting game thus far: its peak all-time concurrent players figure is 29,469. Over 3,200 people are playing it as I write. It has over 17,000 "very positive" reviews.

Taking a more arch approach is Supermarket Chaos, which crash landed onto Steam on June 30. Thanks to an errant robot shelf-stacker with a sudden distaste for order, groceries have been left in a big messy pile on the floor. It is your job, of course, to put everything back where it belongs. This outing offers three maps, with the most challenging containing 9999 objects. Thankfully, online cooperative play is supported.

The most terrifying entry in this genre isn't out yet, but it does make me thirst for whisky: Never Sort By Color, which dares release in November, takes the same tack as all the previously listed games except you're sorting Lego in a room littered with 100,000 bricks. Thankfully you've got a grappling hook, a sieve tray and other tools to help.

And that's not all! Arriving next week is TV Archive: Tidy Up Together, which is the inevitable retro videostore take on the genre. Last week's Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery is about finding puzzle pieces in a whitewalled gallery space, all the better to re-apply them to art works. And also coming next week is Tidy Up Together. I think by now you get the idea.

And like the now-ubiquitous retail sims, sorting simulators are being turned out at a rapid pace to capitalise on the actual commercial success of Librarian. In August alone, and not including those listed above, all of these are listed as forthcoming: Sort Them Ducks, Shelve the Potions!, Shelves & Sorcery, Mall Tidy Up Together, Konbini Cleanup, Storehand, Old Market Restored, Tidy Mart, Game Shop Panic, Big Bad Pharma, Package Chaos and Megastore Tidy Up Together.

There are heaps more "scheduled" for September 2026 and "Q3" as well. Will all of these come out? I severely doubt it. But you're going to start seeing a lot more of these on Steam in the coming months.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 28 - August 4)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the chart below doesn't account for the 1.0 launch of Fields of Mistria, the QuakeCon-themed Bethesda sale, or the recent surprise update and deep discount on Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Mistfall Hunter is inevitably quite high on the list, though we are in a major release slump. The Soulslike extraction RPG only has around 4,700 "mixed" reviews right now, though its player count is consistently much higher than that would normally imply. Its current 24-hour peak concurrents in 37,123 (the record is 44,472).

Studio Bellring Games wrote on August 7 that over a million players had signed in to Mistfall Hunter. That includes both PS5 and Xbox users. It's doing well but—and this still feels surprising to me—not as well as recent hits like Meccha Chameleon.

Three games on the list are there because of major sales: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3 and Spider-Man 2.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Worst game I have ever played. I got this game in a random Steam key bundle for about €5 along with five other games because it was on sale, and I still regret buying it. I think I would enjoy being electrocuted more."

Qube37, on the joys of electrocution compared to the drudgery that is Cyberpunk SFX.

So I've recently given in and decided I won't be waiting for Deltarune's final chapter before I played it all in one go—too many of my mates were talking about it, so I sat my butt down to get ahead of the invariable, accidental spoilers and chew through chapters one to five.

You don't need me to tell you that Toby Fox, developer of Deltarune (and Undertale preceding it) is an excellent composer. The dude made Megalovania, which has somehow survived being piledrivered into memedom, even by the Pope of all people, and still, inevitably, slaps. But the rest of his discography is flooded with bangers. The man can work a leitmotif, lemme tell ya.

Deltarune is no different, though for this Soundtrack Sunday, I want to focus heavily on one song from it: The Third Sanctuary, because this song might be one of my favourite tunes in a videogame ever. I cannot stop listening to this thing, even if it's a nightmarish affront to rhythm.

Spoilers for Chapter 4, if you've not played it yet.

The Third Sanctuary plays in Chapter 4 during the recreation of the church dark world, spawned from the hands of your good time pal and occasional chalk-eating high school dinosaur friend (I promise you this makes perfect sense if you play the game) Susie.

This attempt at recreation is somewhat flawed—see, a dark world in Deltarune is a reflection of the objects around it, who turn into its inhabitants, but it's also a reflection of the person who created it. Susie is uncertain and conflicted for so many reasons I could write a whole other article on them.

An uncertain, mysterious prophecy weighing overhead that Susie has sworn to defy. A realisation that her new mentor figure died years ago, his ashes scattered over a hammer in the next room over. The dark world she creates is a mirror to the one the chapter primarily takes place in, reflecting this—and The Third Sanctuary represents this fragile ground by, well, just give it a listen.

Even if you don't know anything about how music is constructed, you can sense the trepidation and strangeness in it—the starting, the stopping. The next bar of the song starts just a half-heartbeat before (or after) you think it's gonna.

That's due to its use of unusual time signatures, which I'll try my best to explain. A time signature is a representation of rhythm in a song, the most ubiquitous form being 4/4, four beats in each bar. The second (bottom) number represents what kind of beats they are, also known as the note value, and the first (top) number represents how many of them are in a bar.

Britney Spear's "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is a good 4/4 song to get your brain around the concept—sing the titular line to yourself while counting to four, and you'll feel the rhythm: Hit(1) me Ba(2)-by One(3) more time(4)!

Another time signature you might be familiar with is 3/4 time, where there are three beats in a bar—this is what most waltzes are constructed out of (bum-BAH-BAH, bum-BAH-BAH). There's also 5/4, which is most famously associated with the Mission Impossible theme tune.

I won't go too far into the second number, but to keep it very simple: It's always 2, 4, 8, or 16—2 is a half-note, 4 is a quarter-note, and so on. These can be interchangeable, for instance, you could write a 3/4 song as a 3/8 song, if you wanted—you'd just have to adjust the length of the notes accordingly, but because the number of beats in a bar isn't changing, they can be functionally identical-sounding.

So, what time signature does The Third Sanctuary use? Yes. Yes is the answer.

The Third Sanctuary starts out in 9/4 time, then jolts to 11/8 time with a random 4/8 thrown in there (because why not), interludes with 5/4, back to 11/8, jumpscares you with two bars of 12/8, back to 5/4 for a bit, and then the finale: A dance between 12/8 and 11/8, alternating, because who needs to be able to keep track of anything.

You can use an excellent visualiser, created by YouTuber 17a and embedded above, to keep track—and while this might seem like utter madness, Toby Fox isn't just goofing off here and attempting to make drum cover artists have a heart attack, he's using it to tell a story.

This chapter's been out for a while now, so I am by no means the only person to come up with this analysis. But The Third Sanctuary's time signatures of 12/8 and 11/8 don't just clash with each other, they slowly come together over the course of the song, as though comforting each other in the darkness of Chapter 4—quite fittingly, finding each other in the dark.

The melodies present in those final bars swell and grow hopeful, despite the uncertain, stuttering strangeness of the time signatures they're trapped in. More importantly, the main melody bridges the gap between those time signatures and flows over them in a determined way, just like Susie herself after discovering the grim truth of a (yet-to-be-revealed) prophecy.

The Third Sanctuary is incredible not just because it sounds good in spite of its time signatures, but because through them it tells the story of the entire chapter. When a friend of mine showed their musician pal the track, their analysis pretty much accurately summed up the major themes of the story despite the fact they'd never played it.

And then there's the covers and the fan songs that have spun out of it. For the former, I'd like to share this lovely rendition by the Live Videogame Orchestra—something about hearing actual, breathing musicians manage to get a handle on the track is kinda magical.

But there's also fan-inspired renditions. The hilariously-named 5ndth Sanctuary by IamDaDogeOfDaFuture is one of my favourites, having a wild run from 11/8, up to 15/8, up to 29/8—and still somehow managing to tickle my brain in a pleasing way. Here's the song impossibly mashed into 4/4. Here's the song in 5/4. People are playing with time and it's awesome.

Toby Fox has successfully created his own little genre-pod of Math Rock enthusiasts in Deltarune's fanbase, and I couldn't be more delighted. The Third Sanctuary is an utter mess, it's a drummer's nightmare, and it's also one of the most thoughtful moments of storytelling in a videogame, one that's inspired countless of time-signature mad renditions.

I leave you with 4rd (not a typo) Sanctuary. This actually isn't a fan-song, it's a version Toby put in Chapter 5. I'm not analysing it in this article, I've got other things to do, but I'd like you to listen to it anyway.

You've been shot, and I have the hit marker to prove it.

The humble hit marker glyph is a mainstay of the FPS user interface, dutifully reporting the fate of projectiles. Hit your target and 'X' marks the spot. See nothing, and you're hitting nothing. I like the hit marker—it's an absolute form of feedback unique to shooters, and I can think of a lot of games that wouldn't feel right without it.

But it's also a crutch. The hit marker is both overused and often misused, nowadays appearing in every game with a gun as if it's always the best form of communication. The mechanic has even penetrated the singleplayer arena, which is weird, because the studio that popularized the hit marker always meant it to be a multiplayer-only concession.

There are earlier examples of a hit marker, but it was made famous by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The 'X' glyph and gratifying "thwip" sound instantly became iconic to the series, but not the campaign. In fact, the majority of Call of Duty campaigns don't use them. I'm not aware of Infinity Ward ever commenting on why it decided this back in the day, but to me, it's obvious: The hit marker was superfluous to the campaign, because you knew you'd killed a guy as soon as he dropped dead.

Looking back at that campaign today, it still looks totally readable and natural:

I don't watch that and think "this could use some hit markers," and in fact, I think they'd detract from the experience. Hit markers make a lot of sense in the context of PvP, where it's helpful for network and competitive reasons to know exactly when your bullets are landing, but they undeniably add a layer of artifice. They're kind of ugly and distracting, to the point that they become the only visual cue I'm paying attention to in the heat of a match. Compare that older CoD to the recent Black Ops 7 campaign, which features hit markers and enemy health bars, and you do give up some immersive qualities.

Intuitive feedback

As anyone who played an FPS before 2007 can attest, developers were using more creative solutions to the same problems way before Modern Warfare came along: impact animations, wound FX, blood spurts. Land a shot, and the target itself reacts, not your UI. It's intuitive feedback—the videogame equivalent of "show, don't tell" filmmaking. When games really nail it (in singleplayer or multiplayer), it's better than a hit marker.

Which is why I'm calling out two series that definitely don't need hit markers, but have deemed them the default nonetheless:

Halo: Campaign Evolved, why have you cluttered up the HUD with hit markers when Bungie designed the original game around clear, diegetic feedback? I know my shot landed because an elite's energy shield flickered, a grunt died, or a jackal shield popped! Halo Studios (formerly 343) has been injecting hit markers into the series since Halo 4, and I don't love it.

And Gears of War: E-Day, you can do better! In 2006, Gear of War's solution to hit feedback was as elegant as it was gory: shoot a locust, and buckets of blood erupt from the wound. Hit; marked. But alas, The Coalition has succumbed to trends in E-Day, and hit markers are the default for both multiplayer and the campaign (if Microsoft's direct presentation from June is any indication). They work fine in the bits of the multiplayer beta I've played, but in turn, they've toned down blood spurts and made them less useful as an alternative. Perhaps a downgrade?

The old ways are far from extinct, but I do think the shift toward hit markers has given developers permission for their FPS to skimp on intuitive feedback.

This week I fired up Left 4 Dead 2 to remind myself what the pinnacle of hit feedback looks like. Then I played some Back 4 Blood, Turtle Rock's spiritual successor to L4D that, among many changes, introduced hit markers.

Pretty big difference! Left 4 Dead 2's zombie animations, wounds, and ragdolls are still unbelievable. I love the way blood splatters on walls and zombies react to individual impacts where they're struck. It's not only impressive 17 years later, but looks cleaner than Back 4 Blood's in-your-face hit markers. Behind the flickering X's are some pretty bland, unremarkable zombies. Back 4 Blood's hordes don't run, react, or die with the same weight or realism, which is weird, because a lot of the core Left 4 Dead leadership returned to make it.

I'm always keen to read what you all think, but I'm especially interested to hear other perspectives on hit markers, so please do sound off in comments or my inbox (morgan.park@futurenet.com). Hit markers are now this omnipresent fixture of the genre, yet nobody really talks about them. They just sort of happened, then kept happening, then stuck.

I can turn an overgrown property into an industrial vineyard in a single year no problem. I've done it in the valleys, islands, and fields of countless farm sims. Usually it's just as easy to pluck one of its provincial hotties out of town to become my spouse (the overworked leader type, ideally), but magical girl-inspired Fields of Mistria has given me a bad case of choice paralysis. I love them all!

Fields of Mistria originally launched in early access with only the beginning of an already excellent story and two unlockable cutscenes per eligible single. Over the past two years it's added quality of life updates, story progression, and additional friendship and dating scenes. Mistria caps it all off this week with a 1.0 launch that completes the main story and, finally, adds the ability to get married. I would be psyched (I am psyched) except I've spent the past two years confessing my feelings to ten of them and if anything I'm less sure who to choose than before.

Fields of Mistria is steeped in nostalgia for '90s anime. It's got off-the-shoulder jackets. It's got shockingly high waist lines. It's got a guy who's rude right to my face and blushes when I'm nice to him anyway—a dynamic I'm too damn old for but lies dormant in the grey matter of my brain that solidified during the years Fruits Basket was in print. It's a sepia toned flashback to playing my Game Boy Advance in the third row of a minivan and drawing Edward Elric on filched printer paper.

I love how Mistria has characters for all my eras. The fifteen year old inside me will always have a soft spot for tsundere boys like March the blacksmith and arrogant beauties like Juniper the witch. In my twenties I'd have been swayed by Adeline the acting town leader who needs to take a break from organizing Mistria's earthquake recovery. Now I'm drawn to Ryis the carpenter, an unassuming 'guy next door' who moved from the city and isn't sure if he'll put down roots in the countryside.

Mistria pulls off a magical girl-worthy transformation on all those timeless anime tropes. They've got modern frills like loveable hunk Hayden being a pseudo single dad… to a prize-winning chicken. Sweet older sister Reina isn't relegated to unsung family cook; her parents support her chasing national recognition as a chef. Eiland the noble scion looks foppish at first but is way more obsessed with archaeology than his looks. They're all just a little deeper than their archetypes without ever really masking the fact that yeah, Juniper still is a classic arrogant villainess type.

The quality of Fields of Mistria's writing is what's made me so uncharacteristically indecisive. Even the best post-Stardew farm sims are cute but pretty shallow. Mistria is sneaky about how excellently it's written. Its tropey characters mean I'll never bring it up in a "good writing" conversation next to sharply smart things like Disco Elysium. Instead It's more like Avatar The Last Airbender, whose lighthearted tone masks a subtle maturity. Not the kind of maturity with swear words and dark topics, the kind that's emotionally earnest and resolves conflicts instead of omitting them.

After a decade of Stardew-chasing farm sims, Fields of Mistria is the first one to really recapture the magic for me. It addresses so many functional elements of farm sims in a way I can appreciate but what I enjoy most is how it clearly understands that the people and the community are the things to love in this genre more than a button for jumping over fences (we do love a jump button though).

I've smiled over finding out that Hayden the rancher and Valen the doctor were friends as kids, or Hemlock the bartender remembering the first time he asked his wife Josephine to dance at the fall festival even as I'm spinning in circles wondering who to ask myself. I'm still surprised finding fun new little bits of conversation around town, delighted with even more to unearth in the full release.

For two years I got the classic anime release schedule experience: agonizing over these characters while waiting for the next arc of the story to arrive. Now that the 1.0 version has landed, you get to indulge in a modern binge session, seeing Mistria and its cast all grow in tandem as intended.

Sam Barlow is the director of Half Mermaid and one of interactive fiction's modern luminaries. Breaking into game development with his one-move choose your own adventure Aisle, Barlow worked on games like Ghost Rider and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories before striking out on his own with 2015's Her Story.

Blending FMV-style video with an investigative branching narrative, Her Story was a pioneer in the detective game genre. Since Her Story, Barlow has further experimented with combining live-action footage and interactive fiction in 2019's Telling Lies and 2021's Immortality.

Barlow is currently working on two different projects, one with director Brandon Cronenberg. But he took a break from those to show me around the mystery-riddled file-stack of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?