While Chuck Tingle may be best known as the author of Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt and a proliferation of works in a similar style (shout-out to the Space Raptor Butt Trilogy as well as I Have No Butt And I Must Pound), these days he also writes legit and well-received horror novels like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays, and is working on a book about an influencer who is also a grave robber called Fabulous Bodies.

That doesn't stop him from releasing the shorter works he calls "Tinglers", the latest of which is particularly relevant to our interests. It's called Pounded In The Butt By The Physical Manifestation Of Spending An Irresponsible Portion Of My Income On Warpounder 40k Miniatures.

What qualified Chuck Tingle to call out everyone who thinks they need another Warhammer army even though we haven't finished painting the last one we bought? As Tingle explained on BlueSky, he used to play both Warhammer 40,000, where he collected eldar, and Warhammer Fantasy Battle, where he had both lizardmen and skaven, which he describes as his "main trot". He's one of us.

The plot of Tingle's latest has "a handsome sentient battleship model" as its centrepiece, and promises to include "4,000 words of sizzling human on gay Warpounder 40K model action." It's available on Amazon, and I look forward to reading it right after I finish painting the Cathayan sky lantern I bought because it looks cool even though I don't have a Cathayan army to use it in.

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Long before Heroes of Might & Magic enjoyed a triumphant return to form with Olden Era, we had King's Bounty: The Legend, a strategy-RPG in the classic HoMM mold only with a single gigantic world map rather than discrete levels, and some quirky ideas about courtly marriage. Infamously, this was the game where you could marry a frog or a zombie.

The most recent sequel toned down the whimsy and ended up being much blander for it. Fortunately, you can skip that and go back to where it began with a newly freshened up King's Bounty: The Legend for modern PCs. Now it fully supports widescreen resolutions without those uggo black bars down the side of the screen. The maximum zoom-out distance has been doubled and the UI's been given a readability pass.

It's also got a bunch of modern Steam features like achievements, trading cards, and a points shop. There's a dedicated Steam Workshop too, though at the moment the only mod is one that undoes one of the aforementioned readability changes and restores the Original Fonts.

Katauri plans to bring these updates to King's Bounty: Armored Princess next. Right now the series is also on sale, so you can get King's Bounty: The Legend for 85% off on Steam, and the fan-favorite follow-up King's Bounty: Crossworlds is also 85% off.

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Here at PC Gamer, we're all very excited about Grand Theft Auto 6—given it's one of the biggest videogame events of the decade. Rockstar games are becoming an increasingly rarer milestone that seems determined to bring some new big-swing advancement in tech. For instance, gorgeous graphics that're pretty enough to send me into an existential crisis.

Given preorders went up today, you might think that has us all a-flutter with excitement. But 'lo, what's this? It's not coming for PC? Phooey!

Back in 2026, Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two and occasional philosopher, told Bloomberg that "Rockstar always starts on console because I think with regard to a release like that you're judged by serving the core".

The implication that we're both not Rockstar's core consumer base. Left out in the rain, looking sad and glassy-eyed from under our collective umbrella while across the way console players giggle while crashing a helicopter into a building or something.

I echo PC Gamer's own Andy Chalk—and most of our staff—when I say: Hey, what the hell? I can't think of a real advantage, aside from maybe giving your developers more time to optimise and iron out launch day bugs, to abstaining. After all, PC gaming's one of the biggest growing markets in this massive industry.

And I mean, sure, maybe we're a little sore about the fact our coverage'll be impacted by the fact most of us don't have consoles—some of us do, and they'll be working tirelessly for your benefit, but certainly not the lion's share. But even those of us with the honoured videogame boxes are going to be felt put-out by Zelnick's artificial cool kids club.

There's a sort of sorrow to all of this by way of the fact that GTA 6 is likely to be one of the prettiest games in recent memory, and yet it'll be leashed to crummy hardware. Our online editor, Fraser Brown, rallied against the subpar experience of gaming on console as compared to his beastly rig, and I have no doubt will have a grumble about having to play on a blurrier resolution than his 4090s, which shall be sitting in his PC the entire time, neglected.

But even I, as a 3060 peasant without a console, don't think Rockstar's in the right on this one. GTA 5's modding community is lively and vibrant and a boon to the game, and—oh, what's that? Rockstar's been clamping down on non-official mod support? Ah, that makes more sense, then.

The cynic in me also wonders (loudly, in this very article) it has something to do with GTA 6's pricing. In case you're out of the loop, the ultimate edition of the game will feature some core perks hacksawed off and stuffed into its $100 price-point, which is a huge shame.

In a hypothetical scenario, enterprising pirates or modders on PC could find a way to circumvent these artificial barriers—it could be argued that Rockstar really wants folks to splash out for that $20 markup.

Or, I have to concede, stubbornly sticking to its guns. Rockstar games rarely come with day-one PC releases to, as Zelnick said, serve its core audience of console gamers. But also, in the very same interview, Zelnick said that "with regard to a big title, PC can be 45, 50% of the sales." God damnit.

Well, Zelnick, I've got some numbers of our own. We've been running a poll, linked below, that'll be closing on the 28th of June.

Let's take a look at the numbers at the time of writing, shall we? And—oh, 39% of you aren't buying it at all. Alright, that's a pretty substantial amount of PC Gamer readers that don't like GTA, fair does.

But just 13% are excited enough to go for the console release and, as our own Ted Litchfield theorised, potentially provide Take-Two with a double-dip of sales when the PC version comes out. Now, obviously our deeply scientific and accurate polls aren't, some might argue, conclusive snapshots of PC demographics.

It does, however, mean that the majority of you who are excited about GTA 6 will be just like us website staff: Sadly gazing through a window as one of the biggest gaming events of the decade passes us by, because Zelnick doesn't think we're a core audience. Despite accounting for 45% of his business' sales. I'm gonna have an aneurysm.

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Riot Games is making a big change to its Vanguard anti-cheat system: After an update set to go live today (and which may already be live by the time you read this) it will not launch when your PC boots up, but will instead will be "on demand," meaning it will only run when playing a game and will shut down once the gameplay is over.

Vanguard was very controversial when it launched in 2020 because it's "kernel mode" software that, in theory at least, grants Riot access to your PC at an alarmingly deep level. On top of that intrusiveness, it's also effectively omnipresent: It launches when your PC does, and it runs quietly in the background, doing whatever, until you shut down.

Other games roll with kernel mode anti-cheat, like Genshin Impact, Doom Eternal, and Call of Duty games, but in those cases the anti-cheat only runs when the game is running, and terminates when the game does. Now, finally, Riot will give League of Legends and Valorant players the same option—with some conditions.

"Starting later today, the universally beloved anti-cheat product, Vanguard, will begin to support on-demand sessions from all sufficiently secured PC devices," Riot's anti-cheat chief Phillip Koskinas wrote in an update announcing the change.

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"'On-demand' here means that Vanguard’s driver component will no longer launch when the system starts, but 'secured' indicates that this will be possible only if that system’s hardware has met a set of modern security requirements. By opting into pre-boot security mechanisms and Windows’ own native protection features, Vanguard can safely end its watch, and your taskbar can have 256 of its pixels back."

Those "pre-boot security mechanisms" are the conditions in question, and for the vast majority of players it's a matter of convenience rather than capability. Koskinas said that roughly 35% of Riot's players already satisfy the conditions required for Vanguard's new "Pre-Check, " so the option to switch Vanguard into on-demand mode will appear automatically after the update goes live.

For just about everyone else, there's more: You'll need to be running Windows 11 25H2 or later, and have UEFI Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, VBS, HVCI, and IOMMU all switched on. If you want to know what all of that means, or what they do, the full update has the details; it gets technical, but you won't need to get into the weeds to get it all set up. You will probably need to do a little dicking around in your BIOS, though, which may or may not sound like your idea of a good time.

I say "just about everyone else" because, according to the update, about 3% of Riot's players are on older hardware that can't meet the Pre-Check requirements—so for them, the on demand option simply won't be available unless and until they upgrade. Vanguard will continue to operate as it is for the foreseeable future, however, so Riot said it's not really an issue: "We’re not making anyone change anything. We’re willing to wait until the ecosystem matures."

That also holds if you're happy with Vanguard as it is (and if you've been playing Valorant or League or the past few years with no complaint, there's a good chance you are) and don't care about any of this: You can just ignore all of this, do nothing, and carry on as usual.

Koskinas said it's taken this long to give Vanguard an on-demand option because it wasn't until fairly recently that Windows and PC hardware had built-in security features sufficient to enable it.

"Microsoft and PC equipment manufacturers have long-recognized the need for cryptographic verification of boot processes and of the kernel, so they’ve been cookin’ up heat for quite some time," he explained.

"The resulting oven-fresh security features require newer hardware components and newer versions of Windows, but through the power of collaboration and the combined might of our wills, we’ve worked directly with the inestimable Xbox OS Security Team at Microsoft to see improvements made natively to the Windows kernel that have finally afforded us the opportunity to offer an on-demand mode within the Vanguard product."

Koskinas also said that as botting becomes increasingly complex and accessible with the advent of AI, Riot will continue to advance its own anti-cheat efforts. "That said, friction is not fun, and we prefer incentives to requirements," he concluded. "For that reason, our trust segmentation will be surgical, and while we might add more checks to Pre-Check in the future, we plan on keeping things optional until you’re in the most competitive segments, on the strangest devices, or amongst the highest ranks."

Rockstar Games finally dropped the other shoe, making it official that GTA 6 will cost a whopping $80, plus an extra $20 for the Ultimate Edition if you want to enjoy, y'know, a whole bunch of clothing and hairstyles and automobiles.

Yep, entire in-game stores will be closed off unless you pony up a cool hundred bills for GTA 6, making one heck of a pricey game that we'll all probably wind up buying because—what else are we gonna do? Not play GTA 6?

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With that in mind, I thought I'd test your memory on the launch prices of some other games. Can you remember what Valve's Orange Box cost when it first appeared? How about Skyrim's Collector's Edition? Do you remember, all these years later, what the original GTA cost? Test your price tag prowess with our quiz, and let us know how you did in the comments.

The 30^th anniversary of Quake recently passed by—June 22, 2026 was the day—and of course there were acknowledgements, salutes, and celebrations a-plenty, as you'd expect for such a groundbreaking, influential, and enduring game. But it also got a couple of the driving forces behind it reflecting on those days rather more deeply, and as sometimes happens when youthful memories come to the surface, they got pretty deep into their feelings.

Quake co-designer Sandy Petersen, who joined id Software in 1993, got the ball rolling, writing bluntly on X that "Quake ruined id Software." He said Quake "is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design," and credited everyone on the development team for doing "a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right." But, he added, the workload was intense, "and I think it broke us spiritually."

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Petersen then ran through a list of everyone who left id "within a couple years of finishing Quake," including John Romero, Shawn Green, Dave Taylor, Mike Abrash, American McGee, and of course Petersen himself. All of them went on to have long and fruitful careers in game development, "so plainly we didn't depart because of some kind of talent issue," Petersen wrote. "We were all highly competent, just a little burnt out after the labor of Quake."

"Id Software was never the same after," Petersen wrote. "In my opinion (only an opinion), the only other truly great game that id produced was Quake 3, and it was not at the level of the pre-Quake games."

Despite clearly being a bit melancholy about the whole thing, Petersen said Quake was "absolutely" worth the cost it extracted from id: "Games are more important than game companies, and Quake is an iconic titan of the gaming world." But, he added, "man alive it seems like the company could have had its act together better and kept that dream team."

Sandy Petersen is pretty famous for having his recollections repeatedly (but respectfully) knifed by John Romero, but in this instance his reminiscences were met with agreement, mostly, from the other John of the original id Software squad: Carmack.

In response to Petersen's missive, Carmack said Quake was "overly ambitious technically," and that the studio "could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times."

"I pushed everyone too hard," Carmack wrote. "I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.

"On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better."

Carmack said he doesn't think having elevated expectations for Quake level designers was a mistake (and credited Romero with setting that bar high right from the studio's early days), but acknowledged that "we should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier." But, he continued, "there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t."

And then, simply and directly, he apologized: "Sorry, Sandy."

The dissolution of id Software under somewhat acrimonious circumstances has been well documented over the subsequent years: American McGee, for instance, was reportedly fired by Carmack for sub-par performance on Quake, although Petersen later suggested that McGee was actually done dirty by another employee. Petersen also pointed a finger at Carmack's "intensity" in particular in a separate post, writing that Carmack "decided we all needed to be in the same big room together. He’d read about this way of “focusing” the team and it did. But we also had nowhere we could decompress or hide out."

It didn't take long for the other other John—Romero—to enter the convo with his own thoughts on the matter, which aren't too far removed from Carmack's: He echoed the in-hindsight belief that they should have stuck with a Doom++ game while ironing out the fully-3D Quake engine, and that everyone at id was "pushing ourselves past what was reasonable because that was how id had always worked." He also gave particular credit to McGee for being "really good" at building Quake levels, a notably pointed comment given how McGee's time at id ended.

"There are a hundred things we could have done differently, but we did the best we could do at the time with what we knew. Having a media circus around us certainly didn’t help," Romero wrote. "id still goes on, and so does Wolf, Doom, and Quake. Maybe that was what we came together to do. That is more than enough for any game dev, any team, any lifetime really."

Taken altogether, it's a really interesting conversation about one of the most storied game studios in history. But I love a happy ending, and so what really lands for me is how it all wraps up: With an understanding that everyone was younger then, the world was a different place, and as Romero put it, we did the best we could. Following Carmack's apology, Petersen said he didn't blame him for how it all worked out and told Romero he "did an incredible job" on Quake, and Romero thanked Petersen for getting them talking: "It really was a hell of a game."

Destiny 2 has reached the end of the line: The final update is live, TWIDs are over, and we're all left wondering how the one-time king of live service shooters has come to such ignominious ruin. Even Destiny's competitors are baffled by Sony's decision to pull the plug, although some say Sony's not the real villain here at all. If there is a villain, besides Bungie management—which I think we can all agree has been pretty consistently not great—one thing's for sure: It's not Destiny players.

That bit of reassurance came from Bungie communications lead Dylan Gafner, better known to players as dmg04, in response to a Destiny 2 streamer who wondered whether they'd "done enough to try and help the situation," and if there was somehow more they could do.

"'Could I do more?'" Gafner replied rhetorically (via GamesRadar). "You all have done more for this game and our studio than could ever be imagined, and no words can accurately depict how lucky we are to have shared these worlds with you.

"Don't blame yourselves or think you could have / should have done more. This is just the way it goes sometimes."

It's fair to say that Bungie has sometimes had a bit of a rocky relationship with some of the more rabid Destiny 2 player base. Bungie whiffed on Destiny 2 in many and various ways over the years—here's us explaining "why Destiny 2 players got so angry," in 2017—but the backlash from some in the community could be beyond the pale.

In 2022, Gafner wrote on Reddit that persistent abuse and threats against Bungie employees had resulted in "reduced communications as the team plans future protections/strategies to help avoid these sorts of things," which eventually led to the creation of the anonymized Destiny 2 Team social media account. In 2023, after winning a $500,000 legal action against a particularly abusive player, Bungie warned that Destiny 2 developers were still being harassed by members of the community simply because they worked at the studio.

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But, as with so many things in life, the worst of the noise came from a small number of players—the vast majority, while sometimes unhappy with one aspect of Destiny 2 or another, focused their frustrations through a lens of respect, appreciation, and love. Despite the rough patches, that's clearly what's settled in with Gafner.

"No matter the future, we will always have these memories," Gafner concluded. "Thank you. For everything."

There's a lot going on this week, folks. Monday saw a thick glut of Steam Machine news, and today Rockstar switched on the Grand Theft Auto 6 info-hose. I am here to tell you not to care about any of it. Here's the real story: Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 have got new patches.

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale—Edition? You better believe it's Enhanced—all just got a new 2.7 patch courtesy of Beamdog. This is the patch that entered beta last February, now available for all and sundry. Well, I suppose the beta was also available to all and sundry, but now all and sundry are getting it whether they click a button or not.

It's a doozy of a patch, too. Beamdog says that it's focused on quality-of-life updates for the Infinity Engine games this far out (14 years) from their Enhanced Edition releases, and the two big ones in 2.7 are: Steam cloud saves that work how they ought to (GOG cloud saves work "properly", too) and Apple Silicon support on Mac.

Cloud saves on Steam are now controlled, uh, by Steam. That is to say, if you toggle them off in your Steam client settings for BG:EE, they will be off. Turn them on? They'll be on. You might think, "Surely it always worked like this?" but you'd be wrong. Previously, cloud saves were configured in the gameplay menu for the games themselves—the Steam client settings were a kind of vestigial organ. Which is very counterintuitive and not how pretty much every other game on Steam works, so this is a welcome change.

Apple Silicon support, meanwhile, means the games will now run natively on Apple's ARM-based Mac hardware. This was almost certainly done because Apple is set to phase out its Rosetta 2 translation software that lets x86-based applications run on the company's M-series chips (though it does promise to keep it for some older and unmaintained bits of software). Anyway, it's good news—I can't pretend these games didn't already run like a dream on my M1-series MacBook Air, but now they'll be even dreamier, and potentially a little lighter on the ol' battery.

Anyway, I am as ever very pleased to see these classics continue to get care and attention. Here are the full patch notes for 2.7:

Beamdog Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale 2.7 patch notes

• Steam Cloud saves can now be controlled via the Steam client — Previously, the only way to enable or disable Steam Cloud Saves for BG1:EE, BG2:EE, and IWD:EE was within the Gameplay Options of the games. Now, Steam Cloud Saves are controlled by the Steam client and the individual game properties settings
• GOG Galaxy Cloud saves — now functioning properly
• Added Apple Silicon support — With native support for Apple Silicon, on Mac devices you can expect faster app launch times, overall improved performance, and faster rendering. In addition, laptops will benefit from lower power consumption while playing, leading to longer battery life
• New localizations — We added the following community-translated languages: BG:SoD - Chinese (Simplified), Korean, Russian; BGII - Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Ukrainian; IWD - Hungarian, Japanese
• SoD language switch — Switching to the SoD campaign will now only display languages where SOD was translated. Previously, the game always displayed the full list of languages that BG1’s base game supported. If you are playing BG1 or The Black Pits in a language that SoD doesn’t support when you switch to the SoD campaign, the game will change the language to English automatically
• Dynamic language support — We made changes to allow easier language updates and additions in the future
• Chinese font change — At the request of the Chinese localization volunteers, we have changed the font for Chinese
• Font Size saved per font language — The Font Size zoom setting is now saved per font language
• Indexing Fix — Resolved an off‑by‑one error in rebuilt BIF files that affected some community tools
• iOS Restore Purchases — The “Restore Purchases” button has returned, allowing the game to sync with Apple’s purchase history
• Mobile Keyboard Improvements — The UI now shifts so the text cursor remains visible above the virtual keyboard, preventing cursor loss and mis‑registered taps on iOS & Android
• Android Foldable Support — Fixed UI scaling and touch‑input issues on foldable and tall‑aspect devices. The game now properly resizes when the device’s screen configuration changes
• Android Character Export — Exporting a character now also places the file into the user‑accessible directory
• iOS Modding now supported — The game now stores and reads data from a location visible to standard file browsers. You can manage saves and other files directly on your device or by connecting it to a computer.
• Android Override Folder Optimization — Fixed long boot delays caused by large /override/ folders. Importing is manual via an in‑game UI
• Android DLC Display Fix — The Fists of the Fallen DLC for BG2 now correctly shows as installed
• Android Modding now supported — This update resolves a bug that caused incorrect permissions, preventing access via PC or file browsers. Existing installations with incorrect permissions cannot be repaired. You must uninstall and reinstall the game. Because uninstalling removes saves, export them first and copy anything important to a PC:

Sure, Grand Theft Auto has always been about the shooting. The car chases. The seedy criminal activity. But it's also about looking fly as fuck while you do it. Driving around the city in expensive, tricked-out cars. Nipping to the barbershop for a nicer haircut as you climb the criminal ranks. Spending your eventual riches on parodied designer clothing and jewellery. Hitting that level of wealth where you go from looking expensive and put-together to expensive and downright ugly.

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I never expect to have to cough up too much of my own real-life finances to do that, but if GTA 6's Ultimate Edition is anything to go by, that's exactly what I'll be doing. Rockstar's calling it the game's ultimate edition, sure, but I can't help but feel like this is what the developer actually wants the standard version to be, while its $80 version is feeling distinctly Lite Edition.

Now Deluxe/Ultimate/Premium/Insert Fancy Upgrade Term Here cosmetic exclusives are not new to videogames, and preorder bonuses have become a plague on the industry. But usually it's the odd outfit here or cosmetic pack there. Rockstar, however, is going one step further by putting entire stores on the map of Leonida that won't be accessible unless you cough up the $20 upgrade, and quite frankly that's where I have to draw the line.

As far as we know, there are currently five stores that are paywalled: Two mod shops, a clothing store, a salon, and a tattoo parlour. All offering customisation options that, at this point, I deem an integral part of this series' identity. It feels criminal that a game touting itself as the "most immersive GTA experience yet" has the very real potential to constantly pull me out of that immersion by reminding me that I've yet to spend an extra 20 bones any time I get within the vicinity of these 'premium' stores.

Who knows if we'll even be able to enter any of these stores with our paltry, peasant $80 purchase? Will the doors be locked entirely, prompting me to open the store page and fork out for the upgrade? Will I be able to enter, but told that I'm not quite elite enough to get a new paint job—of either the vehicular or manicure variety? There's no winning strategy here besides paying the full, big hundo. And even then, I still feel like I'm losing.

To me, it's a bad sign of what's to come. Not just for GTA, but for videogames. Locking off little pockets of the map for only the biggest spenders does not feel good, especially when it's for a singleplayer game. It doesn't even seem to be ending at cosmetics, either—the pre-order page also lists "action" as something reserved for the Ultimate Edition buyers.

What that looks like isn't totally clear right now—at the very least, it seems to be referring to a series of side missions called PTT Youngin$ Compound and Scores, where you'll raid this gang's store for contraband and special items. This stuff used to be in the game for no additional cost, guys! Come on, now.

The worst part is, this is going to work. The FOMO of shuttered stores and exclusive cars will entice a whole bunch of people to settle on the more expensive version. And quite frankly, I can't blame them. But I also wish Rockstar had simply folded all of this in and offered a flat $100 videogame. That probably would've pissed people off too, but I'd prefer this over paywalling stuff that's been a part of the series for years and acting like it's some kind of cool bonus. Instead, the whole thing comes off as mighty greedy.

Rockstar is known for being very weird with its marketing and releases, telling us as little as feasibly possible. It can afford to, I suppose. We're all gonna be tuned in and coughing up the cash for GTA 6 anyhow—and what a lot of cash it is.

GTA 6 is launching on November 19, 2026, and Rockstar has confirmed it's a "singleplayer experience". That leaves the elephant in the room—its money-printing GTA Online mode—up in the air. In fact, it's not mentioned what's happening with GTAO whatsoever.

Given how popular and lucrative it is for the studio, I think we've all assumed that a GTA 6 Online is happening, despite the developer's radio silence. Plus, a "top secret" feature for 32-player online lobbies was revealed in court documents, which all but confirms some kind of update is coming.

That said, it's not out of the ordinary for Rockstar to launch its multiplayer modes after the singleplayer game. Cast your mind back 13 years, and you'll recall that GTA Online was originally released two weeks after GTA 5. Likewise, Red Dead Online was in early access for players who owned Red Dead Redemption 2 almost a month later.

My big question is what exactly does it look like? Rockstar could borrow Activision's approach to Call of Duty Warzone and replace GTA Online with a revamped version. Is it free to play? Is it available standalone, like Red Dead Online now is? What if they slapped a '2' on the end and called it a sequel?

Potentially, it could even have a subscription service—GTA 6 is expensive, and Rockstar is very much pushing players towards the Ultimate Edition to squeeze some extra profit. If you pre-order GTA 6, you'll get a free month of GTA+, a membership program that gives you a bunch of freebies in GTA Online. I wouldn't be surprised to see this subscription expanded with GTA 6. With no word on what's next for GTA Online, the door's wide open.

All we know for certain is that GTA 6 doesn't launch with any inherent online components. That's not to say that there won't be a new GTA Online thing at the same time, or after launch, however.

From the archives: This story originally ran in PC Gamer (UK) #287.

What stands out most about Knights of the Old Republic II is that it’s less a sequel than a deconstruction. At times, an assassination. Most licensed games, at least those that don’t just put familiar characters into a platform or kart racing game, are incredibly careful. They give us the accepted face of their licence, and maybe sprinkle on a few jokes and meta-references for the hardcore fans. They’re respectful. They don’t tread on any toes.

KotOR 2 goes for the throat. It’s a game about questions and about darkness, and designer Chris Avellone is particularly keen to peel back the more uncomfortable niceties of its universe, such as the convenient split between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and the damage that leads to those labels.

Much of it is designed to invert the original game, as BioShock 2 did with its predecessor. KotOR was, by and large, set in the light side of the universe: a heroic quest, noble warriors fighting evil from a position of moral authority and righteousness.

There was a Dark Side path and moral choices, but it was clear what you were ‘supposed’ to do. Rise up. Become a Jedi Knight. Beat up the guy in black armour who wants to conquer the galaxy. It was the right story at the right time, the Star Wars experience everyone wanted. KotOR 2 uses the same engine and style for entirely different purposes.

For starters, it takes place primarily in the dark—among the poor and criminal-controlled corners of a galaxy still scarred and bleeding from both the Mandalorian Wars and a brutal Sith assault that has largely wiped out the Jedi Order.

The player character is no hero, but an outcast, the Exile, banished for making a difficult decision at the right time, who draws allies not by need or force of charisma but a subconscious Force Bond that binds them (much as the Mark of Torment drew suffering souls to The Nameless One in Planescape: Torment).

Fallen knights. Assassins. Gangsters. Bounty hunters. All of them primarily defined not by their potential, but by their pain. In KotOR we met spunky young Twi’lek Mission Vao and her bodyguard Zaalbar—a Wookiee who owes her a life-debt. KotOR 2 brings us a similar case with bounty hunter Mira and Hanhaar, the difference being that Hanhaar sees this, not unreasonably, as slavery. He’s also a sociopath, restrained only by that one scrap of culture.

Far from a cuddly teddy-bear looking to protect his human, he longs to free himself by killing her, ideally horribly, on the grounds that her death will free him. Yet at the same time, he’s too caught up in the concept to listen when she tries to tell him that he doesn’t owe her a damn thing and can just leave.

Easily the most successful of the team is the Exile’s mentor, Kreia, whose presence can best be described as like going on an adventure with your mother-in-law. Kreia can be mistaken for an assault on Star Wars’ simplistic morality, there for parables such as helping a beggar and then seeing him beaten up as a demonstration that even good acts can have deadly consequences.

That’s overly reductive. Firstly, her belief system is every bit as dogmatic as the Jedi/Sith code, only revolving around balance and self-reliance. Second... spoiler alert… she’s the villain. Like everyone else, her philosophy ultimately comes from pain – betrayal, exile. She’s not a character you’re necessarily meant to agree with, just one there to make you think.

For the most part, doing good deeds in KotOR 2 does result in good things happening. It’s just that the game also wants to explore how the road to Hell can be paved with good intentions, and how good people can fall without realising it. Jedi historian Atris, for instance, is too busy seeing the Dark Side in you to notice how quickly she herself fell.

By this point, you’ve probably noticed something – a lot of talk about story, not a whole lot about the game. Unfortunately, there’s a reason for that. KotOR 2 suffered from one of the most premature launches of the last decade. Not only did it have just a 14-16 month development cycle, but LucasArts ended up dragging it back from 2005 to 2004. It showed.

A New Hope

Over the next few years, fans created the Sith Lords Restored Content mod – installed by default on the Steam version. Much of the missing content, including voice files, turned out to be there all the time, just disabled. This mod switches it back on.

As a result, the KotOR 2 we have now is a far superior game to the one that came out in 2004. The catch is that even at the time it was a clumsy RPG. That’s partly due to the graphics and controls, not helped by KotOR having been primarily designed for the Xbox (which, as we all remember, had a potato instead of a graphics card). It’s partly because of the combat, which was still rooted in the D&D style of BioWare’s past games: a massive clash between cinematic action, constant pausing and barely concealed dice-rolling.

Also, the rush to get the game out in a year didn’t leave much time for niceties. So much of the game feels like it’s taking place in a shoebox, albeit one found a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Great chunks of the game were pulled, much of what was left was rough as old boots made of sandpaper, and the final chapters were embarrassingly incomplete. Some levels were little more than linear corridors containing the same handful of enemies to fight. The already spartan design became downright minimalistic.

Most awkwardly of all, most of the Companion plots were simply unfinished. There’d be a scene on the last world where, for instance, two of the droids on the ship were having a showdown, and then… nothing. We never went back to finish that, the Exile instead having an atrocious final boss fight while being chased by flying lightsabers, in a scene that begged for the Benny Hill music, and then the whole planet exploding with an almost apologetic shrug.

It doesn’t help that by far the worst part comes at the start. The Exile wakes up on the abandoned Peragus station, which desperately wants to be a System Shock experience full of looming electronic horror, but is actually the dullest couple of hours this side of Myst.

Thankfully there’s a mod to skip it on subsequent playthroughs, but too much story is drip-fed here to do that the first time around. Later worlds improve on this, highlights including a two-part civil war on Onderon and a battle between rival bounty hunters on Nar Shaddaa. Still, few scenes have the raw zip of infiltrating Korriban’s Sith Academy back in the first game. You may return to the planet in this one, but like much of the galaxy, it’s in a bad state.

In short, as a raw game, KotOR 2 doesn’t hold up that well. It’s not awful, it sometimes shines, but even post-fixes, it wears both its era and its tortured development on its sleeve. If you’re going to try it now, especially for the first time, it really does have to be for two things: the writing and the characters. Kreia especially is one of the best game characters ever written, never mind in the Star Wars universe, and while the issues that Chris Avellone raises may have been covered in the Expanded Universe, they’re a breath of fresh air in a mainstream game. Even if it’s not quite an RPG classic, it’s very much a game to respect – and a great example of how flipping the perspective on a licence can be endlessly more interesting than playing things straight.

Grand Theft Auto 6—which you would be forgiven for thinking is a videogame, but is actually a civilisational event on par with man's exile from Eden—got a big infodump today, ahead of its preorders kicking off. One smidge of that infodump? A treasure trove of new screenshots to market the game's pricier Ultimate Edition, showing off Vice City, protagonists Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, and a lot of guns 'n' cars.

Obviously, you would like to look at them, and I am nothing if not a servant of your will. So here are all the new screenshots Rockstar has published from GTA 6, divided conveniently by content.

Jason and Lucia

I'll be honest, I find these shots the most exciting. Ever since GTA 4, I've mourned the robust customisation options Rockstar gave us for CJ in GTA: San Andreas. Sure, GTA 5 had a suite of options, but I never felt like Michael, Franklin, or Trevor could get as varied as CJ could back in the day. Here, though? Jason and Lucia can look really dang different, aided in no small part by just how impressive Rockstar's graphics tech has gotten in the 13 years since GTA 5's release.

Guns guns guns

Looks like GTA 6 expands a whole bunch of GTA 5's relatively paltry gun cosmetics, taking a leaf out of Red Dead Redemption 2's book to let you style your weapons of war in all manner of ways. Including putting your names on them. Which seems like a bad thing to do. As a criminal.

Cars

Yes, Rockstar still likes cars a whole bunch, and I must admit they do look very good as they lounge in Vice City's sunset and neon. These are Ultimate Edition screens, remember—small temptations to get you to fork over $100 for the game's rich-guy edition, so if you want to get your hands on a lot of these wheels in particular, be prepared to pay for it.

Stores of Vice City

One of Rockstar's more egregious moves with its preorder campaign is that there are a few fancy customisation shops—tattoo parlours, vehicle mod joints—that will be straight-up closed if you don't have the (more) expensive edition. They do look nice though. Vice City's petit-bourgeoisie look like a classic rogue's gallery of Rockstar freaks and weirdos.

Boats

Florida, remarkably, is surrounded by water, and it sure looks like you'll be spending a lot of your time on the surf as you do your various crimes. My favourite part: that's a damn dolphin, no doubt rendered with Rockstar's classically unhinged attention to detail.

Well, gamers. It's been months of rumours and analysts offering their thoughts on what Grand Theft Auto 6 was going to cost. The big $100 has been thrown around a bunch in that time, despite living in a world where normal videogames cost $70. In this morning's meeting with a couple fellow PC Gamer writers, I theorised $80 would probably be the number.

Turns out, we were both right. Kinda.

In anticipation of pre-orders going live on June 25—here's when that'll be for wherever you are in the world—Rockstar has already laid out how much you can expect to pay. It's offering two editions, Standard and Ultimate, coming in at $80 and $100 respectively. Except I'd argue that the $80 is more of a basic edition, if Rockstar's insane marketing on the big hundo version is anything to go by.

That's because the Ultimate Edition is set to contain "an exclusive collection of premium vehicles, weapons, apparel, and action threaded across all aspects of Jason and Lucia’s story." How does that look in practice? Well, we know there's at least one exclusive salon offering haircuts for both characters, with makeup and manicures for Lucia and facial hair for Jason. There's also an Ultimate Edition-exclusive mod shop, where you can "transform vanilla vehicles into magnificent works of art with detailed interiors, exquisite rims, and donk stylings." That's perhaps the most egregious one in all of the Ultimate Edition "goodies".

Whether these are customisation options you can only get with the Ultimate Edition, or whether there'll be some peasant stores for us $80 buyers, isn't entirely clear yet. Either way, I definitely have thoughts on locking away some of the coolest things about the series behind an extra 20 bucks.

I really can't help but feel like $100 is the price Rockstar (or at least the big wigs) want to charge. "Hey guys! You want the FULL Grand Theft Auto 6 gaming experience? It's only an extra $20!!" Or something like that. The developer is certainly marketing the Ultimate Edition as the best way to play GTA 6—literally, the pre-order news says it "amplifies the deepest and most immersive GTA experience yet".

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It does also feel a little strange to see all these extra cosmetics for a game we've barely seen any actual gameplay for yet. But hey, that's modern videogames for you, I suppose.

Locked shops and cosmetics aside, I am still pretty excited for Grand Theft Auto 6. All the excitement of new screenshots has been dampened somewhat by knowing they come with an extra price tag, but it's done the job of both giving me FOMO and making me hungry to see more of what Leonida has to offer.

The GTA 6 pre-orders are going live soon, letting you pre-purchase your chosen edition of the game for when it launches in November. You might be wondering why there's so much fuss around a pre-order, but since GTA 5, a GTA release has become a once-in-a-decade global phenomenon, even if it isn't confirmed when we'll be getting it on our personal computers.

Rockstar has officially released info explaining when pre-orders go live for each region, so I'll explain that down below, plus a few other things we've learned today.

GTA 6 pre-order release times

You can pre-order Grand Theft Auto 6 on June 25 at midnight local time. Yes, that means no simultaneous release across the globe, but it'll actually vary based on where you live. The info was shared on Rockstar Games official instagram, so you can believe the validity of the source. Sadly, there's no word of a PC release date yet, but it'll most likely come later on as with the previous game.

Rockstar has released info about each edition of the game and their bonuses on its official site. It does look like GTA 6 will also cost $79.99 and $99.99 according to info that's emerged, which is a little more expensive than many were expecting.

We might also get to see a new trailer when pre-orders drop as an added incentive, though I guess with where the hype's currently at it might not even be necessary. Hopefully those pre-ordering will get to see more of the game before they do anyway.

While Vampire: The Masquerade is the obvious option when you want to play a TTRPG where you get to be a vampire, the problem is you need a full table of pretend bloodsuckers to make it work. If you're the only wannabe vampire in your group and everyone else would rather be a more typical RPG hero, your options are limited. Rules for playing a dhampir were included in the D&D supplement Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft back in 2021, but being half a vampire isn't enough for everyone.

Which is where Bound By Blood comes in. The upcoming supplement by Ghostfire Gaming in co-operation with White Wolf will include rules for a vampire class in D&D 5th edition that has blood points to spend, bloodline powers called disciplines to spend them on, and an inner beast to contend with just like they do in Vampire: The Masquerade. It'll also include an adventure set in Vampire's "Dark Ages" timeline, which winds the clock back to medieval Europe.

White Wolf was careful to say Bound By Blood isn't the only thing they've got going on, as the publisher recently revealed it had something big to announce at the upcoming Gen Con event and a few doomers online decided this was it. "We're very excited about sharing the love for Vampires with even more people," White Wolf said, "but want to clarify something since we've seen some wires getting crossed: Bound by Blood is not the primary project we're announcing at Gen Con. They're two different projects."

Now that we've washed the taste of Bloodlines 2 out of our mouths, things are looking up for Vampire: The Masquerade. The upcoming CRPG Eternal Whispers promises to be narrative-driven with big Disco Elysium vibes, and Dimension 20's current actual-play series City Council of Darkness has been a fun take on what Vampire would look like if you removed it from the city and crossed it with Parks and Recreation.

Bound By Blood will be released in July, and will be available on D&D Beyond. After that, the D&D release schedule includes some Greyhawk adventures and a supplement for the Eberron setting called Frontiers of Eberron: Quickstone.

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OD is Hideo Kojima's return to horror, and while I'd like to say it's cloaked in mystery we actually know a fair bit about it: it's co-written with Jordan Peele of Get Out fame, and stars Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and a posthumous Udo Kier. According to Kojima, early trailers may point to "a standard horror game" but it's definitely not that at all.

In fact, we've been told repeatedly that OD is like nothing else that's come before: what it actually is, is a mystery Kojima seems pretty eager to exacerbate. In a new Entertainment Weekly feature which seems designed, maybe with poor timing, to celebrate the virtues and achievements of Xbox as it enters its 25th year, Kojima is called on to comment about OD, which will be published by Xbox Game Studios.

"I wanted to do something new. I wanted to do something different," Kojima told EW. "I had this OD concept since I was working on DS1 [Death Stranding] and I was working on it just by myself. I can't reveal much detail, but it's something that no one has ever seen before. A new game system."

He goes on to say that despite being Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, and perhaps the most beloved (maybe only) auteur in the biz, many weren't receptive to his pitch. "I pitched to many people, to the big companies, and also to the up-and-coming companies. All of them said the same thing," Kojima said. "They said that I'm crazy, and that they really don't understand the concept—that they will not be able to do it."

Phil Spencer, former Xbox head, was pretty keen on the concept though. Or else, he was keen to secure a crowdpleasing exclusive after Kojima's decades-long association with PlayStation. Most of the Metal Gear Solid games didn't or haven't launched on Xbox consoles, though the majority have since been reissued on that platform. Death Stranding and its sequel both launched as PlayStation exclusives: the first eventually came to Xbox, but the second is yet to make the jump.

New Xbox head Asha Sharma supports OD, calling it "deeply moving" and representative of "another kind of game". She also seems eager to conflate Xbox's support of the game with its broader vision for the medium as a whole. "We need to make sure our platform is sufficiently open so more creators and developers can come on board and be successful, because the next Kojima is yet to be known." (True, but perhaps he was among the thousands laid off by Microsoft in the last two years).

Kojima has a tiny bit more to say about OD: "I wanted to go beyond the limit of the 'scariness' that other games had reached. It's a single-player game, and I wanted to make it as scary as possible. But for those that might stop playing when it gets too scary, I have thought of a system that will allow them to keep going. I can't say much more, because it'll give too much of a hint on the system, and I could get in trouble for saying too much!"

OD has yet to get a release date.

I love the look of Marathon, and I like shooters in general. But extraction shooters? Not so much. I'm not very good at them, for one thing, and the constant pressure to get out with your loot before the timer hits zero is a huge drag. So when Bungie said it was looking at PvE modes for Marathon, you bet my ears perked up.

The experimental Sponsored Survival mode introduced earlier this month sounded potentially interesting but not quite what I was after. But the new, full-on PvE Vault Breaker mode revealed today? Yeah, that might be it.

Vault Breaker enables players to venture into Marathon's raid map, Cryo Archive, solo, in duos or trios, to take on a series of increasingly challenging vaults. The mode will have its own unique progression mechanic that enables players to increase in power across multiple matches, until they reach the final vault "and the mysterious entity within."

The new mode will require a special "Sponsored Kit"—one of Marathon's free loadouts—to access, presumably to maintain some semblance of gameplay balance. The bigger twist, though, is that Vault Breaker eschews one of the most fundamental aspects of extraction shooters: Any gear or items you find in the mode will be left behind when you leave. The only thing you'll take with you Vault Data, a new currency that can be used to upgrade your Vault Breaker Sponsored Kit, or to purchase gear that can be used in other modes.

Bungie said eliminating gear extraction will let players "experience Cryo Archive without flooding the economy with low-risk, high-power Cryo loot," which seems reasonable to me. But it's drawn something of a mixed reaction among the PC Gamer crew. Notorious Destiny freak Tim Clark called it a huge mistake, declaring that "not keeping the stuff you find is anathema to me," while FPS guy Morgan Park saw it in a very different light, saying it "sounds like a fun way to learn the map" without getting your ass shot off by people who already know it inside and out. Lincoln Carpenter, ever the voice of reason, said it "seems fine."

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For myself, I'm actually pretty excited. This is where I finally start paying Marathon: I have even less interest in the loot grind than I do in not having my ass shot off by people who already know the game inside and out, so a mode that effectively does away with both, but still affords me the opportunity to experience the setting and action, is exactly what I've been waiting for. But for players who've already learned Cryo Archive inside and out over the last three months, a warmup mode with no stakes or other players might be useful, but probably not what they're ultimately after.

Vault Breaker will be rolled out as part of Marathon's mid-season, which gets underway on July 21. The mid-season will also see the first iteration of the Cradle Evolution system, giving players who have maxed out their Cradle upgrades an opportunity to reset to zero in exchange for an additional maximum energy point and unique cosmetics, as well as "various other quality-of-life, tuning, and other changes, including the addition of player profile stats."

The ongoing regime change and reorganization at Xbox hasn't given much cause for confidence in the state of its studios—particularly Arkane Lyon, which has stayed almost entirely out of the public eye since announcing Marvel's Blade at the 2023 Game Awards. The studio was once again absent at this month's Xbox Games Showcase, and the subsequent reports that "several" Microsoft developers are at risk of closure stoked fears that both Arkane and Blade had been quietly put out to pasture.

Bethesda Softworks boss Todd Howard, however, says we needn't worry our silly little heads, because Arkane's work on Marvel's daywalker is proceeding swimmingly.

As part of an Entertainment Weekly report on the current state of Xbox (via Polygon), Howard offered a brief confirmation that work on Marvel's Blade remains underway, speaking favorably about the state of the project after seeing some of Arkane's latest work in May.

"I'm not at liberty to say when [we'll see more]," Howard said, "but I saw some stuff just yesterday [on May 21] and the folks at Arkane are doing a really, really great job."

Paired with an Arkane artist's request earlier this month that we let the studio cook, Howard's statement is a welcome sign of life. Unfortunately, when it's Microsoft we're talking about, a confirmation that Blade is still in development isn't the definitive proof of a healthy future for Arkane that we might be hoping for: Xbox was willing to announce a new Ninja Theory game at this month's Xbox Games Showcase even as it was planning to give the studio the axe.

Reportedly, the company's rationale is that announcing Senua would make the studio more attractive to other investors and potential owners after it parts ways with the developer. However, given Microsoft's ruthlessness in culling development staff and their projects in recent years—including Arkane's Austin studio, which Microsoft shuttered in 2024—that supposed altruism rings hollow.

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Diablo 4's upcoming season was shaping up to be a big disappointment after the excitement around its latest expansion. Blizzard threatened to completely flatten the identity of the most powerful loot with a change that—while healthy in the long run—spoiled the fun of having ultra-rare items to chase in an action RPG.

But after holding a week-long playtest, Blizzard has taken the overwhelmingly negative feedback and found a promising compromise.

Season 14, the Season of Death Awakening, will bring a permanent change to Diablo 4 that redefines how its rarest items work. Blizzard's goal is to take Uniques, an item tier that was previously pretty niche, and expand their usefulness for a variety of character builds. To do that, it will make Uniques less powerful and their bonuses more random—two things no Diablo player who is looking to perfect their build wants to hear.

Previously, the plan was to ditch the guaranteed bonuses Uniques currently have for completely random stats. Nobody, including me, liked the sound of erasing the identity of the cool Uniques in the game to basically make them Legendaries with a different color. This would've made the game unnecessarily grindy and broken the whole point of Uniques having curated stats that synergize with their unique powers. Why would you want a sword that empowers your critical strikes to not even have any critical strike chance on it?

Thankfully, that's not how it's going to work anymore. Blizzard has given Uniques back two guaranteed stats to fit their themes. The other stats will still be random, but you'll be able to swap one of them out to fit your build.

The solution, as is laid out in the updated patch notes for season 14, is to preserve each Unique's identity while allowing some flexibility with the random stats they can have. This solves the problem Blizzard was originally targeting by moving away from Uniques only working for hyper-specific build archetypes. It was always a bummer to find an item that, for example, boosted your damage only if you invested in fire skills on a sorceress. Now, that item will retain its general damage bonus but could roll stats on it that synergize with cold skills instead.

On top of all of that, Uniques will be able to appear as Mythic Uniques. Diablo 4 already classified a pool of its rarest and most powerful items as Mythic Uniques, but now that title will refer to any Unique that drops with a purple tooltip, like how orange items (Legendaries) are better than yellow items (Rares). These new Mythic Uniques will have maxed out stats when they drop, or when you craft them, giving you a new item type to chase after.

By opening up the possibilities for Uniques, Diablo 4's loot should be more broadly useful and exciting. I was always confident it would be a healthy change for the game, but disliked the way Blizzard had initially decided to handle it. This revised approach is a compromise I'm willing to try when the season starts on June 30.

Lords of the Fallen 2, which had been set to launch this fall, has been delayed to early 2027, a pause that CI Games CEO Marek Tyminski said will provide "additional integration, iteration, and polishing time." It will also, conveniently, move the game out of the immediate blast radius of Grand Theft Auto 6, which is coming in November.

"As development progresses, we have worked closely with the Gameplay Feedback Team, a dedicated group of seasoned souls-like veterans within our Launch Creative Team," Tyminski wrote on X. "Their valuable ongoing input, combined with the team’s vision, has identified meaningful opportunities to further refine and strengthen the overall experience.

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"These enhancements will benefit from additional integration, iteration, and polishing time, enabling the team to deliver the highest possible quality at launch."

No names were named, but Tyminski also acknowledged that the shift "strategically positions Lords of the Fallen 2 outside of a highly competitive holiday period, ensuring the game receives the dedicated attention it deserves."

Well, fair enough: It's hard to fault anyone for making way for a juggernaut, and it's not like we haven't seen this before: GTA 6's own delays, from fall 2025 to May 2026 and finally November 19, have caused headaches for everyone trying to schedule around it.

And it's not just a GTA phenomenon. Last year, Hollow Knight: Silksong sent numerous developers scrambling for cover with its surprise release date announced, and in 2023 Larian fired Baldur's Gate 3 out the door a month early to get out of Starfield's way. (Well, you can't always tell how these things are going to work out.) Going back even further, Cyberpunk 2077 made a big splash of its own in the 2020 holiday season.

A solid release date for Lords of the Fallen 2 wasn't announced, but Tyminski said it's now expected to be out in the first quarter of 2027.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is still five months away (on consoles, remember, no PC release date yet) and preorders won't be live until later this week. But that apparently hasn't stopped numerous websites from promising eager fans that they can get early access to the game right now for a price. Lest there be any doubt, cybersecurity company Malwarebytes is warning that they're nothing but a scam.

A report posted today says "a new wave of scam websites" are offering "VIP early access" to the next GTA in exchange for a grossly inflated price of "a few hundred dollars," payable in cryptocurrency. Malwarebyte also shared a few images of the scam sites in question.

One site leverages GTA 6, Mr. Beast, and Lego all at the same time—a powerful combo, no doubt.

But of course, there's nothing to be had. Worse, because payments are made in crypto, there's no way to recover or report the loss. The money is gone and there's no getting it back.

Stefan Dasic of Malwarebytes described GTA 6 as "the perfect bait" for scams like this in his report. Grand Theft Auto is among the biggest game franchises in the world, with hundreds of millions of copies sold, and it's been 13 years since GTA 5. The hype for GTA 6 is enormous, and "scammers simply exploit that excitement."

You might think that this sort of thing is way too obvious for anyone to fall for, but as a wise old friend once told me, you don't know what you don't know. I've been online for almost as long as 'online' has existed, and I write about this stuff for a living—but a 14-year-old with a smartphone, no matter how hip to the scene he may appear, might be tempted to take a shot.

But it's not just kids, to be clear. As the report points out (and as we've all no doubt seen once or twice in our lives), burning desire can overwhelm chilled caution, and verbiage used on these scam sites encourage impulsive decisions. They also look pretty legit, and the situation is further confused by the fact that preordering a more expensive edition for "advance access" to a new release is very common for videogames now.

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Dasic said Malwarebytes doesn't have information on how many people are visiting these sites but the bottom line is that, like all scams, they persist because they work.

"I am amazed when I see which scams managed to fool people," Dasic told PC Gamer. "There will always be at least one person that will fall for this—either being too young, or too immature, probably not well informed and just wanting to be the first to have their hands on something before everyone else."

Just about everyone is hot to trot for GTA 6, but keep this in mind and keep a clear head: There is no Grand Theft Auto 6 early access at this point. If Rockstar does announce some kind of premium "advance access" for GTA 6, you should only buy it from official sources. And last but certainly not least, if a site is insisting that you pay with crypto it's time to put your hand on your wallet and head for the door. (That last one is pretty much a universal truth, though, so apply it across the board.)

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19, and preorders—official, real, not-a-scam preorders—will begin on June 25. We're still waiting for the PC version to be announced.

After an incredibly brief existence, Owlcat has completely removed a controversial new launcher from Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.

Introduced yesterday, the Owlcat Launcher was intended to be a pre-game space for collating news and updates about Owlcat's various games.

"Instead of searching across multiple platforms for updates, news, and announcements, now you can find them all gathered in one convenient place whenever you launch the game," said the studio.

Though Owlcat said it had taken pains to make the launcher as "unobtrusive" as possible—it required "no mandatory registration," said it did not collect player data, and could notionally be entirely turned off—players hated it. The Rogue Trader subreddit and Steam forum were immediately awash with complaints.

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Partially, of course, that's for the simple reason that these sort of pre-game launchers are universally terrible: bloatware that's useless at best and intrusive at worst. But making matters worse was the fact that turning off the launcher did not, in fact, turn it off. It just made the launcher run invisibly.

"Apparently if the launcher closed, the game stopped recording Steam time (because launcher ID is now how the game is recognized by default)," wrote Owlcat community manager Starrok in the Rogue Trader subreddit. In other words, if Steam didn't detect the launcher running, it wouldn't count your hours in the game. "The team decided to use this background process as a bandaid fix for that.

"I know VERY well how that looks, and unfortunately I was not informed about this change," continued Starrok. "I've already communicated with the team about this and tomorrow they will research how this time display issue can be resolved in a different way rather than leaving an unkilled process that eats up memory."

That was yesterday. Today, it seems that the solution Owlcat settled on was to obliterate the launcher entirely. "We are Rolling Back the Launcher," reads the title of a new announcement. "The game will now revert to the previous patch, completely removing any Launcher-related changes. Thank you for your feedback, and genuinely sorry for the frustration caused." Fans seem pleased.

All in all, the Owlcat Launcher lived for about 19 hours, which is slightly less than the life expectancy of an adult mayfly. It's not the studio's first controversy like this, either: back in 2023, fan pushback forced it to strip a data-sucking tool out of Wrath of the Righteous.

Credit where it's due, plenty of studios would simply leave the offending tech in and ride out the wave of complaints. Opposite-of-credit where it's due, I can't imagine someone at Owlcat didn't know how this stuff would be received ahead of launch. Studio decision-makers should probably listen to them.

Loving someone means putting up with all their flaws. In Final Fantasy 14's case, that's shrugging my shoulders and going "classic server tick moment" every time something that is definitely not supposed to happen does, in fact, happen.

That's been happening an awful lot more lately as I've been progressing through Dancing Mad (Ultimate), the game's newest balls-to-the-wall eight-player raid. The final mechanic of the fight's first phase involves carefully placing 16 teleporting arrows in such a way that when four people get smacked with a classic JRPG Confusion status, they can run in (technically towards another player in an attempt to murder them) and get successfully pinged around the arena.

The problem? Sometimes, they simply straight up did not work. I've had static members run right over them, or get pinged off in every direction except the way the arrow is actually facing. That's because, for whatever reason, the arrows teleported you based on where you stepped onto the panel. Players had come up with ways to try and alleviate some of this bizarre behaviour, but having to create strats around janky netcode never feels good.

It's something I had resigned to forever being a little bit scuffed. So imagine my surprise when, upon peeping today's hotfix notice, I saw something I never expected: it's been freakin' fixed.

"Players will now always be teleported a fixed distance from the centre of the panel in the direction indicated by the arrow, regardless of where they step onto it," the brief patch notes read.

"Previously, players were teleported based on where their character stepped onto the panel. However, when discrepancies arose between the server-side and client-side positional data due to network conditions, the destination of the teleportation appeared inconsistent. To address this, this behaviour has been changed so that teleportation is now determined by the arrow panel itself, rather than the character's position."

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Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why this wasn't the case from the beginning—it makes far more sense to me, personally—but I'm genuinely jazzed to see it actually rectified. Nothing feels worse than getting through the first three minutes of the fight, only to have to wipe the pull because of a little server side shenanigans.

The hotfix has also made it so that players with speed-buffing abilities like Sprint or Expedience shouldn't straight-up run over the arrows anymore. It's funny the first time, but certainly not the 10th or even 50th time.

If you were thinking Destiny 2's ending couldn't get any more depressing, you're wrong. Unfortunately. In a reaction to my pondering of what Destiny 3 should even be (if ever made, of course), a streamer by the name of Chrizmo demanded something that's been brought up a few times over the years: a dating sim.

Ex-community manager Liana Ruppert replied, explaining that, "Fun fact, the team actually made one," backing up a casual confirmation from a few years ago. The issue, which seems to be recurring at this point, is that "leadership was very 'Hard No' that nobody wanted romance or silliness." Boo.

Ruppert describes this long-lost idea as being "very Dream Daddy-inspired," leaving me to picture a very tongue-in-cheek roster of romances like Crow, Mara, and Empress Caiatl. Hell, imagine getting seduced by Xur, Mithrax, or even the Witness. YouTuber 'A Wild Deathstroke' actually made a fan concept video in 2022:

Former senior narrative designer Robert Brookes elaborated, saying that the project was dreamed up during a week-long game jam, where the team was given free rein to pitch and make fun prototypes. Alas, "it was never a full-fledged project," Brookes explains, but the team did lobby to make it so every year.

"Myself and two other narrative team members (who both CAME from romance game design) had an entire pitch deck for one complete with costs and real hard metrics on returns."

Not to kick a dog while it's down, but that's not all we missed out on. Former Bungie director Christopher Barrett revealed that there was "also a fighting game, a Destiny-inspired heavy metal concert, a dialogue conversation system, and other random stuff" made in game jams.

Obviously, these were generally rough concepts made to spark some creative thinking, but it's hard not to imagine how these could've looked in-game. I think a Valentine's event involving a dating sim would've been silly, non-canon fun. It's not been confirmed, but I wouldn't be surprised if something like the iconic Sparrow Racing League spawned from experiments like this.

While it's a shame these ideas never came to any kind of tangible reality for players, it's always interesting to hear more about the behind-the-scenes of Bungie. Even more so, given the reports over the years of struggles between developers and leadership, with the added pressure of lots of red on its financial books.

What weapon comes to mind when you think of a Skitarii in Warhammer 40k? A Shock Maul? An Arc Rifle? Or even the cool Transonic Blades that the Sicarian Ruststalkers use? For me, and a lot of others, it's their iconic longarm, the Galvanic Rifle. Visually, it resembles a flintlock with a glowing blue cylinder mounted on its undercarriage, a cool combination of old and new. But it's never been entirely clear how it reloads—does it take a clip? Or is it a revolver rifle?

Well, when creating the Skitarii class for Warhammer 40k: Darktide, it's a problem the developer Fatshark had to tackle:

"It took us a while to figure out how they actually work and Games Workshop didn't know either," says lead designer, Victor Magnuson, during the preview session I attended. "They've never looked at them in this type of detail before either, so it's something we worked together with them to figure out, how this would actually work in this type of fidelity."

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So what weapon was chosen to help model the Galvanic Rifle? It allowed us, says Magnuson, "to pay homage to a gaming classic, the M1 Garand, which is a weapon I really love using in other games". If you don't remember the M1 Garand, you probably haven't played much Call of Duty or many WW2 shooters. Part of what makes this rifle so iconic gaming wise is its *feel*, especially the signature "ping" when you run dry and have to slot in bullets to reload.

"We came up with this idea where there's a clip of actual bullets that you put in," explains Magnuson. "And then the coil thing on the bottom is where the galvanic charge comes from. This is the type of weapon we've really wanted to do in Darktide for a long time. I'm so happy with how it's ended up, it's super satisfying to use."

As someone who's been playing the Skitarii class this last week and has almost exclusively used the Galvanic Rifle as my ranged weapon, I've got to agree—it feels really good. Fatshark also did a wonderful job with the Transonic Blades, usually reserved for Sicarian Ruststalkers, but here it was allowed to create a sword and dagger combo for the Skitarii, too.

If you want to play Darktide's new Skitarii class, it's out now on Steam.

During the 250+ hours I've spent eviscerating Darktide's hordes of poxwalkers and nurglefied hive inhabitants, few classes have gripped me as much as the Zealot. Is it the sweet purr of the chainsword as I grind off a Mauler's face? Is it that rush as I slide into melee range with a squad of traitor guardsmen and de-limb them as they feebly try to bayonet me? Whatever it is, it never gets old. I'm as surprised as anyone, then, that Darktide's new Skitarii class might have finally converted me to praising the Omnissiah full time.

I've always had a fondness for the cogboys in red, but Fatshark has really excelled itself with this cyborg warrior. First off, it's bloody huge. It's not clear in the trailers, but the smallest Skitarri is the size of the tallest Darktide human, making its tallest variant more like playing an Ogryn without the chunkiness. And I have to say, I take great pleasure in looming over enemies, ominously burbling binharic cant as I bat them aside with my Arc Maul.

The Skitarii's voice is one of my favorite components. During character creation, you can choose a Forge World (including the Moebian 'Branx' created for Darktide), and what bits and bobs you want welded onto your robot man, including Voxcaster Tuning. Here, you pick one of four voices as usual, but you can mess around with it to create a unique variant just for you. It's a nice way of avoiding those awkward matching teammates, especially when we all know it's going to be nothing but full Skitarii teams for the next month.

Skill-wise, Skitarii come in a few different flavours. If you're an Arbites who loves micro-ing your pooch, you'll be eyeing up the trio of Servo Skulls you can bring. I didn't find them particularly strong damage-wise, but they offer lots of utility, allowing you to rez allies at range, deploy a flamethrower to chokepoint corridors, or you can even have them solve the Data Interrogation minigames—a pretty tempting prospect, right?

But as a melee-loving Zealot, I settled for the Chordclaw, which lets you skewer enemies with an extendable stabby hand. I love how wacky it looks, as if you've opened a jack-in-the-box hidden in your trench coat, but instead of a boxing glove, it fires out a giant clawed appendage. It's essentially an "I want this to die" button, letting you end anything big and bad on demand, plus its guaranteed crit, application of bleed and electrify, plus three potential hits, means it chunks through bosses.

I coupled this with the Integrated Refraction Emitter, a shield that consumes grenade charges to make you immune to ranged damage. It also electrocutes enemies around you periodically, making it the perfect ability when you come face-to-face with a bristling wall of guns. One of the advantages of the Skitarii's radial skill tree (versus previous classes' descending ones), is that there's a lot more freedom.

Skitarii can automatically acquire and shoot targets with Advanced Combat Doctrines, or emit electrifying explosions with the Voltaic Emitter. Electrifying enemies and gaining buffs against said enemies is a big part of the Skitarii class, as is the 'charge' mechanic. Your ability has up to three charges, which you gain via acquiring capacitance, and you'll unlock buffs in the skill tree based on how low or high your charge count is. It's not perfect, but it's by far the most unique skill tree I've seen Fatshark attempt in Darktide, which gives me a lot of faith in terms of future class design.

For implements of murder and mayhem, the real standouts for me were the Arc Maul, Galvanic Rifle, and Paired Transonic Blades. As a Zealot and Arbites player I am sick to high heaven of mauls, but the Arc one is rather nifty. When you activate its special action, you charge it with Arc, a new electricity type that hops between enemies (available via the Arc Rifle and Arc Grenades also). The only downside is that this period doesn't last very long and you have to wait for it to charge up again.

The Galvanic Rifle and Paired Transonic Blades are both masterworks of *chef kiss* weapon feel. As Fatshark noted in the preview I attended, the rifle is essentially an M1 Garand, the videogame classic, and it feels so satisfying to fire and reload, cracking off arc bullets into enemies before slotting in a new clip with a delicious metallic click. I sometimes animation cancel the reload just so I can enjoy it again.

Though usually reserved for Sicarian Ruststalkers, the powers that be also allowed Fatshark to give the Skitarii a Transonic sword and dagger combo, which (sorry Hive Scum mains) makes the dual shivs feel like garbage. This blender has two settings—a series of horizontal slashes for groups, and downward strikes and stabs for chunky single-entities. Having two entirely different movesets for one weapon feels super versatile, especially when you can weave the switch into the rhythm of melee combat.

I really hope the Skitarii is just a taste of what we can come to expect from future Darktide classes. It's certainly better than the Hive Scum, and for me, just about edges out the Arbites (a class I love) with its sheer uniqueness. It'll be a fair while before murderbot-ing my way through Tertium grows stale I think.

The best Darktide Skitarii build for my money is all about the powerful Chordclaw ability. While the Servo Skulls are certainly fun and provide a lot of utility, such as rezzing allies or solving puzzles, if you're a melee-enjoyer like me, Chordclaw's skewering hand is too good to pass up, and can brutalize both bosses and tanky enemies.

I'll explain the build in depth below, but it's essentially about crit-ing lots for added bonuses like regaining ability energy, and then using Chordclaw lots to murder enemies and gain further bonuses. It's pretty straightforward, so here's how to set it all up.

The best Darktide Skitarii build

After experimenting with the Skitarii, the best build I found revolves around the powerful Chordclaw ability and using crits to electrocute enemies and gain capacitance (your ability resource). Chordclaw fires out a stabbing arm, a guaranteed rending crit which, buffed with its sub-talents, Probing Strikes and Slice and Dice, hits three times, applies bleed, and gains extra damage for each successive hit.

This is further enhanced with Electro-Strike Conduit, which makes melee crits apply electrocution (including the Chordclaw). Flux Conduit Build-Up will provide capacitance as you crit to regain Chordclaw charges (which includes Chordclaw uses), plus when you do Chordclaw, Moebian Conductor, Voltaic Restoration, and Enhanced Capacitance Protocols will buff your overall damage, replenish toughness, and regain all stacks for Flensing Protocols.

Flensing Protocols is vital here—this key node and its sub-talents give you eight stacks of +2.5% damage and toughness damage reduction, and +1.5% crit chance and melee attack speed. These are reduced when you get hit by enemies, but you regain them all whenever you use Chordclaw.

Lastly, the Integrated Refraction Emitter gives you a three-charge shield which you can use in tricky spots to avoid ranged damage and electrocute enemies in an AoE for more damage against them, thanks to talents like Weakness Analysis Doctrine and Retribution Conduit. It sounds complex, but the fundamentals are crit lots, use Chordclaw lots, profit.

Best Skitarii weapons and relics

These are the weapons, blessings, and perks I recommend using for the Skitarii:

• Melee weapon: Paired Transonic Blades
  • Blessing 1: Shred (+4% bonus critical hit chance on chained hit. Stacks five times)
  • Blessing 2: Perfect Strike (Critical hits ignore hit mass armour bonus from armour. +10% melee critical hit damage)
  • Perks: Melee crit chance, melee crit damage

While the Arc Maul is a very strong weapon to start with, I recommend hopping to the Paired Transonic Blades when you unlock them. These Mechanicus swords have two different attack patterns that you switch via the special weapon action: a series of horizontal slashes for hordes, and downward strikes and stabs for single entities, so make sure to swap between them if you suddenly spot a Mauler or Crusher amidst the crowd.

Considering this build is all about hitting crits (electrocuting enemies for bonus damage and gaining capacitance), I recommend taking Shred and Perfect Strike, the classic Zealot combo which buffs crit chance, crit damage, and makes crits ignore armour mass for more cleave. If you feel like you're still not crit-ing enough, swap Perfect Strike for Riposte—if you play anything like me, you're dodging constantly, so this crit chance buff on dodge is easy to maintain. Perk-wise, I suggest crit chance and crit damage to buff it further.

• Ranged weapon: Galvanic Rifle
  • Blessing 1: Deadly Accurate (+60% critical weak spot damage)
  • Blessing 2: Headhunter (+20% critical chance on weak spot hit until your next critical hit. Stacks five times)
  • Perks: Ranged crit damage, +% damage to carapace armoured enemies

The Galvanic Rifle is a very satisfying weapon and I mainly use it as a means to quickly snipe troublesome specialists or enemies in the midst of combat. With that in mind, I chose Deadly Accurate and Headhunter. These will ensure that your headshots are more likely to crit and that they hit incredibly hard, letting you quickly deal with dangerous foes.

For perks, I recommend you buff your ranged crit damage and (considering you've already got plenty of crit chance via Headhunter) your damage to carapace armoured enemies, who will be the trickiest to kill with ranged attacks.

• Curio bonuses: Toughness, max health, sprint efficacy

Lastly, for curio bonuses I suggest the usual combination of toughness, max health, and sprint efficacy. It never hurts to have a little corruption resistance and an extra wound either, but neither is strictly necessary, I don't think.

Best Skitarii talent and keystone levelling path

This is my recommended levelling order for the Skitarii, but it's worth noting that you can grab most of these at any point thanks to its radial skill tree, as I do in the video above. So, if you're struggling with survivability, pick the talents in here that buff toughness, or if you need extra damage, focus the ones that buff that instead.

Skitarii build playstyle

As mentioned, this build is all about using crits to electrocute enemies and regen capacitance for your powerful Chordclaw ability, which will also provide benefits on use. You've also got the Integrated Refraction Emitter shield to keep you alive under heavy fire or when you need to revive an ally. Here are some other tips for playing this build:

1. Regularly use Chordclaw for tough foes and bosses

Chordclaw murders most enemies and brutalises bosses. Landing three strikes will kill a Crusher from full health in Heresy—I genuinely cannot imagine the havoc a team of four Skitarii with this ability will wreak. Chordclaw also provides extra benefits thanks to this build (including regen-ing Chordclaw because of its guaranteed crit hits), so use it often, especially as it will replenish all your Flensing Protocol stacks if you've been hit by enemies.

2. Snipe annoying specialists with your Galvanic Rifle

The Galvanic Rifle is a great weapon for headshotting foes at long range, and if you're following this build it's essentially set up as a headshot crit machine. Use it for snipers, flamers, poxbursters, hounds, bombers, gunners, ragers, and just about anything else you can safely kill at range with a quick cranial plink.

3. Switch Paired Transonic Blade modes for different foes

It took me a while to get used to this, but make sure to use your special weapon action to swap your Transonic Blades into single-entity mode. I'm pretty sure it changes the weapon's profile, because it suddenly becomes significantly better at piercing armour for Maulers and Crushers. You can also switch modes mid-combat and I'm pretty sure this move counts as a block, too.

4. Use the Integrated Refraction Emitter in tricky spots

Though it costs grenade uses, the Integrated Refraction Emitter is absurdly strong against ranged enemies. You can use it to complete objectives or revive allies under fire, and allies can even shelter behind you since it's an AoE shield. Thanks to its Kinetic Repulsion sub-talent, it also reduces health damage you take in melee and electrocutes enemies around you on use (for increased damage), making it handy for any tough spots you find yourself in.

A recent Steam release has been making the social media rounds of late. Congratulations On Your Purchase is a, I hesitate to say 'game,' but a product, released at the end of May, that costs $1,000 / £748. "You paid for this. Not accidentally. Not on impulse. You saw the price. You read the description. And then you bought it anyway. Welcome" reads the description. Kind of. There's actually a bunch of broken HTML in there I can't copy over without confusing our CMS.

It's a status symbol, in essence: a 2026 replay of that I Am Rich iPhone app from 2008. The intention is that Steam users with more money than sense see it, purchase it, and flaunt it as a testament to their fantastic wealth, while also conveniently signing themselves up for the guillotine come the October Revolution 2.

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Naturally, I picked it up. Oh, don't worry. While it's true that I am incredibly wealthy from my lucrative games journalism career, I didn't drop a thousand bucks on Congratulations On Your Purchase. I used a Steam press account to play it for free and take a nose around, to see if the wonders contained therein could possibly justify the extortionate pricetag.

They can't.

"Congratulations On Your Purchase is a first-person luxury experience set inside a palace," goes the Steam description. "There is a red carpet. There are chandeliers. There are velvet rope barriers." All true. That's also pretty much all there is. There's you—in first-person—bearing whatever name you typed in at the game's start, an L-shaped corridor, and a legion of mildly deformed supporters fixed in a rictus of enthusiasm. They do not animate, they simply rotate on their Y-axes to follow you unblinkingly around the room. Many of them are identical. Looking at them slows my PC to a crawl and makes my fans spin louder than a BIOS update.

Your slack-jawed apostles exist behind the velvet rope. You cannot reach them and they cannot reach you. Instead, you roam the red carpet and, once you have passed the elbow of the L-shaped corridor, come face to face with a featureless blank wall.

This is Congratulations On Your Purchase's one and only mechanic: you can daub the wall with whatever you want—write your name, a witty quote, a rude picture; these are the privileges of wealth. Anything you put up there will go on the game's website. So long as you put it in the right bit, anyway: the first thing I scrawled was too far off to the left, meaning it's not included on the website.

I get the impression that Congratulations On Your Purchase thinks it's doing something, man. "There is no combat. There are no enemies. There are no quests, no skill trees, no loot boxes—well, there is one box, but it contains only the feeling of having arrived somewhere important," reads its description, enigmatically. "The question of whether this experience is worth $999.99 is, philosophically speaking, unanswerable. Worth is constructed. Price is arbitrary. The fact that you are reading this suggests you are already considering it—which means the answer, for you, may already be yes. We respect that about you."

Droll, but there's no 'there' there. The product doesn't live up to the possibly-satirical promises of its description. I don't think it's quite enough to slap a $1,000 pricetag on a hunk of junk and call it a savage act of detournement. At the very least, you probably ought to donate your earnings to charity. Moneygrabbing is still moneygrabbing if you do it with an arched eyebrow.

Anyway, that's it. That is the entirety of the game, which you should under no circumstances buy. Indeed, judging by its credits page, it has only ever had seven players, of which I am number seven. There should never be a number eight.

Destiny 2 is slowly closing its doors—its servers aren't shutting down, but Bungie has emphasised that it won't be getting any more content, bar a massive quality of life patch that has left it in a relatively good, but inert and unchanging state.

One might, if they were being cynical and cutthroat, think this is cause for celebration—particularly if they were in charge of the competition, as Warframe is. Not so, says community director and live ops lead Megan Everett in a conversation with Eurogamer.

"Truthfully, it's heartbreaking. It's earth-shattering. I never thought I'd ever see the day where I'd read an article from Bungie about Destiny 2 essentially shutting down.

"I'm speaking personally, but I know people would echo it as well. No one is celebrating the fact that this has happened to Destiny, and its players and that story. I know that people have obviously compared us in terms of being 'direct competitors' and stuff like that. But I think a game is healthy when you have competitors."

As someone in the MMO space, it's honestly true—World of Warcraft got its act together (at least, when compared to the catastrophe of Shadowlands) when a mass exodus of fans drifted to Final Fantasy 14. Conversely, with FF14's stagnation, it's starting to adopt a lot of the measures WoW and other MMOs did with Evercold, shaking things up.

My point being, healthy competition tends to drive games to be better than one another—and stop me if this is going off the reservation—but I think we can all broadly agree that we like it when videogames are good.

Everett also says it's a shame that Destiny 2's been shown support much too late: "I think what's unfortunate and sad is they announced this was happening, and suddenly people are showing all this support for them. They've been getting a lot of negativity for all this time, and it's like, where was all this love!

"Overall, I hate to see that happen to them. I have close friends who play Destiny over Warframe, and ain't mad about it. We have friends over there, to see this happen to them is devastating to the industry. No one saw Destiny going away"

Sand: Raiders of Sophie launched into early access today after a number of last-minute delays, so I finally got the chance to try out the first-person base-building extraction shooter.

My first thought after about two hours of play? It's like Sea of Thieves but on land, and if your vehicle gets destroyed you've gotta build a new one: you can't just wait a few seconds and respawn with a pristine new ride.

The walking bases, called tramplers, are the star of the game. Before you embark on a mission—you're in outer space, orbiting a desert planet on some sort of Victorian-era gaslamp space station, by the way—you need to prep yourself and your trampler. You can build one yourself by snapping together modules (I haven't played too much with this feature yet) or use a preexisting model.

Take a couple handheld weapons like a pistol, shotgun, or rifle, fill your pockets with ammo, then bring a crate containing heavy guns for your trampler, like 40mm and 80mm cannons.

Once you deploy to the planet, you need to run around your customizable walking base getting it ready for action: mount the guns in a few places on the exterior and load them up with ammo. Manually fire up the huge engine, then run to the steering emplacement and start throwing giant levers like you're Kenneth Branagh driving his spider-mech in Wild Wild West. Your big, noisy, smoke-spewling behemoth will begin slowly stomping across the dunes.

Even the smallest mechs are big enough that getting around on them takes time, having to clamber up ladders and dash through the different compartments to reach the guns, engine, steering, and storage areas. I've only played Sand solo, and there's definitely that same ultra-busy Sea of Thieves feel to it. I've got to pilot this huge mech, adjust how fast I'm going, and check the map, all while scanning the horizon for lootable locations and enemy tramplers (by spying ominous clouds of black smoke instead of distant sails).

I also have to leave my mobile base all the time, scurry nervously across the sand on foot when I want to do some looting, terrified the whole time that another mech is gonna stride up and start blowing mine to pieces. That's a very Sea of Thieves-like feeling.

When the shit goes down, I've gotta leave the wheel to man the turrets, some of which are located well on the other side of the vehicle. It's a mad rush to reload guns and aim turrets and repair damage and make sure the mech, which is still walking so it doesn't become a stationary target, isn't about to crash into something like a big rock or rusted ship. It's glorious chaos, especially for one person.

The sound design in Sand is excellent, too: the trampler makes fantastic mech noises, gears groaning and cables jangling as it lurches across the landscape. The mounted guns are deafening, really making you feel like you're firing a huge, deadly weapon. And you can hear battles taking place from well across the map, letting you know other players are somewhere in the neighborhood.

The PvE part comes in with ghoul-like NPCs who guard some lootable locations: I only ran into a few of them and they're not the most dynamic enemies, basically running toward me and shooting me on sight. More devastating are the automatons who (I think) come blasting down to the planet from orbit and begin stamping around after you. I ran into a trio of them, and while they're not as big as player-built tramplers, they still sock a punch with their artillery and take a decent amount of damage to bring down.

Like Sea of Thieves, Sand is harrowing and tense and it's definitely not a game meant for solo players: there's just a little too much to handle if you're playing on your own. There's one thoughtful feature, though: if you are playing Sand solo, you can join a server that is solos-only, so at least you won't get mobbed by larger crews. Even Sea of Thieves doesn't do that.

Once you've done some looting and stored your stuff in the cargo hold of your trampler, you can drive your trampler to an extraction point, where most of the combat takes place. You have to disembark and climb a tall tower to kick off the extraction sequence, wherein a ship takes a few minutes to come down from orbit to collect you. That's the cue for everyone in the area to stomp your way and try to blow you to hell first.

I've done three voyages so far, though two ended early due to launch-day server issues. My second mission was a fun one: my trampler got blown up by computer-controller walkers that swarmed me, and since I didn't die, I was able to run to an extraction point where another player was about to lift off. I stowed aboard his trampler, thinking it might let me sneakily extract along with him, but once he took off I simply died.

In my last mission, I looted some old ships I found in the desert, shot a few ghouls, bombarded a player attempting to extract (but failed to stop him), then extracted myself while a different player stomped over and took some cannon shots at me. Pretty fun, and I'm interested in crewing up with some friends and playing it more once the server issues have been resolved.

A story trailer for the gross-out horror game Ill dropped earlier this month, although frankly I didn't notice much in the way of story: I was too busy looking at, as cataloged by our Australian goremaster Shaun Prescott, the eye-scoopings, skull stompings, zombie baby punchings, and other such goings-on to really hone in on the narrative angle of the whole thing. Still, Max Verehin, CEO of developer Team Clout, assured me during a recent chat that there is indeed a story going on in there, and that those over-the-top visuals are actually inspired in part by one of the best-loved horror sequences in videogame history: Half-Life 2's We Don't Go to Ravenholm.

The Ill story trailer actually struck me as somewhat less extreme than the debut trailer that appeared at the 2025 Summer Game Fest, which was itself apparently somehow less worse than what the studio cooked up when it first decided to make the game. (And just as a gentle FYI, if you're sensitive to graphic violence and gore, you probably shouldn't be reading this and you definitely shouldn't be watching this trailer.)

"Our entire team has extensive experience in the horror genre, spanning games, movies, art, concept design, and so on," Verehin told me. "Like many players and audiences in general, we’ve reached a point where it's quite difficult to surprise us with anything in this genre.

"When we initially came together, our goal was to combine our experience and create a project that would feel fresh, unconventional, and stand out from the crowd even for us—something that could reignite those raw emotions that have grown a bit dull over time.

"That’s why during our initial brainstorming sessions, we try not to hold back and be bold, letting whatever madness we have run wild. Only after that do we look for a balance: how not to cross the line while still preserving our uniqueness. We aren't trying to do gore for the sake of gore, as our game isn't 'gore porn.' It aims primarily to scare and entertain, rather than just shock."

Which leads back to the narrative element of Ill's latest trailer, which Verehin said focuses on the game's characters and "our mysterious plot," although little of that is revealed: Some sort of unpleasantness in the world's worst hospital and you, who apparently just emerged from a coma, are elected as cleanup guy.

That's not the most original idea for zombie troubles I've ever run across, but it doesn't sound like a straight-up survival horror experience: Ill "combines horror and action," Verehin said, "and since we are fighting monsters rather than actual humans, we expect that tearing through them will bring a sense of fun against the backdrop of the general, oppressive horror."

That's where the Ravenholm comparison comes into play: A grim locale filled with headcrabs and zombie, Ravenholm is a memorable if somewhat incongruous chunk of Half-Life 2, but what really makes it work is the slice-and-dice combo of the gravity gun and numerous conveniently-placed buzzsaw blades. It's not bloody like Ill, but it's definitely a more visceral method of putting down inhuman horrors than just blasting at them with conventional firearms.

"We often look back at our own emotions playing through the We Don't Go to Ravenholm episode in Half-Life 2, how we fought back against the monsters, slicing them with saw blades using the gravity gun, blowing them up, and so on," Verehin said.

"Given the technology of that era, it created the perfect emotional impact. Today, the tech is vastly different, expectations are higher, and the bar for delivering those same emotions to players has risen. And we are doing our best to achieve that exact same effect, but with modern standards."

The tech has indeed improved in the years since Half-Life 2, and I asked Verehin if perhaps it had become a little too advanced—if the realistic depictions of, as Shaun put it, "skull explosions" might put some people off. Well, no—it definitely did, and does, put some people off.

But Verehin said that no single game is going to appeal to everyone, and based on the wholeheartedly enthusiastic responses to Ill trailers on YouTube, and the number of wishlists it's racked up on Steam—it now stands among the top 10 most wishlisted games, according to SteamDB—he thinks they're onto something.

"This audience knows exactly what they want and what they’ve been missing all this time, and they perfectly understand what we’re trying to achieve." And, he added, "we have a lot more content to share down the line, and players will get to see even more elements and mechanics that the game has to offer, which will naturally shape the overall perception as well."

I'll admit that I'm curious. I don't like horror games and I'm not a big gore guy, but Ill has put on enough of a wild freak show that despite myself, I really want to give it a try. It'ss set to launch sometime in 2027.

One of the most popular games on Roblox right now is a multiplayer FPS with zero idle mechanics or brainrots. It's called TTK, and as of this writing, it's been played over 7 million times.

TTK is the newest game from Sable Digital, a duo of Roblox devs who go by PoptartNoahh and CanyonJack. The first version of the game was published in April, but it blew up in a big way last week after clips of its realistic deathmatches went viral.

The version of TTK that everyone is playing right now is a free-for-all deathmatch with basic Call of Duty-like loadouts, but this is apparently just a vertical slice made for testing purposes. Future versions of TTK will focus on "co-op PVE squad AI mechanics" with "story-based doorkicker scenarios/missions" as well as team-based modes. The explosive popularity has caught the pair of devs by surprise, who say the Roblox algorithm "found us too early."

It's an impressive accomplishment for two people. Sable is upfront about its main inspirations here—everything about TTK's slow movement, floaty aiming, high-lethality, and immersive mechanics like magazine checking is meant to evoke bodycam shooters and SWAT games like Ready Or Not. They've done a great job of emulating the feel of Void Interactive's hit co-op FPS in Roblox, a platform that doesn't spit out decent shooters every day.

For a Roblox game, it's quite good. It looks great for something that'll run on a phone, and the absence of Roblox's default block guys is always appreciated. Guns are loud and dangerous, sound is directional enough to hear someone coming around a corner, and its handful of maps (while basic) already offer more interesting layouts than last year's Black Ops 7.

That said, TTK's popularity seems to be more about the Roblox of it all. While there have been viral shooters that borrow heavily from established FPSes in Roblox for years now, there are clearly many folks only now learning that the platform is capable of more than idle clickers, horror walking sims, and 'obbys' (obstacle platformers).

To me, the most notable aspect of TTK is that it's not trying to mercilessly extract money from 6-year-olds. The only way to spend money on it for now is a 400 Robux supporter pack that grants some profile effects—essentially a tip jar. It was nice to spend 30 minutes on this platform without stepping on a pressure pad that triggers a $20 purchase screen. I wonder if TTK will actually stay this chill—perhaps the only reason it's not heavily monetized is because Sable didn't expect all the attention.

Either way, if you've played the games that Sable is pulling from here, there's no rush to go play TTK yourself. It's fine, it's free, but it's also about as good as a number of Steam shooters that release regularly. This one just happens to be in Roblox.

The developers of co-op RPG Fellowship had to publish its season 3 patch notes across five separate Steam news posts, which should tell you just how much is changing in its latest update. Along with tons of balance changes, the new season veers away from its MMO-inspired roots to lean harder into being an action RPG with loot and character builds—a decision that didn't immediately go over well.

The team at Chief Rebel are confident that season 3 will be a turning point for Fellowship as a co-op experience that emulates the thrill of running dungeons with your friends without the baggage of MMO busywork. And a lot had to change to make that happen.

For starters, the old loot system had to go. Community director Hamish Bode told PC Gamer during a recent demo of season 3 that too many players would collect the best gear and immediately stop thinking about it. In the new system, "there's always something cool that can happen," Bode said, like finding a pair of gloves that supercharges one of your abilities.

Bode was speaking my language as someone who has spent the last few weeks playing tons of Path of Exile 2. Fellowship won't be quite as deep as loot-heavy games like Diablo, but the revised item system is an attempt to give players interesting choices to make about how they want to build their characters. It also means there's a real chase for gear upgrades that will help you survive the jumps in difficulty for each dungeon tier.

Necklaces, for example, will now carry random defensive bonuses for every hero, giving you a reason to keep checking for an upgrade every time you find new ones. If you get lucky and find an item perfect for your playstyle, you can now boost all the stats on it through the new Tempering system. From what I saw, Chief Rebel was careful not to add unnecessary bloat that would make it feel like you're gambling for power. Loot has variables, but not so much that you'll be waiting days to see something useful.

Bode said the team is "hyper aware" that the last thing players want is for Fellowship to suddenly feel like a grind. "I don't think it's fun when the game just kind of feeds you everything and kind of plays itself for you," he said. "It's a really tricky balance, but we also have crafting systems so you can have more agency over how you want to progress. Even if you, for example, go for a few runs without finding anything, you can salvage those items and pump those resources into the things that are really good for you."

Bringing back the challenge

Season 3's long list of changes also includes things that are a direct response to players who found the last season way too easy. Bode said the team tried to help onboard new players by making the dungeons easier, but failed to account for the sheer power of its new heroes. "People who were running the new tank and the new healer—it's almost worth saying—broke the game a bit," Bode explained. "It's one of the reasons why we leaned so hard into larger scale testing for this season."

Bode said he personally prefers when games give you the elation you get when you finally kill a frustrating Dark Souls boss. "I prefer to have that because it shows people are wanting to progress through something," he said. "If you go too far the other way and people are like this is too easy and they become apathetic and check out, that's a much worse situation for a game to be in, in my opinion."

Season 3 aims to turn things around from the last season with more challenging dungeons, including a new pinnacle dungeon with three brutal bosses. Every week, you'll be able to run a pinnacle dungeon and receive rewards from any other dungeon in the chest at the end. Completing it will also grant you a Bloodstone, which you can use to greatly enhance your gear.

All of this sounds really promising for a game that fills an important niche you can't find anywhere else. I ran two dungeons alongside Bode as the new melee damage hero Gunde and remembered why I still believe in Fellowship. Gunde joins its list of heroes who feel inspired by archetypes I know from WoW but are wrapped around a core mechanic to manage.

Gunde is a berserker who cleaves through packs of enemies with his twin axes, leaving them bleeding: I spent the first dungeon lining up his AoE attacks to keep enemies maimed and the second watching them melt when followed up with a finisher move that does loads of extra damage to bleeding enemies. Gunde isn't the kind of character I'd usually pick in an RPG, but I won't say I didn't enjoy slicing enemies up instead of casting spells for a change.

Fellowship is still less than a year into early access and already feels like a dramatically better game than it did at the start—and I thought it was pretty good back then. Season 3 is the first time I can sense a vision for the game that won't just appeal to people who need something to do at the end of a WoW season, and I'm extremely curious to see where it goes from here.

Season 3 starts today and you can get the game on Steam for $15, or almost half its normal price ($25) until June 29.

I'm a FromSoft fiend, but there are hardly any other soulslikes I can stand. I can dig something a bit more removed like the first-person Lunacid or 2D Mina the Hollower, but there's an uncanny valley effect for me with stuff like Lies of P or Nioh: It's so close to being the thing I love, but doesn't quite bring it home.

Enter Prison of Husks, whose demo is live on Steam: It carries the same risk of comparison to the champaign of Souls with its camera, controls, and vibes, but manages to be different enough to really get my goat. The first thing that won me over was its commitment to a retro PS1 rendering style, boasting little touches that come off as genuine retro expression rather than hopping on an indie trend.

Those touches include a forced 4:3 aspect ratio, 640x480 default resolution, and chunky console menus. Through that filter, Prison of Husks looks to be blending Demon's Souls vibes and level design with Sekiro combat, as well as some flourishes all its own.

I'm a sucker for a good perfect block parry, and Prison of Husks' had me running back a demo miniboss dozens of times until I buried it. It's not perfect: Sometimes it felt like I didn't have a big enough window to meaningfully counter after a parry, and Prison of Husks lacks the crystal-clear feedback of Sekiro's stagger meter. But the combat felt good—better than most lesser Sekiros I've encountered.

As for the atmosphere, I was intrigued. It's the grey, towering gothic structures and specific strain of cryptic "ooh cursed one" that I associate with Demon's Souls and, to a lesser extent, Dark Souls 1. You play as some kind of life-sized doll automaton possessed by a wayward soul⁠—or maybe more accurately, you play as a wayward soul possessing doll automatons⁠—and you really ought to do something about all this entropic curse stuff in the air.

Prison of Husks is also trying some mechanical experimentation that I respect: It's leaning more action/exploration than RPG, with equippable gear but no complicated stat/class/leveling system that I noticed. Reading into Prison of Husks' Steam page, it sounds like there will be some build differentiation in the weapons and supplemental accessories instead.

I'm also happy to report that it runs great out of the box on Steam Deck⁠—even with throwback graphics, that's not always a guarantee a game is actually lightweight enough for the Linux-based handheld. As a bonus, the Deck's 16:10 screen is also a nice fit for Husks' 4:3 aspect ratio. Prison of Husks is planned to launch sometime this year. You can wishlist it and check out its demo for yourself on Steam.

Stop Killing Games has had a hell of a run, going from a niche, long-shot consumer campaign to an "absolutely incredible" appearance in front of the European Parliament in just two years. But it's hit something of a bump in the road, as the European Commission says it "will engage with consumers and publishers by the end of 2026 to explore ways to improve industry standards," but will not propose any new laws requiring that publishers keep their games operational after their servers are shut down.

The full report has all the details if you want to really get into it, but the much briefer press release has the meat of the matter, which is essentially that existing law trumps proposed new regulations.

"The Commission considers that at this stage it cannot propose a legal obligation to keep videogames playable after they stop being provided commercially," the announcement states. "This is due, also, to existing intellectual property rights. Under EU copyright law, rights holders enjoy exclusive rights over their creations.

"In addition to copyright, other intellectual property rights may also be relevant as they may protect different visual and technological aspects of a videogame."

The commission said, as the UK did in 2025, that existing law already provides "important safeguards" by notifying consumers of a game's dependence on external servers and it may become inoperable when those servers go away. There are further remedies in place for cases in which "the content or service provided does not conform with the contract and what consumers could reasonably expect."

Still, the commission committed to taking "several" (actually two) steps to address the concerns expressed by Stop Killing Games: To "initiate an exchange with the videogame industry and consumer representatives with the aim to draw up an industry code of conduct on managing videogames' 'end of life'," and to work with consumer organizations and authorities to raise awareness of the existing consumer regulations.

In messages posted to Reddit, Stop Killing Games said there was "nothing surprising to anyone" in the decision, and that "the fight goes on."

"This movement is defined by action and we will keep acting, we owe Ross [YouTuber Ross Scott, who launched Stop Killing Games in 2024] and the millions of people that have put their trust in us," Stop Killing Games organizer Moritz Katzner wrote. "MEPs have recognized that, the California state assembly and even the courts have. Let's keep winning."

Katzner also laid out Stop Killing Games' plans for the next few months, which includes continuing work on the Protect Our Games (POG) Act in the US and adapting it for the EU, pushing efforts based on existing legislation in the EU, and building up its new Stop Killing the Internet team.

"One thing I want to say is, I am so glad we've been making inroads in parliament," Scott said in a video released after the ruling. "So do not be discouraged by this answer whatsoever. It's what we were anticipating and unfortunately it's exactly what happened So we can still go ahead and get amended into the Digital Fairness Act. We have majority support in parliament. Everything's still on course to go through with that."

Katzner expressed similar sentiments in the video, noting the organization's ongoing work in the US, France, and UK: "We're much more than just this single petition."

"We're where we are. We're definitely not stuck. I would go as far as saying we're on a very, very good track at the moment."

Plenty has been said about the hundreds of games that launch on Steam each week and the many features Valve has concocted over the years to funnel that waterfall of content through a straw an average player can actually sip on. Latest among them is the new "personal calendar" feature and you know what? I think this is finally the perfect way to recommend games to me.

A small Personal Calendar module now appears on the Steam homepage when you're logged in, showing a couple upcoming releases for each of the next five days that Steam judges you may like based on what's already on your wishlist and the tags of games you typically play. The calendar actually rolled out earlier this month in a Steam blog post but, look, June's been too busy for me to casually surf Steam and also the announcement really undersells the feature.

When you click through to the full Personal Calendar page, you'll see a list of games released in the past month, some from the past week, and then a forward looking calendar of the next two months showing a per-day preview of a few games (up to six for a single day, on mine) that you might like. You can also make the calendar page more specific by filtering for a specific tag like "farming sim" or "city builder" and some other options like games per page and showing or hiding games that are already on your wishlist.

I've given Steam deserved grief for leaning too hard on algorithms to tackle the Sisyphean task of curation, but this solution is the most visually attractive and immediately comprehensible to me, a human, that I've seen from the store in years.

I never really got on with Steam's Discovery Queue, for instance. I get the logic in attempting to pluck games for me out of the mad bucket of Legos that is Steam's glut of releases. Just shoving a new game in front of me every time I click "next in queue" doesn't really help me make sense of my options (and always reminded me of the StumbleUpon browser extension from the late '00s).

A calendar just works though. It's more digestible than Steam's storewide list of upcoming games or the queue that serves just one game at a time. My calendar reminded me that a new Game Freak game, Beast of Reincarnation, comes out on August 3, the day before House House's next game Big Walk, which is the day before the 1.0 launch of Fields of Mistria on August 5. That's going to be a big week for me!

The fact that it mixes in games it thinks I might like with things on my wishlist and the 1.0 launches for Early Access games already in my library is a genuinely good view of how I think about what I want to play next month. Thankfully, it also doesn't recommend a game for every single day which would have taken the concept from refreshing back to overwhelming.

It seems to do quite a decent job of surfacing smaller indie games I've not heard of too, though your mileage may vary if you don't routinely interact with small, weird games for work. It's shown me lots of options including a cute pixelated management game called Cat Isle. The calendars for my fellow PCG folks have included Bingle Bingle for Morgan Park who described it as "roulette Balatro" at a glance. Dinoblade for Lincoln Carpenter, and Cat Chess for Tyler Wilde who made us all watch a trailer of cats battling during a meeting. I think the feature is working.

There was a bit of concern from indie devs earlier this month fearing that changes to the "new releases" module on the storefront would push visibility away from small games. We'll have to wait for folks to report back on how the calendar feature has affected their discoverability. Speaking as a player though, I'm way more likely to peruse and buy from this screen than an overwhelming list of loosely upcoming stuff.

Picture a huge metal beast lumbering through the sand dunes. As it lifts its mechanical legs and places its heavy metal feet down, you probably wouldn't be surprised if it stumbled, lurched, or even got stuck here and there for a bit.

That's what's been happening with Sand: Raiders of Sophie, a PvPvE extraction shooter where you build and pilot giant walking mechanical bases, stomp around in the desert on an alien planet, and battle both other players and their own walking bases. It's taken quite a few missteps on the long, sandy path to launch.

The first delay was last year, when plans for an early access launch in April 2025 were scrapped. Following that, the game pivoted into being a full release upon launch, which was planned for March 2026—but in the final few days of March it became clear that wasn't happening either, and the revised release was then targeted for June 10.

On June 9, the day before that new launch date, not only was the release moved again (to today, June 22), but the game shifted back to being an early access release again. Talk about walking in circles.

But here we are on June 22, and Sand: Raiders of Sophie is finally out in early access! That doesn't mean there weren't still a few more little stumbles at the starting line: as eager fans in the official Discord witnessed today, "a couple of wires got crossed that we need Valves help us uncross," the development team said, which delayed today's launch "an hour or two."

Three hours after that announcement, a 10-minute countdown appeared—which then expired and was replaced by a second countdown, this one for 20 minutes. Gosh.

But then! Before the second countdown could fully run out, Sand finally launched on Steam. It's really out this time! Fer honest!

How is it? Well, I bought it myself (it's 21% off for the next two weeks) but I've been busy writing this story while it's downloading. I'll jump in shortly and let you know if Sand was worth the wait.

Every long-running series benefits from an occasional change of genre. Yakuza dabbling in RPG-style combat works well. Dragon Quest going Dynasty Warriors for a bit is nothing but refreshing. Sonic racing about in a car makes a fun change of pace. Now it's R-Type's turn, the legendary arcade shmup series putting on a strategy hat and stuffing its UI with statistics and material costs.

On the PSP, where the two Tactics games exclusively appeared in the late 2010s, this unexpected shift in style easily stood out thanks to the handheld's relative lack of sci-fi strategy competition. In contrast 2026's PC gamers are utterly spoiled for choice: XCOM, Battletech, Xenonauts 2, and plenty more only a few clicks away—if they're not already installed. What does this release have to offer the kind of person already up to their eyeballs in metal death machines and alien menaces?

A lot.

Specifically, giant monsters with specific weak points waiting at the end of tight passageways. Force units—those glowing orange blobs that can attach to either end of compatible ships—reimagined as versatile mobile enhancements for compatible ships, able to offer a slew of different shot types or even head off independently and ram enemies so hard they're pushed a hex backwards. One stage is dominated by a giant space cannon, and it's on me to lure my enemies into its line of fire without decimating my own forces in the same blast. Weak walls can be shot to pieces, creating new routes and offensive opportunities.

The graphics responsible for showing me these wonders have been rebuilt from scratch, making another run through the original look as fresh as a phallic alien bursting straight out of someone's chest. Neon-coloured energy particles light up smooth metal surfaces, broken structures cast complex shadows on easily missed background scenery, organic horrors glisten in the starlight, and minor spaceships are so detailed it's possible to catch sight of tiny seats inside beautifully rendered cockpits.

Tactics' shmup heritage leaves an indelible mark on every aspect of the game, every feature directly drawing from a design template and visual language most strategy games never touch.

This unusual approach never overshadows the newfound tactical side of the game, which has more than enough depth to satisfy even the most spreadsheet-adoring strategy head. Ships now have fuel and ammo reserves to consider, the threat of being left defenceless and unable to move very real. A range of support craft prevent these new features from becoming a simple case of saving the big guns for the tougher enemies, with mid-flight resupplies and repairs an essential part of the flow of battle, temporarily retreating back to the safety of a mobile transport a sensible way to spend a turn, and slight detours to liberate a strategically placed facility (giving damaged units somewhere else to recover as I press on) well worth my time.

Terrain plays a much bigger role than expected in a game where almost everything can fly and many levels are set in the vast expanse of space. The side-scrolling nature of it all, mimicking the games it's based on, gives this tactical game an uneasy momentum: I have to push forwards, even though I know that's where all the danger is. Vertical drops are deliberately awkward to navigate. Sometimes I'm not facing the right way and there's little I can do about it because shmup law states I face one direction and that's the end of it.

Small maps and cramped spaces create a cautious, claustrophobic mood, forcing me to decide who's going to go first through a narrow tunnel and take the brunt of whatever might be lurking in the dark, or pick an unfavourable position that leaves a ship as open to friendly fire as it does the enemy's because it's the last spot available. Gaseous substances, ice blocks, and asteroid fields can slow ships down or need clearing out first, and at times I even have to consider the direction a waterfall flows in, rising upwards more difficult while I'm flying underneath them. Sometimes whole planets get in the way.

Even when I'm well prepared and on high alert, that sense of vulnerability never quite goes away. A nasty battleship-shaped surprise is always just around the corner, and the game isn't afraid of seizing any opportunity it can get to destroy one of my precious ships, or of letting me thoughtlessly stumble upon a screen-sized nightmare with more mouths than eyes.

The unforgiving nature of combat is constantly reflected in the brief commander's logs between each mission, campaigns painted not as brave expeditions undertaken by confident, well-supported armadas, but desperate fights to survive. In the first game I'm far from the best Earth has to offer, nothing more than the leader of a small scraped-together group wondering what the heck their superiors are up to and not receiving any meaningful answers.

In the sequel the peace I fought so hard for has soured into all-out civil war. The storytelling here takes a different tone to the sober political machinations in the likes of Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics; there's a pervasive melancholy to it that still feels unique, as if I'm constantly marching towards my own funeral rather than on the cusp of a noble last stand.

Even the terrain descriptions make venturing into dangerous territory feel uneasy, simple labels like "Bydo Corpse?" and "Incubation Facility?" reinforcing the idea that my group's completely out of their depth to the point of not being entirely sure what they're looking at, never mind why they're fighting them.

R-Type Tactics doesn't just stand up to modern PC strategy games, it deserves to proudly stand amongst them. This is a polished PC release—mouse compatible and already working beautifully on Steam Deck (officially "Unknown", however)—that feels like it's finally found the right home. What format could be a better fit for a game full of lengthy battles that expect players to weigh up accuracy percentages, range, charge states, fuel consumption, and consider potential counterattacks?

There's never been so many missions to work through either: Well over 100 of them, split across three unlockable campaigns. The second set, brilliantly subtitled Operation Bitter Chocolate, have never been available in English before now, and the additional post-Chocolate "Cosmos" missions are completely brand new.

Here's hoping PC gamers embrace its unusual charms and send this strange spinoff into orbit.

Now that Destiny 2's massive final update is here, it's more or less set in stone forever. Destiny is calcified—no more FOMO, no need to re-grind gear, and the end of a seasonal treadmill.

That should make me sad, and it does, more so because it's over rather than that it's easing off the gas. I've always loved playing it, so seasonal updates were a good excuse to keep looting and shooting. But there's no avoiding that, at times, playing Destiny was a chore of Bungie's own design.

With the threat of a Power cap increase or power-creep removed, you're now free to do whatever you want, whenever you want. You don't need to race through quests to be 'raid ready', or complete seasonal tasks and grind specific god rolls before they vanish into oblivion. And honestly, it's bliss.

Ironically, this is basically how Destiny used to be. The first game was built around major expansions, which would see the player count naturally rise and fall in accordance. And this is how Destiny 2 began as well. However, at some point, we all became fed up with the idea that we'd run out of new things to do and play something else for a little while.

Enter the live service-ification of Destiny, giving rise to unceasing seasonal updates and yearly expansions to keep the good times flowing. As fun as this era was, it's clear that it was practically impossible to sustain for Bungie. Live service games are expensive, and Bungie was one of the very few attempting it from a predominantly PvE angle, where content tends to be very one-and-done compared to infinitely queueing multiplayer matches in Call of Duty, for example. Plus, forcing every story arc to fit a weekly cadence like a TV show wasn't ideal either.

It didn't work for Bungie, and I'd argue it didn't really work for us, either. From my observations, the community is oddly happier with the game in its current state, in spite of it being the end. Of course, people are enjoying the new content, but mostly, I think we're enjoying being able to play Destiny without the pressure. It's nice, isn't it?

Plus, I'm older now and have less time to dedicate to one, let alone multiple live service games. It's an existential threat to a game like Destiny, where the most die-hard fans who picked up the first game in their 20s would be in their late 30s or 40s by the earliest time Destiny 3 could arrive. I figure Bungie will have a hard time getting everyone on board for a return to the seasonal treadmill, or convincing a new generation away from their already-established live service mainstays.

So, in the theoretical situation where we eventually get a Destiny 3, my big question would be what form it would take.

Maybe an MMO-like subscription model would better support a sequel designed from the ground up to be the live service MMO Destiny 2 aspired to be. But perhaps not, since there are very few MMOs left standing these days, and maintaining this would be an expensive venture. And that 'from the ground up' bit is an important note, as Destiny 2's dated infrastructure has constantly shot Bungie in the foot, most obviously in the form of the Destiny Content Vault that removed a whole chunk of game.

Maybe Bungie opts for smaller/spinoff games to more economically tell stories in the same universe, akin to Halo 3 ODST and Halo Reach. I miss the days of focused shooter campaigns and some tacked-on multiplayer, and I love Destiny's world, so I'm not opposed to this at all. However, it would feel like a bit of a gut-punch, downsizing one of the biggest franchises in gaming.

Despite the inherent risk, I'd argue it's best we return to a full-fledged expansion schedule and sequels, and come to peace with the fact that it's alright to put a game down once you've had enough to return when something's piqued your interest. More time to develop large expansions, more time for game-changing sequels. That's effectively how Borderlands works.

Whatever the approach, it's clear that change is required. Destiny 2 died for a multitude of reasons, but new-player onboarding, removing content, and the maligned Portal system are among the largest. These issues can't return. But hopefully the universe of Destiny can.

When Atlus announced its remake of Persona 4 (or more accurately, of Persona 4 Golden), a cry went up around the land. Mostly, I think people were rightly excited about Kanji Tatsumi in 4K, but there are a few peccadilloes in the original game's design that some folk—including here at PC Gamer—were eager to see Atlus iron out. Namely, those dungeons, which in P4 and P4G were quite the slog: a series of procgen corridors that went on for around 10 floors each.

"I think Persona 4 Revival should veer off from Reload's changes," wrote our Mollie Taylor last year. "Each of its dungeons are the perfect vessel to go full Persona 5 style. Palaces that serve as grand setpieces for each character, handcrafted to get real into the weeds of their insecurities and internal conflict."

I'm not sure Atlus has gone quite that far. From the snippets we see in its recent Persona 4 Revival Broadcast, Yukiko's Castle and the Bathhouse both look to be the many-floors-of-corridors affairs of the original games, though I don't doubt Atlus has put in more events and NPC dialogue to spice up the grind, much as it did before in Persona 3 Reload. To be fair, we only get a brief glimpse, so perhaps the studio has something more up its sleeve, but that design looks very familiar to me as someone who has experienced a lot of Persona 4 over the years.

One thing which is quite a bit different, though, is the combat you'll be doing in those dungeons. The Investigation Team/Scooby Gang has a lot of new toys at its disposal for fighting shadows, all lavishly coloured and animated. The three Atlus focused on in its broadcast were: Baton Pass, Send Flying, and Prime Time. Baton Pass is an easy one—it's the mechanic introduced in Persona 5 that lets you give your turn to another party member after downing an enemy.

The other two are more novel. Send Flying is a new mechanic that lets you, more or less, turn individual enemies into vectors for disease. Afflicted a shadow with the fear ailment? You can attack it to send it flying into another foe in the arena, inflicting them with the exact same debuff. Which, hey, great. I've always thought that Persona should let me ravage my foes with communicable viruses.

Prime Time, meanwhile, is a meter that fills as you do battle. Once it tops out, you can, well, activate Prime Time, which drops all your skill costs to 0 and lets you hit foes with a "Prime Time finish," which looks a lot to me like a P3R Theurgy attack.

The only other new combat mechanic that seems notable to me is the addition of a Guard manoeuvre in the overworld. Initiating combat looks much the same as it did in base P4: hit a foe when they're off-guard and get advantage, get hit yourself and get disadvantage. But guarding adds a new wrinkle: if an enemy hits you while you're guarding, they'll bounce off and become dazed, letting you either gain advantage in the full battle or else run away.

Which is all very slick and fun, but I do have to wonder what Atlus is doing to compensate for all these new tricks in your toolbox. Persona 4 was not a difficult game (with the possible exception of Yukiko's bossfight), and the addition of these new combat mechanics feel like they'd make the battle system entirely trivial. Here's hoping the shadows get some new toys to make your life harder, or else I'm going to start feeling bad.

Guild Wars 3's on the horizon—and as part of that release, developer ArenaNet got a little nostalgic in a news post last week. It shared a healthy handful of details on its incoming MMO, including an aim to fix something that shook PCG's own Lauren Morton off the second game.

It also shared an interesting tidbit about the first Guild Wars game. Namely—try as they might, ArenaNet couldn't shake off the MMO tag: "Guild Wars Reforged is, at its core, a game about a small team: a player and their assembled team of henchmen or hero NPCs or other players they want to bring along with them, overcoming challenges in a predominantly instanced game.

"Unless you invited them along, you never saw other players except in the game's social hubs. When we released the original Guild Wars, we branded the game as a CORPG (cooperative online RPG); however, the branding never stuck, and everyone informed us we'd released an MMORPG."

I suppose I'm guilty of doing the same—though it makes sense, given I'm a Final Fantasy 14 fan, and that also happens to be a set of basically single-player RPGs that just so happens to share an online world. Granted, there's plenty you can team up for, but the same goes for Guild Wars 1.

It's particularly interesting because the things that ArenaNet determined as setting it apart from other MMOs are actually more popular in modern MMOs than they've ever been. FF14 and World of Warcraft both have systems where you can fill out your party members with NPCs, and a higher emphasis on soloable content as the years have gone on.

It was a point of contention for Raph Koster (who worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies) when I spoke to him earlier this month for our MMO column—observing that open-world sandbox MMOs, the type Guild Wars 1 sought to set itself apart from, fell out of favour in exchange for instanced theme parks with social hubs.

In other words, when you describe a game where you rarely interact with players outside of social hubs, you can describe a ton of modern MMOs depending on how strict you're being—sure, I'll see players occasionally divebomb a mob in my periphery in WoW or join a mob of particle-effect flinging adventurers for a public event, but I'm not exactly talking to anybody.

Anyway, ArenaNet eventually leant in: "We even won multiple MMO-of-the-year awards! We gave up on the CORPG angle since it didn't stick with players, and we simply embraced what everyone told us: we'd shipped a unique kind of MMORPG."

Morrowind, the gloomiest and mushroomiest of all the Elder Scrolls games, is getting on in years—and it was never the most polished game in town, even upon its release a whopping 24 years ago. If you're sick of those rough edges, you need look no further than OpenMW, a fanmade open-source engine which makes the game play nice with modern hardware and operating systems. If that sounds like your thing, you'll be pleased to know it just got a huge update.

The full patch notes are worth a read if you want to sift through the technical details, but the big highlights are up top: for instance, modders can now create custom magic effects using OpenMW's scripting API, which means that certain additions in popular mods like Tamriel Rebuilt—which previously would have only worked on the original engine using a script extender—can now be remade the open-source engine.

That and other changes, like the ability for all characters to cast enchantments, are laid out in a video breakdown of 0.51.0's additions (embedded above). Even if you care about none of this, it's an entertaining watch, and some of the new graphical bells and whistles are an impressive sight.

The update addresses a slew of technical issues, too. The notes state 0.51.0 fixes "many Lua-related crashes" as well as "annoyances with gamepad menu navigation." And if you're already mid-playthrough using OpenMW, there's no need to start over—it's safe to use your existing saves with the patched versions, though you can't take new saves into the old versions due to a file format change.

It's nice to see the elder Elder Scrolls RPGs and their surrounding communities thriving all these years later, with superlative fan projects like OpenMW and Daggerfall Unity keeping the games accessible to whippersnappers like myself who were two years old when Morrowind released. If that's too boring for you, maybe give a look to mods like Muffinwind Rebaked instead.

It's not very often I get to see my love of rock music and my love of videogame music intersect in interesting ways. But almost every single time I do, one game can be found at the core—Final Fantasy 14.

Part of that is certainly thanks to The Primals, the MMO's official in-house rock band. It's led by FF14 composer Masayoshi Soken, accompanied by localisation lead Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and non-developers Eikichi Iawi, Tetsuya Tachibana, and GUNN.

Sporting a raw sound with distorted, screeching guitars and high-energy vocals from Soken and Fox, The Primals manages to strike this incredibly interesting balance of being right in the heart of nerdom while also putting out the kind of music that wouldn't sound amiss at your local rock show or festival.

It's no surprise, then, that The Primals felt right at home at Download, the UK's biggest rock and metal festival. It was the band's first non-Fan Festival appearance outside of Asia, and despite a short timeslot it was an absolute corker. I had the opportunity to sit down with Soken, Fox, and GUNN the day after their high-octane set, and it immediately struck me just how jazzed all three seemed to be—even after a night to sleep off the post-performance high.

I thought part of that might have been the release of all the nerves building up to the main performance, but it turns out the band didn't have much time for that. "[Download] took us around [the festival site] before we started, and the buggy that was supposed to take us back didn't come," Fox said.

"So we didn't get back until like, 10 minutes before we were supposed to go to the stage. Normally you sit around and you get nervous because you're thinking about it, but because all this was happening I didn't have time to get nervous. And by the time you get on the stage, it's like 'go, go, go'. And of course, once you see people, you take all of that power and go."

Scions and sinners

The Primals is rocking with a pretty decent discography at this point, but curating it to appeal to both fans and potential newcomers (some of whom may have never even played Final Fantasy 14) was important when it came to putting together the five-song setlist.

"Not everyone knew [Final Fantasy] 14, so we approached it from that perspective," Soken told me. "We wanted to make the most of the time we had, so we knew that we couldn't just rely on the songs that get a really good reaction at Fan Fest." Making sure The Primals could show their musical talent to "get everyone on board and make sure they're having a good time" led to a tight selection of some of the band's biggest, most energetic tracks. A choice which, as Fox tells me, actually proved a challenge in execution.

"[The Primals concerts] have the ups and the downs—you have the heavy songs, then you go into the slower songs, more electronic stuff. This time we focused on the heavy, on the power, on the 'go, go, go,' and our drummer was probably this close to dying," he said. "Even though it was 25 minutes—our shortest set ever—I think that's the most tired we've been after a set because it was just 'go, go, go, go, go' all the way to the end, 100% of the way."

Soken leaned forward, telling me: "Shouting. I just shouted the whole time."

Fox joked about the exhaustion he felt by the time the band's final track, Under the Weight, came around. "I was like, am I gonna pass out on stage? But if I pass out on stage, that'd be pretty fucking cool. I was like, I wanted some oxygen!"

While my favourite moment was hearing Absolute Tyranny—one of the game's more recent tracks from this January's last batch of Arcadion raids—the two tracks Not Afraid and Under the Weight were perhaps the most fitting energy for Download Festival, and the ones that The Primals plucked out as the one that had the biggest chance of reeling in new listeners.

A sound reborn

Seeing a videogame band giving it their all on a stage surrounded by tens of thousands of rock fans sprawled across half a dozen stages really drove home just how much closer the two worlds have become over the years, something which the band wholeheartedly agrees with.

"10, 15 years ago, when we were starting out with this kind of thing, there was game music and there was rock music. And there was a divide in between the two," GUNN said. "But in the past few years, I really feel like they've come a lot closer together, and in fact, sort of within that same bubble now."

But as Koji points out, videogame music has always banged—the technology just wasn't always there to fully realise it. "You look back at the music in games 20 years ago and go 'Oh, that's game music,' but it's only because that's how it was sold. You go back and listen to some of those soundtracks from Mega Man. They hit hard. You've got some rocking beats, bass lines that are just crazy.

"But it was because the technology limited it, so you got the bleeps and the bloops, and it was 'Oh, that's just game music'. But you go back and listen to that now and you're like, 'Oh, I see what they were trying to do. If only they had the technology they have now.'"

Now that The Primals has tackled one of the UK's biggest festivals, what's next for them? First of all, a new album, Soken tells me—which should be plush with rearrangements of music from Dawntrail's stellar Arcadion raid series.

But doing this also seems to have given the band the desire to take their music all over the world. "We've never had any opportunity to go and meet our fans in Australia. I want to make contact with The Primals fans in areas and regions where we haven't been able to get in touch with yet. So the next goal: Primals world tour."

I remember when Klei's self-explanatory classic Don't Starve came out, survival-crafting games as we know them now felt new and novel. "Surely this is a passing fad," I must have thought. Well, my adolescent hot takes aged about as well as a Beefalo steak in the hot sun—Don't Starve Together is bigger than ever, having just hit a new all-time concurrent player count peak on Steam, according to SteamDB.

The last time this happened was in 2023, when a steep discount caused the game to go from around 50,000 players to around 100,000. It's a similar story this time, as right now the game is available for less than $2, and peaked earlier today at 122,662 players all not starving simultaneously.

As I write this, it's settled down to around 68,000 players, which is still absurd for a game of its tenure—DST originally released in 2016. Its singleplayer counterpart is still on our list of the best survival games on PC, and its hand-drawn art style has probably helped it along; the game hasn't visibly aged a day in all that time.

If you're unfamiliar with Don't Starve, the title could serve as a full instruction manual. I think the kids these days might think of it as "wikislop," given how deep the rabbit hole goes on its various crafting systems and secrets, but that's half the fun.

Unlike some other survival-crafts, which quickly bloom into creative sandboxes, Don't Starve is more about adding as many years as possible onto your best time, trying to stave off hunger, monsters, and insanity for as long as you can. You can get to a point where it's possible to explore at your leisure, but you've got to fight for it.

Given that the original, solo-only Don't Starve only has a few thousand people playing it on Steam right now, it makes sense that the upcoming Don't Starve Elsewhere is focusing on co-op as well—the series' transition to multiplayer has clearly been a huge hit. Here's hoping that new game lives up to the hype that ferments in a decade.

I needed no further incentive to check out this video that explores why a SimCity game set in the United Kingdom wouldn't work, but even if the idea of comparing metropolitan systems of government isn't thrilling to you, you're going to want to watch it just to see who crops up at the end. It's so unexpected that I think it probably counts as a jump scare, and while I can't say whether it makes the video better or worse, it's sure as hell makes it fascinating.

The subject of the video—which is by YouTuber Chris Spargo—delves into how a SimCity set in Britain would differ from the standard, Americentric version of the game, using SimCity 4 as its case study. As Spargo points out, you can manage some "British" cities in SimCity 4, like London. But it doesn't really look or act like London, because it's built according to the US system of city governance.

As Spargo lays out, the differences between British and American cities are many and run deep. Even some of the most fundamental things diverge radically, like who runs a city in each nation. As with most modern urban city-builders, SimCity 4 puts players in the role of mayor, which works fine for American cities because mayors wield most of the power within a city. But in the UK, or at least, in England, power can be much more widely distributed among councils and boroughs.

Other differences include SimCity's fundamental mechanic of zoning. Spargo points out that zoning in the US is very rigid, hence why they end up with sprawling residential districts with no nearby amenities. The UK has a much more nuanced system that allows for multipurpose zones, but it's also much harder to build anything due to extensive planning permission requirements.

The video also delves into things like what public services a British "mayor" would actually control, and also tacitly explains why UK councils never seem to have any money (short answer, centralisation and massive social care costs).

It's all very interesting, but as the video seems to be wrapping up, Spargo says he "got the chance to speak to someone who seemed like he might know some things about this". Cut to Spargo chatting with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who he credits as a "Part-time YouTuber (51k subs)."

For context, Spargo appears to be at some sort of event also attended by the PM, who explains that he's a big advocate of devolution as he thinks "people who live and work in their community make better decisions about what's best for their community than people sitting in Whitehall or Westminster, frankly."

Starmer then points out that this is why the Labour government has "given more power to, particularly our mayors", which, given Starmer is seemingly about to be replaced by the former Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, is a tad unfortunate.

Putting aside surprise Starmer, Spargo makes some valid points, and it has given me a hankering to play a game that more accurately replicates the challenges of municipal management in the UK.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Dishonored review - PC Gamer issue #246 (UK, December 2012)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation. By Tom Francis

I think I can jump onto another light fitting from here. I’m wrong. I slip, fall, and land inches behind a gold-masked Overseer looking out of the fifth-story window. I only have a split second headstart in getting over our mutual surprise at the situation, and I use it to stab him in the neck.

A second after his body hits the ground, I hear carpet-softened footsteps coming down the hall. Panic. After mentally rejecting three even crazier ideas, I hoist the Overseer’s body over my shoulder and jump out of the window.

Dishonored is mostly a stealth game, where you play a kind of assassin, in a somewhat steampunk city. Those floundering qualifiers are part of the fun: you don’t have to hide, you don’t have to kill anyone, and while the city of Dunwall mixes matchlock pistols with crackling Tesla tech, it’s a rusty, crumbling place that feels unique.

If you don’t manage the stealth part, the first-person swordfight that breaks out is surprisingly fun, and surprisingly survivable. Time your blocks right and you can take out a squad of guards with vicious counter-attack executions. It’s not always viable later on, and I’m keen to avoid it on this mission anyway. My target is the Grand Overseer, head of Dunwall’s witch-hunting religion, and any alarm will send him running to his underground bunker.

As I sail out of the window, still holding the dead guard, I twist round and Blink back onto the window ledge. There are only six magical powers in the game, and you probably won’t use them all, but you’ll definitely use Blink. It’s a short-range teleport spell that’s almost free to cast, and quickly becomes your main way of getting around the game.

It’s silent, so it makes stealth faster and more versatile: you can Blink past the path of an approaching guard to stab him in the back when he investigates your former location.

And it also gives you a precise and reliable way to climb on the scenery. The game shows you the spot you’ll jump to as you aim the spell, so the kind of player who habitually falls off light fittings can still blink to a fifth- story window ledge without falling to his death.

City blocked

The ledge is safe and out of sight, but I don’t think it’s wide enough to drop the body on. And the huge, rainlashed courtyard below is crawling with guards. I circle half the building before I finally see an open dumpster at ground level. I think I can toss him into it from all the way up here.

I’m wrong.

Dishonored’s missions unfold across huge chunks of this plague-infested city. The best of them spend that space in breadth as much as length, letting you explore several city blocks outside of the building you plan to infiltrate. You’re free to sneak through the rat-riddled alleyways, clamber up to the rooftops and Blink between them, or dive into every open window and ransack the buildings for secrets and loot. It’s a fantastic sense of freedom.

There are even side quests in these extensive regions, and masses of incidental storytelling. Books, notes and diaries offer you enigmatic clues to stashes of loot, safe combinations and magical items.

The city watch patrol most of it, but other sections are ruled by thugs, the gutters crawl with plague- zombies, and some apartments are inhabited by stranger folk altogether.

This courtyard, though, is patrolled by Overseers. And a very dead Overseer has just fallen out of the sky and landed heavily on a spiked metal fence, dangling from it like a gruesome warning. I freeze.

They haven’t seen it yet. I slip quietly back in through a different window.

I’m in the meeting room my target is headed for, and there are two glasses on the table. My mission is to kill the Grand Overseer, but there’s an optional extra: he’s about to poison one of the few good men left in the city watch, and I’ve been asked to prevent it. I’m just about to do something clever with the glasses (see ‘Who to poison’) when the doors swing open.

Underseers

I Blink behind a screen in the corner of the room and hold my breath. The guards yell in alarm, I switch to grenades and brace for them to... rush out through the other doors.

They didn’t see me! They must be responding to something else going on. Oh, the bloodied Overseer I just threw off the building? I guess that might be it.

An objective note tells me I’ve prevented the poisoning, with my ingenious and totally intentional distraction technique, so now I just need to take out my target. I slip back out of the window before the metal shutters come down, and Blink down to street level. There’s a gutter down here with a tiny window into the Grand Overseer’s safe room, so all that’s left to do is to load my crossbow and wait.

As well as the openness of the levels themselves, there’s a pleasing amount of flexibility in how to tackle your targets. Prescribed solutions like the poisoning are blended with emergent ones, like planting a razorwire tripmine on the route to the target’s saferoom, or rewiring security to kill him for you.

Sometimes key information about your targets’ location or identity is randomised each time you play, so you have to gather clues through exploration and eavesdropping every time. And there’s even a nonlethal way of dealing with every target.

I won’t spoil what it is in this mission, but it’s a good one. In general, too, I like the ridiculous idea of a game about a ‘supernatural assassin’ going to such lengths to cater to the extremist player who’d want to leave every single person alive. And how many people you kill actually changes the later levels: the more corpses you leave in your wake, the more rats and plague zombies you’ll encounter.

I like all that. But Dishonored goes further. Characters start to moan at you if you kill too many people. The nonlethal objectives sometimes involve substantial side-quests that you miss out on if you don’t want to take that weird path. The game itself even says ‘Optional objective failed’ if you’re so audacious as to actually assassinate the person you were sent to assassinate. And if it feels you’ve killed more than it deems morally acceptable, you’re punished with a deeply unsatisfying ending.

It’s a strangely sanctimonious attitude for a game whose most interesting features all revolve around arranging inventively horrific murders. Particularly when the nonlethal objectives are often crueller than death—one of them leaves a woman unconscious at the mercy of a terrifying creep who’s in love with her.

If you take the hint and try to avoid killing, you hit a practical problem: there’s only one nonlethal weapon.

Your trademark retractable blade, your upgradeable pistol, crossbow bolts, incendiary darts, explosive rounds, grenades, proximity- triggered springrazors, the Jedi-like Wind Blast, the rat-powered Devouring Swarm, rewired Arc Pylons, Walls of Light and Watch Towers all kill.

Sleep darts don’t, so the merciful play style is limited to those and a very slow sleeperhold move. There’s still a quiet satisfaction to playing this way, but it’s much more repetitive than messing around with all the rest of the horrible toys the game gives you.

Gilded cage

The other thing that makes Dishonored slightly less exciting than it initially seems is that it peaks early. The most liberating missions are all in the first half of its 13-hour story. Some of the later ones are too plot-driven to give you that same freedom, and others are just too crowded with guards. One is set on a bridge, but if you drop down to the water to swim around part of it, you’re stopped by invisible barriers.

The game never becomes as straightforward or restrictive as a conventional shooter, it just doesn’t manage to play to its strengths all the way through.

What it never loses is the feeling of a world full of interesting systems to tinker with. Take the technology: every security device is wired to a control panel, and everything that needs a lot of power is wired to a whale-oil battery. Every panel can be rewired to turn the device to your side, and every battery can be removed to turn it off.

At one point I couldn’t find a way past an Arc Pylon: a Tesla-coil that obliterates any intruder in a certain radius. The panel to rewire it was in range of the Pylon itself, impossible to reach alive. The battery that powered it was on a low platform that I also couldn’t get to without going near the Pylon. But I could see it, and I happen to know that whale oil batteries are highly explosive.

I shot it with a crossbow bolt, the battery blew, and the Pylon powered down. While the guards investigated the blown battery, I crept over to the control panel and rewired it. There were a few more batteries in a nearby storage room, so I stole a new one and powered it back up, now working for me. It fried so many guards that I eventually had to replace the battery.

A perfect swarm

Part of the reason Dunwall’s oppressive government installs automated security like this is to curb the spread of rats, which are a system in themselves. They’re everywhere, but they don’t pose a threat unless they gather into a bona fide swarm. That tends to happen around corpses, which they flock to wherever they find them. Once they’ve picked the body clean, the swarm will happily move onto living targets: you or your enemies.

I got cornered by a swarm while sneaking through a manor house. I’d slipped past two thugs to get into a bedroom, but now the swarm was between me and the door. So to solve two problems at once, I shot the wall.

The thugs ran over to investigate the noise, the rats ran over to investigate the thugs, and while the seething mass of vermin and flesh wrestled with itself, I skirted round it and sneaked upstairs.

Then there’s the Possession spell: once you’ve invested enough in it, you can take control of any man or beast for a few seconds. The limitations are pretty strict: you can’t attack, you die if they die, and when the spell ends, you step out of your victim rather than returning to your original location. But you can use Possession to slip past security systems without hacking them, or to escape a crowd of angry guards. I loved taking control of a Tallboy, the towering archers on stilts. The rest of the guards just see you vanish, and search for you while their heavy backup mysteriously wanders off to be alone.

Something else Dishonored never loses is its aesthetic flair. Dunwall is a rotting city port defined by the sharp divide between rich and poor.

Everything is weathered, faded and crumbling except for the pristine soapstone mansions of the aristocracy, and the game art relishes that grotesque contrast. Every monied bureaucrat wears a caricature of a sneer, every plague victim an exaggerated look of permanent dismay.

The masquerade mission is the visual centrepiece: a silk draped party in a manor of dazzling opulence, attended by nasty socialites whose monstrous masks seem like an externalisation of their ugly indifference to the plague. In the street outside, its vomiting victims are cut down by the guards’ explosive arrows if they stumble too far out of the gutter.

Dishonored’s whole world is textured with an oil-painted smudge that brings out the 19th-century vibe—despite the sci-fi tech. That’s part of what makes its atmosphere so intoxicating: we don’t often get to explore a setting like this.

For all those reasons, I recommend turning off almost every part of the interface. There’s a thrillingly nerdy array of options for this, and I found myself getting more and more lost in the game once I’d tinkered with them: I learned to listen for the noise of my mana recharging, read street signs to figure out where I was going, and notice the way I was holding my weapon to check whether I was in sneak mode.

This is all PC specific, and our version gets all the special attention we like: field-of-view options, responsive mouse movement, graphics options—you can even ‘Disable rat shadows’. +5 to the score right there.

Assassin’s speed

The only thing I can’t vouch for is performance: Bethesda aren’t letting code out of their office at time of writing, so I’ve only played it on a 2.8GHz Core i7 with a 2GB GeForce GTX 670 graphics card.

On that setup—contain your shock—it ran smoothly.

The fact that someone’s still putting real effort into the PC version of their multi-platform game is one good reason to buy it. But with Dishonored, there are quite a few. The fact that it doesn’t have any unskippable boss fights. That it’s one of the few major new games that isn’t a sequel or a remake. That a developer went to huge lengths to allow players this much freedom, and a publisher gave them the time and money to make it this slick.

It’s a big, shiny example of so much we keep asking for in games, but rarely get. Luckily, the best way to vindicate it is to buy and then play an amazing game.

It's quiet, save for the faint pings of a street light shifting ever so slightly in the wind down the street. So quiet, in fact, you'd be forgiven for forgetting this is Grand Theft Auto 4.

What's before you better resembles Fargo. It flies closer to the likes of Twin Peaks, reimagined in video games over the years by the likes of Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition. Here in Heartland, an enchanting WIP total conversion mod from creators Kultur-Remix, less is more. Which is hardly how you'd describe Niko Bellic's over the top exploits under the bright lights of faux-NYC Liberty City. But that is sort of the point.

"Cities are nice and all," says Kultur-Remix, "but many of us have only seen Los Angeles or New York through a television screen. How many of us have been through boring suburbs or rolling plains and crop fields in flyover country? Sure, it sounds boring, and if you aren't familiar with suburbia or rural America, this may not be the game for you.

"But, if you grew up with them like our devs, or are at least willing to open your mind and explore a part of America that isn't frequently explored, you'll be in for a treat."

There's an omnipresent calm-before-the-storm vibe to Heartland. It doesn't quite stride into the realms of anxiety—that would do its placid, welcoming nature a disservice—but there is a distinct uneasiness that underpins its suburban purview. By design, it's hard to put your finger on it. It's perhaps body and mind-related, a point of muscle memory that extends to controlling the character models and animations of GTA 4 and simply expecting chaos.

The rise of liminal spaces horror in recent years, not least on social media feeds, treads a similar line in that the super-mundane can project more than meets the eye. In Heartland, this eerie minimalism is illustrated by Sharon's place in 2006 Midwestern America, where crop is king and opportunities are scarce. The mod's blurb describes the protagonist's life as "driven by video games and her job delivering food for the local pizza joint"—a situation that goes awry and is then untangled over the course of 30 missions as the hero finds herself exploring worlds "she never knew existed". In reality, all of the above was inspired by the creators' formative experiences while carving a path in rural suburbia two decades ago.

Kultur-Remix adds: "One of the lead writers has a job delivering pizzas and did it for a few years in a 1980s Buick Skylark. The setting in Heartland is based on many of our developers' lives in boring suburban and exurban hometowns; a boring teenage-young adult life screaming to be let out.

"Despite trying to draw from real life parallels as opposed to doing what GTA normally does and drawing from movies, the closest piece of media we could allude to Heartland would be 1979's Over the Edge. That said, no direct parallels or references have been made to it in the development process of Heartland. Sharon being based on Mary Lynn Rajskub's role as the pizza delivery girl in Weezer's The Good Life music video is probably the only deliberate reference to an outside piece of media in the mod."

From its top-down beginnings last millennium to GTA 5 and the lawless murder grounds of GTA Online, the Grand Theft Auto series has hardly taken a breath in 30 years, and so projects like Heartland, for me, deserve credit for what they don't do as much as anything else. That's not to say it's without its moments of unbridled chaos, but at its core, it's a game about a disenfranchised young adult, forged by its creators' experiences and designed to be relatable to its players.

"First and foremost, we want to bring a unique experience to a great game," Kultur-Remix says. "A story about post graduation young adult angst and a desire to fit in with a crowd, regardless of how bad that crowd may be. Sharon's story will be one many of us can relate to, regardless of social class or country of origin.

"But we would also like to design a map for roleplaying potential. Mods like LCPDFR are quite popular and we would be remiss if we didn't design it for mods or roleplay servers like that. For example, we have a town hall interior fully-modelled with a wing for the sheriff's department. It has zero relevance in Sharon's story but, if someone were to make a roleplay server with the map, they wouldn't have to look too far to find a place to start their game as a cop. We are hoping to make it all open source upon release so it can be adapted to whatever people please.

"Ultimately, through all of this, we are creating a time capsule within a post-9/11 world, depicting pre-recession life in America. Most of our devs have lived through it and remember what it's like, seeing all kinds of shitbox cars on the road before Cash for Clunkers got rid of them all; and turning on the radio and hearing nu metal and pop rock being referred to as 'new' music."

Of course, the rise of the cozy genre and, going back a little further, walking simulators have a lot to answer for here. Games like Gone Home, Tacoma, Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch are standout examples of era-specific worlds defined by nostalgia, and Heartland in many ways feels like the Grand Theft Auto modding community's answer to all of the above. There's a story, characters with rich lore, missions that follow the familiar GTA framework—but there's also wider themes of economic crises, the slow death of the middle class and the omnipresent threat of war on the world stage and how that impacts the daily lives of the blue collar workforce.

As a result, Heartland feels like one of the most authentic total conversions to surface from the GTA hobbyist scene in recent years, as a grittier, warts-and-all look beyond the action movie facade more closely associated with the series in 2026 and now on the cusp of its next blockbuster outing. It's for this very reason that the team chose GTA 4 as opposed to its successor to build Heartland on in the first place.

Kultur-Remix adds: "The short answer as to why we've chosen GTA 4 for the mod is because it's the underdog of the series, just like us.

"San Andreas, while a good game (and with all due respect to those who are doing story mods for 3D-era games), just isn't the best for character-driven stories because it's quite stiff. Heartland was originally a Vice City mod but switched for GTA 4 due to budgetary reasons.

"When we saw the HQ model of Sharon taking running and sliding to cover, we knew we'd made the right decision. Why we didn't choose 5 is mostly because it doesn't do driving, gunplay, etc. as well as the fourth main series entry did. We don't want to reinvent the wheel to tell a good story, so the logical step is to make it for number four.

"From here, we're focused on refining scripting, voice acting for the main characters, mixing radio stations, and working on interiors. And bug fixing too! We'll be damned if this comes out broken, given how long we've spent working on it."

Follow Heartland's development here.

The infamous launch of Cyberpunk 2077 was a low point in CD Projekt Red's history. With hype levels at critical mass, the RPG released in a buggy, unoptimised, and downright unfinished state that was so bad the PS4 version of the game was pulled from the PlayStation store. The company's share price tanked, investors filed a class action lawsuit, and CDPR's reputation was left in tatters.

Yet at the same time, Cyberpunk 2077 was a huge commercial success, and CD Projekt used some of those profits to fix its broken blockbuster. Its 2.0 patch, combined with the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion, addressed many of the RPG's problems, successfully turning around the game's reputation and cementing its place as a roleplaying great.

As far as I'm concerned, all is forgiven. But CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowakowski doesn't believe this is the case for everyone. In a live interview at DevGAMM Gdańsk republished in the Edge magazine's Knowledge newsletter (via GamesRadar), Nowakowski lamented that Cyberpunk's launch debacle likely lost the studio some fans permanently.

"I'm not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc," Nowakowski told interviewer Jörg Tittel. "I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back—if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next."

While there may still be some holes in CDPR's reputation, the experience of fixing Cyberpunk did leave the studio in an advantageous position. Not only financially, but also in terms of its team. "We were left with seasoned, battle-hardened veterans; leaders who were able to carry a different kind of challenge on their shoulders," Nowakowski explained.

This, according to Nowakowski, is why CDPR was able to spread into a multi-project company, with both The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 currently in production, as well as the mysterious Project Hadar. The goal is to become a more prolific developer. But not too prolific.

"Our dream is to be making more games, although we never want to turn into the studio that's going to be launching a big game every year," Nowakowski said. "It may happen. But this is not the goal. We have a rough ten-year rolling plan, but the goal is not to flood the games market with CDPR games."

It's going to be a while before we see the results of CDPR's more prolific structure. The Witcher 4 isn't due until 2027 at the earliest (and I suspect is more likely to arrive in 2028). Cyberpunk 2, meanwhile, may not arrive until 2030.

This is probably why CDPR has greenlit a third expansion to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Songs of the Past, which is being built by The Thaumaturge developers Fool's Theory, is due to be released next year. The expansion is expected to provide a big extra chunk of Witcher-ing, estimated to be similar to Blood & Wine in scope.

Season 2 of Marathon kicked off earlier this month, and thus far it's been a season of ups and downs. Things started badly, with Bungie's traditional launch woes undermining its free-to-play week. But new features like the Night-time Dire Marsh map and its Sponsored Survival quickly proved hits popular with the community.

A few weeks in, however, new problems have emerged. Basically, progression in Marathon has become too easy, which is ironic considering the game's formidable reputation. Where you felt lucky to extract with anything of value in Season 1, Season 2 players have apparently been hoovering up so much loot that their vaults are overflowing with goodies, throwing the game's economy into disarray.

Earlier this week, Bungie published a Steam post explaining what had gone wrong, and what might be causing it. "Out of the gate in Season 2, progression and access to power moved much faster than the previous season," the developer wrote. "For reference, the average wealth in week two of Season 2 is similar to what we saw in weeks 11 and 12 of Season 1. And while we did want to increase progression speeds, we didn't land at a place that's healthy for the game."

Oops. As for what's causing this issue, the answer appears to be a combination of factors. For starters, there were several contributing bugs that Bungie says it's now fixed, such as "guaranteed gold drops in places that shouldn't have them". The rush of Sponsored Kits at the start of the season also gave progression a boost, as did a combined issue with "Sponsored Survival grind" and a valuable chest in the Complex Control area, with players milking Marathon's mostly PvE mode for all it was worth.

The primary factor remains somewhat elusive, however. According to Bungie, there's an issue making higher rarity loot proliferate through the game. But the team doesn't know exactly what's causing this. "This isn't something we've seen in our internal playtests, and we're still unravelling the source." Curious.

While it investigates this, Bungie has made some other "tweaks" targeting progression, such as turning off boosted containers and nerfs to Cradle XP rates. But these are temporary measures, which Bungie plans to "reverse later in the season when we have other solutions in place." Hopefully the team will figure out the root cause of the problem soon, though I'm sure there are some players who don't mind having a slightly easier time of it on Tau Ceti IV, at least in the short term.

The endless online battle of Guild Wars is about to spill over the borders of the MMO genre. Having only just announced Guild Wars 3 earlier this month, ArenaNet and its parent NC has revealed that it's also taking the series into an entirely new genre, through an official Guild Wars card game called Mistbound.

Mistbound is licensed by ArenaNet and developed by NC with the involvement of bilibili—the Chinese equivalent of YouTube.

"We felt it was time to give Guild Wars fans a new way to play together, inspired by the card game roots of the franchise, where they could compete in a competitive PvP arena in a CCG game space," said ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson in a statement. "Having all those experiences they love of the characters and creatures and the sounds of the world of Tyria brought to life in CCG."

By "card game roots" Johanson is referring to the fact that Guild Wars was inspired by Magic: The Gathering, specifically in how character attributes can be modified to create bespoke builds. Mistbound's twist on the digital CCG formula is basically to give you cards that can move around. Its key feature is a dynamic 5x3 tactical grid where units and commanders—which are deployed as cards—can then reposition turn-by-turn in response to enemy movement.

Apparently, this system—which NC calls "dynamic movement gameplay" is intended to make the inherent complexity of a card game like Magic a bit more intuitive.

"One challenge with pursuing deep strategic combinations in card games is that the cards themselves can easily become overly complex,” said Mistbound producer Hwang Sunwoo. "Rather than placing that complexity on individual cards, we wanted to express it through the battlefield."

During battle, players will be able to exploit numerous mechanics like knockbacks, pulls and flanking. Alongside standard units, familiar Guild Wars characters can step onto the battlefield as commanders, bringing unique abilities and tactics for you to take advantage of. You can also expect a soundtrack with contributions from Guild Wars' original musicians, and voice performances for all those Guild Wars regulars.

The bilibili angle of this seems to be on the community development side. The press release says that development of Mistbound is being guided not just by the developers' design knowhow but by "direct, high-quality player input". I also imagine NC is looking to build an audience for Mistbound out of the game, possibly with a mind to the game becoming an esport a-la Hearthstone.

There's no release date for Mistbound as yet, but I doubt this will launch much before the end of the year, and we're most likely to see it sometime in 2027.