First reported by Empire on X, "The Everything App," Simpsons creator Matt Groening may have let slip the existence of some upcoming return for The Simpsons: Hit & Run⁠—though this was immediately disputed by another grandee of the Simpsons Industrial Complex.

"I think the original game is coming back in some form," Groening said in response to a question about the series at a Simpsons panel discussion, part of the ongoing D23 Disney fan event. Current showrunner Matt Selman immediately poured cold water on the idea, declaring "Or not," in response to Groening's statement.

Groening seems to firmly operate in an "emperor emeritus" role when it comes to day-to-day operations of The Simpsons, and it's perfectly plausible that his supposition was based on out-of-date information, and Selman, who's more hands on with things, is correct.

But I'm inclined to think this was a "It's a secret⁠—Ssshut uuuuuup" sort of interaction. We're living in a time of endless remakes and remasters⁠—Spongebob Squarepants: Battle For Bikini Bottom Rehydrated from a few years ago feels like it rhymes with Hit & Run, for example. Most persuasive of all, Selman himself, who wrote the original game, said "never say never" about the possibility of the series coming back just this year.

Groening's choice of words, "the original game is coming back in some form," seems to preclude a sequel and imply a remake or remaster to my eye. But if it turns out he was talking about an art book or retrospective documentary or something, well that'd just be poor form on his part I think.

The reason for all the hubbub was a clever little cult classic of a tie-in game from 2003, a PS2-era, GTA-lite sort of deal where you drove or ran around Springfield getting up to hijinks. I never played it myself, but some of my friends swear by Hit & Run. I think, for a certain band of zoomers and late millennials, it was a way of getting in on the GTA craze if your parents wouldn't let you touch the real deal, leading to lifelong loyalty and nostalgia. Jak 2 ticked that box for me.

It might seem silly to ask in our post-Red Dead horse testicles world, but how much exacting detail is too much? How much is not enough? Gamedev can go on forever if you don't prioritize the things that players actually notice, but if you're making an immersive fantasy RPG, it's critical that the intended illusions—bustling towns, lively taverns, festering dungeons, and so on—not shatter.

This tightrope walk is something CDPR has gotten better at over the years, but it loomed over The Witcher 3's development, as CD Projekt Red's Philipp Weber told Edge Magazine (via Gamesradar). The reason why is simple: wherever possible, gamers love to try and peek behind the curtain.

"If a village only has eight houses, people will want to see if the people truly exist in the world or if it's just fakery," Weber told Edge. "Lots of people nowadays are interested in those kinds of details, and it really came to haunt us."

"Today, if you said 'give me a Witcher 3 village that has eight houses', I could give you that in two hours," he said. But there was a time that "when it came to actually reacting to the player, there wasn't that much detail."

An example case named in the article is that when the player starts using combat moves in the middle of town, NPCs were programmed to drop whatever they were holding and scram. This mostly worked, except for the fact that mothers swaddling their babies would do the same: "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right."

A big component of believability is just giving the NPCs apropos things to do, and cycling between those unpredictably. "We don't give them specific paths," Weber said. "We give them spots of interest that are available and then they're the ones doing the pathfinding ... for the 50 sailors at Novigrad harbour, for example, we made 200 possible spots, so even if all 50 were active at the same time, they would have options."

It seems like the human touch goes a long way here. Cyberpunk 2077's stylish and detailed NPCs are a great case study showing the value of a hand-crafted moment here and there. And while systems-driven simulation is a big part of why these digital nobodies are believable in the first place, CD Projekt has said in the past that the quality gap between manually programmed NPCs and their controversial AI counterparts is "like a canyon."

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

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

SUBJECT: Gordon Freeman. Male, Age 27.

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

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

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

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

B.J Blazkowicz (Wolfenstein 3-D)

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

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

Kyle Katarn (Star Wars: Dark Forces)

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

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

Cate Archer (The Operative: No One Lives Forever)

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

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

Prisoner 426 (Unreal)

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

Caleb (Blood, Blood 2: The Chosen)

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

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

DoomGuy: (Doom)

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

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

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

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

Ranger (Quake, Quake 3)

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

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

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

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

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

Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem 3D)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I used to live here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know if Stars Wars: The Old Republic is the best MMO around—or even the best Star Wars MMO around—but there's something to be said for keeping the party alive for nearly 15 years at this point, even as developer Broadsword took the reins from BioWare in 2023. If you miss those halcyon days when the game had just dropped, well, you might want to give the imminent 8.0 update a look.

It was revealed in a blog post that went up Thursday, and it promises a pretty standard lineup of big MMO update features: a raised level cap, more spells and phat loots to futz with, and new zones to explore in the Twi'lek homeworld Ryloth. But there's also two new systems both tackling the MMO's prickliest design conundrum: difficulty.

The first of those is a difficulty slider, which lets you pick your poison between "a cinematic story-driven journey, a more demanding combat experience, or the ultimate challenge." Notably, you can group up with friends regardless of what you've all chosen, so it'll be interesting to observe how the scaling works out there.

There's also the new "venture" characters, which operate on their own difficulty system split between classic and expert options. These characters have to start a new story from the beginning, but they'll get special rewards for completing extra objectives as they play through the game normally. It's not clear what those rewards are, but the whole thing is apparently meant to "evoke the feel of the classic SWTOR experience" back when it was slightly less easy to roll over a dozen mobs at once.

It's a neat idea, assuming it doesn't morph into some battle pass-inspired FOMO nightmare. SWTOR probably isn't so different from its old self that fans are desperate for an OSRS-style revival, but it does still have a best-in-class leveling journey let down by the fact that you can faceroll your way through a great deal of it. If the rewards are fun to pursue and objectives non-tedious, it could brush the dust off those zones and get people grouping in them again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hate-love relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's all about bias, baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At a time when game file sizes are growing ever larger and disk space is astonishingly expensive, I increasingly appreciate the value of a small game. And they don't come much smaller than TinySol, a solitaire game so diminutive that it can be loaded from a QR code.

TinySol is the creation of vintage computer enthusiasts Classic Bits, and was stumbled upon by YouTuber LGR Blerbs at the VCF Southwest convention in Texas. In what sounds like the beginning of a horror film, Blerbs was randomly handed TinySol at a booth on a 5.25-inch floppy disk.

Despite appearances, TinySol is a new(ish) game, having been in development since 2021. In the dot matrix-style manual that accompanies the hard copy, developer Classic Bits explains "I originally wanted a tiny game to shoehorn into ROM images for GRiD computers and that would leverage the sharp 640x400 AT&T 6300 monochrome video."

Weighing in at a paltry 3 kilobytes, TinySol lets players enjoy three-card Klondike Solitaire with simple black & white graphics. The program is so compact that it can fit within a QR code, which can be decoded with a snippet of code written on TinySol's packaging.

In the comments to Blerbs' video, Classic Bits provided some additional information on the game, saying that the game is "intentionally monochrome for max clarity on old displays," and that the QR code version is actually a "mini low-rez version with limited features". And while currently the 3-card draw is the only mode available, Classic Bits has added a one-card draw mode for an "upcoming release".

Fortunately, you don't need a hard copy or a QR code to check out TinySol yourself. The game is free to download via the Classic Bits website. You can run TinySol in DosBox by dragging and dropping the TinySol executable onto the DosBox application. It's worth noting that many of the three-card draws the game generates are not actually winnable, so Classic Bits has compiled 640 winnable save files that you can also download if you wish.

Immersive sims like Dishonored and Deus Ex are typically solo experiences, but there have been a few attempts to bring multiplayer into the mix over the years. System Shock 2 featured an infamously wonky cooperative mode that was overhauled in last year's Nightdive remaster, while Arkane's Deathloop successfully folded an invasion mechanic into its mix of roguelike running and emergent sneaking.

Now, you can also play Arkane's excellent System Shock successor Prey with a bunch of pals, albeit via unofficial means. The functionally named Prey Coop enables up to 16 players to explore the Talos 1 space station together. Prey Coop is the creation of modder null234, who says that the mod "syncs global campaign progression, story choices, enemy AI, inventory, doors, hazards and world physics across all connected clients."

Although Prey Coop is still in Alpha, null234 says the whole campaign is playable from start to finish on "both new and existing saves". Nonetheless, there are still plenty of kinks to be worked out, such as "visual rough edges, animation quirks, and potential bugs."

Frankly, 16 players running around Talos 1 sound like the worst thing ever, but playing Prey as a 2-player cooperative game should work fairly well. Prey is by far the most methodical and cerebral of Arkane's immersive sims, one that encourages ingenious use of gadgets and powers to get the drop on the Typhon menace. Working together with a partner to set up traps, fight enemies, and bypass obstacles seems like a viable way to play, especially if you compensate for the extra player by amping up the difficulty.

As far as I'm concerned though, you can play Prey with as many friends as you like, so long as you play it. Arkane's dark sci-fi adventure has gone up in my estimations every time I've played it, to the point where I believe it might just be the best thing Arkane has produced to date.

Sure, Dishonored 2 has the more galaxy-brained levels and flashier powers. But I think Prey's slower-burn has the greater satisfaction, especially over repeated playthroughs. It has the superior story, by some margin and the way Talos 1 unfolds as you explore is marvellous. I also find that treating the Typhon as puzzles to be solved rather than enemies to be fought also elevates the experience. There's tons of fun to be had in manipulating those inky aliens from the shadows using all the weird gizmos Prey furnishes you with.

Anyway, I'll step off the soapbox now. If you want to try Prey Coop for yourself, you can download it via Nexus Mods. Alongside the mod itself, you'll need to install Chairloader, forward the appropriate ports, and ensure all players have a legitimate copy of the game and the same DLL build of the mod. Full instructions are available here.

You could tell that Stalker 2 was a true sequel to 2007's survivalist FPS in that it was as broken as it was brilliant. GSC Game World succeeded in delivering the seamless open world it has spent two decades striving toward, but players' exploration of Chornobyl's exclusion zone was hindered by bugs, broken quests, and more performance issues than a drunk orchestra.

The sequel has received numerous massive patches already, but the biggest and—hopefully—best is yet to come. With the imminent arrival of the shooter's first story expansion, GSC has detailed the enormous 2.0 patch that will accompany the DLC.

Named 'Back to the Zone', the 2.0 update will bring both a visual and mechanical refresh to Stalker 2 upon its release next week, as detailed by GSC in an article on its website. The headline change is an overhaul to the Zone's lighting, which GSC says it has altered to provide more varied conditions:

"The sun still shines brightly outside, but now it plays differently across the environment on the ground—shadows and reflections included," GSC writers. Indoor lighting has also been changed to make it "more realistic", while the landscape and vegetation has apparently been reworked for a more natural look.

Arguably more significant, though, are the changes GSC has made to A-Life—the system that governs the behaviour of the mutants and rival Stalkers that prowl the Zone. Again, the focus appears to be on improving the Zone's atmosphere, making it more of an immersive space and less of a warzone.

"The Zone isn't one constant gunfight. It's a lonely place where life carries on by its own rules," GSC explains. "Every encounter or firefight is the result of stalkers and mutants simply doing stalker and mutant things."

Specific changes include giving creatures more places to be like campfires, bus stops etc, and increasing conflicts around those spots. GSC has also fixed some of the more immersion-breaking glitches experienced in the sequel, like enemies shooting through walls.

Other additions coming with the patch include a custom difficulty where you adjust parameters like combat difficulty, anomalies, and the in-game economy, new weapons and scopes, dynamic fog that you can use to your tactical advantage, and binoculars—which are pretty useful to have in a game like Stalker.

Back to the Zone will be released on August 20, launching in tandem with the expansion 'Cost of Hope'. This DLC—one of two GSC has planned—revolves around the series' authoritarian 'Duty' faction and will see players learn what secrets lie hidden in the centre of the Zone. While I'm up for further story adventures in Stalker 2, a smoother ride in the base game is easily what I'm most excited about.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer feature provided by:

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

By Kieron Gillen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is hilarious.

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

In an investor-focused article on the Walt Disney Company website, the entertainment giant revealed an achievement that caught me off-guard: Kingdom Hearts, the mesmerizingly strange Final Fantasy x Disney crossover series, numbers among the company's "billion-dollar franchises."

The article, "How Games Are Helping Shape Disney's Next Chapter," looks to be a combination victory lap/game plan meant to be read by the market-minded individual. It's shareholder chic, touting the company's numerous sales-related achievements in the gaming space, such as its increasingly close relationship with Epic Games and the Fortnite Creative platform, or Marvel Rivals' success among Gen Z. Also, the Kingdom Hearts thing.

Disney executive vice president of games and digital entertainment Sean Shoptaw explained that the company boasts "nine games that have grossed over $1 billion at retail." Among that nine: Mobile game Marvel Strike Force, and Kingdom Hearts.

I truly do not know what to say about this development or its wider implications for Spaceship Earth. The Kingdom Hearts phenomenon passed me by, even though I am in a maximum risk demographic for being a Kingdom Hearts fan (late millennial, owned a PS2). I've always assumed it's the sort of thing you can't be initiated into past a certain age. It's like an elf I just can't see because the magic of childhood has left my soul.

Kingdom Hearts is still popular, though, and weirdly cross-generational. Its release chronology has it firmly being "a millennial thing," but it also feels like "a zoomer thing" as well, judging by the frenzied reactions whenever that big-shoed Sora reappears.

And it makes sense that it has accumulated $1 billion after 15 mainline games—a solid chunk of which are repackaged collections of past games—over a quarter century. To the big mouse, that's small potatoes (the new Spider-Man movie alone will clear over a billion before its theater run is done). Congratulations to the Walt Disney Company, Square Enix, and their respective shareholders.

We finally got another trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 in June, four years, two ages of man, and one geological epoch after its initial 2022 reveal. Perhaps the next billion in Donald Duck keyblade revenue is nearer at hand than any of us suspect?

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

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

Meet the Khajiit

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local Color

Other mods that pair well with this dish

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

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

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

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

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

Khajiit has quests

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

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

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

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

Few things in gaming are more routine than a Call of Duty multiplayer beta, but this year's is actually a bit different. The Modern Warfare 4 beta kicking off on August 21 (for pre-orders only) will include the usual smattering of multiplayer modes, and in a series first, it'll also include a chunk of the campaign.

"Entrenched" is the campaign mission that'll be playable early, and Infinity Ward has published a brief teaser for it (watch above). Based on what we know about the story of Modern Warfare 4, it seems we're neck deep in North Korea's invasion of South Korea by this point.

The mission will follow a squad of South Korean marines (plus one embedded American) in an uphill offensive—we've got trenches, APCs, shotguns, and that thing where an NPC buddy has an elaborate mo-capped brawl right in front of you. In short: a Call of Duty mission, and perhaps a good one.

Warzone will also make an appearance in a beta for the first time, but not until the second weekend. That's the one that's open for all, August 28 to September 1. The new Zodiac Resurgeance map will be playable, and I imagine we'll also learn the ways in which Warzone will be absorbing Modern Warfare 4's gameplay changes.

If you're not caught up, Infinity Ward's first CoD in four years appears to be more about refinements than anything else—clever solutions to things like muzzle flash, hipfire, and movement aimed at maintaining Modern Warfare's immersive qualities while not annoying serious players. I played a bit of multiplayer back in May against other journalists and had a good time, but next week's beta is a proper test drive.

As for why Infinity Ward is double-stuffing the beta, it has not said, though one could intuit that the studio is extending an olive branch to fans disappointed by last year's pretty bad Black Ops 7, and who might not see the urgency to buy another $70 CoD weeks before GTA6 arrives.

Disconnects are an unpleasant fact of life in an MMO, and if you play WoW long enough you'll start to recognize the telltale signs indicating one of your adventurer colleagues has fallen afoul of a network hiccup: They might simply halt in place mid-combat. If they were moving when the connection dropped, their character might proceed to run directly into a wall, or get caught in a brief loop of stuttery motion until the server has enough and logs them out.

Since WoW: Midnight's 12.1 patch dropped, however, players have started reporting some uncanny behavior from their disconnected fellows (via Kotaku). Rather than the expected unresponsiveness, disconnected characters have seemingly started to move and fight on their own.

The best available look at the phenomenon comes courtesy of redditor Stuperstrong, who shared a YouTube video on the WoW subreddit that they'd recorded of their Evoker friend disconnecting and continuing to participate in combat. In the clip, embedded above, you can see the dragon-winged Evoker exhibit the typical signs of a mid-encounter connection drop on the left side of the screen at around 39 seconds—and then they start fighting again.

The video is surprisingly unnerving: Speaking as someone who's played WoW on and off for over 20 years, there's something instinctively unsettling about seeing a player character performing actions when you've received all the visual signals that they absolutely shouldn't be. It feels wrong—and the stiff, robotic cadence of their inputs doesn't help.

Stuperstrong isn't the only one who's witnessed it. Other players responded to the thread with their own eyewitness accounts, like the brother of a warrior player whose game crashed while they were in a Discord call:

"He hung there through almost the entire boss fight we were on and then like 30 seconds into his [disconnect], his warrior charges the boss and starts hitting it," says redditor shlomo_baggins. "My brother was actively narrating his re-login. According to him his game hard locked, froze, and he ALT+F4'd and relogged in. Suuuper weird."

So who's playing when the player isn't? While this could all be an elaborate hoax, the best theory so far is that we're seeing an early manifestation of some sort of unannounced disconnect protection feature.

For a few years now, WoW has used NPC dungeon follower tech to let players run through casual content with a party of AI-controlled player characters who are—in most cases, anyway—surprisingly capable in combat. If disconnected characters are indeed starting to fight on their own, it's not unthinkable that Blizzard might have reworked that tech to keep a dropped connection from ruining a dungeon run or raid attempt for the whole group.

Either that or WoW's haunted. Blizzard hasn't yet acknowledged the phenomenon; until there's some sort of official explanation, all theories are on the table.

Have you ever said to yourself, 'If I was rich I'd get Looking Glass Studios back together and have them make a proper goddamn Thief sequel!'? Or, you know, whatever game gets you really wound up about such things. It's a pleasant fantasy, but not something that ever actually happens—except, apparently, in the case of the recently announced Thimbleweed Park 2.

In a new interview with Bloomberg, Thimbleweed Park creator Ron Gilbert said he didn't want to work with a conventional publisher because his experiences with them haven't been entirely great.

"I don’t mind the publisher earning back their money," Gilbert said. "It’s just that once they have earned back their money and become whole, they still want the majority of the money. Or there are really goofy terms, like you don’t make anything unless it’s a major hit. I always felt that was unfair."

That was the case when Gilbert first expressed interest in doing Thimbleweed Park 2: Publishers were interested but their terms weren't acceptable. Gilbert also didn't want to do another Kickstarter. That left the process kind of stuck, until a friend told Gilbert he knew "a wealthy outsider" who was a big fan of adventure games, and Thimbleweed Park in particular.

Gilbert was dubious, but eventually made contact with the purported wealthy benefactor, who turned out to be an actual wealthy benefactor. Gilbert put together a "very realistic" budget for Thimbleweed Park 2, higher than the cost of the original (which the report says cost just over $1 million), and the as-yet-anonymous rich guy threw the thumbs up on what Gilbert said is a far better deal than he'd get from any publisher: "This deal is a lot more fair in that he gets whole very quickly, and then it’s a reasonable split."

The audience for point-and-click adventures is relatively niche, but those who like them—as this story shows—tend to like them a lot. Adventures also tend to have a longer tail than some genres, at least in part because they're not dependent on cutting edge technology: Many of the best of them, Thimbleweed Park included, look (and, frankly, play) like they were made 20 or 30 years ago.

And Thimbleweed Park is still out there earning, too. "We’re almost 10 years from release and that game still sells," Gilbert said. "That tells me that there is an audience for that game and games like this."

Thimbleweed Park 2, neither a sequel nor a prequel, is currently expected to be out in early 2028.

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

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

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

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

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

Wisdom of the crowd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Palworld went into full release in July after more than two years of early access, and it's going pretty well: A massive surge in concurrent players on Steam is slowly settling back down to Earth, but more than a month after that 1.0 launch it's still putting up numbers that haven't been seen since the early days of that early access rollout.

Work on the game continues and there's more to come, but Pocketpair's publishing and communications head John "Bucky" Buckley recently warned that players should maybe temper their expectations about what's next.

Buckley apparently set the bar higher than intended yesterday when he celebrated Palworld's "incredible" 1.0 launch by retweeting an image of a "Palworld v1.1 brainstorming session," adding, "time to get back to the grind!"

He also invited suggestions, and received more than 2,000 responses, some of them—like more storage slots—manageable, and others, like cross-server PvP or being able to play as pals, less so. Eventually, he was forced to pump the brakes on the whole thing.

"Shot myself in the foot here, 1.7k comments later, but things like 'add a new continent', 'add 20 more levels' and similarly massive undertakings are not really what we want to do with v1.1," Buckley wrote in a more recent message. "Open to ideas but, we’re not planning to spend a year making a massive update for 1.1."

Naturally, that didn't stop people from continuing to make unwieldy suggestions. Buckley made a trooper's effort to answer a lot of them: In response to a request for a "variant system" for pals, he said it wouldn't be difficult, "just exceptionally time consuming. A variant of 200+ pals would take a considerably long time to do. Realistically, a year or more unless we hyper focus it. Unless you don’t do it by hand and automate it somehow but…"

Replying to another user who asked why the process would be so time-consuming, Buckley wrote, "Because we would want to do it ourselves by hand rather than just automating it." (Pocketpair has been quite outspoken in its opposition to the use of generative AI in game development.)

Eventually, though—as it always does—it came to this:

Deeply relatable. There's no word on when Palworld 1.1 will be out at this point, or what will be in it, but Buckley also recently suggested that more collaborations are on the way, so at least you've got that to look forward to.

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, a WB Games-published 2011 action RPG about a different fellowship that went the other way, recently reappeared on Steam in a polished-up Legacy Edition package. While the modernizations are getting a favorable reception—it's currently enjoying a Very Positive rating on Steam—its original launch 15 didn't earn much attention for something with "The Lord of the Rings" in the title.

War in the North didn't review well, but looking back, there's a certain Bethesda-sized factor that might have stolen some of its thunder: Its original release date was November 1, 2011—just 10 days before The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim came out. On X this week (via IGN), a former Warner Bros. dev said that unfavorable matchup might have been avoided if the publisher had taken his advice back in 2011.

Christian Allen—current design director on Project Zomboid and former design director at WB Games Seattle, which coordinates Warner Bros. development and publishing efforts—responded to the Legacy Edition's reveal to share how he'd tried without success to get the publisher to revise its launch plans.

"Wow this is cool. 15 years ago I argued vociferously not to release this up against Skyrim, as it wouldn't get a fair shake. I got overruled," Allen said. "Nice to see it get a proper release."

In follow-up replies, Allen noted that, in addition to the oppressive cultural gravity of Todd Howard, War in the North also suffered from a strangely thin marketing campaign. Either WB Games "wrote it off," or it "thought hardcore LOTR fans would just know about it, somehow," he said. Unfortunately, even the Lord of the Rings doesn't sell itself.

Not long after War in the North's disappointing launch, its original developer—Snowblind Studios—was merged with Monolith Productions in 2012. There, many former Snowblind studio staff would contribute to Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, a production that Allen had initially overseen as WB Games design director. After releasing the sequel, Shadow of War, in 2017 and working for years on a Wonder Woman game, the studio was eventually shuttered by Warner Bros. in 2025 as part of "a strategic change.

As for War in the North, Allen's overall assessment is that it was ultimately a casualty of corporate shortsightedness.

"Quarterly revenue motivations drive more decisions than people realize. It's a big challenge with stock-price driven organizations," he said. "Must be hard to be an exec and go, 'Well, this game will do better if we hold it until March, but my bonus will take a 50% hit.' 🤷"

Maybe the games industry of today isn't all that different from those of previous decades, despite how often it feels otherwise.

In most farm sims, talking to my neighbors is just another chore. Water the strawberries, pet the cows, chat with the rancher next door, who says "Nothing like a cold glass of milk to start my day!" which is the same thing she said two days ago and will say again two days from now. In Fields of Mistria, my neighbors are the reason I get out of bed in the morning.

But first, the farm sim throat clearing: Is Fields of Mistria like Stardew Valley? Yes. You play as a budding farmer new to a rural town where you'll befriend the residents and sell your stacks of cucumbers to fund revitalization of the floundering community. It's the fate of any farm sim in the past decade to get compared to Stardew, which diehards find reductive (yes I grew up with Harvest Moon too), but we can all admit it's the easiest shared reference.

In Fields of Mistria I clear my overgrown farm of trees and rocks, decorate my property over several years, grow seasonal crops, buy and breed animals, fish, forage, donate one of every item to the local museum, pass out at 2 am outside my house because I just needed to run one more errand, collect ores and fight monsters in a mine outside town, unlock passive skills, deliver resources for quests, give gifts to villagers, cook food, *deep breath* and eventually get married and have a baby with the hot local single of my choice after fulfilling a main quest to repair the town where everyone lives happily ever after.

So yeah, It's like Stardew Valley. Also it's adorably pink and inspired by '90s anime. It nails all those farm simming essentials but the thing that truly transforms it from main character to magical is its unexpectedly great writing.

Farming builds character

I don't go into farm sims looking for good writing. Does anyone? The whole genre leans on character archetypes harder than a Hallmark romcom. Mistria doesn't buck the tradition of cute and corny characters: buff rancher Hayden is boisterous and friendly, travelling salesman Balor is handsome and flirtatious, and young town leader Adeline is eagerly detail-oriented. It trades in the same tropes and yet it's the best-written farm sim I've ever played.

Mistria isn't "well written" like a satire with sharp lines I can point to as superiorly clever. It's just earnestly great in a way you can almost miss if you get distracted by puns and the family-friendly tone. It's like realizing that, wait, Avatar: The Last Airbender was surprisingly insightful despite being a TV-Y7 kids show.

Partly, it's a volume thing. There's just so much dialogue in Fields of Mistria. In other farm sims, you start to hear characters repeating the same lines of daily chatter pretty fast and they'll say "Wow, I love this. Thanks!" whether you're giving them a flower or a chunk of gold.

In Fields of Mistria, it's the specificity of lines that really sells each character. Reina works as a cook at her parents' inn and says she feels nostalgic about how her mom used to make breaded catfish if you give her that meal as a gift. Celine the gardener admires the freshness of gifted hydrangeas. Olric the himbo blacksmith just loves rocks. If you give him a piece of stone he responds with any of eight different lines telling you whether it's grainy sandstone or "nonfoliated metamorphic" quartzite. All that for a single piece of stone. There aren't eight different lines for every gift, but I can feel the care taken in choosing where to create extra layers of detail for each character.

On the surface, young noble Eiland is a history buff with a sweet tooth. The gifts he loves most are all desserts and his personal story revolves around a hunt for Mistrian artifacts. Eiland is also kind of impulsive. He never comes out and says "Gee I guess my problem is I should think things through sometimes," while staring through the screen at me. Early on, though, I watch him take an axe to a tree on my farm first thing in the morning, argue with the museum curator about reopening the mines sooner and, one of my favorite little daily dialogues of his: The one where he bought a whole cake at the Saturday Market and wheedles me into sharing some with him because maybe a whole cake was too much cake.

Classic Eiland. It's cute and cheesy, but layered.

Mistria goes five extra miles with its writing at nearly every opportunity. Every Friday night at the inn I can spectate the banter as my neighbors play multiple campaigns of "Dragons & Drama," start a drawing class, a book club, and a dessert-tasting group, all with oodles of personality from the whole cast. Personal story scenes with marriage candidates are all several minutes' worth of conversation and dialogue choices that reveal details beneath that first layer of trope-y persona. Characters even have their own theme songs like they really are right out of an old JRPG.

Even as I walk around town doing my normal farm simming chores I can listen in on characters talking to each other, like Balor discussing wagon repairs with March the blacksmith or Adeline teasing her brother Eiland over the disorder in his office. Mistria is such a fully imagined community of fun individuals who share memories and jokes with each other. I genuinely love stopping to talk with them instead of just skipping past the same old lines.

Fixes for farm freaks

Farm sims have a lot to live up to now that we've got so many to choose from. There's an expectation that they'll meet the rubric by checking off the exhaustive Stardew-plus-Animal-Crossing features list, but also that the best ones can devise new quality of life features to smooth out common wrinkles in the farm simming experience.

Mistria has some of the newly common niceties like a jump button (because walking around all the fences on your farm is a minor annoyance) and a map that shows where every character currently is so you're not turning in circles looking for that one person you need to talk to for a quest. Oh, and you can use shops without their owners present so you aren't stuck unable to buy a barn because Ryis is chilling at the beach with March and Reina.

Other ideas I've not seen before, like the gossip system where Elsie the town socialite can clue you in on items that other villagers like instead of suffering through trial and error (or admitting defeat and just using a wiki). I'm particularly fond of the craftable big bell I can ring to call all the animals on my whole property out of their barns in the morning and send them to bed at night. It's a lifesaver when I'm cutting it close at 1:30 am.

Don't check out

What's more interesting about Mistria is where it resists the convenience of automation. Most farm sims borrow from crafting games here with refining machines: a furnace to turn ore into ingots, a churn making butter from milk, and barrels for beer and wine. You get to toss your produce in, walk away, and come back later to grab your artisan products and pitch them in your shipping bin at premium prices. You become a glorified conveyor belt, carrying seeds to the ground and produce to machines on a farm that sort of runs itself because you've got an optimized sprinkler layout to boot.

Mistria requires, and even incentivizes, me to do everything by hand. Watering crops and feeding animals gives me essence, an experience-like resource I spend on buying passive perks like randomly getting free seeds when watering my crops or higher chances to hook treasure chests instead of trash when fishing. There are no wine barrels at all so the best use of fruits is making jams or desserts in my kitchen. Refining dairy products and ores takes time out of my day (until I unlock perks to reduce that time) which I've initially got to do at the mill and blacksmith in town.

There is a magic spell to call a rain storm to water my crops but I can't abuse it too many days in a row without waiting to regenerate mana. Late in the game there are a few automation tools like sprinklers and a machine to pet your animals, but they're quite late game so I'm never taught to really rely on them. In fact, if I let the machines work for me I've got to expend essence to power them instead of earning it as I would by just using my watering can. At best, the automation tools let me displace my effort from elsewhere but never replace it entirely.

Mistria doesn't want me to set up a farming empire and then mentally check out as I ship 500 bottles of wine without ever leaving my property like a reclusive billionaire. There are plenty of players posting immaculately designed farms on social media with optimally laid-out greenhouses. I've been envious of many already. Even those players, though, are encouraged to invest care in checking on their cows and picking berries by hand.

Mistria's pastel colors and Game Boy Advance-era "blurp blurp" sound effects grabbed me by the nostalgia and squeezed. There's sparkles and frills, sky high waistlines, muscle-y guys in sleeveless shirts and pink-haired girls wearing capes. It's like I'm 11 years old, sitting in the third row of a minivan next to a sketchbook full of Fruits Basket doodles while I mash the A button through "just one more" Final Fantasy Tactics Advance battle before my mom parks at the grocery store. Except now I'm a grownup and I can play just one more day at 1 am and suffer the consequences at my desk in the morning.

Fields of Mistria is the first farm sim in a lot of years that's made me want to spend time in town visiting with its cast even after I've gotten rich off shipping berries to the capitol. It's a fresh lease on farm sims in a shojo manga fever dream.

Embark has finally released some solid information on Arc Raiders' next major update, Frozen Trails. We've got details on all the big and small features players can expect to see, including a snowy map, new arcs, new weapons, and more ways in which Embark wishes to improve "the core Arc Raiders experience".

The biggest feature which Frozen Trails brings with it is the map itself which is unsurprisingly frozen. It'll take players beyond the mountains as they're tasked with investigating a strange signal emanating from the tundra. There's abandoned homes, villages, research facilities, and an observatory to explore and strip for loot. But, just as it is with any other Arc Raiders map, players will have to fight for the good stuff: "You’ll encounter threats above and below ground, and navigate environments that no Raiders have seen before."

Some of these threats will likely come in the form of the new arcs which have been teased for a while now. "Our team has been hard at work developing new ARC threats that will arrive alongside the new map, each designed to challenge the ways you’ve learned to move, fight, and adapt," executive producer Aleksander Grøndal explains in a blog post.

All we know about these arcs so far is that they'll range from "small and nifty problem-makers" (which means they'll probably be similar to the likes of Pops or Ticks), to "an enormous machine that will halt you in your tracks."

It's all relative but when I hear enormous in Arc Raiders I think of the Matriarch, which could mean we'll be getting another map-uniting threat to go up against. Perhaps we'll finally see a glimpse of the rumoured Baron or Duke. But enormous could also just mean a Bastion or Vaporizer-sized arc which would still be a lot of fun to fight and likely just as terrifying.

"Creating new ARC is one of the more involved parts of development," Grøndal continues. "From early concepts and animation to behaviour and machine learning systems that give them their distinctive 'spark of life', every enemy goes through months of iteration to get right. We think it’ll be worth the wait, and we can’t wait to see what you think."

But these new arcs aren't just here to terrify players, it's all about creating another "new high-level challenge" for long time players to sink their teeth into. As more time passes and the regulars get better and better, it's crucial that Embark ups the ante, so in enters "an enormous new Arc Operation designed for experienced raiders looking to push themselves even further."

"Without giving too much away, this new activity is built around many of the ideas that have become increasingly important to us throughout development: meaningful decisions, dynamic encounters, and moments that demand cooperation and careful judgment," Grøndal says.

"Success won’t come easily. You’ll need to balance combat, teamwork, risk, and survival in what we believe will be one of the most intense experiences ARC Raiders has offered to date – one that rewards those willing to rise to the challenge." More on this will be revealed later, closer to its release in October.

Without getting to see Frozen Trails first-hand, all players can go by right now are promises and vibes. But without getting ahead of myself, it seems like Embark is hitting the mark of what players need from this next major update. It's not enough to offer up new maps, arcs, and weapons on their own, players need variety and making small tweaks which will force players to expand upon their habitual playstyle sounds like the refresh Arc Raiders needs.

The crowning achievement of a game is no longer player count or Metacritic score, it's actually the number of collabs it can squeeze into its lifecycle—soon every game will collab with each other to make one giant game. I can see it coming.

Although that may not be the case for Palworld, even with its current collabs it won't just let any old IP work with the critters-with-guns survival game.

"If it really doesn’t make sense then obviously we would never go ahead with it," the head of publishing and communications, John 'Bucky' Buckley, recently revealed in a social media post (via GamesRadar). "You guys simply do not realize the sheer number of collabs we've rejected or scrapped for that reason."

All I can say to that is good—collabs for the sake of collabs suck. I'd much rather see games perfect and polish their own artistic vision than fill in the gaps with someone else's ideas. But even if there are going to be collabs the very least a game can do is take this same approach that Palworld seemingly stands by, with it being far more restrictive with what it lets in. Not everyone can be a Fortnite.

Some of the best collaborations Palworld has are those that slot into place almost seamlessly. Terraria is a good example of such with its creatures and items, like the legendary Meowmere, already looking like they could be found on the Palpagos Islands.

"I think the Terraria collab in Palworld was pretty great," Bucky adds. "Completely understand some people would prefer a more lore-first approach but we've been very open about our fun-first approach since day one!"

Even Palworld's UltraKill collab manages to make sense thanks to all the weapons which are already in the game. Armaments like the Marksman Revolver don't seem so unseemly when players have already had access to the makeshift shotgun or laser rifle in the game. So clearly whatever Pocketpair has on its checklist for collabs is working so far.

Arc System Works can do just about anything, including convincing me to pick up a Marvel-themed 2D anime fighter. Not that I've got anything particularly against either of those things. But as someone who grew up firmly in the 3D fighting game scene (and continues to dwell there) and traditionally doesn't care much for superheroes beyond Spider-Man, Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls should be a hard sell for someone like me.

And yet Arc System Works has utterly enamoured me to its riff on both the Marvel universe and tag fighters, having me grumble significantly less about anti-airs and jump cancels than I traditionally would. Its low skill floor and high skill ceiling leaves tons of room for expression, from casual autocombo mashers to professionals who can hit you with a two-touch death combo if you're not careful.

Avengers Assemble

Whereas most tag fighters are a conservative 2v2 or 3v3 battle, Marvel Tōkon pits a whopping four characters against each other. That would be downright terrifying by usual tag fighter rules—learning two characters has put more than enough folks off the likes of Tekken Tag Tournament and 2XKO—but Tōkon grounds its larger teams by giving all characters a shared health bar.

It means you can essentially play Tōkon as a 1v1 with the odd assist here and there, while letting you go ham with a full team if you want to. But the game doesn't give you access to all four outright. Instead, you'll start with two characters, continuing to build out your team throughout the match through things like stage breaks, wall splats, and… well, losing the round. It folds in an element of strategy that I really like and stops Tōkon from feeling like a total snowball fest.

Its roster of characters is genuinely stellar, too. Each fighter is already loosely grouped up into a team—you've got the classic Avengers with Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther, and Hulk. My personal favourite is the Samurai Outlaws comp made up of Ghost Rider (I am now a little obsessed with Robbie Reyes), Blade, Deadpool, and Loki.

Arc System Works has done such a fantastic job of making each character's moveset fit with their personality. Spider-Man thwips around the stage with his webs, Magik can go for an all-out assault from her portals, and Deadpool's penchant for being all meta absolutely shines through his moveset—essentially chock-full of easter eggs like Kauzya's Electric Wind God Fist, the Jack-O crouching pose, and Scorpion's signature "Get over here!"

I'm grateful to see Arc System Works incorporating both its regular motion inputs and a more simplified control scheme similar to Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising here as well—allowing newer players to forgo quarter-circles in favour of basic directional inputs and a special button. The trade-off is a little less damage than going for the classic method, but it's one that makes Tōkon far more approachable from the get-go, a problem that fighting games often struggle with.

Tag me in

All of these fancy moves can be put to use across Tōkon's (admittedly small) range of modes. For the lore enjoyers, Tōkon offers five Episode stories that cover each of the game's teams. They're penned by comic author Kieron Gillen, complete with gorgeous comic book panel art with a handful of anime cutscenes thrown in for extra pizzazz.

Narratively, they're pretty formulaic for a fighting game, and not all of them are equally interesting. I enjoyed the Samurai Outlaws and Masters of Doom stories significantly more than the likes of Avengers, but they mostly just serve as a fun 11-chapter mode with a lot of reading and not a whole lotta fighting.

Tōkon's multiplayer is where most folks are going to end up spending their time, and in true anime fighter fashion, the game comes with full-blown rooms where you can run a little anime avatar around, or simply dive into casual and ranked matches from the comfort of your training mode.

This is where I really need to start talking a bit about Tōkon's platform-specific issues. For starters, the game has a mandatory PSN sign-in for PC players—anyone familiar with the Helldivers 2 fiasco will know what the deal is here. While it's not exactly the most detrimental thing, it's a frustrating and unnecessary step that Sony has folded in as Tōkon's publisher.

The game also, as it stands, does not run on Linux. As someone who loves taking their fighting games on the go with my Steam Deck, it's a huge dampener. Especially when it's become one of the easiest ways for me to bring a quick and dirty setup for some casual matches at my fighting game locals, having Tōkon closed off to Linux users entirely feels like a ridiculous oversight on Sony's part.

And while Arc System Works has put out a patch in the time I've spent reviewing Tōkon, the game still suffers from unfortunate PC-specific performance issues. Frame drops and microstutters that can lead to rollback frames making online matches impossible, which has been a huge issue for some players. It's something I only experienced once across a handful of online games, but I've got friends with better setups than myself who aren't even able to run the thing at a smooth 60fps, which is completely criminal for a modern-day fighting game.

It really is frustrating to see a fighting game perform poorly on PC in the big 2026, and has already led to PlayStation users switching off crossplay and narrowing the matchmaking pool on our end. Not that I blame them, mind, but it's a real stain on what is otherwise a robust fighter.

Whether the PC version will be dragged up to par with the PlayStation version remains to be seen, but as it stands, there is a clear quality difference between the two platforms.

Despite its performance woes, I am genuinely impressed by Marvel Tōkon. Arc System Works has somehow managed to make a tag fighter not feel totally daunting, even though I'm still spending an awful lot of time getting to grips with its systems. It's not an easy game to master in the slightest, but the work ArcSys has put into lowering the initial barrier to entry makes Tōkon a great fighting game to pick up for newbies and veterans alike.

Yesterday we finally got to see a full reveal for everything arriving in Total War: Warhammer 3's Lords of the End Times expansion and it's a whole heap of content. We've got Nagash and his undead legions, a fully-fleshed out Boris Todbringer and Middenland, plus the Glottkin's putrid hordes, and the greatest of Grey Seers, Thanquol and his giant rat-ogre, Boneripper.

But nestled among the reveals was also the announcement that when Lords of the End Times launches on September 24, you'll no longer need any Total War: Warhammer games to play the huge trilogy-spanning Immortal Empires campaign, which is the best bit of the series. From the official DLC summary:

"In a series first, purchasing any of the [Lords of the End Times] content grants access to the colossal Immortal Empires campaign with no need to own any of the Total War: Warhammer games, making it a great entry point for new players."

The entry conditions for Immortal Empires—the grand campaign which compiles content from all three instalments— have softened over the years. You used to have to own all three Total War: Warhammer games, then it was just Total War: Warhammer 3, and from September, it'll just be any individual Lords of the End Times character, meaning you'll be able to unlock Immortal Empires for about $9 (£7.49) in perpetuity.

In fact, when the Lords of the End Times lords go on sale, it'll potentially get even cheaper. Content-wise, the base version of Immortal Empires amounts to 14 different factions, and 24 legendary lords, and that's not including all the Free-LC lords and heroes added over the years, plus entire free factions like Bretonnia, who also have multiple playable characters.

Alas, while expansion factions and lords are present in Immortal Empires, as it was previously, you'll still have to purchase individual DLC to play those—I recommend waiting for a sale and selectively picking up any extra races you're interested in trying after you've played the game for a bit.

You can currently buy Total War: Warhammer 3 for $9 in the 10th anniversary sale, but with this change in September, it'll actually be better content value to buy Nagash, Thanquol, Todbringer, or the Glottkin for the same price. You won't get the Realms of Chaos campaign, which is missable to be honest, but you'll get Immortal Empires, which contains its campaign map, plus one of the new DLC lords.

The same goes for Total War: Warhammer 1 and 2. The second game's Great Vortex campaign is a fun time, but its entire map is included in Immortal Empires. I've spent many hundreds of hours in every instalment in this series, but even I'll admit there's basically no point going back to individual games now Immortal Empires exists and collates all content.

And with its endgame rework plus all the new stuff, Lords of the End Times' release will be a great time to jump into Total War: Warhammer if you've been eyeing it for a while yet never made the leap.

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

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

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

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

Playing detective

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

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

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

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

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

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

Match report

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

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

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

Just don’t ask me what they mean!

One of the special pleasures in any medieval game is getting to field a trebuchet. In an era where warfare was largely a contest of who can keep people swinging their unfriendliest sticks around the longest before they get hungry enough to leave, there's a sort of giddiness that comes with being the guy who's weaponized the higher art of applied physics to fling half-ton boulders better than any run-of-the-mill onager could ever hope to.

Sadly, there have in fact been real human beings who were unfortunate enough to be in the way of those boulders over the years, and as reported earlier this week by Science, researchers have identified a skeleton they believe could very well be the first confirmed trebuchet casualty in the archaeological record.

The skeleton in question is Skeleton 150, one of a number of skeletons dating back to the 1300s that were unearthed during excavations beneath the chapel of Stirling Castle in Scotland in 1997. Skeleton 150 was one of five whose bones bore the evidence—cut marks, puncture wounds, blunt force trauma—of having died violently.

The injuries that Skeleton 150 had sustained were particularly interesting to University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry, who later examined the remains in cooperation with Historic Environment Scotland and presented her findings at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting.

Because the five battle-damaged skeletons had been buried beneath the castle chapel rather than outside its walls as would have been typical, Buckberry concluded they might have died during the sieges Stirling Castle endured—and ultimately fell to—at the close of the 13th century. A strategic keystone for Scottish forces, the castle was a coveted prize, eventually succumbing to the armies of Edward I at the end of a prolonged siege in 1304.

Skeleton 150, however, was extremely battle-damaged. The warrior's bones had suffered over 160 fractures, including a ruined leg, a massive, jagged break through the shoulder, roughly five dozen unusual breaks throughout the ribs, and 61 distinct fractures across the skull. This was not a man who tumbled off a horse, or even a parapet.

This was a soldier who was all but exploded.

"It looks like he was hit from behind by something traveling at a great velocity. The most similar cases I was finding were car crashes and people hit by trains," Buckberry told Science. "But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304?"

There aren't many candidates for what could cause this kind of damage during the time period, so I'll give you a hint: It was probably something flung by a trebuchet, the counter-weighted siege engine that first appeared in Europe about a century prior. And the English who laid siege to Stirling Castle in 1304 fielded a particularly nasty one: Called the Loup-de-Guerre, or "The War Wolf," the massive weapon was considered the largest trebuchet ever built. One account of the siege, compiled in the Flores Historiarum, says its missiles "pierced the two outer walls … like an arrow through cloth."

That sort of impact is unfortunate for anyone just on the other side of those walls, as Skeleton 150's breaks "indicate a very large area of impact and devastation," Buckberry said. "It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine."

A gruesome end, and a tragic way to be remembered by history. Ah, well—at least nobody captured the moment in a Bannerlord clip.

Nightdive's System Shock remake is great. PC Gamer immsim guy Joshua Wolens gave it an 80% review score, and we later chose it as the Best Remake of 2023 in our annual Game of the Year awards. Three years down the road, Nightdive is following it up with System Shock VR, a VR game being developed by Flat2VR Studios.

This is, going by the Steam description, a straight VR translation of the original game rather than a Half-Life: Alyx-style spinoff: You were caught hacking into TriOp, Edward Diego offered you a deal, you took it, and six months later that whole Citadel Station thing has kicked off.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go play System Shock. It's on sale for $15 on GOG and the Humble Store, if you insist on a Steam key.)

That's fine, there's no need to mess with success, and the Shodan origin story is a classic. But I'm a bit baffled about who this is actually for. VR adoption remains relatively minuscule: The percentage of Steam users with VR headsets, as reported by the Steam Hardware and Software Survey (which doesn't reflect the whole of the Steam user base, but nonetheless "is incredibly helpful to us as we make decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make and products to offer") remains well below 2%, and while the Meta Quest and PSVR2 headsets will also be supported, even with them in the mix it represents a tiny slice of the overall gaming audience.

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is an apt example: It looked pretty good (for a VR game, anyway), it's based on a classic, beloved property, it was well received by players and critics alike—and it peaked at 233 concurrent players on Steam. Publisher Vertigo Games closed one of its studios in June, just six months after Legacy of Shadow launched, saying "the VR market remains a challenging space."

It's possible that converting System Shock from a conventional FPS to a VR game isn't a big deal, and that the resources required are relatively minimal, but I'm not inclined to think so. I do think System Shock could be quite good (for a VR game, anyway), but whether that's enough to make it a success is a different question entirely.

System Shock VR is up for wishlisting now on Steam. A release date hasn't been announced.

Are you someone who spends almost as much time creating your characters as you do playing them in an RPG? Love obsessing over the details of your avatar's facial features, browsing the menu of noses, eyes, ears, and facial hair for ages? Think you're good enough that you could make your character look so much like someone else that you could fool people?

Good, because Legion Was Here is a game that spends more time in the character creator than it does anywhere else, and if you can't create a convincing character, you die.

In Legion Was Here you're a spy. Scratch that: you're the spy. This game is the opposite of James Bond walking into every undercover situation and saying "Hi, I'm James Bond." You're gifted at stealing someone's identity and impersonating them down to the very finest detail, mimicking them so expertly that their friends, family, and associates will have no idea they're talking to an imposter. At least, that's the idea.

Your mission begins on the operating table, where you page through a dossier of information about the person you're going to be replacing. What color and shape are their eyes? What hairstyle do they have? Is their nose big or small, wide or narrow? Try to match their looks precisely enough that you'll be able to fool the people that know them well.

But it's not as simple as just looking at a photo and picking the parts that match. In the demo I played—the full game is due later this year—I've only got a partial photo of someone I'm trying to duplicate, which shows their mouth, ear, chin, and nothing else. For the rest, I've only got a drawing to go off, and it's not super helpful because it looks like it was drawn by a child. I'm pretty sure my target doesn't really look like this:

Did I mention Legion Was Here can be a bit silly? It can. At least I can gather that my target has curly hair, green eyes, and a narrow nose, so I add those features to my own face, and hope like hell the blue crayon that was used means his hair is actually blue.

But it's no use being someone's doppelganger if your disguise can't stand up to scrutiny, so the dossier is also filled with details about that person: where they're from, what they do for a living, their favorite foods, their hobbies, and more. Before the mission you don't know what questions you might be asked, so you have to learn as much as possible.

That's a lot of information to absorb: after the tutorial, the first real mission of the demo is filled with pictures, newspaper clippings, and lots of other notes and files, and that takes ages to pore over. On the plus side, you don't need to memorize everything: you can create a crib sheet by writing notes on your hand like you're in middle school trying to pass a geography test.

Once you're ready, or think you're ready, you set off on your mission. If you didn't get the looks precisely right, the people you're talking to will be suspicious, and as they ask you question after question, even a few small slip-ups can blow your cover. There's nothing worse than looking at your hand covered in notes and discovering you didn't write down the one piece of information that could help you during interrogation.

Did I say it was a bit silly? It's extremely silly: the demo mission has me impersonate a guy who is actually an alien from Neptune in a human disguise, who also likes dressing like a clown. The aliens' dastardly plot is to blow up Mount Rushmore, and you have to endure lots of questions and suspicions from the Neptunians before you get the chance to thwart their evil plan.

The Legion Was Here demo is a lot of fun and surprisingly tricky: the dossier is really packed with information and it's hard to tell what'll be useful on your mission and what won't. On my first try, my disguise as an alien disguised as a human disguised as a clown was convincing enough, but I fell apart under questioning and the Neptunians killed me.

On my second try I succeeded, however, even after a human sheriff showed up and I had to convince him I was a human and not an alien disguised as one. Funny stuff! I'm looking forward to playing more when Legion Was Here releases later this year. You can play the demo on Steam.

Marcus Lehto is known to some as the "father of Master Chief," and for good reason: He was the art director on Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, and its two direct sequels. The look of Halo is kind of his thing, in other words, and he has some issues with how the new Halo: Campaign Evolved looks—specifically, its halos.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a remake of Combat Evolved, all done up pretty in Unreal Engine 5. It looks pretty faithful, to the extent that I watch the trailer and I say to myself, "Yup, that's Halo."

Lehto, however, sees something else—something less. "While Forerunner tech was metal (not stone) it was also ancient, vast, alive, and a tomb to the horrors that lurked within," he wrote on X, alongside images comparing Halo rings then and now. "It had seen hundreds of millennia of conflict. Yet the [new] game shows it as shiny metal that looks like it was built a few years ago.

"The main menu ring is the most offensive thing we see every time we boot up the game. It should feel massive, dark, mysterious, sinister, but also full of wonder. This new ring looks like a shiny new toy—out of scale, no mystery, damn ugly."

In response to a now-deleted post, Lehto also brought up the toll that "war, Flood outbreaks, repairs, [and] collisions" would take on the structure. "Also, the biggest issue is just with [the] pure scale of the design. It lacks all the micro detail that should give it the epic scale it deserves. Lastly, it needs to feel like an ancient tomb."

That might seem to fly in the face of comments Lehto made in 2025, when he said "the game looks and feels genuine," and described it as "gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001." For the most part, though, Lehto seems to be having a good time, and he likes how it looks.

"Overall, I really love the upgrades—movement, cinematics, visuals—damn the lighting is brilliant," he wrote on August 4. "Do I have gripes? A few, but they are taking a back seat to the fun."

Those halos, though? Not great.

As the prophesied hour approaches, we now know when the End Times descend on Total War: Warhammer 3. Today, in a reveal that arrived alongside a new cinematic trailer, Creative Assembly announced that its anticipated Lords of the End Times DLC will launch for TWW3 on September 24.

And in case you weren't familiar with how the End Times turns out for the Warhammer world, that's only good news if you're some sort of undead, or demon-thing, or rat-guy. However, given how prominently the new trailer features Grey Seer Thanquol, a skaven whose schemes are infamous for causing as much carnage—or more—for his fellow rat men than their intended targets, maybe everything will go fine in your personal campaign.

Provided he doesn't, you know, successfully blow up the moon with a big warpstone gun. Fingers crossed, I suppose.

To go along with the release date drop and cinematic, Creative Assembly also published a Lords of the End Times DLC overview, providing a summary look at the new gameplay that'll accompany its four new Legendary Lords.

For example, campaign playthroughs as Nagash, Supreme Lord of the Undead will involve gathering his Mortarch lieutenants and his legendary lost Books to finally ascend to godhood and reshape the world into a sort of global skeleton zone. As one-eyed coolguy Boris Todbringer, players will channel Middenland's battle fervor into empowering its Great Temple of Ulric, earning army bonuses in the process.

If you instead choose the Glottkin, the Rot-father's favorite special boys, you'll sow Gardens of Nurgle as you lay waste to the world, providing beneficial plagues and demonic Nurgle units from its festering depths. And as Thanquol, you will—as previously mentioned—scheme.

While Creative Assembly says those won't "always go according to plan," Thanquol will "see his grand and destructive plans realized" if you're able to manage the collateral damage caused by your plotting. How hard can it be?

The studio also promises substantial free game updates coinciding with the Lords of the End Times launch, including gameplay overhauls for Vampire Counts and Archaon, new end game scenarios, and reworked victory conditions for every legendary lord.

And, "in a series first," Creative Assembly says purchasing any Lords of the End Times DLC—either as a bundle or individually—will provide access to the massive Immortal Empires campaign mode, even if you don't actually own any of the Total War: Warhammer games. It's the most generous the end of days has ever been.

It's been a bit since I've fired up a new Total War: Warhammer campaign, but the End Times sound like the perfect time to ease back into some grand strategy. Lords of the End Times launches on Steam on September 24.

Game Freak's Beast of Reincarnation arrived earlier this month, and the reaction has been a little iffy. It holds a respectable 73/100 aggregate score on Metacritic—lining up quite nicely with our own 73% review—but the response on Steam is "mixed," with many user reviews expressing some variation of "close, but not quite." And for that, game director Kota Furushima is sorry.

"I honestly feel that there are still areas in the game that require our sincere attention," Furushima said in an interview with 4Gamer (via Automaton). "I’m truly sorry that parts of the game haven't provided a sufficiently enjoyable experience."

Furushima acknowledged that some elements of the game "need polishing," and said that more updates, following the first on August 9, are on the way to address issues with story pacing, add frame generation, and give players the option to skip cutscenes. It doesn't sound like changes to the game's difficulty are too high on the priority list, though: Furushima said his intent wasn't to make Beast of Reincarnation a particularly difficult game, but simply to ensure players needed to work effectively with Koo, the Blight-infected canine companion, in order to succeed.

And while the game needs work, it's not a train wreck: Furushima said the co-op combat "has been well-received, and we've also received positive reactions regarding the overall atmosphere of the game. I think the unique post-apocalyptic vibe of the world is resonating with many players."

That last part in particular fits with PC Gamer Australian editor Shaun Prescott's take on the game. "There's a maturity and patience to the presentation that feels more filmic than even the Hollywood-aping fare that Sony doles out (or used to)," Shaun wrote in his review. "Game Freak loves its long, slow, lingering shots. It loves a strangely resonant silence.

"No one quips. There are no quirky asides or overbearing teaching moments. Characters speak elliptically, or else with an unguarded sincerity just a touch removed from JRPG mawkishness. It is severely committed to its bereft, enveloping ambience, and feels like it was made by a team blissfully unaware of Star Wars or the MCU."

That sounds to me like a pretty strong starting point for Furushima's ambitions.

The new Summer Season has launched in Forza Horizon 6, meaning there are new challenges, including a weekly photo at Hokuryu Sunflower Farm, a Treasure Hunt, plus there are two new seasonal cars to earn. In the Horizon Mascot Party, you can get the Exomotive Exocet Sport and the Datsun 2000 Roadster, though you'll have to complete challenges to build up progress. So, here's where to find the photo spot.

Forza Horizon 6 Hokuryu Sunflower Farm location

This photo challenge is a nice easy one, since all you're really doing is taking a picture of your car in a giant field of sunflowers, which leaves you a lot of options. You can find Hokuryu Sunflower Farm on the east side of the Hokubo region—simply look for the giant yellow field on the map, west of the Irabuohashi Bridge.

Another way to track it down is to look for the striped multicoloured field (Shikisai-no-oka) on the map in north Hokubo, then move your cursor directly southeast to find the yellow field

As mentioned, you can take your picture anywhere in the field with your chosen car. Doing so will earn you the Yellow Sports Sunglasses clothing reward, but also three Season Reward points so you can progress towards those two Summer Season cars. If you haven't yet, make sure to also complete the Shimanoyama region Treasure Hunt for some more easy points.

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

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

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

Join us, as we tip the dominoes once again:

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

A tragic early chapter

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

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

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

However…

Phantom pains

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

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

Adaptation

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

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

Proliferation

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

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

Tactical espionage action, of a sort

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

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

Militaires sans frontières

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

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

Snake eater

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

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

Do it

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

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

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

Videogames.

Sources and further reading

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

Read more on PC Gamer

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

The new summer Horizon Mascot Party Festival Series has arrived in Forza Horizon 6, and that means a new weekly Shimanoyama Treasure Hunt, plus more challenges and rewards. There are also two seasonal cars you can progress towards, the Exomotive Exocet Sport and the Datsun 2000 Roadster, and completing this challenge will give you a little bit of progress towards earning them. All that said, here's where to find the chest.

Forza Horizon 6 Shimanoyama region Treasure Hunt location

This week, the treasure chest is located at the Shimanoyama Drift Circuit in the far north-east of the Shimanoyama region. All you need to do to find it is:

1. Head towards the circuit
2. Turn off to your left and head under the sign towards the entrance
3. Turn left into the circuit itself
4. You'll spot a bunch of open garages on your left side with advertising banners on top—the chest is in the third garage along

Simply smash into it as usual and you'll get 100,000 credits, 5,000 XP, and 3 Season Progress points towards those two Summer Season cars.

For more progress, make sure to complete the photo challenge at Hokuryu Sunflower Farm, plus the weekly challenge involving the Toyota Japantakushi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover feature: Onimusha: Way of the Sword

Written by: Robert Jones

Magazine exclusive: Until September 26th, 2026

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

Secondary feature

Additional content in this month's issue

Subscribe to PC Gamer magazine

How many issues are in an annual subscription?

• 13 issues a year, including a special holiday issue in late December.

What's the difference between the UK and US versions of the magazine?

• The UK edition of PC Gamer magazine has a slightly higher page count than the US edition, with extra content available.

Are PC Gamer subscriptions available outside the US/UK?

• Yes, we ship PC Gamer magazine to many countries around the world. For a full list of destinations, please visit Magazines Direct.

What form does the digital magazine come in?

• Digital editions of PC Gamer magazine are provided in PDF and EPUB format, readable through Pocketmags.

Big Walk is a co-op only online game about hanging out with friends and solving puzzles. Given we are currently living through peak friendslop thanks to the likes of Peak, RV There Yet?, R.E.P.O. and Content Warning, it was probably inevitable that Big Walk would attract that coinage too.

But does Big Walk deserve it? Does any game deserve it? "I love that there is a word out there to help people categorize games that are good for groups of friends to play together, and that it recognizes that the friends are the important part! It's a useful concept imo," wrote House House's Nico Disseldorp in a new Reddit AMA.

Still. The "slop" part of it isn't super appealing, despite a lot of people using it in a joking and affectionate way. "Personally I'd prefer the second word wasn't 'slop' because it's a term with so much baggage (like AI slop) and I think these games are so thoughtfully made," Disseldorp went on.

"But artists always hate the genre names used to describe their work, so it's nothing new."

The House House team also touched on the real world inspiration for Big Walk's environment. There are heaps of game studios in Australia but they rarely make games explicitly set in their home country. House House's Big Walk isn't strictly set in Australia either, but it definitely looks a lot like the Australian bush. The greens are dry and slightly muted. Gum trees, or trees looking very much like gum trees, are rife. When I watch gameplay footage of Big Walk I can smell the dry eucalyptus.

It turns out that's because Big Walk's world is based on a real world national park in Victoria. House House's Jake Strasser revealed as much. "The game world is directly based on Wilsons Promontory National Park in south-east Victoria," he wrote.

"All the plants in the game are native to the Prom, as well as the iconic granite. The topography of the island is also based directly on the Prom—we started with a LIDAR heightmap of the real place, and then started sculpting and accentuating landforms from there. We also live just a few hours drive away! So we could literally go to the place to get inspired, take photos for textures, record all the atmos etc etc."

In his Big Walk review, Christopher Livingston avoided using the term friendslop entirely, calling it "a joyous jaunt through a gentle world full of thoughtfully-designed puzzles."

Behind soundproof glass, Tyler is frantically signalling to me by wiggling both his arms over his head. I look over at Morgan, behind a different glass wall, who is holding a puzzle piece over his head—but he can't see Tyler's frenzied arm-swings. I repeat Tyler's gesture, wiggling both of my arms, and Morgan silently gets the message: Wrong piece. He drops it and picks up another.

What's interesting is that in the dozen hours we've been playing first-person co-op puzzle game Big Walk together, wiggling both arms over our heads has meant a number of things and "wrong" is just one of them. It's alternately meant "I've found something" or "come here" or simply "hooray!"

And as well as meaning "wrong," like it does now, it has also meant the complete opposite: "Correct!" That's the genius of Big Walk: it teaches you to communicate with your co-op partners so effectively that you can use the same gesture to mean a half-dozen different things, yet you'll almost always know exactly what your companions are saying. Even when you can't hear them.

Little steps

Here's how chill the vibes are in Big Walk: there's a tutorial zone where you learn how to jump, crouch, and pick up and use objects, but at no point is there any indication you've finished the tutorial. There's no big arrow pointing at where to go next, or even when to go: we just sort of eventually wandered away from the tutorial and discovered a huge mysterious island waiting for us. No rush.

In our initial wandering we found a tall crane-like structure and eventually noticed it had a button on it, well out of reach. When we figured out how to push that button, we were rewarded with a small poof of confetti and a bulbous red object we decided to call a "nubbin" because it doesn't have a real name. We soon located a slot for that nubbin elsewhere, which led to more puzzles containing more nubbins.

Big Walk was communicating with us non-verbally: solve puzzles, collect nubbins, find more puzzles.

As chill as the world is, however, the limitations of Big Walk are more extreme than a lot of games. The nights are dark, much darker than many survival games, making it easy to get momentarily lost in tropical sprawl. You can carry only one object in your hands at a time, and even when you find storage solutions like backpacks, you need a friend to both attach it to your body and retrieve gear from it. Welcome to a world so dedicated to cooperation that you need a friend just to access your own inventory.

If you want to talk over the game's proximity chat you need to be within a dozen yards of each other. Any further and you'll need a walkie-talkie to keep in touch—though if you're all carrying walkie-talkies, how are you going to carry all those nubbins you're finding?

These restrictions are there to teach you what Big Walk is all about: sticking together, communicating, and relying on your friends for everything—which is precisely what makes it so great.

Puzzle me this

There's a nice variety of puzzles on the island: some require pushing buttons in unison or in a sequence, some want you to work together to get an object to a certain spot before a timer expires, some need you to describe symbols or shapes to a player who can't see them. But we weren't that far into Big Walk before puzzle elements we'd already seen started being recycled, which worried me early on: were we just going to be doing the same handful of puzzle types over and over?

Sort of. Big Walk's puzzle elements quickly begin repeating themselves—you'll see the same symbols, buttons, soundproof doors throughout a playthrough—but developer House House has done a great job remixing and complicating its solutions, throwing in new twists on the formulas we'd already learned.

If one puzzle needed us to describe symbols to each other over voice chat, the next iteration might ask us to pass fragments of the solution from one player to the next like a game of telephone, or send signals from a mile away, or develop an impromptu code.

As we solved similar types of puzzles a few times, we were unconsciously developing a shorthand—a way we could understand each other even given new limitations. Non-verbally, through its thoughtful and clever puzzle design, Big Walk was teaching us how to also communicate non-verbally.

Pal world

It wasn't always easy: occasionally we had to quit a puzzle halfway through to discuss a new strategy. But I was surprised and delighted how many times we encountered a new wrinkle in a puzzle but still aced it without a rehearsal. That's when waving our arms over our head meant "hooray!" the most: each puzzle completed was a real cause for celebration.

I won't spoil the game's ending, but after a dozen hours everything we'd learned was put to the test, letting us use the shorthand we'd developed in ways I couldn't have predicted. And we crushed it. Finishing Big Walk was a real feeling of satisfaction, and it was twofold: not only had we learned the game's puzzle-based language, but we'd invented our own, almost without knowing it.

It's not just puzzles that make Big Walk great: the world is a supremely enjoyable place to just hang out with friends. There's no death, no jumpscares, no monsters, and no real pressure to do anything except whatever you want to do at that particular moment, including impromptu dance parties or playing catch.

This is a gentle place where the worst thing that can happen is becoming briefly stunned after falling off a cliff, or accidentally kicking a precious walkie-talkie into the woods because you pressed the wrong button.

Big Walk is a joy: a chill game about curiosity, exploration, and overcoming obstacles using friendship and cooperation. Grab a pal or two (or 12!) and play it: you'll find you can communicate in ways you didn't expect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today's Helldivers 2 update is bittersweet for the hardcore fans: The teased arrival of new Illuminate enemies did not include the anticipated Cultist unit, but it did add two other monstrosities that just kicked my teeth in for half an hour.

Everyone say hello to the crusher and the wretch, a pair of melee bruisers rounding out the Illuminate faction with some much-needed variety. They're the headliners of today's Devoid of Liberty update, which charges Super Earth's bravest soldiers with counteracting an imposing void that's opened up in Illuminate space.

It's at this point that I wonder if you're seeing the same resemblance making the rounds online: The wretch are dead ringers for Dead Space necromorphs, and the crushers seem directly inspired by Silent Hill's Pyramid Head (except they carry big clubs, not a big sword). If you're going to borrow, it better be from the greats.

And man, these things do feel at home in Helldivers 2. The wretches serve as a new frontline enemy alongside the basic "voteless" zombies. Similar to the mid-sized Terminid units, wretches are faster than helldivers at a full sprint unless you shoot off some of their creepy-crawly legs. Unlike the Terminids, these jerks are pretty smart: they will pivot on a dime to avoid your line of sight, preferring to attack from the rear after making you waste ammo.

They're simple to kill if you can hone in on their tiny heads or shoot off their limbs, but they overwhelm easily in groups. Unless you're extremely confident in your aim, shotguns might be the play for these guys.

Crushers are kind of the opposite: Giant, meandering brutes wielding long clubs. They have no ranged attack and only a prominent helmet for armor—so far, knocking off the helmet to reveal the head is the quickest way to put one down. These guys seemed a little underwhelming at first, but they're sneakily lethal. Keeping away isn't hard, but their health pool is huge, so they're a problem you have to deal with eventually. Watch out for the club's surprisingly far reach: if it connects, that's the ballgame.

While it's great to see the Illuminate faction get some much-needed love, this is a smaller update than I anticipated. There's no new biome (unless stormy cities with twisters count) or major piece of tech like the tank introduced earlier in the year. I do like how Super Earth has begun summoning SEAF troops of varying classes to reinforce players—could this be a test run to eventually give us direct control over troops?

Looks like this one won't match up to the memorable raid on Cyberstan, and that's fine. New weapons that aren't tied to a warbond are quite rare these days, which is a shame, but 240 hours later I'm still happy to buy the occasional $10 warbond for some new toys. The armor sets in the new Warhammer warbond look cool, but none of the weapons seem interesting enough to justify the $5 crossover upcharge.

Indeed, Helldivers 2 is in an age of refinements. Today's patch made some great quality-of-life changes to short magazines and backpack reloads (you don't need to have the backpack on to assist anymore), and after a months-long break, this was also my first time seeing the campaigns terminal on my ship. The level cap has also increased to 300 for Super Earth's truest sickos.

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

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

Stuff I recommend

Here's a good video from 2026

PC Gamer reads I recommend

2026

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

Oldies but goodies

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

Back in 2024, Immortality creator Sam Barlow teased a new thing codenamed Project C. During today's Kinetic Publishing Showcase, it was finally unveiled as Precognition, a sci-fi thriller being developed in a collaboration between Barlow's Half Mermaid Productions and horror director (and son of David) Brandon Cronenberg.

Precognition will set players off as Diana, a woman who receives an experimental brain implant that gives her visions of the future. But in the fine tradition of Cassandra and quantum mechanics, it's not all upside: By exploring her visions and committing them to present-day memory, Diana changes the future she's seen.

"We’ve really been trying to test the limits of non-linear storytelling, focusing on how the game feels to play, while encouraging player agency and freedom," Barlow said. "We’ve pushed ourselves even harder with Precognition by bringing the feel of investigation and mystery games into a world of cause-and-effect, with a story that spins out as a consequence of your choices."

Barlow opted to partner with Cronenberg on the new game because he wants it to be "a very authentic sci-fi horror experience," and Cronenberg—who's played Barlow's previous games Immortality and Her Story—understood the assignment.

"The films I make tend to be subjective and experiential, with the horror emerging as one person’s perspective of the world warps around them," Cronenberg said. "The games that Sam and the team have made over the years are subjective experiences by their very nature—no two people will have the same experience with them. So it’s the perfect place to explore these themes further."

Precognition "follows in the footsteps of Immortality," the announcement promises, with a blend of FMV cinematics, non-linear storytelling, and an emphasis on player freedom. That sets a very high bar to clear: Immortality earned a nearly unheard-of 95% score in our review as "Sam Barlow's best, most thought-provoking game yet." Score aside, that accolade itself is no small feat given that its predecessors, Telling Lies and Her Story, are genuine bangers themselves.

Whether Precognition will up the ante as Immorality did remains to be seen, and this is the bad news for fans of Barlow's games: It's currently expected to be out in spring 2028. For now, you can throw it on your wishlist pile on Steam.

CD Projekt has confirmed that nine employees working on The Witcher spinoff Project Sirius have been laid off, saying it has "adjusted the size of the Sirius team to reflect the project's needs at this stage of development."

"As a result, four people in Boston and five in Warsaw are leaving the company, while nine others have been invited to internal recruitment processes for potential roles on other CD Projekt Red projects," a rep said of the cuts, first reported by Kotaku.

It hasn't been a smooth ride for Project Sirius, which we first learned about in 2021 when CD Projekt acquired The Molasses Flood to work on an "ambitious project" based on one of CDPR's existing properties. The plan at the time was to keep The Molasses Flood operating as a distinct entity with its own "identity," but that fell to the wayside in 2025 when CD Projekt fully absorbed the studio into its own structure.

That move followed trouble with Sirius that ultimately led to a reboot and "updated direction" for the game. Five years after The Molasses Flood acquisition, we still know virtually nothing about the game—its proper title hasn't even been revealed yet.

And while the number of people being laid off is small compared to the massive cuts at companies like Xbox and Electronic Arts, 18 employees represents a significant chunk of the Sirius development team. CD Projekt said in its Q1 2026 financial report that 83 people were working on the game, meaning that more than 20% of the team has been cut.

Amazon's big MMO era has taken its last gasp, as the company is ending its publishing deals for both Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark. The games themselves will continue, however: NC will take over Throne and Liberty for Western markets near the end of 2026, while Smilegate will do the same for Lost Ark in early 2027.

Little should change for players as a result of the handoffs, although a small number of details on the Throne and Liberty changeover are still being hammered out and will be announced closer to the actual transition. On the Lost Ark side, some user data will not make the transfer, including in-game mail, friends list memos and group names, guild member nicknames and memos, and chat messages and history.

The games themselves will continue to operate as they always have and will receive regular content updates leading up to the changeover, although Throne and Liberty developer FirstSpark Games warned that major updates may be held back until the transition is complete.

Swinging the axe on Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty is pretty much the final nail in the coffin containing Amazon's once-lofty gaming ambitions. The company put a pin in its home-grown MMO New World in 2025 as part of a shift away from big-budget gaming (which of course also saw major layoffs), but it continued to serve as publisher of those externally developed MMOs in the West.

Lost Ark fans started to get nervous about that arrangement earlier this year, though, as a new round of layoffs in March impacted Amazon's Lost Ark team. In light of that, this outcome is probably good news.

This is normally where I'd embed the Courtroom Chaos Starring Snoop Dogg trailer to remind everyone what Amazon Games is now focusing its efforts on. But while poking around for more information on these MMO handovers, I came across something new, and possibly worse, and I now inflict it upon you:

Bad news: Dawn of War 4 is no longer a mere month away. King Art Games' first take on the RTS series was due on September 17, but it looks like the war needs a bit more time to cook. It's been pushed back until December 3.

If you shell out for the Commander Edition, you'll be able to sneak in a bit earlier, though, with the three-day early access unlock letting you dive in on November 30.

"As we approached the final stages of development, we saw an opportunity to further enhance Dawn of War 4 and deliver the quality of experience we’ve always envisioned," said creative director Jan Theysen. "The additional time will allow us to continue optimising performance, resolving bugs, and applying further polish to ensure players have the best possible experience from day one."

Dawn of War 4's launch will be followed up by free updates with new maps, the return of Crusade mode, more commanders and a mission editor. Two story expansions are also in the works.

There are a lot of big games coming out between now and the end of the year, but this is one of the new releases I'm most excited about. The first two Dawn of War games are among the best RTSs of the 3D era, and King Art's work on Iron Harvest has left me confident that it can rise to the challenge of bringing the series back to its glory days.

Back in 2025, I got to play a skirmish, controlling the Blood Ravens in a big ol' scrap against the orks. And while King Art has made some tweaks to the formula, its closest relative is undeniably the OG Dawn of War. It was an absolute blast—one which ended in an orbital strike that took out the final ork base, while my beefy Dreadnoughts smashed any greenskins trying to escape their grim fate.

I've been craving more time with the game ever since, but I guess I'll need to wait a few months longer.

Ever since they were introduced back in Helldivers 2's Heart of Democracy update when the Illuminate invaded Super Earth, the SEAF troopers have held a place in the heart of every Helldiver. These NPC soldiers stand basically no chance against the hordes of bugs, bots, and space aliens who besiege Super Earth's worlds, bristling with ever-more exotic implements of murder, but they do their best and that's what counts.

Well, with the new Devoid of Liberty update, which sees us battling against a tide of void-mutated enemies the Illuminate have unleashed, the SEAF have also been buffed to better face the battle. To quote the official blog post:

"We have commissioned SEAF platoons to aid in completing operations. They’ll arrive on dropships to fight alongside you and your squad, offering medical support via stims, but also give a boost to your morale when you salute, shake hands, and–of course–hug them."

Yes, that's right, you can now hug the little troopers in blue. I hopped into the game to try it out, and, as you'll see below, SEAF troopers will pause mid shot and accept your offer of a little morale-boosting cuddle. It's only fair to show your appreciation, they do have a tough job after all.

Though, as you can also see at the end of the clip, I'd advise against hugging troopers when you're in the thick of combat, unless you want to share a casket because they couldn't untangle your remains. I've played a few missions in the new update and the SEAF actually amount to a somewhat fearsome fighting force now, with support weapons and increased numbers, and they'll periodically drop in on shuttles to help in the fight.

We'll definitely need the help, too. Those new Crusher enemies don't go down easy and they're weirdly hard to hear coming. The Necromorph-esque Wretch enemies, too, add a fast-moving component that the Illuminate didn't have before, and can really close you down quickly if you're not paying attention.

We've got a tough fight ahead of us, but don't forget to take a moment to stop every now and then to show your SEAF contingent their work is appreciated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marvel Tōkon—the all-out 4v4 tag fighter from 2D fighting game veteran ArcSystem Works—didn't get off on the best foot with PC players. Forced PSN logins and frame drops that were leading to a whopping eight frames of rollback in online modes saw the game launch to "Mixed" reviews, before eventually tanking to "Mostly Negative" over the weekend.

And while there's zero chance of the PSN stuff going away, ArcSys has at least been speedy about trying to tackle those pesky frame drops. A patch earlier this week has done the bulk of the work on optimising performance, leaving the game a helluva lot smoother for it.

It turns out that one of the primary culprits was the game regularly checking for audio inputs, of all things. According to the patch notes: "These unnecessary checks could cause sudden frame drops and performance drops. This has now been addressed."

The patch has also reduced overall CPU usage, including addressing an issue where "the CPU ran high throughout the startup process," and one where "additional load on the system was being created due to periodic audio processing during matches."

It seems to have had a positive effect overall—the game's Steam rating is back up to Mixed since the patch landed, and from my own time playing, I've definitely noticed a smoother experience overall. It doesn't seem to have completely fixed the PC port, however, at least not for some folk.

A handful of Steam reviews are still complaining that the game is struggling to hit 60fps, with those performance dips still leading to rollback frames that would teeter into unplayable. I've also experienced lower framerates here and there—even in parts you wouldn't expect, like the Episode cutscenes—but it is still undeniably in far better shape than it was at launch.

Unfortunately, as it stands, a framerate fix doesn't seem to be stemming the tide of negative reviews criticising Sony's forced PSN login. It's a situation we've already seen back when Helldivers 2 pivoted to a mandatory sign-in, which was received just as poorly as it is now—and one that Sony is incredibly unlikely to back down on.

The new Helldivers 2 Devoid of Liberty update has arrived, alongside the Warhammer 40k warbond, but there are also a bunch of new titles you can unlock as you level up. Since the level cap has gotten a big boost, and you earn a new title every 10 levels, Arrowhead has added a bunch to fill in the gaps.

Any XP you earned above Level 150 was also banked this whole time, so you might have already unlocked a bunch of these with the new update.

All Helldivers 2 new titles

There are 15 new titles in Helldivers 2 coinciding with the level cap bump from 150 to 300. As before, you'll get a new title every 10 levels. The new ones are:

If you've been playing at Level 150 for a while, chances are you will have unlocked quite a few of these titles already thanks to our XP being banked this whole time.

Oblivion Remastered has led a rather odd post-release life. The closest we've got to a new Elder Scrolls since 2011 released in April last year, received a fair amount of acclaim, then essentially went silent. It twitched into activity a couple of times in the months following its release for patches 1.1 and 1.2, but since then? Nada, and the game still has its fair share of performance woes and missing quality-of-life features.

But take heart, because a year after its last patch, Bethesda has remembered it released an Elder Scrolls game. In the wake of Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 release—which reportedly runs rather well—the studio took to X to promise players that it's working on getting the improvements it made for the game's Switch version ported over to other platforms.

"We've heard your feedback asking for an additional patch for Oblivion Remastered," wrote Bethesda. "The Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game has a number of optimizations that we are looking into bringing to other platforms and we will share more when we are able."

Which is good, of course, but it is a touch absurd that an Elder Scrolls release has spent a full year in stone-cold silence, with fans unsure as to whether anything was going to happen to the game ever again. Bethesda even maintained a 'suggestions for Oblivion Remastered' channel in its official Discord that whole time, which gradually went from earnest suggestions for new content and improvements to players imploring the studio not to abandon the game entirely.

I would hope, but not expect, that porting over the optimisations from Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 version would not be the last we hear of the game. Oblivion's a classic—and one of the funniest games ever made—it deserves more care and attention than it's getting right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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