We still don't know a huge amount about The Witcher 4. But we do know it represents two big changes for the series thus far. The first change is, of course, that Ciri will replace Geralt as the lead character. The second is that CD Projekk will replace its in-house REDengine with Unreal Engine 5.

There's been considerable speculation as to why CDP is abandoning tech that's delivered some of the most cutting-edge visuals of the last decade, with some fans suggesting that Cyberpunk 2077's difficult development and compromised initial release might be a factor. But the studio's co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has formally dismissed this suggestion, stating the decision had more to do with CD Projekt's general ambitions than Cyberpunk specifically.

Speaking on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast (via GamesRadar+), Nowakowski addressed the claim that Cyberpunk was the straw that broke REDengine's back: "A lot of people think like this, but this is a bit of a false assumption," he explained. "Because the issue with Cyberpunk was not really REDengine itself.

Instead, Nowakowski said that CD Projekt never really wanted to be an engine developer in the first place, stating that. "The dream of the company was actually never to make technology." He conceded that CD Projekt did want to make "visually and technically cutting edge games", for which in-house tech seemed to be the optimal solution for the studio. But what ultimately drives the company is "telling the stories in the most convincing and immersive way."

Hence, when CD Projekt's leadership saw The Matrix Awakens demo of Unreal Engine 5, they decided that adopting third-party tech would be preferable to continuing building their own tech. "If we form a relationship with Unreal and if we work on certain things which are specifically required to make games of the size and scope and certain technicalities about it that we need for games, it could actually work."

With this in mind, CD Projekt pitched a "strategic collaboration" to Epic, where they would not simply license the tech but influence its direction from the inside. "We're actually, I think, the only team in the world outside of Epic that deals with the inside of the 'black box' that the engine is. Nobody else is doing that except for us and them, which we do through collaborative efforts together," Nowakowski remarked.

It'll be interesting to see what impact CD Projekt's input has on Unreal Engine 5 going forward, since the tech has thus far gained a reputation for being a stuttering mess. I'm also intrigued as to whether CD Projekt's input is limited to Unreal Engine 5, or whether the studio's voice carries through to the AI-heavy Unreal Engine 6—given Nowakowski's previous statement that the company isn't "planning to rely on AI making complete games".

Dune Awakening was lauded for its survivalist take on Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic when it was released last year, but there's one element of Funcom's sci-fi adventure that's proved consistently controversial, and that's its MMO-adjacent elements. Players seemingly love constructing bases and braving the many dangers lurking in Arrakis' deserts, but are less keen on sharing that experience with other players, especially when the game becomes more competitive in its PvP focussed Deep Desert.

Now though, in a move that would please Harkonnens galaxy-wide, Funcom has made it so you can keep Arrakis all to yourself. Dune Awakening's long-sought after single-player mode has arrived. Update 1.5 introduces a tweaked version of Awakening suitable for solo play, while also adjusting Arrakis in a bunch of other ways to make it generally more accessible and less punishing.

Funcom has changed several core mechanics to make solo mode work, chiefly retooling multiplayer-reliant systems so they can work independently. The player-driven market known as the Exchange now functions as a sci-fi supermarket offering a wide-array of items for players to pick up as they please. Meanwhile, its Landsraad political system simulates rival guilds automatically, ensuring it "progresses even without player participation". Finally, while not player-driven, Coriolis storms have been softened so that players can maintain progress in the Deep Desert, though Function cautions that these storms remain "very dangerous."

Perhaps the most interesting addition, though, is difficulty settings. Awakening now features three difficulty presets for both single-player and self-hosted servers, alongside a fourth, customisable difficulty mode that lets players tweak parameters like sandstorms, security zones, item durability, base decay and even XP multipliers.

Alongside adding solo play to Awakening, Funcom has also made its multiplayer less confrontational. Multiplayer can now be played wholly PvE. The Deep Desert's PvP is no longer mandatory, while the starting area of Hagga Basin is now exclusively PvE (although you can make it a "full PvP zone" if you run your own server).

This friendlier approach isn't limited to player interactions either. The game itself has been made less punishing in a variety of ways. Bases can be reconstructed wholesale thanks to a new snapshot system that acts as a blueprint for your entire base. Destroyed vehicles can be recovered for up to 30 days after being lost. Base upkeep taxation has been removed entirely, and the durability penalty upon death has been lowered from 5% to 2%.

Funcom summarises the changes with the line "You don't have to lose things anymore," which, while I understand the sentiment, is a little strange given that Arrakis is supposed to be brutally harsh by its very nature. But Dune Awakening is far from the only game currently trending away from friction. Bungie is adding a permanent PvE mode to Marathon, after its uncompromising extraction shooter failed to maintain a large audience. Even in the realm of single-player, The Blood of Dawnwalker's developer has said it may not include a time-limit system in the sequel (which the studio is already working on) after it proved the most controversial element of the otherwise lauded RPG.

I don't know whether this trend toward smoother, more siloed gaming experiences is a positive one, but given the 2010s were dominated by fiercely challenging soulslikes and hyper-competitive battle-royale games, it is interesting. In any case, If the addition of single-player has ignited your interest in Dune Awakening, Funcom's sci-fi survival sim is half-price until October 1.

As reported by Automaton, the 2026 CESA Videogame Industry Report, a survey-based assessment of the Japanese games business, shows a sharp uptick in AI adoption by Japanese developers: 85.8% in 2026, up from 51% just last year. In July, a separate survey covering just online game devs showed a 100% rate of AI adoption.

Breaking things down further, 63% of total respondents claim to use generative AI tools on a daily basis, while 22.8% turn to them more irregularly. The survey did not distinguish between disciplines or different forms of generative AI output like code, concept art, in-game assets, or text.

Developers cited benefits including improved efficiency and reduced cost and development time, while "human verification" and avoiding the use of generated material in player-facing circumstances are commonly-deployed safety measures.

The Japanese industry has been far quicker to adopt AI tools than its North American counterpart: Just 36% of respondents to a similar GDC 2026 survey reported using AI tools as part of their job, while 52% of survey respondents believe generative AI is negatively impacting the industry.

One thing I'm curious about is whether Japanese gamers are as vocally hostile to generative AI use as their anglosphere counterparts. Even if there isn't the same social stigma amongst developers, it just looks tacky and cheap when AI-generated assets sneak into a retail game.

The Japanese industry certainly appears to be in a healthier place overall compared to North American triple-A, but I'm skeptical whether generative AI adoption has significantly contributed to that health, and it could very well precipitate quality, player trust, or employment stability issues down the line.

The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley has apologized for singling out God of War Laufey in a comment about lack of innovation in triple-A games.

"God Of War Laufey, I look at that game, and every pixel is mindblowing," Straley said in a recent Edge magazine feature. "The amount of work and skill that's gone into every single frame… I've made those kinds of games, and I'm still blown away. But when I actually look at what you're doing in the game? I'm not excited. And that's nothing against the God Of War team. Just, across the board in triple-A, it feels like there's no opportunity to inject fresh, innovative ideas."

In his apology, posted on X, Laufey said that his comment is being used for "clickbait."

"I want to apologize to the Laufey team for dragging you all into this uninvited & unnecessary negative attention," the director wrote. "I was trying to illustrate an industry concern & my mistake of naming your game is being used out of context & for clickbait. You don't need this. I'm sorry."

Straley didn't take back the central thrust of his remark, however, expanding on his position in a series of posts which place blame on industry leaders for the lack of "clear direction and conviction" he perceives in today's big budget development scene.

"The quest for GaaS & wanting to recreate the next Overwatch, Fortnite, Roblox, etc is not a viable strategy & frankly shows these 'industry leaders' don't know their own brand," said Straley.

"Hot take: There's a lack of good leadership, clear direction & conviction from the ppl at the top, in charge of the money. (Money = stability) I believe if they understand their brand, they could have honest, inspiring conversations w creators to steer our medium to innovate."

Straley left triple-A development in 2017, and founded a new studio, Wildflower Interactive, in 2021. The indie studio is working on singleplayer adventure Coven of the Chicken Foot.

In a new VGC interview, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi revealed that the upcoming JRPG is looking at a 200GB install size, bigger than almost any game out there, and certainly an outlier among singleplayer RPGs.

Hamaguchi was responding to a question about Revelation's retail, physical version. It was previously disclosed that Revelation would require additional downloads alongside the two blu-ray discs that come in the box. We're not even part of that particular conversation on PC⁠—we're lucky to get a download code in a plastic box these days.

"Things are still getting worked out, but it’s probably going to be around 200GB of game," Hamaguchi said. "I understand there are a lot of opinions about this topic, but at the end of the day, the fact is we need to overcome the hardware to a certain extent."

That's one big boy. For context, FF7 Remake requires 100GB of available hard drive space on Steam, while Rebirth demands 155⁠—Revelation's full system specs are not yet up on its own page. All told, the FF7 Remake trilogy will weigh in at 455 GB of space. While the original PS1 game was quite the contender in its time, shipping on three CDs, at the end of the day it consisted of about a gig and a half of data⁠—1.3 according to TheGamer, and 1.7 according to GamingBolt.

I think the biggest install I've ever tolerated was 150GB of Destiny 2, but I'm a different person now. Call of Duty has grown infamous as a hard drive hog, but it's also relatively modular. At a time of brutal storage markups amid the RAMpocalypse, 200GB is a tough ask for one game, but Revelation might be one of the rare few with the star power to pull it off.

It's generally agreed that this is a very bad time for the videogame industry. There's some disagreement on just how bad it is—Tim Cain says it's not as bad as the infamous crash of the early 1980s, Brenda Romero says it's worse—but the bottom line is that if you're comparing your current situation to that very specific moment in time, the situation is definitely not good.

In a new Knowledge newsletter, originally published in Edge magazine, numerous veterans of the game biz shared their thoughts on the industry's troubles, and what might be done to address them. It's a very interesting discussion, but also a bit disheartening to some extent, because several make the point that the real problem goes way beyond just videogames.

"It's impossible for me to look at this as a game industry problem, when really it’s the result of this much bigger, complex system that we’ve allowed to be captured by greedy, rapacious forces," former Arkane Studios creative director Harvey Smith said.

Pointing to Redfall, the game that preceded the closure of Arkane Austin in 2024, Smith continued, "Instead of just being crushed and thrown to the wind, maybe those people would have figured it out and then, another cycle along, they would have had another Dishonored.

"And, even if they just made the occasional hit—one out of every three or whatever—wouldn’t you want to hold onto that? I guess the answer is no. You wouldn’t want to do that, if there’s an opportunity cost where instead you could put that money into AI, and even if it’s a bubble, your share price goes up massively."

Other developers shared similar thoughts. "I don’t think our current financial models are set up for art or entertainment," Kitfox Games co-founder Tanya X. Short said. "I just don’t think art is what capitalism is designed to nurture. But humans are."

Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies vet Raph Koster, whose Playable Words studio recently launched a new MMO called Stars Reach, said "systemic dynamics are what really make this happen," and that "absent regulation, it develops into market concentration, followed by cartels, followed by monopolies. That’s intrinsic in how it works."

Sam Barlow, known for games including Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immorality, put the situation in even starker terms: "Ultimately, to fix what’s broken in the videogame industry, we might have to fix reality."

It's a depressing thought alright, particularly given humanity's seeming drive to do the opposite of 'fixing things,' but it's hard to dispute the point when the mainstream videogame industry is busy swallowing itself via multi-billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that seem to inevitably lead to massive layoffs and increasingly constricted creative decisions. Earlier this year, Devolver Digital, which went public in 2021, announced its intent to get off the stock market because the videogame business is simply not compatible with the market's demands for "predictable, sequential growth"—a stark admission that the system as it stands just isn't working.

Despite the gloominess of the situation, Smith said he's "an optimist," and he believes that "people will keep coming together and keep making cool things."

"The model might be different, the structure of it all might be different, but I’m hopeful there’ll always be a market for that, as long as people are brilliant and creative, and they want to do good work," he said. "That’s what gives me hope. As long as I see that, I’m like, we’re going to come out okay in the end. It may suck for a while, we may have to depose some kings, but it’ll be okay."

The full report covers a lot of ground, and features commentary from other industry veterans including Shawn Layden, Tim Sweeney, Craig Duncan, and Amir Satvat, who was honored at The Game Awards in 2024 for his work assisting laid-off game developers. It's worth a few minutes to read in full—check it out at edge-online.com.

While Monster Hunter Wilds' performance issues dominated the conversation about its reception on PC, one of the other ongoing sources of player frustration was the entry's approach to difficulty. Initially, a number of players thought the game was too much of a sleepwalk—but once later updates started amping up the threat level, many of those same players thought Capcom's solutions were inelegant, relying on arbitrary increases to monster damage.

In an interview with PC Gamer at this year's Tokyo Game Show, Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance director Takuro Hiraoka said Capcom's goal for the base game was to avoid driving away newer players—but he's working to ensure the expansion's endgame will satisfy players who thought its approach to difficulty missed the mark.

Speaking via translator, Hiraoka said balancing difficulty is "one of the most challenging things to get right in a game," and his objective—first and foremost—is to prevent a situation where players don't feel like they can finish the game they've purchased, because it's not likely that those players will ever come back.

"In my mind, that's where the difficulty curve should be for Wilds, and I think we achieved that—but the player base was so good and so skilled. We had a bit of a gap in expectations. Maybe players got better than we expected in the intervening years," Hiraoka said. "We've grown the audience greatly since Monster Hunter: World, and that was a game where a lot of players dropped off before finishing the story because it got too hard too quickly. We're trying to tackle that issue, which I see as a problem."

The reception to Wilds' difficulty, he said, has been a learning experience for Capcom, informing how the studio is working to appeal to "not just the hardest of the hardcore" with the Ascendance expansion while making sure challenge-oriented players don't feel alienated by the effort.

"We expect that if you purchase the DLC, you're going to want to see as much of the story that we've presented as possible—but for players who want to go far beyond and have the really toughest challenges, we expect that the endgame loop is what really satisfies their needs," Hiraoka said. "We're working on that balance at the minute."

Along similar lines, Hiraoka said that the aggression showcased in Capcom's recent Ascendance weapon breakdown videos shouldn't lead players to believe that they'll be able to completely outclass monsters with their new Boost Bracer attacks. While the videos are edited to highlight the impact of those new mechanics, he said it's "not quite so constant and aggressive" over the course of an actual hunt.

"There is a cadence to it, where the player is building a gauge, keeping an eye on how many charges they have, and deciding when they want to bust out those actions. And you only have a certain amount of time in boost mode whenever you do activate it," Hiraoka said. "Overall, the player hasn't become this hyperaggressive, constant demon mode type of presence. It's a new tool in your box. How to strategize on when to use it, and the way it changes each weapon's gameplay, is for the players to discover."

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance launches in 2027. You can wishlist the expansion on Steam now.

The Hollywood Reporter says noted huge guy Alan Ritchson, best known as the star of the popular Prime series Reacher, is in talks to take the lead on Sony's upcoming Helldivers movie. If negotiations are successful, Ritchson will step into the role left behind by fellow huge guy Jason Momoa, who dropped out of the project in June.

The Helldivers film was first announced in February, with Momoa starring and Justin Lin, known for his work on the Fast and Furious films, set to direct. Reasons for Momoa's withdrawal just a few months later weren't provided, but given his star power, it was a blow.

But his departure also represents a big opportunity for Ritchson, whose own star has risen rapidly following the debut of Reacher in 2022. Ritchson has appeared in numerous movies in the past—more than I realized, frankly, I'd never heard of the guy before he started wandering into small towns and breaking bad guys in half like they were dry twigs— but according to THR this would be his first time actually headlining a major feature film.

I'm kind of torn on the casting, frankly. I'm sure he'll be fine in the role—along with being huge, he's also got easy on-screen charisma—and action is definitely his thing. But I can't help wondering if maybe he's a little off for the role, too. To me, Helldivers is about unremarkable, anonymous guys being fed into the meatgrinder of fascist imperialism, and Ritchson comes off as a little too heroic (and beefy) for that.

I may be assuming too much about the film, but to me, there's really only one true John Helldiver, and it's this guy:

Or at the very least, someone who looks like him: A soft, compliant man of unremarkable talent who's suddenly realized that he's made a very big mistake. Can you see Alan Ritchson pulling off this face? I sure can't.

The Helldivers film is currently slated for release on November 10, 2027, although given that it doesn't have its lead actor fully nailed down yet, I wouldn't be too shocked if that gets pushed back.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming! Not to us on Team PC, mind: It will eventually, but right now it's a strict console exclusive. Why? Hard to say: Publisher Take-Two Interactive has taken pains to reassure PC gamers that they're very important and loved, but also, y'know, not now.

The latest reassurance to gamers on personal computers came during Take-Two's annual shareholders meeting, held yesterday, during which Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked about the potential impact of PlayStation 5 Pro shortages—ironically, driven at least in part by the looming launch of GTA 6—on the company's plans for releasing the game on PC.

After clarifying that the question is really about "the cadence of PC launches," Zelnick continued, "The strategy of the company is over time, generally speaking, to launch for any platforms for which there's a meaningful audience. But that isn't always the case, and certainly if platforms were no longer viable, we would change that strategy. And I would note that the PC platform is becoming more and more important to our company over time."

So, what does that mean? Essentially, that Zelnick doesn't want to talk about it: GTA 6, for better or worse, is a console exclusive, and that's clearly where the studio's focus is.

Which isn't to say Zelnick's response isn't confusing, but that's something of an ongoing pattern: In May he said PC can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases, but that GTA 6 is debuting on consoles because Take-Two is focused on "serving the core consumer," which apparently does not include PC gamers—those gamers who, you may recall, can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases.

Those struck me as inherently contradictory statements, and saying the PC is "becoming more and more important" when it's clearly already very important doesn't really clear that air. I can understand why Zelnick wouldn't want to just come out and state the obvious reason for holding back GTA 6 on PC—double-dipping—but if he did, we'd at least be able to relax and say, 'Well, yeah, that makes sense.'

Speaking of not wanting to talk about things, Zelnick was also asked about GTA Online during the meeting, to which he reminded attendees that GTA 6 is "a singleplayer experience," and that GTA 5 Online "continues to be a robust business for us" that Take-Two will continue to support. The CEO of Twitch thinks GTA 6 multiplayer will come out next year, but it's not entirely clear whether he's speculating or relaying inside info.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19. We'll get it someday.

If you're like me, you've probably become increasingly disheartened almost by the day at just how hard it's becoming to distinguish real photos from fake, AI-generated ones. It does not bode well for the future. There are plenty of suggested solutions, but I like one I just learnt about in particular, in the form of the upcoming CAIM1 camera.

The company, Caim, says it "is the world's first camera that attests human origin of your moments the second you press record and gives physical and open verifiable proof."

Even more surprising than this, though, is where I heard about the camera: Noctua's X page. Yes, the maker of the absolute best fans for your gaming PC apparently also makes the little fan that goes inside this camera. I suppose that explains the colour scheme.

The photo on Noctua's X post shows the little fan inside—the sensor that sits in front of it has been removed. It seems the camera itself doesn't come with a lens, either. The company says it's a "BYOL: bring your own lens" kind of deal.

Noctua has a separate page explaining how it keeps the camera cool and why it went with the specifc fan it did. The fan in question is the NF-A4x10 5V PWM, which Noctua says "provides a combination of compact dimensions, strong airflow and pressure performance, low-noise operation and precise PWM speed control."

"Using a conventional 12 V fan," the company says, "would have required an additional step-up converter." But this would of course take up more room and chew through more of the battery life, plus create more "electrical switching noise and ripple."

Noctua also explains that the fan's bearing system and motor drive helps prevent vibrations and "tonal noises" which do, indeed, seem very important to keep quiet in something like a camera, given the sensitive nature of the sensor and optics.

Given Noctua has consistently impressed us here at PC Gamer by how quiet its fans are despite pushing through plenty of air, it makes sense that its fans are being sought by other kinds of manufacturer than PC ones. Heck, we've seen a Noctua fan in a gaming mouse, so I suppose a camera shouldn't really be that surprising.

The specific camera here seems like a particularly useful one to lend a hand towards, though. Combatting AI fakery will surely be an ongoing battle over the coming years; it'll be interesting to see which methods for doing so will stick around.

The camera company says, "We've partnered with leading security hardware innovators Tropic Square to integrate TROPIC01. From the moment you hit record, your sessions are locked behind an auditable hardware-encrypted pipeline, ensuring that what you capture belongs exclusively to you."

Apparently the verification—the crypto proof—is stored on an "immutable decentralised infrastructure." The proof is open and accessible for anyone to verify, too.

Over the last two weeks, Capcom dropped a parade of weapon breakdown videos showcasing the new Boost Bracer mechanics coming in the Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance expansion. Serving as a sort of on-demand sicko mode, the Boost Bracer lets hunters juice their combat actions with additional speed and impact, and adds some deliciously over-the-top attacks to the existing weapon movesets.

PC Gamer spoke to some of the lead Monster Hunter developers at TGS to pick their brains about how the Boost Bracer evolves the flow of Monster Hunter combat—and which weapon they expected to gain the most fans with its new moves. Asked what weapon they'd stake 10,000 yen on climbing the popularity rankings in Ascendance, one of the developers had an immediate answer.

"Hammer," series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto said without hesitation. "I think the hammer should definitely go up a place or two."

As a hammer main myself, my natural inclination is to cosign Tsujimoto's objective appraisal of the weapon's self-evident efficacy, utility, and inherent nobility. But I'm obligated as a journalist to acknowledge that there might be some slight favoritism in play.

Tsujimoto, who's worked as Monster Hunter series producer since the release of Monster Hunter Freedom 2 in 2007, has a decades-long record as an avowed hammer diehard. At the 2023 Justdan Game Festival in Taiwan, he revealed his Monster Hunter Rise guild card, which confirmed that he'd used the hammer in each and every one of his 895 completed hunts.

He literally doubled down on his hammer devotion in prerelease interviews for Monster Hunter Wilds: Asked by PlayStation Asia how he'd utilize mid-hunt weapon swapping—a new feature in Wilds—he said "both of my weapons will be hammers."

To Tsujimoto's credit, and at the risk of revealing even more of my personal biases, I'll note that the hammer's Boost Bracer toolkit does look pretty sick. In its Ascendance hammer breakdown video, Capcom showed off the return of Rise's Impact Crater switch skill as the new attack that'll let hammer hunters enter boost mode. And once they've engaged sicko status, they'll have access to a mid-charge boost dash for repositioning and closing distance, as well as a brutal new one-armed slam that can follow up the hammer's heaviest charged attacks.

If you suspect this coverage has a compromising pro-hammer slant—and at this point I suppose I can't blame you—Ascendance director Takuro Hiraoka offered a second opinion: While the long sword has always enjoyed its place at the top of the MonHun weapon popularity rankings, he said gunlance will likely win over some converts.

"There's definitely an appeal—a special kind of romance—to gunlance this time that'll maybe see it go up the rankings as well," Hiraoka said.

If you haven't seen the Ascendance gunlance breakdown, I should clarify that the appeal in question involves using the gunlance's explosive shells to perform airborne plunging attacks and overheated stake thrusts. If that isn't a special kind of romance, I don't know what is.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance launches in 2027. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

Gears of War: E-Day is set to launch on October 6, though there's early access available before then. In the lead up to launch, The Coalition has posted expanded system requirements for the upcoming bug blast. These include what the game asks of your rig for top performance on the top settings—it's not easygoing, to say the least—but providing your GPU is at least capable of ray tracing, most should get by fine on medium settings.

An RTX 5070 Ti or RX 7900 XT will be required in order to run the game at 4K with the Ultra preset enabled. This is targeting a steady 60 fps, and I would assume, from the 12 GB of VRAM noted in the table below, that one should be able to swing it on a lower-end card with some assistance from upscaling.

Gears of War: E-Day supports DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, and Intel XeSS 3.0 at launch, so we're not short of options there.

Otherwise, GPU demands are similar to those we saw back in June: an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 at a minimum, or an RTX 3060 Ti/6700 XT as recommended. It's only at 4K Ultra that demands seem to really ramp up. Though there is a blanket requirement for a ray tracing-capable graphics card to play Gears of War: E-Day. The devs explicitly say so on the new system requirements table:

"A hardware ray tracing capable graphics card is required. Graphics cards without dedicated hardware ray tracing support are not support."

You can't ask for it to be clearer than that. The game comes with ray-traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination.

CPU demands are pretty wide-ranging: from a mere Ryzen 5 2600X at a minimum, to a Ryzen 5 5600 as recommended. For 4K Ultra, it looks like eight cores or more are best; furthermore, a 3D V-Cache chip is recommend: the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The studio also suggests an Intel Core i7 14700K. I'd assume newer Arrow Lake chips would suffice, too, despite their slightly weaker performance at times.

RAM requirements are modest enough, even at 4K, at a mere 16 GB. Though only 12 GB are required to play the game. You'll have to make way for the game on an SSD, however, as 115 GB of storage space is required. That does actually need to be a solid state drive, so sayeth the devs.

If you signed up for a Steam Frame, it's time to check your inbox for an email from Valve. The company has run its 'one-time randomisation' to decide who gets a unit from the first batch and who is left on the waitlist. Once you know where you land, head over to this community reporting website; we're already getting a good idea of the odds of buying a Steam Frame from the results so far.

The odds were stacked against us. That's the picture I get from this tremendous website by coah80 that asks the community, 'Did you get a reservation?' Users can respond with: waitlisted, reserved, or no email yet.

With 35,000 (and counting) results so far, it looks like around 44.7% of respondents were lucky enough to get a reservation, and 51.6% are on the waitlist. 3.8% say they haven't received an email yet.

A quick reminder of how this works: those of us who signed up for a Steam Frame via the Store page were entered into a one-time raffle that took place on September 17. This determines who has a unit reserved for them and who was added to the waitlist. The reserved units are offered up first, and if someone doesn't buy theirs, the unit moves to the next person on the list. Once those reservations are sorted, Valve will start working through the waitlist.

If you sign up for a Steam Frame today, you'll join the back of the waitlist. That's at least 18,254 customers long, at time of writing, though you have to assume that many of the people who signed up for a Steam Frame have no idea this website even exists. There's a good chance it's a lot higher than this site suggests.

The Steam Frame comes in two capacities: 256 GB and 1 TB. As I wrote in my Steam Frame review, I'd rather the 256 GB model. It's considerably cheaper and while you can't upgrade the internal storage, you can slot in a microSD card to expand your library further. If you're mostly going to use the Frame for game streaming, you don't need a huge amount of space on the device anyways.

Good news, looks like a majority of users also agree on storage sizes. The community site also asks which model a user signed up for and offers the option to share their location, which many have, giving us even more data to go on. The 256 GB model is the more popular option country-by-country. It only takes $240 to change hearts and minds, as I think with a smaller premium in pre-memory crisis times, we may have seen those stats reverse. The 512 GB Steam Deck was a popular choice when it first launched.

I've been getting stuck into World of Warcraft: Forever's beta—though I'm a little less levelled up than I'd like to be. Initially, I just chalked this up to launch-day queue problems, but as it turns out, there's a little more to it than that.

See, I live in the UK, and Blizzard rarely does beta testing with EU-region players in mind. Forever's no different, the servers appear to be located solely in the US. Which isn't too much trouble, mind, I can deal with playing on 100+ ping for a beta test. What I can't deal with is logging in, having 300 ping, suddenly spiking to 2000 world MS, and then disconnecting.

The solution? A VPN. The moment I set my VPN to a US region, I received a cosy 100 ping and zero disconnection issues. As I quested through Durotar during EU times, I was able to corroborate the fix with plenty of other EU players who were experiencing the exact same thing with the exact same solution.

The EU WoW Forever beta forums are on fire with (understandable, though perhaps overexpressed) outrage: "We shouldn’t need a VPN service just to get a playable connection to a game we already paid €60 for," writes one player. "Can confirm VPN fixes it, I have <100ms ping on VPN and basically don’t feel lag. But obviously, [I] shouldn’t have to do that," adds another.

If this were, say, simply a closed-invite beta, I wouldn't even blink at this issue. But the fact of the matter is that Blizzard has used the beta to sell the Skyborne Epic Pack, it's pretty rough. Here's the store page for the EU: While the pack is keen to mention beta access, I can't find any mention of the beta's server locations on the page—just a notification of the dates it's taking place.

On the other hand, this is clearly some sort of network issue that Blizzard will doubtless fix. VPNs aren't magic, they can't make the internet go faster. What they can do is reroute your internet connection in a way that can skip routing issues—as is the case with me, and other EU-based players.

From what I can see, these connection problems aren't a known issue on the forums. As such, I've reached out to Blizzard for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response.

The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt Remastered releases on September 29 as a free upgrade for everyone who already owns the game. That's pretty exciting, even if you're like me and have played it through several times already: any excuse to reacquaint with the Butcher of Blaviken is welcome in my household, and the Songs of the Past expansion, scheduled for next year, feels like a dream.

Still, rather than replay The Witcher 3 over and over again I could opt to read the Andrzej Sapkowski books the games are based on. I could do that, but leaving aside the fact that reading doesn't have graphics or visceral interactive combat, there sure are a heck of a lot of Witcher books.

Thankfully a boxset exists gathering 8 of them. Amazon is currently selling this big ol' box for only AU$68, which is 50 percent cheaper than the usual AU$140. That RRP isn't too much to ask for eight sizeable fantasy novels and short story collections, so carving half that price off feels very generous indeed.

Significant caveat: since this boxset was released in 2024, it's missing the most recent instalment, Crossroads of Ravens, which released in September 2025. That's not something you should worry too much about: as my colleagues note in their rundown of The Witcher novels, Crossroads of Ravens is a standalone prequel, so you'll probably want to read the rest of them first anyway.

Once you do get the boxset (and they've very highly regarded in these parts) you'll probably want to know which order to read them in. This is not as straightforward a question as you would think: thankfully we have a resource for that.

To highlight what a good deal this is: the Kindle edition, an incorporeal digital license that you can't display on IRL bookshelves, is currently going for AU$94.99. Don't do that.

PAX Australia returns to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in October, and this year's Expo Floor promises to be packed with playable games.

For starters Sega will have four games to try including Total War: Warhammer 40,000 with three playable scenarios, as well as Alien: Isolation 2, Persona 4 Revival, and Yakuza's noir prequel Stranger Than Heaven. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's multiplayer will also be playable ahead of its October 23 launch.

Square Enix's booth will have a hands-on opportunity for players to try Final Fantasy 14 on Switch 2, then create a bracelet and take a themed photo. FF14's localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and global community producer Toshio 'Foxclon' Murouchi will be taking part in a behind-the-scenes panel where they endure a hot sauce challenge while sharing war stories. Attendees will get an early peak at Final Fantasy 7 Revelation at a special showcase too.

The Ubisoft Community Esports stages will host Rainbow Six Siege competitions, an Assassin's Creed sea shanty singalong, the Ubisoft Cosplay Runway, and a Just Dance-Along, among other events.

PAX Australia runs from October 9–11, and badges are on sale at the official website. I'll be spending most of the weekend at the PAX Rising indie showcase trying to play as many of the more than 90 indie games on show as I can. There's plenty more worth checking out on the full schedule.

Judging by the November release schedule, few publishers will dare release within spitting distance of GTA 6. Which is understandable, but it's caused a massive bottleneck in October: Ace Combat 8, Gears of War: E-Day, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Modern Warfare 4 will all release next month.

And that's not including all the other anticipated games not under the wings of a major publisher. I'm talking about a new Hellraiser game, Silver Pines, Jonathan Blow's next one, Planet Zoo 2, a remaster of Tales of Eternia, and the 1.0 launch of Enshrouded. There's even a new Final Fantasy 2D-HD remake.

Joining this fray will be Valor Mortis, a new first-person soulsike (their words) by the creators of the Ghostrunner series. It looks better than the concept sounds: a recent demo was well-received, mostly because it seems to nail first-person melee combat, which is famously hard to get right.

I wouldn't dare predict how well or otherwise Valor Mortis will sell when it releases on October 13, but it certainly has its work cut out for it. Its publisher Lyrical Games is well aware of this, as CEO Blake Rochkind told The Game Business in a recent interview.

"By virtue of the development schedule, the cards we’ve been dealt is that we are one of the only new IPs launching this fall," Rochkind said. "We are pretty confident in Valor Mortis. But ultimately, the worst thing we could do is not push our chips in and say, ‘We want this to be a game that you can pick up alongside these other great games.’"

That's basically the approach Lyrical Games is taking: they've priced Valor Mortis at $40 so that people can play it and the pricier blockbuster fare releasing alongside. “A developer I spoke to recently had a lot of success with a game priced at $30, which would probably be $40 today. One thing they said that really stuck with me is: ‘We never regretted being an ‘and’ game. We never regretted pricing our game as something that you can pick up alongside other games.’ Going with this price point will help us be an ‘and’ game.”

This is probably common sense among publishers but it's interesting to hear it presented so bluntly. Just as it was interesting to hear the creators of Peak rationalise its low price: "4 bucks is also kind of 5 bucks, 3 bucks is 2 bucks. And 2 bucks is basically free".

It's also interesting, albeit understandable, that a AA action game would prefer the company of four other blockbuster competitors rather than GTA 6. The only meaningful November competitor there is Nintendo's Ocarina of Time remake, which is also something most wise publishers will want to give a wide berth to. Neither are releasing on PC.

Over the last three years, since the Wilds of Eldraine set, Magic: The Gathering's core expansions have been building to a climactic storyline. It's very comic book, a multiverse-threatening crossover that's been set off by the planeswalker Jace Beleren trying to create a new multiverse, one that's free of all the threats Magic's setting has faced in recent years—Phyrexians, Eldrazi, etcetera—but which will overwrite the existing multiverse once it's complete.

This sets up a bunch of mirror matches where famous planeswalkers face off against their doppelgangers: the pyromantic Chandra versus a cryomantic version of herself while none-more-goth necromancer Liliana is up against a version of herself who practices life magic and, horrifyingly, wears white.

Of course, not everyone playing Magic knows who all these characters are. Tomik Vrona, for instance, is a member of the shady Orzhov Syndicate who excels in finding legal loopholes. If you know him as a lawyer for the magic Mafia, seeing him in Reality Fracture as a sparkmage who delights in breaking not only the laws of the legal system but also physics comes as a bit of a shock. If you don't know all that Tomik lore, it's not going to land as hard.

Which is why Reality Fracture's booster packs will give you an echoed pair together. You'll be able to see both versions of Tomik, or Ajani, or whoever at the same time and understand the contrast between them.

For me, Magic is often a social game, living up to the Gathering in its name. It's an excuse to sling cards and chat to people without having to care about poker or whatever. The setting and characters are secondary to the play, and the sweeping drama of Jace's girlfriend breaking up with him so hard he rewrote reality, or whatever is actually going on, is always going to be secondary to the jokes we make around the table.

I'm glad that someone on the production team did the hard work to insure paired cards would land in packs together, because it means I get to see a fire wizard and an ice wizard together and know exactly what's happening without having to know the events of a tie-in novel trilogy or a six-issue limited series.

Reality Fracture will be available digitally in Arena on September 29 and will have its global release on October 2, with pre-release events starting on September 25.

Matthew Rhys is having quite a moment. The actor cleaned up at the Emmys on Monday, making history by becoming the first man to win two Emmys for a leading role on the same night (for comedy series Widow's Bay and limited series The Beast in Me).

And in doing that, he actually set another record by becoming the only person to receive a lead actor Emmy for all three genres—he'd already won one for drama series The Americans back in 2018.

And his moment continues: Rhys actually has yet another new show out this week. Golden Axe is an animated comedy based on the Golden Axe video game series made by Sega way back in 1989. All 10 episodes are streaming now on Paramount+.

Joining Rhys, who plays dwarf warrior Gilius Thunderhead, is Danny Pudi (of Community and Mythic Quest) and Liam McIntyre (he played JD Fenix in Gears of War 4). Improv comedy fans will also be thrilled to hear the voice of Lisa Gilroy, playing sorceress Tyris, and Cart Tart, who voices… let me see if I've got this right… a humanoid panther.

"In an homage to Sega's iconic 1989 video game, Golden Axe follows legendary warriors Ax Battler, Tyris Flare and Gilius Thunderhead as they reunite to save Yuria from the evil giant Death Adder, who just won't seem to stay dead," says Paramount+. "Their quest is complicated by Hampton Squib, an inexperienced and wildly underprepared adventurer whose dream of heroism far exceeds his abilities. Forced to work together despite their flaws, they must find a way to stop Death Adder once and for all."

I'm a fan of just about the entire cast, and while I haven't seen it yet—and in fact only heard about the show for the first time today, and I've never played the games, either—I'm gonna check it out. If, like me, you're not subscribed to Paramount+ because you simply aren't interested in 26 different Taylor Sheridan shows, you can still see the first two episodes of Golden Axe for free on YouTube here and here. I've thoughtfully embedded the trailer below, too.

Hideo Kojima took to his social media channels earlier today to announce Bill Skarsgård as the new lead for his upcoming stealth-action game, Physint. He also reaffirmed some of the game's casting announcements from before it changed hands from PlayStation to Xbox after a seemingly messy split with Sony. Physint's top-billed cast are:

• Bill Skarsgård
• Charlee Fraser
• Don Lee
• Minami Hambe

Alongside the casting announcement, Kojima shared a new poster for Physint featuring Skarsgård, Fraser, and the new tagline "The Next Cold War Begins." Tucked away at the bottom is, perhaps, the most exciting news for me personally: Third-billed on production behind Hideo Kojima and Hideo Kojima is the GOAT, Yoji Shinkawa, on "character and mechanical design."

The longtime Kojima collaborator and Metal Gear character artist also worked at Kojima Productions on Death Stranding, but it's comforting to get confirmation he was unaffected by the recent production dust-up.

Speaking of Physint's continuity, Fraser, Lee, and Hamabe had all been confirmed in a prior Kojima Productions announcement about Physint's cast. Skarsgård as leading man John Physint (working name) is the only new casting info⁠—though, like with Shinkawa, it's probably worth clarifying after everything that's happened.

I was initially disappointed. Based on John Physint's shadowy appearance in the game's first teaser, I was hoping Kojima would spring for Robert Pattinson in the role. He's a known gamer on a bit of an all-time career hot-streak, and feels like a perfect fit for Kojima's oeuvre. Skarsgård was pretty great in Robert Eggers' 2024 Nosferatu, though, and I can only hope he brings a similarly unsettling, sexual energy to Physint.

Kojima seems to be spinning up marketing for the game again now that Microsoft has scooped it from Sony. The PlayStation parent company reportedly cut Kojima off for going over budget and missing deadlines. There's been no definitive word, but it's hard to imagine that Kojima will be allowed to keep using Sony and Guerilla Games' proprietary Decima engine (which also powered Death Stranding) now that he's left the fold, potentially delaying this game that already felt like it was years away.

Kojima's other big upcoming project, O.D.—also published by Xbox⁠—looks much closer to release. Its "Knock" trailer from last year makes it look like a return to some of the ideas explored in Kojima's legendary demo for the canceled Silent Hills, P.T.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is a pretty excellent RPG, but there's one aspect of it that not everyone loves: Time. Simply put, it's a limited resource in the game, which restricts what Coen—that's you—can do. Our reviewer, Australian editor Shaun Prescott, found it injected a sense of urgency into the game, at least in the early going, but said he'd "also like to pick some nirnroot and play some Gwent, thank you very much"—that is, have the time to relax and fiddle with non-essential tasks on his own terms, at his own pace.

Other players clearly felt the same way: One of the first mods to come out for The Blood of Dawnwalker is the "Better Story Timer," which effectively eliminates the impact of the ticking clock entirely—and which has since become, by far, the most popular Dawnwalker mod on Nexus Mods.

How much of an impact that reaction has had over at developer Rebel Wolves is impossible to say, but in an interview with Eurogamer, studio CEO and game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said it might not be used for the game's sequel.

"We will play with it. If we will have parts of the story, or the whole story, to which it fits, then we will use it," Tomaszkiewicz said. "If we will have stories where it does not fit, we will not force it. We will play with this system and we will try to use it to boost the urgency of some events in the game. But I'm not saying that in every game we will have the same scheme or loop—it's not like this."

Tomaszkiewicz acknowledged complaints about the time mechanic, and the mods available to remove it. He doesn't have a problem with that, but he does encourage players to try Dawnwalker with the clock running first: "We balanced [Dawnwalker] in a way that it's possible to do around 80 percent of the content with the time mechanic so it's not so bad.

"The arguments of, 'I want to see everything in one playthrough,' I understand, but it's false to begin with, because even in games like The Witcher, you cannot see everything in one playthrough because you have choices and consequences, and different things happen when you choose different things," Tomaszkiewicz said.

I have that same feeling myself with most games—I want to see everything the first time—but Tomaszkiewicz is correct: The Witcher 2 forces players to make a choice at a critical juncture that unavoidably excludes a significant amount of gameplay, and that seemed fine; Obsidian's Pentiment, released to acclaim in 2022, has a very strict time mechanic of its own that's essential to the experience. Missing out on things in videogames is not all that new or unusual—if anything, it's the inevitable outcome of choice in videogames that so many players say they want.

Interestingly, Tomaszkiewicz said that complaints about the time mechanic have tailed off considerably now that Dawnwalker has been out for a couple weeks, because people have finished the game and realized they actually had more time than they needed—a pattern he expects to continue as players continue to wrap it up.

"There will always be people who will have a problem with that because they don't like time mechanics at all, but I think that is fine," he said. "They can download the mod and play without it if they want."

And yes, even though The Blood of Dawnwalker has only been out for a couple weeks, Rebel Wolves is already eyeballing a sequel: The studio is now looking for a lead writer to help "craft the next chapter in the Dawnwalker saga."

WoW: Forever, Blizzard's modernized twist on WoW Classic, launched a beta today, but most people have only experienced a login screen so far.

Following a live Q&A, Blizzard turned the WoW: Forever beta servers on. The queue times weren't too bad to start: I had about a nine-minute wait when I first logged in. But once it finished, I was disconnected and kicked to the back of the line for another, even longer queue.

It appears I'm not the only one who has made it past the queue only to be disconnected and prompted to start the whole process over again. Players and streamers are all reporting similar issues, although some people have successfully made it in.

Blizzard acknowledged the issues on X: "We're working through some final issues, and we expect the doors to open soon."

There doesn't seem to be any trick to the queue. You just need to wait it out and pray that it lets you past the initial login screen.

WoW: Forever is the first version of WoW that doesn't use realms, or servers, in the same way as the others. Instead of picking a realm, you pick a ruleset (normal, PvP, or Roleplay) and join the same server as everyone else. Blizzard did it this way to help preserve the social aspect of the original MMO. This might also be why the queue times are so rough.

Wowhead and others have been busy datamining the game's files for new details. You can already go through all the new class talent trees and peek at some of the reworked armor sets. It might be worth taking a look while you wait to get in, or, if you're like me and don't want to spoil everything, cross your fingers and hope you can play a little before the risk of long queues gets even worse on the weekend.

There will be plenty of time to play the WoW: Forever beta, however. It'll stick around until October 21 before Blizzard fixes it up for its November 4 launch.

As reported by TorrentFreak, the ubiquitous DRM producer, Denuvo, is attempting to take one of its biggest foes to court over their work circumventing the antipiracy measures on games like Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong. The case is unique in that it comes from Denuvo and not one of the individual copyright-holders of an affected game.

The target of the lawsuit, who goes by "voices38" on various channels, is particularly prolific when it comes to putting out DRM-circumventing patches or "cracks" for games that license Denuvo's copy protection software. Denuvo is suing voices38 under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits tampering with digital protections.

While voices38 is an anonymous actor, Denuvo lists a number of social and gaming services accounts associated with them in its filing, an indication that the company will likely subpoena Valve, Reddit, and/or Discord for identifying information. We saw a similar move from Rockstar recently as it attempted to uncover the identity of GTA6 leaker Cyberleek.

"On information and belief, Defendant is an individual who has circumvented Denuvo’s technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works," Denuvo wrote in its filing with the Northern District of California. "Defendant has further announced, posted, or disclosed online, including through Reddit, how to circumvent Denuvo's technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works, facilitating or allowing others to similarly circumvent those controls and access video games without authorization."

Denuvo's software is largely unpopular with gamers, pirates or paying customers, as it is seen as invasive and a drain on system resources (Denuvo claims that its software does not affect game performance), but major publishers still turn to it as an antipiracy measure. Denuvo's legal strategy echoes the successful actions taken by Bungie and Activision against cheat developers for their competitive multiplayer games⁠. In addition to keeping up in the anticheat arms race, some companies have taken to suing cheat makers out of existence.

But part of what let them pursue that strategy is the fact that developing hacks for multiplayer games had evolved into a grey market business with identifiable, profit-making entities to sue, while piracy is more diffuse and inherently not a moneymaker. Successfully unmasking voices38 is the cornerstone of any successful legal action by Denuvo.

Voices38 does not seem particularly bothered by the threat, or they're just playing it very, very cool. "All is fine, everything will continue as normal," they wrote in a comment on the piracy-focused CrackWatch subreddit.

Just four months after the release of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and two months after laying off a significant number of employees, Studio ZA/UM has announced Zero Parades: Director's Cut, a major update that will add roughly 40,000 words of new content, a new encounter, and other improvements and fixes.

From the announcement on Steam: "Zero Parades: Director's Cut is the definitive edition of our espionage RPG, bringing more story, scenery and mind-fuckery to discover during your bid to reunite The Whole Sick Crew. And yes, we heard you: that includes more Melita."

All due respect to Melita, but the real centerpiece of the Director's Cut appears to be Quisach Roundabout, a new "dramatic encounter" about escaping the titular roundabout. As someone who lives in a country where roundabouts are still relatively new and rare, I'd say that sounds relatable, but apparently this adventure runs a little deeper than just having to figure out which lane you're supposed to be in.

"Hershel and her old friend Ramses find themselves stoned out of their minds, behind the wheel of a hijacked tuk-tuk and seemingly unable to escape the Quisach Roundabout late at night. The objective seems simple enough: take the right exit and head home. Fail to do so, and well... things might get existential. And possibly fatal."

The Director's Cut also offers a new "backstage mode," providing a look at technical insights into the game's development, cut content, and stories from art director Kaspar Tamsalu, new clothing, interactions, death screens, and "atmospheric additions," various quality of life improvements, "and loads more."

Zero Parades: Director's Cut sounds a lot like Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, which brought full voice acting, new characters, a new location, and more to the acclaimed 2019 RPG. But there's one notable difference: Where The Final Cut arrived a year and a half after Disco Elysium's release, Zero Parades: Director's Cut is dropping just four months after the original release. The relatively muted response to Zero Parades compared to Disco Elysium may be a factor in that seeming rush, particularly given that the studio previously cited that shortcoming as the reason for layoff of up to 32 people that was announced in July.

In any event, the response to the Director's Cut from Zero Parades fans is very positive, and it does represent a second chance of sorts for the game: It's coming as a free update for current owners on October 1, and will also mark the game's launch on PlayStation 5, which is set to happen on November 3.

Diablo 4's current Season of Hell's Legacy is focused on celebrating the 30th anniversary of the series, which debuted all the way back in 1997. As part of that effort, Blizzard has been reaching back into the past to bring back iconic characters and enemies like Deckard Cain, Baal, Mephisto, and of course the Big D himself.

The recent discovery of Rune word recipes from Diablo 2 had players wondering if maybe Blizzard has any other blasts from the past stashed away in the new season, and as discovered by redditor JT99-FirstBallot, the answer is a very big yes.

Tristram, of course, is the village that serves as the home base of the original Diablo, where players go to buy and sell items, and interact with a range of sadly doomed NPCs like Griswold, Ogden, Pepin, and Wirt. But it's more than just that: As the hub of what is arguably gaming's most influential action RPG, Tristram is a seminal piece of digital landscape, burned into the memories of old-time Diablo fans—and its destruction sometime prior to the events of Diablo 2 (sorry, mild spoiler there) was a genuine bummer.

What's particularly impressive here is how faithful this recreation of Tristram is. The visuals are obviously dramatically improved (although it looks just as I remember it—isn't the human mind a wonderful thing?) but the layout is spot on, and all the characters are there, doing what they do. What really lands for me, though, is the audio: I'm not a Diablo fan by any stretch these days (I haven't touched the series since Diablo 2) but that Tristram guitar riff hits like a truck, and Griswold's voice, well—that's Griswold's voice!

But the attention to detail runs even deeper. As YouTuber MacroBioBoi explains, this Tristram can be turned into Uber Tristram, a special zone previously only accessible during the Pandemonium Event from the Diablo 2 expansion Lord of Destruction. Uber Tristram is basically a copy of the destroyed village seen in the first act of Diablo 2, with one big expansion: You have to fight Baal, Mephisto, and Diablo at the same time. The payoff for kicking all that Prime Evil ass is the Hellfire Torch, an extremely powerful charm—and yes, the Hellfire Torch reward is waiting for you in Diablo 4 now, too.

Blizzard is clearly going hard to recapture the magic of Diablo's glory days for the 30th anniversary, and going deep too. Which naturally leads to the question: What else is in there? It certainly seems like there's more up the sleeve: The Uber Tristram bosses also drop a new item that players are still trying to figure out what to do with.

Now that Diablo 5 is coming—though not until 2029—there are no more expansions planned for Diablo 4, and seasons will be the focus. Blizzard says we can expect more storytelling though. Namely, it needs to bring about the apocalyptic return of Diablo to set up the events of the sequel, which will take place after Sanctuary has fallen to the forces of evil.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said that Grand Theft Auto 6 multiplayer will launch next year, in 2027.

Rockstar hasn't made any official announcement about GTA 6 multiplayer, what's going to happen with GTA Online, or when we can expect the PC version. It's a safe bet that Clancy is not authorized to make such an announcement, but his comment doesn't sound speculative.

"We spent a lot of time talking with Rockstar about their plans, and also helping them think about how they can engage our creators," Clancy told the publication. "You are going to see this big bump with GTA 6, but then an even bigger one next year when they launch multiplayer."

I've reached out to Rockstar and Twitch for comment.

When battling tree-swinging trolls, ice-spitting dragons, and fire-breathing skeletal demigods, it's hard to think of a skill more important than dodging. A shield or a weapon held up defensively can help, sure, but escaping deadly attacks in Valheim is often down to how quickly you can tuck and roll.

Which makes it a bit curious that over the past five years of early access, you couldn't redbind the dodge skill to a single key or button press. If you want to dodge on keyboard, you have to hold the block button (mouse 2) and press jump (space bar) and pick a direction (WASD). On controller, it's a stick + button combo. No single tap for a deeply important maneuver has been available for the past five years.

Until today! Those busy Valhiem devs finally took a peek at player feedback and noticed the request people have been making constantly for the past five years, seven months, 15 days, 17 hours, and 22 minutes: You have now been granted the ability to remap your dodge key to an alternate—no doubt single-tap—configuration.

Better late than never?

That's not the only key rebinding option that's been added. You can rebind items on the radial wheel and hotbar, too. A much newer request, to disable the intro cinematic (which only appeared with Valheim 1.0 last week), has also been granted. There are also some bug fixes, notably more tinkering with the Valheim cheat-flagging feature that was mislabeling some players and resources as cheats.

Have a look at the full patch notes below, and good luck trying to unlearn the muscle memory you've developed for dodging with three different keys over the past five years or so. One note: the patch, devs say, "will require a few days to get uploaded to all platforms." I've checked and it's live on PC now, however.

Quality of Life:

• Added several new keybinding options to the keyboard (Alternate dodge key, hotbar rebinding (on top of 1-8), support for rebinding radial wheel, support for removing keybinds)
• Added accessibility setting to be able to toggle blocking
• Add toggle to Gameplay settings to skip the intro cinematic on startup
• When attacking, the player’s rotation now also snaps towards the intended attack direction when the “attack towards look direction” option is enabled, not just when it’s disabled.
• Swapped Motion Sensor and Sheath keybinds on gamepad, returning Sheath to its original keybind. Motion Sensor can now be activated with the alt-key + Sheath button instead.

Optimizations:

• Improved GPU performance when tessellation is disabled by eliminating unnecessary GPU overhead in this case.
• Heightmap shadows are now calculated more accurately and at a lower performance cost.
• Optimized particle systems in the main menu to reduce overdraw.
• Multiple GPU performance improvements on Switch 2.

Bugs & Issues:

• PlayerBase effect on some build pieces has been increased to block enemies more
• Fixed inaccuracies in stick input pre-processing that made it heavily weighted towards axis-aligned movement and 30% too slow diagonally.
• Jotun puffs and Magecaps no longer respawn.
• Fix for player characters sometimes mistakenly being marked as temporary cheaters, leading to items dropped by monsters they kill being incorrectly marked as having a cheated origin.
• Cheated stackable items no longer stack with regular items, preventing uncheated stacks from being “corrupted” into a cheated state.
• Persistent Events devcommand (“pevents”) is now actually behind the devcommands toggle and not available in the console by default.
• Fixed errors when using the grappling hook’s secondary attack on creatures.
• Fixed various issues with Ashlands water (VFX, water damage not stopping)
• Fixed a bug where characters didn’t save correctly when manually pressing Save while playing on a server hosted by someone else.
• Disabled biomedata caching, fixing a bug where the cache could end up in an invalid state, making it impossible to join remote servers.
• Fixed Deep North battleaxes tool tier, can now cut all the trees.
• Made placeable boulders persist, only placeable on the ground, break if the ground they’re standing on goes away, and give ground-level support.
• Updated Ballista to make it accept all new trophies (All Deep North enemies + Bjorn + Vile)
• Timberwood build pieces no longer incorrectly show up in earlier biome locations
• Fixed various crashes/errors that could happen in rare circumstances
• Fixed a bug where Helmet of the Protector was craftable directly via the Black Forge
• Fixed a bug where terrain modifications by players or monsters could lead to performance and portal issues in multiplayer, such as performance and portaling issues, terrain seams, and terrain modifications becoming undone
• Updated Deep North and Winding Tunnels music for better balance and to remove some clicks when looping.
• Now plays the correct music in Mörkhalla.
• Better mixing of location music in the Deep North.
• Tweaked Seal and Baby Seal colliders to better match their bodies.
• Fixed an issue where the “No time for snoozing” achievement could sometimes not be unlocked in multiplayer
• Fixed an issue where The Homesteader and The Architect achievements could unlock repeatedly.
• Nintendo Switch 2: The TV output no longer switches from 120 Hz to 60 Hz while the virtual keyboard is open or while in the home menu when using the balanced graphics preset and playing online multiplayer, which caused a black screen while entering and leaving these menus.
• PlayStation®5: The TV output no longer switches from 120 Hz to 60 Hz while in the home menu when using the balanced graphics preset, which caused a black screen when entering and leaving this menu.
• PlayStation®5: The “Stronger Together” achievement is now achievable.
• Steam: Fixed a bug where Steam Cloud could get stuck in an invalid state if the game crashed while saving.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says the European Union's plan to restrict social media use by children, including a complete ban for anyone under the age of 13, is "terrible for the next generation of humanity" because of the impact it will have on the growth of creativity and expression.

Announced today, the EU KIDS Act—"Keeping Internet Digital Spaces Accountable and Trustworthy," because overwrought acronyms for serious legislation isn't a uniquely American phenomenon—imposes a blanket ban on social media accounts for anyone under the age of 13, although "specially-designed child-friendly video-sharing services" can be established via their parents' or guardian's accounts.

From the ages of 13 to 15, accounts can be set up under the supervision of guardians, although they should have "limited features and screen time." From 15 up, minors can set up their own "autonomous accounts" without parental consent, although "parental guidance remains essential during this stage."

The goal of the new regulations is to effect a "gradual approach" to social media use—the digital equivalent of teaching kids to swim before throwing them into the lake. Notably, the KIDS Act covers not just traditional social media platforms—Instagram, TikTok, and the like—but also "video-sharing platforms, online games, AI chatbots or companions," plus app stores and operating systems. Some services, like online encyclopedias, educational platforms, and digital news outlets, would be exempt.

"Today, our children are engaging with the most sophisticated technologies ever created. Technology that was never created with their wellbeing in mind," EU president Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. "Our KIDS Act is reversing the burden of proof—it is for platforms to show they are safe by design. And we put parents back in the driving seat, giving them the tools to help their children navigate a safer online world."

Sweeney takes a different view of the situation, however. "This would be terrible for the next generation of humanity," the Epic chief said on X, a day prior to the act's official announcement. "The apps and games of today are the paintbrushes and tree forts of yesterday. Fortnite has Creative Mode, Roblox has Roblox studio, and being a digital creator is in everyone's reach, till politicians take it away."

It's fair to say that it would not be great news for Epic if the EU suddenly made it a whole lot harder for kids under 15 to play Fortnite, and without wanting to sound like an 'in my day we drank straight from the hose!' guy, I would point out that paintbrushes and tree forts are still readily available. It's not as if pre-teens will be reduced to cave painting and hitting each other with rocks if they're suddenly no longer able to generate content for billionaires.

Even so, I find myself on board with Sweeney's broader stance—this isn't a great idea—not out of concerns that it will dull the creative instincts of the next generation, but simply because it's a potential security and privacy nightmare that's difficult to enforce and may or may not achieve its stated goals anyway.

And as other PC Gamer writers have previously pointed out, the impact of social media on young minds is only part of the problem, and arguably a relatively minor part: It also bakes the brains of adults with startling efficiency.

The EU KIDS Act is not a done deal. The proposed regulation has been submitted to the European Parliament and Council, and from there will enter the legislative process required for approval. Given the recent enactment of social media bans for kids and online age verification requirements in Australia, the UK, and some US states, though, and "the clear demand for urgent and comprehensive action" expressed by the EU, I expect it will be soon enough.

As reported by IGN and Gabe Follower on X, Backrooms director Kane Parsons shared an Instagram story from Valve's Bellevue, Washington headquarters on September 16. The director has previously said that Portal was extremely influential on his work, inspiring hopes for a Parsons-led adaptation or some other collaboration with the studio.

There's more circumstantial evidence in favor of this being more than just a friendly visit: Parsons previously told The New York Times in May that making a Portal feature film would be his "dream." What's more, this isn't the first time Parsons has been seen at Valve HQ. His Instagram story commemorating a visit in June has been preserved by user eugen3 on the Valve subreddit.

Those are encouraging signs that we could have a Portal movie from a guy who'd do a great job on it to look forward to, but there are some caveats. Parsons also told the NYT in May that he doesn't want to move on from Backrooms until it reaches some kind of conclusion, and he is already engaged to direct a sequel for A24.

There is also the matter of J.J. Abrams' seemingly-abandoned Portal movie project. He last spoke about it on the record in 2021, but there could be some standing contracts or agreements to consider.

I find I'm not particularly excited about a videogame adaptation unless the right director's involved, but there's been a lot of that going around recently. Zach Cregger's Resident Evil is looking like a slam dunk, even if some people are grumpy it's not about Leon Kennedy, and I find myself increasingly excited for Alex "The Guy Who Wrote Dredd" Garland's upcoming Elden Ring movie.

Parsons has already shown himself to be a master of the sort of abandoned corporate surrealism that defined Portal⁠, and his passion for the subject matter would also be cause for excitement. Gaming also runs in Parsons' family: His father, Michael Parsons, was a longtime technical artist at Telltale during its legendary 2010s hot streak.

The industry obsession with high-resolution graphics has haunted it for years, but given the dire state of things in regards to both layoffs and hardware prices? It's now starting to be downright incompatible.

Raph Koster, a veteran developer who worked on Ultima Online and was the creative director for Star Wars Galaxies—and is now making another MMO, Stars Reach—has been banging that particular drum for years.

"I think the first time I spoke about, ‘Hey, cost is going to kill us’ was 2005," he tells our friends at Edge Magazine in a massive interview inside Issue 428. "Myhrvold’s Law says that software is a gas—it expands to fill whatever computer you have … The place that shows up the most in games, for better or worse, is in content costs."

Reiterating similar thoughts spoken to me when I chatted to him back in June, Koster says that "what used to be a single 128x128 texture is now multiple 4K textures with shaders and all this stuff. And, yes, tools have improved along the way. You don’t handpaint that texture pixel by pixel any more—you can use procedural tools like Substance, or just purchase it from a texture library or whatever.

"But there’s still [a] downstream cost, even if it’s just testing how those umpteen textures and shaders interact. It all adds up." Combine that with the fact that game prices haven't gone up in parallel to these ballooning development costs, thanks to constant deals—"who buys something at $60, even, today?"—and you've got a recipe for disaster.

A cyclical one, mind. "Unless we hit the singularity," Koster says, "a platform will come along that changes things." Koster lays out a few key qualities this hypothetical platform would require in order to save the industry (or at least, the developers working within it) from this steadily-approaching iceberg:

"It needs to provide a new affordance, meaning there has to be gameplay you cannot get except on that platform … [it needs to be] worse for making traditional games—because that means the big incumbents cannot just transfer their expertise, come in and dominate.

And to top it all off? "The number-one biggest thing this new platform needs is to have shitty graphics." Referring to a few historical examples, like Flash games, social games on Facebook, the Wii, and mobile. That's not to say these platforms'll be immune to those problems, though.

"They eventually catch up, and then the costs rise in exactly the same way. But we haven’t had a new platform come along to reset that cost curve in a long time. Like, a long time."

If you remember a very cool project we reported on a few months ago that got Ubuntu Linux up and running on PlayStation 5 consoles, I have some bad news: the lead developer of the open-source project, Andy Nguyen, has stepped away:

"I am stepping away from the PS5 scene and stopping all my work on PS5 Linux," Nguyen posted on X. "After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish PS5 Pro support and release in 2027, it's all down the sink."

"The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony."

The project, which was run by Nguyen, used hypervisor bugs to get Ubuntu Linux working on the PS5. Once past Sony's barriers, open-source Mesa drivers were tweaked to get everything working as it should, but you had to stay on older firmware to prevent Sony's patches "fixing" the hypervisor bugs that permitted the project to work.

Nguyen was working on getting Ubuntu working with the PS5 Pro, but that relied on the "only hypervisor bug left", which has now been reported to Sony by the "slop kiddies." Which will presumably mean a patch from Sony and goodbye to the project.

"I asked them [the people who found the hypervisor bug]," Nguyen says, "to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy Linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead."

I'm unsure how much of Nguyen stepping away has to do with this happening to the Pro project, and how much is the prevalence of "noobs." It seems like perhaps a little of column A and a little of column B. I'm not a dev so I can't say whether this kind of negative environment is encouraged by 'easier' development using AI, but it wouldn't surprise me.

When Dishonored director Harvey Smith announced his new studio, co-founded with fellow Arkane alumnus Ben Horne, there was no doubt about the kind of games the team would be working on. Black Pony Immersive makes it pretty damn clear. Putting "immersive" right there in the name is a statement of intent, one born from his experiences at Arkane.

"About the name, it was important to us to say to people, 'This is who we are,'" he tells us. "When Arkane was independent, very often people would come in and they would try to get us to work on some game. And it was not in our wheelhouse. People would say, 'You're going to go under by turning your nose up at this project, this is money. People are offering you money to do this DLC for this third-person action shooter.' And we'd be like, 'Yeah, but we don't like those, we don't know how to do them well, and we think that game is dumb.' So we're generally going to say no, and gamble the company on doing what we are known for."

Of course, Arkane would go on to become the best known immersive sim studio. And that was because it stood its ground and kept working in that genre, despite the offers to work on projects outside of its wheelhouse.

"There was a moment when we were pretty desperate," he recalls, "and a bunch of people working on BioShock 2 said, 'God, we're in a tight spot. We need somebody to take on a bunch of levels. You know who's out there? Arkane is out there.' So we took Christophe Carrier, our level design director, who is really the wellspring from which a lot of that thinking at Arkane came from. We took him and a team, and we put them on BioShock 2. And that only happened because people associated us with that kind of game."

Ultimately, though, after spending decades building this reputation, Arkane would eventually take a detour—the vampire-themed multiplayer shooter Redfall. "That was a game that did not come together," says Smith, "and we never should have been working on a games-as-a-service game, to be honest."

Redfall led to the closure of Arkane Austin, and thanks to the Xbox reset Arkane Lyon is now in a difficult position. French labour laws meant that Xbox couldn't just massacre it like it's already done with so many other studios, but it feels like it's hanging on by a thread.

As an independent studio with such a clear creative direction, Black Pony Immersive will hopefully avoid this fate. "There are many ways to fail, many ways to succeed," says Smith. "But specialising in what you love is not a bad path."

I've had a very good time with Final Fantasy 14's new Beastmaster, and I've very much enjoyed the Crucible of the Unbroken—but that doesn't mean there aren't problems. While the first few boards are a great time, problems start to pop up when you try to be competitive.

Those problems have grown so numerous, in fact, that Square Enix has postponed the first season of the Crucible of the Unbroken's ranking system, as posted on the game's official site: "Since the release of beastmaster, we've seen many players enjoying the new limited job and tackling its challenges.

"That said, we have also received considerable feedback on Beastmaster's combat balance, as well as reports of issues with certain gameplay mechanics, which we are working to address. If rankings were to begin under these conditions, it would be difficult to determine whether the results reflect the intended balance of the job and its mechanics, impacting the fairness of the ranking process."

As for what the problems are, it's a little complicated: In order to get on the leaderboards for the Crucible's ranking system, you need to beat a board on the "third degree", which is, to put it plainly, really hard. But required, if you want a Tourmaline Golem Mount, which would only be given to people who land in the top few hundred players (this varies based on region size) when the season ends.

This clashes up against the scoring system itself. In order to get more points, you need to get board bonuses.

Some of these bonuses make sense—things like not failing mechanics, taking damage, and the degree bonuses themselves. Others, though, are a bit of a headscratcher: You get more points if you use only three familiars (rather than the permitted 15), don't use campsites, feed, spend coins, or get gear, and stick to a single familiar type.

If you want to place on the leaderboard to get that mount, you have to basically not engage with the systems that make the mode interesting to begin with—that is, tailor-fitting a roster to each fight. This'd be a little like, if in World of Warcraft's Mythic+ system, you got more points by not using your talent trees.

As a result, players have been trying to figure out ways to cheese stuff: Harsh conditions are known to prompt min-maxing, after all. Which, given there's a mount with a little FOMO added, is a recipe for the kind of player dissatisfaction that sinks systems. Which I think would be a great shame!

Personally, I think the Crucible could do well to take some more pages out of existing roguelike's books—like Hades's Heat system, for instance, where players get to pick and choose what modifiers they need to play under, rather than systematically mandating that players drop a bunch of interesting mechanics to chase a high score. Scrapping the reward being tied to landing on the leaderboard (something which would force players to min-max even if they don't want to) seems smart, as well.

AMD promised neural rendering is coming to Radeon cards and consoles with FSR Diamond, and we're starting to see signs of that new approach in the works from the red team. The company's technical staff just published a paper on how it's using image generation to replace global illumination in real-time.

The paper outlines a technique for generating more realistic-looking lighting on a frame-by-frame basis. It's titled "Temporally stable generative illumination with a one-step diffusion model". Diffusion models create images by working through a noisy image, often over many steps; however, AMD's researchers are using one that produces an image in one denoising step, using the details and lighting baked into a scene to generate a new one. That's important for being able to run it quickly.

The idea is to produce something that looks like global illumination—indirect light bouncing off objects and illuminating stuff nearby—through image generation, rather than computationally intensive techniques like path tracing.

"In our work, we try to solve global illumination as an image generation problem," says SungYe Kim in a video presentation on the paper. Kim is one of the authors. "Global illumination is what makes a rendered scene look real, and it is also the most expensive part of rendering."

The proposed method takes a frame with direct lighting—light straight from a source to an object with no further bounces—as an initial lighting 'hint' to the diffusion model, Stable Diffusion 2.1 Turbo.

The model itself is trained on a synthetic dataset of 31,000 frames of interior scenes rendered in Blender Cycles, which is Blender's ray tracing production renderer. Each has 1-30 lights and objects that move around. That way, "the model sees a wide range of lighting conditions." The training comprises running through this dataset 50 times on AMD Instinct MI210 GPUs.

Sparse lighting, radiance, material, and geometry 'signals' are used to "keep generation aligned to geometry and lighting". The frame that is fed into the diffusion model is processed in such a way as to force the model to focus on illumination, rather than any other details. That's going to be a pretty important step should this technique ever make it out into the wild west of videogames; the public reaction to these sorts of AI tools can be pretty gnarly.

The researchers also use what's called a temporal VAE, or TVAE, to improve consistency. This uses motion vectors to align the current frame with previous ones. It stores a history of previous outputs to ensure that the lighting doesn't flicker or go all weird between generations. That can become an issue with these sorts of models: run the same task over and over again and they'll produce slightly different results every time, and a human will readily notice that when it's running in real-time on a frame-by-frame basis.

The final result is composited with the original frame using only direct lighting, which likely softens any errors a touch. The blog post says the method is "suitable for real-time rendering use cases with frame-by-frame generation."

Compared to other generative models, "our method recovers the soft shadows and the bounce lighting, while RGB↔X hallucinates content that is not present in the scene and DiffusionRenderer distorts the geometry," Kim says in the presentation.

The model is said to run at 0.29 seconds per frame, which is roughly 3.45 frames per second, at a resolution of 512 x 512. That's on an RTX 3090, too, which is deemed pretty quick compared to those other named techniques yet shows there's a long way to go for gaming. The whole process requires around 8–9 GB of VRAM, too. Remember, this is just that global illumination step, not the entire pipeline for rendering a frame.

So, it's not just Nvidia looking into neural rendering as a new frontier for computer graphics, though we knew that already. Earlier this year, AMD's Jack Huynh announced a new suite of FSR technologies that it called FSR Diamond. This includes "next-gen neural rendering", which this new research falls under; alongside improved ML-based upscaling, ML-based multi-frame generation, ray regeneration, and path tracing.

How AMD sells these sorts of technologies to us gamers once they're ready is going to be something to watch. I'm sure the red team has been looking closely at the firestorm erupting from Nvidia's slapdash announcement of DLSS 5—and subsequent backpedalling and rephrasing in order to make it seem less egregious to gamers and more a tool for developers—and thinking, 'eesh, how do we avoid that while still making use of all this research?'

Rumours are already circulating about an application of neural lighting from AMD, such as from leaker Kepler_L2 on the Anandtech forums (via Overclock3D). Whether that refers in part to this, or something further along in the development process, we can't be sure, but it's clear that neural rendering isn't exclusively being worked on by Nvidia.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta arrives today, but the dataminers are way ahead of us, having ferreted out all sorts of new details. WoW Forever's still around a month and a half from launch day, so this should be considered a work in progress, but it's still interesting.

As datamined by WoWHead, Forever will be bringing all sorts of unique set bonuses to the game as an incentive to actually go out and farm. The Postmaster set, a level 56 kit, now nets owners Return to Sender, which gives you a free spell reflect after falling to 25% health. The Necropile's Raiment, meanwhile, has a chance to steal life from spellcasting, and the Bloodmail's Regalia can bleed enemies that attack you.

Even low-level armor sets have cool bonuses now, like the Defias Leather set, which, at four pieces, has a chance to make your melee attacks bleed the target on a 5% proc chance. The Embrace of the Viper five-set bonus seems wild, too, giving you a chance to just outright stun your targets for 1 second.

I think it's neat as heck and a good sign that Blizzard intends to keep up this whole horizontal development thing. The fact that even lower-level gear is being treated as more than just a stop-gap makes me more excited for the entire exercise.

The max level dungeon sets are interesting as well—like the Warlock's Dread/Deathmist raiments, which have a chance to fear attackers when they strike you on a 60 second cooldown. Raid sets, which should come from the new raids added to Forever and have bespoke set bonuses, are also cool.

For example, the feral tanking set, Grovekeeper's Rage, lets you cast Rebirth while in bear form. And a lot of these sets provide damage bonuses against certain creature types, like a rogue set that adds attack power versus humanoids, or the warlock's Demonheart Raiment, which gives spellpower against demons.

And while not all of these datamined sets are made equal, they're also not made finished, so I anticipate a few of them getting a heck of a lot more interesting when the full game comes out in November.

It feels a bit like we're in the long wait before the hardware world returns to normal, doesn't it? Thanks to the global memory shortage, when memory-clad products launch at all they're slapped with dizzying price tags. Given this, hearing that we're only going to see one next-gen GPU next year feels about right. And apparently it won't be a top-end one, either.

That is what we are hearing from prolific and usually very in-the-know hardware leaker Kepler_L2, no less (via VideoCardz). On Anandtech forums they say: "AT2 is the only GPU getting released next year. Everything else from both AMD and Nvidia is 2028."

AT2, if you were wondering, is supposedly the codename for the GPU that is going to be found in Xbox Project Helix, which has been pegged for a 2027 launch for some time. That we'll see at least one new AMD GPU next year, then, isn't news. But what is new is confirmation—assuming Kepler is right—that this GPU is the only new one we'll see next year, especially given it's expected to not be the most powerful of AMD's next-gen line-up.

There's no official word from AMD on this, but rumours have had it for a long while that there'll be an AT0 ('Alpha Triton 0') GPU with 96 compute units (CUs) that will compete with Nvidia's RTX 6080-level GPU. If Kepler's recent statement is true, therefore, it seems AMD will be launching its midrange GPU first, courtesy of console launches.

It would also mean we shouldn't expect any new Nvidia GPUs. Though it's worth noting that at least one hardware leaker—Moore's Law is Dead—disagrees with this and claims we could see an RTX 6090 launch. Kepler disagrees, saying "he's wrong."

Kepler's wording does, however, leave it somewhat ambiguous as to whether Nvidia could release Super versions of current GPUs, given these wouldn't be "new" GPUs but new configurations of the same GPUs. But those have reportedly been cancelled anyway. It's been looking less likely Supers would launch ever since the memory crisis kicked up, given previous rumours had it that RTX 50 Super cards would primarily offer better memory configs.

Nvidia has RTX Spark now, anyway, I suppose. And for my money, given the state of the current PC hardware market, I'm not counting just one new GPU next year as that much of a loss. Roll on 2028, though.

Back in May, myself and some of the fantastic PC Gaming Show team went to Finland to interview the brilliant creative minds at Remedy. We learned a lot about Control Resonant, the upcoming ARPG sequel to 2019's Control. We showed you a snippet of those interviews in our June PC Gaming Show, but now, we've declassified the full video.

In case you need a refresher, Resonant follows Dylan Faden, brother of newly-appointed FBC director Jesse Faden, who spent most of the original Control locked in a cell because of his dangerously powerful abilities and possession by the Hiss. After waking from a coma, he discovers the Hiss have escaped the Oldest House and are running rampant in Manhattan, New York. Simultaneously, or maybe because of their incursion, the island is being affected by an otherworldly threat called the Patterning. It's turning people into monsters and making everything look weird.

"It's not simply a matter of ordering things in a predictable way, it's affecting the people," says creative director Mikael Kasurinen. "It affects time, it affects light." Everything in the city is topsy turvy: Fortunately, Dylan has the ability to flip the gravity and walk on walls and ceilings—or are those ceilings and walls? It's hard to tell.

Remedy didn't look to other videogames for inspiration. Instead, the work of M.C. Escher was used for inspiration, as were films like A Field in England (a real trip that I'd encourage everyone to watch) and Paprika. But why not games? "There's this tendency of people not taking risks, and games start to resemble each other quite a lot," art director Elmeri Raitanen says.

What intrigues me most about Control Resonant is the Resonants themselves, people who have been twisted into monstrous bosses. Dylan can defeat them and gain their power, but you're not forced to fight all of them, or even specific ones, lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos explains. Being a more open world game than its predecessor, Resonant may require you to defeat a certain number of bosses, but there will be more than that number available to fight, and developers can't always be sure what powers you'll have at any given time.

This can lead to some unpredictable outcomes: The devs told me about one playtester who didn't get the gravity shifting ability until much later than they'd expected. That variability will make it interesting to see what sort of challenge runs emerge when the game launches.

Personally, I'm gonna go for all the bosses, they look awesome. We get a good glimpse of a giant that spits lava, a big floating head, and a smaller, more elegant Resonant who was once a dancer, performing in Manhattan when the Patterning struck.

Remedy worked with real dancers to get her movements right, and the score for her fight was very important, too. "I went through quite a lot of my kitchenware and built a rhythm based on Fibonacci numbers," composer Petri Alanko says. So beats in the music follow a pattern of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on—you take the last number and add it to the number before it to get the next. Isn't maths neat?

That's not the only sonic trick Alanko used. Because Dylan is figuring out who he is without the Hiss possessing him, he's basically been reborn. "In the beginning, almost all the sounds that are related to him, they are formed of sine waves, which is basically the simplest form of sound," Alanko says. "Whenever he's evolving as a person, or as a weapon, some other frequencies, other nuances, other textures, the tonal effects behind whatever Dylan does, gets more complex and more, let's say interesting."

While Dylan and Jesse are related, don't worry about the Control universe going the way of Star Wars and only caring about one family. Kasurinen, the creative director, says he envisions a whole world, filled with different stories and characters. He took inspiration from pen and paper roleplaying games, and wants to create a universe with rules, but where players can see it from different perspectives.

You'll be able to see Resonant properly for yourself when it launches September 24. You can pre-order it on Steam. And don't forget to check out our upcoming PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, airing September 20.

Heart Machine, the developer of the Hyper Light games and Possessor(s), has laid off "nearly everyone at the studio" following the collapse of a deal with an unnamed publisher for funding of its next project.

"I have very difficult news today," studio founder Alx Preston wrote on LinkedIn. "We had been working on an unannounced title, funded by a publisher. This week, they decided to no longer move forward with it. Without this key income for the studio, any other immediate prospects or other funds, nearly everyone at the studio had to be laid off. It's devastating.

"Everyone will be provided with as much support as possible, including assisting with placement. If you know of any roles for extraordinarily talented, kind people, please reach out and we will coordinate."

Heart Machine's debut game, Hyper Light Drifter, launched to critical and commercial success in 2016; the studio's follow-up, Solar Ash, didn't meet quite the same acclaim when it arrived in 2022, and Heart Machine ran into trouble a few years later, ending development of Hyper Light Breaker while it was still in early access and laying off employees. Released just after those layoffs were imposed, the action-platformer Possessor(s) earned "mostly positive" reviews on Steam, but not very many of them.

It's not clear what comes next for Heart Machine. Preston said the studio will "keep pushing to find a path," but also warned that at this point, he's "not sure yet what's next for Heart Machine to survive."

Have you heard the rumor that Bungie is looking to somehow merge Destiny and Marathon into a single series? I'll admit that I hadn't, until Marathon creative director Julia Nardin took to X to say flat-out that it's not true.

"As someone who's worked on both Destiny and Marathon, I can confirm that the 'leak' about us merging the two IPs is fake," Nardin wrote. "They share a lot of the same Bungie DNA, but like siblings they're also their own independent entities. Please don't believe everything you read online."

Nardin should know: Prior to taking up the creative director mantle on Marathon earlier this year, she worked on the narrative for multiple Destiny 2 expansions, and served as associate narrative director on the free-to-play mobile shooter Destiny: Rising. Nardin's message was also reposted by Bungie comms lead Dylan Gafner, better known to the community as dmg04.

The message appeared to be in response to a lengthy "leaks" post on 4chan, subsequently posted on the Marathon subreddit, which makes claims ranging from basic gameplay changes to a move to a free to play—and, of course, the merge: "There has been some vague testing the waters internally to rework Marathon and Destiny into a single IP with Marathon representing the beginning of Mankind's Golden Age and to foreshadow more threats to be used in a future Destiny project."

I suppose that would be workable—it's not too much of a chore to mash up disparate properties via the passage of time and weird shit happening in the background—but the obvious question is, why would Bungie bother? What's the payoff?

Lots of Destiny 2 fans are unhappy that their favorite game has reached its end, but I don't think they're suddenly going to come trucking to Marathon because of some meaningless narrative twist. And that's Bungie's real problem: Marathon numbers are sagging badly and efforts to turn that around haven't gone anywhere.

That's a concern with caveats because Marathon, unlike Destiny 2, isn't free to play, but Bungie's been going hard since the game's launch to find its footing: With the Destiny 2 team gone and no new projects imminent, Bungie needs Marathon to work. The studio recently delayed the game's planned September content update into December, preceded by a smaller seasonal refresh in October, and also abandoned its "strict seasonal schedule," as part of its plan to turn Marathon "into a more alien and dynamic survival experience."

Relentless optimists may note that Nardin didn't address any of the other leaks in her post: The free-to-play transition, for instance, or that K-pop crossover skins are happening. And who knows? Maybe some of the predictions it makes will come true. Personally, though, I think Nardin's final bit of advice is good: Don't believe everything you read on the internet. (And my own personal addendum: especially if it comes from 4chan.)

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie comes out this week on September 18, and the early reviews have just dropped. It's good news for games and horror fans: it sounds like just about everyone likes it, with more than one reviewer calling it the best videogame adaptation ever made.

(That's a pretty low bar, but still.)

Granted, early reviewers are hand-picked by studios, so it pays to take these first batch of glowing reviews with a grain of salt—and speaking of salty, PC Gamer (despite asking nicely a number of times!) wasn't granted a press screening, so we can't offer our own take. I know, boo hoo, poor us. In the meantime, until we get a chance to see it ourselves, you can get hyped by what a bunch of other outlets have said about the latest Resident Evil flick:

GamesRadar+ (4/5): "Turns out eighth time's a charm, as despite much pre-release griping over the absence of iconic game characters like Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield, director Zach Cregger's Resident Evil isn't just the best Resi movie by a distance; it's the best video game movie full stop," says Jordan Farley.

Polygon (91/100): "Cregger takes his love for both the franchise and the genre and channels them into something we've never really seen before," says Jake Kleinman. "Resident Evil is funny, scary, gross, and beautiful. Above all else, it captures the fight-or-flight experience of actually playing a Resident Evil game."

Gamespot (8/10): "By backing away from the stories and characters of the video games, Cregger dodges the giant bullet of 'that’s not my Leon Kennedy' and instead lets us finally experience Resident Evil ourselves, through our own eyes," says Eric Frederiksen.

IGN (8/10): "With a laser focus on putting its hero through the worst night of his life," Tom Jorgensen says, "Resident Evil is a simple and exciting survival horror story that benefits greatly from director Zach Cregger’s sensibilities."

Discussing Film (4/5): "Even though it’s an original story, Cregger’s take on Resident Evil sets a new high bar for video game movies by capturing the source material’s demented spirit while doing something clever and inventive with it.

Collider (8/10): "Clocking in at 90 minutes, Cregger's Resident Evil puts a lean, mean spin on an iconic horror franchise that's only poised to keep getting bigger, with a story that sits within the margins of the existing games while still giving fun, clever nods to its source material," says Carly Lane.

AV Club (B): "The 90-minute B-movie so deftly juggles gags and gross-outs that, when it’s finally boxed in by the larger demands of IP, it’s as tragic as watching a beloved character succumb to the dehumanizing effects of a virus."

Rolling Stone (Unscored): "Screw what hardcore fans say a movie adaptation should be," says Pie Conzaga. "Cregger’s take on RE is just as gross, funny, and scary as the games."

Variety (Unscored): "Is it a good movie?" asks Owen Gleiberman. "Let’s call it a sweetly executed piece of escapist trivia. It’s got a quirky relatability… for a Resident Evil movie."

The Hollywood Reporter (Unscored): "Cregger very much makes the film his own while displaying his obvious affinity for the source material," says Frank Scheck. "He’s crafted a propulsive, simultaneously terrifying and hilarious thrill ride that showcases both his cinematic chops and perverse sense of humor."

A few more quotes? Lisa Laman of Land of the Nerds says "Resident Evil is automatically up there with Exit 8 and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as the best live-action video game movie ever made," Donald Clark of the Irish Times says "Cregger’s shameless romp, though smallish in scale, feels like the best Resident Evil film in the franchise’s long history," and Adam Olinger of Adam Does Movies (YouTube review) calls it "the best videogame movie of all time."

MindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) appears to have undergone another round of layoffs, and these latest cuts could be fatal, as multiple people have indicated that all remaining employees are being let go.

BARB has been struggling since the release of its startlingly bad (yet still strangely entertaining) action-thriller MindsEye in 2025, a situation made outright bizarre by the studio's repeated claims that it was the victim of a sabotage campaign. The insistence on that narrative seemed to drive a wedge between BARB and original MindsEye publisher IO Interactive, which ultimately washed its hands of the whole thing; updates continued to flow, including an execrable expansion that promised (and utterly failed to deliver) "evidence of the sabotage" that brought MindsEye low, but so did multiple rounds of layoffs and employee allegations of gross mismanagement and unauthorized employee surveillance.

Taken altogether, and particularly given the unforgiving nature of the videogame industry, a bad ending for BARB seemed inevitable, and that point may now have been reached.

"Unfortunately, along with the rest of my colleagues at Build a Rocket Boy, I am facing redundancy and now looking for a new opportunity," lead weapon and prop artist Adam Ridsdale wrote on LinkedIn.

Principal talent acquisition partner Dan Hawkins shared a similar message, writing, "With a very heavy heart I raise my green banner, along with the rest of my colleagues at Build a Rocket Boy. I am 'Open to Work' actively looking for a new adventure." Hawkins added that he "will be seeing BARB through till the very end, helping wrap things up here in the HR department," suggesting that "the end" is at hand.

Senior VFX artist Jason Waller also pointed to a studio closure: "Along with everybody else left at Barb my role is being made redundant." Numerous other employees have also reported their layoffs, without mentioning the wider impact of the cuts, including Rockstar veteran Stuart Ross, who served as head of audio at BARB.

Build a Rocket Boy hasn't made any sort of public statement on the reported shutdown, but it certainly looks like it may have finally reached the end of the line. I've reached out to the studio for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

It's been a good while since we last heard about Balatro's big 1.1 update—a year, almost to the day, since developer LocalThunk delayed it into 2026. There's still no sign of it, but the community did catch sight of LocalThunk yesterday when he popped into the Balatro Discord to let everyone know that everything is going fine.

"I'm happy the leaks are going over so well," LocalThunk wrote, referring to teases about the 1.1 update that he's been posting himself. For instance:

"I know you guys want to know as much as possible about 1.1 but I can't give away too much. I know it's taken a very long time and I've completely blown past the 2025 time frame but I promise I'm cooking in the way that is both best for me and ultimately for the game."

That tracks back to LocalThunk's 2025 message about the 1.1 delay, in which he said he became "well and truly burned out" after going too hard for too long on Balatro's development. After taking an extended break, he "very slowly" eased back into the work and was approaching more like a hobby developer, avoiding deadlines and not "trying to force things creatively." He also expressed regret for announcing the then-2025 release target for the 1.1 update, a point he reiterated in his new message.

"I understand how frustrating that must be and I wish I could go back in time and slap some sense into myself," LocalThunk continued. "At the time it was still go-go-go and I never even considered that I could allow myself to stop, then after mobile came out I was just so burnt out I couldn't touch the game for a bit. Luckily things have changed."

Consequently, LocalThunk said he'll continue to turn up in the Balatro Discord now and then to reassure people that the 1.1 update is still in development, and maybe post some more "leaks," but there won't be any commitment to a release target until it's ready to go. He also made clear that despite knowing people may be frustrated by the long wait, he's not going to speed things up: "I don't want this to be half baked and wreck Balatro, I love the game too and I want to play a fun game not a rushed botch job."

"I truly am having the best time making the game now. This past year of dev has been probably the most fulfilling work I've ever done, including pre launch times when it was a little hobby project," LocalThunk concluded. "I'm trying to keep offline as much as possible because that's a recipe that works well for me but I'll ease back in when 1.1 is ready to go."

People on the Balatro Discord, for the record, showed no sign of the frustration or impatience LocalThunk is concerned about: Most of the responses expressed happiness that he's doing well and encouraged him to take his time with it. One apparent newcomer to the Discord was particularly excited by the mere appearance of the dev:

For Balatro heads eager for information on what the update will contain, LocalThunk shared more than just the 'four Jokers' tidbit above. The major points are collected in this Reddit thread: A tier 2 voucher named Lunker, algorithmic changes for picking the next voucher, a blue stakes rework, and that sort of thing. What really leapt out to me, though, is that LocalThunk expects the 1.1 update to be the end of the road: After the 1.1 update comes, a 1.1.1 update will follow "for balance tweaks and changes after player feedback."

"That's likely it," he wrote. "Don't expect any more than that." He also confirmed that Balatro will not be getting a multiplayer mode.

It should go without saying at this point, but I'll say it anyway: The Balatro 1.1 update sounds like it will be big, but there's absolutely no indication as to when it will arrive.

Ex-Microsoft engineer David Plummer has revealed that he was the "primary author" of Windows XP's Product Activation system on the OS side, and so he's got some inside details on the workings behind the infamous "FCKGW" product key. You know, the one that seemed to be written on every pirated, home-burnt CD copy of the OS back in the day.

No clue? Me neither. I'm completely unaware of such illicit activity, and I reject any accusation otherwise. Anyway, the famous (and now defunct) key was, in its entirety, FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8—and Plummer thinks it may well have been leaked by an OEM or similar with early access to Microsoft's then-new, all-blue XP operating system.

"As you likely recall, Product Activation required that you have a key, and you’d have to activate it online or over the phone," Plummer begins. "But Microsoft had large corporate customers... and those customers did not want to have to activate every offline PC."

Said customers would be given a Volume Media disc image, which could then be unlocked with a Volume Key. To confirm the legitimacy of such an install, the product activation system would inspect the disc image to find a secret 10 MB "binary blob" which was only present on the Volume Media. As a fun aside, this data blob just happened to be an encrypted version of Microsoft Bob.

"I took their disc data and compressed and encrypted it several times," says Plummer. "Rest assured it’s encrypted and even in the AI age no one has extracted it yet. I really just needed random data, so I started with a precompressed binary image because, secretly, I was young and didn’t know if I could trust CryptGenRand."

"And so, if you ever tried the FCKGW key on a regular XP CD, it wouldn’t work," Plummer continues, "because you didn't have Bob in your bits. But if you had the means in 1995 to download large ISO binaries or copy CDs, all it took was the key and a copy of the disc."

Unfortunately for Microsoft, a piracy group called Devils0wn posted a complete Windows XP Pro Corporate ISO five weeks before the official launch, alongside the valid FCKGW key. As Windows Product Activation skipped the rest of the validation process once a mathematically valid key was combined with the Volume Media data check, ta-da, a seemingly-legitimate install of Windows XP was yours.

"Pirates then started baking the key into images or just writing it on the CD with a Sharpie," says Plummer. As for where the key itself came from, he speculates that "the most plausible source is an OEM or hardware partner that received final media early so they could ship PCs on launch day.

"Dell is the name that comes up most often; Intel has also been mentioned because of later source dumps. There were very few organizations that actually possessed a VLK [Volume License Key] that early, which is why the timing points at a partner rather than a random corporate customer."

"But I do not know," Plummer confirms. "Presumably someone does."

In the aftermath, Microsoft started blacklisting product IDs belonging to the leaked keys in Service Pack 1, while Service Pack 2 "made the check more aggressive" and started blocking updates for installs using the key. However, Plummer says that valid, un-leaked VLKs continued to work with Volume Media versions of XP for years.

"The operational failure was that the media and one of those keys left the building before the product even reached stores," Plummer concludes. "Once both pieces were public, WPA’s hardware-binding never got a chance to run."

Interestingly, Plummer says in the comments that he never came across a keygen that actually worked for Windows XP, while others in the thread have speculated that those available at the time were simply faking the generation part and randomly selecting leaked Volume Media keys from a list.

Ah, the internet really was the wild west back in those days, that's for sure. Still, now you know why that mysterious sequence of numbers and letters worked for so long, and later became ingrained in the memory of many PC users. Not me, though. First time I've ever seen it in my life, guv. Honest.

Microsoft, at this point, drips gore from head to toe. The megacorp has made a hobby of shuttering studios and laying off thousands of devs, in attempt after attempt to right the listing ship of its games business. No luck yet, on that front.

You might wonder how Playground's upcoming Fable reboot, in the works for a decade now, has evaded its parent company's reign of terror. In a chat with The Guardian, Playground co-founder and Fable director Ralph Fulton offered up a pretty simple explanation: Fable's just that important.

"I genuinely think Fable is an important game," said Fulton. "What has protected us over a long development cycle is that so many people within Xbox view Fable as vital to the DNA of the platform." That is to say, Fable is a potent Xbox brand, like Halo or Gears of War, and that's protected it from the chop.

It fits the pattern of Microsoft's studio closures. Though the end of studios like Arkane Austin (rest in peace), Tango Gameworks (before it was picked up by Krafton) and others felt brutal, they didn't strike at the heart of that amorphous thing you might call the Xbox brand. It did not claim the life of any character you might see plastered on a banner or standee at a Microsoft Gamescom booth.

Honestly? I might not have instinctually put Fable in that bracket, but I can see why you might, and in that light I can believe that Xbox execs would be timid about hurting it. Fulton, mind you, doesn't just think Fable's importance starts and stops at Xbox: "I would go a step further and say it’s important to video games as a whole. It offers a combination of elements that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else." Ironically, I suspect that wider importance matters less to games industry execs.

It's that time of year again, folks. The PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct is nearly upon us. We sent a crew out to Japan to film exciting moments from the show floor, and we'll be giving you more information on over 30 games. We'll have world premieres, shadowdrops, DLC, release dates, and more.

This year's show will be hosted by the fantastic Frankie Ward, an award-winning presenter, frequent PC Gaming Show host, and all-round esports legend. You'll also see our wonderful senior editor Wesley Fenlon delivering vox pop interviews straight from the event itself.

Here's how to watch it live, so you can be among the first to see everything we're showing off for you.

How to watch the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct 2026

The PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct 2026 airs Sunday, September 20, 2026 at 9 am PT, 12 noon ET, 5 pm BST, and 1 am JST—this will technically air Monday, September 21 if you're watching from Japan.

You've got your pick of the litter when it comes to where you watch. The show will be airing on YouTube, Twitch, X, GamesRadar+, Steam, Bilibili, eCLUTCH, Ginx.tv, ESR Network, and Kuaishou.

Grab your snacks and a drink, because the show will be around 90 minutes long and feature games from Arcane Ermine, Caldera Interactive, Chorus Worldwide, City From Naught, Clear River Games, Devolver Digital, Firefly Studios, Fireshine Games, HABBY.FUN, KO_OP, Loftia, Megabit, New Tales, Skystone Games, The Game Bakers, Total Mayhem Games, Veewo Games, and WuselFaktory.

We've got more than 10 world premieres, a new trailer for Let's Build a Dungeon by Springloaded, the exclusive release date reveal of Virtue and a Sledgehammer from Devolver Digital, a new trailer for RTS Stronghold 4 from Firefly Studios, and a deep dive into Tenebris Somnia, the retro survival horror adventure with live action cutscenes from New Blood Interactive. You can check out all of the games on our Steam page.

There will also be some great streamers watching along, so you can join them and enjoy the show with a group. If you're interested in co-streaming the show yourself, just fill out this form.

World of Warcraft: Forever's an interesting pitch—instead of no changes, it's an all-changes version of vanilla WoW. Updated talent trees, new quests, essentially an envisioning of the OG game where, save for the new sky elves, all of the fresh additions are horizontal. New dungeons and raids all packaged within that original level 60 cap in good ol' Azeroth.

But given Blizzard just did Season of Discovery, at least one question was brewing in my mind—would the developer add some of the wilder class designs, like healing mages and shaman tanks, as optional skill trees or playstyles?

Sadly not, says senior game designer Josh Greenfield in a recent GameSpot interview: "[Season of Discovery] was always meant to be ephemeral, and it allowed us to take some risks that we probably wouldn't really take in a 'forever' game. A lot of the changes, I think, in spirit—a lot of the lessons we learned—are carried over. But some of the more out there things that weren't originally in original WoW, we toned them back a little bit."

I already had a feeling, given a lot of the preemptively put together talent calculators—but these were assembled from a beta version of the game, gathered together in snippets at Blizzcon. By no means were its prophesied talents final. However, what I did see had me leaning in the way of playing it safe.

Aside from a few very cool additions and redesigned specs, a lot of the changes were simply bringing class design elements from modern WoW back into its vanilla age. Take combat rogues, for instance, which enjoy an equivalent of the outlaw rogue's central trick, lowering all of their cooldowns by a few seconds when they use a finishing more.

That's not to say that there's no experimentation in Forever's future, mind. Greenfield continues: "It's one of those things—it's in the name, it's forever, we can do a lot of things over years, but we wanted to start from a place where the soul of the class is very coded and original WoW-centric.

"But there's still meaningful changes and really exciting ways to play your class … But some of the Warlock tank, Shaman tank, not quite yet? But never say never, y'know." It's a bit of a shame, given Forever is sort of meant to be Blizzard's replacement for a WoW 2, but I can at least understand why the studio's starting off a little less experimental than it could've. And that's not to say the boat isn't being rocked at all.

The Witcher 3 is getting an expansion, Songs of the Past, over a decade after its release—along with a pretty hefty remaster. And you might think hey, how is CD Projekt Red working on all of this and The Witcher 4 at the same time? The answer, like many studios, is that it's not doing it alone.

The studio's partnering up with Fool's Theory, a studio led by former CDPR folks, in a sort of cousinly collaboration. When speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens, Jakub Kutrzuba, an executive producer at CDPR, was asked if it was at all intimidating or scary to share The Witcher 3 with outside studios:

"Yes, yes it is, because we care very much about what we are doing here. Using this analogy of a baby? This is very correct. As a parent, I also think twice about leaving my baby with someone. But I know that there are people over there who are not me, who take the best care ever of them, and I think this is the case here. "

It helps that, as mentioned, Fool's Theory has former CDPR developers on its leadership (the studio was founded by Jakub Rokosz, a senior quest designer at the company). Kutrzuba says: "the fact that we have a really long history with many people from Fool's Theory … that helped a lot, because it's not like we needed to really understand the mindset and philosophy, make sure that we operate on the same level and we have the same aspirations.

"That was [already] clear, so that helped a lot. But it's never easy. Especially when we are thinking about collaborating on something where there is a lot of creative work, we are looking at these studios and the talent from the perspective of the narration. It's not an easy thing to tell a good story … but we would say this is what we want, right?"

In terms of searching for future partners for more projects—which'll be a necessity if they continue to broaden their scope—Kutrzuba says it's all a matter of making sure they've all got some basic assumptions down:

"There are studios over there like us who care about players, who care about what they are doing. It's not just a business for them. They want to do art. We want to do art, yeah? We consider games as art, and not everyone [does] over there.

"We know that having someone who operates in the same mindset is very helpful, because it helps us to be on the same page quicker. So we are also looking for some familiarity here and there, but I think that final part—and this can be maybe even the most important part—is the common understanding of quality.

"Because usually we are aiming very high, and it's so much easier to work with someone when you know that we have the same understanding of some abstract common words like what quality is, what high quality is, what CDPR quality is, what is a good story."

That understanding of story and art really is the main pillar, Kutrzuba insists: "If you don't have that, if you have a different understanding of the same terms, it creates a lot of tension during the development. So we are trying to make sure that before we start, we are partnering with people who understand these basic terms the same way as us."

The great AI debate has heated up in recent weeks, amid calls from some industry figures for a slowdown in development—although others, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, seem keen to dismiss many of those calls as simple doomsaying.

Now, former US president Barack Obama has posted his thoughts on X regarding the issue, and it's something of a balanced take.

"I was encouraged this week to see the leaders of the frontier labs agree on the need for them to slow down the pace of AI development. Given the stakes, it’s a good and necessary first step," said the former US commander in chief. "But I’m even more encouraged by the growing recognition that how this powerful new technology develops should be at the center of our public debate."

While the former president said that it's clear to him "the potential impact of this technology is not overhyped," he also recognised that the industry is moving "at lightning speed—even faster than those who are engineering it can keep up with."

"I’m not an AI accelerationist who believes it will lead to some techno-utopia, and I’m not a doomer who thinks it will inevitably lead to humanity’s destruction," Obama continued. "But whether this technology results in amazing breakthroughs in medicine, energy and education or unleashes huge economic disruptions, greater inequality, and potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now—choices that should be made not just by the companies involved, but by all of us."

The former president then highlighted Project Blueprint, an effort to link US Democratic politicians with industry leaders to create more robust standards for AI regulation. However, it seems Obama isn't too keen on the idea of AI industry luminaries marking their own homework.

"At the end of the day, voluntary standards made by a handful of tech companies won’t be enough," he continued. "We need government—and specifically our leaders in Washington—to get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread."

Obama's comments follow on from those made earlier this year by Democratic senator Bernie Sanders, who called for a moratorium on data centers and the creation of more government AI regulation in a previous address. Sanders has since proposed the Artificial Superintelligence Ban Act, with potential prison sentences for those who violate its clauses.

Obama, however, seems to be inclined towards a more cautious approach. "Given what we know about technology, we can’t stuff AI back in a box," the former US leader concludes. "But we can collectively determine how it's developed and how it’s used, rather than sitting back and letting AI and its fallout happen to us."

Given the public backlash surrounding AI data centers, and the many concerns around the rampant US development of the tech underneath an extremely pro-AI Republican president, it's perhaps no surprise that public figures from the opposite side of the house are jumping on the moment.

That being said, after the reveals over the past few months regarding AI agents going rogue—and amid increasing concern that the artificially intelligent train we're all strapped to has little in the way of brakes—it's refreshing to see the issue of control making its way to the front of the debate. Yes we can? Perhaps not. But we can try, right?

When I got to play a sliver of Company of Heroes 3's dynamic Italian campaign for the first time, it was hard not to be impressed. The team had taken all the best parts of Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault, expanded it, and then added all sorts of novel new ideas. It felt like I was playing Total War: World War 2.

A year later, once I'd been given unfettered access to the campaign for my review, I was less impressed. Player feedback had inspired Relic to remove one of the new features I dug the most—controllable detatchments—but there was a larger, more fundamental problem: the dynamic campaign wasn't dynamic. The fascists largely sat back and let me liberate Italy.

The RTS battles remained incredible, and the second more traditional campaign was excellent, leading to me giving it a score of 82% in my Company of Heroes 3 review, calling it a "failed experiment but a great game". Broadly, though, the player reception was not great, and user reviews on Steam continue to sit at Mixed.

"We set out to build the biggest Company of Heroes game ever," Relic CEO Justin Dowdeswell tells us. "More factions at launch. Two full campaigns playable at launch. I think it was an ambitious goal we set, and that showed up in some of the issues of launch around the level of polish and some of the bugs that the players were encountering. We didn't quite land it."

The Italian campaign was conceived early in the game's development, but actually getting it to work was a "stumbling block" that never quite got resolved, Dowdeswell says. "Yeah, we bit off more than we could chew. The idea was great. The spirit of it was good. The team was energised. It was just more than we could get done in time. And it wasn't nearly as polished as it needed to be at launch."

Relic thought, or at least hoped, that everything would fall into place eventually. "For so many of us in the industry, things come together kind of late in the project," Dowdeswell says. "So when it's not there and you still have time, there's this belief: well, we'll get there, we always do. And this one, we didn't."

When that didn't happen, Relic had to deal with the fallout. "It's disappointing for sure," Dowdeswell says. "It's so much work. A big team spent years and years making that game, and to see it not land well with players, it hurts.

"Obviously we spent serious amounts of time in postmortem discussions: where did we go wrong? What can we do to fix it? And just taking the time to be really thoughtful about what the top issues were that we needed to address, and when we could get them addressed by. So that was really the focus. I think we got over the initial shock quickly, and then it was just heads down. Let's work on these problems and find ways to turn it around, basically, knowing we want to do that quickly."

But was there a way this could have been avoided? At the time, Relic thought it was doing things right: bringing in content creators, modders, competitive players and other members of the community to chat to the studio and, eventually, play the game during development.

"So I think that was good," Dowdeswell says. "But by the time we got to the place where we actually were ready to start sharing software, some of those decisions were so far back that it was too late to reverse them or change them, and it was also too late to really course correct by the time we knew the game had to come out."

This was all years ago, but to Relic's credit it hasn't given up on Company of Heroes 3. On its second anniversary, Company of Heroes 3 2.0 arrived with lots of free improvements and additions, on top of premium DLC. And earlier this year Relic launched Final Stand, a standalone wave-based roguelite. Unfortunately, like the base game, it's sitting at Mixed on Steam. Later this year, we're also getting the 3.0 update, which will include additions to both games.

Perhaps more exciting is the prospect of the original Company of Heroes returning in the form of a remaster, Company of Heroes: Definitive Edition, with enhanced textures and lighting, quality-of-life improvements and a 64-bit upgrade. It's due in 2027.

Following its split with Sega, Relic is now independent, but it remains dedicated to Company of Heroes. And while the latest iteration may have not quite panned out, I remain convinced that nobody does WW2 RTS battles quite like this lot.

It's no secret that the US administration, under President Trump, has been keen to get foreign chip manufacturing migrated closer to home. There are also benefits for Taiwanese and Korean chipmakers manufacturing in the US; of course, the least of which is avoiding the threat of tariffs. And now it seems SK hynix could be considering joining the likes of Samsung and TSMC by setting up shop to make chips on US soil.

Specifically, this could be thanks to talks with Intel, Reuters says, according to "three people familiar with the discussions." This would either mean leasing some of Intel's planned Ohio fab or forming a joint venture with the company and cloud firms.

This latter option is one that analyst Jukan reckons is the more important detail here: "Not many people are paying attention, but what matters in the Hynix and Intel news is that Hynix and Intel could form a JV with hyperscalers hungry for memory supply. That's more important than the Hynix and Intel news itself."

If it did come in the form of a joint venture, it could bode well for both Intel and SK, as there would be shared risk and an entire shared infrastructure.

It's not the first we've heard of this, as only a couple of weeks ago there were reports that SK could be considering using Intel Foundry to produce its base dies. Now there's just a lot more credence to these rumours, even if they are indeed still just rumours. It's also worth noting that SK hynix already has some production set up in the US, but that's just for packaging, not actual wafer production, and it only recently broke ground. The potential Intel-SK deal the latest rumours refer to would be for making actual chips.

As Reuters notes, Intel hasn't had the easiest time of it over the past couple of years, so any kind of deal could relieve some pressure on the chip giant. The company, remember, was struggling to the extent that it gave the US government a 10% stake last year.

Saying that, the company has been seeing the tides turn over the past few months and has been keen to highlight that positivity in its earnings reports. And after news of this possible Intel-SK deal seeped out, its share price has jumped up—though not to anything more than a small spike compared to the entire past 6-month period. The same goes for SK hynix.

There could also be pressure against SK starting manufacturing in the US, as Seoul is unlikely to want the company to move in that direction. Though if SK hynix does use Intel fabs for its production, it won't have to invest a ton of physical capital into it, which might stave off concerns about moving too far away from Korea for its production.