The biggest 'will they, won't they' in gaming right now involves Arc Raiders and whether it will finally add a PvE mode. All seemed promising after a very successful PvE test during the start of Frozen Trial, but news has since petered out, with Embark saying it needs a bit more time to figure everything out.

I thought this meant Embark needed time to get all its ducks in a row and figure out the logistics of a permanent PvE mode, but it turns out that adding one isn't actually that hard.

"We could just frankly add PvE,” Embark's CEO Patrick Söderlund says in an interview with The Game Business. “It’s not a difficult thing to do. But we didn’t want to obstruct or fiddle too much with the core loop of the game where the PvP aspect of a PvPvE game does add, we believe, adequate tension."

The biggest issue concerning a PvE mode is what it means for the game itself. The whole point of Arc Raiders being PvPvE is so players suffer even more tension as you never know when you're going to be jumped by an arc or other player. PvE obviously removes one of those threats, and the worry is that "by removing one substantial component, you’re fiddling with the core emotional loop." Something that Embark has previously decided "was not the right thing to do".

"We’ve now since tried it and realised that it’s fine," Söderlund adds. "Maybe people can choose what they like. But that was our fear all along. People may have been wondering, 'why the hell aren’t they just doing what some players were looking for?' We were looking at the holistic picture, which we have to do. And to protect the creative integrity of what we have created."

I understand the draw to maintaining the creative vision, but unfortunately there are compromises to be made in a live service game. After releasing a game to players a certain amount of control gets handed away also, because in order to encourage players to come back and keep playing your game you need to give them what they want.

"We’re going through that data right now," executive producer Aleksander Grøndal says. "What we did see, which was really interesting, is that there was a huge amount of interest in it, and there were a lot of players who tried it out, and almost 50% of the rounds that were played during the test were on the PvE server. It created a moment.

"Some of the interesting takeaways are that some people who said, ‘Hey, I want PvE,’ changed their mind. They didn’t want it because it was lacking some of the values that the product had. And then you had players who absolutely loved it.

So the reality of the situation is clear: "Now it’s for us to figure out how we can cater to the specific needs of the players. But of course, not at the expense of the integrity of the experience itself, where you water it down and become a game of nothing.”

Open up Task Manager and check how much memory Discord is currently hogging on your PC. If it's anything like mine, it's probably north of 500 MB. Alas, things should change soon, as Discord is moving the client completely over to a new programming language. It might not sound like that big of a deal, but Discord's CTO, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, shows it running on as little as 290 MB of memory.

Discord is switching from Electron to Rust. Electron is a software framework, a building block that allows JavaScript apps (among others) to run standalone on desktops. Built on Chromium, the underlying model behind Google Chrome, there is an overhead here that swapping to Rust aims to fix.

Vishnevskiy says, "We've been early adopters of Rust since 2018 and a lot of our infra, voice tech, and even some of the current client is already Rust, the holy grail was getting the whole client there. That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native, mobile keeps native UI but shares app code with desktop via Rust."

Though some suspected Discord would be swapping to Rust using Tauri (an open-source framework for desktop and mobile platforms), Vishnevskiy says it's actually using GPUI (a framework written in Rust), but "We have our own patches on top of it".

Vishnevskiy also says the goal is to get the program into testing with users soon, but no official date has been given. Either way, with Vishnevskiy showing off a resource demand of 290.2 MB whilst active, that's still a pretty big dip below what it runs at now. Mine is currently flitting between 500 and 600 MB, and my colleague Jacob saw it go up to 785 MB running on Windows.

Reportedly, the new Discord client is also faster to use, booting much quicker. Vishnevskiy showed two laptops, one with the old client and one with the new, and the new client opens up significantly faster (six seconds versus one in my approximation).

Naturally, we are hearing this from the mouth of the company, so we'll have to get the new Discord client in our hands to see how much faster and how much more efficient it really is, but anyway, to get a little more out of your current memory will always be a boon right now.

The memory crisis is continuing to drive the prices of gaming gear up, but software tweaks like this (including both Epic and Steam getting faster) are very much welcome in my eyes.

I've spent all night playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake on the Switch 2, and it's a fantastic experience, but some would prefer to tinker and toil over an emulator than enjoy Link's new look. The game is already running on PC, but performance issues are aplenty.

You can see progress is moving pretty fast from the emulator crowd, just from these two videos by Unreal Gaming PC on YouTube.

Published on the game's official launch day, November 5, this video shows the game getting over the splash screen and running the cutscenes fairly well; however, it suffers from bad flickering, stuttering, and frame rates around the 20-30 fps mark during gameplay.

12 hours later, another video. This time showing the game running between 30–60 fps during gameplay, albeit with some persistent flickering and stutters throughout. There's undoubtedly still a long way to go to a playable experience to match the native Switch 2, but that's marked progress for half a day's work. Especially considering the game is designed for an Arm-powered handheld with very different hardware to what's running the emulator (Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 64 GB of RAM, and RTX 4080).

User akakevinvro on X also posted a video claiming a pretty steady 60 fps.

Both are running on the Lichii emulator for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. It's called the "VERY experimental Nintendo Switch 2 emulator" on its GitHub page. It's an open-source project that has similarities to projects of the same ilk, such as Yuzu. Yuzu's developers settled a legal dispute with Nintendo of America and shut down development of the emulator in 2024.

Nintendo has a long history of taking down projects it deems to infringe on its rights, while emulators such as the now defunct suyu often argue that they do not circumvent Nintendo's privacy measures.

In this case, the files for Ocarina of Time's remake were reportedly dumped online ahead of its release, according to SrLinguicaVIVE on X.

Remember when Grand Theft Auto 6 was delayed, not once but twice? It's hard to forget: its first release date was treated as a day of mourning by some particularly upset fans. Despite all the outcries from fans, Take-Two Interactive chief Strauss Zelnick has repeatedly explained that he doesn't regret the decision.

Talking to WSJ the interviewer asks Zelnick what his immediate emotion was after hearing from the team that GTA 6 needed to be delayed: "I don't always feel calm but I tend to come across as calm … The timing of the call was not great for an array of reasons. We had just had a board retreat 10 days earlier so I wasn't thrilled about the timing. That said, this is a balancing act with all creative executives and it's not just time, it could be resources."

"These are very difficult decisions to make," Zelnick continues. "If, on the other hand, if as a refresher course, your mission is to make the best entertainment on earth and part of your three part strategy is to be the most creative, sometimes you have to make these expensive and inconvenient decisions in service of that mission goal.

The delay was essential, Zelnick says, to stay true to Take-Two's mission "to make the best entertainment on earth."

"What happens when people take the other approach," Zelnick asks. "The other approach being we're slavishly devoted to a schedule and we're just going to ship despite what is going on. I'm not going to throw any competitors under the bus, but if you know anything about the videogame business in the past few years there was a very high profile release that fell into this category. They shipped and they had to pull the title after shipping because it didn't work."

I don't think there's much doubt about what game Zelnick is referencing here, but just in case anyone is wondering, my bet would be on Concord—yeah, it's probably Concord. And for good reason: it didn't have a shred of the anticipation that GTA 6 has but was still bankrolled by a major studio and essentially burnt hundreds of millions of dollars—a cautionary tale if ever I heard one.

World of Warcraft: Forever's launch has been downright impressive—MMOs are notoriously difficult to run servers for, particularly when it comes to launch, where players will get bottlenecked into servers, throwing devs into a catch 22: Do they increase capacity and wind up wasting money in the long run while things die down, or do they ride out the wave? And yet, after the chaos of the beta, it's been buttery smooth.

Which is why I'm willing to forgive Blizzard for a weird quirk of its realmless layering technology—cities have been empty, empty as hell. Which is a shame, given I know that hundreds of thousands of players are technically on this thing—and yet, none of them are in my Stormwind.

Well, Forever's devs are working on a fix, per the official forums: "Just wanted to chime in," says Aggrend, "And say that we are aware of some issues with certain areas not feeling as populated as they should. We will be tweaking some numbers tomorrow to help things feel a bit more lively. Thanks for the feedback on this one!"

That's a relief to hear, especially given I'm on a roleplay server, and there have been problems with this sort of thing where phasing has interrupted the flow of narrative commerce in the past. Cities, especially, should feel lived-in, and it's hard to create a sense of community when people you could be writing with keep bamfing in and out of existence.

But even if you aren't a roleplayer like yours truly, I think you should be gladdened by this news—big cities are one of the places where crowding isn't a problem at all, but rather, the thing you want. They're social hubs, and rubbing shoulder to shoulder with the masses at the auction house is kind of the whole point.

At least anecdotally, my Stormwind's been looking a lot more populated, and I'm sure that as populations settle to sane levels and Blizzard keeps chipping away at this tech, the streets'll be bustling again.

Earlier this year, Electronic Arts was snapped up by a consortium including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) and the investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in a deal worth $55 billion. According to Reuters, now the PIF and Silver Lake have their sights set on Unity Software, the company behind the multiplatform game engine of the same name.

Silver Lake is already one of Unity's bigger shareholders, owning roughly 8% of the company since investing around $400 million in it back in 2017. "Silver ​Lake’s Egon Durban also sits ⁠on Unity's board," as Reuters notes, "a dual role that would typically lead him to recuse himself from board deliberations on a sale."

The deliberations so far apparently include a valuation of about $25 billion, though since then Unity's most recent earnings report has come in, showing profits higher than estimated. Unity's come a long way since the Runtime Fee scandal, but it's not all about improvements to the engine like its ability to integrate with Unreal. As Reuters reports, "Strong ⁠growth in Unity's AI-powered Vector advertising platform helped it post its first quarterly profit on a GAAP basis since going public in September 2020."

The first thing that happened to EA after it was acquired was mass layoffs and being saddled with $18 billion of debt. I can't imagine anyone actually working at Unity has their fingers crossed for this deal to go through, but the videogame industry does seem determined to speedrun its way into a consolidation crisis where three consortiums own everything and almost everyone is unemployed.

Ultima creator Richard Garriott was one of several developers on a recent panel hosted by the Georgia Game Developers Association, and Lord British was in fine form. Calling himself the "great-grandpa" of the group, he began by summarizing the current problems faced by the videogame industry.

"It's not just one thing," Garriott began. "I think if it was one thing it would be a lot easier to diagnose and come back from, but it's a lot of folks who don't understand videogames trying to make money off of videogames, it's a political climate, it's a billion things. All the threads have woven together into this horrible knot that we're seeing now."

He went on to describe a cycle he's seen play out multiple times over his years in the industry, where a technological advance comes along and everyone races to make a simple game that highlights that advance—whether it's the CD-ROM or a 3D-rendering pipeline or the internet—and only in the short gaps between these leaps forward is there much demand for something deeper.

"That cycle has been normal," Garriott said. "But we're at a new one, and this new one is machines are now fast enough to where the bells and whistles are no longer what's important." Without another advance having the same impact, he said, "we're at this kind of creative cliff where I think people don't know exactly what to do to prevent it and I think we've lost a lot of the original creators that were associated with those IPs and the bigger companies, and so I think we're floundering."

Garriott also had something to say about the way publishers have responded to the current state of the industry—by canceling games and laying off staff. Referring to his own publisher, Origin Systems, which he sold to EA in 1992, Garriott said, "Origin pre-EA, we never cancelled a project. Our theory was that if that team is capable of getting across the finish line, even if it doesn't sell well, they'll now know what it feels like to finish. And they will get feedback from the sales and the public as to what they did and didn't do right and so that team will be more strong, the individuals will be stronger, and we'll be able to circle back and do a more competent game next time.

"If you cancel a project, that means all those people on that team think you the publisher suck, because obviously their idea must've been brilliant, and so your willingness to cancel it was not their fault, but you the evil publisher. And half of them are probably going to leave or get fired, and maybe you'll scoop a few of them over into some other project that's now the priority project, but we thought that was a bad move on our own."

Things changed once EA snapped up Origin and took control, however. After that? "We canceled more projects than we completed by a long shot," Garriott said.

Xbox has joined the 'faster launcher load times' arms race, announcing that its updated Xbox PC app, available now to Xbox Insiders, launches up to 60% faster, and has also been overhauled to offer "simpler navigation, updated filters, and new ways to organize your games."

Along with the faster launch time, Xbox said the home, store, and Game Pass pages in the updated app load up to 50% faster, while in-app windows open up to 65% faster—depending upon factors including device, internet connection, system configuration, and usage, of course. Library navigation has been simplified, search has been improved, and friends and social features are now part of the main navigational window.

Credit where it's due: That change to friends and social features is welcome. I don't use the Xbox App much—to be blunt, it's pretty much exclusively for Sea of Thieves. But after a long stretch away from it, I recently jumped back in for some high seas adventures with the crew, and I'll tell you this: Figuring out how to connect with my fellow online swashbucklers was kind of a headache compared to the super-simplicity of Steam. It worked fine, it just wasn't smooth and easy, so anything that helps with that, I'm happy to take.

I'm less excited about the faster loading times. Not that I'm going to complain about performance improvements, I'm just not sure it matters in the grand scheme of things. When the Epic Games Store promised that its "vibe coded" launcher was faster than Steam, a common reaction was mockery: Much of that was sparked by Epic's insistent banging of the 'AI is inevitable' drum, but there was also a lot of 'who cares?' in the reactions, too. I think the Xbox PC app may face the same: Faster is good, sure, but is it going to convince many PC gamers to use it instead of Steam when they don't have to? Of this, I have doubts.

(Steam also recently dropped a performance update that promises to improve loading times as well, blunting the impact of both the Epic and Xbox boosts even further.)

If you want to check out the updated app for yourself, you'll need to be in the Xbox Insiders program—for that, you'll need to install the Xbox Insider Hub. A "refreshed Xbox web experience" is also on the way, with an improved library tab, more efficient use of screen space, and light, dark, and high-contrast visual modes.

Two weeks after literally calling "bullshit" on EA's decision to close BioWare, immsim legend Warren Spector has posted a follow-up message on LinkedIn that avoids the spicy language but sounds angrier than ever.

"I recently posted my thoughts about EA’s shuttering of BioWare," Spector wrote. "Those of you who read my post know that I was unhappy. I remain so.

"The tragedy of so many layoffs the last few years hasn’t been lost on me, but for some reason, BioWare hit me on an emotional level nothing before had. I was gut-punched."

But some readers, he continued, replied to say that BioWare's best days were behind it, and that shutting it down was a "sound business decision." Those reactions appear to have re-stoked Spector's rage, as he said those people missed his actual complaint: That the game industry executives who are responsible for these problems are never the ones to suffer the consequences.

"If studio-level people leave, resulting in dilution of talent, someone is creating an environment that pushes them out. Do those culture-killers pay any price?" Spector wrote in his new message. "If executives misread the market, over-hire, or make decisions that result in under-funded, over-funded, poorly-marketed games, do they lose sleep, let alone jobs? Do those same executives suffer like developers when the needs of financial partners and investors take precedence over players, does anyone up there care?

"Is there ANY accountability left in this world?"

Then he took direct aim at Electronic Arts' C-suite with some very large, ugly numbers:

• Andrew Wilson, chief executive officer: $38.65 million
• Laura Miele, president, EA Entertainment and Central Development: $13.7 million
• Stuart Canfield, chief financial officer: $11.3 million
• Jake Schatz, chief legal officer: $8.4 million
• Mala Singh, chief people officer: $8.3 million

Those figures represent the total compensation given to EA's executives in its 2026 fiscal year—a single 12-month period. They're also significant increases over the previous year: Wilson, for instance, got $30.5 million in 2025, while Miele's was given $9.1 million.

Ironically, those EA executive salaries aren't even directly related to the BioWare closure. Wilson's $8 million raise (and all the others), which was awarded in part for "meeting all milestones for a high-quality launch of Battlefield 6," came just a few months after laying off employees at the studios that made it—Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive—and entirely shuttering Ridgeline Games, which had been working on a new, more story-focused Battlefield game.

"Tens of thousands of do-ers and makers are out of work and these people think they're worth that kind of compensation?" Spector concluded. "And if you think this is a discussion about 'sound business decisions' I hope you never get anywhere near running a business. Or at least that people have the sense not to go work for you."

Spector's frustration and anger comes through here even more clearly than it did when he dropped his uncharacteristic curse, because it's focused: Waving our hands and bemoaning the bullshit might be briefly cathartic, but pointing the finger at these guys over here and saying "this is why" brings the problem into focus like the sun through a magnifying glass.

Sadly, pushback on compensation packages of this size are extremely rare. An analyst report in 2020, when EA shareholders took the unusual step of rejecting a proposed pay hike for the company's executives, said the failure rate of such proposals was just 2.7% in 2019, and 2.6% in 2018. Wilson was paid more than $21 million that year.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a recent podcast that "from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and be used 5% of the time."

Altman was talking about people running AI models locally rather than relying on data centers, which allow RAM usage to be maxed out in this "very supply-constrained environment." What many heard and responded to—PC gamers in particular—was resentment directed at those of us who don't run AI companies, but would still like to have and use our own personal computers, as a treat.

In an exchange on X this week, Altman said that his remark was "taken out of context" and that he actually wants "the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers."

"I have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time," Altman said.

Altman's argument for increased memory production is no consolation to the tech enthusiasts and gamers who've been priced out of new hardware by his company and the rest of the AI industry. What we've been calling the RAMpocalypse hasn't just affected high-end PCs, either: In the lead-up to GTA 6's console launch, a PlayStation Pro is $900, if you can even find one.

The bitter reaction to Altman's comment also comes from concerns that big tech companies want to push gamers off of local hardware so that they can rent us cloud computing. For an audience that's already disgruntled about the erosion of game ownership, the thought of losing control over our own hardware is not palatable, however much cloud streaming services like Nvidia's GeForce Now have improved.

That concern is now coupled with the generative AI-heavy future that tech leaders are pushing. If generative AI is best delivered as a cloud service, and the games industry is going to increasingly incorporate generative AI into games, it follows that we will be pushed toward cloud computing.

Nvidia DLSS pioneer Bryan Catanzaro made a comment to that effect at a GDC panel I attended earlier this year. Speaking about hypothetical games built with AI "world models," Catanzaro noted that we probably won't run those models locally, because "AI is fundamentally much more efficient in the cloud."

Some air was let out of the AI bubble this morning as tech stocks took a dive. After seeing gains on Wednesday, the S&P 500—the index which tracks big companies including Nvidia, Oracle, and other bettors on the AI buildout—has dropped by around 3.9% as of 2:30 pm EST.

Nvidia shares are now trading lower than they were at the start of the year. Memory and storage company Micron is down about 15%.

Democratic victories in the US midterms, and country-wide votes to curb data center expansion, have contributed to the reduced confidence in AI stocks.

Speaking to CNBC, One Point BFG Wealth Partners chief investment officer Peter Boockvar said that investors are now "questioning" the $1.2 trillion in AI-related capital expenditure Wall Street has forecast for next year. "Well, maybe that's not going to happen," he said.

Last month we got news that Wing Commander 3, the FMV space-combat sim with perhaps the highest concentration of Mark Hamill in any videogame, would be getting a remaster. Producer Jim Vessella is heading up the project, and revealed it during a presentation at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo.

What he did not reveal, it turns out, is that five other Wing Commander games—plus Road Rash—would be getting their own dolled-up re-releases, and that they'd all be dropping on Steam, GOG, and the EA App today as part of a larger bundle of 25 "EA Classics". No, I don't know why you'd buy them on the EA App either. It takes all sorts to make a world.

Here's the full list of games that are dropping. Anything labelled "Anniversary Edition" is an updated, remastered version of the original game. Anything not labelled that is simply a re-release.

• Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition
• Wing Commander: 35th Anniversary Edition
• Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi: 35th Anniversary Edition
• Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger: 30th Anniversary Edition
• Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom: 30th Anniversary Edition
• Wing Commander Prophecy: 30th Anniversary Edition
• Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition
• Wing Commander: Privateer
• Wing Commander: Academy
• Wing Commander: Armada
• Strike Commander
• Theme Hospital
• Crusader: No Remorse
• Crusader: No Regret
• Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
• Ultima II : The Revenge of the Enchantress
• Ultima III: Exodus
• Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
• Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny
• Ultima VI: The False Prophet
• Ultima VII: The Complete Edition
• Ultima VIII: Gold Edition
• Ultima IX: Ascension
• Ultima Underworld I
• Ultima Underworld II

If you're a GOG user, the only new things on that storefront will be the remasters—GOG's had all the other classic games for yonks now, but on Steam it's a veritable deluge of hearty, classic stuff. Personally, I'll just be glad to have a copy of Theme Hospital where all my other games are. And if someone fancies turning on Workshop support for it and integrating CorsixTH, they won't hear any objections from me.

On the remaster front, EA pinky promises it hasn't mucked the games up. "Each Anniversary Edition preserves the original look, feel and creative intent of the game, with quality-of-life updates to support modern systems, controls, improve performance and make the titles more approachable without compromising their authenticity."

You know what? I'm inclined to believe it. Vessella, who's more or less become the face of EA's old-game preservation and restoration efforts, also had a big hand in the work on the Command and Conquer Remastered Collection, and that was rather excellent even without access to the source footage of those games' FMV cutscenes, which seems to not be an issue here.

EA says the remasters are the fruit of "the discovery of a physical media vault containing thousands of Betacam, VHS, and D1 tapes alongside other media assets", while "the digitization process recovered the supposedly lost Master FMV sequences for these seven legendary titles, which were meticulously re-edited to restore the over 1,500 cinematic scenes across these games".

As many readers are no doubt keenly aware, we are—as of today—two weeks out from the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6. To celebrate its impending conquest of the collective attention economy, Rockstar has released a launch gallery of new GTA 6 screenshots showcasing the breadth and color of simulated life in Vice City.

Totaling 39 new screenshots, the launch gallery has a bit of everything: It's got night life, it's got wildlife, and—most importantly—it's got plenty of protagonists Jason and Lucia holding guns and making their serious 'I am involved in violent crime' faces. You gotta have those.

Of that bunch, I'm particularly interested in the screenshot of a gun-toting, tactical-geared Jason seemingly having stepped off a military aircraft and into a firefight, because there appears to be a dog in the background equipped with its own combat gear. Could Jason and Lucia get access to their very own D-Dog? At this point, we can only guess.

Vice City being Vice City, the launch gallery features plenty of partying, showing off dance clubs, dockside dive bars, heavy drinkers, and general debaucherists of all ages. Including your Margaritaville types.

Rockstar took the opportunity to flaunt the variety of its Florida Man representation, revealing all sorts of colorful individuals worthy of the mythology. In one screenshot, a scarred man with heterochromia has two varieties of dead reptile within arm's length. In another, Jason is menaced by a sort of knife-wielding human mullet. Even the cops are a form of Florida Man: There aren't many places nowadays where you can flaunt that sort of moustache/aviator combo without a hint of irony.

And, I'll note, the new screens show a terrifying degree of pore fidelity—and how there's a wide range of skin care philosophies in Vice City. I'm not naming any names, but some of these guys could stand to try out a facial moisturizer. You'll thank me for it. It's nice.

Also, there's an alligator.

There's plenty more to pick through, from wide-angle shots of police raids and hazy meadow sunsets to high-speed chase stills and scuba diving scenes. All those remaining screenshots are in the gallery below.

Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on console on November 19—but we're still waiting to hear about PC. And we're being very patient and brave about it, too.

I don't remember the last time I actually took a duster to my own rig. But in my defence, I only recently upgraded my motherboard and that required I remove pretty much everything out of my PC in the process of ripping out an old ASRock mobo I could no longer trust in favour of an Asus. So, that basic action meant that I had cleaned my PC by proxy in the past couple of months, though without actively cleaning it.

Which has me straddling both camps of PC Gamer reader, it seems. Because, while the biggest single majority of readers we polled can't remember when they last cleaned their PC, either, a healthy 45% of readers have actually given their rig a thorough once-over in just the past six months.

Now, I get that you have to change your bedding/towels/pants more often than that, but six months is but a mayfly's daydream in the life of your gaming PC. So, I applaud all of you taking rig maintenance so seriously.

This all came off the back of a recent weekly poll where we asked the question: When did you last dust/clean your gaming PC? Sure, over a quarter of you are living in filth, but I'm still proud of the rest of you.

Wholesome

When did you last dust/clean your gaming PC?

Votes (%)

Time immemorial (I don't remember and I'm annoyed you even asked)

26

Fairly recently, at least in the last 6 months

23

Pretty recently, in the last 4 weeks

17

Sometime in the last 12 months

15

Over 12 months ago

14

Just now (in the last 24 hours)

5

Votes (%) Data

Product	Value
Time immemorial (I don't remember and I'm annoyed you even asked)	26
Fairly recently, at least in the last 6 months	23
Pretty recently, in the last 4 weeks	17
Sometime in the last 12 months	15
Over 12 months ago	14
Just now (in the last 24 hours)	5

Along with the 26% who can't remember, there are another 14% of readers who haven't lifted a finger to dust their PC in over a year. Then there are the paragons of virtue, the children of the light, the 5% who cleaned their PC only that very day they saw the poll. Blessed ones.

But if you look at the numbers in total, we are a culture in balance. There's a healthy 45% of readers who have cleaned their machines in the past six months, and on the other side another 40% of readers who haven't touched their PC with a duster in over a year, with a 15% fulcrum in the middle who have spent time cleansing their rig in the past 12 months.

Equilibrium is everything, but where do you sit on the cleanliness teeter-totter? And how important is it to you?

This week we want to know something else about good PC hygiene, but not of the physical variety, more of the firmware side of the equation. So we're asking: When was the last time you updated your main PC's BIOS?

We've seen more of Grand Theft Auto 6 than we were meant to at this stage. All we were meant to have was a Netflix special, some sparse previews, and a very late launch trailer. But thanks to a certain leaker, some players have been able to see way more than we ever imagined.

This was both good for those who wanted to see more of the game before forking over $100 for its ultimate edition, and bad for the players who wanted an unsullied first look at GTA 6. The leaks gradually escalated, with the party responsible even threatening to leak the entire build and declaring they'd activate a dead man's switch if Take-Two pursued legal action against them.

"Because of the file sizes and the complexity, piracy is less of an issue in interactive entertainment, but it's not been a non-issue," Zelnick says. "And in the event where it turns into an issue we address it in the same way every other business does, which is with legal work and then with technical work, and we'll have to do both." And it's done exactly that. Despite the threats, Take-Two subpoenaed Discord for more user information concerning the leaks, which has since been granted by a court.

"I think it's fair to say that piracy is going to be an issue in our business going forward—we're just going to have to be vigilant about it," Zelnick adds. "Now, it's a little more complex because for all of our games you have to be connected with our servers to have a good experience. So with piracy are you really going to set up competitive servers? Is it really going to be a good experience? It won't be a great experience. But it's not nothing."

World of Warcraft: Forever has proven extremely popular—and while I was preparing for the launch last night, I was bracing for the same experience I had in the beta. Namely: Long queue times, connection errors, and disconnects. At least I wouldn't have to use a VPN this time, I thought, that is some small saving grace.

Turns out I needn't have worried. There was a brief panic, mind, when I finished a breezy five minute queue and landed on a ruleset selection screen that was completely greyed-out. But one eight minute queue later, and I was in—and proceeded to quest until 4 am with nary a disconnection or lagspike to be seen.

Granted, I am playing on both the EU realms and the roleplay ruleset, both of which are bound to be less populous. But having hopped online, it doesn't seem like I'm alone: "I fully expected to not be able to play today, but I logged in with no queue and no lag," writes one equally-astonished player on the game's subreddit.

"Outside of having to spawn camp some wolves at the start, this has been the best wow launch I've seen so far. I haven't really had to compete for mobs, or herbs or quest drops, and I only had a brief moment of lag," writes another.

On that point, I do feel like the phasing is maybe working a little too well. I had an eerie experience jogging around Stormwind (admittedly, this was at 3 am on a Wednesday. Anyone with a normal job was likely sanely and soundly asleep) and having the Alliance's capital city all to myself.

But it is early days, with Blizzard clearly having braced hard to deal with its server capacity. And compared to the opposite of having to bare-knuckle wrestle people for quest tags—or group up and cooperate like some kind of loser, I guess—it's way more preferable. So kudos for Blizzard, managing a downright smooth MMO launch. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some kobolds to rob of their candles.

Intel has already committed to bringing its XMX-powered upscaling and frame generation tech to Linux via Valve's Proton compatibility layer, but one enterprising developer is clearly not willing to wait for the chip behemoth to get it working and has released an experimental version on Github (via Phoronix).

This new release promises "real Intel XeSS super resolution and XeSS Frame Generation inside Proton games, running on the GPU's XMX (matrix) units instead of the DP4a fallback that stock Wine/Proton gets." It was built on a OneXPlayer 3 handheld running the same Intel G3 Extreme chip that ships in the latest MSI Claw and the new Acer Predator Atlas 8, but has also been tested on a discrete Arc B580 GPU, too.

And it's already delivering a 29% performance boost in Cyberpunk just from the switch to XMX processing of upscaling, and when you throw in XeSS Frame Generation you're looking at a 145% performance boost. That is just one game, however, and the only other benchmark they note is for Forza Horizon 6 where the performance boosts are not quite so great, with a 16% bump from the XMX implementation. Though again you are looking at a healthy frame rate increase from 3x frame generation.

The installation seems surprisingly straightforward; you just unpack the release archive somewhere safe and run the install command. Then every game will run with the patched drivers without the need for any special launch options.

The one note is that you must be running the native Steam client to support the XMX switch in Proton, with the Flatpak Steam client not being currently supported.

It's great to see this being picked up and running with Intel's Arc GPUs right now. The ideal would be to have Intel get the official release out and available for anyone running SteamOS, or any other Linux distro, with their Arc-based graphics silicon, but given how straightforward this implementation seems to be, it's a great stop gap measure.

And it's worth noting that while graphics card prices have become an apocalyptic nightmare, where you might have to barter a kidney or two just for the privilege of potentially buying an RTX 5060, the two Intel Battlemage cards are still relatively affordable. The Arc B580 is around $330 and the Arc B570 is a shade over $300 today. That makes them solid 'budget' cards, and now they're becoming great options for that little Linux gaming tower you always wanted to build, too.

Now, if only those excellent G3 Extreme handhelds weren't so damned expensive…

With the Xbox Series X and S rapidly ageing, it looks unlikely that the next console generation will be affordable at all. As such, I've been looking at AMD to bring its modern GPU feature set to older hardware to stop me from having to upgrade. It seems it felt my gaze, and Xbox Series X, S, and Xbox handhelds now have FSR 4.1.2 support, which developers can turn on in their games.

AMD has just updated its Game Development Kit with FSR 4.1.2 and two new upscaling models for Xbox Series X and S: the Full INT8 model and the more efficient Lite INT8 model. The Lite one is half the size of the Full one and has a lower upscaling cost. Either console can use either model, but game developers are able to choose which type they implement.

AMD has put out a GDK sample for developers to test, which "switches between the Full and Lite models at runtime, so developers can compare image quality and upscaling cost in the same scene. Upscaler memory is the same for both models because it depends on render and display resolution, not on the model. That makes the choice a performance trade-off, not a memory one."

Interestingly, Ancient Gameplays tested the Lite and Full models two weeks ago and noticed that Lite works better with lower input resolution and even removes some visual noise that is kept in the Full model. They say the "Lite model needs to be more stable because it will be aimed at handheld devices, iGPUs from laptops, and the render resolution on those cases will be way, way lower."

FSR 4.1.2 is also now supported on Xbox handhelds (the top-end ROG Xbox Ally range to start with), though this is seemingly only the one "highly efficient INT8 model", and developers can only get access via Asus' preview driver for the Xbox Ally X and X20. AMD says "it upgrades DirectX 12 games with FSR 3.1 or newer, and ROG Xbox Ally support follows in a later update."

How developers choose to integrate FSR 4.1.2 on Xbox Series X and S will be on a case-by-case basis, but the Lite model being solid certainly suggests good things for future optimisations. And RX 6000 graphics cards got FSR 4.1 early, just a few weeks ago, giving older hardware a little bit more performance.

This is all just in time for a huge launch on Xbox: Grand Theft Auto 6. The game officially launches on November 19, and being a Rockstar game, it's looking like it will be a real graphical showcase. But playing on six-year-old hardware could pose a challenge, so getting an upscaling hand just before the game reaches the starting line surely can't hurt its reception. You won't be able to play the game on Xbox handhelds until the PC port (they aren't really Xbox consoles after all), but I won't be complaining when I'm squeezing a bit more performance out of my Z2 Extreme chip in everything else.

Switch 2 sales have plummeted over the summer months compared to this time last year; accounting for a drop of nearly four million units. That's sure to be a warning sign for Nintendo, especially as the company increased the price for the handheld across the globe at the start of September—near the end of the period it's currently reporting—which could have an impact on future sales over the busy holiday period.

Nintendo has reported its sales figures from April 1, 2026 until September 30, 2026. It calls this period 'FY27 Q1-Q2' because companies are weird. Nevertheless, it's the previous six months of the year, and it's been a tough one for hardware.

The Switch 2 sold 6.49 million units: a 3.87 million unit reduction compared to the 10.36 million in the same period last year. That makes a change from the original Switch, which sold in increasingly larger amounts for the first five years of its life.

The Switch sold just 1.27 million units during the same period, down 32.7%, but that's not a huge surprise for the outgoing handheld.

So, what to make of the dip? It is a marked reduction in Switch 2 sales compared to its bumper launch year. But that's the thing. The Switch 2 sold incredibly well in its first year; 19.8 million units sold. That's a bigger success story than the Switch. It launched just before the end of Nintendo's weird financial years but reached around 17.7 million units sold by the end of its first full year. Though it did go on to double that figure the following year, which the Switch 2 is likely to fail to achieve.

Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 2 over the course of this summer period. It first announced the price increase in May, 2026; however, it didn't implement it until September 1, 2026 in most of the affected regions (US, Canada, Europe). Only Japan saw a sudden price increase effective in May, 2026.

The company asks $500 for the console, an increase of $50 over its original launch price. It blamed "changes in market conditions" at the time, which is common parlance for 'memory prices are ruining everything.'

The most recent reporting period ended on September 30. So we don't quite know what impact that $50 price hike will have on the success of the handheld from these figures alone; however, Nintendo has reevaluated its forecast up until March 31, 2027 at just 16.5 million Switch 2 units sold; down from 19.86 million in the previous 12-month period. That's a 16.9% reduction.

"Although unit sales of Nintendo Switch 2 hardware declined compared to the same period of last fiscal year, many consumers continued to adopt the system, spurred on by factors like the release of new titles," Nintendo says.

And it's true, games are flying off the shelves for the Switch 2 relative to last year. Up 18.8%, from 20.62 million to 24.49 million. A certain remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time might help bump those figures, with the game coming out today. Even Switch titles are selling like hot cakes; the majority of game sales remain with the bulk of players on the last-gen console. Up 6.8%, from 61.56 million to 65.73 million.

So it's not all bad for Nintendo—it still has one of the best-selling consoles on its hands. It's just been curtailed by the pesky memory and cost of living crises. Haven't we all?

Reader, a confession: each night, before I retire to my chambers, I light a small votive candle. Bowing over it, I clasp my hands and beseech the ghost of Josh Sawyer (who is not dead) to return to the Pillars of Eternity games and add the weirdly-decent gamepad support they got on console to their PC iterations. I am an old man who wants to play them on my Steam Deck, and the existing Steam Input templates don't cut it for me.

My prayers are answered. In an announcement yesterday, Obsidian declared that now is the time of the Pillars of Eternity and Deadfire: Controller Support Public Test. Both PoE 1 and 2 have ongoing Steam betas that will allow you to play with full, start-to-finish controller support. You can opt into them and try the new feature for yourself by visiting each game's properties and opting into their respective November 4 beta versions.

Being betas, they're a touch buggy right now. Indeed, one of Obsidian's very first notices to players in the public test's announcement is "This is a public test, so please expect bugs", but I'm nevertheless impressed by the limited time I've spent mucking around with the games on Steam Deck.

There are a couple of misaligned gamepad prompts, and a very slight amount of awkwardness with the analogue movement, but frankly my main takeaway is 'Dang, it's kind of wild how well these isometric CRPGs adjust to non-keyboard-and-mouse support'. Which, yeah, is how I felt about the console versions too.

The public test runs until November 25, and the devs will use the data gathered to iron out wrinkles like those I just listed for a full release.

It's not all about gamepad support, by the way. Just, you know, mostly. Obsidian also announced patch 1.3.10.0 for PoE 1 and patch 5.1.0.0 for Deadfire. In PoE 1's case, the patch mostly smooths out some minor niggling bugs with the UI and the game's recently implemented turn-based mode.

Deadfire's patch is meatier: that game's older turn-based mode has been rejigged to integrate the improvements from PoE 1's turn-based mode. Characters no longer take a single turn per round (instead, they move as much as their initiative allows), lethality has been greatly increased—that kinda thing.

I'm a die-hard real-time-with-pause guy, so it's all fairly academic to me, but PoE 1's turn-based innovations got a lot of plaudits from players who were very hopeful they would end up ported back to Deadfire. My friends, this one is for you.

Neither Critical Role diehards nor Hololive vtuber fans could've predicted that they'd work together to film a new tabletop roleplaying series. Shattered Legends is the product of a collaboration that might sound bizarre at first but makes perfect sense when you consider vtubers are basically just voice actors, like just about everyone else in Critical Role's orbit.

Matt Mercer certainly sees them that way. He tells PC Gamer that filming Shattered Legends with Hololive vtubers gave him a "deeper understanding and appreciation for the skill and talent that each of these performers has." The only challenge, he says, was the technical logistics of filming a show with a mix of humans and 2D anime girls.

The original idea for Shattered Legends, before it even had a name, was a pitch from Nerissa Ravencroft, Hololive's "Demon of Sound" vtuber. A long-time fan of Critical Role, Ravencroft says she could barely believe it when her manager told her they were up for it: "I was in awe for multiple days."

"Growing up, I never had friends or knew anybody who ran a TTRPG campaign, so it’s been a heavy desire to play one for a long time," she says. "I just so happen to be one of the luckiest girls in the world, as I get to play with not only my fellow [Hololive vtubers], but Critical Role!"

Ravencroft took the lead on Hololive's side, creating her own character, working with artists on the visuals and unique vtuber models based on everyone's characters, and helping produce an original song.

The story of Shattered Legends was inspired by Berserk and Soulsborne games. All the vtubers—which includes Ravencroft, Mori Calliope, Gigi Murin, and Shiori Novella—wanted to tell a darker story than fans might've expected. Mercer and Marisha Ray, who played alongside the vtubers, helped them fit it into Critical Role's existing setting Exandria as a self-contained "canon-ish" campaign.

The group will be playing Daggerheart, Critical Role's own fantasy TTRPG. For those unfamiliar with it, Daggerheart eschews D&D's d20 rolling system for two 12-sided dice, one representing your 'hope' and the other your 'fear'. If your hope roll is higher, you can spend a point of it to do something beneficial, but if fear is higher, the GM can use it whenever they want to challenge the players.

Mercer prefers Daggerheart when playing with new players and likes how the narrative dynamics "allow for baked-in tension and release, while also inviting players to collaborate in extremely creative ways."

Ravencroft, who is one of those new players, says she was "a bit intimidated" as someone who normally plays videogames, but found it easy once things got going, especially with Mercer and Ray at the table. "Having Matt as a GM for my first Daggerheart campaign is already crazy enough," she says, "but with an incredibly experienced and talented roleplayer and actress like Marisha, we were truly in the best hands possible."

Although the story fits neatly into six episodes, Mercer says there's "much promise of a wider world for these characters," and that "there's always room to pick up these seeds for future adventures" if people want it.

Shattered Legends will premiere on Ravencroft's YouTube channel in mid-November.

Yesterday, after eight years of waiting, Bethesda finally gave The Elder Scrolls 6 a title: Sentinel. It then warned that, after eight years of waiting, more waiting is in store because "it'll be some time before we're ready to share more." Then Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, one of the industry's best-known and most reliable reporters, weighed in, saying the game is "still more than two years away."

You know what comes next, right?

Schreier's 'two more years' statement, echoed by Jez Corden of Windows Central, attracted quite a range of comments, not all of them of the polite sort. That led Schreier to Reddit, where he could elaborate on his statement.

Pointing out his record of accurate calls on previous Bethesda releases Fallout 76 and Starfield, Schreier wrote, "I'm a reporter. I am not telling you this because I enjoy watching people get mad about having to wait for sequels to their favorite video games. I am telling you this because it is true, and because my job is to report accurate facts and clear up misinformation. TES6: Sentinel is more than two years away."

Did this clarification calm the roiling waters? Well...

Many of the replies are understanding, grateful, and sympathetic to Schreier's plight, but there are plenty that express doubt or distrust, suggesting that the two year window was pure speculation. Others want to know why Bethesda would drop the title announcement yesterday if the game really is that far out, given that Todd Howard has previously expressed regret about revealing The Elder Scrolls 6 so prematurely in the first place. Why repeat that mistake?

A few optimistic souls are holding onto the dream of a 2027 release that emerged from the reveal trailer for Skyrim on the Nintendo Switch 2:

And then there are the Elder Scrolls fans operating on a whole different level from the rest of us. Redditor Reacryoum, for instance, thinks Bethesda is leading up to a surprise trailer drop on November 11—that's actually one of the more grounded theories to emerge over the past 24 hours. Casting back to one of Bethesda's old Twitter posts, Jayehemcee speculated that the theme of the game is "time," and that this is all part of the game's marketing. I'm not sure how that one works in practice, frankly, but I respect the ambition.

Minimum-Act-7571 put forth the idea that Bethesda is actually messing with Schreier by intentionally feeding him false information, because it's super mad at him spilling the beans all the time—although they also admitted that it's a "new copium theory," and so perhaps not meant to be taken entirely seriously.

I think the best of the bunch, though, is this one from Any-West7160, who believes the Sentinel title reveal contains the actual release date: November 11, 2027. I don't believe it, but I like it.

Here's the video in question—what do you see in the stars?

The best videogame conspiracy theories are always the most bonkers, but what complicates the situation just a wee little bit for Sentinel is that one such theory was actually correct: The Sentinel subtitle was stashed away in a Starfield easter egg for years before anyone noticed. Maybe it was just a coincidence, sure, but the numbers don't lie, as the saying goes—and those numbers said Sentinel. And they were right!

So there's precedent there, pretty certainly, but it's also a lot easier to drop in a reference to a locked-in-stone game title than it is to do the same with a relatively far-off launch date that's subject to disruption and delays. And as others have pointed out, including Schreier, it's extremely unlikely that anyone is just lying about the far-off release window for a little bit of PR pop: Evasion and word games are one thing, but straight-up dishonesty will leave your credibility in shreds pretty much instantly.

What it all adds up to, ultimately, is this: Two more years of waiting and maybe more, plenty of hopium and copium along the way, and a wise piece of advice from Vanquisher_84 which will almost certainly go unheeded:

See you in 2029?

I can't ignore the elephant in the room: Grand Theft Auto 6 is out this month, but we still don't know when we'll see Rockstar's return trip to Vice City launch on PC. When we asked in a poll whether y'all planned to wait for the PC release, play it on console at launch, or double dip and do both, a whopping 71% said you would wait. Modding is half the fun for me, so I get it. I'm with you.

But even PC releases are dodging the big GTA 6-shaped gap in November, so what new games are even out there for you to play? Well, World of Warcraft: Forever kicks off the beginning of the month if you need a new MMO to get sucked into. Then Warhammer Survivors is just a few days later, and there's a whole slew of updates to pick through. It may be a light month, but it's not empty.

I'm eyeing a few November releases myself, though I wouldn't mind taking the time to catch up on the 2026 games I missed. As for recommendations, I'll let my colleagues take it from here.

November 2026 PC Gamer picks

November 2026 gaming events and sales

• ExileCon hosts a two-day celebration of things Path of Exile-related starting November 7
• The Golden Joystick Awards air its 44th annual live ceremony on November 11
• The Streamer Awards recognizes its 2026 winners on November 12
• TwitchCon San Diego begins its three-day event on November 13
• League of Legends Worlds 2026 continues through the month, with finals on November 14
• Dreamhack hosts its Stockholm event on November 27
• More Epic Store free games go live every Thursday, and you can check out these Steam sales for weekly themed deals:
  • Nov. 16 – 23: Auto-Battler RPG Fest
  • Nov. 16 – 16: Black Friday Sale

November 2026 game updates and DLC highlights

The November 2026 games calendar

New game releases, events, and updates you can check out this month, all in one place.

On Tuesday, tens of millions of Americans voted in midterm elections to deliver a sweep of generational Democratic victories in federal and state races, reflecting a leftward electoral shift that's being interpreted as a nationwide rejection of Trumpism.

But even as Republican candidates and incumbents suffered defeats in what had traditionally been considered some of the party's most entrenched strongholds, the midterms also issued a stinging rebuke to another major source of voter frustration: Data centers. At nearly every opportunity, Americans voted in favor of local ballot measures to halt, slow, or stymie the pace of data center construction in their communities.

As tracked by Data Centers on the Ballot, across the 47 local midterm elections in the American cities and townships that featured ballot measures on data center construction, voters favored restrictions on the rate of data center expansion in 38 of the 39 completed counts. Of the eight races that remain open, voters supporting additional data center restrictions are leading in all six of the races with only partial reporting. For the two remaining races, no results have yet been posted.

Here's the rundown of the types of measures voters are supporting:

• In ten of the closed races, voters approved adding megawatt caps for data center projects to their city or town charters. Typically, those towns selected 25 MW caps; for comparison, a planned OpenAI facility in Effingham County, Georgia is expected to demand 3,200 MW. Voters in favor of megawatt caps are leading in two partial counts.
• Ten of the elections included non-binding advisory questions posed by village councils and town electors, asking whether voters thought their towns should permit or restrict data center development. In nine closed races, voters voted in favor of restriction; pro-restriction voters are leading in the remaining partial count.
• In seven closed races, voters rejected rezoning measures that would permit the construction of data center sites, and voters opposing a similar rezoning decision are leading in another partial count.
• Voters in five races approved outright bans on new data center constructions, and a similar ban is leading in one race with partial reporting. In two other races, measures that would require voter approval before new data center construction can progress have either passed or are leading.
• In six other completed races, voters opted for other data center restrictions, like temporary moratoriums and additional conditions on data center tax benefits.

At time of writing, only one ballot measure that would have introduced data center restrictions failed: In Harwood, North Dakota, voters refused an amendment to the city charter that would have required Harwood to commission an independent review before approving new data center construction or expansion.

Aside from that one exception, it's not hard to suss out why so many of those measures have passed. NBC exit polls show that 56% of yesterday's midterm voters considered AI data centers either "crucial" or "a major factor" in their choice of Congress person, with data center opponents driven by concerns of environmental toll, energy costs, noise pollution, and—one must imagine—the upward-spiraling cost of RAM.

France's Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) union has accused Microsoft of sabotaging work on Marvel's Blade and then using the inevitable results to justify Arkane's closure.

The union said development of Blade "is going fine," and that the game is on par with Arkane's previous body of work, which includes the Dishonored series, Prey, Deathloop, and the sadly overlooked Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Despite that, "workers have to face the harsh reality: our studio might get closed because, and only because, Microsoft decided to, even if that means sabotaging the game it funded."

"Microsoft chose to justify the closure on economic reasons," the union wrote. "But Microsoft is actually why those economic reasons even exist. Because after freezing hiring for 19 months, which artificially caused delays and additional cost, Microsoft now uses those same delays and additional costs as a reason to close down the studio."

Closing Arkane would defy "financial logic," the union claimed, as it would likely cost more money than just allowing it to finish Blade—and furthermore, it added, Arkane is profitable—"just not profitable enough for Microsoft."

"Microsoft is responsible for the situation Arkane is in today. Microsoft is responsible for the situation the workers are in today," the union said. "So Microsoft has to take full responsibility here and act accordingly."

While its "dearest wish" is to see Arkane "live on," STJV said the studio's future has to go beyond just completing Blade. And if that's not feasible and Arkane must close, it falls to Microsoft—"the company who decided that Arkane has to shut down"—to take care of the hundreds of lives it has thrown into turmoil. Given Microsoft's essentially limitless resources, the union believes the company has a moral obligation to go beyond the bare minimum required by law: "We will not allow the lives of Arkane Studios' workers to be destroyed without the company paying a fair price."

The union is not aiming low with its demands. First, "to give employees control over the decisions that shape their future" while acquisition negotiations are underway:

• Go beyond the mandatory Work Council consultation, and actually give employees representative & unions a say in the discussion to choose a potential buyer.
• Setup a protection fund for employees on the level of the PSE compensation in case workers get fired for economic reasons by the buyer in 24 following months.

Should Arkane ultimately be closed, it demands Microsoft "funds commensurate with Microsoft’s status as a corporation" to ensure employees are properly compensated:

• A redundancy payment of 200K€ ($225,000).
• Two years’ redeployment support funded by Microsoft.
• The introduction of shared resources for training and studio creation, with a residual bonus to enable all employees to look to the future with confidence.
• Compensation up to the redundancy payment for independant workers’ contract breach.

Those are big asks, but the union isn't wrong about the resources Microsoft has at its disposal: Microsoft's net income for the first quarter of FY27 was $36.6 billion. Xbox is a small contributor to that total, but it is a part of Microsoft, and that makes it Microsoft's issue to deal with.

For now, the fate of Arkane remains unresolved: The studio fell victim to the most recent round of cuts at Xbox, but a recent report indicated that it might yet find a home with a new owner. I've reached out to Xbox for comment on the STJV union's demands and will update if I receive a reply.

It was a big night for Democrats in the US, as a "blue wave" saw the party retake control of Congress in what CNN called "a stunning blow to Trump." Among the night's big losers is former Halo composer Marty O'Donnell, whose run for Congress ended in a spectacular, crushing defeat—and then a dunk from his congressional opponent that can only be described as brutal.

O'Donnell began his political career in 2024, saying he "never wanted to be a politician" but felt compelled to do so by what he described as the deterioration of the US: "Big tech, big pharma, big media, big whatever—all trying to control big government in Washington DC."

That effort didn't work out so well—he placed fourth in the 2024 Republican primary for Nevada's third congressional district—but he tried again in 2026, this time with the support of US president Donald Trump, which O'Donnell enthusiastically welcomed despite previously calling Trump an "idiot." Well, winds and tides change.

Anyway, O'Donnell won the 2026 Republican primary, and then got in the ring with Susie Lee, the Democrat incumbent who's held the seat since 2019. It did not go well for him.

Hey, that happens sometimes—you think you got it, and then it turns out you don't actually got it at all.

But O'Donnell's Trump-toned campaign, complete with dire warnings about open borders, Marxism and the woke left, accusations of corruption leveled against Lee, embrace of the far-right commentariat, and occasional asides to remind everyone that he's absolutely not mad about being fired by Bungie, did not exactly endear him to his political opponents, or very many other people, really.

So after dismantling O'Donnell, the re-elected Lee—who seemed to largely ignore O'Donnell's rhetoric during the campaign—sent him off into the sunset with this:

I'm just a bystander on the scene—I'm not even American, much less a Democrat cheerleader. But holy cow. You can see that crater from orbit.

O'Donnell did not take Lee's farewell particularly well, which led to even more smoke in the comments.

I think this is one of those times were you have to just take it on the chin and move along. We'll see how that goes.

New Blood Interactive has been around for more than a decade—it's celebrating its 12 year anniversary, in fact—and is still going strong. Dusk, Gloomwood, Amid Evil, Fallen Aces, Ultrakill—it's got an enviable catalogue that continues to grow. But CEO Dave Oshry is still imagining how it might end.

By keeping the studio relatively small, letting everyone work remotely, and not putting all its eggs in a franchise basket and spitting out endless sequels, it's been able to keep doing its thing. And that's the only way Oshry wants it to work.

"If we couldn't be successful doing it this way, I wouldn't want to do it at all," he tells us. "Rather than scrambling to find publisher money or investor money, I'd rather just shut it down and be like, 'We tried, we did our best, we made some cool games, that was it.' And I still want to do that. People are like, 'What's the end look like?' And I'm like, 'In 20 years, we're done. I'm gonna say goodbye, shut it down. Thanks for playing our games. That was fun. I'm gonna go fishing now.'"

Should New Blood start to struggle, Oshry has no interest in selling it to keep it alive. "I'm never gonna sell it. I'm never gonna give it to anybody else. It'll be our time." He'll be content, he says, if people remember its games fondly. "I hope people remember us like their favourite game studios from the '90s or 2000s. Except I don't want us to have the shitty ending like a lot of those studios had, where they got acquired or they went out of business. I want us to have a happy ending. I want us to go out on our terms."

It's a promise that hits a lot harder these days, with so many studios getting gobbled up and then being tossed aside. As October came to a close, EA killed off BioWare after years of mismanagement. 30 years down the drain. Like countless studios that have been acquired by the likes of EA, Microsoft and Embracer, there was no happy ending.

Oshry describes the games industry as "a machine that requires product and labour, and that's not us". Instead, he prefers to think of New Blood as a band.

"Our games are our albums. We tour, we sell merchandise, and everybody plays their part. We're like an orchestra now, actually, more than a band. Because we got a lot of people, and a lot of musically inclined people. We're like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra at this point.

"Eventually the band's gonna get old, and we're gonna get tired, and we're gonna do our retirement tour, and we're gonna call it a day before we get sad. Before we're on stage and people are like, 'Ah, they're getting a little long in the tooth. They can't hit those high notes anymore.' So before that happens, I want to shut it down and enjoy my life."

Nexus Mods, the world's largest mod site and more or less a second home for anyone who's ever installed a Bethesda game, has new rules regarding AI-generated and AI-assisted mods on its platform. In short, it's taking a Steam-ish approach: no outright bans on AI content, but it's compulsory to disclose where it's been used in your mods, and to what extent.

"An outright ban will not eliminate AI from the modding process but will prevent people from mentioning its use", wrote Nexus owner Victor 'Foledinho' Folmann in an update yesterday. "We'd prefer the opposite; it should be out in the open, clearly labelled, and regulated according to the rules that we can implement on our platform".

So, starting yesterday, modders uploading new projects to Nexus will have to tick a box declaring how much AI was used in their work, including promotional materials. They can declare their mods "AI-generated", which is to say mostly produced by AI; "AI assisted", for mods that are mostly human-made with a little LLM assistance on the side; or declare them free of the tech's touch altogether.

"AI assisted" modders will also have to make public explanations as to where and how AI has been used, in addition to the box-ticking. The tags will be shown more prominently—right after adult-content tags.

Meanwhile, Nexus itself is pledging never to use mods to train AI or to sell them to third parties that want to do so. The site is also introducing new permissions that will let authors declare whether they are open to (non-Nexus) parties using their creations for AI use and training, with the default being "Ask Me".

How long does everyone have to get themselves in-line with the new rules? Glad you asked. "We'll also be introducing a 60-day grace period for existing mods to meet the new requirements, giving Mod Authors time to review their mods and make any necessary changes to them. This grace period starts today (3rd November 2026) and ends on 2nd January 2027."

I was a little unsure as to whether the new rules would truly apply to every mod on Nexus. There are a lot of them, after all, and plenty that have long since been abandoned by their original creators. Nevertheless, Nexus tells me that "it applies to every mod uploaded to the site, including ones that were uploaded prior to our announcement and the grace period." So better get your ducks in a row, mod authors.

Anyway, will every modder using AI dutifully hew to these rules? No, but Nexus says it knows that. "While we hope these changes will encourage everyone to disclose their AI usage, to be honest, that’s not going to happen. Additionally, we are putting clear moderation standards in place, enforced with consequences for breaking the rules", says Folmann. We'll see how it all shakes out in the months to come.

You may well be sick of reading about it—I am certainly sick to my stomach writing about it—but here's another doom-filled prophecy about the continuing memory crisis. Doesn't seem quite so funny calling it a RAMpocalypse now. The CEO of memory module maker TeamGroup, Chen Ching, is claiming we still haven't seen the worst of the supply crisis, and that even in 2027 "there will be no downward price trend whatsoever."

According to a report from BigGo Finance, which cropped up while I was searching for a credible source after mydrivers wrote about it, Chen thinks the worst of the shortage will be from now until the middle of next year, and that we're likely to get to a point with DRAM that "even money can't buy goods".

"Right now you can still buy goods, they're just expensive," he says. "In a little while, you may not be able to buy goods at all."

This is all on the back of an earnings call for the company, where it announced record quarterly revenue of NT$10.139 billion (around $308 million), which is an increase of 34% compared with last quarter.

TeamGroup, like most memory manufacturers looking to capitalise on the current crisis, is prioritising where it can get the most cash from, and that comes from selling direct to data centre and enterprise folk, rather than us normies. Just as chatty Sam Altman would like it to be. Fully two thirds of TeamGroup's business is now selling into other businesses, where previously that percentage was just a quarter, with the majority going into the consumer market.

Chen claims its relationships with vendors will help it continue to get inventory, even if it has to pay premium spot prices for it. But he notes that supply will continue to be the big problem, suggesting that supply and demand equilibrium is unlikely to be achieved any time before the second half of 2028, or potentially even later.

And, obviously, that means prices will remain high, or more likely keep rising. "How can prices fall when there's nothing left?" he questions like a good little doom-monger. Good 'ere, innit?

Remember the 3D craze? The Nintendo 3DS, 3D TV, 3D cinema; it was a new, exciting technology that some expected would go mainstream one day. Then the dream just sorta died. People don't talk about it much these days; except for this wonderful project that takes normal videos and turns them, alchemy-like, into slightly more 3D-looking videos using the Steam Frame.

And let me tell you, it's actually pretty good.

It's called framedepth, and it's made by a user going by guix8 on GitHub. It's a plugin for Chrome that adds a stereoscopic 3D effect to any video when viewed via the browser on the Steam Frame.

It's surprisingly fun. I've been watching live gigs and eating challenges on YouTube and the stereoscopic effect is automatically applied once enabled via the extension. It definitely adds some extra level of immersion to it. Not much, but some. I wouldn't go as far to say I felt like I was there in the crowd for either spectacle, and maybe I wouldn't want to be in the firing line of a food challenge, but it's better than I thought it would be. An ever-so-slightly more engaging way to watch YouTube in VR.

The installation process is a bit more involved than your average Chrome plugin, requiring the Steam Frame to be in developer mode. You need to install Chrome on the Steam Frame, which requires a quick trip to the SteamOS desktop to run the Konsole and install via Flathub (flatpak install com.google.Chrome). Then you have to download framedepth from the GitHub and whack more code in the terminal:

cd ~/Downloads && f=$(ls -v framedepth-*-steamos-arm64.tar.gz | tail -1) && echo "$f" # the newest download

sha256sum -c "$f.sha256" && tar -xzf "$f" && cd "${f%.tar.gz}"

bash install.sh # ~/.local/share/framedepth, user service, extension files

Finally, it needs to be loaded as an extension into Chrome, which also requires developer mode to be enabled for extensions in the browser. Once installed, you can enable the 3D effect and change the settings from a dropdown menu right there in Chrome.

The pop-out slider to the max seems to have the most impact on the 3D effect; the equivalent of cranking the 3DS slider all the way up.

There's a bunch to play around with here, but it's worth a go if you have a Steam Frame. If anything, just to rekindle lost excitement for 3D technologies that never managed to win us all over.

Dead by Daylight's devs have found themselves in hot water and in the middle of quite a mess. In short, over the Halloween weekend a team member saw TheBurntPeanut playing Dead by Daylight, not in a sponsored stream I may add, and gifted him free DLC, items, and currency.

All the Dead by Daylight DLCs combined come to $335/£301: a substantial sum to just give away to a streamer who makes more money than most of us will see in a lifetime. TheBurntPeanut did then offer to give back all the content and said that he was willing to pay for it, but the official response from an official Dead by Daylight account on his stream was, "We can take the heat. They are yours to keep."

This turned out to be untrue, as shortly after the stream Dead by Daylight rescinded this offer. In an official social media post the devs explained: "we have already removed the content that was granted to the creator".

So what went wrong? Well, gifting hundreds of dollars worth of free stuff to a wealthy content creator who isn't undertaking a sponsored stream isn't a fantastic look. But the DBD community were more annoyed about the conflict in values. Something that the Dead by Daylight creator has now acknowledged:

"When collaborating with a new creator, we normally look thoroughly at their past content to determine whether they are representing the values of inclusion our community expects from us. In this case, this was not taken into proper consideration or discussed as a group.

"When we talk about our values in relation to our community, we mean respect, transparency, diversity, and creating a space where people from different backgrounds and experiences feel welcome. Diversity is one of DBD's core principles and everyone is welcome to play it. But when we choose to work with a creator, we're putting our name next to theirs, and we want to partner with creators whose words and actions share and support that principle."

They have also confirmed that there will be updated request and approval methods for this kind of thing going forward to ensure "any Dead by Daylight spokesperson is properly representing our team and our values."

AMD has just posted another record quarter, with revenue topping $13 billion and its net income sitting at $2.4 billion. That is a lot of billions, and my brain is slightly struggling to comprehend it. But AMD's CFO and treasurer, Jean Hu, is projecting that this success will continue into the next quarter, predicting revenue figures of around $17 billion for Q4. Let's just compare that to Intel, which is expecting to continue posting flat, or slightly down, revenue figures of $15 - $16 billion itself.

Such a result would represent the first time that AMD has actually generated higher revenue figures than Intel for its lifetime. Or as far back as I can find the actual revenue figures for anyways.

Whether that will necessarily translate into a higher net income figure for AMD, I'm not entirely sure. Maths is not my strong point, and whether AMD's total revenue going up by another $3 billion will push its net income over the $3 billion mark where Intel currently sits I'm not sure. But it's going to be mighty close for sure.

But net income is not really the significant thing in terms of making history; AMD has been consistently turning a profit since 2018, and in the years up to now there have definitely been times when it has beaten Intel on that score, most notably in 2024 where Intel reported a staggering $18.7 billion loss for the year. AMD made $1.6 billion in that same timeframe. And last year AMD beat Intel again in the profit stakes.

Despite it being a punishing last quarter for Intel in terms of its stock price collapsing, the company did at least return to profitability.

But total revenue is still something else entirely. Intel has remained relatively flat in terms of its own revenue figures, while AMD has surged on the inside. Its recent earnings call puts AMD at roughly twice what it was reporting just two years ago.

For the fabless company to be where it is, and where it's expected to be by the end of the year, is quite staggering. Especially for any of us who watched AMD flailing around in the mid-2010s. You've got to hand it to Dr. Su, the turnaround for AMD has been little short of miraculous.

A chain of events that led to a record-breaking $6.3 billion mega-hack began with a dodgy download, so says the company that was hacked, Binance.

The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange says that the hack was not a "single isolated breach or simple phishing incident"; multiple steps were required to break through its security measures. It all began when a Wallet DevOps engineer (named Engineer A) downloaded a tampered Homebrew installation that was suggested to them by an unnamed search engine.

Homebrew is a third-party package manager for macOS. A report from the SANS Technology Institute, linked to in Binance's investigation, suggests that malicious adverts for Homebrew have been spotted in search engine results, hoping to ensnare users into installing malware on a user's PC.

"Our security team detected the anomaly, replaced the device, and rotated all related credentials as a proactive security action," Binance says. "However, Engineer A’s role and his related colleagues on our wallet infrastructure team was exposed to the hacker."

Then came a separate incident with a software engineer (named Engineer B). They were contacted through a job hunting platform (Binance says it was a legitimate platform) and was asked to attend a first-round interview with a HR representative. This was followed by up a second-round interview with the CEO. Not the HR representative, nor the CEO, however, were real; the company was made up.

The aim of the interviews? To offer Engineer B an 'assignment' that was really a repository of malicious code that executed during setup. The malware ran a series of commands and evasion techniques to avoid detection, thus avoiding Binance's security checks.

The attacker used Engineer B's now-compromised computer and an internal AI tool to gain control over two further machines: that of Engineer A and another Wallet Software engineer (Engineer C). They discovered a container deployment permission token on Engineer A's machine. With this, they could log into Engineer C's computer using the stolen credentials to create a container and trigger a malicious script to start the mega-hack that would drain $6.3 billion worth of funds from wallets used to store transitory funds by the exchange.

So, basically, the internet is a bad place, and you can't trust anyone. Or, at least, you have to have your wits about you—especially if you happen to have the key to a multi-billion dollar company's finances stored on your PC somewhere. Luckily, my PC is just pictures of my cat and a Steam backlog that won't quit.

That's actually some of the criticism levelled at the company. Should it have been possible to get this level of access even with spoofed ads and jobs?

And here's Binance co-founder Yi He on taking that criticism...

Reminder that the FBI reckons a North Korean hacking group is behind the attack, which North Korean officials have unsurprisingly denied. Binance has frozen roughly half of the funds that were initially stolen, and has already covered the rest.

When the Greybeards invite you to High Hrothgar in Skyrim, you have to climb a mountain to reach them. There's a messenger called Klimmek waiting in the village of Ivarstead at the bottom to warn you what an arduous journey this is going to be. To get to the top of the Throat of the World, he says, you have to work your way up The 7,000 Steps.

It's well-documented that there aren't actually 7,000 steps carved into the side of the mountain. Some of them are buried under the snow, making an exact count impossible, but the actual number is closer to 700. And even if you argue that The 7,000 Steps refers to the number of footsteps it takes to ascend the mountain, according to the dedicated researchers at the Ultimate Elder Scrolls Portal it only takes "approximately 2,400 footsteps" to get there.

As part of Bethesda's 40th anniversary, which included the reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6's subtitle, the studio reminisced about their previous work, which is how we know they really did try to get 7,000 steps into the side of the mountain.

Of course, like most open world games, Skyrim isn't designed to scale—otherwise the capital city of Solitude would have a population of less than 100 people. But in the same way that for every named NPC we should assume there are a bunch of people off-camera, distances are compressed so that it doesn't take a week to get anywhere. For every step we watched the Dragonborn climb there are another nine implied steps we don't see, and even more frost trolls.

A new kind of Steam problem has emerged: Games keep missing their release dates because Valve can't keep up with approving them.

Several frustrated indie devs have publicly posted about the limbo status of their finished games in the past week—including the developers of Food Devils, Wheel Make It, and Cubic Earth—saying that their applications have gone unanswered after up to 20 days, despite Valve's listed review window of three to five business days.

In the case of Cubic Earth, developer structmira hasn't been able to contact Valve and has no choice but to wait. "Our game's trailer amassed more than 60,000 views on YouTube, and we had more than 6,000 wishlists," the developer told PC Gamer over email. "Now, our Steam Community page is rapidly filling with player complaints, and we've lost all momentum."

Valve commented on the backlog today in the form of a Steamworks update aimed at helping developers pass the preview process. In it, the company admitted that it's "running a little behind" with wait times that are up to double the usual.

"We aim to test every game build in a timely manner, typically within 3-5 days. However, we're running a little behind right now and taking up to 12 business days," Valve's FAQ reads. "Much of that delay is due to having to re-review games, which isn't great for you or for us."

The update itself is, primarily, a new series of checklists that places the onus on developers to submit better applications that "pass review quickly the first time." The most significant new requirement is to have "run your game through Steam for at least five minutes" to make sure it functions correctly, which you'd think wouldn't need to be said. The tone of Valve's request suggests that it's also surprised by the state of some of the games it's being asked to approve..

"Believe it or not, sometimes we review builds that have not ever been played through Steam," the update reads. "This means that even if a game runs smoothly when a dev launches their executable directly, they might have missed basic steps that would impact a user installing and playing via Steam."

Other checks include confirming which of those "common redistributables" a game needs before submission, confirming cloud saves and achievements are in order, and adding a minimum of five screenshots to the store page that depict gameplay (another obvious, but apparently necessary standard).

Though Valve did not comment on why a logjam in its processes has developed only recently, despite the number of new Steam games rising rapidly every year, the elephant in the room is AI.

New language models capable of whipping up functioning games very quickly, and Valve's laissez-faire curation, has prompted an explosion of AI slop games on Steam in the past few months—most of which don't receive much visibility, unless you're unlucky enough to browse Steam Next Fest without the "personalized" mode on. A Valve developer recently acknowledged that there's a slop problem on Steam, but said that they don't want to "be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use."

If you look at today's update through that lens, perhaps Valve isn't so much speaking to experienced developers with these obvious-sounding guidelines, but vibe coders who lack basic game dev understanding. Also today, Itch.io announced that it deleted "a couple terabytes of AI slop" from its videogame storefront to combat the wave of low-quality games appearing online.

Whatever the cause of the holdup, Valve said more changes are coming to the build review process, but this is a "great starting point."

Saying that it believes "schools should have control over AI in their classrooms," Google announced today that it will turn off access to its AI tools for K-12 student accounts. But there's a catch: Along with those AI tools, it will also disable Google search functionality.

In a blog post entitled "Designing responsible AI for learning," Chris Phillips, Google's vice president and general manager of education, extolled the virtues of AI tools in "productive struggle," which he described as "enabling students to be actively challenged without getting so overwhelmed that they give up."

"That's the philosophy behind Guided Learning," Philips wrote. "In Gemini, Guided Learning acts as an interactive study tool that coaches students through the process of problem solving through open-ended questions and step-by-step breakdowns. Our research shows that Guided Learning leads to measurable learning gains for students, and we're now bringing Guided Learning to more products." Those products include Google Search and Google Classroom.

"After listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers, we are now updating our approach to controls for Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search," Phillips continued. "Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on."

It sounds like Google Search on student accounts can be re-enabled separately, but that also ushers AI back into the equation: Google said in the update that it is "building Guided Learning capabilities into Search for student accounts to help them work through problems without skipping straight to answers." In other words, there is no search functionality on these accounts without AI intrusion.

Speaking to the New York Times, Phillips said "search and AI are deeply integrated," and confirmed that schools can't have one without the other: Students at schools that have turned off Google's AI tools "will not have access to search, and they'll see a message from their school that indicates it's not available."

Phillips presents the policy as responsiveness and responsibility on Google's part, but the reaction from educators is not entirely positive. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten told NBC that "Google has prioritized its business interests over the education of our children," adding, "Instead of working with teachers and parents to uphold privacy and ensure their tools are safe and useful, it throws the baby out with the bathwater and bans access to the tools altogether."

Fairplay, a non-profit that aims to protect children from "the exploitative and harmful business practices of marketers and Big Tech," was somewhat harsher in its assessment. "Google's attempt to strong-arm schools into using its AI products is likely to backfire," Fairplay executive director Josh Golin said in a statement. "Schools should use this opportunity not only to turn off AI, but to teach students that 'Google' isn't a verb, but the name of a surveillance and advertising company whose presence in schools has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with developing lifetime brand loyalty.

"Because AI isn't safe for kids and undermines education and critical thinking, schools should turn off Google's AI tools the minute that option becomes available. And rather than fret about losing access to Google search, schools should use this opportunity to help students find more privacy-protective alternatives for search, as well as ways to do more substantive research beyond search and click."

Former FTC chair Lina Khan, who was right about Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, also weighed in, accusing Google of "using its search monopoly to coerce schools into adopting AI."

"Multiple courts have found Google liable for violating antitrust laws, and this latest move shows it remains unchastened," Khan wrote on X. "As the public increasingly pushes back against the use of AI in schools, Google is making clear it will punish those who don't fall in line."

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, a longstanding critic of oligopolies and corporate greed, said that "Google is trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools."

Google is trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools.No corporation should have the power to dictate how we teach our children. Our public schools exist to serve students, not to grow the profit margins of Big Tech.

— @mayor.nyc.gov (@mayor.nyc.gov.bsky.social) 2026-11-03T22:58:02.432Z

As NBC noted, research on the impact of AI in education is still quite limited, and some studies purporting to show meaningful benefits have been found to be flawed. That makes the headlong rush into AI integration, championed by massive AI companies and pretty much no one else, so controversial and potentially dangerous. Trying to force AI into classrooms while the technology's impact on mental health is an increasingly serious concern is audacious, and promises of more rigorous safety standards tend to ring hollow anyway: In October, the attorneys general for eight US states accused competing product OpenAI of ignoring its own safety warnings in pursuit of profit.

Google's new policy on AI in schools comes just days after shares in Google parent company Alphabet took a hammering as the company's AI Mode cut deep into its search business and revenue. I've reached out to Google for more information about the new educational policy and will update if I receive a reply.

A new report from Bloomberg says Dishonored developer Arkane might not be as doomed as it appeared last month, as multiple companies have made offers to acquire the studio.

Citing "people familiar with the negotiations," the Bloomberg report says Ubisoft is among Arkane's suitors, as are at least two other unnamed gaming companies. Xbox has also considered selling the studio to its own management, effectively making it independent, although whether that option is still on the table isn't clear.

Despite producing an enviable slate of acclaimed immersive sims over the years (until it was compelled by senior leadership to do otherwise), Arkane fell victim to the Xbox "reset" in July that saw thousands of employees laid off (with more still awaiting their fates) and four studios cast adrift. Arkane avoided being the fifth, reportedly thanks to France's "Florange Law" that compelled Xbox to search for a buyer before pulling the plug.

The deadline for that search was November 13, after which Arkane would be shuttered—but a few weeks ahead of that date, Microsoft extended it by a month, to "explore options, including finding a partner to support the studio through the development work still ahead," a reference to the Marvel's Blade game Arkane currently has in development. That extension suggested there was at least some hope that Arkane might find a new home, instead of being closed.

Going from Xbox to Ubisoft could be viewed as a "frying pan to fire" move, given Ubisoft's own ongoing financial struggles, layoffs, and closures. But Arkane's immersive sim expertise could be a good fit for some of Ubisoft's biggest properties, including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and—yes, I'm just going to say it—Splinter Cell, which would be magnificent in the style of Dishonored. Arkane and Ubisoft both being French companies can't hurt, either.

I've reached out to Xbox and Ubisoft for comment on the report, and will update if I receive a reply.

It's been a good few months for Remedy Entertainment. In its latest financial results, the Finnish game developer announced that its third quarter revenue had more than tripled to €39.6 million ($44.3 million) from the €12.2 million ($13.7 million) it made during the same quarter last year.

That spike in income is all thanks to preorders and launch sales of Control Resonant—of which only the first seven days of sales were counted in Remedy's third quarter figures. On October 15, Resonant sold its millionth copy, making it the fastest-selling game in Remedy history.

"This is our first self-published game of this scale, built on our own Control IP," said Remedy CEO Jean-Charles Gaudechon, who was appointed to the position earlier this year. "Praised by players and critics alike, it marks a defining milestone for the company."

Gaudechon also noted that "close to 50%" of Resonant players were Control newcomers, indicating the sequel had achieved "a key goal" of expanding the audience for Remedy's brand of stylish interdimensional sicko content. Its mission for the immediate future, the CEO said, is to continue delivering Resonant to more interested players—2.4 million of whom still have yet to turn their wishlists into purchases, according to Remedy data.

"Our priority now is to get Control Resonant into the hands of more players. Excellent player reviews, penetration in all our target markets and a substantial outstanding wishlist base give a solid foundation for the game's longer-term sales potential, supported by both organic visibility as well as our targeted marketing activities," Gaudechon said. "As with the launch, we will invest with discipline, prioritizing actions with a clear return."

While Remedy's operating profit margin was still thin for the quarter—1.5% of revenue, or €0.6 million—Resonant's strong launch performance is a welcome change of pace from where the studio was at the end of last year. In November 2025, it had posted an operating loss of €16.4 million thanks to the flop of FBC Firebreak. From the sounds of it, Remedy's aiming to continue that momentum with whatever work it has planned next.

"Alongside the launch of Control Resonant, our other projects are proceeding in the pipeline," Gaudechon said. "Sales over the remainder of the year will ultimately define our financial year 2026. Control Resonant gives us a solid foundation for growth."

You might be thinking, if you're the optimistic sort, that today's official unveiling of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel means that wheels are turning and things are happening and you're going to be off to Hammerfell soon—or at the very least, learning more about what's coming in Bethesda's next big RPG. Alas, in a follow-up post on social media, the studio made it clear that you shouldn't start holding your breath just yet.

"Thank you for 40 years of shared memories," Bethesda wrote. "We can't wait to make even more together with The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Development continues, and while it'll be some time before we're ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you."

Thank you for 40 years of shared memories. We can’t wait to make even more together with The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Development continues, and while it’ll be some time before we’re ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you.

— @bethesdastudios.com (@bethesdastudios.com.bsky.social) 2026-11-03T19:25:45.598Z

"Some time" is obviously not a defined span, but I find that generally speaking it's a nicer, more politic way of saying "long time"—for instance, you could say it's been "some time" since Bethesda first announced the Elder Scrolls 6, and yeah, that's true. It was also eight freakin' years ago, and we've heard basically nothing since.

That is, very roughly, the same amount of time Bethesda needed to make the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena, as well as Daggerfall, Morrowind, the Morrowind expansions Tribunal and Bloodmoon, and the spinoff games Battlespire and Redguard. If you're (relatively) new to the series, eight years represents the span between Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls Online, a stretch interspersed by Skyrim and five major expansions: Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles for Oblivion, and Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn for Skyrim.

Of course, Bethesda's had other things on the go over the past eight years too. Todd Howard said shortly after The Elder Scrolls 6 reveal that it was in pre-production, while Starfield was in full production. Starfield was Bethesda's top priority in the years leading up to its 2023 release; Howard later said that they'd just wanted to answer the fan question (are you making a new Elder Scrolls?) that came up every time they announced something else, like Starfield.

"Just pretend we didn't announce it," he joked. "Doesn't exist. No one's heard a word."

How long Sentinel will take to get from here to launch is anybody's guess, although Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said on Bluesky that it's "still more than two years away." When questioned about his prediction, Schreier asserted that it's not a prediction at all, and that he knows "the time frame the game is targeting."

This week, Bethesda Game Studios is celebrating its 40th birthday—a celebration that included the full name reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel, successfully completing the eight-year task of adding a word to a thing.

In addition, Bethesda is commemorating the occasion with the launch of a 40th anniversary site collecting the anecdotes and favorite memories of studio staff, including one Alan Nanes. Now a design director, Nanes was originally hired at Bethesda as one of its first full-time QA testers—and by his own description, he got the job by being a pleasant fellow to spend time with.

According to Nanes, his history with Bethesda started during Morrowind's development. He was close friends with Bethesda devs in multiple departments, and it was an era where that was enough to get you in the building.

"Things were a bit 'Wild West' back then, and my friends allowed me to hang out (yes, before I was an employee) there, playing multiplayer games with them and just getting to know everyone," Nanes wrote. "Eventually, Todd Howard noticed my presence in the studio and asked if I wanted to test out their new game."

In time, his impromptu testing sessions started attracting an audience of Bethesda developers who would pick his brain about their design choices, scribble notes, and debate with each other about potential tweaks to the game while watching over his shoulder.

"It was an extraordinary feeling, the first time I felt like I was contributing to the creation of an actual videogame (I believe you can find my name in the Morrowind manual's credits under 'Special Thanks')," Nanes said. "After this became a regular occurrence, Todd Howard and Ashley Cheng seemed to decide having full-time, in-studio QA would be a valuable addition to the team, and I took on that mantle."

Nanes later graduated to a quest designer position for Oblivion, and was more recently credited as lead companions designer on Starfield. But while his tenure at Bethesda might've had a storybook trajectory, the history of QA workers at the studio has been a contentious one in the years since Nanes was hired.

Driven by frustrations surrounding compensation, advancement opportunities, workload, and more, QA workers at Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax initiated a unionization vote in 2022, officially forming ZeniMax Workers United - CWA—then the largest videogame union in the US—when the vote succeeded in January 2023.

Those frustrations remained unaddressed as contract negotiations with Microsoft stalled for over two years, driving the QA union to vote overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike in April 2025. Its contract was ultimately ratified in June 2025. When a number of those QA workers were affected by Xbox's July 2026 layoffs, that contract allowed the union to enter into an "effects bargaining" process to negotiate severance terms for its impacted members, culminating in "a significant agreement" in September 2026.

Indie-oriented digital storefront Itch.io is beginning to push back against the rising flood of AI, announcing on social media that it's "deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop" and made it easier for users to filter out games made with generative AI.

A few days after Valve admitted that Steam has a problem with AI slop and game cloning, Itch.io chimed in to say it's experiencing something very similar: The number of game pages being created every day on the storefront has doubled over the past two months.

Itch.io didn't provide a reason for the phenomenon, but it's not hard to figure out: When one Bluesky asked why it was happening, Itch.io replied "take a guess," accompanied by crying and robot smilies, and then added that "the number of downloads and purchases has *not* doubled."

Now it seems to be moving to action. "Just deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop," the storefront posted last night. "Just because you can upload 10 terabytes of poorly optimized AI generated models doesn't mean you should upload 10 terabytes of poorly optimized AI generated models."

The account also linked to Itch.io's guidelines on "uploading excessive amounts of automatically generated or AI-generated content," which says that while content created by generative AI "can be useful or interesting, do not use automated systems to mass produce product pages. We will consider this spam and may remove your pages from our browse and search pages."

The guidelines apply to, but are not limited to:

• Games or projects that are predominantly created by algorithms or AI with minimal human intervention
• Content that is randomly generated with no or minimal curated design
• Multiple iterations of essentially the same content that are generated by AI or algorithms

Like Steam, Itch.io requires developers and publishers to disclose their use of generative AI in their games. That disclosure requirement has now been expanded from game assets to "the tabletop (aka physical games), books, comics and soundtracks categories," all of which now require disclosure.

It has also added new browsing and search filters on the site, so users can exclude some or all use of generative AI.

The tabletop (aka physical games), books, comics and soundtracks categories on itchio now require completing an AI disclosure in order to edit or create your page. These join the game assets section which has required disclosure for the past 2 years.

— @itch.io (@itch.io.bsky.social) 2026-11-03T19:42:09.935Z

The "No AI" tag page cuts straight to it:

Itch.io's action isn't likely to stem the tide of AI slop that's engulfing the world of gaming. Apart from the fact that it represents a very small percentage of a market dominated by Steam, the simple truth is that AI slop is easy to churn out in overwhelming quantities—that's what makes it so attractive to people who care less about creation than they do about making a few bucks on a lucky swing of the bat.

But it is action, and I think that's important: While some argue that mandatory AI disclosures have the potential to harm developers, the gen AI geyser is unquestionably doing harm right now, to users, developers, and the industry as a whole. Unless and until that changes, proactively excising the worst of the slop torrent and making it easier for gamers to avoid the mess entirely is the least that online storefronts can do.

Konami might have finally set down the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1 to focus on releasing Metal Gear Solid 4 from its PS3 prison, but modders continue chipping away at the PS2-and-earlier era Metal Gear games. MGSHDFix, whose mission statement is to repair broken visual bugs, fix crashes, and generally give the older Metal Gears a bit of a spitshine, has got a big new update. Now is the era of MGSHDFix 5.0 (actually, 5.0.1. There was a hotfix).

"We've got performance improvements, massive vanilla loading time reductions for MGS2, loose .MP3/.WAV/.OGG/FLAC soundtrack loading for MG1/MG2, WIP raw mouse input support, and loads of new restoration and bugfixes", writes author Afevis Solmunko.

There are, to be honest, way too many fixes to properly delve into here, so I recommend either checking the patch notes out yourself or taking the mod for a spin in your preferred Metal Gear. We can call out some of the big ones, though.

For example, want to play Metal Gear 2 as Mel Gibson? No? Well that's a shame, bucko, because MGSHDFix 5.0 provides an option to restore that game's MSX2 sprites. "Yes, you can finally experience Mel Gibson fighting Sean Connery as Kojima intended," writes Solmunko.

Also in the OG MGs, there's now an option "to make doors automatically check your inventory for keycards (how MGS2 keycards work)", which frankly sounds blasphemous to me.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

More practically, the latest version of the mod boasts that it dramatically cuts down loading times in MGS2. "We've greatly sped up level loading by adding a new system that prefetches a list of all the assets for all the rooms that are directly connected to the current stage you're in… Speedrunners have reported that this new prefetch system has shaved upwards to 5 minutes off of the elapsed realtime from their runs". On Linux (and thus, Steam Deck) specifically, Solmunko says this can "reduce level transitions load times by 4~6 seconds for every room you go into".

Plus, MGS2 and MGS3 now have limited support for raw mouse input in third-person, with support for first-person hopefully coming in MGSHDFix 5.1.0.

All good news, in other words, and it's nice these classics are now released in a way that lets fans do this kind of loving work for as long as they like.

Eight years after it was announced, it's finally officially official: The next RPG in Bethesda's long-running Elder Scrolls series is called Sentinel.

The title was revealed in a video celebrating Bethesda's 40th anniversary, narrated by Todd Howard (of course), who cast back to the studio's first game, Gridiron—Bethesda was big on sports games back in the day—before moving into The Elder Scrolls series, the games that would take it to the big leagues, in the early 1990s.

"As we're here in the 40th anniversary, we think about all of the games we've made," Howard says as the video draws to an end.

"And so even though yes, we're looking back,we're also looking forward to all we're doing, particularly with the Fallout franchise and obviously The Elder Scrolls. You know, everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6. And we thought, hey, given the moment, what a perfect time to tell you what The Elder Scrolls 6 is actually called."

And thus is the title revealed: Sentinel.

There's an interesting quote after the title is revealed: "The scroll offered only a shimmer, a veil thinly lifted to my eyes. A future lost. A victory undone. Sands of time scattered by fate." Those words were uttered by Yazar, Moth Priest of High Queen Iradne of Hammerfell in the year 4E 206, which was UESP pointed out puts Sentinel at least five years after the events of Skyrim.

No other details are revealed, but the title (and that quote) presumably also reveals the setting: Hammerfell, home of the redguards. Sentinel itself is one of Hammerfell's major kingdoms and capital of the Alik'r Desert—reflected in the teaser's sandy backdrop. It's something of a geographical shift from the flyover of the generic mountains seen in that 2018 reveal, although the Alik'r is bordered by the Dragontail Mountains, so who knows.

But, for those who like to dig deep in search of clues, here's the best image I could get of the jewelled whatsit revealed under the sand, just before it disappears. Mean anything to you?

So there you have it! The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel. Hopefully it won't take another eight years before we hear anything more about it.

If you are playing Morrowind in 2026, my recommendation is that you do so using OpenMW, its 18-year-old fan-made and open-source engine reimplementation that makes it run smooth as butter on any modern machine you point it at, whether you're running Windows, Linux, macOS or, hell, FreeBSD if you wanna get really sicko with it. It's simply the most convenient way to get a cromulent version of Bethesda's best game running on modern systems.

And now it has a new version. Or rather, a new release candidate that will prove the basis of its upcoming 0.52 version. Released a couple of days ago, OpenMW 0.52 RC1 contains a bunch of fixes, some new features, and one minor alteration to the fundamental forces of the universe. It's not the doozy of, say, OpenMW 0.50—which added gamepad support and thereby made Morrowind on Steam Deck dizzyingly easy—but it's still pretty meaty.

For instance, consider: "Water-walking actors now drown when knocked out" and "Implemented terminal velocity". Say what you like, but the second of those seems pretty meaningful for a game that contains Scrolls of Icarian Flight and the first is quite a funny sentence. The terminal velocity fix contains, within itself, a sub-fix for the basic laws of reality: "fixed gravity being 0.01% off"). We are free of our shared hell.

The biggest new feature in OpenMW 0.52 is probably the lighting stuff. It's called clustered lighting and it removes "the normal per-object light limit". I don't really know what that means either, but the short and tall of it, per an explanatory August blog post, is that "it has a dramatically lower performance impact than raising the limit to Aetherius. In fact, the performance can in some cases be better than with the regular light limit."

Morrowind, one of the best videogames ever made, continues to get better.

Two of my favorite game studios getting together for a tag-team showcase in a classic PC gaming genre that doesn't get the love it deserves? You better believe I'm going to have a word or two to say about that—so allow me to draw your attention to the upcoming Point-and-Click Showcase being co-hosted by Amanita Design and Rusty Lake.

The Point-and-Click Showcase will feature world premieres, release date announcements, and new demos for more than 35 adventure games of all types, including ghost stories, murder mysteries, cozy puzzle games, and whatever's going on here:

The Point-and-Click Showcase takes place on November 4, but ahead of that—as in, right now—you can take advantage of the Point-and-Click Showcase Steam Sale. Running until November 9, the sale features discounts on dozens of adventure games across a range of styles, from the classic Excavation of Hob's Barrow to the award-winning Heaven's Vault, the bizarre Dropsy, the horror of Stories Untold, and the time-wasting of The Longing.

Primordia is a steal for $3, and yes, I am once again going to foist The Night of the Rabbit upon you, because it's brilliant and you can get it right now for just $2.49. You can pick up Rusty Lake's latest, Servant of the Lake, for $5.35—33% off—and while Amanita's most recent release, Phonopolis, is not on sale, Chuchel is, and I will never not recommend that.

So, long story short, it's a good time to be an adventure gamer and if you haven't sampled the delights already, this is the perfect opportunity to change that. The Point-and-Click Showcase begins at 9 am PT/12 pm ET/6 pm CET on November 4, and will be streamed on YouTube and Steam.

Game Workshop and Henry Cavill's Warhammer 40,000 project has been in the works for two years now, with the most recent news being that renowned horror director, writer, and showrunner Mike Flanagan—known for projects such as the Carrie miniseries or The Haunting of Hill House—has joined the crew and will be writing the script.

Otherwise mum's the word concerning this project, with very little being shared about it. In fact, the most we've got so far has been Flanagan recently chatting about a few bits and pieces during his Carrie press tour.

Flanagan describes the process of discovering all that Warhammer 40,000 has to offer as "a very cool and unexpected on-ramp into it, which I think is very exciting. I’m sworn to secrecy on all of it, but I'm having the time of my life working on it."

It's good to hear that, at the very least, he's having fun. There's certainly a lot of material to work with here and a lot to get stuck into for a horror director. I haven't been completely convinced by some of Flanagan's projects. Midnight Mass took too long to get going, The Fall of the House of Usher felt confused, and The Haunting of Bly Manor was too much of a Hill House clone. Though, I am still intrigued to see how this Warhammer 40,000 will turn out, especially with Cavill working on it.

I actually quite enjoyed Amazon's Secret Level Warhammer 40,000 short. You can hardly go wrong when focusing on the Deathwatch, but the gore and the violence still went down really well in my book. So I'd like more of that please.

Gaming on Mac has come a long way. Gone are the days of limited releases, though not absolutely everything is playable on the platform. Thankfully, community developers are only too keen to plug the gaps.

FX Steam Launcher on GitHub brings SteamOS to Apple Silicon Macs. Specifically, this independent, open-source project is based on the ARM64 Steam Frame version of the operating system. Therefore, you're getting Windows game compatibility on Mac thanks to Proton 11 and FEX, alongside the very swish SteamOS interface (via Videocardz).

Obviously, there are a few things to bear in mind if you want to go all in as a Mac gamer. For one thing, this is not a native installation, and is instead running SteamOS by way of a virtual machine on your Mac. For another, this is a GitHub download to begin with, but once you've got it installed, the launcher directly downloads the official SteamOS image from Valve and then even handles OS updates too. Neat!

As this is an unofficial effort, there are a few more caveats still. The FX Steam Launcher itself currently only supports Apple Silicon Macs running either macOS 15 (from September, 2024) or newer. However, to actually get the latest and greatest running, you may need something much more recent than that.

Bear with me here, but Proton and FEX are essentially only the first hurdle. DXVK is required to run DirectX 9, 10, and 11 games, while DirectX 12 releases rely on VKD3D-Proton. Then either MoltenVK or KosmicKrisp is the next hurdle graphics instructions will need to pass before finally handing off the baton to Apple’s Metal API (though there's some experimental support for DXMT, which allows DirectX 10 and 11 games to run without VKD3D-Proton).

Anyway, all of that is to say KosmicKrisp, a pretty pivotal translation layer in this whole process, requires at least macOS 26 or later to run. That's a fair amount of hoops to jump through, though; if you can get it running, the launcher does allow you to run SteamOS either windowed or fullscreen, while letting you still access macOS either way.

On account of not being a Mac power user, I've not had a chance to test it out myself, but YouTube creator ETA Prime tested the launcher with The Witcher 3, Stellar Blade, and Left 4 Dead 2 on their Apple M4 Max. At high settings, the creator saw performance to the tune of over 70 FPS for each of these games, with Left 4 Dead 2 breezing past 200.

That said, Stellar Blade was running at a mere 800p resolution, while the rest of their tests ran at a maximum of 1080p. Furthermore, not all the games they tested even ran as well as these cherry-picked examples (to say nothing of The Witcher 3's funky-looking trees).

Still, what's possible with this launcher remains impressive, though gaming on Mac even without it is far more viable than it once was. For Apple's big 50th birthday earlier this year, our Jacob explored the things Mac does better than PC. Our Ian was also mighty impressed with the Apple Mac Studio M4 Max—though he does also note, "Christ, what are you doing? Buy something else for gaming".

On that front, any would-be Mac gamer could do much worse than the MacBook Neo, which is now going for $699/£699. Not even Apple is safe from the memory supply crisis, but as the situation continues to drive up the cost of traditional gaming PC parts, who could blame a gamer on a budget still picking up the MacBook Neo instead? Especially with unofficial projects like FX Steam Launcher at their fingertips.

Overwatch's skin distribution is, in one word, lopsided. With a roster of 54 heroes and counting it can be hard to ensure that every character gets their fair share of cosmetics as is, but when you add popularity into the mix it gets even harder.

As a free-to-play game, Overwatch makes the bulk of its money through cosmetics like bundles or standalone skins. Skins also take a good amount of time to prototype and create, so to ensure its efforts aren't wasted the team needs to pick heroes based on how many players will actually buy the end product.

"Every new piece of content that we introduce to the game, whether it's a hero or even a map, you know, means that the pool of everything that we've got, it is spread out a little bit," game director Aaron Keller says in a group interview (via Kotaku). This leaves room for two kinds of heroes to get regular skins. There's popular heroes like Ana, Genji, and Soldier 76 which are played by a large proportion of players and then there's the fan favourites who aren't just popular but have a dedicated playerbase who will consistently buy skins like Mercy, Kiriko, Juno, and Widowmaker.

However, Team 4 has, in recent years, made a clear effort to bulk up cosmetics for new heroes. "Constantly expanding our capacity" to create skins for characters like Anran, Freyja, and Vendetta who have all been included in recent skin collabs. And while the devs have been able to create more skins than those that just "support the actual bottom-line business", money still needs to be made.

It's kind of like a pay-it-forward system. By making cosmetics that will sell well, Team 4 are able to dedicate time and energy to heroes that won't yield as much of a monetary gain. "The place that you can see that most transparently is the Mythic skins that we release," Keller adds. "Each season we release two Mythic skins, and typically one of those is going to be for a hero that we think is actually going to really drive a lot of that support for the business. And then another one is going to be for a hero that typically hasn't gotten either a Mythic or a lot of other skins in the recent past."

I recognise that I'm probably in a fortunate position where my main, Ana, has always had a healthy amount of new and very cool cosmetics. But the point still stands that this is a business, so Team 4 needs to make responsible financial decisions for reasons that are at times out of their control.

"We recognize it's important to players," Keller says. "We want to be doing as much of it as we can, but we still always want to be doing it in a way that's also responsible, and [lets us] know that we can continue supporting this game going forward."

Final Fantasy 14's queues can get long—not for roulettes, mind, those are usually pretty nippy—but if you're trying to complete a specific alliance raid as a newer player, you can be stuck twiddling your thumbs for ages.

Square Enix is planning to make a change that'll fix that soon, though. In a recent blog post to the game's website, it's been announced that same-region player matchmaking'll be available starting November 10 after a successful trial period on its Japanese servers.

What does that mean? Basically, FF14's server architecture is into physical data centers (Japan, Europe, Oceania, and North America), then logical data centers, which are sort of like realms in other MMOs. For instance, the NA servers have Crystal, Aether, Dynamis, and Primal (then within those centers are "worlds", which can be travelled and matchmade between pretty easily).

You've been able to hop between these logical data centers manually for some time—it's pretty common, for instance, for Crystal players to hop on over to Aether to group up with folks for high-end content. But you need to log out to do so, with said parties constructed through the in-game party finder.

After November 10, however, matchmaking for things like roulettes will also be possible within the same physical data center, as will the party finder writ large, cross-world linkshells, fellowships, and friend list and /tell functionality. Travelling between data centers will also be made easier, too.

This is a huge quality-of-life boost that should massively cut down on queueing times—but it'll also make organising or creating groups for the aforementioned high-end content way easier, too, allowing folks to see and join listings for different logical data centers without having to hop between them.

My secret hope, as an EU player who's currently stuck on North American ping for community reasons (it's where all my mates are), is that this sort of functionality might one day lead to cross region travel so I can hop on over to the EU whenever I actually want to do content. A guy can dream.