Even though we still haven't seen a gameplay trailer, Grand Theft Auto 6's pre-release sales have been "unprecedented," according to publisher Take-Two. So why doesn't the public company just tell us specifically how many GTA 6 preorders it's sold?

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier recently posed that question to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who said that the volume of GTA 6 preorders is so unprecedented that they "can't tell whether they mean anything."

Specifically, Take-Two is unsure whether the preorder count can be used to accurately estimate GTA 6's total launch sales based on established wisdom, or if it's such an outlier that established wisdom doesn't apply, and people who'd normally wait to buy the game after launch are opting to preorder.

"The massive demand for preorders we've seen to date could reflect a pull forward of sales that otherwise would materialize in the fullness of time," Zelnick said.

Because they "simply don't know the demand curve because it's just never happened before," the CEO says that "the raw numbers could potentially be misleading," and as such Take-Two is keeping them to itself for now. (Though it is clearly happy to indicate that GTA 6 is already an extraordinary success.)

The next big moment for GTA 6 is a proper gameplay reveal, which will debut exclusively on Netflix on August 27, and then on Rockstar's public YouTube channel six hours later.

Regarding that controversial deal (I don't think it shows much respect for GTA fans myself), Zelnick told Bloomberg only that "there's reasoning" behind it and we'll "understand more" once we watch it.

All this talk of GTA 6 preorders is purely academic for the PC-only crowd, as there's still no PC release date for the game. The console-only launch is frustrating for PC gamers however you slice it, but it's made extra irritating by today's inflated console prices: The PlayStation 5 Pro currently goes for $900.

Crimson Desert, while often a chaotic, systems-drowned game—is also rather good, if you're into chaotic and messy things. Its brand of delightfully irreverent overstimulation charmed my pants off when I went to see it pre-release, and it's certainly captured the hearts of a few of us here at PC Gamer.

It's also raked in the big bucks for developer Pearl Abyss, whose recent earnings letter puts in perspective just how much of a win it was for the studio: "Crimson Desert sold approximately 2.11 million copies during 2Q26, with digital sales accounting for 1.72 million copies (82%) and physical sales accounting for 0.39 million copies (18%)."

Those sold copies produced an operating revenue of ₩406.2 billion, or around $284.5 million, in the first and second quarters of 2026—none too shabby for under a year's worth of sales! Interestingly enough, North America and Europe are the two main drivers. This number includes revenue from Black Desert Online, the studio's MMO, but those regions apparently accounted for over 75% of the profit.

Mind, there's a law of large numbers going on here. North America and the EU have an estimated 1+ billion people combined, whereas South Korea has around 51 million people in it—Crimson Desert is still very much popular on Pearl Abyss' home turf, it's just the population of Korea is outnumbered nearly 20:1 when compared to the NA+EU market blob.

Anyway, if you're one of the people who made up that number, you've got some DLC to look forward to, as the letter reads: "Crimson Desert is preparing key initiatives, including DLC, strategic pricing, and platform expansion, to ensure long-term success … The DLC is currently under development scheduled for release this year while we refine its content direction and overall quality. Specific details regarding pricing, content composition, and launch timing will be officially announced in 3Q26."

Looking it up, South Korea's fiscal year starts on the calendar year—with the third quarter having already begun, but lasting until the end of September. That means that, at latest (assuming these plans bare out) we've still got a month and a half to wait for details.

But that's still honestly sooner than I expected, especially given the rapid pace of updates that Pearl Abyss has been pouring into this thing. We're talking birdwatching, we're talking economy overhauls. 20 news types of small animal? Sure. New mounts? Here you go, sweetie. What's that, you're all full? Are you sure you don't have room for a wyvern? Here comes the aeroplane, open up, yum yum!

It's a blistering speed of new additions to an already systems-bloated game, but hey—anyone who's still tucking into Kliff's wild adventure probably doesn't mind having seconds, thirds, and fourth servings.

It's always heartbreaking when fan projects get axed—but one sorrow from last year was Bionicle: Masks of Power, which was shut down by Lego after it had peacefully co-existed with it for eight whole years. The project, a fully-fledged third-person action game by Team Kanohi, had attempted to thread the needle by playing nice with Lego's rules on fan-made media.

Unfortunately, eight years is a long time—and as Kanohi said back then, "the Lego Group's stance on fan-created media has changed." It was some genuinely impressive work, and you can see a full two-hour gameplay walkthrough of what could have been below.

But there's still hope for that original vision. Team Kanohi has rebranded to the appropriately-titled "Unmasked Games", a studio that's working on something called Rustbound.

As the site reads: "Rustbound is an upcoming third person action-adventure game from Unmasked Games set in an entirely original world," in other words, it's likely that Unmasked Games has hit its eight years of prior work with the legally-distinctification beam, a feat that's likely taking a ton of work to pull off—but will at least preserve the skeleton of what was there before.

And you know what? Good for them! While my Bionicle-loving inner child is a little sad I'm not getting a modern version of the third-person action games I spent my younger years wrestling with (I was eight, and thus not yet come into my true gamer power), my inner adult is more excited to see what Unmasked Games can cook up on their own.

I'll even go one step further and say that the current aesthetic from the teaser is more interesting, anyway—the core of Bionicle is still there, in the blending of mysticism with technological aesthetics, and the as-yet-unnamed protagonist's new design is pleasantly reminiscent of the designs from the Bionicle movie. In a legally distinct way, of course.

Back at June's PlayStation State of Play stream, my most-anticipated action game of the year popped up with a short teaser trailer starring a mysterious masked man fighting with a sword in one hand and a baby in the other. In a much, much longer trailer today coinciding with pre-orders going live, Phantom Blade Zero revealed who was behind the mask: Donnie "Ip Man" Yen.

Call this Phantom Blade Zero's Keanu moment—except Yen is doing more than lending his face and voice to the supporting role of Mó Yuan, protagonist Soul's father. That'd be stolen valor in a kung fu game, considering Donnie Yen is an action star not just in his native Hong Kong, but internationally, thanks to roles in Rogue One and John Wick 4. He has some all-timer Chinese action classics to his name, including Hero, Iron Monkey, and Once Upon a Time in China 2, and since 2008 he's starred in multiple films as the man who taught Bruce Lee kung fu, grandmaster Ip Man.

Developer S-Game announced with today's trailer that Yen has been involved as a "creative consultant" for PBZ's kung fu choreography since 2023. That means the studio's managed to keep his role under wraps since the game was first announced. I imagine the commenters over on Bilibili are going apeshit right now.

"Huge thanks to Donnie and his stunt team for bringing authentic kung fu to the game," the trailer's description reads."

If you were conspiracy-minded and paid really close attention to detail, you may have been able to see this reveal coming. Back in 2023, S-Game founder Soulframe Liang wrote a post on the PlayStation Blog naming Kenji Tanigaki as the game's "action director." Tanigaki has been a member of Yen's stunt team for some 30 years, collaborating with him on at least a dozen projects. Looks like we can now add one more to the list.

Phantom Blade Zero was scheduled to release just a month from now, but was recently delayed until October 29 for extra polish. Donnie Yen's star power, at least for the Chinese audience, is probably yet another reason Soulframe isn't worried about competition from GTA 6. A PlayStation State of Play stream diving deeper into the game is planned for next week, on August 17.

Pre-orders are live now on Steam, with a few goodies in tow.

16 years ago, we used a trailer for the then-upcoming action RPG Lord of the Rings: War in the North to drop a sick burn on people who maybe take their Tolkien a little too seriously. The game launched a year later, in 2011, to middling reviews and disappointing sales, and there it sat until the delisting process began in late 2018; SteamDB indicates it got the axe on Steam the following February.

But now it's back, which you already knew because you read the headline, in a Legacy Edition version, with enhancements including hot-swappable characters, refined enemy-target locking, an improved interface, new autosave feature, and numerous bug fixes.

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North - Legacy Edition follows the "untold story" of Agandaûr, a servant of Sauron who's raised a powerful army in the ruins of Fornost. Naturally, it falls to you to deal with it while that other Fellowship is horsing around on Mount Doom: "Build your own Fellowship of three heroes and confront the growing threat in the North, making your mark on Middle-earth in a grand adventure with visceral, satisfying combat and rich character progression."

It was never entirely clear why the original Lord of the Rings: War in the North was delisted, but the reasonable assumption—as always—is that expiring licenses had something to do with it.

That could also explain the comeback: It's complicated and I can't promise it makes sense, but Aspyr, the developer of the Legacy Edition, is owned by Embracer, which also owns Middle-earth Enterprises, and through that a whole bunch of Lord of the Rings stuff. So basically, it's all Embracer, so they can do what they want.

Embracer recently announced a plan to spin off Middle-earth Enterprises and a bunch of other stuff it owns into a standalone company called Fellowship Entertainment, but you probably won't see a lot of light between them: Once the spinoff is complete, just about all of Embracer's C-suite—CEO Phil Rogers, COO Lee Guinchard, and CFO Müge Bouillon—will move to take the same roles at the new company.

As you might expect, given that it's all Embracer, there's more of this to come: "Fans can look forward to even more classic releases by Aspyr from the beloved franchise in the future!" the studio said.

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North - Legacy Edition is live now on Steam and currently 10% off its regular $20 price.

Grand Theft Auto 6's potential price-point was a thing of much consternation in the lead-up to its reveal. Months of rumours—and even the Bank of America getting involved in the discourse, because why not—led to the question: Are they really gonna charge $100 for this thing?

You're reading this article because they didn't, but you're also reading this article because they sort of did. See, GTA 6 has both an $80 version and a $100 version, the latter of which hides some potentially major parts of its identity behind the upgrade, including a handful of stores that may very well remind you that you've not shelled out every time you go near them.

There's this itchy capitalist feeling that Rockstar probably did actually want to charge a hundo for the thing, but didn't, because that'd have gamers up in arms—as it turns out, that might've been the smart play. In a recent interview with CNBC, Take-Two interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick says:

"It's skewing more to the premium edition, but that might be a reflection of the fact that the most avid consumers are the ones that are pre-ordering now," Zelnick says, before adding that they're unlikely to lower the game's price point themselves, even if retailers might want to reduce their own margin to draw in customers:

"We preserved our pricing on Grand Theft Auto 5 for a very long time—much longer than a standard release of an entertainment property."

Now sure—as Zelnick says, this is a case of sample size. I'd be very surprised if, writ large, most people had $100 in their pocket to shell out for a video game, even one as glitzy and prestigious as GTA 6. I reckon he's on the money (pun intended) about more excited gamers being more likely to both pre-order and spend the extra dough.

But it very much feels like GTA 6 is, in combination with the content locked off behind that paywall, basically $100. And if what Zelnick says is true—that those sales are split down the middle with a lean towards $100—then Take-Two has effectively gotten away with charging $90 for the game's pre-order when every last bead on the abacus is set into place.

And man, my feelings are mixed. Yes, $100 is a lot of money to spend on an entertainment product in the, uh, interesting financial times we live in. But there is the elephant in the room that the production of big-budget games like GTA 6 has absolutely outstripped inflation. Would I pay $100 for a videogame? No, even on principle. But given it took literal, actual billions to make, $100 is technically low-balling it.

You have to wonder if GTA 6 might even be part of an endangered species, now. Sure, we'll get other Grand Theft Auto games assuming we're all still around in 10+ years, but can an industry that's so hungry to chase quarterly results at the exchange of all else sustain anything else of that game's scale and budget? Probably not, but hey—maybe things'll get healthier and less layoff-happy in a decade. One can hope.

August 6th, 2026 was the 40th anniversary of Metroid, one of the few videogames in history to be so influential it has a whole genre named (at least partially) after it. You'd be forgiven for not realizing last Thursday was such a significant date because Nintendo seemingly forgot itself—and not for the first time.

But the anniversary didn't go completely uncelebrated. Posted to the Metroid subreddit last Thursday, a new fan game called Metroid Prime Origins marked the occasion with a "a fully complete adaptation of Metroid Prime for the GameCube in 2D, complimented by a fake-bit aesthetic." I've played the first hour or so, and it's an extremely polished, great-feeling Metroid game that could pass as the real deal if Nintendo ever actually made throwbacks this cool.

That "fake-bit aesthetic" means Metroid Prime Origins is stylistically reminiscent of the original, 8-bit NES game, but significantly more detailed. It's not holding itself to the harsh color palette or memory constraints of that console, but still deliberately a bit more "retro" than Super Metroid. For a moment I found that disappointing—Super Metroid is still a fantastic looking game—but the more I reflected on it, the more I was glad to see this fan team go for their own distinct look. Considering many fan games either reuse official art assets or craft their own to look nigh identical, Metroid Prime Origins feels like a cut above from the start.

It plays really well, too. Samus can smoothly grapple over ledges, and on a controller free aim is mapped to left bumper and aim lock is mapped to right bumper, making it quite easy to hit enemies without awkwardly repositioning yourself. Metroid Prime's scan visor, used in puzzle solving and to deliver lore about every little thing in the 3D game, is nicely recreated here: you just tap a trigger to scan creatures, which are added to a bestiary, while less frequent lore scan spots fill in a log with more detailed entries.

It's been so long since I played Metroid Prime that I can't say in too much detail how closely Prime Origins hews to its design. The novelty of Metroid Prime way back in 2002 was in how it translated the series' traditionally more limited navigational puzzles and interconnected rooms into more complex 3D, so this process of working backwards does make Prime Origins feel quite traditional and familiar. But considering how few actual 2D Metroid games Nintendo has made in the last 20 years, a good one of those is probably happy news for a lot of people.

It's seemingly not happy news for Nintendo, though, as Prime Origins' trailer was removed from YouTube within hours of launch, and so was an Archive.org download link for the game itself. It's currently still available for download via Google Drive, though for how long it's hard to say.

"This game was made with no generative AI. All sprites and music were created by fans, and all of the in-game lore has been re-written; based on the original NTSC lore," lead developer Lv.4 Games wrote on Reddit. "P.S. I know I am now a target of the Nintendo ninjas, no need to tell me."

Lv.4 Games also posted on Reddit that they received no takedown notice from Nintendo; the trailer's former YouTube page states it was "removed for violating YouTube's Terms of Service."

It's impressive that the developers managed to develop the entire game in stealth and release it without getting shut down like so many Nintendo fan games in the past. That was clearly a calculated move.

"I couldn't talk about it for the last three years," sprite artist Zevroid posted on Reddit. "It's a great mark of pride to have been a part of this project! Hopefully as many people as possible get to play it before Nintendo flips out."

It's hard to stress just how polished Metroid Prime Origins is, despite being an unofficial release. The generous options menu includes autosave, hints, damage scaling and damage numbers, and a neat setting that lists the name of each room when you enter it; you can also toggle controller vibration and mouse aiming on or off, so Metroid Prime Origins is playable even if you don't have a controller.

The demake is currently only available on Windows, but that may change at some point. Lv.4 Games previously worked on another well-received fan game, Castlevania ReVamped, which was later made open source and released for both Windows and Linux.

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

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

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

Witchful thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spell it out

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

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

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

No Man's Sky has changed an awful lot in the 10 years since its launch. Hello Games' space sandbox has received a few dozen major free updates that have added features like base-building, spaceship construction, multiplayer missions, companions, mechs, and even its own version of the Death Star.

Speaking to PC Gamer for No Man's Sky's 10th anniversary, Sean Murray said that despite all those massive changes and added features that have transformed the space sandbox… he still likes the 2016 version of No Man's Sky just fine.

"I've gone back to the original, played the game without any updates," Murray said. "And I've got a real soft spot for it, to be honest. It's a more esoteric experience. It's a little bit weirder, but it's got its charm."

"The feeling that I have when I play it is, I'm alone and I'm on a planet and I don't know what's over the hill," Murray said. "And I really love that feeling."

Which isn't to say the updated No Man's Sky, even with its busy community events and multiplayer hubs, can't feel that way too.

"I still get that feeling when I play No Man's Sky now," he said. "That is still in there, and is still the heart of the game. But personally, I love that I can do so many other things in the game now. I do really love base building, and I've really, really enjoyed—we added custom ships last year, and I lost myself in that. It's a real dream for me to have that in the game. I'm a sci-fi nerd, so I love making ships."

Even though the updated game is quite a departure from his original vision of No Man's Sky, Murray still sees restless exploration of a massive galaxy as the core of the experience.

"I'm happy that we support all of those things, and I'm happy that there's loads of other ways to play the game, but the heart is still the same for me," he said. "The real driver, that's still there, and that experience can be had when I start a new save, which I often do. It's still there. I still have that feeling."

Lies of P studio Nough, formerly Round8, has released a 16-minute mini documentary about its culture and work on the Lies of P series, including development anecdotes and talk of the developers' ambitions for Lies of P's in-production sequel.

But first, the name change: According to the video description, Nough is "upholding the development philosophy of Round8 Studio and operating under the motto 'Games by Gamers.'"

It's not entirely clear to me whether Nough is a full rebrand of Round8, or rather spun off from the original company, itself a subsidiary of publisher Neowiz. The end result is the same as far as we're concerned, I think: The people who made Lies of P are Nough now, a portmanteau of "Not Enough." Neat.

The studio is still tight lipped about the Lies of P sequel, which we know is in full production, but has yet to get a formal reveal or even name. The Nough devs were very open about their ambitions to make a bigger, better game, though.

"From the very start, my goal has been to create the world's greatest action game," said combat director Lee Jeonghyeon. "And we're getting there, one step at a time."

Overall director Choi Jiwon said that the team wants to match the passion they brought to Lies of P, and make a game they'd like to play. "The players can always tell," Choi said. "As a gamer myself, I know they can tell when a game has been made with real dedication."

Choi concluded the video by calling on fans to trust the process. "We're giving everything we have to make it the best it can be," said Choi. "So please wait just a little bit longer. We won't let you down. I promise."

A big portion of the video's runtime was dedicated to the unique way Nough tested Lies of P and Overture, and continues to test the unnamed sequel. Choi streams a playtest of the game to the company at major milestones, showing how it's coming together.

More periodically, Nough has a "Game Day" where the entire studio puts aside regular work to play as much of the current build as possible, then fills a survey about the experience. According to the documentary, this feedback resulted in Lies of P's difficulty modes, as well as major cuts and a story shift on Overture.

This approach seems to be working out. While PCG news writer Lincoln Carpenter liked but didn't love Lies of P in his 74% review, I've heard nothing but good things about the Overture expansion. News writer Harvey Randall is putting his faith in Lies of P 2 sight unseen based on the strength of Overture.

Devora Wilde has been in loads of videogames. While she's most famous for playing Lae'zel, everyone's hot gith girlfriend in Baldur's Gate 3, she's also been in games like Solasta 2, Clair Obscur, Crimson Desert, Split Fiction, and Red Solstice 2. She's in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 as well—not that she knew about it at the time.

"I started getting comments when the game came out, 'Oh, you're in Space Marine 2!' I was like, 'No, I'm not. What is that?'" Wilde said in an interview with IGN. It was only after someone on Twitter sent her a clip of the performance that she realized it was true. "I had to go through like all my stuff, all my emails, try and match up the codename of the game with the actual game. And then in the end I realized I was in that game."

It's common for actors not to be told the name of games they're working on until the last minute, if at all, for fear of leaks. When Wilde auditioned for a role in Silent Hill 2, in which she ended up performing mocap and stunts, she only twigged what game it was after thinking some of the dialogue sounded familiar then looking it up online.

Wilde played multiple roles in Space Marine 2, including a servo-skull and a Cadian soldier whose messages you find. It was a recording of the latter that convinced her she really was in Space Marine 2. "'I was like, 'Oh, that's me. I'm an audio log.'"

Wilde has been in several Warhammer games and animations. She plays Tzarina Katarin Bokha in Total War: Warhammer 3, provides the Authoritarian voice option for the female Arbitrator in Darktide, and she was one of the Sisters of Battle in the Adepta Sororitas animation Penitence on Warhammer TV. "It just so happens that I've done a lot of Warhammer stuff," Wilde said, "and I never realized how vast the universe is, genuinely."

It's well-known that the PC ports of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas were a shemozzle, thanks in part to re-used code across the trio of games, but also a general lack of care that used to be the norm when it came to PC ports. The excellent SilentPatch has long been the solution, and it's now even better thanks to a significant update that not only fixes leftover bugs, but also restores cut content that was inaccessible thanks to typos in the code.

One big change you'll notice with this version of the patch is that 100 voice lines have been restored to GTA San Andreas. Some of these were only bugged in a specific circumstance—like the lines CJ says when shooting at people, which only worked if you played with a controller. Those lines will now trigger when you pull the trigger when aiming with mouse and keyboard.

A lot of other dialogue that would otherwise never be heard has been restored too. Pedestrians will now have conversations about the weather, criminals have lines specifically for running away, CJ has unique lines for taking over specific neighborhoods and more lines when interacting with sex workers, there are more gang taunts, cops now announce when they have you surrounded or need covering fire, there's a grunt specific to being sprayed with paint, and more shopkeepers have lines for when they're being held up. According to the patch notes, "Most notably, the Ammu-Nation vendor had over fifteen voice lines for this event, all previously unused!"

That's the tip of the iceberg when it comes to improvements across all three games. Lens flares and heat haze now scale with resolution, NPCs can use sniper rifles and RPGs properly, cops no longer shoot gangsta-style, birds spawn correctly, roadblocks face the right way, and you can put a boat in your garage without crashing the game.

Extremely specific bugs, like the one that turned the sky over San Andreas red at 8 pm if it was raining, have finally been squashed, as well as the one that caused an explosion in Fort Carson by incorrectly spawning a plane in someone's driveway. GTA 3's street gangsters now walk in formation instead of meandering around and then freezing, fixing a problem that affected even the PS2 version.

The list goes on. SilentPatch was already essential to fix more blatant issues like broken mouselook, but now it's even better. If you're in the mood for a replay, here are the setup instructions for all three games.

When I open up a trailer for a parkour game, I expect breakbeats or bassy electronica. You know, something radical—Vholume zigs where other games zag, scoring its run 'em up action with dejected, atmospheric synths punctuated by lonely footsteps and effortful grunts. A self-billed "melancholic first-person parkour adventure," it looks like the moody stepchild of Mirror's Edge.

A new trailer for the game dropped last month and revealed it comes out Aug. 21. It provides a sneak peek at the game's overgrown, brutalist jungle gyms and shows off Vholume's multiplayer. According to its Steam page, you can race your buds in real time or compete against their ghosts. It seems ambitious given that just three people are credited as developers on Steam, one of whom you may recognize as one of the Lemaitre Bros. behind Straftat. We called that game 2024's best FPS, and its music is, in fact, radical.

I hear the kids are really into liminality these days, so Vholume's dystopian dream world should appeal to anyone who saw Backrooms and felt like, for the first time in a long time, they were right where they were supposed to be. It also honors the parkour game tradition of being overtly anti-authoritarian, centering a plot where the protagonist has to get "ration tickets" for his family.

A cliche? Maybe, but parkour platforming is kind of the perfect setup for dystopian themes: why bust out of a cage if you're not going to run, jump, and be free? Living in America's contemporary car-centric world, I sometimes long to leap from rooftop to rooftop just so I can be somewhere without filling up on gas. I can't wallrun or strafe jump, though, so videogames will have to do.

And it's a great time for that sort of thing, as there are plenty of other Mirror's Edge-likes on the horizon. If Vholume has piqued your interest, you can try a demo out on its Steam page.

Tencent's ambitious attempt to build a rival to Grand Theft Auto appears to be floundering, as Last Sentinel developer Lightspeed LA has laid off 80 people following the publisher's loss of confidence in the project.

If you're not familiar with Last Sentinel, that would be forgivable. The cyberpunk open world has been in development for six years and was announced at The Game Awards in 2023. But doubts began to circulate about the state of the Last Sentinel after a suite of promotional videos published last year failed to show any footage of the game itself.

Now, as reported by Bloomberg, it appears we'll be lucky to see any of Last Sentinel at all. Following multiple delays and at least one partial project reboot, publisher Tencent has opted not to move forward with the project, and as a result Lightspeed Entertainment has laid off dozens of employees.

As Bloomberg details, Last Sentinel appears to have been in trouble for some time. The game was built as a glossy open-world affair set in a vertical city in a cyberpunk Japan, featuring destructible environments alongside the usual GTA-ish mix of driving and shooting.

However, the game was being built by a much smaller team than Rockstar used for its latter-day open worlds, and according to anonymous sources at Lightspeed, that team had to contend with an unclear vision and a "polarizing" approach to management by former Rockstar San Diego studio director Steve Martin.

After a poor playtest and an unimpressive demonstration to Tencent executives earlier this year, Lightspeed apparently scrambled to assemble an improved version of Last Sentinel. But whatever the team put together apparently wasn't enough, and Tencent has washed its hands of the project.

To be clear, Last Sentinel hasn't been cancelled yet. Lightspeed is still working on the project without Tencent's backing. But the studio is planning to "shift the creative and development direction" of the game "to meet player expectations". Given players were set up to expect a cyberpunk open-world rival to Grand Theft Auto, it's hard to see how Lightspeed can square this given the challenges that lie ahead.

Let's be real, come August 27, the Grand Theft Auto 6 "extended look" is not going to be exclusive to Netflix for six hours as advertised. It's going to be exclusive to Netflix for however long it takes for someone to record it and distribute a torrent.

You wouldn't download a car, but would you download an ad for a game about stealing cars?

It would be, I've now had to consider, technically piracy to do so. After all, Netflix probably paid good money for the privilege of being the first to show the world GTA 6 gameplay, although we can only guess, because the financial terms of the deal haven't been disclosed.

Aside from whatever funds exchanged hands, GTA publisher Take-Two's motivation for the deal is to signal that GTA 6 is a cultural event that transcends the gaming scene. And Netflix gets to be associated with that cultural event.

I get Netflix's angle. I don't get Take-Two's, unless the payday was astronomical. Everyone already knows GTA is a big deal, and it's plain disrespectful to GTA fans to turn the gameplay trailer they've been waiting for into a money-making opportunity, especially given that many of them have already pre-ordered the game.

Having to wait six hours to watch a trailer is a relatively minor inconvenience, all things considered, but monetizing a trailer is just tacky. It certainly doesn't reinforce Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's claim that GTA 6 is an "incredible bargain" at $80-$100. It suggests, instead, that we should brace for maximum nickel-and-diming and FOMO exploitation.

I suppose this is how it goes when you don't have to worry about your reputation. There's not much Take-Two and Rockstar could do to hurt GTA 6's sales at this point: They've already sold a zillion pre-orders (or something like that) without any gameplay trailer at all. If there is a line that can't be crossed, it's a couple celestial bodies removed from a tacky gameplay reveal or a new labor scandal.

When the GTA 6 extended look debuts on Netflix on August 27, we'll watch it and report on its contents here, but I imagine a quick scan of social media will allow you to illicitly experience the marketing beat early, if you're the sort of outlaw who dares to watch pirated videogame trailers.

Seasoned FromSoftware investigator Lance McDonald has shared a recently uncovered early internal showcase of Demon's Souls, FromSoft's crucial pivot point between King's Field and Dark Souls, and the progenitor of its own subgenre.

The demonstration consists of a PowerPoint presentation deck and early gameplay trailer. It was shown at "Gameshare 4," an internal Sony event held in May, 2007, almost two years before Demon's Souls' initial release in Japan.

The real highlight is that two minute gameplay showcase, possibly the earliest look we've ever gotten of Demon's Souls in action, with key differences from the final game. First and most striking: There are a few sequences in a first-person camera mode à la King's Field, FromSoft's spiritual predecessor to Souls. It makes for a distinct minority of the footage's runtime, and seems to have been an optional mode you were meant to toggle between.

It also ties into what strikes me as an equally profound, but less immediately grabbing difference: Demon's Souls' early 3D camera was locked behind the player model, which always faced away from the camera⁠—it reminds me of the Jedi Knight games, for a frame of reference.

This would have complimented the first person mode better than the final camera, but it would have also made for a radically different overall experience. The Souls series of today is defined by a camera that can freely rotate around the player and lock onto enemies⁠—it's the bedrock of the games' positioning-based combat.

The demo takes place in an early version of Demon's Souls' tutorial area. The Vanguard Demon is shown in his same arena, practically unchanged compared to the final game⁠—indeed, his moveset and animations have survived all the way to Elden Ring with the Erdtree Avatars.

The Dragon God's arena is open-air in this version, a volcanic crater instead of the magma cavern of the final game. The trailer also features enemies not seen in Demon's Souls' release version: Bipedal snake men resembling the man-serpents of Dark Souls. FromSoft loves revisiting a motif.

There are plenty of interesting nuggets in the PowerPoint as well, read in the video by John Linneman of Digital Foundry. Here's what stood out to me:

• Some striking concept art, including the Flamelurker boss and an open, grassy area with a weird, big hole at the center⁠—the ominous valley and strange rock formations weirdly remind me of the fingerprint ruins from Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.
• FromSoft and Sony clearly felt Demon's Souls' asymmetric multiplayer was its ace in the hole (and/or potentially confusing), and spent a lot of runtime explaining it.
• They presented it as a midpoint between MMOs and pure singleplayer games, joking that it would destroy your life less than the former (complete with a reference to South Park's "Make Love, Not Warcraft").
• A real "Oh, bless their hearts" development roadmap that predicted completion in June, 2008. Demon's Souls launched in Japan in February '09.
• Repeated references to a "worldwide release," underlining the bad feelings that must have resulted over Sony only publishing Demon's Souls in Japan.

Overall, what was at the time an anodyne bit of internal corporate communication is now an invaluable piece of videogame history. Demon's Souls was a crucial transition game that could have just as easily become a fondly-remembered but little-played cult classic.

It almost didn't make it to America and Europe, and there was no guarantee that it would prove one of the most influential games on the coming decade. Now we understand how close it was to being a very different experience.

After letting the speculation machine run wild for months, Take-Two announced in June that Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch with an $80 price tag for the basic, missing-some-stuff edition. That's a lot of money, especially when you consider that most people will feel compelled to lay out the extra $20 for the Ultimate Edition, which promises "an exclusive collection of premium vehicles, weapons, apparel, and action threaded across all aspects of Jason and Lucia’s story." But Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick reckons it's actually a heck of a deal for what you're getting.

Asked about the $80 price point for GTA 6—and the decision to leave NBA 2K27 at $70—during today's investors call, Zelnick repeated a point he's made previously: That Take-Two aims to "deliver way more value to consumers than what we charge them."

"The real cost of a triple-A videogame is a whole lot lower today than it was 20 years ago. Pricing has not kept pace with inflation," Zelnick said. "And our goal is to continue to overdeliver for our consumers because how you feel about any experience is the intersection of the experience itself and what you paid for it.

"To say that we expect that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be an incredible bargain as experiences go is a gross understatement, because Rockstar Games is known for overdelivering."

Not every game is Grand Theft Auto 6, a point made earlier this year by Bank of America securities analyst Omar Dessouky, who warned that if Take-Two didn't increase the GTA 6 price, the industry as a whole would probably be stuck at the $70 price point for years to come. So while GTA 6 will launch at the increased price point, Zelnick said not all Take Two's games will.

"Our goal is not to maximize price," Zelnick said. "So in this case, I think what we’ve decided to do makes a whole lot of sense in the context of what we’re delivering, and that’s the lens through which we’ll look going forward as well."

Grand Theft Auto 6 remains scheduled for release, on consoles, on November 19. We'll get our first look at gameplay on August 27, at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET on Netflix, and then six hours later on YouTube.

Despite a record-breaking launch in February 2025, the sales of Monster Hunter Wilds haven't been stellar since. In its second sales quarter, the newest MonHun—which was widely dinged by fans for optimization issues and creative missteps—stalled severely, and by the time 2025 ended it was getting outsold by earlier entries in the series.

In its latest investor Q&A, however, Capcom said it still has high hopes for Wilds: The company wants to not only improve its sales, but to eventually have Wilds surpass Monster Hunter: World as Capcom's best-selling game of all time.

Capcom told its investors that it's already seen an improvement in Wilds sales following long-awaited performance fixes in early 2026. Additionally, the company claims that it has "seen a response to" the reveal of the upcoming Ascendance expansion and the recent Wilds price drop.

"We plan to continue improving the game’s technical performance as we aim to drive its total unit sales beyond those of Monster Hunter: World over the medium to long term," Capcom said.

It's an ambitious goal, because Wilds will need to cover a wide—and still widening—sales gap to get there. According to its latest quarterly report, Monster Hunter: World has sold over 30 million units since launch, and still managed to sell over 780,000 copies in the last quarter despite being over eight years old.

While Wilds' impressive launch has given it a nice headstart on its total sales figures—as of March 31, 2026, it's sold 11.4 million units—its rate of sales has plummeted so dramatically that, unlike World, it's not even represented on Capcom's best-seller ranking for the last quarter. Even with Wilds in a sound(er) technical state, the eight-year-old World is still seen as the best entry point into the series—it remains the only Monster Hunter on our Top 100 list.

That said, there are factors that could work in Wilds' favor. Its upcoming Switch 2 port could be a big deal for folks who only game with Nintendo, and if Ascendance is anywhere near as good as World's Iceborne and Rise's Sunbreak, it could secure Wilds' long-term reputation like those earlier expansions did for their respective Monster Hunter entries.

Still, a disparity of 19 million sales makes for a pretty big if.

After years of speculation, after reams of fan theories and screenshot analysis, we'll be finally getting a full look at Grand Theft Auto 6 on… hold on, Netflix? Really? Right, okay, sure.

This news comes courtesy of the site itself, which has a preview page that reads: "Coming August 27: See an extended look at Grand Theft Auto 6, the next evolution in the groundbreaking Grand Theft Auto series." It's given the tags of "crime films" and "action adventure films". Which is technically true for a documentary about Grand Theft Auto 6, I guess—but very much not true of the game itself. Because it's a videogame, and not a film.

The first look will nonetheless be debuting, as mentioned above, on August 27 at 3 pm EST/8 pm BST. It'll also be coming to YouTube, but six hours later, meaning Netflix has swung a six-hour exclusivity deal with Rockstar for the purposes of, I assume, getting people to pay for Netflix subscriptions.

And hey, from a business perspective? Bully for Netflix, good for them! This is sure to get at least a little pocket change in the coffers of a subscription service that's grown a little less popular thanks to all the advertisements and, er, AI advertisements.

These kinds of deals will almost certainly work slightly better than Netflix's other attempts to get a slice of the videogame pie, given it took one of its games down after just half a year and closed its AAA development studio in 2024 in order to make AI games with a new head of operations, who, er, exited around four months later.

Basically, offering exclusive streaming options to key-jangle people into paying for a month of Netflix subscription seems like an altogether more sensible proposition than an Amazon-esque hubris, believing you can do videogames just because you do movies and TV good and have a lot of money to throw around.

And, hey—if you're excited about GTA 6, you'll finally get to see it! Yipee! You just might have to take a six-hour nap unless you've got a few bucks in your pocket, or if you happen to already have an active subscription going.

During my world-exclusive hands-on preview of Onimusha: Way of the Sword in Capcom's headquarters in Osaka, Japan, I interviewed the animation director, Hiroshi Yugen, about creating the incredible sword-fighting animations for the game. When the star of the game is the legendary sword master, Miyamoto Musashi, a warrior who won over 60 duels during his lifetime, you're going to want to get these animations right.

"When we get to making action in our games, the first step is always kind of self-study and learning about how to do these things and how to use these things," explains Yugen. "And then we proceed to the stages of design and motion capture. [So I] sat down and spoke with the director, and we [decided we] really wanted to focus on creating this very realistic, grounded sword action for the game, and so from the very beginning, the main goal was first to research the depths of swordplay and how to do that.

"We figured it was best to speak to experts in the field, and so we were introduced to motion capture artists and action stunt coordinators at a studio called Katsugekiza Motion Capture Studio. So we were paired together with an expert who knows about sword fight choreography and has provided that kind of service for a lot of different famous movies and dramas."

But what was the process of shooting the animations for Way of the Sword? I'm shown footage from Capcom's state-of-the-art motion capture studio in Osaka that has over 150 high-tech cameras for tracking and recording motion. A full team of stunt actors is suited and armed with faux weapons, and they're all taking advice/direction from Yugen in between action takes for a scene where Musashi is attacked by a group of ninjas.

"So the first step is taking the action and the game design specifications, what we want to achieve with the action in the game, and explaining that to the actors and sword fight choreographers in the studio, so that they have an idea of what we're looking for," says Yugen. "So what I'm explaining in this video is the rules of the game and how things work on a mechanical level. So I was explaining to them that they need to approach from the right-hand side for the particular animation that we're going for."

I then watch as the team of stunt choreographers and sword technique experts act out the fight, which can be seen in part in the above Way of the Sword preview video. I'm no expert with the sword, or a martial arts expert, but it is obvious these guys know what they're doing.

"So essentially, what you just saw there," says Yugen, "was them basically rehearsing the action that we explained to them. So we take this temp recording, and then we can see that instantly within the engine itself, and then we can review and revise bits."

This last bit really blew my socks off. Mere moments after the fight had been motion captured, the fight just wasn't ready to watch back on film, but it was actually injected into Way of the Sword's game engine, Capcom's upgraded RE Engine, so the actual recorded animations could be appraised looking like how they would do in the game.

"With the rehearsal takes," continues Yugen, "we can take those and iterate until we get to a form of it where we're quite happy with the creation of the action that we've captured. And as with what we saw before with the rehearsal take, once we've recorded that, we can see it instantly within the engine. We can review the motion there."

I ask if it is Yugen who is responsible for making the final decision on what take is good to go.

"So ultimately the decisions all come down to the game's director. He's the one that gets the final sign-off. But even from the actors, there are cases where we've been happy with the performance, but the actors themselves are not satisfied. They're like, 'No, no, no, that wasn't right. I've got to do this again.' And so there are many cases where they will keep doing more and more takes until everyone is satisfied."

It's evident that a dump truck-load of expertise, care, and attention has gone into Way of the Sword's animations, and judging from how awesome many of my fights were during my hands-on preview of the game, I think it fair to say that it has been time well spent.

For more insight into Onimusha: Way of the Sword, be sure to check out the video preview above as well as pick up the next issue of PC Gamer magazine, which has a world-exclusive deep dive feature on the game and also includes a huge A1 Onimusha poster.

It feels like western blockbuster games development is dying. Amid endless rounds of ruthless layoffs and studio closures, a component shortage crisis driving up hardware prices for both PC and console users, and the industry's often-disastrous pivot to live service, it's hard to imagine a healthy future for the kinds of lavish, seasonal tentpole releases that used to be the bread and butter of the medium.

I know western studios still release these things. In 2025 we had Assassin's Creed Shadows, Doom: The Dark Ages and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to name a few. This year: Forza Horizon 6, a forthcoming Wolverine game, and 007 First Light.

But none of those 2025 games had the cultural impact of a Silksong, Arc Raiders or Clair Obscur, nor were they as sticky as Nintendo, Capcom or Konami's blockbuster output. It's roughly the same narrative this year so far: Forza Horizon 6 was fine, but Korea-made Crimson Desert was a viral sensation. Many, many more people read about Subnautica 2 on PC Gamer than they did 007: First Light.

When they actually get made and not unceremoniously canceled, blockbusters with luxurious seven figure budgets and inescapable marketing just don't have the clout they used to. But there's one massive exception looming on the horizon.

For Real

GTA 6 really feels like the last of the dinosaurs. For one, a big part of the conversation will focus on its envelope-pushing graphics, which feels like an increasingly irrelevant point of discussion in 2026.

The drive towards ever-increasing graphical fidelity has been inseparable from this medium since its birth. It's why we have Doom, Tomb Raider, Crysis, Oblivion and Cyberpunk 2077. It's why we have console generations and dedicated GPUs. It's probably why there hasn't been a new The Elder Scrolls game since 2011.

"Immersion" is near universally valued as the goal in blockbuster development. The word's ubiquity goes hand-in-hand with the medium's obsession with graphical fidelity, which overwhelmingly manifests as realism. After all, what could be more immersive than a videogame that looks like the actual world?

The more realistic a game's shimmering isle or wartorn city, the better. In western blockbuster development, realism has disproportionately ruled the roost compared to, say, the cel-shaded Borderlands look, or that one weird anime Need for Speed game (remember what EA and Insomniac did to Fuse?). Even fifth and sixth gen mascot platformers were marketed for the realism of their newly impressive 3D spaces.

But I don't think the majority of people playing games care about graphical fidelity and its attendant "realism" anymore. Games like Palworld, Peak, Phasmophobia and Valheim make bigger cultural splashes than IO's new Bond game did. Crucially, they all look different. The way they look translates as a sensibility or a purposeful style. But when the rotely realistic-looking Bond game did go moronically viral, it was because the graphics, which strove for realism, weren't realistic enough.

If you were born the year Crysis released, you're 19 now. If you were born the year Skyrim released, you're 15. Graphics have definitely "improved" since then, but nowhere near to the extent they did between, say, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. It's not even close. And yet, it's these iterative nudgings towards greater immersion that defined big splashy games and the marketing of them for decades.

Remember when Spider-Man 2 went viral because the puddles got nerfed? That's the parodic end result of the industry's focus on realism as a measure of its progress. Meanwhile, my tween daughter rotates between Minecraft, Stardew Valley and Hades 2. Some of her contemporaries subsist entirely on Roblox brainrot.

The big exception to this generational shrugging off of fidelity is GTA 6. It'll likely be the best looking "realistic" videogame ever made, but it won't be because of its underlying computer technology. Its unprecedented realism will be mostly attributable to Rockstar's budget. Rockstar—which has reportedly spent well into the billions on GTA 6—can afford to employ a team of people dedicated to making dog fur look uncannily lifelike, or body sweat drip and roll in a very true-to-life way. It's not mere technology that gets us here: it's the result of Rockstar being wealthy enough to pay people to do it.

Advances in realism can no longer come from John Carmack sitting alone in a room making true colored lighting from scratch. It comes from massive teams of specifically-qualified people working on all those finer details most players won't notice. Most studios, even big ones, can't afford to make every building in an open world city look different. The people in these massive teams all command a wage, and there's a limit to what most studios can pay. Rockstar has as close to "no limit" as the industry gets.

That's ultimately what the graphical arms race is in 2026 and beyond: whoever has the most money and the strongest will to spend it wins. And no other studio is even close to rivalling Rockstar in these stakes.

Graphics Accelerator

What happens to the big western blockbuster after GTA 6? I don't think GTA 6 will kill it, but it'll maybe have a Baldur's Gate 3 effect. Developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. presciently warned about this phenomenon in the lead up to the RPG's 1.0 release. To expect that "every RPG should be like [Baldur's Gate 3] going forward" would be to create "the expectations and conditions to ensure your favorite creators may never be able to give you the thing you love ever again."

Which is true, but it's also been an unfortunate reality in game development for as long as I remember. Many are the hairy tales of studios pivoting to newer, less-familiar engines in their attempts to keep up with the graphical joneses. If a game looks bleeding edge it (partially) markets itself.

There is an important difference: Baldur's Gate 3 is famous for its systemic complexity and mind-melting player agency. It lets you do things you've always dreamed of doing in RPGs, which even fractionally smaller RPG studios may struggle to emulate. Singleplayer GTA games, on the other hand, are best known for their edginess, their immersive, simulated cities, and their immersive, realistic graphics.

GTA 5 wasn't dramatically more sophisticated than GTA 4. It didn't change the way people make or play open world city action games. Having three protagonists was neat, but it didn't enforce any new norm on the medium. But one thing's undeniable: it looked amazing. It was more realistic and detailed than any game that came before it. That's what counts in Rockstar's world.

So it's possible that competing western triple-A studios will never be able to make a good looking videogame ever again. Maybe GTA 6 will emphatically murder the arms race that has been petering out for years.

But it's also possible that GTA 6's graphics—and take a deep breath, because I'm about to say something pessimistic about GTA 6 —won't hit with the impact that has historically buoyed the series because, ultimately, who cares about realistic graphics in 2026? How much better can they realistically be on six year old hardware? And won't it still ultimately be an open world shooting and driving game with some lavish narrative accoutrements? (Perhaps it'll be much more than that, but it'd be bucking against tradition.)

Nearly everyone with a console will buy GTA 6 when it releases in November. Many PC gamers will buy a console to play it. It's going to be absolutely huge and it'll dominate the conversation for months. But here's what I think happens afterwards: western studios, the ones still operating healthily, will go on developing their games within their comparatively limited scopes. Outlier philistines will gripe online that they don't look as good as GTA 6, but most people won't care.

Then, two or three months later, until the next GTA Online comes out, GTA 6 will be forgotten, its existence taken for granted.

It'll still be a watershed moment for the medium. I think it'll be the last videogame that can market itself on the strength of its exorbitant graphical detail. It'll be the full stop in that fun but ultimately kinda destructive continuum. As a former Sony Santa Monica exec told me last year, the timeworn blockbuster model is not sustainable.

For those who insist on following that route, they'll need to do so keeping in mind that fewer people will have access to high end hardware because everything is now stupidly expensive and getting worse. As a result, what constitutes the "mass market" in games will shift dramatically. In a worse case scenario our descendants will binge on low-rent UGC. More optimistically, the medium will continue to grow and flourish without the pixel counters breathing down its neck: if that happens, games will be allowed to become more complex in more interesting ways.

Have you heard the good word?

Sorry, good words. Two of them, to be precise: Ace Combat.

I know I'm not the only recent convert to this long-running series; after the announcement of Ace Combat 8 last December, I saw a wave of chatter across social media reiterating that what the uninformed might expect to be rather disposable, After Burner-esque arcadey dogfighting games are actually sick as hell. I played my first Ace Combat this year—2019's AC7: Skies Unknown—before heading to a preview event for Ace Combat 8, and I can confirm that these games are, in fact, cooking with jet fuel.

AC8 is out in October, but I encourage you not to wait for it, because Ace Combat 7 is on sale on Steam right now for 80% off, and is absolutely worth playing if you have even a shred of interest in aerial warfare.

While the planes are all intricately modeled and the game's interface has a sort of militaristic seriousness to it, the tone of Ace Combat is gloriously melodramatic. "What begins as 15 minutes of shooting at radar towers and the odd enemy fighter quickly descends into boss fights against impossible constructions, battles with drone swarms, and navigational setpieces straight from a Universal Studios ride," PC Gamer reviewer Phil Iwaniuk wrote back in 2019. While Phil wasn't completely taken with Ace Combat's anime instincts, I was—I loved the over-the-top cutscenes in this game, which usually involve narrators talking about reaching for that big blue sky or mourning the political strife of their wartorn country.

They're also really pretty.

It's frequently silly and over-the-top, but there's also some pretty deft narrative work being done considering the game's primary focus is locking onto enemy planes and pressing the missile button. The story jumps between three different threads that eventually converge, characters meeting hours and hours into the campaign. It doesn't hurt that those intersecting moments tend to be monumental, playable moments—launching an assault on an enormous space elevator, or dogfighting with the best pilot who's ever lived, or facing off against a next-gen drone that movies unlike any of the aircraft you've encountered up to that point.

Ace Combat 7's missions consistently do a great job of throwing unexpected twists at you, or objectives that amp up the intensity and urgency of what's ultimately a pretty limited set of actions: do a barrel roll, get a missile lock, fire, repeat. You also get to tinker with the planes a bit between missions, but aside from picking a jet that's better for dogfighting or one that's better for bombing runs depending on the mission, there's not a ton of nuance there. There is a lot of gawping at the cool planes in the hangar, though, which I also recommend.

Thanks to how varied the missions are, I don't think there's much risk of being Ace Combat'd out by playing this game just a few weeks before AC8. If anything, I think AC7's melodrama will get you in the mood for more. It's a perfect breezy summer game to fit in this month, before September's wall-to-wall schedule of upcoming games.

AC7's current Steam deal ends in the next 22 hours of this writing, and is $15 (£12) including a Top Gun Maverick DLC tie-in with a bunch of cool planes—though heads up that using them early in the campaign will trivialize some of the challenge. You can get a Steam key even cheaper elsewhere, though: Fanatical has the base game on sale for just $8.69 (86% off) for the next 11 days.

Take-Two Interactive, publisher of Grand Theft Auto 6, will hold its Q1 FY2027 results call on Friday, August 7, and I don't mean to sound alarmist or over-excited but I think something might be happening. Allow me to explain.

Part of my job involves listening in to quarterly investor calls, in case anything interesting is revealed about current or upcoming projects—you never know when a CEO is going to accidentally leak a release target or confirm The Witcher 4. So naturally, it behooves me to know when these calls are happening.

US-based publishers generally hold their calls late in the afternoon in the Eastern time zone, typically 4 or 4:30 pm, and Take-Two is no exception: Results drop at 4, get on the phone at 4:30, and that's your day done. But this upcoming investors call is scheduled for 8 am ET—that's 8.5 hours earlier this T2's usual call time.

The obvious question is, why? Take-Two head of global corporate communications Alan Lewis tells me it's "just scheduling." It may well be "just scheduling," but with the biggest videogame in years now just a few months away from its scheduled release—Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch, for consoles, on November 19—oddities like this naturally draw extra scrutiny.

Of course, if there is a big secret GTA 6 announcement inbound, Take-Two wouldn't tell me about it, but I persevere nonetheless. So in the event that we are in for GTA news, I see two possibilities.

One, a delay: GTA 6 marketing was meant to kick into gear this summer, but here we are in August—just three months from launch—and we've had nary a peep. Weird, right? This week's investors call is the last with any meaningful space between it and GTA 6 day, so if Take-Two is hitting the brakes and wants to mollify investors with an urgency, this is the time to do it.

Possibility two: Early August is mid-summer, which means we're still well within that promised marketing window. Rolling into an investors call with the biggest game trailer to come along in years would be a baller move, and set the company up to absolutely bulldoze the holiday quarter. Which it's going to do anyway, assuming taht first possibility isn't correct, but sometimes it's fun to let 'em know you're coming.

Neither of those theories explain why Take-Two is holding its investors call at 8 am, but consider this: I dug through T2's quarterly earnings calendar all the way back to the start of 2020, and do you know how often it's held investor calls on a Friday? Never! So there you go, right?

For the record, I think a Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer drop is far more likely than a delay, but a last-minute postponement doesn't strike me as beyond the realm of possibility either. Yes, there's also the chance that this is indeed "just scheduling," I suppose, but that's not very exciting—nor does it answer the underlying question of why?

Whatever the reason, we'll be watching, and we'll let you know what happens when—if—it happens.

The shakeup at the top of the Assassin's Creed food chain continued today with word that Eric Baptizat, the lead game designer on Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag and director of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, has returned to the company after several years away to become game director of the Assassin's Creed brand.

"Eric needs no introduction in this universe," Assassin's Creed head of content Jean Guesdon wrote on LinkedIn (via Eurogamer). "16 years at Ubisoft, key contributions to Black Flag, Origins, and Valhalla as Game Director, his passion for gameplay craft and his deep connection to this franchise speak for themselves.

"Seeing someone with his expertise, his rigor, and his collaborative spirit step into this role fills me with confidence and honestly, a lot of excitement, for what's ahead for the brand."

Talking about "brands" rather than "games" always makes me a bit itchy, but Baptizat's credits are legit. After working as a designer on numerous lesser-known games, he served as lead game designer on James Cameron's Avatar: The Game. It wasn't great, but he followed that up with Black Flag, which was great, and from there worked on Unity and Origins before becoming game director on Valhalla. He left Ubisoft in 2021 to join EA Motive, where he first directed the Dead Space remake and then served as game design director on Battlefield 6.

That's a pretty good run, and it's good news for Ubisoft that it's getting the band back together, at least a little bit. Baptizat is just one guy, but he's a high-profile guy on some of the best-loved Assassin's Creed games, most notably Black Flag—which, you may have heard, is doing pretty well these days in its Resynced guise. He's not going to singlehandedly save Ubisoft, but bringing that guy you know from that game you like back into the fold is at least a start.

Do you remember the trailer for that gorgeous Chinese action game at this year's Summer Game Fest? No, not Blood Message. And not Phantom Blade Zero, which showed up at Sony's State of Play. I'm talking about Swords of Legends, which featured a boss fight against a flying magician whose body happens to be an ornate rug. I've played it, and it's every bit the lavish, Unreal Engine 5 rendition of Chinese mythology and folklore it appears to be. Five years ago this game would've floored me—but here in 2026, it's instead made me a little apprehensive about the influence Black Myth Wukong is likely having on the upcoming wave of big-budget Chinese games.

You wouldn't know it from the name if you don't speak Chinese, but Swords of Legends is the sequel to Gujian 3, a 2018 RPG in a series beloved in China long before Black Myth Wukong made a seismic impact on the country's game industry. The Gujian games started out as turn-based, Final Fantasy-esque RPGs before leaning more heavily into action with each sequel (as Final Fantasy has done, itself). When PC Gamer contributor Kerry Brunskill covered the first Gujian, they did what most of us do when writing about an RPG: focus on the characters and story.

"All six members of your playable party consistently contradict the obvious pigeonholes lesser tales would leave them stuck within forever," Kerry wrote. "If you’ve got the time for it—and you might not have—Gu Jian’s leisurely pace exudes confidence in its world building, the closest accessible equivalent perhaps being Falcom’s Trails of… series; you feel these extended scenes and the endless spread of ancillary characters are included because they enrich the setting and everyone living within it. To the game’s credit these details really are important and over time numerous plot threads weave into one beautiful tapestry, your own shock as everything falls into place as strong as the reactions found in any of the cast."

By contrast, I couldn't tell you the name of the beautiful-but-generic character I played in the demo for the new Swords of Legends. The first thing I did was fight a giant bull named Ox-Head, who called me "boss;" defeating him in a tutorial battle turned him into a summonable sidekick I could call in when I needed help against a tough enemy. I welcomed the help, but had to wonder how much of a role he'll play in the story. Does he have quests? Can he talk with other characters, or change his opinion of me based on any decisions I make?

Swords of Legends' demo, limited to a few boss fights and one chunk of a linear level, emphasized the "action" half of the action RPG equation so thoroughly that really the only sign of the latter was the column of stats on the inventory screen.

As action games go, Swords of Legends does seem promising! You've got your standard light and heavy combos, but my eyes lit up when I saw that it was eschewing dedicated block and parry for interchangeable weapon skills and artifacts, which each affect the abilities you have in combat. The starter artifact comes equipped with a guard skill, of course, which uses mana unless you pop it with perfect timing. But I started having more fun when I swapped it out for the Thunder Banner, which replaced that block skill with a crackling, damage-dealing dash with generous frames of invincibility. All of a sudden I had to play aggressively, because blocking wasn't an option.

Later I equipped a hard-hitting parry skill on a greatsword and baited one of the bosses into attacking me, consistently punishing him with the riposte. It was a defensive playstyle, but a higher risk one—each parry used up some of my mana, and mistiming it left me wide open for a wallop.

Swords of Legends offers enough choice from the jump that it's at least not living wholly in Sekiro's shadow. That's a relief, considering Nioh 2 and 3 and Ninja Gaiden 4 and Rise of the Ronin and Wo Long and Lies of P and Phantom Blade Zero and The First Berzerker: Khazan and *deep breath* Clair Obscur and Spider-Man 2 and Doom: The Dark Ages and Resident Evil 4 Remake and Onimusha and 70 other games I'm forgetting have all leaned into press-the-right-button-at-the-exact-right-moment reactions. I think Sekiro's a masterpiece, but too often parrying gets in the way of the more expressive, flow state combo mashing of older action games like Devil May Cry.

In the same way I hope the next five years of action games have ambitions beyond the parry, I hope the big budget wuxia games coming in Black Myth Wukong's wake don't mistake its success as a template and narrow themselves to the path it's already walked. From the bit I've seen (too little to judge definitively), Swords of Legends seems more Black Myth than Witcher 3—which is a shame, because a full-on RPG in an already established series seems like the perfect way to truly delve into China's thousands of years of mythology.

Swords of Legends does, at least, have some wonderfully creative designs in just the hour or so of scattered sections I got to play. In my favorite scene, my taciturn protagonist sat down in a roadside inn for tea, only to end up dueling a warrior wearing a teapot on his head like a helmet—who was also wielding a teapot with a comically long spout as his sword. Most of his attacks flung boiling water around the arena.

The flying rug boss likewise felt like a character ripped from a folktale I've never read but now very much want to—he hid himself in one of three spinning teacups once I did him enough damage, then angrily rained fireworks down on my head when I caught him. Classic magician stuff.

I hope there's a lot more where that came from, and that the fun characters we've yet to see aren't all just boss fights at the end of linear, Souls-lite maps. There's still a long wait ahead: Swords of Legends is on Steam, but it doesn't yet have a release date.

During my exclusive hands-on with Onimusha: Way of the Sword at Capcom's HQ in Osaka, I sat down with the game's audio director, Shunichi Suwa, to talk about how the music, environmental and character audio, as well as weapon sound effects were designed.

And, for a game that has a huge focus on duelling with blades, I immediately asked Suwa about how Capcom's sound team had created the myriad of weapon sound effects in the game. Was it just Suwa and his colleagues going at each other with real swords?

"Yes, we did use real swords and real scabbards for the creation of sounds, especially for like the sheathing actions," confirms Suwa. "We definitely made use of real weapons there. [However], in terms of making the sounds for the swords, actually using real swords doesn't always produce the best sounds if you're using [them in] the natural way, as you usually use swords. So in a Foley studio, we made use of a special katana made specifically for producing those kinds of sounds, and also a variety of different metals and stones as well to create a lot of different sound effects."

Suwa then shows me the specially made katana, which is visible in the above video. The sword looks normal apart from two things. Firstly, it is thicker than a regular katana, and secondly, it has a pronounced S-shaped kink in the blade near the hilt. It's like the blade has been folded back on itself a few times. Why create this special katana, though? What does it deliver that is different from a real katana?

"So one of the reasons for using [that] particular sword is that, for this game, we weren't really aiming to have a very clean sound for the swords. We wanted that very raw, kind of rough feel to the sounds, that really kind of grating, kind of scraping sound. We really wanted to capture a sound that really sold that."

I'm handed the blade as well as a corrugated iron bar, the sort used in construction, and invited to slide the blade against the bar. The noise it creates is the exact sort of rough, metallic noise that can be found in Way of the Sword when the game's hero, legendary swordmaster Miyamoto Musashi, deflects the blows of his enemies' blades.

"The reasoning behind us going for this very raw, kind of rough, unprocessed sound," continues Suwa, "was that we really wanted Musashi, while he is a sword master, to showcase the kind of raw strength side of him and the way he fights. So we wanted to really portray that part of his character through the sounds."

Anyone who has played the Onimusha: Way of the Sword demo will be able to relate to what Suwa says. Musashi's fighting technique is very raw, with wild, powerful swings of his katana. This contrasts with Musashi's main rival, bad guy Sasaki Ganryu, whose fighting technique and movements are more refined, smooth, and snake-like.

After playing both the publicly released Onimusha: Way of the Sword demo, as well as an extended, multi-stage, hands-on experience inside Capcom's headquarters, I can confirm that, maybe unlike any other game I've played, the sword action in this game delivers a raw, kinetic feeling that is incredibly impactful. And, as you would expect, the sound effects play a large part in that.

To see more Onimusha, be sure to grab the next issue of PC Gamer magazine, where we'll have a world-exclusive, in-depth preview.

The long war is over. Justice is done. The revolution, the necessity of which Assassin's Creed players have discussed for a long time, has taken place. Edward's hateful blowpipe is vanquished.

In a new patch for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Ubisoft proudly declares that "The Blowpipe Can Now Be Hidden." Players, it turns out, had rather taken against Edward's handy little dart-dispatcher.

Before this patch, it was an ever-present aspect of his costume once he obtained it in the game's story, and I suppose some folk didn't think it blended well with his outfits.

"We saw your feedback, and we have given players the option to hide the 'Blow Pipe' from Edward’s back," writes Ubisoft. "In order to do so, access your outfit in the inventory and select R2 for the option to 'Hide Gear'". If you're on the other side of the great blow pipe war, you can also opt to keep it visible.

I admit, I do find it kind of funny that—in a patch weighing in at between 1.8 and 3.7 GB, depending on your PC storefront of choice—this is the headline item. People have clearly been yelling in Ubi's ear about this goddamn pipe ruining their efforts to keep Edward in the dernier cri.

To be fair to them, I get it! A lot of the game's outfits don't really have an obvious place for the blow pipe to hang from, so it ends up hanging in space in an obtrusive way.

Anyway, there are, would you believe it, other changes in the latest Black Flag patch. For instance, there are now double the number of autosaves (10, in place of the earlier five), fixes for some broken tutorials and DLC notifications, and it revives the much-missed ability to toggle your hood while performing a leap of faith. There are also numerous fixes for gameplay issues, world stuff, textures, and so on, which I'll list below.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Title Update 1.0.6

General

• Increased number of autosaves from 5 to 10 to allow players to load from earlier progressions.
• Fixed an issue on PC where Cutscenes could be locked at 30 FPS when Graphics settings were set to ‘custom’ from any ‘Low’ presets.
• Added missing tutorial on how to ‘Throw Money’.
• Fixed an issue where DLC Pack notifications could appear at the start of a new game.
• Fixed an issue where Edward could start sliding right after fast travelling to a synchronized viewpoint while sprinting and jumping down.
• Fixed an issue on PC for Mouse & Keyboard where Quest icon could be marked/unmarked when selecting the Quest tab.
• Fixed an issue where players did not receive a purchase confirmation message for Resource Packs.
• Fixed an issue where players could be unable to parkour while holding down RT after remapping RT to sprint.
• Fixed minor crashes that could happen during Ground and Naval fights.
• Fixed an issue where Edward’s hood could not be toggled during the Leap of Faith.

Gameplay

• Fixed an issue where players could be unable to perform leg sweeps on enemies in an ‘attentive’ or ‘suspicious’ state.
• Fixed an issue where the Brute Elites were sometimes not charging towards the player.
• Fixed an issue that could occur when players tried to hire dancers while on top of a box.
• Fixed an issue where “Quick Use Rope Dart” may no longer be usable when interrupted by an enemy attack or after a rope dart hang.
• Fixed an issue where players were sometimes unable to assassinate drunk pirates in smoke after entering combat with them.
• Fixed an issue where Enemy ships sometimes did no damage when ramming the Jackdaw at certain angles.
• Fixed an issue where dead bodies on benches could be looted/carried after loading a save file.
• Fixed delayed reaction from guards upon seeing a hanging dead body.
• Fixed an issue where Edward wasn’t always turning to look at where he was aiming in a Naval battle.
• Fixed an issue where Edward could trigger a takedown while vaulting over the enemy.
• Fixed an issue where the Naval Convoy’s leader could go flying after lowering wanted level or sending it to Kenway’s fleet during Boarding.

World

• Fixed an issue where players may get stuck when attempting to parkour between a tree and a wall in Kingston.
• Fixed an issue where players could ‘Fast Travel’ to an unsynchronized viewpoint in Havana.
• Fixed an issue where there was no warning message displayed when trying to fast travel to a captured fort while in a restricted area.
• Fixed an issue where players could get stuck in free fall when climbing behind the chest at Mariguana Island.

Progression & Economy

• Fixed an issue where the Kraken wheel cost was listed incorrectly / the Kraken wheel is wheely expensive.
• Fixed an issue where ‘The Benjamin’ ship codex unlocked at a later quest.

UI/Menu

• Updated font for Simplified Chinese to allow for better readability.
• Fixed an issue where players may become soft-locked when switching to the Map tab while visualizing a Codex entry.
• Fixed alignment issues when language was set to Arabic.
• Fixed an issue where Ally ship icons were displayed
• Fixed an issue where the Vision Preset’s enabled black background for objectives remained on during Modern Rifts.

Visuals & Graphics

• Fixed multiple animation issues.
• Fixed minor ragdoll issues.
• Fixed multiple camera issues during assassinations.
• Fixed lighting issues while underwater.
• Fixed visual gaps present in the Fort wall of Nassau.
• Fixed Enemies’ blood coming out from hips instead of chin during the pistol finishing kill
• Fixed visual issues in Tavern Brawl with knocking out enemies near tables and chairs.
• Fixed clipping issues with the cape of ‘Hellion Armor’ when there are strong winds.
• Fixed issues where PSSR was not properly enabled if the same account was used first on PS5 and then on PS5 Pro

Localization

• Fixed incorrect localization of “Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced” on all platform packages in Simplified Chinese.
• Fixed incorrect localization of the Trophy/Achievement “Ed the Diver” in Simplified Chinese.

Audio

• Fixed various missing audio issues.
• Fixed missing audio for when a normal guard blocked melee attacks from the player.
• Fixed an issue where the Hideout’s watermill audio would be played after entering and exiting the menu despite the Hideout’s Garden not being unlocked.
• Balanced certain dialogues in Simplified Chinese to be more audible.

SPOILERS

Quests

• "Overrun and Outnumbered": Fixed an issue where James Kidd remained idle if the player skipped the cutscene and quickly used a “Sleep Dart” on an enemy.
• “Delirium”: Fixed an issue where the sails could be seen floating when swimming up.
• “Traveling Salesman”: Fixed an issue where low-quality civilian models could be observed if the player skipped through the cutscene.
• “Vainglorious Bastards”: Fixed an issue where the “Royal African Ship” could sometimes sink after the cutscene.
• “A Second Chance”: Fixed an issue where Edward could fast travel to the Jackdaw while carrying food, which may cause the food to disappear.
• “Mayan Mysteries”: Fixed an issue where the “Mayan Armor” could not be obtained due to missing a Mayan stone that was obtained before “Overrun and Outnumbered” quest.
• “A Cockalorum”: Lucy will sometimes go out of hiding during 'Reach the villa' objective.
• “The Sage's buried secret”: Fixed an issue where James Kidd could get stuck if the player blocks his route up the rocks.
• “What the Devil!”: Fixed an issue where players could unintentionally clear the objective “Board the HMS Demolition” as Edward.
• “Templar Ships”: Fixed an issue where players could remain stuck in combat if they were detected by enemies while eavesdropping on civilians.
• “Upton Travers”: Fixed an issue where the objective to ‘Kill Upton’ was missing after loading a save file.
• “Diving for Medicines”: Fixed an issue where players could lose autosave files if they participate in “Uptown Travers” during the main quest.
• Fixed an issue in certain quests where enemies did not react accordingly if inflicted by sleep/berserk dart while following another person.
• Fixed an issue where on Black Island, "Morgan's Treasures" and "Midnight Moonshine" could sometimes remain unavailable to players.

Last week, developer ShiftUp released a video marketing its upcoming sequel Stellar Blade: Blood Rain. A so-called "music video" which was riddled with generative AI, from Evie's harrowing grin to a very rubbish song with cringeworthy robotic vocals.

The video has garnered a whole bunch of backlash—from myself included—as people wondered why on earth a company raking in good gacha money (its other game, Nikke: Goddess of Victory, is a consistent high ranker on gacha revenue charts) felt the need to put out something so utterly devoid of soul. Or really, that didn't have anything to do with Stellar Blade: Blood Rain in the first place.

Well, ShiftUp CEO Hyung Tae Kim has now come out to tell us that we're just misunderstanding, guys!

"EVIE, the character at the heart of this video, was created from head to toe by our talented artists and modelers through more than a year of dedicated work," a tweet from him read. "The AI is not creating her from scratch. It is rendering and presenting the character based on the data, design, and craftsmanship our team created. We would truly appreciate it if you could view the work with that understanding in mind."

I think if anyone here is misunderstanding, it's Hyung Tae Kim himself. Anyone could deduce that Evie's design wasn't the thing being created with AI. But when almost every other aspect of your video is generated with AI—parts of her suit literally morph in and out of existence, the food she eats has that horrible AI slime effect to it, signs plastered along walls and vending machines are in garbled nonsense AI language—it not only undermines whatever vision you had in mind for your character's design, it cheapens your overall image.

And that's before you even get into the fact that the song is also AI-generated, despite ShiftUp having some crazy talented composers on board. If you really wanted to go all-in on a music video to market your game, you could at least get a real human to whip up a song.

Unfortunately, I don't envision ShiftUp or Hyung Tae Kim slowing down on AI usage anytime soon. South Korea is a huge consumer of AI, and its embrace of it has rippled into the development cycles of studios who reside there. Kim himself has been on the AI train since around 2022 (despite being a talented artist himself) which makes this unsurprising, but most certainly disappointing nevertheless.

As you can see in the above video, I recently travelled to Osaka, Japan, to go inside Capcom's headquarters and play its upcoming action game, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, as well as talk to many of the lead devs who have worked on it.

And, as part of my developer interviews, I spoke with Art Director Hiroyuki Nara about the character design of Onimusha: Way of the Sword's bad guy, Sasaki Ganryu, who made a memorable appearance in the game's publicly released demo.

Sasaki Ganryu, like the game's hero, Miyamoto Musashi, is based on a real-world Japanese sword master who fought during Japan's Edo period. However, as with Musashi, Capcom has put its own spin on these fierce rivals. But how did the devs go about designing them?

When it came to designing Sasaki, Nara explains, "there's been some depictions of him in other fiction, but it's not something that we really consciously thought of when designing him [in Way of the Sword]. In this case, it was more a case that we wanted to create a character that would be a very strong contrast to Miyamoto Musashi. They both come into this game in this world with the same goal. They both want to be the best they ever was in terms of swordsmanship, but their way of thinking and their way of approaching life and things are very, very different.

"So that's something that's depicted very clearly in the way that they dress quite differently. Sasaki is very conscious of style and of people, how people see him and perceive him, whereas obviously Musashi is not quite on that wavelength. So we wanted to depict that clearly in the way that they dress, and he does have these elements of being quite cocky. [Sasaki] thinks that he's this naturally gifted swordsman. He's better than Musashi, so that's something as well that we wanted to kind of give away and kind of flashy nature."

As anyone who has played the Way of the Sword demo will know, Sasaki is very much Musashi's direct opposite in terms of looks, movements, and combat style. Whereas Musashi looks rough around the edges, dressed in humble, raggedy garb, Sasaki has the air of an aristocrat about him, with fancy, bright clothes and accessories. And whereas Musashi's combat style is based on power, with strong, wild swings of his katana, Sasaki's is very smooth and elegant, with slick, snake-like movements. I ask Nara about Sasaki's movements, and I get a surprising but, in retrospect, spot-on response in how the devs went about designing them.

"We want to have a really clear contrast between the way he moves and the way Musashi moves. So whereas Musashi's movements are quite wild and kind of rough and kind of powerful, Ganyu's movements are quite refined, but also they have an edge of eroticism to them. They're very alluring in the way that he moves. So that's definitely something that we were thinking about when they cast the motion actor for the role, and seeing those auditions and the person that was on screen and the way they were moving."

Want to see just how erotic Sasaki's movements and combat style are? The demo for Onimusha: Way of the Sword is available to download now (you can grab it on Steam). And, for a world-exclusive hands-on preview of the game, be sure to pick up the next issue of PC Gamer magazine, which also comes with an awesome A1 Onimusha: Way of the Sword poster.

I've spent the last week playing Beast of Reincarnation and I've really enjoyed it, though I am not, admittedly, a huge lover of parry-centric action. And Beast of Reincarnation has loads of parrying. You can't not parry in Beast of Reincarnation, but there are ways to make the combat far less reliant on precise parries and dodges.

Protagonist Emma starts with a crossbow and when I realised this I wrote it off as a throwaway accoutrement that you can't really rely on, kinda like the rifles in Bloodborne, or the companion drone in Stellar Blade. But no. Focusing on the crossbow and the long bow—which you get about an hour into the game—is basically the game's easy mode, without resorting to the game's actual easy mode (which exists, by the way).

Because if you focus on upgrading projectiles they'll end up chewing through health bars at a stunning rate. While some bosses—especially those with two forms—will last longer than your ammo supply will, projectiles are a sure fire way to absolutely shred their health pool from a safe distance without taking too many close range risks in a game where two hits can kill.

Spoilers follow, but this is me against the first major boss in New Game +. The video isn't really meant to demonstrate how easy it is, but more to show what crossbow violence looks like when you invest in it. This boss has a second phase, but luckily I hadn't used a single one of my arrows yet.

(Yes, enemies can still close the distance on you if you're not careful. No, investing in projectiles will not completely eliminate the need for parrying and dodging.)

It's a lot of fun to float suspended in mid air, thanks to Emma's entanglement gauge, while raining down hell on the vast majority of enemies incapable of touching you. Arrows and bolts replenish at every checkpoint campsite, and since these are very, very common (perhaps too common) you can pretty much mainline projectiles from about a third into the game.

The best direction on Emma's skill tree to start with is the bottom left, where Tracking Shot is the first option. This, as you'd expect, makes your ranged arrows track enemies. Further on you can increase the chance of shots not consuming arrows or bolts by up to 15% percent, which dovetails nicely with a later skill that gives a 50% chance of replenishing up to 10% ammo for ranged weapons for every enemy killed.

Another skill, Magic Bullet, will have each tracking shot loop back around and hit an enemy again once its first made contact. Add to this Scatter-Shot, which splits every ranged projectile into three spreading shots, and you can probably imagine the potential for some intense audio-visual fire works here. Whenever I was popping off bolts the area felt like a News Years dancehall.

But for Scatter-Shot and the also awesome Entangled Shot—which makes every ranged attack "slightly" restore your world-pausing entanglement gauge—you'll also need to invest heavily in Emma's Hair skills as well. Overall, my focus on Emma's projectiles meant that I didn't invest a whole lot in the mutt Koo during my first playthrough, but there's always New Game + for that.

The skill tree isn't the only avenue to upgrade projectiles. At workbenches and campsites you can upgrade each ranged weapon to at least +11, in my experience, which takes in upgrades to reload speed and damage. Every individual arrow and bolt can be upgraded too. For example, I've upgraded acid arrows to +2, which increased its damage and the amount I have in my quiver. I put the vast majority of my amber into upgrading projectiles, which probably would have seemed silly to me in most other action games but not here.

Overall, I was surprised by how viable a projectile playthrough of Beast of Reincarnation is. Now, to focus on the dog...

Beast of Reincarnation is a sci-fi action RPG whose parry-happy woman protagonist is on a mission to save an apocalypse-blighted humanity. On paper it sounds like Stellar Blade, and in practice, it feels a bit like Stellar Blade. It's open but linear, and ruthlessly focused on speed and dexterity. And yet, while Beast of Reincarnation may draw from the same pool of inspiration—think Sekiro, Final Fantasy, Nier—the net result is cosmically at odds with Shift Up's outing.

Emma is a young woman stricken by the Blight. It's the very same phenomenon that has transformed 41st century Japan into a wasteland of verdant ruins. She entirely lacks emotion thanks to her malady, nor can she remember her life before the illness. To make matters worse, she's an outcast among survivors by dint of her condition. But in exchange she has inherited some gnarly Blight powers, namely the ability to generate aggressive, tentacle-like flora.

The Blight is an infection spread by the titular beast of reincarnation, whose wrath is renewed every hundred years. Though an outcast, Emma and her similarly Blight-infected dog companion Koo are tasked with taking the fight to this mysterious deity-like beast. So off they go, chaperoned by a small crew in a giant military biped which serves as home base.

The flagrantly unoriginal premise seems to promise a bombastic, relentlessly loud spectacle. But entirely to its credit, Beast of Reincarnation is an unusually quiet and patient thing. If Stellar Blade is psytrance with the bass jacked right up, Beast of Reincarnation is psytrance with the percussion removed entirely. I mean, it's essentially a precision-oriented action game, and it can often be very tense, but the whole project is suffused with an elegiac doom. This is a richly atmospheric, melancholy videogame. It took me by surprise.

Parry On

But let's assess it as an action game first. Emma is a dab hand with a sword, but an even dabber hand at parrying with it. Like Stellar Blade, Beast of Reincarnation is a parry dance and there's just no getting around it, though if you feel vindicated by the sudden popularity of the "parryslop" pejorative, there are ways to loosen things up.

One way is with projectiles. Emma has a bow and a crossbow, and if you invest in them via Beast of Reincarnation's typically convoluted skill trees, you can make them monstrously powerful. Both can be equipped with three elemental varieties, and ammunition is automatically replenished at bonfires campsites. If I aim my bows mid-air the world slows to a crawl but Emma doesn't, an effect which depletes the "entanglement gauge" I can also manually trigger to slow down time on foot, or to use my special attacks.

But the most effective way to fill a depleted entanglement gauge is to pull off perfect parries or dodges with an ever-increasing array of swords, none of which feel different but carry certain passive benefits. Parrying and dodging is also the most effective way to make sure canine Koo's powers stay viable in combat. While the mutt will happily fight without my input, I can trigger their special attacks via a turn-based combat style menu. Smooth application of these specials will also marginally heal Emma.

I think this will be wildly variable between players, but since Emma and Koo share a pool of skill points I ended up investing far more heavily in the former than the latter. I found myself almost forgetting to use the dog's special attacks (I was too busy raining down explosive bolts from the sky) though they were always marginally useful: especially for that sliver of health, because most enemies will kill you in two or three hits.

(Not that I'm ragging on the dog: Koo's a lovely hunk of fluff.)

Beast of Reincarnation's skill trees do offer the possibility of contrasting playthroughs. Rather than focus on projectiles I can upgrade Emma's hair, which is one of the game's neatest tricks. Emma can use her sylvan expandable ponytail to gain a huge elevation boost or create bridges to otherwise inaccessible platforms. Better still, she can use her locks to eff her enemies' shit up in ways ranging practical through to "for no better reason than it looks cool".

Green Out

I liked the combat, for the most part. If you're a parry tragic but enjoyed the slightly more forgiving windows of Stellar Blade versus Sekiro, that's basically where Beast of Reincarnation sits on the spectrum. There's a gratifying freneticism to more prickly encounters that really highlights the emotional decompression afforded by the dog’s light turn-based trappings.

But while the fighting feels good in the hands the encounter design is often extraordinarily dull. Beast of Reincarnation takes place across a series of discrete maps of varying openness, and it often feels like enemies are just plonked thoughtlessly onto the map. There are usually too few of them at once to really ratchet the tension, especially if I stealthily eliminate some in advance. It usually took the presence of at least one hulking heavy to give the scraps any zest, but then, there's very little at stake when I die: campsites serve as checkpoints where I can save, craft and level up, but they are almost comically abundant, and anyway, no items are lost upon death.

Where combat sings is during major encounters with bosses or mini-bosses. What otherwise simmers boils over into something spectacularly spicy. It's an overused analogy, but when all of Emma's abilities interlock—her bows, her magical hair, her swordplay—Beast of Reincarnation feels truly balletic. It’s just a shame it only ever reaches that point during big cinematic scraps.

The game's prizing of fluidity is somewhat undermined by the overly rugged art style, whose lush and tangled regrowth is full of geometry that may or may not be solid. It can put a real dampener on exploration. The graphics can be egregiously busy too, often resembling a general green mucky murkiness that makes it hard to take in the true scale of the world. This extremely green overgrown wasteland remains an extremely green overgrown wasteland for the vast majority of the game, and while it can sometimes be gorgeous it wends rather too closely to the tech-jungle look of Avatar or Horizon Zero Dawn, which is starting to feel overplayed.

It also runs pretty poorly on my gaming laptop, with frequent dips below 60fps with settings on medium and FSR 3 toggled on. My PC is just below the recommended specs, but even on low it occasionally trembled. (A performance patch rolled out just an hour before this review went live, but I haven't had the chance to test it.)

Of course it's not perfect, but I admire Beast of Reincarnation. The fact that it comes from Pokémon studio Game Freak is both bizarre and, in other ways, makes perfect sense. This is a prestige double-A outing, which is basically what all Pokémon games are if you remove that timeworn brand.

But what even is double-A? Is it just "mid-range budget"? Or is it a vibe? Because if it's just the latter, Beast of Reincarnation is decidedly not that. The characterisation and voice acting—I played in Japanese, but English dubs are available from the main menu—is among the best I've seen in a big action game for years. Emma's robotic impassivity could have been performed as blandly stoic, or doll-like and naive, but instead registers as oddly, hauntingly absent.

And like I said, there's a maturity and patience to the presentation that feels more filmic than even the Hollywood-aping fare that Sony doles out (or used to). Game Freak loves its long, slow, lingering shots. It loves a strangely resonant silence. No one quips. There are no quirky asides or overbearing teaching moments. Characters speak elliptically, or else with an unguarded sincerity just a touch removed from JRPG mawkishness. It is severely committed to its bereft, enveloping ambience, and feels like it was made by a team blissfully unaware of Star Wars or the MCU.

Do not be misled: Beast of Reincarnation is tonally further away from the hypersexualised Stellar Blade than, I dunno, Pac-Man, despite feeling like an answer to its popularity. I knew the Pokémon studio's first blockbuster action RPG would be imperfect, but I also didn't expect it to be so fun and distinctive.

Modder Elevna on the Nier Replicant Nexus has made my day with the full release of Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139…, a project that replaces the young protagonist of the cult classic's 2022 remaster with his grizzled, older counterpart from the 2010 original.

Let's back up: In Yoko Taro's vision for Nier, the titular protagonist (whose name you're allowed to change for some reason) was a waifish anime twink who kinda looks like Raiden from Metal Gear. This was during peak Xbox 360, the piss filter era, so Square Enix executives wanted a hero with a little more Unreal Engine 3 beefy masculinity to appeal to the west.

The compromise: Japan got two versions of Nier. Replicant on the PS3 boasted Yoko Taro's preferred "Brother" Nier, so named because he's siblings with fellow main character Yonah. The Xbox 360's Nier Gestalt featured "Father" Nier, who was aged up to his 40s, put on a powerlifting program, and made to be Yonah's dad. In the west, we basically only got Nier Gestalt no matter the console version.

Fast forward to 2022, and Nier gets a remaster because everybody took another look after the explosive success of Nier Automata and realized the original was always good⁠—I liked Nier before it was cool, and I'm not bitter about all those 6/10s it got. The cheekily named Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139… brought Brother Nier to the west for the first time, giving us oldheads something to get excited about (aside from finally having a PC version).

Here's the thing, though: Yoko Taro, I love you and your eccentric auteur purity, but just this once, the shadowy cabal of risk-averse, art-hating, shareholder-worshipping executives was right. Father Nier is the man. Grizzled dads protecting their kids in the post apocalypse is played out, sure, but Father Nier is one of the high water marks of the form⁠—not the least because he's kind of an asshole who sucks and makes everything worse.

Nier shows a world well past its sell-by date, and while both Brother and Father Nier are men possessed by ungovernable rage, Papa Nier cuts it with this sense of mournful weariness that just ties a nice bow on the tragedy of it all. It's mostly sold by a career-best performance from prolific voice actor Jamieson Price, who I only just realized was also part of one of my favorite dialogue exchanges in any RPG.

There were rumblings Square Enix might do an official Father Nier DLC, but it never panned out. Cue Elevna's Gestalt mod, which offers a full, luxury Papa Nier experience in 2026. The original model is back and touched up, great, but Elevna also dug all of the audio files for Price's voiceover out of the original and ported them here, making the mod essential.

That would have been enough for me, but Elevna's attention to detail is truly impressive. Nier's alternate skins have also gotten Papa versions, and ver.1.22…'s bonus chapter now has repurposed voice lines from Price to smooth things over⁠—rewatching the chapter's cutscenes, Nier mostly makes small comments and combat barks that can easily be fudged. Elevna even ported back in relevant dialogue from other characters referencing Nier's age.

My favorite small detail: Nier's OG DLC (now just part of the game) features a dream arena where you fight as the other version of Nier⁠—Brother back in 2010, Papa in Replicant. Elevna's Gestalt mod swaps Brother Nier back in for the dream fights.

Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139… is a perfect mod by my reckoning, acting on a supremely niche demand (my supremely niche demand) at an almost absurd level of craft and care. It makes me happy. It's how I'll do my next replay.

ShiftUP CEO Kim Hyung Tae hasn't exactly been lowkey with his pro-AI stance over the years, but he and his company have now made it clearer than ever with one of the most god-awful videos I've ever had the displeasure of witnessing from a company with enough money to do better.

Stellar Blade: Blood Rain—the sequel to 2024's Stellar Blade, which I thought was just fine—is due to come out later this year. And what better way to market it than with a terrible AI-generated music video where Evie's skin-tight suit has a belly button and fingernails, and parts of her outfit phase in and out of existence all while she smiles at the camera in a deeply unsettling manner.

As if that wasn't bad enough, it's all to accompany a song that is also AI-generated. Shrill computerised bleeps masquerade as Evie "singing" high notes during the chorus—which eventually melt into an ear-splitting cacophony of robotic words—and a musical composition that barely understands the fundamentals of what makes music good in the first place.

It is a song so utterly devoid of soul, and also of anything that feels even remotely related to Stellar Blade: Blood Rain and its universe. It actively undermines the game, its theme, and any visual identity it's attempting to present in favour of something that looks shit, sounds shit, and completely discredits any goodwill ShiftUp may have had.

And it makes me worry about the way a hobby I have spent so many years loving is going. For all of the videogame soundtracks that have made me cry, or pumped up, or irrevocably happy. Because they were crafted by a human who understood exactly what they had to do to make me feel those things. Humans who also feel the things they were trying to make me feel through their music.

Videogames are a form of art, and art needs a human touch. Parading around a song that feels so utterly lifeless, that doesn't tell me what Stellar Blade: Blood Rain is actually about? It's frustrating, but especially coming from ShiftUp—a company that is certainly not short of money thanks to the revenue it makes from gacha game Nikke: Goddess of Victory. One which consistently finds itself estimated in the top 10 to 20 gacha earners alongside giants like Hoyoverse.

It can do better. It does do better! Nikke is home to some of my all-time favourite videogame bangers. It literally has a long-time rhythm game composer on its team who is responsible for a good chunk of Nikke's discography. I cannot understand why anyone would think that some of the worst AI-generated music I've heard in a hot sec is the better option.

I'm not entirely sure what effect ShiftUp was hoping to have with this video, but it has completely turned me off trying Blood Rain entirely. I was actually rather looking forward to seeing how the team could expand upon the Stellar Blade universe—I thought the first game's narrative was surprisingly underbaked considering the company's chops for storytelling in Nikke, and I was hoping to see more good stuff in Blood Rain.

And big companies normalising this behaviour only paves the way for more to follow suit. It threatens to open the floodgates, to no longer relegate this kind of garbage to those AI YouTube playlists made with some terrible 80s-themed thumbnail while everything looks and sounds diabolically crusty and deep-fried. It has the very real possibility to continue showing up in our games in a big way, while still demanding the same kind of money we were paying to have a human involved in its creation.

That sort of domino effect is how we have the very real possibility of ending up with reams of samey, soulless games that feel like the very antithesis of why this hobby exists in the first place. And that's why it's so important to call this garbage out for what it is the moment we lay eyes on it, to let companies like ShiftUp know that this ain't it, and we don't want it.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 just closed out its second year of post-release support with a one-two punch of updates. Patch 14, aka The Confrontation Update, adds a new enemy and significantly expands the game's PvP options. Since Confrontation's release, a separate update has added Steam Workshop support to Saber Interactive's hugely successful shooter.

Let's start with the Confrontation update, which, as the name, suggests is heavily focussed on Space Marine 2's PvP mode, Eternal War. Patch 14 adds two new PvP arenas, a medium-sized map called Sanctum, and Facility, which Saber describes as "one of the most compact PvP maps" available in the game. Alongside these maps, the patch adds weekly PvP rewards, meaning you can earn cosmetics and other in-game rewards by playing matches and completing challenges.

If you're more interested in the cooperative side of Space Marine 2, then the update introduces a new enemy for players to fight—the Scarab Occult Terminator Sorcerer. The Sorcerer is a tough miniboss opponent that will appear throughout the game's Operations mode, and furnished with a wide array of abilities. He's able to create copies of himself, teleport around the battlefield, and attack the player with a powerful laser beam. This video gives a good overview of the Sorcerer's moveset. It seems like he'll provide a stern test for even the most grizzled Ultramarine.

As for the Steam Workshop support, obviously it's early days for Space Marine 2 mods. But there are a few player-made extras that are worth checking out. The main one is the Astartes Overhaul, which has been available on NexusMods for a while. The mod rebalances Operations while adding new weapons and customisation options. It introduces three new classes to play as—Terminator, Chaplain, and Apothecary, as well as four new weapons including an Assault Bolter and an Artifex Bolt Rifle that comes with optional incendiary bolts.

Most of the other currently available mods are addons for the Astartes Overhaul. These range from adding some extra execution animations to letting you play with six or even nine-man squads. There are a few non-Astartes mods however Health on Executions makes Space Marine 2's grisly finishers even more like Doom's glory-kill system, while Rogue Trader Tyranids reworks the game's insectoid menace to more closely resemble their 1985 models.

While this wraps up Space Marine's second year of updates, Saber Interactive has confirmed that it will continue supporting the game for at least another year. The developer hasn't specified what new stuff will be coming to the sequel in the next twelve months, but a detailed roadmap will be revealed on the game's second anniversary in September.

First reported by GamesRadar, former Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida is apparently just like us: He loves Bloodborne, and he doesn't get why Sony and FromSoftware haven't done anything with it since its November, 2015 expansion, The Old Hunters.

Yoshida's remarks were part of his keynote address at Japan's CEDEC Industry event. Yoshida structured the talk around impactful, memorable games he encountered over the course of his almost 40-year career with Sony⁠—this included his first hands-on experience with Demon's Souls, and Sony missing out on the chance to publish Dark Souls.

"This game has a lot of fans all over the world, and it still doesn't have a PS5 version," Yoshida said regarding Bloodborne. "PlayStation's first-party team is releasing a ton of remasters, so why don't they release this one? There's no PC release.

"I am often asked why these haven't been released, but it's a complete mystery. Maybe they'll come out in the future. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll make a special edition. Maybe they won't. As a huge fan, I hope it will come out."

There's certainly a degree of "buddy, wasn't that your job?" energy to a former Sony executive lamenting Sony's lack of action, but it makes more sense considering the timeline and Yoshida's portfolio before his 2025 retirement. He switched to being head of PlayStation Indies in 2019, just four years after Bloodborne's release and before the start of the PS5 generation.

I'm a simple man, and all I've ever wanted is Bloodborne as it was, but playable at arbitrary resolutions and framerates on PC. The notion of a remaster never appealed to me, but that doesn't even appear to be on the table anymore after Sony had its go-to remaster studio, Bluepoint, devote its resources to a God of War Multiplayer game before shutting it down. Even more mystifying has been the lack of a 60fps or 4K patch for, at this point, PS4 Pro, PS5, or PS5 Pro.

And at this point, I don't think the discless, PC-scorning, maximum customer value-chasing Sony of 2026 could produce a version of Bloodborne superior to PS4 emulation. You need a hearty rig⁠—Steam Deck is unfortunately out⁠—but Bloodborne emulation looks like it's in a shockingly strong place. I just need to set aside the time and startup energy to dump my old Blu-ray copy one of these days.

Baldur's Gate 3 proved that the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, with some tweaks, make a brilliant framework for a videogame RPG. And yet Wizards of the Coast seems intent on making games that don't use that framework. Last year the publisher announced Invoke, one of its internal videogame studios, was making Warlock, a third-person action adventure that seems like an attempt at making their own God of War.

Warlock may well turn out to be a decent game, it's just odd that while I'm sure Wizards of the Coast will find a studio it trusts to make Baldur's Gate 4 eventually, it's not interested in making another game like it only without the words "Baldur's Gate" in the name in the meantime.

We still don't know much about Warlock, but WotC did use its D&D keynote at Gen Con to reveal that Maggie Robertson, who portrayed Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village and Orin the Red in Baldur's Gate 3, will be playing the protagonist's patron. Like every warlock, you'll get your powers from a pact with a supernatural benefactor, in this case the witch Tasha of Tasha's Hideous Laughter fame. When she's not cooking up level-1 control spells she's an archfey with her own domain, which I guess is what gives her the ability to hand out eldritch blasts.

Warlock also features Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica, who was the voice of EDI in the Mass Effect series, Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat X, and Sarah Kerrigan in StarCraft 2, as its protagonist. And that's basically all we know about Warlock so far. Its first actual gameplay footage will debut at Gamescom, which runs from August 26–30 in Cologne.

One of the greatest tragedies in Sony's live-service culls was the cancellation of The Last of Us Factions, the standalone sequel to the surprisingly great multiplayer mode from the original PS3 game. While Sony is still sending live-service games over the top despite the 180 in philosophy, this beloved multiplayer component is officially dead in the dirt. Well, as far as Naughty Dog and Sony are concerned.

Modder Speclizer thinks otherwise, as they've been working on a multiplayer mode for The Last of Us Part 2 on PC since the start of the year, which is planned to launch in September 2026. Just yesterday, the modder revealed that his project has "hit quite a big milestone." The mod can now handle proper 4v4 matches, where it was previously limited to 1v1s.

Speclizer regularly shows off what they've been working on via X. For example, it now also has a functioning leaderboard, and recently added the Seraphite Forest map to complement the Houses map previously shown off.

A major focus now is "exploring the methods of animation sync" to replicate the incredibly smooth, dynamic animations used in Naughty Dog's projects. As far as I understand it, in The Last of Us Part 2, only the player character has access to the full suite of animations—NPCs have different movements, which the modder realised when initially jerryrigging multiplayer functionality.

The mod creator also runs a YouTube series showing the fascinating behind-the-scenes in adding a fully-fledged multiplayer mode to a famously cinematic singleplayer game.

It's a very impressive mod, truth be told. You'd think a mod like this would be crude, but it's currently got a proper main menu with map selection and gear loadouts, a matchmaking system, and, of course, it's actually playable and looks exactly like what you'd expect from a multiplayer mode using the sequel's bones. I'd say it looks on track for September, and I'll be counting down the days.

Is it the standalone Last of Us Factions that Naughty Dog was working on? No, probably not, but Sony killed it and this is the next best thing.

Two weeks ago I came to you with news that Thief: The Dark Project (and its expanded version, Thief Gold) were getting a sort of pseudo-remaster courtesy of GOG, ahead of its official Nightdive remaster coming this winter. My sentiment at the time could be summed up as: hey, this is cool.

Well, I've now played a chunk of GOG's dolled-up Thief, and my sentiment can now be summed up as: hey, this is cool.

No, really. I've spent a bit of my workday going through Thief's opening Bafford's Manor mission, and I'm genuinely impressed by how well a technically un-remastered version of Thief holds up in the big '26.

It's not radical—you'll have to wait for Nightdive's effort for your proper bells and whistles—but it is remarkable. There's a lot to be said for having a version of Thief you can just boot up and play, in modern resolutions on modern systems, and with startlingly well-integrated controller support, of all things.

It's the gamepad stuff that most blows my hair back. Now, let's be clear, the role GOG plays in this is mostly that of curator and collator: gathering up fan mods, securing the relevant permissions, and bundling them up. But it made good choices with Thief—the inclusion of Peter Wright's Gamepad Mod turns the venerable classic into a game I could comfortably play on my TV.

It's no hacky add-in, Thief really feels seamless on an Xbox One controller, right down to the new radial menus that pop up to let you select your equipment, artfully slowing down the game to enable you to make your choice.

It's not just the gamepad, of course. Making NewDark—a fan patch for the game that's all but mandatory these days—part of the game's default installation is an obviously good move, letting the game run at modern widescreen resolutions out of the box like it was made for them in the first place. It all lets Thief's age get out of the way of your enjoyment of it, and solves the vital issue of 'I want to play this old game but can't be bothered faffing about with mods and fan patches'. Someone else has faffed for you.

Wrap it all up with GOG's other fixes and, well, it's the kind of treatment I wish all the classics could get—the easy inclusion of all the myriad essential fan-patches that accrue around old games, saving you from having to venture out and install them yourself. I mean, hey, I'd rather everything got the super-polished Nightdive treatment, but until we live in that world, this does just fine.

I've said it before and, in all likelihood, will say it again several more times: one of the best things about PC gaming is that modders can come in long after a game has been set aside by its developers, and proceed to clean up all the nagging bugs and imperfections that continue to linger.

Take, for example, MGSHDFix, which sprang into existence not longer after the initial launch of the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1 to spruce up MGS2 and 3 (plus MG1 and 2) ports that were, at the time, lackluster. Konami's done a lot of work on the games since then, and they're in a good state, but there's always work to be done. That's why MGSHDFix 4.0.0 released over the weekend.

It's a doozy. "With MGSHDFix 4.0.0, MGS2 is effectively restored back to its original pre-HD Collection state," writes author Afevis. "All of MGS2's graphical effects that Bluepoint left unimplemented (there was a ton of things that were literally left marked as 'BLUEPOINT TO-DO' still in the source code that are still untouched to today), have been fully restored (either through the game's own rendering system, or in some cases, through modern custom D3D11 recreations.)"

While Bluepoint's 2011 HD-ifications of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3—which are what the Master Collection versions are based on—are generally well-regarded, that doesn't mean there weren't some regressions from the original games. MGSHDFix de-regresses them. For instance, both games' depth of field rendering now actually works, and scales properly with modern resolutions.

MGS2 got most of the game-specific love here—a meaty list of PS2-era effects that were missing from the Bluepoint versions have been restored, like certain water effects, cutscene filters, motion trails, crossfade camera transitions, bloodstains on guards and more. It's a lot of stuff that you might not notice is missing, but which is certainly nice to have. And in games that have the kind of strong directorial vision that MGS does, it's sure nice to feel like you're getting the visual experience the original designers intended.

Anyway, if you want to check it out, you're best off downloading the 4.0.1 hotfix version that released yesterday. A little bad news if you run the mod using Luxtorpeda on Linux, like I do: Luxtorpeda is still pulling the 3.1.0 version of the mod at the time of writing, but I don't doubt that'll be fixed sharpish.

The era when it seemed like every second game was about zombies and the one where I played a lot of Flash games because they were free had a lot of overlap. Which is why I have fond memories of the hours I lost playing games like The Last Stand and Rebuild 2. I've just had a flashback to that time thanks to Yet Another Zombie Defense HD, which has had its price temporarily dropped by 100%.

It's a twin-stick shooter where you spend the nights shooting zombies and the days building defenses, erecting barricades and saving up to buy a turret and then realizing you also need to buy a gun to mount on top of that turret. There's local and online multiplayer, a bunch of weapons and traps to unlock and modes to play, and it sure does have the look and feel of an indie game from a bygone age—even if it was only released in 2017.

It's got a Steam Workshop too, where you can download skins to make your survivor look like Hatsune Miku, Garfield, Deadpool, or Shrek. Never change, Steam Workshop.

Yet Another Zombie Defense is available for free to promote the upcoming release of Yet Another Zombie Survivors, which is a bullet heaven game with the same aesthetic and an escalating horde that builds to giant werewolves, mummies, and other B-movie baddies. It's currently available in early access, and is scheduled to hit 1.0 on August 20.

I'm not big on the survivors-like genre, but I do like to turn my brain off and headshot zombies, which is why I was happy to snag Yet Another Zombie Defense on Steam where it's currently free until July 30.

We're still in the dark with regards to a GTA 6 PC release date, but the neon-filtered pre-order screen for Rockstar's next blockbuster on my PS5 looks too good to be true. I've racked up thousands of hours in GTA Online on PC over the last decade, but in the space between its arrival on desktop in 2015 and its launch on the PlayStation 3 two years prior (a statement that now reads like a typo), I must have clocked hours into the hundreds.

As detailed by PC Gamer's own Rory Norris last month, developer Rockstar insists at this late stage on describing GTA 6 as a "single-player experience"—but there's simply no way an evolution of the game's multiplayer offshoot isn't in the immediate offing, right?

Whatever form that takes, I fully expect to once more use its console iteration as a test bed for my inevitable platform switch when the time comes. But the overarching question at this point is: what guise will GTA Online 2.0 take upon arrival? And, perhaps more to the point, what do we even want that to look like?

Clear as mud

Without sounding too much like an old bastard, I suspect age will play an integral role here. I was 27 when GTA Online landed in late 2013, and I first migrated to Los Santos from the boundless plains of Minecraft. Now 40 years old, my desire to build and refine my own worlds has waned quite significantly, therefore I view Project Rome—the codename widely associated with Rockstar's reported push towards user-generated content and tools for the next era of GTA Online—through a lens of relative indifference.

I still think UGC is very cool—watching my kids grow and raze their own creations in Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox is a joy; as is engaging with other people's projects in games like Dreams. But, and I can only speak for myself here, I no longer believe I'm the primary target demographic for out-of-the-box creator-led experiences.

Which is, of course, totally fine. I'll still enjoy this parallel of GTA Online Part Two in the same way I thrive in Grand Theft Auto 5's roleplaying scene, despite having not once built an asset or script of my own in these spaces. Rockstar's acquisition of Cfx.re, coupled with the omnipresent Project Rome chatter in forums, suggests the studio is thinking beyond the traditional single/multiplayer split towards something much broader in Vice City, and the enduring success and appeal of FiveM has shown that millions of players are happy to spend countless hours in Los Santos without ever touching Rockstar's intended gameplay loop.

GTA 6 will never be, say, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but GTA Online 2.0 will almost certainly need to evolve in order to meet the expectations of modern players—not just in terms of what other games are doing right now, but also by virtue of GTA Online's growth beyond recognition over the last 13 years.

To the latter end, GTA Online remains the same high-stakes murder playground it has always been, but over time it has also inadvertently become, quite simply, a cool place to hang out. From its machinima scene to its stunting community, its Dr Dre update to its After Hours nightclub circuit, its nefarious business activities to its still booming roleplay spectrum and its many, many more subcultural identities, GTA Online has become as much of a platform as it has a tangent of a popular single-player video game.

I suspect that distinction is an important one as we enter the next chapter, but in any event, given that Rockstar has barely shown us what GTA 6 looks like in motion⁠—far less anything on the nuts and bolts of Online 2.0⁠—I cannot help but wonder. Can Rockstar support creativity without breaking the essence of what has allowed Grand Theft Auto to endure for the last 30 years?

More questions than answers

With a more user-generated focus comes a series of questions. Who in GTA Online 2.0 moderates that content? Who profits? Who owns maps? Can creators monetise? Do servers stay independent? How much freedom is too much? What about GTA Online as it applies to GTA 5? Will there be a tangible link between the two worlds? Or will Rockstar put the original GTA:O out to pasture, similar to Blizzard's handling of Overwatch 2 and its forerunner? Answers on the back of a faux Miami postcard, I guess.

What may be more important here isn't how Rockstar views GTA Online 2.0, but how it views itself on the cusp of a new and almost certainly redefining era. If GTA Online as it exists today has become a platform, then it's very possible Rockstar sees itself through a similar lens. Epic has Unreal Engine, for example; it has Fortnite and it has the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN).

Roblox, on the other hand, has Roblox Studio. Valve has Workshop. Build a Rocket Boy, despite Mindseye's well-documented troubles, still has big plans for Everywhere as a UGC-driven prospect. And Rockstar between times has purchased FiveM.

Should GTA Online 2.0 in turn become more like Fornite, then? Should it introduce a formalised creator economy and revenue sharing, a Discover tab that helps surface community creations, branded collaborations, and live events? I don't know, is the short answer. I've long felt a large-scale Grand Theft Auto-flavoured Coachella-style endeavour would be fantastic—akin to Fortnite's Travis Scott event of 2020—especially given the fact Rockstar has a host of world-class DJs at its disposal by way of its Circo Loco Record imprint.

Heists on a far grander scale would be much-welcomed too, continuing the steady evolution of the series-signature set-piece from GTA 4 through 5 and now 6, incorporating more players by way of bigger servers. And then some degree of seamless roleplay integration is something I'm certain would absolutely fly on PC, standing on the am-dram shoulders of everything that's come before in Los Santos and Blaine County.

These are but a few things I personally would love to see, but with so much of the basics still unknown, it is, unfortunately, impossible to think too hard on big picture stuff. The next iteration of GTA Online enters a very different world from its predecessor, and with so many well-established live-service platforms already in operation, Rockstar finds itself in relatively unfamiliar territory and under a degree of unfamiliar pressure.

Without blowing smoke up the developer's backside, though, if anyone can pull off such a feat, it's surely them. The fact that Rockstar has shown us absolutely nothing to this end concerns me ever-so-slightly—but I guess the arrival of the series' first single-player venture in close to a decade-and-a-half will serve as a pretty good distraction from what may or may not lie ahead. And that grace period between GTA 6's imminent console launch and its long-awaited arrival on PC gives Rockstar plenty of time to sort itself out with an eye on our platform of choice.

From the archives: This story originally ran in PC Gamer #321 (UK, Sep. 2018). The review appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation.

It’s a damn crime that no game ripped off Red Faction: Guerrilla’s Geo-mod destruction feature. You take a hammer and you use it to smash out a panel of a wall and break through a pillar. Smash out a few more walls and maybe the building creaks. A few more whacks of the hammer later and the whole thing comes down, perhaps with you inside. And hey, maybe it knocks through another building on the way down. It’s still amazing to watch.

Guerrilla does this one thing really well. It’s an otherwise uninspired open world game, with okay driving, unimpressive shooting and a boring story. Hell, Mars doesn’t even look that nice, because it’s Mars. But knocking down buildings in an open world is more than enough to carry this game.

You’ll crash a jeep through a base. You’ll detonate mines and blow up a bridge, which will then collapse on top of an enemy settlement. You’ll melt the beams of a tower and watch it fall over. This destruction felt great in 2009, and it still feels good now.

In this Re-Mars-tered edition, which is free for owners of the Steam version, THQ Nordic touts reworked textures among other improvements, along with better shadows, lighting, a shader and postprocessing rework, and native 4K support.

For a freebie, it seems pretty good after four hours or so. I can’t say I notice vast visual improvements, but environmental textures like rocks and the ground look a little sharper. The lighting is nice, too, but it’s not a vast upgrade.

To anyone picking this up for the first time, I recommend focusing on the campaign. That’s where the biggest destructive opportunities are, like a huge bridge and a massive tower, which take meticulous use of the object-melting nano rifle and rocket launcher to bring down.

You’ll wait a while to unlock all the really good toys, but the singleplayer will give you plenty to blow up along the way, as well as a dull story about miners rebelling against an army that’s a bit like a boring version of Firefly. The big destructive opportunities in this campaign need to be seen, though—I still talk about them with friends years later.

I’m not in the mood for finishing the campaign these days after doing it twice before, but that’s where the game’s Wrecking Crew mode comes in. It’s basically a score attack that gives you a quick dose of the game’s destructive physics in a variety of settings.

You pick a loadout, set the parameters, like time limits and how easily the buildings fall, then knock them down as quickly as possible. It makes a great pass-the-pad party game, and there’s a challenge mode with leaderboards, too.

No imitators

It’s weird that no one else made a game like Guerrilla after its release. Destruction features have shown up in everything from Battlefield to Minecraft to Just Cause, but Volition’s game still offers something that no other game does. It’s the idea of blowing each building up like it’s a puzzle, efficiently using your arsenal so it collapses in the most satisfying way possible.

It might’ve been Red Faction’s sparse Mars setting that made Guerrilla work in the first place. It’s noticeable that all the best buildings are far away from one another, and it probably wouldn’t have been possible for Volition to replicate the Geo-mod system in the vast cities of Saints Row. But that is the type of open world game I’ve always wanted to play, where you can manipulate the environment.

We’re instead in an age of open world games packed with busywork and towers to climb. I like those, too, but Guerrilla shows open worlds and destructible buildings are a perfect match.

Even old THQ didn’t seem to know why Guerrilla was good. Volition followed this up with Armageddon in 2011, a bad sequel that took us away from big open setpieces to the tedious, more linear underground. Still, if THQ Nordic is bringing Darksiders back for another shot, perhaps Red Faction will get its chance again, too. I just wish its influence, and its collapsing buildings, had carried a little further.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, a game with a title that feels like it ought to have a colon or an em dash somewhere in there, is finally here and it's selling like whatever the nautical equivalent of hotcakes is. Hardtack, I guess. Not only did it sell 2 million copies in a single day, a recent financial report includes Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot saying "Two weeks in, the title has already exceeded the annual expectations we had."

"The strong launch of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced in early July by Vantage Studios is an encouraging proof point," he said. "The game is the highest-rated Assassin's Creed title since the original Black Flag, and we are very pleased with the praise it received from players … I would like to warmly thank the teams whose talent and dedication brought it to life."

Guillemot's thanks come at an interesting time, given that nearly a third of Ubisoft Barcelona was laid off just weeks ago, triggering a labor strike. This was part of a larger wave of layoffs which affected hundreds of workers. As it has done with a variety of Ubisoft games, Ubisoft Barcelona supported the development of Black Flag Resynced and "did all the underwater levels" as tech and gameplay animator Manel Cota posted on X back then.

Regardless, the ludicrous sales Black Flag Resynced is enjoying seem like a signal that the original game's reputation is strong enough to carry this remake through potential turnoffs for prospective players, such as the day one DLC, simplified swordfights, and in-game shop. In his review, PC Gamer's Morgan Park called the game "a well-made, but inessential remake that loses more than it gains."

If you've been hitting the high seas yourself, check out our guide on how to see all the new stuff—if not, the original is there and as good as ever.

I still remember the long ritual of installing World of Warcraft to my parents' laptop as a young'un, mystified by the sheer number of discs it took to squeeze the game onto a hard drive.

The more discs a game took to install, the better it must be, I figured—child me would be aghast at the contemporary world, where game boxes come with mere codes inside and PlayStation is killing off disc production. That last factoid has triggered commentary all over the industry and beyond, with everyone from Ubisoft's Yves Guillemot and French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon weighing in.

Speaking to IGN, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser gave his own commentary on the physical vs. digital debate with a multifaceted answer. "I don't know that I care. If people want that, I think companies should provide it," he said.

"But I don't know that I personally care. And I also think the ability to update games, as critical as people are of digital releases, the ability to update and fix problems in games has been really useful for the quality of games." Notably, both physical and downloadable patches existed before digital distribution became the rule. Magazines like the superlative PC Gamer would even help distribute them!

Grand Theft Auto writer Jeffrey Crawford "Lazlow" Jones, who was with Houser for the interview, weighed in as well. "I mean, we all have that sort of feeling of when you get that copy and you put the disc on the console, but I also have to say, I really like being at the airport and going, 'oh cool, I can download some quick games to my Steam Deck for this 12-hour flight."

Jones went on to talk about how tangibility still has its perks even as a creator: "[It's] just really fulfilling to have a physical thing you can say, 'Look, we made a thing.'" Houser followed up, "I love physical media. I think everyone does, you know." It's worth noting that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be both a digital-only game and console-exclusive at launch.

One aspect of Helldivers 2 I've repeatedly lamented is how many of its new toys are locked away inside Warbonds, with too few new weapons, equipment and stratagems unlockable through regular play. Hence, it's worth giving Arrowhead credit when they do let you unlock a new toy through spending requisition slips and nothing else. Such is the case with the M-103 Supply FRV, which will become available for all Helldivers to unlock in October.

The Supply FRV is one of three variants of Helldivers 2's offroad truck. The vanilla FRV is equipped with a mounted machinegun, while the Incinerator FRV swaps that out for a flamethrower. The Supply FRV comes equipped with both an automated turret and a supply rack at the rear of the vehicle, good for eight full restocks of Helldiver ammo and equipment.

The Supply FRV was originally made available as a stratagem to players who participated in June's "Census Thunder" campaign, which saw players battling hordes of Illuminate 'Voteless' spewing from voids opening up across the galaxy. Now though, Arrowhead has decided to roll the vehicle out to all Helldivers 2 players—albeit with a significant delay. In a Steam post, Arrowhead said that players who earned the FRV in June had "enabled the rest of your comrades in arms to access this equipment in October," adding that "a rising tide of firepower lifts all divers".

The Supply FRV is the first stratagem reward to derive from Arrowhead's new galactic campaign system, which replaced the previous system of running objectives in June. Introduced to give players a better chance of taking part in the shooter's collective objectives, galactic campaigns are part of a much broader overhaul that Arrowhead committed to earlier this year, following growing player dissatisfaction with the live-service shooter.

The second galactic campaign—Lightning Intercept—is currently underway, with players attempting to destroy an Automaton orbital platform. We don't know what the next campaign will be, but Arrowhead has said that a Warhammer 40,000 themed Warbond will be revealed on July 30, one of the few video game crossovers that I'm actually intrigued by.

The late '90s was a wildly exciting time in the internet's history, one that witnessed a Cambrian explosion in websites as users crawled out of BBS forums and began forming dedicated webpages of their own. PC gaming coverage was no different. There were entire websites dedicated to covering individual games, not least the Planet network operated by GameSpy. If there was a PC game that you were looking forward to, chances are there was a website somewhere out there waiting to cover it.

Today, most of those websites are long dead, the victims of over-ambition, the brutal realities of the modern internet, or good old fashioned link rot. But holed up on some dusty server in the internet's Outer Rim, one crazy old hermit clings on to the past.

A New Hope

The Massassi Temple is a community website dedicated to Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, which has been running consistently since it was launched in early 1998. The site was created by Brian E. Lozier, who is also the site's current owner and administrator.

Lozier became a fan of PC gaming playing first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. But Lozier's newfound hobby was quickly interrupted when he joined the United States Air Force, working at what he describes as a "secure facility" as a computer operator.

If this sounds thrillingly clandestine, Lozier stresses it was anything but. "It was really boring," he points out. "We were just having to wait for stuff to happen and then respond to it. Most of the people who did that job with me watched cable TV for hours."

It was around this time that Lozier discovered Star Wars: Dark Forces, which, as a huge Star Wars fan, reignited his desire to play PC games. "I had to buy a new computer just to play it," he says. As it turned out, Dark Forces wasn't quite the dream game he'd hoped for. But when Dark Forces 2 came out two years later, that was another matter.

"I thought it was the most amazing thing ever, and I started watching or reading other websites," he says. "There was a site called jediknight.net and they were saying 'Hey, there's people working on the level editor so you can make your own maps for this thing.' I was blown away."

Lozier began making Jedi Knight maps in his spare time. But he found learning how to use the level editor difficult. "The way the levels are constructed was really different than anything my mind could think of." Hence, he decided to write some tutorials to lessen the growing pains of other wannabe Jedi Knight modders. Since he needed somewhere to host the tutorials, he decided to build his own website.

This also proved more of a challenge than Lozier anticipated. "I had to learn programming, and I had told myself earlier in my life that I was never going to be a programmer," he explains. "[But] then it turns out I wanted to make something … so I learned it out of books."

The secure facility Lozier worked in understandably did not allow people to bring in external computers. So Lozier would write the code for The Massassi Temple on pencil and paper during work downtime, then take it home and test it on his computer. Between designing the site and writing the tutorials he planned to host on the site, the process took a couple of months. "Right now it looks really close to what it did back in 1998."

The Force Awakens

The Massassi Temple launched in 1998, with Lozier announcing the site on jediknight.net. The news spread across other sites like Blues News, Voodoo Extreme, and Telefragged, which also indirectly hosted the site at one point.

It wasn't long before people started showing up, keen to benefit from Lozier's tutorials. "Our most popular section in the early days, especially, was the message boards, where people would go in and ask questions. 'How do I do this? How do I make this type of feature in my level? How do I use the programming language?'"

Initially, Lozier would respond to every inquiry personally, while also posting the latest Jedi Knight-related news. But the site quickly grew to the point where its community became self-perpetuating. "Within a couple of months, there were more people answering the questions that I had no idea how to answer," he says. "It felt really good to see people getting use out of it and being inspired."

But the site's popularity was only beginning. Over the next couple of years, the number of visitors grew, and grew. "In the late '90s and early 2000s, the site was getting millions and millions of visitors," Lozier says. "We were running ads, we were making multiple thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue."

Much of this cash went on operating costs. The server alone, which had a cutting-edge 300-megahertz processor, cost $1,000 per month to lease. "It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time that was the state of the art, because none of the shared hosting could keep up with us, right? We would just bog down their servers."

By the time Lozier left The Air Force, The Massassi Temple was bringing in more money than his military salary. Lozier realised a career might be in the making. "I left the Air Force thinking 'Hey, I can do this.'"

Fallen Order

With The Massassi Temple operating smoothly, Lozier began setting up websites about other games that were tangentially related to Jedi Knight. "The team who made Jedi Knight split apart, and some of them started their own game company called Nihilistic Software. They made a Vampire: The Masquerade game that we were all excited about."

As such, Lozier set up Planet Vampire in association with GameSpy, alongside several other Planet sites. He also launched websites dedicated to Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, which was built with the same engine as Jedi Knight, and a Serious Sam site for which he created level editor tutorials. "That did really well actually. In Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, I was so surprised—I beat the game, and it was rolling the credits, and my name was on there."

Best of all, Lozier's association with GameSpy meant he got to see the games industry in action. "When I was working on Planet Vampire and some other Planet sites, IGN and GameSpy sent a bunch of us to E3 multiple times in a row," he says. "I got to meet John Romero, I got to meet people working on the later Quake and Doom games … it was just amazing."

But even as Lozier's website empire blossomed, the cracks were beginning to show. Several of the games Lozier had established websites for flopped, which meant the websites did too. "Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption, we were so excited about it, but then once the game came out it didn't get very good reviews and people had a hard time playing it," he says. The Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine site also struggled. "At the last minute we found out [LucasArts] weren't going to allow mods."

Then, in early 2000, the dotcom bubble burst, and the shockwave ripped through Lozier's collection of websites. "All the money that was flowing around disappeared," he says. "We saw CPMs drop to tiny pennies, fractions of a cent, where you had to get hundreds of millions of hits to make any decent money."

One by one, the sites Lozier built began to shut down, and he realised the floor was collapsing beneath him. "I was like 'OK, I'm not gonna make money with this. I need to feed my family," he says. Lozier handed control of the site over to someone else, got a job as a software developer, and left The Massassi Temple to its fate. "That was one of the times where I let it go."

Return of the Jedi

Yet where every other site Lozier created died, The Massassi Temple kept on going. Lozier believes this is down to the dedication of its community. "The site wouldn't exist without all the people that visit and that are on our Discord and that are sharing and working on stuff."

And over the years, The Massassi Temple has built up a vast array of additional Jedi Knight adventures. This includes hundreds of mods and more than a thousand multiplayer maps. Some of these are wildly ambitious, including JK Gunrunners, a total conversion mod that transforms Jedi Knight into a modern day roleplaying game, featuring vehicles and racing. "We did level contests over the years where people would submit maps to include in the big multiplayer pack," Lozier says.

Alongside the maps and mods it hosts, The Massassi Temple is also a key nexus for ongoing Jedi Knight support. Many of the developers involved with OpenJKDF2—an open source reimplementation for Jedi Knight—hang out in The Massassi Temple's Discord channel. The site's tendrils have also reached out into broader game development. "We've got a couple people who are active AAA game developers in our Discord," Lozier says, while David Wehle, developer of The First Tree and the upcoming horror game We Harvest Shadows, cut his teeth making mods for Jedi Knight.

Thanks to its community, Jedi Knight is chugging along nicely. Nonetheless, Lozier says the community would be happy to see something bring this aged FPS back into the limelight, such as a Nightdive-style remaster similar to what the studio did with Star Wars: Dark Forces. "I think we would all really appreciate an updated version, especially if it supports all the old mods that still exist," he says. "I hope they make an easier way to play multiplayer. That would be the absolute best thing to keep the community alive and keep the game alive for longer."

Survivor

Lozier has stepped away from The Massassi Temple several times over the years. But he has never fully been able to let it go, intervening on several occasions when the site looked likely to shut down. The last time he took the site over was "seven or eight" years ago. "I'm sort of stubborn, and I have a hard time letting go," he says.

Today, The Massassi Temple is but a small corner of the internet. "Traffic is lower and lower every year now," Lozier says. As such, he has begun to think about what happens if the site should shut down, and how to preserve both the site and its contents for the future.

The site's code is already available open source on GitHub, so the next stage is to preserve the community's creations. "I want to have a permanent archive of all the levels, maps, and mods that people have made over the years that are hosted by us," he concludes. "It's no skin off my back, like the community made the site … the main content that everybody cares about was not made by me."

Lozier has no regrets about how things panned out with his website career. "I taught myself programming as a hobby in this dark room in the Air Force to make this website, and I've been a software engineer since then as my full-time job." That said, he does wonder whether something was lost in the post-dotcom era of the internet, where traffic has been increasingly funnelled toward a small handful of megasites:

"Back then, if you wanted to know about snowboarding, you went to a snowboarding website. If you wanted to go to message boards about a videogame, you searched up the videogame and went to the websites," he says. "Nowadays, the entire internet has transferred to these big corporations. A lot of the Jedi Knight community and snowboarding communities are now on Reddit or Facebook or whatever, so you don't have an individual identity for your Jedi Knight playing versus your snowboarding."

Then again, he thinks the dotcom crash was, in the long run, a good thing for The Massassi Temple specifically. "It was a hobby that turned into something commercial, and we lost something there, because I was focussed on more sites, getting more impressions, showing more ads, making more money," he says. "When the dotcom bubble burst, and all those ad dollars dried up, it transitioned almost immediately back into a hobby, and that's a net positive for the community, because I don't have to worry if I don't update it for a year, it's still there. It's still alive.

As a series, Grand Theft Auto has spent decades cycling between the same three locations, with each variation of Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas being more detailed than the last. But players haven't been able to explore all three locations at once since the release of the original.

Until now. A modder has done what Grand Theft Auto hasn't since 1997, creating a mod that lets players travel instantaneously between the settings of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. And it's all thanks to that most underutilised of game technologies—portals.

Veteran Grand Theft Auto tinkerer DryxioGTA posted a video of the mod—which is still in development and doesn't seem to have a proper name yet—on YouTube (via GamesRadar) The clip shows the player travelling between three brightly coloured portals located in San Andreas' Grove Street. Walking through each portal transports the player instantly to the relevant game and location, switching to the appropriate player character in the process.

DryxioGTA provided some technical details in the video's comments. He confirmed that all three games are running "inside the same process, sharing one Direct 3D device" and that "each portal is a live GPU texture" with the relevant game "actually running behind it, it's not a video or a captured window". DryxioGTA also says that the three worlds maintain their own saves, missions, and settings, and that they continue to run the world state, including traffic and physics, in real time.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the mod is that the portals don't just let the player travel between cities, they also allow for interactions between those cities. DryxioGTA demonstrates this by shooting through a portal, gunning down several civilians. This causes peds in his current world to attack him and triggers a wanted rating.

It's seriously impressive work, and the GTA fans responding in the video's comments are clearly bowled over. "The fact that you can shoot the peds and other objects through the portals is just beyond unimaginably insane," writes li_B4shar_il, while ross3695_basedhax observes that "We got inter-GTA portals before GTA 6."

In fairness, it's not that long before Grand Theft Auto 6. Rockstar's hugely anticipated sequel is due to land in November, and that fact alone has already had a substantial impact on gaming. Every other developer is scurrying to get out of the way of Rockstar's behemoth, resulting in the next three months being crowded with dozens of highly anticipated launches.

Despite a poor reception, weak sales, and losing publisher IO Interactive, developer Build a Rocket Boy hasn't given up on its open world shooter MindsEye. Which might be commendable, were it not for the multiple rounds of layoffs, the wild conspiracy theories emanating from its executives, and allegations from former workers that spy tech was covertly installed on their machines.

But whatever's going on in and around the studio, MindsEye itself is still receiving updates. And the most recent update adds quite a lot of stuff, though whether it's stuff everybody wants is another matter.

Described as "one of the biggest yet" by BARB in a Steam post, Update 8 brings a major new component to MindsEye—multiplayer. Specifically, it adds a team-based mode called "grenade football", in which players apparently "swap their boots for launchers and bring the firepower to the pitch."

Contrary to what this implies, grenade football participants do not in fact wear the launchers on their feet (though that would arguably make for a more interesting spectacle). Instead, grenade football is basically Rocket League without the cars, with players in red or blue jumpsuits running around a pitch blasting a giant ball at each other's nets.

There's a video of grenade football in action below. Like so much else about MindsEye (certainly post-launch MindsEye) it looks very basic and rough around the edges. The ball, which is far too large to actually fit in the launchers, just kind of disappears into them when a player collects it, so reading where the ball is and who currently possesses it is tricky.

There's also the question of who you're going to play Grenade Football with. At the time of writing, MindsEye had attracted a peak of 36 concurrent players in the previous 24 hours. Which I suppose is enough to get a game or two of Grenade Football going—just. But if you are interested in checking it out, I'd recommend doing so promptly.

In short, I don't think the developers of Rematch have much to worry about. But that isn't everything the update adds. Alongside the addition of multiplayer, the update also introduces some extra racing circuits, a raft of social features to help players interact across the game, and further improvements to the singleplayer.

These are what I'm most intrigued by. The update reworks numerous elements of the vanilla game. Improvements include better enemy physics when being hit by explosions, difficulty adjustments to various missions, a general overhaul to AI pathing and behaviour, improved vehicle handling, and animation transitions between moving, combat, and interactions.

I couldn't care less about all the clearly doomed multiplayer and metaverse stuff BARB seems hellbent on adding. But I would like it if the basic campaign was half-decent to play. Aside from Grand Theft Auto 6 looming over the horizon, there aren't many games of this ilk being made anymore.

Hence, while the launch version of MindsEye was undeniably terrible, I've no objection to seeing it improved. There are some questions over how BARB is attempting to improve MindsEye, however. Earlier this month, former MindsEye developers protested at a fan event being held at the studio in the wake of yet more layoffs and the secret surveillance scandal, as the Independent Workers of Great Britain Union claimed that BARB was "handing over work, both paid and unpaid, from the BARB workforce to the BARB fanbase, during a game sector job crisis."

Bad news for anyone looking forward to playing the new Tomb Raider game Catalyst next year: It's not going to be out until the year after that.

Word of the delay came from Amazon Gaming chief Jeffrey Gattis during an interview with The Game Business. Talking about Amazon's game investment strategy, Gattis said the company is into pretty much everything, "from what we call game night games, which are those phone-as-a-controller games, which I think of as single-A games that are in the single millions of dollars to develop, all the way up to triple-A."

Then, to provide an example of how Amazon remains committed to big-time, he dropped the news: "We've announced the two Tomb Raider titles—Atlantis comes February 12^th of next year and then we'll follow on in 2028 with the next one."

Tomb Raider: Catalyst hadn't locked in a hard release date, but when it was announced at The Game Awards in 2025 it was set for launch in 2027.

It's possible that Gattis merely got his years or games mixed up: I still occasionally do the 'what year is it?' Jumanji meme in real life when my wandering mind is suddenly snapped back to reality by someone asking if I've finished filling out the form.

But this strikes me as unlikely, for two reasons. One, saying "2028" specifically is very different from rolling with "next year" when you're not completely sure what year it is right now.

Two, and more to the point, Tomb Raider: Catalyst developer Crystal Dynamics appears to be in a bit of disarray. In March, the studio conducted its fourth round of layoffs in 12 months, and studio leadership—not just at CD, but anywhere that's taken a big hit—may say that cutting to the bone isn't going to impact ongoing projects, but at some point that's probably just not so, as presumably those laid off people served a function that they're not around to handle anymore. Even if you're only talking about the psychological toll that constant layoffs take on those who remain, that's going to have an impact.

To be sure, I've reached out to Amazon to ask if the 2028 target as expressed by Gattis is correct, and will update if I receive a reply. Until then, though, I'd suggest making other plans to occupy your gaming time in '27.

I fulfilled a childhood ambition over the past week: I finally got the notoriously elusive Big Boss rating at the end of Metal Gear Solid 1, a feat I've simultaneously been drawn toward and terrified by ever since I first played the game on my PS1 in 1998. How did I do it? Stick-to-itiveness, gumption, and raw skill.

Also, cheating. I played the much easier Japanese version of the game and exploited a couple of speedrunning skips in order to hasten my progress. Hey, it counts.

Anyway, my challenge to you, reader, is to accomplish the same thing in the ongoing free-to-play period for Metal Gear Solid 1 on Steam, which expires Monday, July 27 at 10 am EDT / 1 pm PDT / 6 pm BST. You should probably do it the non-cheating way. It was cool when I did it, but for you? A bad look. I don't make the rules.

If you'd like to know why a three-year-old re-release of a 28-year-old game is currently running a free-to-play trial thing, I have two answers for you. The first: the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 2—which finally frees Metal Gear Solid 4 from its PS3 prison—is due out on August 27, and this is a way to gin up some MGS hype. The second: Konami is a baffling company that operates according to no law but its own.

If you shied away from Vol 1 of the MGS Master Collection for the state it was in at release, I have good news: it is much better now. All three MGS games in the collection have received significant patches since its lackluster opening day, and MGS1 in particular now looks and feels a lot better, thanks to the ability to switch on higher-resolution rendering and actually functional analogue controls.

And if you still want to sand down the remaining rough edges, I recommend the MGSM2Fix mod, (which can be easily installed via Luxtorpeda if you're playing on Steam Deck or desktop Linux).