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

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

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

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

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

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

Risky business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Midnight Snack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Electronic Arts now officially owned by Saudi Arabia, CEO Andrew Wilson has made some changes at the top, appointing former EA Sports president Cam Weber as president and chief studios officer, and former "chief experiences officer" David Tinson—basically the top marketing and communications role—as president and chief operating officer.

The announcement of the promotions came in a message initially shared with employees that was presumably meant to be reassuring, but lands mostly as just empty pap. After waxing poetic about the company's long and eventful history, Wilson said EA is "entering one of the most exciting and transformative moments our industry has ever seen."

"Every era of innovation expands what's possible," Wilson wrote. "New technologies open new doors, but it is the creativity, ingenuity and courage of our teams that transform possibilities into unforgettable experiences. At EA, we've always believed our greatest opportunity is to create what others haven't yet imagined. This is the spirit that has guided us for more than four decades, and it will continue to shape our future."

It's the kind of wordy, meaningless positivity usually reserved for shareholder calls (when EA had those), but vaguely familiar to my reading, too: A slightly reworded take on the increasingly common promise that yes, we're using AI for game development, but it's all driven by human creativity.

AI does seem likely to feature largely in EA's future: Silver Lake CEO and managing partner Egon Durban said the new owners will "invest heavily in EA’s growth, including what AI can do to enhance game development and player experience," and less cheerfully, there's also an expectation of massive layoffs to follow as EA looks to manage the billions in debt it's taken on to finance this deal.

The promotion of Weber and Tinson was similarly exuberant: Wilson said EA will need "bold creativity and exceptional execution" as it moves into its next phase, but fortunately it has "a deeply experienced leadership team across the company."

I think it's notable that Weber was previously the head of EA Sports. Some observers, including former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes, have speculated that EA's takeover will leave it tightly focused on its dominant franchises—EA Sports FC and Battlefield, basically—to the exclusion of smaller-scale fare. Without wanting to read too much into it, putting the top EA Sports guy in charge of all EA studios can pretty easily be seen as movement in that direction.

Electronic Arts has officially now passed into the hands of Saudi Arabia—specifically, the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, as well as firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. It is with a grim lack of surprise that I now inform you that this will, reportedly, involve a lot of layoffs.

The news comes courtesy of Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who posted to Bluesky: "EA officially goes private tonight, meaning: EA will no longer trade on the NASDAQ for the first time in 36 years, all stockholders of EA (including many employees) will receive $210/share, [and] EA will take on $18 billion (!) in debt, putting it on the hook to pay ~$1.8 billion/year in interest.

"EA's annual Ebitda is around $1.5 billion, which should be enough to service the interest payments. But the publisher has told debt investors that it will cut $700 million in annual costs including $170 million in 'organizational efficiencies,' per Bloomberg. In other words: mass layoffs."

This is, technically, a called shot—but it's a called shot in the sense of saying that a giant boulder rolling down a hill is probably going to flatten the sand castle it's headed towards. Maybe it hits a pebble and jolts out of the way at the last second—maybe $700 million in annual costs will be cut through, I don't know, pragmatic restructuring or executives reducing their salaries. Perhaps pigs shall fly. Anything's possible.

But given the state of the current industry, I'm inclined to agree with Schreier here. Large-scale acquisitions like this typically result in mass layoffs and studio closures, as was the case with Microsoft's $68.7 billion purchase of Blizzard, which resulted in a bloodbath of 1,900 laid-off employees across the company and Xbox.

That ugly trend has continued unabated: Microsoft's recent 'reset' saw 1,600 layoffs, with 1,600 more to come by 2027, Ubisoft has continued to make deep cuts as it struggles to stay alive, and yes, EA has already made significant layoffs of its own ahead of the acquisition—and that's just the past couple months.

There's a huge flood of talent, both institutional and new, that's now being dropped into a hiring pool already thousands strong—adding what's bound to be a rash of layoffs from EA to that pile is bound to be grim tidings.

All of this comes in spite of the fact that the wider industry is as big and as profitable as it always has been, with global games revenue surpassing $200 billion in 2025. Where's all that money going? Clearly not to the people making the things, that's for sure.

And now it's official: Electronic Arts, one of the most storied publishers in videogame history, has been fully acquired by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. EA said in a press release that the takeover "brings long-term capital, sector expertise, and strategic support" to the company, which is now "positioned to accelerate creativity and innovation to shape the future of entertainment."

"This moment recognizes the extraordinary people whose creativity, ambition and passion have made EA one of the world's leading interactive entertainment companies," Electronic Arts CEO and chairman Andrew Wilson said in a statement.

"We're entering this next chapter from a position of strength with partners who share our vision and ambition. Together, we'll invest boldly, accelerate innovation, and build the next generation of games and experiences for the hundreds of millions of players and fans who inspire us every day."

While EA's new ownership is nominally a consortium, the deal leaves Saudi Arabia firmly in control of the company, with an ownership stake of 93.4%. That's caused some concern among observers who worry that the kingdom's notorious repression of human rights, particularly among women and the LGBTQ+ community, leave the company's future support for inclusive games like The Sims—or anything that's not "guns and football," as former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes put it—in jeopardy.

Wilson has previously said the company's values will "remain unchanged" under its new owners, but Saudi Arabia hasn't been shy about using videogames to sportswash its reputation in the past, and I see little reason to expect that to change now that it has full control of one of the world's biggest and best-known game publishers.

Still, money talks, as the saying goes, and an awful lot of it was thrown around in this deal. Saudi Arabia's purchase of EA is the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history, which imposes significant financial risks alongside all the moral ones. No one really knows what to expect from EA going forward, but—again, invoking Weekes—it does seem that anything not EA Sports FC or Battlefield is subject to at least some uncertainty.

The specter of an increased focus on AI has also loomed over this deal, as EA has spent the last year and change laying off game devs—a move possibly aimed at helping lighten the $20 billion debt load EA has taken on to finance the deal. That didn't stop the company from giving Wilson $38 million for a year of whatever he does, though—$8 million more than he got last year.

In any event, Silver Lake CEO and managing partner Egon Durban effectively confirmed that EA is indeed looking to AI as the future. "EA’s franchises are some of the most beloved in entertainment, combining exceptional creative talent with a relentless focus on players," Durban said. "As long-term investors in technology, we admire how EA’s innovation fuels imagination and human connection.

"We’re proud to join with PIF and Affinity Partners to invest heavily in EA’s growth, including what AI can do to enhance game development and player experience, and excited to partner with Andrew and the EA team as they raise the bar for fans everywhere."

And yes, Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US president Donald Trump and owner of Affinity Partners, had similarly upbeat comments on the whole thing: "EA has created stories, characters, and communities that have become part of everyday life for hundreds of millions of people. We're excited to support the company as it continues to reach new audiences, inspire the next generation of creators, and expand the ways people around the world connect through play."

While a minority player on the financial side, Kushner was presumably key in getting the deal done: Along with being Trump's son-in-law, he has significant financial ties with Saudi Arabia through the PIF's $2 billion investment in Affinity Partners. Kushner is also a US diplomatic envoy to the Middle East.

With the purchase complete, Electronic Arts will be delisted from the NASDAQ.

Bad news for anyone holding out hope that some power-on-high would swoop in and put a halt to Saudi Arabia's takeover of Electronic Arts: A new Form 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission says the deal has green lights across the board, and will be done next week.

More formally, "as of July 30, 2026, all regulatory approvals required to complete the Merger have been obtained," the filing states. "Electronic Arts currently expects the Merger to close on or about the close of trading on August 4, 2026. Completion of the Merger remains subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the remaining customary closing conditions set forth in the Merger Agreement."

Realistically, I don't think anyone expected that this proposed takeover by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund would run into too many obstacles. The Federal Trade Commission fought like hell when Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, and ultimately lost; the PIF takeover of EA seems far less likely to trigger concerns about competition, because it's not a merger of two game makers into one bigger game maker, but rather a change in ownership.

Which isn't to say it's without risk. The acquisition will take EA private, leaving it—within regulatory limits—subject to the whims of its new owner. In this case, that's effectively Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, chair of the Public Investment Fund, and credibly accused mastermind of the 2018 murder of journalist and Saudi regime critic Jamal Khashoggi.

The impact of that change is already being felt. Some of the biggest Sims 4 content creators quit EA's creator network in 2025 over the buyout; one, Lilsimsie, wrote that "the values represented by the people acquiring EA are fundamentally at odds with what I stand for and support," presumably a reference to the Saudi kingdom's ongoing repression of women and the LGBTQ+ community. Former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes expressed similar concerns, predicting that "guns and football" games will be fine, but that "gay stuff" and "politics [they're] not going to like" are going to fall by the wayside.

Apart from that, the deal presents no small amount of risk to EA itself. The $55 billion deal is the largest leveraged buyout in history, and financing it will leave EA saddled with $20 billion in debt. That's a huge burden it will have to pay off. In similar situations, we've seen companies aggressively cut costs, paring themselves to the bone and casting aside anything but the most proven moneymakers. In EA's case, those moneymakers would be Battlefield and EA FC—the "guns and football" invoked by Weekes.

"The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has failed the American consumer," Players Alliance HQ, which has organized prior demonstrations against the takeover, said in a statement. "By approving this unprecedented and corrupt $55 billion acquisition, private equity and the Saudi PIF gains a dangerous foothold in the videogame industry, which now threatens the affordability and freedom of creativity deeply critical to the success of gaming." The group said it intends to continue its efforts "to hold EA to account and prevent their anti-consumer practices from spreading across the industry.”

A serious challenge to the takeover was never in the cards. One of the minority backers of the takeover is Affinity Partners, an investment company owned by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US president Donald Trump, and Trump is also tight with bin Salman. The current chair of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, is also a very vocal Trump supporter.

Remember when Battlefield 6 dropped in 2025 and it was a big hit, selling seven million copies in three days and becoming the first Battlefield game to outsell a competing Call of Duty? And then Electronic Arts rewarded the people who made it by laying off an undisclosed number of them? And also laid off the entire team working on an all-new, more story-focused game in the series?

I remind you of all this—and, since we're on the topic, of former Dragon Age boss Mark Darrah's recent characterization of the company as "a hedge fund with a videogame hobby"—because EA released its Form 10-K/A SEC filing yesterday, revealing among other things that CEO Andrew Wilson's "total compensation" for the company's 2026 fiscal year was $38,649,984, an $8 million increase over his 2025 pay driven in no small part by the success of Battlefield 6.

There are numerous factors involved in EA's decision to give over $38 million to Wilson for a single year of doing whatever it is he does, of course, but "business performance" is surely one of the big ones. And that category is led by Battlefield, which met "all milestones for a high-quality launch," including "positive critical reviews and stable services and gameplay."

"The highly successful Battlefield launch" warrants a second mention, alongside the move to sell the company to Saudi Arabia, in a separate category regarding the company's management "in an unpredictable external environment."

Big ups to Battlefield 6, then, and also to Wilson's pay package. His base salary, for the record, was 'only' $1.3 million, the same as 2025, but the bonuses and bonus modifiers add up right quick.

Here's a breakdown of the pay structure for Wilson and the other big dogs at EA, which also illustrates how his total pay shot up by $13 million in two years, even though his base salary hasn't budged.

There's a notable bump in Wilson's "other compensation," from $678,858 in 2025 to nearly $2.4 million in 2026. This, the report explains, is due primarily to an increase in his "personal security benefits." An assessment conducted in 2025 recommended that Wilson use private air travel for all personal travel as well as business travel, and as a result he "was permitted to use corporate aircraft for personal travel subject to a 75-hour cap," which ended up costing $1,245,946.

Hold on, there's more. You may recall Joshua Wolens pointing out in 2025 that Wilson's total compensation for that year was 260 times greater than EA's median employee salary—a big increase from the 170:1 ratio the previous year. Well, it's up again: The report says the ratio of Wilson's compensation to the median EA employee was 305:1 in 2026. That gap widened despite the median salary at EA also increasing, from $117,302 in 2025 to $126,612 in 2026, although EA noted that it had calculated a new median employee salary for the 2026 comparison.

It was a pretty great year for Electronic Arts then—unless you were an employee at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, Motive, Ridgeline, Full Circle (it wasn't all Battlefield), or EA's recruitment, customer support, trust and safety, and IT teams who found themselves without jobs while five people in the C-suite collectively "earned" around $80 million. For one year, remember.

It's grotesque, but as Joshua said in 2025, this isn't a problem unique to Wilson or EA. Our system prioritizes shareholder value above all else, and the relentless drive for maximal profits and growth has fuelled an explosive increase in executive compensation across the board. In 2019, for instance, Wilson just barely squeaked into As You Sow's ranking of the 100 Most Overpaid CEOs, while former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick landed squarely in the middle of the list.

Ah, NOX. Poor NOX. Westwood's 2000 ARPG last graced our pages three years ago, as one of eight PC gaming classics that are still worth playing today, where Russell Adderson wrote that it "might have been everyone’s favorite ARPG" had it not, you know, come out in the year 2000—just a few months before Diablo 2.

Alas, that's how it shook out. But hey, it looks like NOX is getting a second chance over a quarter of a century on: GOG has announced it won its latest patron poll to choose a game to induct into its Preservation Program—meaning GOG will commit to keeping the game supported and easy-to-run from now until the end of all things. Or at least the end of GOG.

It was not an especially close-run thing. The games patrons could vote to induct into the program were: Lands of Lore 1 + 2, Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honor, Silver, Albion, and NOX. With almost 10,000 total votes, NOX came away with 3,068. The game in second place, with 2,239 votes, was Might and Magic.

GOG hasn't said exactly what it's gonna do to NOX. Some games—like the recent GOG Star Ocean releases—don't get much more than a quick check to make sure they still work, but I suspect the storefront will go further with this one.

This is the second game, after Thief, to enter the Preservation Program this way, and as I wrote yesterday, GOG pushed the boat out with the work it did on Thief and created an excellent version of that game in the process. I have to imagine NOX will undergo similar treatment.

Serendipitously—almost like it was planned this way—NOX is currently on sale on GOG for $1.39 right now, and will be for another 15 hours at the time of writing. If you own the game, you'll get whatever GOG does to it for free. Did I just go and buy NOX as soon as I heard this news? Yes. I figure you might want to do that too.

Electronic Arts' big RPG series Dragon Age did not get a happy ending. The most recent game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, failed to meet sales targets, and EA quickly beat feet in the other direction, putting the torch to BioWare on the way out the door. It's not often that game franchises are put down forever, but former BioWare stalwart Mark Darrah, the executive producer on Dragon Age: Origins through Inquisition, thinks that in this case, it's probably gone for good.

Making any game through EA is difficult "because of EA’s complicated relationship to shipping games at all," Darrah said in a new interview with FRVR. "Someone once described to me EA as a hedge fund with a videogame hobby that it wished it didn’t spend so much money on. And I think that remains true."

Because of that, and the "frightening number" of dormant properties EA owns, Darrah said he has "no concept of who could, would, possibly pitch [a new Dragon Age game] at EA."

"What I’ve heard is if you go and decide you’re going to make a [game based on existing IP]… the instant you’re about to start, suddenly like three different people who think they control it come out of the woodwork and essentially rip you apart and chew you up and spit you out," Darrah said. So even if someone other than BioWare pitched a new Dragon Age game, "what I expect would happen if they try to do that, is somebody at BioWare would essentially become one of those people jumping under the vents to rip that person apart. I suspect that it wouldn’t happen for a variety of reasons."

In some way, Darrah's outlook is optimistic because it presumes both the continued existence of BioWare, and the possibility that EA would let anyone make a new Dragon Age game—neither of which strike me as a sure bet at this point. Not just because The Veilguard "underperformed," but because EA's all-but-assured takeover by Saudi Arabia could mean a serious bloodletting as the company takes on billions in debt, putting all but the most essential of EA's games at risk. A new Mass Effect remains in the works at Bioware.

Former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider suggested in his own recent, less-than-happy assessment of the series' future that EA executives are likely to deem Dragon Age as non-essential simply because they don't understand it."They never knew what to do with it," Gaider said in June, adding that even when it exceeded expectations, as Inquisition did, it was treated as "a fluke."

Saudi Arabia's proposed $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts has cleared one potentially significant hurdle, as the European Commission says it will not oppose the buyout.

"The European Commission has approved, under the EU Merger Regulation, the acquisition of sole control of Electronic Arts Inc. of the US by the Public Investment Fund ('PIF') of Saudi Arabia," the ruling states (via RPS).

"The Commission concluded that the notified transaction would not raise competition concerns, given its limited impact on competition in the markets where the companies are active. The notified transaction was examined under the normal merger review procedure."

The European Commission's approval of this deal came much more easily than its thumbs-up of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard a few years ago, which spawned an in-depth investigation and specific commitments from Microsoft before the green light was given.

But the EA deal is also quite a bit different: Not a merger, but a transfer of ownership that will see the company taken private. That carries significant risks of its own, including the $20 billion in debt EA will take on to finance the deal, but those factors don't enter into this ruling, which is based solely on its impact on competition within the EU.

There are still obstacles ahead, at least nominally. Game developers and US lawmakers alike have expressed "profound concern" about the deal and called on the US Federal Trade Commission to "carefully scrutinize" the proposed takeover.

That doesn't seem likely to go anywhere, though. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson is a stalwart supporter of US president Donald Trump, Trump is tight with Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, bin Salman is chair of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund—which will own more than 93% of EA if the deal is approved—and the whole thing is being backed by an investment firm founded by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

From the archives: This feature was originally published in PC Gamer #305 (UK, June 2017). It appears below as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation.

No gaming genre can generate stories quite like the colony sim. Almost entirely unique to PC gaming, colony sims task players with building and sustaining a habitat for a group of AI characters, which could be anything from dwarfs to demons.

Although the player controls how the colony is shaped, constructing rooms or buildings and filling them with useful objects, they do not control the inhabitants directly. Instead, the colonists interact with their surroundings and other NPCs via AI systems that simulate their needs and desires.

Through these desires and the player’s ability (or inability) to meet them, colony sims produce incredible, incidental plotlines; tales of dwarves who delve too greedily and too deep, unleashing hordes of monsters into their fortress, of bitter rivalries between demonic creatures that tear apart the plans of an evil dungeon master, of prisoners who explode into riot because the warden forgot to build a shower block.

It’s the autonomous personalities of these AI individuals which separate colony sims from other populace-focused strategy games such as management sims and city-builders.

“You watch more named non-player creatures interacting with each other over a longer period of time in a colony sim,” says Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, “And you’re watching them more carefully than you generally watch, say, scheduled NPCs in an RPG. It gives you a chance to really get to know the characters, and how they respond to situations both you and the game world throw at them.”

But this also makes colony sims tough to develop. Since the release of Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper, which set the template for colony sims through the colourful and often fractious personalities of its demonic creatures, only a handful of similar games have been made. In recent years, however, the genre has witnessed an exciting resurgence, thanks to the dedication of a few tiny development studios.

Dwarf Fortress is the flagship in this resurgence. Created by Bay12 Games, Dwarf Fortress is an immense, 20-year development project currently halfway to completion. Its simple premise is that you build and maintain a colony of dwarfs, but the ultimate aim is to generate and simulate unique fantasy worlds in their totality. This includes everything from the terrain to the history, right down to what clothes individual characters wear.

The sheer scale of Bay 12’s project is mind-boggling. The aforementioned features are merely entry-level stuff for Dwarf Fortress’s preposterously granular simulation.

More recent additions include procedurally generated poetry, the result of a cascade of new features that typifies the rabbit-hole that is colony sim development. “If I recollect,” says Adams, “we were working on taverns at the time and we were dedicated to allowing the dwarves to play the instruments that had been in the fort. This led to procedural instruments, which led to procedural music, which led to procedural lyric descriptions, which led to procedural poetic forms and also dance forms.”

Such detail increases the range of unique events that can happen to the dwarfs in any given fortress. But it’s also important that the player is not ignored as a part of the game. Indeed, one of the immediate challenges in designing a colony sim is determining how much control the player should have over the colony and its inhabitants.

“It’s important at some point to have a conception of what the player ‘is’. For us, it’s the ‘official will of the fort,’” says Adams. “So you’d ideally be able to give orders and decide on other fortress-level activities, while the dwarves are in control of their own lives, and can even decide to disobey orders in extreme cases.”

Dwarf Fortress’s dedication to simulating every angle of fantasy colony life has made it legendary within the industry. But it is an extreme game in all senses, and this applies to its flaws. It is famously difficult to get to grips with, thanks to an archaic presentation and user interface, while its commitment to random numbers means your experience with it can vary wildly.

Rimming the changes

Not all colony sims are so uncompromising, however. Ludeon studios’ sci-fi colony sim RimWorld is a natural evolution of Dwarf Fortress’s design.

But not only is it more accessible, with a straightforward user interface and a modern art style, it also flips Dwarf Fortress’s design philosophy on its head. Rather than using procedural generation as a basis for its storytelling, it uses storytelling as a basis for its generation.

“RimWorld is designed at every level to generate story,” I’m told by Tynan Sylvester, founder of Ludeon studios and lead developer on RimWorld. “That’s always been the central pillar of the design, to the point that I deliberately decide every design conflict between ‘game’ and ‘story generator’ directions in favour of the latter.”

This concept is embodied by RimWorld’s AI Storyteller. Inspired by Left 4 Dead’s infamous AI director, this is an overarching AI system designed to maintain the pace of the game. The system comprises two principle components. “Story watchers” monitor the game state along specific parameters, such as player wealth or dangers encountered.

Then “incident generators” take those statistics and respond to them by triggering events in the game. These could be positive, like a much-needed cargo drop, or negative, like a disease epidemic.

“She [the AI storyteller] attempts to match a rising and falling pacing curve, and not to over-brutally murder struggling players,” Sylvester explains. “Though she also is not pandering or cloying. A struggling colony can still be hit by pretty brutal raids or disasters, because in extreme challenge lies the greatest drama.”

Although it helps to mediate the player experience, the AI storyteller adds another layer of complexity to the colony’s simulation, which already has potentially dozens of AI agents moving through it, all with their own goals, needs, emotions, and ambitions.

Add all the different rooms you can build, items you can craft, trading systems, weather systems, environmental hazards and hostile aliens also included in the game, and you’ve got one huge pile of overlapping, interlinking, and potentially conflicting systems.

This is another of the major challenges of colony sim design—structuring the development.

Knowing when to add features and game mechanics, and when to stop adding features and game mechanics, is crucial. “I think the characteristic design danger in this genre is drowning in your own complexity,” says Sylvester. “It’s very easy to just end up submerging players in complexity and micromanagement.

"My approach here is to treat player learning and player attention as precious, limited resources and ‘spend’ them accordingly. If any mechanic would require any amount of player learning or player attention, I try very hard to redesign it so it can be optional, or set things up so it only applies in some situations, or so it can be introduced gradually.”

Inner space

Considering the player’s experience of your colony sim is vital in other ways too. One of the toughest challenges when designing these games is not creating a system that produces interesting events, but ensuring it communicates those events effectively to the player. This is a problem that has been agonised over by Simon Roth, the creator of the colony sim Maia.

Maia traces its origins more to Dungeon Keeper than Dwarf Fortress, but has a similar commitment to simulating its alien world at an extremely granular level—particularly with its human colonists. In Maia, everything can affect a colonists’ mood, not just hunger, thirst or fatigue, but whether they’ve spent enough time around other people, and even the lighting of the room they’re in.

In total, Maia’s colonists have around 50 needs that can affect their mood, but communicating all this information to the player in a way that’s both clear and unobtrusive isn’t easy. “Presenting more information to the player has been the biggest difficulty in the game,” says Roth. “The thing is with the AI it’s so incredibly complex now, although the code is well laid out.”

Machine Studios has tried to solve this problem by giving the player both direct and indirect information about the colonist’s mental states. Unlike Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, Maia’s 3D engine means Roth and the team can use detailed animations to communicate colonist emotions.

Ironically, this only works for obvious emotions and needs, such as hunger, anger, fatigue, etc. For subtler problems, the team needed a more direct solution. So they enabled the colonists to send the player emails.

“The emails were not such a big thing,” says Roth. “But since we realised we needed to present more depth to the player, the colonists can send emails. They can send these long procedural things.”

Alongside straightforward statements about their physical and mental state, in an unusual move, the colonists can also present the player with direct choices about how to deal with certain scenarios in the colony.

“If they’ve got a skill for a thing and they spot a potential problem in the base, they can suggest doing something to the player, and the player can either give them a yes or no answer”, Roth says. “It shows the AI are more self-aware than you realised.”

Although almost 30 years old, the colony sim genre has barely been explored. This recent smattering of games has pushed the envelope enormously in the last few years. But the great irony of colony sims is the more detail you include in the game, the harder it is to ensure that detail will be appreciated by the player.

Hence they need to be thought of like any storytelling medium. Ultimately, it’s not about how many words your story contains, it’s about how entertaining they are to read.

It took nine months, but Battlefield 6 is about to get its most requested feature. Naval warfare returns to the series on July 21 with the introduction of Tsuru Reef—BF6's new biggest map—a pair of boats, and more guns.

Perhaps more interesting is what's coming in phase 2 of Season 4 on August 18: OG Battlefield map Wake Island gets a modern update, complete with its aircraft carrier spawn points and beach assaults. At the same time, Battlefield 6 is hosting a Top Gun crossover that adds a new two-seater jet (styled like the films) and brings back a mode that first debuted in 2006's Battlefield 2142.

Top Gun: Carrier Strike—based on Battlefield 4's Carrier Assault, which is based on 2142's Titan mode—tasks two teams with sinking the other guy's aircraft carrier through the language of Conquest. Capture flags to launch missile barrages at the enemy carrier, culminating in an on-foot boarding assault on the carriers themselves. At least, that's how it worked in the old games. BF Studios says Carrier Strike has been reworked for BF6, which could mean anything from "it takes fewer missiles to win" to "there's no boarding phase anymore," which would be a shame.

It's funny and a little sad that old features are being reintroduced as brand crossovers, as if the only way to justify making a cool mode is to get Paramount to sponsor it, but at least Top Gun is an aesthetic match for Battlefield. It already makes more sense than when Battlefield 6 had an (admittedly fun) motocross course sponsored by Red Bull a few months back.

One other Top Gun-themed mode is coming as well, though this one's on the Redsec side. Top Gun: Fighter Sweep is a jets-only Gauntlet mission that takes place on a "modified Tsuru Reef." If you find Redsec as tedious as I do, the jets will also be usable on jet-only servers in Portal.

EA's press release has more quotes from Top Gun: Maverick actors (sans Cruise) than details about Carrier Strike. Miles "Rooster" Teller says it's "a huge honor to appear in a long-running franchise like Battlefield with its millions of fans, and talented people working on it," adding that "with Top Gun, it's like two titans meeting."

There's a zero percent chance Teller meant to reference the relevant name of the 2142 mode right? Battlefield's Top Gun festivities don't start until August, but the return of naval warfare next week should be a pretty big deal.

While former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider won't play The Veilguard, he knows enough to realise that the series ain't looking too hot right now. He's pretty sure it's dead, at least under EA.

When we asked if he saw a future in the series he considers "his baby", he wasn't hopeful.

"From Electronic Arts? Unlikely. Throughout the entire time I was there, we were always one breath away from the project being shelved. The thing that happened is that we kept releasing games, and it would sell much better than they thought it should, and it kept surprising them."

EA never seemed to understand Dragon Age, as evidenced by the Origins trailer that used a Marilyn Manson track and was filled with blood. Instead of a mature fantasy RPG, it was presented as some edgelord nonsense for teen boys. This misunderstanding continues to this very day. EA CEO Andrew Wilson, for instance, blamed The Veilguard's failings on a lack of live service features. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

Things were different with Mass Effect, EA's favourite RPG.

"It was funny," says Gaider, "because if Mass Effect releases didn't sell as well, they got excuses, because it was an action-oriented game. They thought it should sell more. It was slicker."

Gaider has nothing bad to say about the sci-fi RPG, and counts Mass Effect 2 as one of the "best RPGs of all time", but the differences in the way Dragon Age and Mass Effect were treated by EA must have stung.

"The way EA looked at it was that Mass Effect was the slick, modern RPG that had action, and they could sell really easily. Whereas Dragon Age was old-fashioned and focused on story. Our action, ranging from Dragon Age: Origins, was a little bit on the slow, cumbersome side, and then was too fast. They never knew what to do with it. So whenever a Dragon Age game sold well, we got excuses on the opposite side. Basically that it was a fluke."

It's worth noting that Dragon Age: Inquisition beat EA's sales expectations and became BioWare's most successful game. But EA has always treated Dragon Age, as Gaider says, like "the redheaded stepchild".

"They gave us a head of marketing at one point who literally talked about having to put lipstick on a pig in order to sell it. When you're on a team and you're hearing this, you're like, ‘Alright, what am I supposed to do with this?’"

Despite all of this, Gaider is interested in working on Dragon Age again—albeit not with EA. Though this is a more recent development.

"If you'd asked me that in the past, I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time. I left the Dragon Age team before I left BioWare. After Inquisition came out, I went to Mike Laidlaw and I said, ‘I've told all the stories with mages and dragons and what have you that I have in me. And I could keep going, but if I keep working on this, it's going to become rote, and I think that would be a disservice to the team. So I should step aside, let fresher voices rise’. I don't know if that was the right decision, but it felt right at the time."

If someone gave him the keys to Thedas now, though, he might be up for it.

"I do like a challenge," he says. "So if, out of some weird alignment of the stars, somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, ‘Breathe the life back into this baby’, that'd be a tough one, but I think that'd be an interesting thing to do. To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that’s what I would want to do with it."

If Richard Garriott can get his hands on Ultima again, who knows? Maybe there's still hope for Dragon Age.

There's a common thread amongst former BioWare developers: They are proud of what they worked on, have a lot of love for their former studio, and they have few good things to say about publisher EA. For understandable reasons.

David Gaider was with BioWare for a long time, joining the studio after the success of Baldur's Gate. He started as a writer on Baldur's Gate 2 and worked his way up to lead writer for Hordes of the Underdark, Neverwinter Nights' best expansion. But he's best known for Dragon Age.

Thedas is Gaider's creation, and he served as lead writer on Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, before leaving BioWare in 2016. He also wrote several novels and comics based on Dragon Age. "It was my baby," he tells us.

This is one of the reasons that the chances of him playing The Veilguard were always going to be slim—"no matter what".

"Whether it was successful or not, it was always going to make different choices than I would have made for it. The team took it, and they did their own version of it, and I don't really want to see what's changed. It's totally selfish—I just don't want to see what they've done with my baby, good or bad."

Regardless, it was not successful. At least not in the way, say, Inquisition was. It sold well and had plenty of positive reviews, but it's never been able to escape its Mixed user review rating on Steam, and it didn't meet EA's expectations.

EA's expectations, of course, are part of the problem.

One of the other reasons Gaider hasn't played it is that he knows "too much about what went on behind the scenes," characterising development as an "ordeal" where EA "handicapped" the team right from the beginning.

"Electronic Arts really did a number on them in terms of setting them up to fail, honestly. From everything I've been told about the game, it seems like that's exactly what happened. It didn't deliver on a creative level. It didn't deliver the sales. That's part of what EA likes to do too. They require a certain level of sales, and if you don't match that, it doesn't matter how good the game is. If it underperforms, you're essentially dead."

The Veilguard was not a great Dragon Age game—or at least it failed to capture what I found special and exciting about the series. And a great deal of the blame must be placed on EA's shoulders, as a company that is almost pathologically incapable of understanding what players want.

Take, for example, CEO Andrew Wilson's assessment of The Veilguard's failings. Was it because the quality of the writing took a dip? The shift to action-RPG? The companions who showcased a complete lack of agency? No, says Wilson, it's because it wasn't a live service game.

EA didn't just set up The Veilguard to fail, it also threw BioWare under the bus when the predictable happened, while completely misunderstanding what went wrong in the first place.

Unfortunately, Gaider hasn't had a smooth ride since leaving BioWare. He joined Beamdog and pitched a Planescape: Torment sequel to Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, which they liked but refused to fund. He's now creative director at Summerfall Studios. Its first game, Stray Gods, unfortunately launched around the same time as Baldur's Gate 3.

"Not to suggest that Stray Gods was in any way competition, but Baldur's Gate 3 came out and was such a huge hit that it was all anybody could talk about," he says. "So whatever chance there was of Stray Gods getting noticed disappeared."

Gaider is now working on a heist RPG, and while publishers have been enthusiastic about the pitch, nobody is funding it yet. Gaider says it's "make or break" for the studio.

It is time to do war crimes in a cool way. Battlefield 6, EA's big loud military-themed shooter that earned a coveted 82% from PC Gamer FPS czar Morgan Park, is free-to-try for a week. The trial period runs from yesterday, June 30, up until July 6.

The trial gives you access to five modes and four maps, which I will lay out in a conveniently bulletpointed form below.

Modes:

• Tactical Obliteration
• Breakthrough
• Conquest
• Escalation
• Casual Breakthrough

Maps:

• Railway to Golmud (Which, again, our Morgan really quite liked)
• Cairo Bazaar
• Contaminated
• Eastwood

Actually accessing the BF6 free trial is a little weird. Or at least, it seems slightly odd to me, as a man to whom the live-service world is scary and alienating. You don't get it by visiting the Battlefield 6 page on your PC storefront of choice (which is Steam, let's be real), you get it by heading to Battlefield Redsec (also available on the Epic Games Store and the EA App) and downloading that.

Redsec is, ordinarily, EA's portal to its already free-to-play version of the BF6 experience, but now you'll find some of the premium, full-fat stuff in there too. For a limited time only, of course.

I think you might want to check this one out. Why? Well, let me shamelessly quote our Morgan once again, who sang the following paean to BF6's unfussy chaos: "Place your palm on the pavement, and you can feel the low rumble of a hobby yearning for what we loved 15 years ago: the spectacle of scale, the unserious chaos of vehicular warfare, red grunts vs. blue grunts, the permission to make your own rules, and an environment where the guy obsessed with metas is having the least fun."

And if you fall in love with things exploding on big maps, then whaddya know? Battlefield 6 is 50% off on Steam for the ongoing summer sale. Almost like they planned it.

Electronic Arts' president of enterprise development Laura Miele says the rise of artificial intelligence in game development can bring about "a real rise in creativity" by removing tedious grunt work and enabling faster development processes overall.

Miele expressed her thoughts on the matter earlier this month during a Game Business Live showcase at Summer Game Fest, where she was asked if the growing use of AI tools will result in shorter development cycles overall.

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

"Perhaps in some parts they will," Miele said. "I really believe in what I've seen, that I'm pretty excited about. I've always wanted to help our studio developers remove friction and I've always kind of wanted to be a hero to them and help them create career-defining experiences.

"And I think that AI, what I've seen, how AI has enabled removing friction from our pipelines and our tools and our workflows, has been pretty exciting. It's removed some tedium out of their jobs. And I've seen faster prototyping. I've seen faster creativity and shorter, faster conversations around creativity and coming to alignment. So, we're seeing it and I think there's a real rise of creativity that comes from removing some of the tedious tasks out of development."

Exactly what sort of AI is being discussed here isn't made clear, and there's a big gulf between, say, the AI-powered project management tools used by Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda at GenDesign and the generative AI slop machines that have become such a pox on, well, everything.

But EA hasn't been shy in the past about its enthusiasm for generative AI. CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2024, for instance, that the company is "embracing [generative AI] deeply," and that "about 60% of all of our development processes have high feasibility to be positively impacted by generative AI."

EA is also reportedly counting on the power of AI to bring down its operating costs and help cover the $20 billion in debt financing the company took on as part of its $55 billion acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. (If you're wondering why EA, the target of the acquisition, is also taking on billions of dollars of debt to pay for it, PC Gamer's foremost finance wiz Lincoln Carpenter explains. The short version: Everyone's terrified.)

Employees are reportedly less upbeat about the AI-powered future, which some suspect is being used to justify layoffs at the company. Whether driven by AI or not, EA has laid off hundreds of employees at BioWare, Respawn, Cliffhanger Games—which was closed outright—and elsewhere since the Saudi investment was announced in September 2025. The most recent round of cuts reportedly occurred earlier this week, putting an undisclosed number of people out of work.

The Sims 4 painted the town green with its outdoorsy, fairy-themed expansion, but if you don't want to work your way up the faefolk rankings to get to the good stuff, you can use Enchanted by Nature cheats for an easy shortcut. Some fairy features don't have their own code, but here you'll find cheats for most Sims 4 careers, skills, and traits that were added with the expansion.

If you need extra guidance, check out our main list of The Sims 4 cheats for a refresher on the basics. And if you're looking for other expansion commands, we've got lists for Businesses & Hobbies cheats and Life & Death cheats.

Enchanted by Nature career cheats

Enchanted by Nature added one new career to The Sims 4 with the Naturopath. It's a handy career for curing ailments, and you can even take things a step further with branching career paths as a Lifestyle Coach or Apothe-curist.

Enchanted by Nature skill cheats

The Sims 4 received two new skills with Enchanted by Nature: Apothecary and Natural Living. Sims skilled in Apothecary will learn how to make cures for ailments, while Natural Living sims learn how to thrive outdoors.

Use the testingcheats true command before setting a skill level via cheat code.

Enchanted by Nature trait cheats

Sims get three standard traits in this expansion: Disruptive, Mystical, and Plant Lover. There are Enchanted by Nature cheats for all three, but you can always add them via Create-a-Sim by:

• Using testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Using cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Clicking your sim and selecting "Edit in CAS"
• Find both in the "Social" traits section

You can also add or remove traits in the console with the codes below. Traits marked with the fairy emoji 🧚 are exclusive to the occult sim.

Personality traits

Reward traits

Enchanted by Nature death cheats

Enchanted by Nature adds two overdramatic deaths for fairy sims, Death by Emotional Starvation and Death by Emotional Overload, but there's only a cheat for one.

Fairy death cheats

How fairy sims die from Emotional Overload

Fairies can detect and absorb other sims' emotions, but consuming Overload Moodlets can lead to Death by Emotional Overload. Here's how to get the process started:

• Use Detect Emotion on other sims to find overload emotions (look for an exclamation❗)
• Use Absorb Emotion until it triggers Enraged, Hysterical, or Mortified
• Continue until triggering Death by Anger, Death by Laughter, or Death by Embarrassment

Sims have been able to die from extreme emotions for a while, but the fairy sim option is still a new way to experience all three possibilities. If you're trying to avoid death or bring someone back, refer to our main list of Sims 4 cheats.

Enchanted by Nature fairy cheats

As Enchanted by Nature's occult sims hone their magical abilities, they'll also improve their fairy ranking. There are five ranks to work (or cheat) your way through, each with their own perks and special manipulation magic.

There's no cheat to directly equip the fairy rank to your sim, but you can use an XP shortcut to accomplish the same thing.

Remember a couple years back, when some of the top men behind the Dead Space series dangled a fourth game in front of Electronic Arts, and the response was basically, "Lose my number?" It sounds very much like that was the last gasp for the once-great horror games, at least for the foreseeable future, as producer Chuck Beaver said in an interview with FRVR that it just doesn't have the juice to satisfy the C-suite.

Beaver, who served as a producer on all three Dead Space games, said the challenge facing Dead Space is a familiar one: It needs the potential to be a huge hit in order for EA to give it the green light, and the "numbers just aren't there."

"Horror games have a bit of a ceiling, you know, and I think the number back in [former EA vice president] Frank Gibeau’s day was five million units to keep going on Dead Space," Beaver said. "I think the number is like 15 million units now, given the cost of things."

That's "a sadness in capitalism for all of us to suffer," he said—at least "until AI makes it apparently easy for you and I to just type 'make Dead Space 4'." This, FRVR clarified (in case it needed clarification), was a joke.

It's true, though: Game development costs are skyrocketing, at least for so-called triple-A games, and that puts the cost of failure way up too: It's "a high-stakes game for big boys only," as Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently put it.

But there's a deeper problem facing games like Dead Space, too. "Companies now are looking for the next Fortnite," Beaver continued. "They need something that is a perennial moneymaker." Singleplayer games like Dead Space that come to the table with no live service offerings or endless monetization options are a "dinosaur fossil of a business model" by comparison.

Yeah, it sucks—Dead Space was great—but Beaver's not wrong. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was well-received by fans and critics but considered a failure by EA because it failed to "break beyond the core audience," as CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2025. And the lesson it learned from that? "Games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement."

At the same time, it's also fair to say that while many of us have fond memories of Dead Space (which, by the way, is almost 20 years old now, in case you weren't feeling sufficiently aged yourself), it's not exactly a world-beater. The 2023 remake of Dead Space was quite good but not a big seller, and The Callisto Protocol, a grisly Dead Space-like headed up by OG Dead Space executive producer Glen Schofield, met with a similarly flat response. Schofield, who left developer Striking Distance less than a year after the game launched, said in 2025 that he may be done making games entirely.

A small group of protesters opposed to the Saudi Arabia-led takeover of Electronic Arts staged a "raid"—in the metaphorical MMO sense of players teaming up to confront a powerful boss—at EA headquarters yesterday, demonstrating in front of the Madden field at the center of the company's campus before attempting to present a petition signed by more than 70,000 people to EA leadership. Unfortunately, the delivery failed: While the protest went off with only one minor hitch, the attempt to serve EA the petition directly was stymied by security guards.

The "hitch" in question was EA's decision to place barricades around Madden field ahead of the protest, along with a small sign saying the field was closed for a "private function." Players Alliance, the group responsible for the protest, said it had not been in contact with EA over the matter, but that it believed the barricades were erected specifically to keep protesters off the field.

The protest did occur, directly in front of the barricades, and while it was small—as far as I could see on the livestream that ran yesterday, only about a dozen people were involved—it was enthusiastic and focused.

"Gamers raided EA’s HQ because we’re no longer willing to sit back while private equity firms and corporate executives turn gaming into another industry built on ripping off consumers," Twitch streamer and Players Alliance HQ member Zefrine said in a statement. "EA placed barricades around the Madden field precisely because the company is afraid of the growing public pressure against this buyout while regulators are still deciding whether to approve the deal.

"The pressure is working, and over 70,000 gamers stand with the Players Alliance to fight back against corporate greed and finally hold these corporations to account."

EA declined to allow the protesters to deliver those 70,000+ signatures directly, however. A Players Alliance representative said security refused to grant them access to the building, but told them that he would take the petition and "give it to the right people."

The group also emailed the petition to EA CEO Andrew Wilson and the US government's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

The EA buyout is controversial for a couple reasons, beyond the usual concerns about media concentration. First, the leveraged buyout—the biggest in private equity history—will leave the company burdened with $20 billion in debt, which could result in layoffs, studio closures, and cancellations as the company seeks to cut costs wherever it can.

There are also worries that the Saudi-led ownership could impose content restrictions on games: EA said not long after the acquisition was announced that it "will continue to be guided by our cultural values," but its failure to say what exactly those values are was notable.

The acquisition has also drawn the attention of game developers and US lawmakers, some of whom expressed "profound concern about the foreign influence and national security risks" attached to the deal, although they're generally calling for greater 'scrutiny' and promises rather than a halt to the whole thing—which, as we learned from Microsoft's buyout of Activision, doesn't add up to much.

But the great likelihood is that those protests and concerns, while entirely valid, will ultimately go nowhere anyway. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and head of the country's Public Investment Fund, is a close associate of US president Donald Trump, and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner is also set to benefit from the deal through his Affinity Partners firm—which the PIF invested $2 billion into not long after Kushner left his White House senior advisor role during the first Trump administration. In 2025, Trump interfered in Netflix's planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which eventually went to Paramount Skydance in a deal backed by Kushern's Affinity Partners.

Cast your mind back to October 2024 and you may remember the time when Russia fined Google a website-breaking amount of money. Like grains of rice on a chessboard, a fine Russia levied against Google for blocking some pro-Kremlin channels had compounded to the point that Google 'owed' the country ₽2 undecillion. That's a two followed by 36 zeroes. That amount was later capped at a more generous ₽91.5 quintillion but, either way, it's more money than there is on Earth.

Which I suspect, as a tactic, was not much of a winner, as Russian courts have turned around and asked for a much more payable fine from EA, Take-Two, Battlestate, and NetEase (via Kommersant) for failing to localise the data of Russian gamers on domestic servers.

Law firm Semenov and Pevzner told Kommersant that Russia's media regulator, Roskomnadzor, had filed lawsuits resulting in ₽2 million fines against the four companies, while three remaining lawsuits against Embracer Group, Digital Extremes, and Epic Games are yet to reach a conclusion.

Which is not a lot. At the time of writing, ₽2 million is about $27,000. If the court were to impose the maximum allowable fine against the three remaining companies—₽6 million—that would be just over $80,000.

That's couch-cushion money for companies at this scale, whose revenues are measured in the billions. In the unlikely event any of them were to pay, it would be tantamount to a rounding error on their balance sheets.

Perhaps this indicates that the fines themselves are not the point. A source spoken to by Kommersant suggests that the lawsuits are merely the beginning of a crackdown on foreign-made online games within Russia, a move which would likely redound at least somewhat to the benefit of homegrown games. For its part, Roskomnadzor says it has no such plans, but it would fit the country's previously documented attempts at "digital sovereignty".

The Sims 4's big ghost overhaul expansion turned the afterlife into an entire occult sim experience with new ghost abilities and a Soul's Journey quest to dog your sim past the grave. This full list of Life & Death cheats can help you max out your Thanatology skills, cheat to the top of the new active career as a Reaper, or quickly unlock those ultimate abilities for your ghost sims.

See our main list of Sims 4 cheats for a refresher on all the basics, or scroll down to get the trait codes you need for defying death.

Life & Death Career cheats

There are two new career paths in the Live & Death Expansion: Undertaker and Reaper. If you want to become a scythe-wielding dealer of death, the Reaper career is the objective-based active career you're looking for.

Life & Death new death cheats

There are a few new ways to die in Life & Death, technically, but mostly they're just new contexts for existing deaths like old age. You can find all the relevant base game death cheats in our Sims 4 cheats page. The one truly new death in the expansion is the Murder of Crows.

I have not managed to find any cheat code for the Murder of Crows death. Below I will tell you how to achieve the death quickest but I have not found a way to undo it, so proceed only if you're certain!

How to get murdered by crows

• Place a "Grim Standard Ascendant Crow" from Buy Mode
• Enable testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Shift + Click the crow and select Cheat Relationship > Set Min Friendship
• Normal click the crow and select Socialize > Provoke
• Repeat the provoke action several times until the crow is "dangerously" angry

How to get unmurdered (in theory)

As mentioned above, there is not a known trait cheat to remove the death by crow status easily. Below is a way to un-ghost yourself with cheats otherwise but this method has not worked for me and when re-entering Live Mode my sim remains a crow'd ghost. Here's how to remove a cause of death:

• Enable testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Enable cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Shift + Click your sim and select "Modify in CAS"
• Open the "cause of death" panel in the top left
• Hover over the currently selected death and click the x to remove it
• Click the ✔️ in the bottom right to save changes and exit Create-A-Sim

Life & Death skill cheats

The Life & Death expansion comes with just one new skill track for Thanatology. Use the cheat testingcheats true before setting a skill level via cheat code.

Life & Death trait cheats

There are three new standard sim traits in this expansion: Chased By Death, Macabre, and Skeptical. You can easily add or remove these by:

• Using testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Using cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Clicking your sim and selecting "Modify in CAS"
• Find all three in the "Lifestyle" traits section

You can also add or remove these traits in the cheat console with the codes below.

Personality traits

❗ Remember that Macabre and Skeptical are mutually exclusive traits. You'll have to remove one before you can add the other.

Grief style traits

Grief styles are part of the new system for this expansion that controls what type of mood your sim will usually experience while grieving a death. They're noted in the simology panel with all their other traits.

Reward traits

Soul's Journey cheats

Add bucket list items

To easily add items to your sim's bucket list in the Soul's Journey section of their Aspirations panel:

• Enable testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Shift + Click your sim
• Use the interaction path Pack Cheats > Expansion packs > EP17 - Life & Death > Add Unfinished Business Objective

From there, choose a bucket list category like "I want to create!" or "I wanna party!" which will open a menu to select a specific bucket list goal.

Earn Soul's Journey ranks

To easily complete ranks of your sim's Soul Journey, use the cheats below to jump to a particular rank. You can skip to the end of your Soul's Journey by using the highest rank cheat right off the bat.

❗You must become a ghost to progress to ranks "Newfound Purpose" and "The Big Picture" but you can use these cheats to skip ahead to the final rank after going see-through.

Ghost mastery cheats

After becoming a ghost, your sim will have ghost experience points to unlock in their Simology panel like other occult sim types. To jump ghost ranks and unlock ghost powers, use these cheats below.

Ghost Mastery ranks

Ultimate Blessings

After leveling up to Transcendent Wraith rank, you can cheat your way to unlocking the good or evil Ultimate Ability as a ghost with one of the cheats below. Use the interaction category "Ghost Mastery" on another sim to either grant them longevity and need fulfillment or drain their life force and siphon their needs meters depending on your alignment.

The Sims 4's small business-focused expansion added a couple new skills and several new panels and menus for managing your operation. With a full list of Businesses & Hobbies cheats, you can swap the alignment of your in-home hustle from lawful to shady, level up your painting and tattooing skills, or skip the work to grab some new aspiration reward traits.

See our main list of Sims 4 cheats for a refresher on all the basics, or scroll down to get the trait codes you need for unlocking those new abilities.

Pottery and Tattooing skill cheats

The Businesses & Hobbies expansion comes with two new skill tracks. Use the cheat testingcheats true before setting a skill level via cheat code.

❗Remember that the artistic pottery reconstruction art Kintsugi is not a separate skill track. You unlock the "repair ceramic" interaction at Pottery skill level 7.

Businesses & Hobbies trait cheats

There are two new standard sim traits in this expansion: Idealist and Shady. You can easily add or remove these by:

• Using testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Using cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Clicking your sim and selecting "Edit in CAS"
• Find both in the "Social" traits section

You can also add or remove these traits in the cheat console with the codes below.

Standard traits

❗ Remember that Shady and Idealist are mutually exclusive traits. You'll have to remove one before you can add the other.

Reward traits

Hidden Traits

Businesses & Hobbies small business cheats

Find the Small Business menu in the very bottom right of your interface in "Owned Businesses" where you can see your small business alignment and renown level. You can control both values with the cheats below and then open the "Small Business Perks" menu from the same panel to buy perks with your renown points.

Small Business rank cheats

The easiest way to increase your small business rank is with a Shift + Click cheat. Make sure that testingcheats true is enabled first, then Shift + Click on your sim. Use this interaction path:

• Pack cheats > Expansion packs > EP18 > Increase small business renown

That interaction will move your small business rank up by one level at a time. If you want to set your small business to a specific renown level, use the cheat code values below.

Small business reputation cheats

The fastest way to directly set your small business alignment is with a Shift + Click cheat. Make sure that testingcheats true is enabled first, the Shift + Click your sim. Use this interaction path:

• Pack cheats > Expansion packs > EP18 > Set small business alignment

You can choose any of the seven alignment values by selecting their name. You can also achieve the same thing with these cheat codes:

Skill Mastery perk cheats

This expansion introduced skill mastery perks with powerful skill-boosting side effects which you can find at the top of the Skills panel. You can unlock these perks naturally, buy Mastery Perk potions from the Satisfaction Points rewards menu, or just cheat them. Your sim can only have four skill mastery points at once, so you can use the cheats below to add or remove them at will.

• traits.equip_trait [trait code]
• traits.remove_trait [trait code]

I suppose it was inevitable: Less than a year after Activision and Paramount confirmed that a Call of Duty movie is in the works, The Hollywood Reporter says a Battlefield movie is on the way too.

It's still very early in the process—the report says the "hot package" is currently being pitched to studios and streaming platforms—but Christopher McQuarrie, who's written, produced, and directed the last few Mission Impossible movies, among others, is attached to do all of the above for this film, while Michael B. Jordan is onboard as a producer and may also possibly star in it, depending on how things shake out. Electronic Arts is also attached as a producer.

That's kind of ironic, because when the Call of Duty movie's release date was announced, I suggested the plot (which we still don't know about) could very well end up something like Without Remorse, the tale of an unstoppable American hero caught up in a high-stakes conflict between the US and Russia starring—you guessed it—Michael B. Jordan.

Then again, The Terminal List starring Chris Pratt might be a better fit—it's a series, not a movie, but Pratt literally says "Now you're in the battlefield" in it.

This, as I've previously said about the Call of Duty movie, highlights the challenge both of these projects face: How do you make a film based on either of them that's not just a generic war movie with a brand stapled to it—especially given how much both series have borrowed from war films like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and, never forget, The Big Red One? It's literally the title of a Call of Duty game.

(21 years later, it still hasn't come to PC, but we remain hopeful.)

Call of Duty could follow along one of the Modern Warfare plots and probably do alright (hell, they could just remake Big Red One and call it a day), but Battlefield doesn't have that established cast of killers that's immediately recognizable as those guys from that game, even if you can't remember their names. I've played two or three Battlefields over the years, and the most I can recall about any of them is that one was modern, and two (I think?) weren't. And yeah, that's just me, but I'd bet good money that in this one thing, at least, I'm not too far off the norm.

Be that as it may, THR says interest in the Battlefield film project is running high, and "it will not be cheap" for whoever picks it up. The report also states that a theatrical release is being prioritized, so it's not clear at this point whether streaming powerhouse Netflix will get a shot at it.

There's no hint of a release date yet, obviously, but given that the Call of Duty movie project seems to be considerably further along, I wouldn't expect Battlefield to hit screens for at least a few years—and that's assuming it doesn't end up like the Splinter Cell movie, spending a decade in limbo before someone mercifully pulls the plug.

It was reported earlier this month that Amazon MGM Studios' head of global TV Peter Friedlander had requested script rewrites for the in-development Mass Effect TV series in order to make it "more appealing to non-gamers." Not very cool! But the claim may also not be entirely accurate, as writer and executive producer Daniel Casey said on Bluesky that it's news to him.

"So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I'm writing (I've signed NDAs, etc)—but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you," Casey wrote (via Kotaku). "I don't know where that 'non-gaming audiences' quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me."

So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I’m writing (I’ve signed NDAs, etc) — but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you. I don’t know where that “non-gaming audiences” quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me.

— @danielcaseytypes.bsky.social (@danielcaseytypes.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-04-20T22:11:54.105Z

Whether that's good or bad is a matter of perspective, I suppose, although frankly I think that if you're writing specifically to appeal to existing Mass Effect fans, you really are running the risk of alienating or shortchanging people coming into it with no foreknowledge of the series. In the bigger picture, though, I think it's better for all involved when executives keep their big ideas to themselves, and let the creative people—who are paid to be creative—do the actual creating.

Of course, at this point not much creation has been done, at least not as far as the public is aware: Casey, who co-wrote the screenplay for F9, is signed as writer and producer for the Mass Effect series, while Doug Yung is showrunner, but there's still no word on a cast, specific timeline, or what the series will actually be about, except that it will not be based on the original Mass Effect trilogy.

Encouragingly, the team behind Amazon's hit Fallout series is also involved in the production. Personally, I feel like Mass Effect is much more of a closed loop than Fallout, but who knows? Maybe lightning will strike twice.

In case you'd forgotten, there's also a new Mass Effect game in development at BioWare, although much like the series we know very little about it beyond the fact that it's happening.

This week is the most excited I've been about Battlefield 6 since it launched. EA announced that seven more maps are coming this year, and several of them are legitimately huge. Naval warfare is making a comeback, filling in a blank that's very much felt in its current pool of samey, landlocked locales. A remake of the fan-favorite Wake Island will even reintroduce asymmetrical beach invasions with functional aircraft carriers.

Taking in the 8-month roadmap as a whole, I can see a Battlefield 6 that I want to play a lot more of. But when can I actually play that game? Your guess is as good as mine.

This is one of the problems with roadmaps, or more specifically, the trajectory of live service updates. Not only do developers treat exact release dates like they're state secrets until days before they come around, but seasons themselves are now chopped up into smaller pieces, and the average player doesn't know which pieces to expect soon and which fall under a nebulous "mid-season" umbrella.

It's especially bad in Battlefield 6, which has so far split its seasons into three monthlong mini seasons. Each mini season gets a new gun, an event, and sometimes a map. The idea behind splitting the pie up this way is to create the impression that Battlefield always has something new and exciting going on, when in practice all they've done is demonstrate that individual Battlefield updates aren't worth showing up for.

Season 4, for instance, is hyping up the grand return of naval warfare, but on the day it begins, that grand return will amount to a single map. More are coming, but when? Don't worry about it, says EA.

Allow me to describe what I suspect is a common experience:

1. Player reads about Battlefield 6 getting two new maps, new features, a handful of guns, new modes—they get excited
2. Weeks later they hear the new season starts tomorrow, so they reinstall/update the game
3. The season begins, and they boot up Battlefield 6 to find just one third of the stuff they read about is actually there: a map, a mode, and two guns locked behind battle pass grinding
4. They try the new map for a while, but decide to wait until the season is actually feature-complete
5. They forget to check back in with Battlefield 6 until the next roadmap comes around, and the cycle repeats

EA seems to operate under the assumption that everyone who enjoys Battlefield 6 is hopelessly addicted to it—that by drip-feeding morsels of roadmap content every four weeks, our thirst is quenched right as our mouths are getting dry. That doesn't reflect how I play Battlefield at all, and the player numbers we can see suggest I'm not the only one.

Battlefield has never been my forever game. Its brand of casual competition, static classes, and joyous chaos make it the perfect FPS to get obsessed with for days or weeks at a time before I put it back on the shelf for a while. Even in a live service age where developers pin their hopes on constant engagement, a lot of people don't have one "forever" game as much as they have a rotation of "sometimes" games.

At its best, the FPS "season" is really just an expansion (or "map pack" if you're in your 30s) that you don't have to pay for. Seasons are fun when they feel like a true event—a significant milestone that signals to lapsed players that it's a good time to check back in.

The only "right" time to jump back into a Battlefield season is, paradoxically, right before it ends. It's really a baffling setup to continue on with, in no small part because it hasn't worked.

You could argue that Battlefield's problem is one of volume—that what it truly needs are more maps each "full" season to fill out the mini ones. That brute force strategy does work for Call of Duty, but personally, simply releasing what's promised in a season when it begins would go a long way. Make the occasion actually mean something!

After 80+ hours of Battlefield 6 I'm only coming back in bursts—I'm not a caged hamster that will eagerly appear when DICE refills my bottle every four weeks. The cage is wide open, and I can always go gorge on the dozen other shooters I could be catching up on.

Battlefield 6 was a hit. Millions of folks played it, enjoyed it, and complained about its shortcomings. Six months and two unimpressive seasons later, Battlefield 6 has firmly fallen out of the limelight. DICE finally appears serious about changing that, and it's starting by tackling the single biggest complaints Battlefield 6 fans had about it at launch: maps are too small, too cramped, and lack a certain sea breeze.

In an unexpected move, DICE has shared an extended Battlefield 6 roadmap that encompasses the rest of 2026, and the headlining message is maps, maps, and more maps.

Here's the quick rundown:

Season 3: May - July 2026

• Railway to Golmud (map): Returning from BF4, four times larger than Mirak Valley
• Cairo Bazaar (map): Returning from BF3, limited vehicles
• Battle royale solos
• Battle royale ranked and leaderboards
• New weapons, modes

Season 4: July 2026 - "Fall"

• Tsuru Reef (map): A naval warfare map that's "even larger than Golmud," introduces boats to BF6
• Wake Island (map): An OG Battlefield 1942 map complete with aircraft carrier spawns
• Custom lobbies
• Spectator mode
• New weapons, modes

Season 5: Fall

• 3 new maps
• "More to be revealed"

The "we've heard your feedback" tour begins in May with Season 3 and the arrival of Railway to Golmud, a "reimagined" Battlefield 4 map that's four times the size of Battlefield 6's biggest launch map (Mirak Valley). It'll support all vehicle types (a tragic rarity in Battlefield 6 at the moment) and brings back the moving train that's also a capture point. Nice.

Next up is Cairo Bazaar, a remake of Grand Bazaar from Battlefield 3. Not a map I have fond memories of, and I'm not thrilled it's yet another medium-sized map with no air vehicles, but at least it isn't Operation Metro.

Season 4 is what I'm actually looking forward to: naval warfare. Boats! Islands! Wake Island! Heck yeah. First up in July is Tsuru Reef, a Battlefield 6 original that's "even larger than Golmud"—DICE is really underlining how it's not scared of big maps anymore.

Later on comes Wake Island, a classic Battlefield map dating back to 2002. Aircraft carriers with "functional flight decks" are back, which I take to mean one team will spawn on carriers and launch a beach assault on the island team, as was the case on the original Wake Island map from Battlefield 1942. It's the sort of asymmetrical map design that Battlefield (and really FPSes in general) have gotten away from.

Season 5 is shrouded in mystery. DICE says that it's planning on releasing three maps as a "holiday treat," but made it clear that won't be the norm going forward. The roadmap includes a hint at one of the maps—a puddle reflection revealing neon lights (seen below). That's not immediately ringing any bells here, but if it does for you, let me know!

Aside from these season-specific promises, the studio also laid out a list of "priority features" coming sometime in 2026:

• Leaderboards
• A server browser with "persistent servers"
• Spectator mode
• Proximity chat
• Reworks for New Sobek City and Blackwell Fields
• Platoons (Battlefield clans)

That server browser thing is especially confusing and non-specific, as Battlefield 6 already has something called a server browser, so I've broken that out into its own article here if you're interested. As for map reworks, DICE said in a press Q&A that it plans to tackle the "divisive elements" of Blackwell and Sobek City, including (but not limited to) cramped air space.

There's no hard dates on any of this stuff yet, but Season 2 countdowns in Battlefield 6 itself suggest it'll wrap up in the middle of May.

EA is spilling the beans on what's coming to Battlefield 6 for the whole rest of 2026. The headliners? More large maps and the return of naval warfare, including the fan-favorite Wake Island coming sometime in Season 4. But alongside seasons themselves, developers from Motive also laid out a list of "priority features" in the works.

In a press Q&A hosted by EA, Motive senior creative director Roman Campos said these features are coming sometime in 2026 and are not tied to any particular season:

• Leardboards
• Server browser with persistent servers
• Spectator mode
• Proximity chat
• Platoons (clans)
• Rework of New Sobek City and Blackwell Fields
• Elite and Open Competitive Series

"We are planning to get these out this year, but some of these will be tested in Labs before release and evolve with our players," Campos told press.

Most of those are self-explanatory, but what's this about persistent servers? Last time I checked, Battlefield 6 already has a server browser with persistent servers, it just sucks really bad.

As it stands, setting up Portal servers is an obtuse process that involves a web browser. It also fails often, the rules around bots and XP are restrictive, and the server browser itself is buried under a sea of Netflix-style menus.

This is the same server browser that, prior to launch, EA was confident would tick all of the boxes for fans wanting to curate their experience. So when Campos says a "server browser with persistent servers" is coming in 2026, we need more details.

Is this a new server browser that replaces the "Portal browser?" By persistent lobbies, are they suggesting we'll finally be able to join official servers from a list like we could as recently as Battlefield 1? And what of the "custom lobbies" feature also promised for Season 4—does that intersect with this server browser somehow, or will that be a third way to make a BF6 lobby?

Assuming it's not only me homing in on this particular bullet point, I've reached out to EA with some clarifying questions and will update this story if answers come through.

At the turn of the 2010s, fans of PC tactics and strategy games were feeling justifiably hard done by. The indie boom that would eventually enable the likes of Mewgenics and Slay the Spire 2 to become chart-toppers was but a nascent spark. And the mainstream publishers? They were looking askance at their trove of beloved '90s click-and-think licenses, wondering how to warp them into something with broader appeal.

An XCOM reboot was announced, reimagined as an experimental first-person shooter from the creators of BioShock. And Starbreeze, the Swedish studio behind Riddick and The Darkness, was handed the reins to Syndicate, the isometric Bullfrog classic. That, too, became an FPS.

In the eyes of many PC gamers, these projects weren't just disposable spinoffs, they were insults. EA and Take-Two were exhuming corpses and posing them like Captain Price—all in the vain hope of infiltrating the blockbuster shooter market. It was hardly an atmosphere in which these games could be judged on their own merits.

That's a particular shame for Syndicate, which named one of its principal cast Merit, and hired seasoned Hollywood villain Michael Wincott to fill his lungs with raspy baritone evil. It was Merit who first sold me on the idea that Syndicate might be slightly better than its reputation. I watched with growing interest as he loped around glass-covered corporate towers with a chunky pistol and the ease of a man in his own living room—a standard-issue cyberpunk trenchcoat in place of a dressing gown.

While Wincott's voice definitely contributes to Merit's air of insouciance, a lot of credit has to go to Starbreeze's animation and mocap talent (including one Josef Fares, who worked on Syndicate right before his breakout hit as a director, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons). Merit's choreography imbues this corporate saboteur and assassin with the vibe of a colleague who's been in the same role a little too long; a competent familiarity that verges on boredom. At one point, Merit calls an elevator, blows the head off the scientist unfortunate enough to occupy it, then casually kicks the dead man's legs free of the doorway. "You're in my way," he says, without feeling. Then, turning to you, by way of goodbye: "Have fun."

Syndicate's world is, fundamentally, a lesson in the importance of antitrust laws. Its conglomerates have glommed onto more and more companies, absorbing biotech firms, petrochemical giants and computer chip production lines—to the point where quality of life is dependent on working for one of several continent-spanning employers. Nationhood has been rendered irrelevant—an idea that's only become more convincing in our own timeline as Silicon Valley has run roughshod over Europe's leaders, reducing the latter to cringing compliance as misogynistic algorithms and art-thieving AI are crowbarred mercilessly into citizens' lives.

In Syndicate, disputes between companies are resolved with impunity by Adam-Jensen-ass agents, and you embody one of them—shooting up lobbies and labs as collateral damage piles all around. To some degree, Syndicate is exactly as its detractors imagined it might be: a linear spectacle shooter, soundtracked by Skrillex, which leaves little or no room for the player to pick their approach.

But it's not an unthinking FPS. Syndicate's development began under the watch of veterans who had made Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness. By its end, many of them had left to found MachineGames, ultimately becoming the custodians of Wolfenstein. This rocky process evidently left its scars on Syndicate, but also left traces of that team's trademark brilliance, too.

For instance: Syndicate's levels are littered with codex entries and transcribed conversations, filled with irony and pathos respectively. Follow the prompts for further reading and you'll wind up in a back-and-forth rhythm between murderous rampages and quiet study—a pacing the Wolfenstein games have offered ever since.

Even off the page, Syndicate makes space for moments of quiet as you step through seaborne cities and listen in on the gossip of receptionists. This kind of breathing room was by no means a given in the era of Black Ops, which was defined by the constant bray of machine gun fire. Back in 2012, Call of Duty was reaching for science fiction and landing somewhere near gadget-driven gobbledegook. Syndicate, by contrast, is admirable in the consistency and diligence of its worldbuilding.

Sure, I didn't necessarily need a potted history of a fictional South-African-Dutch weapons manufacturer. But scan through the internal comms of your employer, Eurocorp, and you'll find an engrossingly grisly history laid out in the coldest possible terms. Take, for example, the "aggressive and innovative lobbying programme" carried out against EU anti-trust legislators: "Total cost 41.3 million euros; 18 deaths; two clinically induced comas; one chemically induced mental collapse". A bargain, one supposes.

All that background narrative matters. It contributes a context that ensures Syndicate feels like more than a series of vents, lift shafts, vents, Brian Cox monologues, vents, warehouses and vents. Even if, strictly speaking, that's exactly what it is.

There are no optional routes that BJ Blazkowicz might find through an environment, nor throwing axes to help you cut a quieter path through Syndicate's levels. Yet there's certainly a whiff of proto-Wolfenstein in the laser rifle that causes my controller to buzz with AA-powered energy, and a pervading fondness for heavy weapons in general. One extended sequence with a minigun proved so deafeningly out of whack with the game's overall sound mix that my dogs made their disapproval clear with sustained stares. Less noisy than the minigun, but no less dramatic, is the thermite gun that spews liquified metal.

Ironically enough, the greatest weakness I've identified in Syndicate is a decision that was made to placate fans of the original strategy series. Namely, it's just a bit too hard. "It's a very challenging, hardcore shooter game," EA partners exec producer Jeff Gamon told Eurogamer in 2011. "It's very traditional in that sense. It's really tough."

Except, of course, traditional first-person shooters of the late 90s and noughties tended to give you room to manoeuvre. Space to back off, reassess, perhaps find another door or an overlooked cache of ammo with which to bolster your position. In a 2010 game, staged in confined rooms with enemies who spawn in waves, being felled by a sudden volley somewhere over your left shoulder doesn't feel like what Gamon once called an "excellent shooting experience".

Needless to say, EA didn't win over longtime Syndicate fans. But in arse-about-face fashion, the publisher did wind up contributing to the return of strategy games. In fact, Bullfrog veteran Mike Diskett used the disappointment of the shooter reboot as a springboard to kickstart Satellite Reign—a highly tactical spiritual sequel to the original series, which won critical acclaim three years later.

In a sense, Diskett did Syndicate a favour in return. Now freed from a legacy it was never going to measure up to, this misbegotten FPS is far easier to like.

These days, we indelibly associate IO Interactive with the Hitman series, but back when the studio was young we… well, we associated it with the Hitman series. It's been making Hitman for a while, starting with its first game, Hitman: Codename 47, all the way back in 2000.

But after releasing Hitman 2: Silent Assassin two years later, IO zigged where you thought it would zag: it released Freedom Fighters, a squad-based third-person shooter set in a Soviet-occupied USA. Its claim to fame was its rather excellent battle system, where the overall battle was made up of all sorts of smaller skirmishes between different squads and soldiers, and that made the whole thing feel very alive indeed.

It was great, is what I'm saying, and it almost didn't get past the suits at its publisher, EA. In an interview with Edge magazine, lead designer Mads Prahm recalls that EA had some serious doubts that the Hitman guys could pull off an action-packed shooter. To be fair, they had good reason to think so: "For the first year or so, I remember we really struggled," said Prahm.

"Making a fast-paced, very casual console game with completely different controls, movement schemes and AI for the characters… There was a lot of pressure to deliver something that the game didn’t really look like."

A year in, and IO mostly had a lot of barren levels. "There was no action. There were a lot of empty levels, but the gameplay wasn’t there at all." To allay its fears, EA decided that IO would have to throw together something that could serve as proof, essentially, that the studio actually knew what it was doing.

Prahm ginned up something to show the suits out of loose music and gameplay footage and, miraculously, that was enough for EA. When IO actually had a working, playable prototype to show them a few months later, EA was even more stunned.

"I remember they had very low expectations," recalls Prahm, which perhaps ended up helping IO, "because we had brought something that they hadn’t expected to see." EA gave the team the green light and even conscripted Prahm onto what he calls an "improvised press tour". The rest is history: IO got cracking on its now-more-solid vision for what Freedom Fighters would be, and it turned out to be—for my money—the best non-Hitman game the studio ever made.

At their core, sims are hedonistic little squirrels constantly meeting their needs one moment at a time without any ability to think through a sequence of actions. That's by design, one Sims 4 developer says, but he always wanted sims to have a more thoughtful approach to their own lives when left to their own devices.

David "Rez" Graham is now the director of game programming at San Francisco's Academy of Art University and the developer on his own unannounced game, but served as lead AI programmer for the original release of The Sims 4 over a decade ago. In an interview with PC Gamer, Graham shared the challenges inherent in making more autonomous sims.

"Sims don't plan anything," Graham explained. The Sims approximates how humans make decisions, but at any moment, they're constantly reassessing what they should do one objective at a time. "They run AI on a cadence and say 'what is the next thing that I want based on my motives, traits, whatever?'"

A player can fill up a sim's action queue with a series of tasks in a sensible order, but a sim can't autonomously decide to go to bed early so they have time to exercise before work in the morning like a person would, for instance. They stay up playing video games until 2 am which, yeah, painfully realistic, but not quite intentionally so.

"I've always wanted to have some level of planning in The Sims," Graham said. The lead AI programmer on The Sims 3 attempted it, he said, after which Graham himself attempted it on The Sims 4.

"It's always shot down, rightfully so, because the problem with game AI is you have to telegraph it," Graham said. He described watching someone ride up an escalator in front of him just minutes before and, after reaching the third floor, immediately turning around and riding the escalator back down.

"If we were in a game, somebody would laugh about that and say that's a bug or that that guy's entire job is to go up and down the escalators forever to show the illusion of life in a city. In reality, that guy was probably just like 'oh, I'm not supposed to be on the third floor.'"

A player watching that happen, Graham said, would need to see the character have some kind of reaction like a dialogue bubble or a spoken line to say "Oops, I'm on the wrong floor!" for them to believe that something intentional had happened.

Finding a way to telegraph the "thought process" behind a sequential set of actions a sim might take does sound like a pretty monumental task. If a sim could plan for that early morning workout, how would you show a player that going to sleep before the sim was tired was done with intent, and was not a bug?

More than that though, too much autonomous planning by a sim, even if done perfectly, may remove the fun for players, Graham said. "A big part of The Sims is players telling stories. As soon as sims have too much autonomy, then what is the player doing except watching a fish tank?"

Graham said that he considers himself a "storyteller" type player in The Sims, turning off aging and living out each life stage until he's ready to move on, so he can relate to not wanting to have the game wrest too much control away from him.

He believes there probably is a middle ground between fish tank-ifying the simulation and sims having no ability to plan ahead whatsoever, but he can see why the idea hasn't ever stuck.

"So many ideas that we had on The Sims got shut down," Graham said later on, talking about the balance needed to maintain scope and ship a game in a studio the size of Maxis compared with his current indie project. "Correctly shut down because they were crazy ideas!"

It's an accepted fact by Sims players that no matter how well you think you know the game, sims have a mind of their own. Sometimes you can wrestle them into behaving the way you want with arcane tricks of furniture placement or by installing mods. If you're one of Maxis' programmers, though, and you're in an "ask for forgiveness instead of permission" kind of mood, maybe you just rewrite the entire under-the-hood AI in about a week during development.

Former Maxis developer David "Rez" Graham is now the director of game programming at San Francisco's Academy of Art University but worked QA back on 1999's Sim City 3000, and by the time of The Sims 4 was serving as lead AI programmer. That's AI in the "programmed NPC behavior" sense, not in the generative AI sense.

One of the stories he likes to tell from that time: completely overhauling the AI logic inside every sim's brain right in the middle of development.

"The core of the AI for The Sims 4 took me a month—maybe not even that—to write, and then two to three years of iteration," Graham said in an interview with PC Gamer. "At one point, I rewrote the core of the AI, just rewrote it, and that was a scary thing to do."

Graham had two computers at work, he recalled: one for development and one that just ran the build of the game. "I'm not happy with what's happening," he said of playing the build of The Sims 4 at that time. "I mean, it's working. I'm just not happy with it. [Sims] weren't choosing the behaviors that I wanted. They weren't solving for their motives in the way that I wanted to solve for them, and I'm just like 'there is such a better way to do this.'"

Graham didn't go completely rogue in the way you'll sometimes hear from the war stories of developers at big studios in the aughts, but he did take a gamble. The Sims 4 was approaching an alpha state, at which point there was no way he'd get approval to flip the table on the whole AI system. For about a week, Graham spent his nights working away on a separate development branch until around 11pm until it was in a state he was happy with.

He went to his boss, The Sims 4's lead gameplay engineer Peter Ingebretson, and claimed he wanted to rewrite the AI. "He gave me this look. It's a look that I'll treasure forever, of: 'what you just said sounded crazy, but also I'm willing to hear you out.'"

Graham spent the next hour convincing Ingerbretson, mathematically, of how he wanted to rebuild The Sims 4's logic, which is when he revealed the truth: "Here's the cherry on top: I've already done it though."

Graham got approval for the extra time needed to finish shoring up his new AI logic and time with a member of Maxis' QA team to do the initial round of debugging before taking his changes to the wider team. "To everyone's credit, they instilled a huge amount of trust and said: yeah, okay, let's do it," Graham said. One big stack of bugs later, he was ready to make the swap to the new AI for The Sims 4.

"It was one of the best projects, one of the most interesting projects, I ever worked on because as a developer most of the time you walk into a project that has some establishment," Graham said. "For The Sims 4 there was a very, very basic, weighted random [system] that chose actions and nothing else. There was very little in the AI. So it was the first time that I got to really sit down and build the AI from nothing. I mean I took those files and deleted them.

"I don't know how many AI programmers get to do that."

Six months after the successful release of Battlefield 6, which sold more than seven million copies in just three days and was among the top-selling games of 2025, Electronic Arts has confirmed that an unknown number of employees have been laid off from the studios that made the game, including Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive.

"We’ve made select changes within our Battlefield organization to better align our teams around what matters most to our community," an EA spokesperson said in a statement supplied to PC Gamer. "Battlefield remains one of our biggest priorities, and we’re continuing to invest in the franchise, guided by player feedback and insights from Battlefield Labs."

IGN, which first reported the layoffs, said the cuts reflect a "realignment" across Battlefield studios as the development shifts focus to maintaining the game's live service support. That transition arguably hasn't gone smoothly: like many games, Battlefield 6 isn't as popular as it was at launch, and some of that falloff can be attributed to EA postponing its season 2 content in January, as well as the arrival of ARC Raiders less than three weeks after it launched in October. Since then, the studio has continued to focus on plans to improve the game.

Battlefield 6 peaked in November with 22.5 million monthly active users (in 37 markets) across all platforms, according to data from Newzoo, PC Gamer's official data partner. The shooter drew 8.98 million MAU in January of this year, according to Newzoo, the 10th most popular game by that metric, making it played by more people in January than games like League of Legends, Rainbow Six Siege X, Marvel Rivals, and Apex Legends.

Electronic Arts is also under pressure arising from its looming acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, a move that game industry unions and some US lawmakers have worried will lead to widespread layoffs as the company is taken private.

There's no getting around the ugly reality of the game industry that maintaining a game can be handled by a much smaller team than what's required to actually make one. But EA also reportedly said in 2025 that it expected Battlefield 6 to pull in 100 million players, an extremely ambitious goal that not even its developers believed was achievable. If that target was ultimately missed, management may see an opportunity to justify becoming "more agile," to use a popular catchphrase of the suits, much as it did with BioWare following the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Whatever the rationale, these layoffs are just the latest demonstration that, as we said in 2025, making a good, successful game is no guarantee of job security.

Sims 4 players who want more stuff in their game will soon be able to "discover, purchase, and play" new content via the Sims 4 Marketplace, an "in-game destination" unveiled by EA today. And for those who prefer to make (and sell) that content, it also announced the Sims Maker Program, which will enable approved content creators to publish their work directly to the Sims 4 Marketplace, and earn money for their work.

The new Marketplace "is fully integrated into The Sims 4," EA said, enabling players to browse and purchase Maker Packs—"a curated collection of Create a Sim and/or Build/Buy items created by a Maker"—and other content using Moola, a new virtual currency. Creators will set the cost of each Maker Pack, and will earn 30% of their Maker Pack sales—so if someone purchases the Snazzy Living Room pack for 400 Moola, for instance, the creator will earn $1.20.

This new program will not replace free content: EA said content creators can continue to offer their work for free on other platforms, under the terms of its standard policy, although content available elsewhere cannot be sold through the Marketplace. Standard Sims 4 content, like expansions, Game Packs, and Stuff Packs, will also still be available for purchase through regular channels using real money.

The Sims 4 Marketplace and Maker program sounds more than a little like Bethesda's Creation Club, which rolled out to some controversy not quite a decade ago and has since proven to be either not a bad idea after all, or maybe just something we all got used to, depending on how you look at these things.

It's a different world now than it was then, though, and I think there's a lot more room for something like this to succeed (or at least to be given a fair shot), especially among Sims fans, who have demonstrated time and again that they don't mind paying for what they want.

Many Sims modders already get paid for their work through things like Patreon, but EA's enforcement of its policies around selling Sims 4 custom content has been unreliable and the community has a sticky relationship with paid mods as a result. An official Maker Program means EA takes a cut instead of another platform, but may at least mean the rules are clearer. This will bring official custom content to console players for the first time, which is a nice bonus.

The Sims 4 Marketplace is set to launch on PC and Mac on March 17, and will come to consoles "in the next couple of months"—no solid date on those platforms just yet, sorry. If you want to sign up for the Maker program, you can dive into that process at ea.com. You'll have to be at least 18 if you want to get in on the action, be "comfortable communicating in English," live in a non-embargoed region, and have an account in good standing. Assuming you've got those bases covered, you'll also have to submit two examples of your work for a "technical evaluation." Applications for the Maker program will open on March 5.

Just five months after the early access release of the Skate reboot, Electronic Arts is "transforming" development studio Full Circle so it can "better support Skate's long-term future and focus the team on the things that matter most to you." And yes, let there be no doubt, that means layoffs.

"These shifts mean making changes to our team structure, and some roles will be impacted," a message attributed to Full Circle states in the euphemistic style preferred by game studio executives.

"The teammates affected are talented colleagues and friends who helped build the foundation of Skate. Their creativity and dedication are deeply ingrained in what players experience today. This decision is not a reflection of their impact and we’re committed to supporting them through this transition."

The free-to-play, multiplayer Skate isn't putting up huge numbers on Steam, where it's been averaging a few thousand concurrent players since the beginning of 2026. That doesn't tell the whole story—Skate is also available on consoles and mobile devices—but it is a dramatic dropoff from its first few weeks of release, when it hit a peak concurrent player count of nearly 135,000.

Despite that, and the layoffs, Full Circle said work on Skate will continue: "We look forward to working with you as we move faster, listen more closely, and deliver consistently for all of you. Our commitment to Skate, and to the millions of players who believe in it, remains strong."

In its most recent development update on Steam, posted on February 20, Full Circle laid out its plan for Skate season 3, which includes changes to how it will handle updates in the future. Upcoming features shared in future roadmaps will be defined as either "in development," or "on the radar," the latter being "ideas we're exploring" that have no fixed timeline or even firm commitment that they'll make it into the game.

"We’re doing this to be clear about where things stand—and about how we work," the studio wrote. "The further out something is on the roadmap, the more room it has to shift, or sometimes, be shelved altogether. But we’d rather show you what we’re thinking, even while it’s shifting, than wait until everything is locked. That’s how we want to approach Early Access with you."

Managing expectations for a game that's in early access, where the future is always fluid, doesn't sound unreasonable, but it definitely lands differently in light of today's cuts. The number of people put out of work by the Full Circle layoffs has not been disclosed. I've reached out to EA for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

Battlefield 6 is pretty awesome, unless you happen to be in a jeep. The LGT (light ground transport), Battlefield 6's most plentiful vehicle, is a failure on every level.

"It is so bad at its one job—safely transporting—that it's not unusual to watch your team ignore a fleet of free jeeps and choose to hoof it across the map instead," I wrote in October 2025. "With four seats, one turret gunner, and absolutely zero protection from bullets or mines, taking a ride in Battlefield 6's sole transport car is like announcing to the entire server that five free kills are vroomin' their way soon."

Over four months later, the LGT remains as useless and undesirable as the day Battlefield 6 released. Nobody bothers using one for its intended purpose, and when the exception that proves the rule decides to brave the danger, they usually get blown to bits or bail within seconds. So when I sat down to speak with two DICE developers about Season 2, I politely demanded to know when jeeps wouldn't suck.

The short answer? DICE is aware that light vehicles are death traps, and now getting around to doing something about it.

"I'm going to take the light vehicle feedback with me to the team from you today," DICE hardware producer Kit Eklöf told PC Gamer. "But I also want to promote that there's a Battlefield Labs test coming up where we're going to test some vehicle improvements around this issue, specifically because we've heard the feedback that vehicles are death traps. We are going to try a package of vehicle improvements on Labs very soon, so keep an eye out for that."

Sounds promising, but it also stings to learn another important improvement for Battlefield 6 is, at minimum, weeks and weeks away. I can live with that, and I'm glad DICE has this Labs platform to thoroughly test stuff, but I'm going to go out on a limb and claim even a half-baked payload of buffs for the LGT pushed live tomorrow would leave it in a better place than it is now.

I hope tank buffs are part of the package too, because armored vehicles across the board behave like they're made of somewhat thick cardboard. The unbelievable number of rockets that engineers lug around these days, and the popularity of the SMG-equipped class in general, has cut the expected lifespan of even a decent tank driver to anywhere between two minutes and "exploded like a July 4th firecracker as soon as you get in."

It's rough out there for vehicles, which is a strange thing to have to say about what are supposed to be vital power weapons in Battlefield 6.

Talk to anyone playing Battlefield 6 about what they'd like in the game right about now, and maps will certainly come up. Folks want more maps in Battlefield 6, but not just any will do—they want large ones with open space, lots of capture points, and support for air vehicles.

Too few of BF6's launch maps checked those boxes, and after months of vaguely saying it's listening to that feedback, DICE is finally saying it will also act on that feedback.

"We don't want to spoil too much yet, but we've heard the message very clear," DICE seasons producer Philipp Girette told PC Gamer on the subject of map feedback. "You've seen recently in Battlefield Labs that we started testing Golmud Railway, one of the older Battlefield maps. That is one of the responses [to that feedback] that we can give there, and the rest is for the future."

DICE has indicated that the Golmud Railway remake has been prioritized specifically to address map size in Battlefield 6—the map won't make the cut for Season 2, but its numerous test periods suggest the team wants it out as soon as possible.

Both Season 2 maps, Contaminated and Hagental Base, were already planned before launch, but DICE producer Kit Eklöf says one actionable change made before Contaminated's launch was its fly zones—the area outside the map where air vehicles are allowed to fly. Playtests in BF Labs revealed they were too small, so DICE widened its fly zones for launch.

I asked DICE if the "bigger is better" approach could trickle down to existing maps that've been criticized for their restrictive, cramped layouts (looking at you, Sobek City). The answer was understandable, but disappointing: the team's priority is the next map they have to make, so don't expect any major developments there.

"For the maps, we try to make changes for the ones that are currently in development," Girette said. "And then we look further ahead, as you said. It takes a really long time to make these maps. We're somewhat, not limited, but we have to be very targeted in what we do…I think we will definitely take a look at the existing maps, but there's nothing we could announce that is going to happen within Season 2."

Even with the resources of four distinct studios across the globe, Battlefield 6 is a large ship that turns slowly. The first wave of Season 2 content is out now, with more coming in March and April.

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy expansion allows players to join dynasties and become nobles for the very first time. Rising up the ranks or choosing to take down your rivals is a game of patience, drama, and unforeseen consequences. Luckily, a public peeing scandal couldn’t stop my rise to power for long.

But, as with any The Sims 4 expansion, there’s cheat codes that can make your journey a little easier. So, whether you’re aspiring to become the head of a Dynasty or ruler of the entire Kingdom of Ondarion, the path doesn’t have to be so treacherous. From fulfilling the Social Puppeteer aspiration to earning a quick and easy Noble promotion, here’s all the cheats you need to know in The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy.

How to enable The Sims 4 cheats

Before you can use the cheats in The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy expansion, you need to enable them. Simply press Ctrl + Shift + C to open the cheat console in the upper left-hand corner. Then type your cheat codes into the console and press enter to activate them.

If you’re looking to use the shift + click cheats from this guide, the first cheat you'll need to enter is "testingCheats true". This enables a lot of freedom to use The Sims 4 cheats, and in Royalty & Legacy, it’s especially handy for shifting Favor and enabling Power Shift events.

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy skill cheats

The new Swordsmanship skill will enable you to rise up the Noble career ranks, defeat opponents in duels, and even potentially pull the Simcalibur sword from the magic stone. Here’s how to level up quickly:

• Stats.set_skill_level major_Swordmanship 10

The max skill level for Swordsmaship is 10, but you can enter any value up to 10 to pick a more specific skill level.

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy trait cheats

If you’re looking for an easier way to get the Threadshifter trait than working out how to complete Anansi’s Trials, then there’s a cheat for you. Plus, there’s other traits you can equip if you’re looking to possess Noble standing:

• Traits.equip_trait trait_Threadshifter - equip Threadshifter trait
• Traits.remove_trait trait_Threadshifter - remove Threadshifter trait
• Traits.equip_trait trait_noblecareer_BlueBlood - equip Blue Blood trait
• Traits.equip_trait trait_noblecareer_Promised - equip Promised Noble Inheritance
• Traits.equip_trait trait_noblecareer_ExRank - equip Former Noble Hustler
• Traits.equip_trait trait_noblecareer_RegalRomancer - equip Regal Romancer

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy career cheats

Learning how to become a noble in The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy isn’t as linear as the usual career paths, but if you want to cut out the middleman, here’s the cheats that’ll help you:

• Careers.add_career Noble - to join the Noble career
• Careers.promote Noble - earn a Noble promotion
• Careers.demote Noble - earn a Noble demotion

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy dynasty cheats

To rule a great dynasty, you need prestige and unity. Luckily, you can cheat your way there, as any mischievous ruler might do:

• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 0 - for Prestige level 0
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 100 - for Prestige level 1
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 450 - for Prestige level 2
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 1350 - for Prestige level 3
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 3300 - for Prestige level 4
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 6700 - for Prestige level 5
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 11100 - for Prestige level 6
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 16100 - for Prestige level 7
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 21100 - for Prestige level 8
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 26100 - for Prestige level 9
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_prestige 31100 - for Prestige level 10
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_unity 0-44 - for a Crisis state
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_unity 45-84 - for a Neutral state
• Stats.set_stat rankedstatistic_Dynasty_unity 85-130 - for a Stable state

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy aspiration cheats

The Social Puppeteer aspiration has many devious and sometimes tricky milestones you need to complete. The final reward is an Ironclad Reputation, meaning you can’t be extorted and you also have a much better chance of extorting others. If you want the trait without all the hassle, you can use this cheat:

• Aspirations.complete_current_milestone - to complete the Social Puppeteer aspiration

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy death cheats

In Royalty & Legacy, there’s a new way to cause a Sim’s death and that’s by tampering with the new cuckoo clock item. Make it easier by using this cheat:

• Traits.equip_trait trait_Ghost_SecretPassageway - death by cuckoo clock

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy shift+click cheats

As long as you’ve followed the instructions for enabling shift+click cheats mentioned above, you’ll be able to select your Sim and pick "EP21 - Royalty & Legacy…"

Under this branch, you’ll see "Noble Favor…" which gives you a choice to pick level 1, 2 or 3 in favor of the Commoners or level 1, 2 or 3 for Royal favor. You can also choose level 0 which will give you neutral favor.

There’s also "Power Shift Events…" where you can either "Create Crystal Slippers" to find crystal slippers in your Sim’s inventory which they can wear at Grand Balls to enhance charisma. Or "Create Noble Frog" which will also then appear in your inventory. From there, you can choose to kiss said Noble frog and marry them.

In The Sims 4: Royalty & Legacy, there’s a new active career: becoming a noble and leading a (somewhat) life of leisure. Your sim will work their way up to eventually ruling a kingdom, whilst navigating scandals, earning "favor," and spending a lot of time on the throne.

But, joining the noble career doesn’t take the usual linear path of choosing to ‘Find a Job’ on a phone or computer. No, that’s for commoners. To become a noble, there are a number of different ways to join, ranging in levels of difficulty, as well as possibly setting you back a Simoleon… or 3,000. It’s the best paid job in all the land though, so you’ll make your investment back in just five days. Here are all three ways to become a noble in The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy:

• Research your noble legacy
• Find a high-ranked noble
• Buy a throne

How to become a noble in The Sims 4

Research noble legacy

This is a simple way to join the noble career path, and all you need is the book, "The Duchess Diaries: A History of Nobility". Fortunately you can find it on any bookshelf around Ondarion. If for some reason you can’t find it, you can also buy it for 20 simoleons from your bookshelf or on a computer like any other book.

Choose the option "Research Noble Legacy" and you’ll learn about the "fantastical drama of Duchess Dalina who was pressured to abdicate by her mother when she caused the Mice Rebellion by cooking too much grilled cheese, or the well-known Count Steven V who attempted to split the inheritance between his 27 children." Just a hint at the scandals that can be unleashed in Royalty & Legacy, and your ticket to the throne.

Find a high-ranked noble

Another way to become a noble is to find someone already excelling in the career. To determine who’s a high-ranked noble, you can access the Kingdom Manager in the top right of the Manage Worlds screen. Here, you’ll get a list of all the nobles in the kingdom, starting from the highest ranking.

Once you’ve figured out who is a high-ranked noble (level four or above), pay them a visit and select "Request Knighthood" under the "Friendly" interaction category. This option will be available immediately, but there’s also the option to "Attempt Introduction," which you might want to try first. It’s likely they won’t want to talk to you and if they don’t know you, they’re also unlikely to give you a knighthood. It takes a while to ingratiate yourself and with much easier options out there, I’d recommend leaving this one as a last resort. If you fancy a challenge, try increasing your Charisma and Swordsmanship skills and then just keep badgering them.

Buy a throne

Thrones are a new item in the Buy/Build mode for Royalty & Legacy and they’re also the key to becoming a noble. There’s two kinds; Majestic and Ornate, costing 2,500 and 3,000 Simoleons respectively. Once you’ve purchased one and placed it in your home, you interact with it and choose "Join Noble Career."

It’s as simple as that and, to be honest, you’re going to need the throne for a lot of your noble duties, so you’ll have to buy one eventually anyway. If you’re not ready to invest though, you can invite yourself into the home of one of the noble families in Ondarion and use their throne to join the career path.

How to inherit a noble title

A sneaky fourth option? Not quite. While you can bestow your noble title to members of your family from spouse to children (teen or older), they’ll need to be part of the noble career to be able to inherit it. Once they’ve joined the noble career though, they don’t have to rise in the ranks. All they have to do is wait for you to abdicate or pass away and they’ll inherit the noble career level you’ve worked so hard for.

If they have a higher title than the one they'd inherit, they’ll keep their current title instead. Or, if they’ve been promised a noble title from someone else that is higher, that will trump yours. Either way, you can join the career and do none of the work. If you don’t promise anyone your noble title and you lose it (say through extortion) any spouse or child living in the Kingdom and in the noble career can select the throne and "Claim Lost Career Rank."

How to get promoted in the Noble career

It’s also worth talking about how to get promoted in the noble career, which is also not as linear as usual progression. Your sim will still need to complete tasks and earn their ticks to reach promotion-ready status, but instead of it being automatic, you must select the throne and choose "Noble Promotion." From level three onwards, you can also choose to "Receive Promotion through Coronation Speech" or "Receive Promotion through Coronation Ceremony."

If you want to avoid the pomp, you can always just choose "Noble Promotion" and it’ll trigger immediately. Looking for an even quieter royal life? You can enable automatic career progression in the pack settings menu and if you qualify, it’ll happen at 7am.

In The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy expansion, there's now a whole new world of exploring your social standing, noble ranking, dynasty prowess, and focusing on your rise to the top (and stepping on people's heads to get there). Amongst all the scandal and bravado, there are new mysterious events to uncover called Power Shifts.

From pulling the magical "Simcalibur" sword from a stone to kissing frogs and turning them into a Sim you can romance, Power Shifts are often fairytale inspired but not all of them are good. In fact, there's one Power Shift that'll encourage you to cause mischief, be deceitful, and spread secrets: Anansi's Trials. This crafty spider character wants to reward you for being naughty. So, it's time to spin your very own web and unlock a new Trait.

Anansi's Well location

Where is Anansi's Well?

In Ondarion, the world in the Royalty & Legacy expansion, travel to the Darong Dynasty residence located in Dambele. It's a massive mansion also called Dambele Palace.

Once there, head left slightly from the main residence and you'll see Anansi's Well hidden within a courtyard. The well is unique, displaying a spider-like structure at the top and is situated within a spiderweb of tiles surrounding it. You'll also notice spiders crawling around the well that your Sim may well be frightened of.

How to complete Anansi's Trials

First, you need to interact with Anansi's Well by selecting "Examine Anansi's Well". A poem will pop up that reads: "Anansi, sly weaver of tales untold. Calls forth a Sim both curious and bold. To enter his Trials is to dance with the sly, Where riddles twist under the spider's eye. The wise earns boons from challenges met, But careless Sims find tangled debt." This marks the first of many riddles.

You can then 'Ask for Anansi's Advice' which will cost you one Simoleon. This isn't a necessary part of the trials, but may help you solve clues or hint at things that could happen deeper within the Trials. You have to wait a while before you can ask for more advice, but the advice does seem to be different each time.

Trial One: Weave a Story

To accept your first trial, select "Trials…" then "Trial One: Weave a Story". You'll notice the other three trials, but you can only complete them in order.

The riddle is as follows: "Spin a tale with wit and weight. Speak a story, and let Anansi decide your fate." You'll also notice a moodlet that says you've started the trial and you've got three days to complete it. So, it's best to get to work.

For this riddle, you need to find a Sim and tell them a story in the "Friendly" section of the interaction menu. It doesn't matter where you head, but I opted for Ye Olde Voyager, the new bar in Verdemar. A nearby option would be the new Backroom lot that appears to be a library, that has a hidden nightclub on the floor below.

Once you've told a stranger a story, Anansi will pass judgement. Fortunately, it seems he's pretty pleased with most stories you tell. You'll get a Confident moodlet and be able to move onto the next trial.

Trial Two: Offer a Secret

Head back to Anansi's Well and this time select the second Trial. The riddle here is: "Whisper what hides beneath your smile. Hold a secret too tightly and the web may twist, but share it and Anansi's favor finds you." It seems Anansi loves secrets and it's time for you to share a secret with someone.

First, you'll want to have a secret to share and that's done in a number of ways in the Royalty & Legacy expansion. You can simply select "Gossip…" and ask Sims for secrets (as long as you have mutual acquaintances), you can research your own family tree in the Family Tree Compendium, or you can buy secrets from the Information Broker on a computer.

After sharing the secret, you'll get Anansi's approval and a Fine moodlet allowing you to move onto the third Trial. Back to the well!

Trial Three: Spin the Web

For Trial Three, the riddle is as follows: "Weave a trick. Twist a thread. Let another stumble while you rise. Let Anansi judge if you are clever enough to dance in the web."

For this one, you don't have to be part of the Noble career, but it does unlock a new interaction if you want to give it a try. Then, you can "Lie About Royal Lineage" under the Mischief category. Alternatively, you can always "Lie about Career".

Anansi loves it when you tell a lie, proving your deceitful nature, and prompting him to open up Trial Four.

Trial Four: Fulfill The Thread

The fourth and final Trial will take you a little longer, unless you're already skilled up in Writing. The riddle reads: "Gather the words that linger in your mind, and bind them to the page. If written with excellence, it will endure gracefully in Anansi's web. This is your final trial."

For this, you need to write a story, but, not just any old story, an excellent one. So, you'll need to get your writing skill up. I tried writing a book at level 1, 2, 3 and 4 and Anansi didn't like them. At skill level 5 though, I wrote a book that was of "Excellent" quality and he finally gave me the reward for completing his trials. If you really don't want to spend time on the writing grind, you can always use Sims 4 cheats to increase your skill level.

Anansi's Trials rewards

Once you've completed all four of Anansi's Trials you are rewarded with the Threadshifter Trait. This trait will allow you to shift Favor and rewrite your social standing.

To do this, you'll have a new interaction when you click on your Sim that says "Shift Favor". By selecting this option, you can switch between having Favor with the Commoners and Favor with the Royals, depending on what suits your situation. You won't be able to do this whenever you like though, you'll have to wait a while between each swap.

The next Sims 4 expansion, Royalty & Legacy, launches next week and the details we've seen so far are all to do with family legacy and scandals. Coincidentally (or likely not) it's landing right in the middle of season 4 of Bridgerton, the regency era romance TV show that is also all about the scandals of capital 'S' Society. The new expansion essentially puts you in the role of chief gossip columnist Lady Whistledown, uncovering and spreading secrets about the nobility.

Gameplay screenshots are from the preview build of Royalty & Legacy which not final and is subject to change.

We're all Whistledown now

The new life aspiration for Royalty & Legacy is "Social Puppeteer" with goals like discovering secrets of other sims, extorting them with those secrets, and exposing them to ignite a scandal that damages reputations. Eventually I'm meant to work my way up to finding out secrets about the Robin Hood-like "Royal Robber" character and becoming friends with the shady information broker.

Secrets and scandals are all tracked in my sim's notebook with details about each secret's severity and how long before it "fades into obscurity" and ceases being useful, which is usually a matter of a few days or a week for "major" secrets. Any secrets of their own are also logged in the notebook.

It's all so very Whistledown-like that I went digging to see if there was a reference to the show anywhere in the expansion the way The Sims often adds easter eggs in the descriptions for in-game items. The cheeky Bridgerton reference is tucked away on a new rug item, of all things. The two pieces of the "This Rug Is Made For Walking Rug by Regalissimo" have little nods to the opening greeting of each of Lady Whistledown's publications, saying "Nothing can end your dynasty, dear reader" and "The land that you see in front of you, dear reader?"

Quite good timing on that, after an early episode of the latest Bridgerton season that premiered just two weeks ago really hangs a lantern on it when Queen Charlotte asks Penelope "Lady Whistledown" Bridgerton to recite her upcoming publication aloud, specifically demanding she begin with "Dear reader."

Sims of Society

It's only a tiny nod, but the comparisons are only going to pile up higher when Royalty & Legacy launches just a couple weeks ahead of Bridgerton season 4 part 2. There are already dozens of player-made Bridgerton families waiting to be downloaded from the gallery including several based on the season's romantic lead Sophie Baek.

Royalty & Legacy's new features around family trees and hidden family connections play into this season of Bridgerton pretty darn well too. In the expansion, family trees can have "secret connections" and "forged connections", meaning you can play out some extra realism of Sophie's story as a nobleman's illegitimate daughter. All the eager Live Mode players are going to have a lot of new dramatic storyline possibilities when they dig into the web of family connections you can create.

From just a few hours with the preview build of Royalty & Legacy I did see a lot of potential for dramatic storylines but I did feel, again, that life sims should be strategy games. Asking a sim for a secret about a mutual acquaintance gives a popup where I can accept or reject the secret as true and I wish that digging for secrets would just result in one being generated whether I like it or not, adding risk to my choice to go looking for them.

That's likely to be a monkey's paw request though, because my secret digging so far has resulted in multiple instances of the same secrets for several different sims—a love affair with the base game burglar Robin Banks or some illicit use of voodoo dolls. There are definitely more fun kinds of secrets to uncover (secret relationships, secret children, etc) but it feels like I might have to play both sides of the chess board to make them happen.

We'll have more to say about Royalty & Legacy after playing the launch version of the expansion on February 12, but here are some other little bits and features I picked up after a few hours with the pre-release build:

• Noble Decrees can be enacted by reaching level 5 or higher in the Noble career
• Noble Decrees are a bit like lot effects that apply to the entire kingdom, things like increased skill gains, higher cooked food quality, or increased rates of twins
• The reward trait for completing the Social Puppeteer aspiration is an "Ironclad Reputation" that makes a sim immune to extortion via secrets
• Non-noble and base game sims can also have secrets
• You can use the Family Tree Tapestry item to forge a family connection to another sim
• The Royal Robber can sometimes leave a gift of simoleons outside your door
• There are 10 ranks of nobility for a kingdom and you can change the title names (masculine, feminine, and neutral) for all of them in the kingdom editing menu from neighborhood view
• You can extort a dynasty head to forgive or name outcasts, change heirs, receive "favor", make rivalries or alliances, abdicate their position, or just for money

The next expansion for The Sims 4 is all about royal dynasties, family secrets, and scandals. While I love that for everyone who was dying for some new family tree features, that's all squarely in the realm of Live Mode and I am a staunch Build Mode woman. I almost don't feel tempted by Royalty & Legacy at all because The Sims 4 dropped something that was made just for me in a new base game update: more staircase customization.

The Sims 4's pre-expansion base game update happened today and yes, there's some family tree stuff in there too but I don't care because, I am quite serious, look at these stairs:

Those are flared stairs—how grand! Of course the new feature is supposed to pair well with all the big ballrooms EA wants you to build to host dramatic waltzes in the expansion, but as someone who rarely hits the play button I will just be here tweaking the railings for about five hours.

As briefly described in the patch notes, you can add a flare to the top or bottom of a staircase, either symmetrically or asymmetrically, which is an admirable amount of forethought for how us Build Mode freaks are going to want to use it. I jumped in quickly to test it out and it basically works how asymmetric roof gables do: a new pair of arrows at the bottom and top of the steps that you can use to widen the end (with certain width intervals) and holding shift to drag just one side at a time.

We can also now apply stair rails to just one side or the other of a staircase and change the length of the rail so that it stops partway down. Great for ballrooms, sure, but suburban McMansions with forked staircases are going to get a little glitter from this update too. Interestingly you can also have a railing stop before the top of stairs, not just the bottom.

This isn't quite as revolutionary a change as when configurable stair bends were added but still, this is going to keep me busy for a bit.

Here's what else got added in today's February 3 base game update:

• Family tree relationship labels for in-laws, half siblings, great grandparents, step parents and step children, and more
• Autonomous flirting between in-laws and step-relatives now prohibited by being close relatives
• Flared stairs
• Customized stair railings
• "Africana" style filter in Create-A-Sim
• Jewel-tone metallic nail swatches
• "Lost Legacies" four-week gameplay event begins

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy launches next week on February 12 and yes, it will have a bunch of new Build Mode items in it as expansions always do. Seriously though, I'm just happy with new stair tool toys.

I'm not entirely confident that Mass Effect 5 will ever see the light of day. Between the Andromeda debacle, the dismantling of BioWare after Dragon Age: The Veilguard missed whatever expectations EA had for it, and the upcoming acquisition of EA by Saudi Arabia, the environment just doesn't seem entirely conducive to another big sexy space adventure.

But the wheels are continuing to turn. The most recent sign of progress comes from Mass Effect executive producer Michael Gamble, who's looking for help getting the new game done. "Hi, I’m hiring a very important senior leadership role," Gamble wrote on X. "They’ll report to me and it’s gonna be awesome."

The post includes a link to a job listing for a production director on the next Mass Effect game. Before you get too excited, this is a high-level position (pay range is $187,000 - $259,400 CDN plus benefits), so you're not going to get any details about the game itself except that it will be the next chapter of "one of the highest-rated and most celebrated series in video game history." Except for the last chapter, I suppose.

But if you're curious about what it is a production director actually does, here's the lowdown:

• Act as a strategic bridge between creative intent and development execution, translating high-level vision into a clear direction that enables teams to deliver at AAA quality.
• Provide leadership across the full development lifecycle, anticipating needs, setting executional direction, and ensuring teams are positioned to succeed at each phase.
• Build and sustain strong coalitions across creative, technical, production, and partner teams, fostering alignment and shared ownership of outcomes.
• Break down complex creative and technical goals into understandable, actionable components, ensuring teams understand both the why and the how behind their work.
• Identify and mitigate risks early, drive resolution of cross-team challenges, and make informed tradeoffs that protect quality, schedule, and long-term franchise health.
• Represent the project and production organization in communications with studio leadership, EA partners, and external stakeholders, including press as needed.
• Establish and reinforce clear objectives, transparency, and accountability across teams to maintain alignment and momentum

It goes without saying but just to ensure everyone's on the same page here (and maybe save Mike some unnecessary rejection emails), this is not an entry-level gig. You'll need at least 10 years of game-dev experience "including senior-level leadership on multiple large-scale AAA titles," expertise in the RPG and action RPG genres, and "strong executive presence with an influence-based leadership style," among other things. So that lets me out, then.

What matters here is not the likelihood that I might one day get a real job, though, but that EA is hiring—and more pointedly, that it's hiring for a role that will usher Mass Effect 5 from concept to reality. The fact that the team doesn't already have someone like that indicates that work is still in the very early stages, but that they're looking for someone to take the job means EA is, at least for now, serious about moving ahead with it. I call that good news.

Three months after US senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren expressed "profound concern about the foreign influence and national security risks" that could result from the Saudi-led takeover of Electronic Arts, 46 House Democrats have joined the chorus with a letter calling on FTC chair Andrew Ferguson to "carefully scrutinize" the proposed takeover.

The letter's signatories, led by Labor Caucus co-chairs Steven Horsford, Debbie Dingell, Mark Pocan, and Donald Norcross, say they have "serious concerns" that the acquisition will lead to layoffs, studio closures, wage suppression, and an unwelcome concentration of sports and entertainment brand ownership that could lead to "anticompetitive coordination."

Median worker pay at EA has declined steeply year over year, the letter states, a trend that suggests the company "may already face limited competitive pressure to retain or reward talent." It goes on to say that EA has eliminated more than 1,700 jobs since 2023 and warns that even deeper cuts could result if the acquisition is closed because of the massive debt financing involved, "which creates strong incentives for the acquiring firms to pursue further cost-cutting measures, including layoffs, offshoring, restructuring, or studio closures."

The concerns expressed in the letter largely repeat what's been previously been said by observers and analysts: Very generally, that the takeover is unlikely to be good for anyone except the extremely wealthy people behind it. Shortly after the acquisition was announced, PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter put together a detailed explainer on leveraged buyouts and the risks they pose, and the less-than-glowing record of private equity management of acquired companies.

The letter does not mention (but I'm going to) the impact of Saudi ownership on future EA releases. Saudi Arabia is notoriously hostile to LGBTQ+ people, criminalizes same-sex relationships, and has a long history of repressing human rights for women and girls. That's not a great ownership environment for games like The Sims and Dragon Age, both of which have come to be known for their embrace of diverse representation. And if you think that such things are beneath the notice of Saudi rulers, take a moment to sit back and think about why Ronaldo is in Fatal Fury: City of Wolves.

(There's also the fact that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the chairman of the PIF and de factor ruler of Saudi Arabia, is believed by multiple international intelligence agencies to have ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. This also goes unmentioned in the letter.)

"The FTC's 2023 Merger Guidelines make clear that mergers harming workers, suppressing wages, or enabling dominant firms to reduce labor demand may violate antitrust laws," the letter states. "Given the scale of this acquisition and EA's current dominance over the domestic videogame labor market, we believe careful scrutiny of this deal is essential. The transaction also raises serious concerns about interlocking directorates and common ownership across competing game publishers.

"This kind of overlap heightens the risk of coordinated anti-labor practices, including wage suppression, hiring restrictions, or informal no-poach dynamics and could further weaken the already limited bargaining power workers have in this industry. These risks should weigh heavily as the Commission evaluates whether the acquisition would leave workers more vulnerable to coordinated or unilateral harms.

"We respectfully urge the Commission to conduct a thorough investigation into the labor market consequences of this proposed acquisition, including EA's existing wage-setting power, the likelihood of post-transaction layoffs, the degree of labor-market concentration in relevant geographic and occupational markets, and the role of cross-ownership in shaping labor outcomes."

You may recall similar concerns being expressed by the FTC a few years back regarding Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. If so, you also likely recall how it worked out: Massive layoffs, studio closures, and a not-undeserved 'I warned you, bro' from the FTC.

Given that, you might expect the Electronic Arts acquisition to face some kind of meaningful resistance from US regulators. I suspect the opposite is more likely, however: US president Donald Trump is famously chummy with bin Salman, and Ferguson, the FTC chair, is a stalwart Trump supporter. Beyond that, one of the minority partners in the acquisition, Affinity Partners, is owned by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. The power of capital ultimately hammered the Microsoft-Activision deal through the system despite determined opposition from the FTC; now that there are effectively no roadblocks, I strongly suspect EA will go down much easier, no matter how many polite and respectful letters are sent.

Boldly I will log onto the internet today and admit I am boring. I've never installed Wicked Whims. The notorious adult content addon is one of the biggest Sims 4 mods out there, quickly updated after every official patch as fans lament they can't bear to play without it. It sure feels like everyone but me is Wicked-pilled, which may not be far from the truth: The mod's creator says that it gets launched an astonishing 400,000 times per day.

German news site Taz (Die Tageszeitung) published an interview this week with Turbodriver, the modder behind Wicked Whims and its less naughty equivalent Wonderful Whims. It's a bit of a drive-by in which Turbodriver only briefly touches on topics like being compensated for modding, access to adult content online, and whether he finds his mods controversial.

The details about himself he's willing to share (his identity not among them), mostly boil down to not seeing himself as an educator or an activist. Wicked Whims has contraception, explicit sex, and abortion, but that's in pursuit of the realism that players want more than making a statement, he claims.

What was way more enlightening to me was the girthy daily player count that Turbodriver estimated. Translated from German by Google Translate, Turbodriver said that Wicked Whims is used 400,000 per day. "That's how often my server is pinged, at least, because someone starts the game and has installed the mod."

That's not 400,000 unique users per day, mind. Turbodriver may not have access to that information and the 400K figure likely includes some of the same users playing more than once per day. Horny doesn't sleep, you know. In a Patreon post from December, Turbodriver says that the number of Wicked Whims players has been growing every year alongside The Sims 4's main playerbase.

I'm attempting to convert apples to oranges here, but looking at the concurrent players (not daily unique users) for the top games on Steam via Steam.db versus the 400,000 daily launches (also not daily unique users) for Wicked Whims, it seems like the number of folks playing just Wicked Whims (versus unmodded The Sims 4) could hold its own in the consistent top 10 games being played at any time on Steam.

It's tough to dismiss Wicked Whims as a niche mod for horn dogs when you see that kind of number. It's come by that smutty reputation fairly—the top line feature is "fully animated and interactive sex"—but you're more likely to hear Sims fans online praising it for realistically depicting fertility and menstruation or the nuanced attraction system that they prefer over what was added in the official Lovestruck expansion.

As for what he's working on adding to Wicked Whims next, aside from the less sexy bug fixing and code library improvements he also detailed in the December post, Turbodriver gave Taz one little spoiler: a new camgirl profession. It really is all work and no play around here in sex mods land.

Well, Anthem is dead, and let's be honest with ourselves: It's fine. Most of us forgot Anthem even existed long before the final call, and we were genuinely surprised to discover last summer that the servers were still running. Which isn't so much an indictment of the game but of the system that produced it. Who tells BioWare to make a live service shooter?

Anyway, what's done is done—or maybe not. As the curtain fell, a small group of diehards expressed hope that it might somehow be brought back without a reliance on EA's servers—hope that was given, well, hope when former executive producer Mark Darrah said Anthem did actually have local server code "right up until a few months before launch," and more importantly, "the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."

That's a far cry from actually making it happen, but some people do seem to at least be making progress in that direction. Youtuber And799 (via Kotaku) has posted a video showing Anthem alive and kicking, and—big points here—with two players (actually two accounts) logged in simultaneously.

The second account joins at around the 4:30 mark, if you want to cut straight to it:

It's very preliminary stuff, a proof-of-concept rather than anything like a playable game, and a redditor who says And799 is working with the Fort's Forge restoration project described it as "a really hacky thing" and advised that everyone temper their expectations accordingly.

Of course, not everyone is taking that advice entirely to heart.

There's still a long way to go, and it's quite possible the whole thing will be derailed, either by technical issues or a cease-and-desist letter from EA. And even if it does all come together perfectly, I don't anticipate a great Anthem revival: The game was a flop, and the fact that it's effectively impossible to get it now means that whatever curiosity spike revived servers might drive isn't going to result in a surge of new players. I think it's great that Anthem could remain accessible to those who love it, but hopes expressed by a few turbo-optimists that EA will recognize the error of its ways and bring Anthem back officially are awfully optimistic.

The renewed interest in Anthem has resulted in at least one notable change of mind, though. Moderators announced earlier today that with the game shut down, the Anthem subreddit would be moved to an archived read-only mode. Following pushback from the community, however, moderators said they "didn't realize how much demand there'd still be for this forum to keep discussions going," and so they're "pausing and rethinking the approach."

"If this community is going to continue, it needs solid volunteers who are genuinely willing to take on ongoing moderation responsibilities so the sub can be maintained at a level it deserves," the mod team wrote in a now-stickied comment. "There have been several and long phases where it has all been just one moderator away from "banned due to the lack of moderation" and the exhaustion from it is the reason why the closure of the servers felt like a fitting end. But, the community comes first."

It's a bit like Anthem itself, then: Maybe the lights will stay on, if the community can make it happen. And maybe it can.

The first Sims 4 expansion of the year has been revealed and it's cause for celebration for two groups of players: the Romantasy fans who are going to start churning out 'enemies to lovers' warring dynasty storylines and everyone who's been asking to finally get an expansion with an African theme. The Sims 4 Royalty and Legacy is all about creating family dynasties, earning prestige, and responding to scandals—this one is definitely for the Live Mode players.

EA says it partnered with the same Pan African Gaming Group as it did for the West African update last year to work on the new Create-A-Sim and Build/Buy mode items for Royalty and Legacy. One of the three neighborhoods in the expansion's new world is also West African-inspired.

Royalty and Legacy release date

Sims 4 Royalty and Legacy launches on February 12, 2026 for the usual $40 expansion pack price.

Typically there's bonus content included for players who buy the expansion within its first couple months, which is happening again, but this time it's two full new kits. The upcoming Tea Time Solarium and Silver Screen Style kits are included with Royalty and Legacy if you buy it before March 15.

Sims 4 Royalty and Legacy trailer

The reveal trailer for Royalty and Legacy gives away quite a lot of the planned features coming in the expansion plus hints towards a bunch more. You can see three main families (dynasties) that will feature in the expansion's story, traces of the new "scandals" system, meters for dynastic "prestige" and "unity" and more. Plus a whole lotta swords. You can't do royalty without some ornamental pomp.

There's a gameplay trailer scheduled for January 22 that will show off more of the nobility system.

Sims 4 Royalty and Legacy features

• New world: Ondarion
• New career: Noble
• New lot type: Backroom
• New skill: Swordsmanship
• New resource: Favor
• New WooHoo: Secret passage
• New death: Cuckoo clock
• Dynasty system
• "Scandals" system
• Sword duels
• Secret passageway item
• Swordsmanship tournaments

Royal dynasties

Family dynasties are the big new feature for the Royalty and Legacy expansion and seem like they'll operate from a menu similar to other group features like clubs and werewolf clans and so on.

Here's what's been revealed about how you'll manage a dynasty:

• Choosing "values" which may be the same as or cross over with existing Traits
• Designate an heir
• Designate an outcast (seems to imply just one?)
• Usurp the head of family
• Expel a sim from the dynasty
• Earn "Prestige" for the dynasty—likely to unlock perks at level milestones
• "Scandals" like bad behavior or infidelity can lower PRestige
• Respond to scandals by issuing an apology, denying it online, or writing a book

Backrooms

This new lot type in Royalty and Legacy is dual purpose. You can build it as a library, gym, or museum that will then transform into a night club at night.

The reveal trailer for the expansion didn't show this system in action, but I'd guess it likely reuses the lot segmenting tools from For Rent and Businesses and Hobbies to denote the daytime rooms of the lot versus the night club portion.

Sims 4 Royalty and Legacy new world

The new world for Royalty and Legacy is called Ondarion which will have three neighborhoods (and three corresponding dynasties). Here's what EA has said about each:

• Dambele is the West African-inspired neighborhood and home of the Darong Dynasty, "where the arts are cherished, and shared spaces such as the open palace gardens and communal market embody its culture of generosity and togetherness."
• Verdemar is home of the Thebe Dynasty and "populated by heroic outlaws and cunning nobles, is as unpredictable as the sea that surrounds it."
• Bellacorde is home of the Capp Dynasty and "defined by romance, opulence, and candlelit corners that invite illicit rendezvous."

Ubisoft suffered a blow today as Julian Gerighty, the executive producer of The Division games, announced that he is leaving the company to take a position at EA's Battlefield Studios.

"Quick update from the Base Of Operations: It's time for me to hang up my go bag (keeping the watch) as I go on another grand adventure," Gerighty wrote in a message on X. "The Division's future burns bright, and I can't wait for you to discover what the teams have been working on."

Gerighty didn't say what he was off to, but Ubisoft Massive spilled the beans in a message posted just a few minutes later. "Today, we want to share that Julian Gerighty, executive producer on the Tom Clancy's The Division franchise, is heading off to a new adventure at Battlefield Studios. While we'll miss him, his mark will live on at Massive and we'll continue to bring the world he's been part of creating to our players for years to come.

"Julian, your legacy is part of this studio and remember: Once an Agent, always an Agent."

Gerighty spent more than 25 years at Ubisoft before his departure, rising from "market knowledge manager" to creative director on The Crew. He moved to Ubisoft Massive in 2014 and took on the same role on The Division, The Division 2, and Star Wars Outlaws; he was announced as the executive producer of The Division as a whole in 2023, when Ubisoft also revealed that The Division 3 is in development.

The timing of the announcement is interesting. It was just a week ago that Gerighty appeared on the New Game+ showcase to talk up The Division 3, saying it's "shaping up to be a monster."

It also comes just three days after Ubisoft announced layoffs at Ubisoft Massive, after a "voluntary career transition program" failed to pare the numbers back sufficiently. That's not to suggest the layoffs impacted Gerighty directly—he's the public face of one of Ubisoft's biggest series, and besides, it typically takes more than three days to submit your resignation and find a gig at a major competitor—but it doesn't necessarily point to smooth sailing, either.

Somewhat ironically, a rumor that Gerighty had left Ubisoft began making the rounds just a few months ago, which Ubisoft Massive denied at the time as "far from true." Whoops.

It certainly looks like an amicable split, but I am reminded of the departure of Assassin's Creed vice president and executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté in October 2025, just seven months after the successful release of Assassin's Creed Shadows. Ubisoft paid a warm tribute to Côté's "leadership, creativity, and dedication" when it announced his departure, shortly after which Côté said he'd been forced out after refusing to take a reduced role at the company.

While Anthem wasn't well-loved at launch, it wasn't hated either. Steven Messner gave it a middling score of 55 in his review, which aligned with my own feeling of being a bit whelmed by a game with a clear identity crisis—a live service multiplayer game that wanted you and your friends to play strongholds together, but then return to a singleplayer hub where you'd have to shush during the story bits.

Even then Anthem had its diehards, and the patches and updates that followed addressed some of its more significant flaws. Not enough to save it unfortunately, but enough to guarantee a small but dedicated community of Freelancers who have suited up and returned to Fort Tarsis for the final day before EA pulls the plug on Anthem for good.

Our Lauren Morton is one of the players who logged on to say goodbye. "It's not empty," she says, "but it is quiet." There are Twitch streamers running missions until the end, and high-level veterans "waving and jumping and emoting" around the Launch Bay. The subreddit is full of players sharing their last screenshots and achievement pop-ups and quoting Anthem's tagline, "Strong alone, stronger together."

They're also praying for last-minute salvation, or an eventual revival via community-run private servers. As dinklebot117 points out, "avengers and suicide squad added offline modes before ending support. i believe redfall as well". When a less optimistic player said, "Great, Redfall. For the 5 people still playing it", dinklebot117 quite fairly replied, "bro we are in the anthem subreddit careful where you throw those stones".

Anthem's loss, whether it affects you or not, is another reason to value the message of the Stop Killing Games campaign. Messy though it was, Anthem had its fans, and now they're losing access to a thing they paid for and supported through to the end.

I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day because the year was 2022 when I first watched EA tease the "next generation Sims game" with the codename Project Rene. Two years later it said "actually that's not the Sims 5 though" and spent another year being weird and silent before finally admitting today that yeah, Project Rene is now a mobile game. Simultaneously though, it made sure to mention that a huge portion of the team is working on "the next evolution." Here we go again.

In its start of year blog post today, EA says it is "committed to singleplayer life simulation experiences," and reiterated that it is continuing to work on updates and improvements to The Sims 4. After that, it coyly adds:

"Singleplayer PC and console experiences will always be a part of our future, with more than half of our global development team dedicated to The Sims 4 and the next evolution. More news in the coming months!"

The Sims 4 and "the next evolution," apparently two different things.

The recent rumors point to anything from a Sims 4 code base rewrite to a full remake, though the grist for that mill was mostly unsubstantial vague-posting from unconfirmed sources. After all the hubbub about it, well-known Sims 4 modder SimMattically stepped in to put a damper on things by posting, "there’s no Sims 4 remaster."

So it's likely not working on a remaster and likely not working on The Sims 5, but is working on a "next evolution," and crucially one that's singleplayer, not another attempt at taking The Sims online.

The only other hint we have is EA's investor presentation from 2024, during which it announced (and has still never really explained) a platform called The Sims Hub to unify The Sims 4 with Project Rene and other Sims games. During the same presentation, EA entertainment & technology president Laura Miele said that the team would be "updating the core technology foundation" of The Sims 4. The direction for Project Rene seems to have shifted in that time though, so I'd hesitate to put too much stock in any other plans EA announced over a year ago.

This tiny acknowledgement of something else in the Sims team pipeline feels like a bone thrown to keep all us life sim dogs from snarling over the confirmation that Project Rene really is just the mobile game we don't want. At this point though, this tired old Sims hound will take it.