Nobody is particularly surprised anymore when the newest hero or class added to a game ends up being its strongest by far. You can't really be the new flavor of the month without some extra sauce. But sometimes developers don't get the balance right and the new toy gets left on the shelf for other, more exciting options.

This is basically what happened when warlocks debuted in Diablo 4 alongside the release of its Lord of Hatred expansion earlier this year. Despite being a marquee feature of the expansion, warlocks were criminally underpowered compared to the rest of the roster. Other classes–with their newly juiced up skill trees—could smash their way through the game while warlocks were left to limp along in their wake.

Normally, I wouldn't care that much if one class couldn't compete with another in a largely singleplayer game, but warlocks also suffered from having a number of skills that forced them to stand still to cast, disrupting the flow of combat. They were not only weaker than everyone else but clunkier, too—the last thing you want in a fast-paced action RPG like Diablo. Even paladins, the other new Lord of Hatred class, weren't as flimsy as warlocks when they arrived.

Blizzard will be giving warlocks another chance next season. According to people like creator MacroBioBoi, the fussy skills are fixed and the buffs are huge. On the PTR, warlocks are capable of clearing out the hardest dungeon tier in the game even using severely unoptimized gear. In the current season, this was only really possible by exploiting bugs.

Blizzard dumped a ton of buffs into warlock skills and opened up ways to scale their damage that weren't available before. Builds that were mediocre are now cruising through the game without fear. MacroBioBoi showcased a build where you surround yourself with burning skull minions and had no trouble melting through high-level monsters.

A chunk of the warlock's power comes from a new seasonal gem that gradually makes you stronger the more enemies you kill, but MacroBioBoi suspects that even if you were to nerf that gem, warlocks would still be one of the strongest—if not the strongest—classes in the game. And the best part is that their newfound power has been distributed pretty evenly across their skills, so a variety of builds should excel when the season comes out for real.

A Season of the Warlock will no doubt help some players cope with Blizzard's controversial decision to rework the strongest items in the game. Mythic Uniques will continue to function as the new highest tier of items, but will be easier to craft and find than they are in the current season.

We still have no clues on what is missing from the PTR though. Blizzard said the mysterious lack of a new seasonal system (other than the jewels) will be cleared up at BlizzCon. My money's on a seasonal story that will finally tie directly into the main story as we get closer to a third expansion.

Last month, we covered Warhorse Studios' European trademark filings for Kingdom Come Salvation, which provided an early indication of what title we can expect for the third "Kingdom Come adventure" that Warhorse announced was in the works in May. Beyond the name, the filing featured tantalizing language about "services for matching users with computer games," leading to speculation that the next Kingdom Come could include online functionality.

This week, additional Kingdom Come Salvation trademark filings have emerged in the US (via Phrasemaker), containing expanded language about online services. But while it's tempting to read the trademark classification as a promise that there's jolly medieval Bohemian camaraderie in our future, we checked with a videogame IP expert who said we shouldn't get our hopes up.

In both the European and American trademark filings, the sections stirring up speculation are the goods and services classifications specified for the trademark. In addition to the IC 009 classification typically used for videogame trademarks, the filings also classify Kingdom Come Salvation under IC 041—a classification that the World Intellectual Property Organization says covers "services having the basic aim of the entertainment, amusement, or recreation of people," including online gaming services.

In the European filing, the language for the IC 041 classification is fairly general, referring to "online interactive entertainment" and "electronic games services provided by means of a global communication network." While the US filing uses similarly broad terms, it also includes these two eyebrow-raising service descriptions:

• Providing online computer games featuring virtual environments in which users can interact for entertainment purposes
• Providing online computer games featuring virtual worlds in which users can interact for entertainment purposes

While neither of Warhorse's previous Kingdom Come trademark filings included IC 041 classifications, the Salvation filings are "far from a promise that the next Kingdom Come videogame will feature multiplayer," according to videogame IP lawyer Kirk Sigmon.

"As part of our usual cautiousness, IP attorneys generally try to make sure that we file trademarks in enough classes to cover a broad spectrum of how the mark might be used by the company, as well as in view of the fact that certain terms can be read broadly," Sigmon said. "In turn, you can find plenty of examples of non-multiplayer games registered in IC 041."

As an example, Sigmon—who previously walked us through the basics of videogame patent law in the early days of Nintendo's Palworld lawsuit—pointed out the trademark registration for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Despite being a purely singleplayer game, its filing similarly featured an IC 041 classification, with language referring to "providing online computer games featuring virtual worlds in which users can interact for entertainment purposes." It's beneficial for both a trademark's owner and their IP attorneys, he said, to give themselves as much rhetorical space to work with as possible.

"One of the biggest reasons IP attorneys might register a singleplayer game that way (e.g., referencing a game being 'online') is that the term 'online video game' could be interpreted pretty broadly – for example, I might need to argue sometime in the future that distribution of a game via Steam and/or a game with downloadable DLC is, in some sense, 'online,'" Sigmon said. "Also, you never know if a game might go fully multiplayer in the future, so it helps to have that breadth. Along those lines, I’ve personally helped register trademarks in IC 041 for games that didn’t have traditional multiplayer components."

As for Kingdom Come Salvation, he said the filing could hint that the game "might be somehow online" in the broadest sense, but we shouldn't be holding our breath for any multiplayer features unless an official announcement materializes in the future.

Baldur's Gate 3 is known for being, well, smutty—so much so that when the game first came out, we were in fierce, rigorous, masterful debates over it (stop giggling). The game has a lot of sensual scenes, but it also comes with a streamer-friendly mode to cover up all the jiblets and tatas.

A streamer-friendly mode that failed, briefly, on one of Larian's own streams. Senior communications director Aofie Wilson has been streaming a Dark Urge run on various platforms, and has arrived at Act 3's House of Hope (spoilers for that, if you still haven't managed to finish a playthrough).

In this late-game dungeon, you can meet with Harleep, an incubi that Raphael keeps around—mostly to top himself in BDSM gear, a feat of self-love so vicious it'd make Narcissus blush and say 'bit much for me, mate'.

Anyway, that streamer-friendly mode failed during Wilson's playthrough when, for some strange reason, Harleep's nipnaps went completely uncensored as her character took to the sheets with Raphael's psychoanalysable, personified fetish.

The stream's still up on X, and you can see the clothes malfunction happen at around 1:26:00—as Larian's doubtless panicking staff try desperately to cover her up with a golden d20. Which, that being the reward for an honour mode playthrough, does seem a little denigrating of the badge of honour. My bard earned that title fair and square, and now 'tis being relegated to a censor bar. The degeneracy!

Both Larian and publishing director Michael Douse had a good laugh about it on X, with the latter writing: "Baldur's Gate 3 is now cancelled", and the former tweeting an image striking through both YouTube and TikTok as platforms on which you could find Wilson (dubbed "undiluted and raw" by her own stream overlay as the debauchery played out) continuing on, unabashed.

Anyway, Larian's not been given the boot permanently—both channels are back up, it's just this stream in particular that was shut down. And to quote Wilson's own words: "At least we had a nice time."

During his time at Bethesda Nate Purkeypile was an artist on Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield, as well as lead artist on Fallout 76. Now independent, he's responsible for stealth-archer bowhunting FPS The Axis Unseen, but when he spent some time talking to YouTube channel The Examined Game recently, his tenure at Bethesda was the main subject.

With Bethesda finally making the long-rumored news of a Fallout 3 remaster official, naturally that came up. Purkeypile is excited about the idea of seeing one of his children be taken over by someone else. "I'm personally looking forward to that," he said, "because we were like super tech-constrained making Fallout 3. And you could only place so many lights."

The Fallout 3 Bethesda released wasn't really what they'd hoped it would be at the time, he went on to say. "It's not like it's exactly how we intended," he said. "I get why people are more upset over like movie remakes and stuff, but in the case of games and particularly the art side of it, it's 100% not what we intended, and it was very, very constrained."

Fallout 3's concept art has always been a tantalizing glimpse at what we could have had, but even a simple change like extending the draw distance to give a better sense of the Commonwealth Wasteland's scale would be an improvement. Purkeypile is in favour of the kind of modern remaster that goes a bit further into remake territory, though.

"I think a lot of these remakes have been done frankly better lately too," he said. "Like the Resident Evil ones and stuff, those were fantastic. Whereas for a while I think a lot of those updates were just like, 'Oh, we made the textures a little bit bigger, and like threw a sharpen filter in Photoshop,' and it doesn't really look that much better, or actually as good as other games that are coming out."

Luke Dale, best known to gamers as Hans Capon in the Kingdom Come: Deliverance games, is trying his hand at something new: Serving food and drinks at a medieval tavern in Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic.

This is not a role in an upcoming videogame. As he reveals in a new video on YouTube, Dale went out and bought himself an actual tavern in Prague, which he is now renovating into Nobleman, "inspired by the places where noblemen would gather and conspire and socialize. Not a themed bar, not a tourist attraction, but a local space where local people can have a really good beer, amazing food, and a bloody great time."

Dale said he doesn't actually have any experience with running a pub and calls it all "a very terrifying thing," but added that it's something he's always wanted to do, particularly since much of what he's done in his career doesn't always "feel real." He was inspired to finally take the leap with Nobleman by his love of Prague, and the Czech Republic in general.

"Ever since I moved to Prague and ever since I've worked in Prague, I've just been so humbled and so appreciative of this country. And so for me, this project and creating this tavern is like a love letter to Prague," he said. "It's a love letter to the Czech Republic and how much I love this city and this country and everything that it's given me.

"You know, my girlfriend is Czech, my dog is Czech, and so much of my identity has been influenced by this culture. The beer, the food, everything about it is stuff that I just adore and I want to be a part of it and contribute to it."

Running a pub is a tough gig, but it does seem like it might be a good fit for his circumstances. Dale said in July that the success of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series hasn't led to new roles in games, so instead he's shifted focus to streaming. He's built up a pretty sizable audience already—180,000 subscribers on YouTube, 73,000 followers on Twitch—and if nothing else, this venture should give him plenty of content.

Nobleman's grand opening is set for October 1. If you want to follow along with what's happening, you can sign up for updates at nobleman.cz.

I'm not that into the original Path of Exile, but playing so much of the sequel has exposed me to plenty of people who do. A huge topic of discussion around the current league is about loot and the lack of it.

Many players are unhappy with the majority of the loot coming from chests rather than monsters, and the inability to scale the difficulty up for more rewards. Basically, loot isn't very exciting, especially when you roughly know what you're going to get before you even finish an activity.

Developer Grinding Gear Games is already addressing some of the immediate issues in upcoming patches, but it's also planning on a much bigger rework in its next major update. Speaking to PoE streamer Zizaran in a recent interview, Christopher "Octavian" Laferriere said to expect "an extreme shakeup of the endgame" in patch 3.30.

"3.30 will have a huge emphasis on endgame shakeup," Laferriere continued. "We plan to get to as many existing league mechanics as possible and give them all something new, something interesting, something different from before, because one of the problems that we see is that the endgame has just gotten stale."

PoE has been around for over a decade and has accumulated a lot of unique league mechanics over the years. This is why people will tell you they're still a beginner with only 1,000 hours clocked. Balance tweaks aren't enough to spark new creative ways to engage with it all, so one of the focuses of 3.30 will be allowing different league mechanics to interact with each other more often. It will also include a reevaluation of what items should even be tied to a specific mechanic rather than something you can find anywhere. The idea is to make random loot drops more spontaneous and less deterministic—something Path of Exile 2 does really well.

Laferriere told Zizaran later in the interview that the scope for 3.30 will be so big that smaller additions—in this case, new transfigured skill gems—might be limited. The update won't be out for another four months, but it already sounds like it's going to be a significant moment, as POE borrows ideas that have gone over well in the sequel and sees how they fare.

Sovereign Tower has genuinely surprised me. At first glance, it's a cosy-looking management romp with shades of Reigns and Yes, Your Grace. It's colourful, a little silly and chock-full of charming eccentrics. This is not an inaccurate assessment, but it's also so much more—and a lot darker than the soft colour palette and whimsical tone initially suggests.

After opening the door to a magic tower, you become the Sovereign, the leader of a nation and a big player on the international stage. Yesterday, you were an itinerant leper. Now you're the boss. What are your credentials? Who cares? You've got destiny on your side.

Take the reigns

Each day follows the same broad loop, where you'll hold an audience with commoners, diplomats and your fellow rulers, dole out decrees and advice, and then send your knights on quests—typically given to you during the audience phase—all around the world.

The choices you make determine what the rest of the world thinks of you, from your knights to your citizens, who are split into merchants, scholars, nobles and "people", who I guess are just everyone else.

Every quest will challenge a specific set of abilities—strength, agility, charisma, luck, magic and wit—only a few of which will be revealed to you. If a manticore hunt demands a strong sword arm, you send your strongest knights—simple! But not quite. See, each knight has a list of positive and negative attributes, like a love of water or a fear of crowds, which can raise or lower their chance of success at a given quest.

These attributes are initially invisible, requiring you to get to know them, or to send one of your advisors to spy on them. The same goes for their preferences, which don't impact the quests themselves, but will affect their satisfaction level.

If you send someone who's afraid of the dark and hates to hunt into a gloomy forest to kill some wolves, there's a good chance they'll fail the quest and think you're a bit of a dick. But you can still make them try, anyway, and if you buff their abilities with the right gear, they might succeed despite all of the obstacles.

So the management side of things is surprisingly dense due to the way it works in tandem with this pretty full-featured RPG system. This could have easily been Sovereign Tower's big hook, but it's actually one of two, and its companion is what really makes the game properly impressive.

Time crime

Deep inside the bowels of the tower sits an artefact inhabited by a demon. This demon has a pretty neat party trick: it can turn back time. And it's very eager for you to use this power. Convenient? Absolutely. Suspicious? Oh yeah.

Here's the deal: if you're not happy with the outcome of a quest, decision or scripted moment, you can turn back the clock. This is of course handy if you've opted not to allow for manual saving, but this power goes well beyond an in-fiction way to savescum.

See, when you go back in time, your character retains everything they've learned in the now-defunct timeline. This means you can not only take a different path, entirely new options open up for you that reflect your knowledge of the future.

Say one of your knights gets killed off—not dying valiantly during a quest, but cowardly murdered in the tower. And through another knight's investigation, you discover who the culprit is, and why they did it. Well, now you have everything you need to go back in time to stop it from happening.

But should you?

You're not just thwarting a murder, you're killing off a timeline, and all the events that resulted from that crime. Maybe some of them are even positive. You could bring back some characters while losing access to others. And who's to say that the best timeline is the one where this knight lives?

Killing time

Aside from all that, there's the big conundrum at the heart of Sovereign Tower: should you really be making deals with a demon? Especially a demon who is so desperate for you to use this power. Well, I ain't telling.

You can stick to your guns and prove you've learned things from so many other time travel stories, refusing to engage with this system. And should you do that, you'll still have fun. Sovereign Tower is an excellent RPG/management game/visual novel hydra. But the temptation to meddle is so damn tempting.

This tension might be the game's most potent feature. The ethical, existential crisis that results from the discovery of time travel is a big part of the genre, but it's something few games really tackle. Sure, they might pay lip service to it, but as players we never really need to grapple with it.

Sovereign Tower, meanwhile, never stops testing you. Whenever a big decision is made, whenever something goes wrong, whenever you reach a milestone—the demon is always there, whispering in your ear: "Could you have done something differently?" And the answer is always "Yes". But do you act on that knowledge?

I've been roleplaying as a pretty rotten monarch. I've allowed whole towns to drown, I'm rude to peasants and diplomats alike, and I regularly send my most ruthless knight to steal, murder and cheat. My kingdom won an international horse race because we poisoned all the other riders. I suck. But I still agonise over the choice to turn back time.

It's a testament to the writing and the game's memorable cast of weirdos. This is not an abstract choice. The world and its inhabitants feel tangible, and eradicating a timeline is a weighty decision. I know I can gain a lot by making changes, but what will I lose?

I love that I'm wrestling with these questions. And as I'm still playing through Sovereign Tower, I don't yet have any answers. This might be the best part of the experience. I don't want to learn that there's a correct path—though I suspect it won't end up being that black or white.

Sovereign Tower launches tomorrow, on August 6, and while I unfortunately won't have a scored review up in time for its arrival—it's technically a short game, but it's greatly extended by time travel shenanigans—I'm already clearly smitten. If you want to wait for a score, however, come back in a couple of days for my full review. In the meantime, Sovereign Tower's Steam demo is still available, letting you play up to the end of the first main quest.

Dark Heresy is currently in beta, and Owlcat is keeping everyone informed about the inquisitorial CRPG's progress via a quarterly update. Said update collates news including the addition of daemonhosts to the enemies we'll face (if you've gone up against them in Darktide you'll know that's a big deal), community-voted customization options making it into character creation, and two new companions for us to collect for our squad like grim Pokémon.

The first of them, Laarthyr Cairnareth, is an aeldari corsair you might recruit or defeat depending how friendly to aliens you're playing it. He'll be worth having on your team thanks to his psychic powers, which he uses to find paths through the dangers of Warpspace via the labyrinth of tunnels his people use called the Webway. (If you need a guide through 40K's sea of proper nouns, Lexicanum is your friend.)

The second new companion to be revealed was Saro, a sanctioned psyker who stands in contrast to the defiantly unsanctioned psyker Idira, who was recruited in Owlcat's previous 40K game, Rogue Trader. Unlike her, Saro's mutant abilities have been turned to the service of the God-Emperor after a regime of thorough and brutal testing. As Owlcat's summary of sanctioned psykers puts it, "Their lives are usually short, and their existence is wretched, but their abilities, tempered by sanctioned rituals and an iron will, become a mighty force in the eternal struggle to defend the Imperium."

The update also includes some stats based on decisions players made in the beta. Apparently the most popular player-character choice was a Noble Officer from a Hive World, and the faction most befriended via Dark Heresy's reputation system was the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The most-bought item was the melta charge because, as Owlcat says, "Someone clearly likes big kabooms."

Owlcat recently reassured fans that, while its upcoming Expanse game is more of a cinematic-style RPG, the studio won't turn its backs on hardcore RPGs. And Dark Heresy sure seems like the kind of build-focused hardcore CRPG Owlcat is known for. It doesn't have a release date at the moment, and according to our Ted Litchfield, now is actually the time to get disgustingly into the previous game, Rogue Trader.

Baldur's Gate 3 is—my god—three years old at this point, but it continues to do numbers. I don't mean player numbers, though god knows it keeps doing those too, I mean that it keeps generating stats. How many deaths, how many murders, how many deployments of a weapon named "Poo-Scraper" in combat—that kind of thing.

Now, Larian is showing those stats off, in what seems to have become an annual tradition. In a post on Bluesky, the studio highlighted some of the dafter numbers that player behaviour in BG3 has produced.

First up, some normal ones: 500 million mod downloads and 13,000 mods uploaded. The story NPC that died most often across people's games was, by a country mile, the Tiefling leader Zevlor, who bit the dust 12.3 million times. Second place was the wizard apprentice Rolan, who died 8.6 million times.

You get the idea. Then the bizarre stuff comes. The Nut-Buster—literally just a rock—has been deployed twice in combat in the game's Creche area. Poo-Scraper, its accompanying blade, and property of the quasit Shovel, has been used four times in combat across Act 3.

It's that time of year again, you naughty number-loving nerds.

— @larianstudios.com (@larianstudios.com.bsky.social) 2026-08-04T17:02:27.680Z

Over 30,000 players have taken on the Netherbrain drunk, under 1% have managed to obtain 180,000 gold in a single playthrough and, most disturbing of all, just over 9,000 players experienced the game at a 9:16 aspect ratio. That is to say, they were playing with their monitor turned portrait.

But the worst stat, if you ask me, is this one: "More non-Dark Urge players have managed to murder Alfira than Dark Urge players." For reference, Alfira is the lovely, blameless bard you encounter in BG3's grove area during Act 1. If you're playing Durge, the game forces you to kill her during a cutscene (though you can, technically, avoid it with a bit of metagame shenaniganry). When I played Durge, it honestly upset me a bit. Alfira really is a nice person, toe to tip.

But more people have simply elected to murder her than have been forced into it by the game's narrative. I'd guess that's down to people doing (non-Durge) evil playthroughs, but still—congratulations, players, you are all monsters.

Dragon's Dogma 2 will be getting its first big proper chunk of DLC soon, and in addition to nixing those weird microtransactions that did more harm to word-of-mouth than the actual game, it's also slated to be getting a hard mode difficulty for players who have everything maxed out.

That's per a Q&A featured on the game's Steam page, where game director Kento Kinoshita stated: "We're working on a Hard Mode that will provide a satisfying challenge for seasoned players whose stats have reached, or are approaching, the level cap."

The actual hard mode itself doesn't have a release window, but it is coming, with producer Naoto Oyama adding: "Please stay tuned for further updates regarding the details of Hard Mode and its release window."

As for whether Dark Arisen itself will provide a meaty challenge for gamers looking to get thrashed about again, Kinoshita writes: "Both the Forsaken Dominion and Lost Rites are expansion contents, so we've designed them to offer battles with an even greater sense of tension and challenge than the main game.

"We're aware that there's a very wide range of player level across the community, so with that in mind, we're adjusting the balance so that everyone can enjoy the experience—whether they're just starting their adventure, still progressing through the game, or have already completed multiple playthroughs."

Kinoshita adds that, even in the normal mode of the DLC, "the difficulty gradually ramps up as players progress through the expansion content, with enemy encounters becoming increasingly challenging along the way. As players reach the middle and later stages of the content, we've balanced it so that even those who have already hit the stat cap can still enjoy a meaningful level of challenge."

So, to clarify, Dark Arisen will have endgame-appropriate fights—the future hard mode will simply add another layer of self-flagellation to the game which, despite some changes to its thorniness, is still known for being kind of hostile in a fun, wrestling-you-in-the-mud kind of way. I'm glad that those who've nonetheless tamed the game's grisly systems will have some real challenges in the future, however.

Final Fantasy 14 isn't any stranger to crossovers—but Evercold will be a first for the MMO, wherein both the raid series and the alliance raid series (8-man and 24-man raids, respectively) will be crossovers. With the latter being a whackadoodle Evangelion crossover, and the former being a far more reasonable FF7 one.

This won't be the first time FF14 has had crossovers with other Final Fantasy games, mind. There have been seasonal events with Final Fantasy 15, for instance, and the Omega raid series in Stormblood was chocka with FF game references—although that was justified by way of a computer simulation. Still, we got to kick Kefka's butt.

In a recent interview with GamesRadar+, current FF7 remake director Naoki Hamaguchi (who will be involved in the crossover) tells the site his team was really pumped to "come up with all these ideas", but at "the same time we have to be really careful that it's not impacting the FF14 patch release schedule, because then that would be putting the cart before the horse".

As a matter of fact, both Hamaguchi AND producer of FF14 Naoki Yoshida had to tell their team to "calm down" and "be reasonable", with Hamaguchi in particular instructing his team to "look at our bandwidth to see what's realistic and to make sure that they can do their best work".

Which I'm glad for, to be honest. While I've grown fonder of Dawntrail's host of content as the expansion has gone on, I can't help but feel as though Creative Studio 3 was spread a little thin between making Final Fantasy 16 and its MMO, working on limited resources that, for instance, caused Occult Crescent's first Forked Tower raid to only have one difficulty setting.

As a matter of fact, criticism of Dawntrail has been so firm that it's finally gotten Yoshida and co. to start making big changes to the game with Evercold, which is a reassuring sign that things are on track. I'm glad that the directors of both games, then, are being purposefully reasonable about how much their teams can handle—which is good, because the prospect of getting to fight Sephiroth in my favourite MMO does fill me with glee.

In a new interview with PCGamesN to mark Owlcat's 10th anniversary, studio co-founder and creative director Alexander Mishulin talked about Owlcat's history and upcoming projects. Two things really caught my eye: Owlcat's still got hardcore CRPG fans covered, and the studio's bulked up to the heavyweight division.

"We will continue to make CRPGs because we love them," Mishulin said of the action-RPG versus CRPG question. "We do not want to become stagnant. We will be trying different approaches for our RPG games, trying to find the best possible fit for the idea of the game.

"We want to create the best possible RPGs, we like them, we play them, we get inspired by them and we want our games to feel the same, that we would enjoy them ourselves and hope that they will inspire someone else to create even better ones."

Owlcat's first three games share an engine, design sensibility, and overall structure⁠—you're a monarch or otherwise leading a state-level organization⁠—so the very Mass Effect-like The Expanse: Osiris Reborn represents a huge, if exciting, departure. I didn't think there was a danger of the studio permanently pivoting away from the house style that put it on the map, but Mishulin's statement is reassuring.

It's also backed up by the other game Owlcat has in development, Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy. It iterates on Owlcat's CRPG engine and the ruleset of Rogue Trader in a way that echoes the jump from Pathfinder: Kingmaker to Wrath of the Righteous.

But it's also a big departure in its own way: Owlcat is trading its customary ruler fantasy and light 4X elements for an ambitious, highly reactive, detective/investigation metagame⁠—it sounds rad.

The studio has massively expanded to work on two projects simultaneously: Both PCGamesN and Wccftech have reported that Owlcat currently consists of around 600 employees. Looking at other RPG big boys, Larian was north of 500 at last check-in, and Obsidian is currently in the low 200s following Microsoft's latest layoffs.

According to a 2024 fact sheet, CD Projekt Red has 1,134 worldwide employees, while a 2023 financial statement had its heartland studio in Warsaw accounting for 615 of them.

BioWare was likely pushing a 500-600 person headcount at its fullest extent in the 2010s (with the Montreal and Austin branches), but back of the napkin math has it now at 100 or fewer employees following post-Veilguard layoffs.

It's unclear how many separate offices Owlcat's staff is spread across. Originally founded in Moscow, the developer is currently headquartered in Paphos, Cyprus. This expanded manpower is certainly in the "Yep, that's enough people to handle two RPGs at once" range, and you could imagine Owlcat satisfying both action and CRPG fans by keeping up a multi-game approach, similar to what BioWare managed with Mass Effect and Dragon Age during its golden years.

I'm not sure whether to feel sheepish or smug that I exclusively come to Owlcat games late. On the one hand, I feel like a fairweather fan of this underrated RPG powerhouse, one whose output and ambition is honestly kind of scary.

But on the other hand: Owlcat has yet to have a single smooth launch. PCG weekend editor Jody Macgregor gave Rogue Trader a 59% in his review at launch in December, 2023, and I don't blame him one bit.

I hated this game when I tried the beta that fall. The fun unfamiliarity of being a 40K newcomer was outmatched by the frustrating unfamiliarity of a complicated new RPG system⁠—Rogue Trader is at least as intricate as Pathfinder, but without any built-in, D&D-derived muscle memory. The fact that "hit points" are called "wounds" made me feel indignant in a way I struggle to describe. You're not special, stop calling them that!

But perhaps Rogue Trader has earned its silly little proper nouns by now. With the release of its Infinite Museion DLC, I decided to finally dive back in and give it the second chance I'd always planned to, just like Jody did last year.

Similar to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Kingmaker before it, Rogue Trader has grown into an all-timer RPG. It's also hit one of my main quality indicators for the genre: I'm so obsessed with its character building that, dissatisfied with the first guy I made after 20 hours, I rolled a new one and beat its first act again in half the time.

In the Navy

When I played Rogue Trader in beta, there were no guides I could rely on, and its level-up screen made for a quagmire of effects, stats, and nouns with little indication of what was actually good. I'd recommend a guide, either from cRPG Bro or Revan619 on YouTube⁠.

For my playthrough on the notch above normal "Daring" difficulty, I'm following builds for my main guy and every single companion, but after 30 hours of gameplay, I do finally feel like I have enough knowledge to make tweaks at my discretion.

On my first guy, I made what's widely agreed to be the most powerful single build with the⁠—let me take a deep breath here⁠—"Death World Pyromancer Psyker Blade Dancer Executioner."

It's built around a few abilities that make you more powerful the more injury debuffs you have on you, as well as a set of powers that let you spend hit points and kill enemies to get a ton of extra actions per turn. It's certainly powerful, and it's always cool to be an edgelord with two swords, but it just felt janky and stale after a while.

I found I was having way more fun controlling the companion Abellard, whose build was basically identical to one buildsmith Revan dubbed "the most fun for new players." That's right gamers, the Navy Officer Warrior Arch Militant. Basically: You dual wield a sword and a gun. When you score a critical or parry an enemy with your sword, you automatically make a free attack with the gun.

Eventually, gun attacks make your sword more powerful, and vice versa. It feels badass, ultimate lightning tank mode in the middle of all the enemies, instagibbing beefy dudes with your signature one-two punch and parrying chumps left and right.

Tally-ho

I just beat the final boss of Rogue Trader's first act with my dark future seaman, and I keep playing it out in my head. Spoilers, but you get ambushed by a Chaos Space Marine with twice as much health wounds as the next-strongest guy in Act One. The world you're on just had its sun go out, and in-between shredding your party with his bolter machine gun, this bad hombre will blow up the last remaining shuttles offworld one-by-one.

That obviously can't stand, so I had my whole party turn and focus on beef boy, only sending my main man Abellard to tank the annoying support mooks. I knocked off the Space Marine's first 200 hit points wounds with three bolter salvos from my freaky gun nun companion, Argenta⁠—two on her own, and the third with an extra turn courtesy of fish princess Cassia.

That teed the boss up for a finisher from my Rogue Trader, wiping out his last hundo or so of health wounds with a critical charge and revolver shotgun to the face.

I felt incandescent. That was one of the best-feeling things I've done in a game in a month of Sundays, and I got a nice little achievement (only shared by 12.4% of players!) for taking him down without losing any of those shuttles.

There's also a whole RPG here, by the way⁠—companions, romance, skills, planetary management, Rogueing, Trading⁠—but that turn-based combat and buildcrafting is the perfectly-charred neapolitan crust of this pizza. Rogue Trader is redeemed, here's hoping Owlcat's upcoming Dark Heresy just bangs like this outta the gate⁠—it sounds like it will.

I don't need to explain what Baldur's Gate 3 is since it's one of those games you hear about endlessly, whether you want to or not, because it remains a universally acclaimed phenomenon. PC Gamer's Fraser Brown gave it our highest score ever in his review, a positively covetable 97, and everyone I know who's played it did not stop once the credits rolled. But if you've yet to take the plunge, now might be a good time: it's the cheapest it's ever been on Steam.

Granted, that's just 30% off, but it's still a historic low which takes the game down from $60 to $42. That's 28 Costco hot dogs, and I can personally say I've gotten slightly more enjoyment out of Baldur's Gate 3 than I would get out of 28 Costco hot dogs. In the following paragraphs, I will try to advocate for why that is.

For one, BG3 takes Dungeon & Dragon's fifth edition and turns into a buildcrafter's playground—its turn-based combat is a meticulous recreation of the real thing that combines 5e's RAW with Larian's trademark elemental field combos and prop destruction, lending the improvisational feel which characterizes tabletop play. The purchase of 28 Costco hot dogs prescribes a very specific sort of evening that invariably ends in physical agony.

BG3 is also a compelling bit of fantasy fiction in its own right, with an action-blockbuster story that'll have you battling otherworldly horrors, adjudicating the fates of entire towns, and falling in love with your troubled companions. Its sense of choice and consequence is shocking given the 100+ hour scale of its campaign, offering you the agency to become a paragon of virtue or an angel-murdering psychopath. 28 Costco hot dogs, on the other hand, only offer you one choice: sitting on the commode until your legs go numb.

On top of all that, BG3 is eminently moddable: you can turn the game into a roguelike, supercharge your player character for a solo playthrough, or try out that fancy new third-person camera to pretend you're playing a wayward Dragon Age spinoff. Admittedly, the hot dogs are pretty competitive in this category, as hot dogs famously allow for a variety of toppings. I'll call this one a tie.

Anyway, BG3 is quite a good RPG that feels like a bold step forward for a very old style of game. If you like 5e, there's not a better way to experience it in a videogame, and if you don't like 5e or are unfamiliar with it, it's such a solid fantasy game in its own right that it might just make you a believer.

Oblivion Remastered releases on Nintendo Switch 2 in August, which normally would be wholly irrelevant to PC Gamer. We've been merrily exploring revamped Cyrodiil for well over a year at this point. But you might want to hide your stealth archer in the corner of whatever dungeon you're exploring and check out Bethesda's latest promotional video for the Switch 2 launch. It's a little different from the usual fare of game footage and dramatic voiceovers.

To herald the Switch 2 version's imminent release, Bethesda brought back veteran Elder Scrolls voice actor Wes Johnson—who plays many characters across the series including Oblivion's default Imperial males—to reprise his most colourful role in the series, the mad, cheese-loving god Sheogorath.

In the video, Johnson—dressed as and in the role of Sheogorath—records lines in a sound booth and causes general mischief with the aid of an exasperated audio technician. As the video progresses, the Prince of Madness becomes increasingly baffled as to why he has to record lines he's already done before.

It's a shameless bit of marketing fluff, but it's nonetheless entertaining to see Johnson in full swing as Sheogorath. It's also a relief that he has apparently made a full recovery from the life-threatening medical emergency he suffered 18 months ago, during which he was hospitalised and put into an induced coma.

The responses to the video are similarly pleased to see Johnson in action. But there is an undercurrent of discontent to many of the comments. These mainly centre around the remaster's widely reported technical issues on PC. Not only do many Steam reviews report performance hitches while exploring Cyrodiil, but the game also suffers from a wide array of bugs. Some of these have been around since the original Oblivion released in 2006, while others are entirely new.

What doesn't help is that Bethesda and Virtuos appear to have abandoned the PC version. While Oblivion Remastered received a couple of patches after launch, the last one—update 1.2—arrived over a year ago. Consequently, recent Steam reviews have dropped down to Mixed, though the game still has a Mostly Positive rating overall. Let's hope the Switch 2 launch brings a bit of PC TLC too.

Sometimes I understand why modders flame out, burn their bridges, and give up entirely. Every time I look at a posts page on Nexus Mods, for instance. A perfect example of this has been the reaction to Relysia's True Third-Person Camera mod for Baldur's Gate 3, a labor of love that gives the traditionally birdseye CRPG an over-the-shoulder viewpoint.

Baldur's Gate 3 already has a third-person mode, you might say. All you have to do is plug in a controller and the camera will drop for a more console-RPG experience. And if that's not good enough for you, there's the Native Camera Tweaks mod. Hundreds of people on the internet have been tiresomely pointing this out over the last couple of weeks, every single one of them convinced they are the first person to make this vital observation the rest of us need to read.

Relysia has seen these comments and then, with admirable patience, made an eight-minute video documenting all the ways their mod is different. For starters, with the True Third-Person Camera mod, you can look up. The viewpoint when you play with a controller is locked into a downward angle and can't be changed. Native Camera Tweaks does let you look up, but when you need to bounce back to a more distant view you have to manually adjust the camera, where True Third-Person Camera switches with a simple press of the asterisk key.

There's also the fact True Third-Person Camera defaults to a slightly off-center over-the-shoulder view, where the other solutions default to centred third-person. It's the difference between Tomb Raider 2013 and Tomb Raider 1996. The Native Camera Tweaks viewpoint is adjustable, but you have to edit a file to do so, while True Third-Person Camera is compatible with Mod Configuration Menu for in-game adjustments to the POV position on the fly.

There's more to it than that, but basically, yes, it is a different experience. I've played with the mod for several hours and found it meaningfully distinct and the perfect excuse to start yet another playthrough.

Baldur's Gate 3 works better from this angle than a lot of other CRPGs because so much effort was put into making it look good in those up-close dialogue scenes. Not all of it, of course. Looking up when you're underground or on the bottom floor of a building sometimes reveals places where nobody expected you to do that, and you'll want to switch to the regular camera when you're sneaking or when a companion points out something they've spotted nearby but which you can't see. If Larian put this in as an option they'd have made a lot of extra work for themselves tidying up the kind of stuff that's forgivable when exposed by a mod.

The mod also changes back to the regular camera when combat starts, although Relysia is planning to address that in an update, adding "immersive combat mode, where the camera stays very close to the action throughout". I might stick to the top-down camera for combat myself, but it's always nice to have options.

A big part of the appeal of PC gaming is being able to personalize things to your persnickety preferences, and having multiple ways of doing that—even if it means having two mods with similar but different effects—is the perfect example.

You can download True Third-Person Camera from Nexus Mods, along with WASD Character Movement for the full "what if Dragon Age was turn-based" experience, and get Party Limit Begone while you're at it, because that's still the most essential mod for Baldur's Gate 3.

Videogames have always struggled a wee bit—and I'm being generous here—with the subject of romance. Explosions, dragons and alien invasions? It's got that stuff locked down. But the language of love has proved a bit more elusive. Developers, especially RPG devs, have refused to back down in the face of this challenge, however, and we're now at the point where the absence of romance has become more noteworthy than its inclusion.

Arguably, this is BioWare's legacy. It wasn't the first, but BioWare's RPGs really codified videogame romances—specifically romanceable companions—starting with Baldur's Gate 2. This has become so commonplace that even games that aren't really RPGs, like Star Wars: Zero Company, need to answer the question: can we knock boots with our colleagues?

But is this feature really essential in an RPG? Is it even warranted? If we were just talking about the BioWare model, I'd have to say absolutely not. But there are some caveats.

BioWare's actually designed some genuinely great relationships over the last few decades. In Dragon Age, the potential relationship between the Grey Warden and Morrigan is critically important for the series' overarching story, and equally important is how the development of that relationship really lets you get to know one of Origins greatest and most closed off characters.

Mass Effect also does some interesting things with its romanceable companions. The relationship with Liara, for instance, starts off a bit creepy. In the context of her species, the asari, she is effectively a child, despite being over 100 years old, which is clearly emphasised by her innocence and naivety. By Mass Effect 2, however, she's gone through a great deal and comes across as more self-assured and grown up, and while she only appears in the DLC, the relationship feels considerably more nuanced.

Shep's trilogy also benefits from having the same protagonist throughout, giving you the opportunity to develop a relationship across three distinct games and DLC. There's a lot of room to explore romance, then. But the series never quite manages to escape BioWare's formulaic approach to romance.

You have a handful of conversations, say that you're crushing on someone, and then just before the end of the game you sit through a sex scene. Your companions rarely have much agency—it's just another power fantasy.

This is not the only approach, though. In Baldur's Gate 3, for instance, Larian explores lots of different kinds of relationships with much greater depth, from the purely sexual to the exceedingly romantic. It's an incredibly horny game, but at the same time it doesn't treat sex as some kind of reward that you're working towards. Depending on the character, you might end up having a meaningless tumble in the hay within the first act.

Larian also used romance to enhance companion storylines. In my first playthrough, my PC's relationship with Karlach really elevated her arc and made the beats hit a lot harder. Baldur's Gate 3 relationships are also tested, sometimes, and can be sources of friction within the party. And they are woven throughout the game, rather than being relegated to a few chats and an awkward sex scene before the game's climax.

This approach, unfortunately, is the exception rather than the rule. And even when it is handled well, I find it can still too often veer into wish fulfillment. Case in point, the decision some games make—including Baldur's Gate 3—to have every single character effectively be pansexual, to make sure the player can hook up with whoever they want. It's fantastic that this allows for more queer romances, but I'm not sure it really counts if every companion is playersexual.

Romance has become a box that needs to be checked, where its only purpose is to please the players who have understandably come to expect it—but picking important story beats and mechanics just because they've become conventional only serves to homogenise RPGs.

I used to be all for companion romances, and I proudly celebrated Baldur's Gate 3's horniness and sexual free-for-all back in 2023. And like I said earlier, I still think it was broadly handled pretty well. But lately I've been skipping romance in my RPGs unless the RPG in question is genuinely trying to do something interesting with it—which is rarely the case.

And it's great! I played 150 hours of Rogue Trader and never felt the slightest bit of FOMO when I rejected my entire crew. And when I had to embark on a relationship in Dragon Age: The Veilguard to help out the guides team, I spent most of my time cringing—even though I romanced the only likeable character in the entire game, Lace Harding.

I'll give you this, though: Fable's approach to romance is hilarious. Marry every single character! Embrace polygamy! I kinda respect how the series makes it purely mechanical. There's no real relationship here, just the odd bonus. Is it saying something about the ancient institution of marriage. Nope! It's just having fun. And that's actually a great reason to include this kind of system. It serves a clear purpose beyond attempting to meet weird expectations.

PC Gamer is not a monolith, however, and it wasn't difficult to find a colleague to argue that, in fact, RPGs do need romance. So here's Harvey with another perspective:

OK, I've had my say, Harvey's had his say, but what about you lot? Do you crave romance in your RPGs, or have you had enough of them?

What is that quasi-critical darling and pillar of K-content Crimson Desert even about, anyway? The answer becomes less clear by the day, as now it's something of a full-blown trading simulator—given this is the developer behind Black Desert Online, a game where you can breed and sell horses when you get tired of adventuring, I'm surprised it took this long.

Trading was already in Crimson Desert, but a sizable economy overhaul arrived in the latest patch, which you can read about on Pearl Abyss's website. It adds 133 new trading posts, rebalances "types and quantities" for all trading posts, and introduces some new mechanics to simulate supply and demand.

For instance, when too many items are sold at a single location, that will affect local prices. And if you trade at remote locations ("hard to reach by wagon," as the notes describe them) you'll turn a higher profit. That's on top of the fact that trade profits in general have gone up, and there are 24 new types of "high-value" goods to move.

The response on social media is a mix of pleasant surprise and raised eyebrows. "I'm actually baffled," said Reddit user VictorBelmont. "I thought like three people actually did wagon trading." a reply from Hazel0mutt reads, "Probably because it was a shitty system. Now I'm excited!" The update seemingly continues a long trend of Pearl Abyss shrugging off critiques that less is more by insisting 'no, more is more.'

There's a host of minor fixes as well—certain challenges which were bugged before should be completable now, and there are "improved interaction animations" for animals like the platypus and the feathered weasel. That might sound negligible, but you don't get kudos from the Prime Minister of South Korea by cutting corners on your platypus animations.

Things haven't looked great for Dragon Age since its latest entry, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released to a mixed critical and muted commercial response back in 2024. EA subsequently laid off dozens of BioWare's staff, and numerous former developers have recently said they believe the series is probably dead.

Yet, while there's little hope of a new Dragon Age game anytime soon (if ever), might there be a chance EA revisits the old Dragon Age games? The original Mass Effect trilogy got a spruced-up rerelease in its Legendary Edition back in 2021, despite the fact that EA hasn't exactly been desperate to push out new games in that series either (though a new one is apparently in the works, with the devs being too busy making it to talk about it). Hence, could EA test players' appetite for Dragon Age with a similar remaster for Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition?

Sadly, the chances of this happening are slim too, at least according to former Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah. In the same FRVR interview where he declared Dragon Age as probably dead, Darrah also pointed out that, while he had once envisioned a "Champion's Edition" equivalent to the Legendary Edition, EA is now unlikely to exhume the old games for a remaster due to the practical difficulties of doing so.

Basically, it all comes down to technology. Where all three Mass Effect games ran on Unreal Engine, which is a widely used technology, the three Dragon Age games were all built on different engines. Dragon Age used BioWare's Eclipse engine—an upgraded version of the Aurora Engine (which was also used by CD Projekt for The Witcher), Dragon Age 2 used the further enhanced Lycium Engine, while Dragon Age: Inquisition ran on DICE's Frostbite tech.

"There's basically no one at BioWare any more that understands the Aurora Engine," Darrah told FRVR. "There's basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine. So, unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal, there are basically no companies that could help you."

On top of this, Darrah reckons that such a remaster effort would require a new team, but claims that "EA doesn't like having employees, so, if you're going to do that, you're going to do that within the umbrella of BioWare, which means those people are not working on something else."

That said, Darrah does think that a remaster of the original Dragon Age would sell well, mainly due to how it's a bit crusty around the edges today. "Dragon Age: Origins wasn't the most attractive game. There's a lot you could do there to make it a lot better looking."

There was a point in the most recent Path of Exile 2 league that I thought I would have to quit playing the game. Every 20 minutes or so, the entire game would freeze. I'd wait for a solid 30 seconds before everything came back to life, praying I wouldn't lose my character the second I had control again.

When I looked up why this could be happening, I found dozens of Reddit threads about the same issue. People have been suffering from intermittent freezes and crashes since the game launched in early access and the only solution was to swap a setting that made it look considerably worse until developer Grinding Gear Games figured out a solution.

It turns out the freezes were just the first part of a troubleshooting saga that the developers have been on for the last year and a half. As of this week, the war against Path of Exile 2's constant GPU shader crashes is finally over thanks to a mountain of effort GGG put into diagnosing them.

Despite identifying the exact Nvidia driver code that caused it, game director Jonathan Rogers explained in a recent video that the graphics company won't fix anything unless you provide it with the steps to recreate it. "And those steps unfortunately can't be 'just grind to top tier juiced maps,'" he said.

"Even though ultimately this is a bug in the Nvidia driver and it affected a huge number of high level players, quite frankly, they just didn't really seem to believe that it was as common as we said it was," he explained.

GGG started by having someone just play the game for multiple hours hoping it would eventually crash. But with no real clues on what could be causing it, this was a crapshoot. "You really are just taking shots in the dark at that point," Rogers said.

After making no progress toward a solution, the dev team decided to build a system to at least prevent the game from crashing. The freezes I, and many others, experienced were the result of the GPU crashing and the game reloading the textures, shaders, and entire engine without closing down.

Rogers said the solution was "pretty good" but that they were still determined to figure out what was actually causing it. "So we went down an incredibly deep rabbit hole of trying to reproduce it," he said. GGG added a bunch of ways for the game engine to track useful data and a specialized replay system that could play back long gameplay sessions for hours on PCs around the office.

"Eventually with the replays and an incredible amount of work from our engine team, we managed to get it to happen fairly consistently," he said. "We got a replay that would reproduce it every five to seven minutes on average."

They took that replay, packaged into a file you could use to run it again, and shipped the specific rig it was running on to Nvidia—"PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there."

It took some time, but Nvidia finally got back to them and said it would look into it. It came back a few weeks later with a fix: by increasing the shader heap size, the crashes would go away completely. And earlier this week, the Nvidia Game Ready Driver 610.88 was released with this note: "Path of Exile 2: Fixed intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode."

"The saga is over and now our engine programmers can go back to optimizing some more normal performance problems," Rogers said, before popping open a bottle of champagne in celebration.

I would be celebrating too if it took almost two years to solve a problem that wasn't even your own fault really. There's nothing worse than being surrounded by dangerous monsters—or looking at a pile of valuable loot—and having the game go unresponsive for a solid 20 seconds. Fingers crossed that no other bugs will show up so everyone can have a smooth experience when it hits 1.0 later this year.

I know celebrities are just richer, more out-of-touch versions of us peasants, but I do admit I get a bit of a kick out of seeing them obsessing over the same videogames as me—Keke Palmer playing The Sims and Tekken, Doja Cat's current journey through Final Fantasy 14, that one time Lady Gaga played Bayonetta.

But there is perhaps no bigger celebrity nerd than artist The Weeknd. I mean, his Instagram profile picture is literally drawn by Final Fantasy royalty Yoshitaka Amano, y'all. The Weeknd knows ball. I'm not at all jealous, by the way.

But perhaps my favourite The Weeknd arc has been his journey with the Persona series since earlier this year. He's been posting an absurd amount of his time playing the games over on his alt Instagram account, and it's been an absolute joy to see him becoming just as obsessed with the series as I am.

He's been making his way through both Persona 3 Reload and Persona 5 Royal, but it's the latter game that really seems to have grabbed his attention. Particularly Tae Takemi, the doctor who you take all sorts of odd medicine from and, more importantly, serves as one of the game's romance options.

What started as sharing his devastation at fumbling her romance option has now progressed into a full case of Down Bad, and The Weeknd's Tae Takemi craze has known no bounds. Pop over to his Instagram stories and you're almost guaranteed to see something about her on there—as I write this, there's a surprisingly excellent mashup of his song Popular and Butterfly Kiss, the song that plays while in Takemi's clinic.

He's been posting goofy little tweets too—like one where he responds to a post of somebody getting his vinyl signed by Takemi's voice actress with a clip from his own music video where he's sobbing while typing "PLEASE talk to me!" All with Takemi's face edited over it, of course.

The biggest one yet, though, is what I can only assume is a Photoshopped image of him with a giant Tae Takemi tattoo blasted over his upper arm. It doesn't quite look real enough to be legit, and scouring some recent concert vids makes me pretty certain this is just once again The Weeknd Tae-posting to hell and back. But hey, would I be surprised if he actually got it? Absolutely not.

The Weeknd's even had the pleasure of visiting the Atlus offices to play a little bit of Persona 4 Revival early, as well as scope out what's going on with Persona 6. Once again, definitely not insanely jealous or anything.

It has sparked questions of whether he'll end up featuring on Persona 6's soundtrack, though. For those not familiar with the series, Atlus tends to go for a pretty distinct sound with each game in the series, and a lot of that tight branding and audio identity comes from sticking to just one or two artists each time. You could play just the vocals from a Persona game and immediately clock which one it's from based purely on who is singing it.

And of course, with The Weekend's current obsession and Atlus visit, people are wondering whether he'll show up. I couldn't imagine Atlus dedicating just a small track to him, but I also can't imagine an entire score with his vocals behind it. With Persona 6 looking like a grittier theme this time, The Weeknd's vocals are maybe a little too soft for the vibe. But hey, who knows? Maybe we'll be seeing him on the soundtrack after all.

The Genshin Impact 7.0 livestream codes are here, and with them, our first proper look at everything snowy Snezhnaya has to offer. This is Genshin's fifth full region added since launch back in 2020, but the home of the Cryo Archon holds significantly more importance than other regions due to the Traveler's often fraught relationship with the Tsaritsa's Harbingers, who've gotten in the way since we arrived in Mondstadt.

As per usual, miHoYo will drop three livestream codes during the special program, which I'll add to the list below as they do. There are also details on how to redeem them lower down if you haven't before. Since livestream codes usually expire within a day or so, make sure to redeem these as soon as possible if you want them. Otherwise, see you in Snezhnaya.

Genshin Impact codes: All current livestream Primogems

• Everwinter - 100 Primogems and 10 Mystic Enhancement Ore
• OntoSnezhnaya - 100 Primogems and five Hero’s Wit
• Odette0812 - 100 Primogems and 50,000 Mora

How to redeem Genshin Impact codes

To redeem your Genshin livestream codes, you'll first have to reach Adventure Rank 10 by playing the game a bit. This won't require too much progress if you're starting the game for the first time, and after that, you'll have two options in terms of code redemption. You can either claim them through the game itself:

1. Launch Genshin Impact
2. Open the in-game menu
3. Select Settings and then Account
4. Click Redeem Now and paste a code into the box
5. Grab your Primogems from the in-game mailbox

Or you redeem codes online through the dedicated website:

• Navigate to the Genshin Impact code redemption website
• Enter your info and select character region
• Add a code in the box and choose redeem
• Collect your rewards via the in-game mailbox

Dungeons & Dragons announced it'd be doing a World of Warcraft crossover earlier this week—but it also, additionally, teased a Star Wars crossover at the end of its D&D Vision keynote. Further details can be found on the D&D Beyond site, revealing that the crossover will be coming in 2027 as part of a "Season of Rebellion".

"We want to let our community know that D&D Universes Beyond is additive to the incredible roadmap we have for our own worlds. We have been staffing up to support this initiative and look forward to what the future holds."

And, hey—cool! I like Star Wars, I like Dungeons & Dragons (no really, I do, no matter how much I moan at Hasbro), but there is a small, itchy part at the back of my brain that's wondering if Hasbro is trying, once again, to capture the same monetisation systems it created with Magic: The Gathering and apply them here, where they might not fit.

For context, Magic: The Gathering does heaps of licensed crossovers. We're talking Monty Python, we're talking Assassin's Creed. We're even talking Garfield. No universe is safe, there is no IP that cannot be turned into a little slip of paper. The bountiful world of trademarks is merely fertile soil for the ever-expanding Magic empire.

And, to Wizards of the Coast's credit, a lot of those crossovers have been neat—it's cool to see your favourite series/comics/little black cat thoughtfully represented by game mechanics, whether they be entirely bespoke cards or just reskins. So why am I hemming and hawing about this? Shouldn't I be happy?

Part of the problem is just the format. I hate to be that guy, but there's already a Star Wars TTRPG. Heck, there's even already a very popular D&D 5e Star Wars fan project. But I think there's this assumption that Hasbro—and some of its customers—make where they assume that the D&D, D20-based framework can be applied to anything.

And as someone who loves TTRPGs of all shapes and sizes, that just… isn't true. D&D is a great system for grand heroics, dungeon-crawling, and combat—but if you, say, want to do teenage superheroes? You should at least try Masks. If you want to do mech combat, you should at least try Lancer.

The reason Magic crossovers work is because, well, it's a card game. The nature of a Magic match doesn't really change all that much based on what your cards look like, the art within them, or the theming.

This isn't the case for a TTRPG campaign. In a TTRPG, the rules need to work with the story or vibe you're trying to put across.

The two announced crossovers, World of Warcraft and Star Wars, can easily work in a D&D setting. Heck, D&D's had its own space opera setting, Starjammer, for a while. But there is a little part of me that fears Hasbro will start stretching further and further into obscurity, because there's only so much IP out there.

For instance, D&D just isn't that great at horror. There's Curse of Strahd, sure, but I'd like to point out that Curse of Strahd's entire plot involves you finding a cool sword made out of sunlight and going to not-Dracula's castle to kick his ass. A D&D crossover with an actual horror property just won't have the same bite that a good game of Dread or Mothership does.

However, that's only a fear for now—and to Wizards of the Coast's credit, there have been announcements that play more to the system's existing strength, too. We're going to be getting both Dragonlance and Greyhawk settings coming back, with the former helmed by original co-creator Tracy Hickman, and the latter led by Luke Gygax. Plus, Drizzt! Drizzt is here, again. Oh, and freaking Dark Sun. There's tons to be excited about.

Fallout 4 remaster, Fallout: New Vegas remaster, Fallout 5, Fallout 3 prequel for Fallout 76, Fallout (the TV series) Season 3, and whatever Fallout game Obsidian is now working on… there's a whoooooole lotta Fallout coming your way if you're a Fallout fan.

But, uh, not for a while. What's a Jet junkie to do in the meantime? Well, how about Fallout: New California, a full conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas that just released on GOG. Here's the trailer.

Fallout: New California may have just appeared on GOG but it's not so much new as it is newly accessible. The project has been around for quite a while, and if you don't believe me, we called it "the best Fallout game you'll play this year" way back in 2018—and at that stage it had already been in development for roughly seven years, originally called Project Brazil.

Officially hosted now on GOG, it can now be installed and launched easily if you own Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition, rather than downloading the files and other half-dozen recommended mods through Moddb and managing the install yourself.

What's Fallout: New California all about? Glad you asked. Here's what I've skillfully cut-and-pasted from the mod's page on GOG:

"In Fallout: New California you play as the kid from Vault 18. Orphan. Loner. Mutant. On the last big night of the Vault Ball season in 2260, you make a fateful decision that will change the course of your life—and eventually the future of the New California Republic," the developers say.

You read that date right: it takes place before Fallout 2, back in the day of the original Interplay Fallout games. Cool.

"You will face the New California Republic under president Wendell Peterson, the New Reno Mob's Bishop Family, the remnant Shi Clans, The Enclave Leonidas Squadron, the Super Mutant Army, and the bloodthirsty Raider Alliance that have banded together in the remote Athens-Tec Uranium Mine off the Long I-15."

I haven't played it yet myself, but some more text I strenuously Ctrl-C'd and Ctrl-V'd from our original article about the mod calls it "a remarkable achievement, and one of the most confident and professional mods I’ve ever played." Sounds good to me.

For the first time in three years, we're not getting advance notice on absolutely everything coming in the next Diablo 4 season. Usually, Blizzard spells it all out in the patch notes, but this time it's keeping its lips sealed until BlizzCon in September.

There's still a good amount of stuff to see in the season 15 blog post, including new seasonal items, returning items from past games, and further changes to the controversial Mythic Unique item changes from last season. But there are two sections that look suspiciously empty, suggesting that the full reveals will happen on stage at BlizzCon.

The first of these are called "Challenge Dungeons", which seem to be boss encounters that randomly appear while you're exploring the open world. Blizzard specifically says you'll enter these new portals to "fight against a fearsome boss" and that the difficulty level will be customizable once you're well into the endgame.

My first thought after reading about the Challenge Dungeons is that they might be a permanent version of the current season's Deathtoll Chambers. When you kill the seasonal world boss, you can jump into a portal and participate in a mini event that ends in a big loot explosion. Swap that out with a boss—maybe even one of the game's tougher lair bosses—and I can kind of see this being a fun way to make open-world exploration more unpredictable than it is now.

"Note that the encounters you experience here are built specifically to test the underlying system, and the final season 15 experience will feature different content," the post reads. It's possible this means the finished version will have different bosses, or maybe something else entirely. Either way, I think these have the potential to spice up a part of the game that is already kind of dull.

The second sparsely explained new system is another event that will catch you by surprise in the open world: Overland Ambushes. You'll see a message saying you're being hunted by a demon and will have 30 seconds to escape or fight it. "This encounter will test the mettle of Sanctuary's strongest warriors," the description says. "This is a difficult encounter."

I have a lot of questions about where this can happen, how often it can happen, and what you get out of it, but Blizzard seems to be intentionally leaving it vague. Your guess is as good as mine on how this one works, but it might become clear once the PTR is up next week to test it out.

The rest of the seasonal stuff sounds promising, too. There will be new "Soul Splinters" items to slot into your jewelry. Each one offers powerful damage buffs but comes with a cost, like increasing your damage taken or periodically stunning your character (you won't catch me using that one).

Blizzard is also reaching back into Diablo's past and releasing new versions of old Unique items from Diablo 1, Diablo 2, and Diablo 3. Leoric's Crown from Diablo 3, for example, will be worn in your helm slot but will count as a jewelry item to boost the effects of gems you socket into it. Even if it turns out to be terrible, I love when items break the rules like this, and I'm glad to see Blizzard trying some stuff out for the next season.

On top of all of that, Blizzard is bringing back Diablo 3's "Rebirth" system for recycling characters every season and massaging some of the pain points with the controversial changes to Mythic Uniques in the current season. Basically, Mythics will be easier to craft and find and the rarest ones, known as Iconic Mythics, will now have weaker, Unique versions so you can work them into your build earlier on in your journey. I'm still not sold on Mythics becoming a new upgraded tier of items rather than a select pool of truly rare items, but I'm willing to see how it all works out in the end.

Blizzard will have most of this to test in some form on the Diablo 4 season 15 PTR beginning on August 4 and ending on August 11.

New ZeniMax Online Studios co-head Nick Giacomini says that despite deep cuts at the studio as part of the most recent round of Xbox layoffs, The Elder Scrolls Online "is here to stay." But those layoffs, which saw more than 200 people let go including Giacomini's predecessor Joseph Burba, mean that previously announced timelines are no longer workable, and things are being moved.

"Instead of rushing to hit a previously announced deadline, we are giving our teams the runway they need to do things right," Giacomini wrote in today's update, invoking the same term—"runway"—Xbox used when it dumped Compulsion and Double Fine. "Some of our upcoming additions, like the Class and Combat Refresh and our new Trial, are highly complex, and we want to ensure they hit the mark before we put them in your hands."

What this means in practical terms is that Update 52, which had been scheduled for Q4 of 2026, will instead arrive in January of 2027, and season 1's new Crimson Veldt trial is also being bumped to '27. Less certainly, from the sounds of it, ZeniMax is now "targeting 2027" for TESO's promised class and combat refresh, although it is "discussing some interim options for the classes still awaiting their full refresh to improve your player experience in the meantime."

As for 2026, Update 51 will launch on September 27, one week later than planned, with a new challenge, "Rumors" game system, and "player experience improvements," while TESO season 2 will debut on October 21.

The impact of the Xbox layoffs are obviously being felt at ZeniMax, but Giacomini said in his missive that "we are not looking to just 'maintain' the game. We are looking to grow it."

That's appropriately upbeat for a new studio boss, but the reality remains that ZeniMax has been gutted by layoffs over the past two years. Original TESO director Matt Firor, who helped launch the studio in 2007, also departed following the 2025 layoffs and was replaced by Burba, who lasted only a year before he was let go in this latest round of cuts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's something defiant about the trend of deliberately ugly immersive sims. It is a statement: mechanics are king and beauty is a distraction, so here is something we scraped out of the vents on a PlayStation 1. I admire it. Not the graphics; the graphics look awful. I admire the sentiment.

The latest in this proud tradition is Parkside: Decayed Soul Manipulation (in environments not restricted by the PC Gamer style guide, that title is rendered in all caps) from Banana Hardsoft, which releases on the 31st of July but has a demo you can play right now. It's got a System Shock start with a Deus Ex finish: you're Alexander, a hacker in a rundown world where the billboards blare messages like "Do Not Hinder Law Enforcement". You hack a little too deep and men with guns kick down your door.

It's not System Shock's Trioptimum Corp, though, it's a gang of zealots set up like the Catholic Illuminati. They strap you into a machine that lets you remotely pilot a combat-ready body and send you off to kill a man. It's all part of the ineffable plan to serve the Divine Rod. Or something.

It's all very aesthetically piquant, even if Parkside deliberately keeps its plot mysterious by communicating it mostly through symbols and non sequiturs in its earliest hours. But who cares? You have a man to kill and many different routes to follow to do it.

This is where everything starts to feel more Deus Ex than System Shock. Your combat-body bristles with augments—cloaking, defence, literally possessing people, and son—that you can activate using experience, gained by poking your nose where it shouldn't be and pursuing objectives.

Me? I opted to jack up my speed and jump height (which, incidentally, made my body look scarier, and capped my maximum possible reputation with NPCs as a result) in the hopes that I could bound my way up the outside of my target's building. Parkside's maps are shot through with vents and ledges and other little eye-catching paths to follow—I figured I would surely find one if I leapt about the place a little.

I'd have to leap carefully. Here's the thing: Parkside has no saves. Instead, you can sup from a Divine Elixir in certain, limited rooms to give yourself a one-time-use checkpoint. I suspect it might rub some people the wrong way, but as a man who always wants to be protected from his own savescumming tendencies, I appreciated it.

Did my plan work? Well, no. There were vents, but I couldn't figure out a path up to them. What I did find was the corpse of a dead soldier on a nearby roof, who had also been observing my target, and the large assault rifle he had by him made short work of my mark. It also made short work of the approximately 8,000 cops who swarmed the building on hearing gunfire, and when I ran out of ammo, I simply hopped in a nearby car to escape the rest. Yes, a car. Imsims have cars now. It's a brave new world.

It scratches a lot of OG Deus Ex itches, and I'll be curious to see what the full game has to offer when it releases on the 31st of July. Next time I might even avoid having to wipe out every cop in the map, but no promises.

While we weren't too hot on the 2025 soulslike Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, it was a hit for Chinese developer Leenzee and publisher 505 Games, reaching five million players across all platforms. However, a report from the Chinese publication Gamersky earlier this year claimed that the game's director and producer, Xia Siyuan, had been fired from Leenzee. A number of staff were also reportedly let go.

Although the Wuchang IP was then sold to 505 Games' parent company, Digital Bros, for around $4.6 million back in April, the future of the series was left up in the air until today: 505 Games just announced that Siyuan is working on a sequel with his new studio, Indolphinity.

"Today, we're excited to share that 505 Games has officially entered into a new partnership with Xia Siyuan, the original creator of WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers, and his new studio Indolphinity … to jointly create a brand‑new chapter of the WUCHANG IP."

"As of now, the WUCHANG sequel has officially entered its preparation phase:

Indolphinity will lead the creative development, while 505 Games will provide funding and global publishing. Future development will remain firmly rooted in China."

“We are delighted to embark once again on a deep collaboration with 505 Games under our new studio banner, Indolphinity,” said Siyuan in a separate statement. "As a homegrown development team made up of Chinese creators, we have always believed that a rich cultural heritage is the essence of our games and their competitive strength."

"505 Games's respect for the creative process and its genuine understanding of developers' needs are perfectly in tune with our own values, and this shared vision gives us confidence in the long-term future of the series."

Of course, it depends on how this sequel pans out, but it sounds like those involved have high hopes for this up-and-coming soulslike. Digital Bros co-CEO Raffi Galante chimed in to say that they "strongly believe in Wuchang as a long-term global franchise."

While very few soulslikes can go toe to toe with FromSoftware, it's nice to know that Wuchang isn't being left to rot, and that its original team is getting another shot after all.

I'm surprised it's taken 13 years to happen, but Final Fantasy 14 is finally bringing Final Fantasy 7 to the MMO in a big way. Upcoming expansion Evercold is getting an entire raid series dedicated to the remake trilogy—that's 12 whole fights spread across three tiers which will trickle in over the course of Evercold's two-to-three year lifespan.

It's been a long wait, but as Rebirth and Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi tells me, the stars finally aligned to make the crossover happen. "I was speaking to [FF14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida] about the fact that Evercold and Revelation release dates were actually going to end up being fairly close together," he said. "And so, instead of having them as two separate things … let's do something that can really energise the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole."

As for what we can expect when the raid series lands? Well, that's all very mysterious right now. Hamaguchi kept tight-lipped on what sort of fights we'll see, though he did hint towards efforts being made to make a Final Fantasy 7 boss more suitable for Final Fantasy 14's raids.

"We're working with both teams to talk about lore and to make sure it's well established," Hamaguchi said. "At the same time, Final Fantasy 14 raids have their own way of working. For example, you've got to have quite big bosses for that to be able to work.

"So, I'm not confirming or denying whether Sephiroth will be making an appearance—but say, for example, you can't just have human Sephiroth be absolutely massive. So how would he appear? What would go on there? These are the kinds of things that we have to think about when we're thinking about how we can get the world of Final Fantasy 7 into 14 in a way that works."

I mean, hey, I certainly wouldn't say no to a giant Sephiroth. But I also can't help but think about when he made an appearance in Kingdom Hearts 2 and how, despite very much being normal human-sized, he was by far the most foreboding fight in that entire game. Of course, when you've got eight players of varying stature surrounding a regular dude, that might just feel like unfairly beating on a guy.

It seems that the ultimate goal, though, is making sure designs and lore are compatible for both worlds. "You really have to make sure that things make sense to the fans," he said. "If Cloud just appeared in FF14 like 'Hey, I'm Cloud,' without any consistent rules, people are going to be like 'Well, that doesn't make sense.' So we really have to think about how and why these worlds are going to be connected. And that's why we have [OG FF7 writer Kazushige Nojima] on board as well to make sure that things are all looking good from our side. If we don't have that all in palace, then players are just going to look at that and go 'This feels fake.'"

But everything has to go through the father of Final Fantasy 7's cast of characters himself: Tetsuya Nomura. The longtime belt-loving Square Enix artist is also assisting with the raid series—seriously, I'm kind of shocked to see just how many big names are working on this.

"I won't mention specifics, but when [Creative Studio 3] were saying 'We'd like to have this character as a raid boss,' we had a discussion on how we can make them big. I'll use an example that it is definitely not. So say Cloud is the boss. Nobody wants to go in there and just see Cloud looking like Cloud, but massive.

"The lore is really important in establishing why. Like [you need] a good in-game reason why the character would be big and be able to have people fight them at that kind of scale. So yes, we spent a lot of time discussing that. And then you can come up with an idea and be like 'Well, we could do this.' And then Tetsuya Nomura will say 'No, you cannot do that to that character. You cannot show them like that.' So these are the parameters that we're working with, and we're always coming up with new ideas to try and see what we can do."

I am so curious to know exactly who or what Hamaguchi is referring to here, and I'm already doing my best to dive deep into my brain and remember which formidable foes are particularly small. My first thought was maybe a tonberry—a 10-minute savage fight with a slow lil guy could be very funny—but I think scaling him up without any other changes makes a lot of sense.

Whatever it is, I'm already giddy at the thought of the raid series in Evercold. Part of me is a tiny bit sad that both the alliance raid and eight-player raids are crossovers next expansion—with the alliance raid being all about Evangelion—but since Hamaguchi seems positive about intertwining the lore in a way that feels right, I'm ready to trust his vision.

Final Fantasy 14 may be an MMO, but it's certainly never sacrificed the series' talent for excellent storytelling. It's stuffed with incredible worldbuilding, a cherished cast of characters, and heart-wrenching story beats that'll get players shedding a tear from just hearing a few notes from a song that played during a cutscene.

It is, however, also a story that requires hundreds of hours to experience the full breadth of its narrative—spread across A Realm Reborn and five meaty expansions, with a sixth one on the way. While Square Enix has pruned quests here and there in an attempt to streamline the experience, it's still a helluva lot of game to ask a new player to commit to.

I've had the good fortune to be playing since the beginning, but I can say with absolute certainty that if I was only just starting the game, I'd be damn near paralysed by how daunting the new player experience is—especially if you want to play with friends who are already across the finish line.

It's something that director and producer Naoki Yoshida seems to be thinking about as well, especially as the upcoming expansion Evercold marks the official beginning of the MMO's next arc with the Godless Realms Saga.

In fact, he's considering two things right now, he told the press during a media Q&A at the Berlin Fan Festival. Though he's being rather secretive about both of them. "The first one is something that we will carry out at Evercold's release or before Evercold," he said.

"The second one involves a system, but we're currently reviewing the possibility of this. We're still considering feasibility and addressing whether or not we would be able to introduce the system. And for these things that I'm talking about, there's a non-zero possibility of us being able to implement it for 8.0. So there is a possibility that we could make it."

Yoshida admits that he's previously been hesitant to allow players to potentially skip expansions or story, but the MMO has grown so much that a potential solution is becoming unavoidable. "I had previously said that I want players to enjoy the story, so I would like them to have a fresh experience right from A Realm Reborn," he said. "But now we are at this point, we've begun thinking about accommodating these kinds of requests."

As for when we can find out more, Yoshida hinted towards more details at the Tokyo leg of Fan Festival which'll be happening at the end of October. But overall, he's "thinking very positively about the possibility of incorporating something and accommodating those requests."

Honestly, I was surprised when Yoshida didn't do this for Dawntrail. Considering Endwalker marked the end of the Hydaelyn-Zodiark saga, I'd half-expected Dawntrail to act as a new, optional onboarding point for players picking up the game for the first time.

It wouldn't surprise me if it's the expansion Yoshida has in mind if the game does end up offering a secondary start point—it's essentially a bridge between the old arc and the upcoming one, and feels like the best fit besides Evercold. I can understand concerns about the narrative holding less weight if you've not experienced one base game and five expansions of it, but it's also a big ask. And when Final Fantasy 14 appears to be the golden goose of Square Enix, any way to make the MMO more enticing to newcomers feels like a win-win.

Do me a favor and don't let Lunarium get lost in the sea of game releases on Steam. Tons of action RPGs show up in my inbox and it's sometimes hard to differentiate which one is which. Lunarium stood out mostly because of its art style, which sort of looks like it would fit on the cover of a Nier or Final Fantasy game.

And then I played it and discovered one of the best action RPGs of the year.

The last thing I want is for a game with such an evocative, hand-drawn style to get swallowed up by the tidal wave of Steam games that try to fake it with generative AI. Lunarium's crumbling ruins and overgrown forests are like a Nier: Automata level squished down into an isometric 2D perspective. It's a sad game with a world painted in muted colors, as if the dark monsters you encounter are draining the life out of it.

Lunarium sort of plays like a soulslike, but it's much closer to Sekiro than Dark Souls in terms of pacing. Dying will respawn all the enemies, but you can dispatch them (or skip them entirely) to get back to where you were in no time. Main character Ave starts off a little sluggish—the first boss fight took me a few tries as I adjusted to the range of her dashes—but she quickly becomes way more agile than a typical soulslike hero as you collect upgrades.

Ave is actually just one of two characters you play. After a brief intro sequence, she meets Lune, a mysterious floating archer who can help Ave in battle. At first I thought Lune would be my FromSoft-style level-up girl, but she's actually a ruthless combatant in some of the game's most intense encounters.

As Ave, you focus on handling enemy attacks with dodges or parries to set them up for Lune. The parry system works just like Sekiro where timing it perfectly builds up a stagger meter on enemies. Raise it high enough and you can command Lune to break their posture with an arrow so Ave can carve them up.

Even though you only directly control Ave, you still have to think about them both tactically. I picked up a skill early on that let Lune buff Ave's final swing in a combo and I found that the tiny delay it added to her swings forced me to decide if it was worth using it or not. Certain monsters are too fast to spare the second you need to line up a parry, but boy was it satisfying to deflect three swipes as Ave and shatter the enemy's defenses with Lune's arrow just before her final swing connected.

I knew I was going to like Lunarium the moment the skill tree showed me a way to chain Ave's dashes together like I've been doing as Duchess in Elden Ring Nightreign for 500 hours. Don't let the first hour or so fool you: You won't be swinging at monsters over and over for the entire length of the journey. There are a bunch of different ways to approach fights as you craft cloaks and embroidery for Ave that modify her abilities. The Steam page teases one that increases her damage the more attacks she does in a row and one that makes enemies weak to backstabs, so I imagine there are plenty of different combinations to try out.

None of this would matter much to me if I didn't find the two girls so charming. Some of the English localization doesn't always land, but there's enough fun banter between Ave and Lune that you want to see where the story's headed. Ave is a pretty headstrong character, but is willing to hear Lune out when she warns her that the black tendrils infecting the world aren't something you can just pick like weeds. I stopped just short of meeting another character who shares the same magical powers as Lune but has seemingly failed her duty to prevent whatever's happening, and I suspect that meeting won't go very well.

My preview build was missing a good amount of the text entries that explain the history of the ruined kingdoms and temples you pass through. But even without that context, I could tell that the developers thought about the history of this place and weren't just throwing around broken statues to meet the soulslike quota. There's an attention to detail in the environments and the way they're connected to each other that makes each section stick in your mind. Even the shortcuts that help you save time when you're backtracking are hidden in such a way that makes you feel smart for finding them.

I wouldn't say I went into Lunarium with low expectations, but I certainly wasn't expecting to find something so well made. It would be a crime to see this game get overlooked in such a saturated genre on Steam. July already gifted us the brilliant new Hell Clock expansion for build-obsessed action RPG players. Now we have Lunarium for the ARPG players who want to explore a moody world on the brink of collapse. Lucky for me that I get to enjoy both.

Lunarium is coming to Steam on July 28.

With Bethesda making us wait going on 15 long years for the next Elder Scrolls game (I'm not including Oblivion Remastered), we've been left to our own devices. A phenomenon I've noticed spike as of late is calls for a Morrowind remaster, and a lot of chatter surrounding Bethesda's seminal 2002 RPG in general, like game devs weighing in on how it would fare if it came out today, and the history behind The Lusty Argonian Maid. We're all getting cabin fever.

To make up for it not being ported to every platform in existence like its older sibling Skyrim, crafty Reddit user Dumpster Buddy (as spotted by Eurogamer) has somehow managed to get Morrowind running in your browser.

"I got OpenMW (the open-source Morrowind engine) compiling to WebAssembly," they explain, "so the whole game runs in a browser tab now. You open a link and you're standing in Seyda Neen. No install, no launcher."

The most baffling detail is that it's the actual game engine flowing through your browser, "not a stream and not an emulator." It looks exactly like it would if you booted it up from Steam, you can save your progress, and it has controller and mod support. The developer is even considering adding features like multiplayer and a mod manager to their makeshift browser port.

"Getting it there meant rebuilding the parts of the engine that expect a desktop," the creator explains in the associated YouTube video's description. "The renderer (OpenSceneGraph) had to be brought over to WebGL2, and most of the graphics work went into shadows that stop crawling when you move, water reflections done with a custom shader blur, and per-pixel lighting. Hardware anti-aliasing doesn't survive post-processing on WebGL2, so we supersample instead."

But there is a big drawback: you need to have the game files installed so that your browser can read them from your disk, in which case you might as well just play it on Steam. Theoretically, though, as one commenter points out, you could chuck these files onto a portable drive and take your browser-based Morrowind with you on the go, say, on your work computer.

However, there is a very bare-bones demo world if you'd just like to see what it would how it works and pootle about the classic UI, no files needed.

Still, it's very cool and shows the unceasing passion and creativity of Bethesda's fans all these years later, in spite of the fact that those same people have been living vicariously through these old games and The Elder Scrolls Online for over a decade. Please tell me TES6 is soon, Bethesda.

Final Fantasy 14 has become just as much of a social chatroom as it has an MMO. You'd be hard-pressed to find a veteran Warrior of Light who hasn't spent copious amounts of time rummaging through their glamour dresser or paying regular visits to the aesthetician for a new hairstyle in order to perfectly present their ideal image as they idle in Limsa Lominsa or run around the expansion's latest player hub.

That playstyle has led to an increasing demand for more flexibility and freedom in the way players can present their characters over the years which, for a long time, was met with a fair bit of resistance from director and producer Naoki Yoshida. Requests to unshackle gear from job or role-based restrictions were long declined, with Yoshida once saying that "it would feel awkward if a Black Mage jumped into an instanced dungeon with full plate armour."

That argument very much lost its juice as Final Fantasy 14 started adding in more gear that wasn't particularly befitting of any job or role—hell, the game literally added a full plate armour set for all classes before Yoshida ever made the above comment.

At the end of last year, however, Yoshida relented. Patch 7.4 finally let us mix-and-match gear from all jobs, which made me inconsolably happy, as someone who's always felt as though Dancer's aesthetic was far more suited to Scouting gear than the Aiming gear it's assigned to.

It felt like the first foot in the door for Yoshida relaxing his views on staunchly maintaining the MMO's lore accuracy, and the recent Berlin Fan Festival has taken another step further. Upcoming expansion Evercold is giving players more freedom in how they customise their characters, like removing the warpaint from male and female Miqo'te, or having fully interchangeable horns across Au Ra instead of locking them to certain face shapes.

I can't help but feel like it's perhaps a decision Yoshida isn't entirely happy to be making, but one that he's choosing to do in spite of his own opinions. "It's our responsibility to come up with the lore, the world, and the rules of the game, and then to provide that to the players," he told the media during a Q&A at Fan Fest. "And because of that, I think from a creative perspective, we are really particular about how we want that world to be, and we are really honest about that."

Yoshida goes on to explain why he's perhaps been a little reluctant to relinquish certain characteristics until now. "Let's take, for example, the Miqo'te. The Miqo'te is a hunter tribe, and a warring tribe, so it's only natural that they would have their warring makeup. And previously, I said that we would not remove that war makeup from the Miqo'te.

"In the past, we did receive feedback from players. They were like 'Yeah, we want to turn it off. We want this makeup off.' But I refused because I said these are the rules of the world that we provided, and this is the lore behind the race. And it was for this reason why previously we hadn't allowed it."

The thing that made him change his mind, it seems, is allowing more freedom from a roleplaying perspective. "But when it comes to this lore and being very particular about the lore, I thought to myself that [removing markings] could be considered an aspect of roleplaying. And in that regard, I kind of upgraded my own mindset or my approach to it."

But despite all this, Yoshida still very much seems like he prefers to stick to the ways of the lore accuracy. "As a player myself, if I'm playing with a Miqo'te, I would personally not turn it off," he said. "The reason is that I love the lore behind Final Fantasy 14 and the unique characteristics of each race. But when it comes to the question of following that lore and being really loyal to that lore, I think it's not a question of good or bad. But now I think it's more a question of how particular you are about that aspect, and that's more tied into role-playing."

Ultimately, it seems like providing a choice was where the decision came from. As someone who is also a staunch enjoyer of lore accuracy, especially when it comes to Final Fantasy 14—as much as I love a silly name, I always love when they're actually accurate to a character's race and backstory—I can definitely understand why Yoshida has perhaps been a little hesitant to let go of a world he's helped to craft, even if it's through more trivial matters like a bit of paint on a catgirl.

But more choice is good for everyone, and I'm already excited to see what players do with a slightly more expanded customisation when Evercold launches next January.

A few weeks ago Bethesda Studios hit the big red button and announced that both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas remasters are in pre-production, but that wasn't all—there was also news of Fallout 76's next major expansion.

"Fallout 76 continues to be home to millions of players exploring Appalachia together," an official news post from Bethesda explains. "With nearly 70 free updates released to date, the journey is far from over. In fact, we have a major Fallout 76 expansion planned for next year; Raven Rock, a prequel story to Fallout 3."

The last major expansion for Fallout 76 saw players venture to Ohio for the first time in Fallout lore in the Burning Springs expansion. Released around the Fallout TV show's season 2, Burning Springs was meant to marry the game with the show and its Fallout 3/ New Vegas inspirations; aka, "desert, deathclaws, and raiders."

But if Raven Rock is going to be a Fallout 3 prequel then, first off, it's going to be a very early one: 76 takes place over 100 years before Fallout 3. Secondly it'll venture over to the other side of the map, as it'll probably head to the Capital Wasteland—which is east of Vault 76—specifically to Raven Rock or Site R, a former military base and shelter built into the mountains.

If I had to guess what we'll be doing here, I'd say it'll likely have something to do with the Abraham Lincoln AI superfan ZAX since it would've been active at this time around the years Fallout 76 takes place. But we'll have to wait quite a while longer to get any solid information on the expansion as it's not set to release until next year.

I'm all for exploring more regions in Fallout 76, and while I'm a little sad we won't be seeing any more of Ohio for the foreseeable future, a Fallout 3 prequel ahead of the remake is exactly the kind of expansion I'll head back to Appalachia for.

I will be truthful: if you grabbed me by the lapels and demanded I tell you when Nioh 3 came out, I would answer something along the lines of 'the late 1980s'. The fact that the third Nioh—a rather good game, per our 90% Nioh 3 review—only released in February of this year feels like a weft in the tapestry of space-time.

But so it was, and so it is that Nioh 3 will, on August 19, get its first DLC in the form of Hell Rising: "Our protagonist and appointed shogun, Takechiyo, journeys through time and is led to Edo in the future by an unknown yokai he met in his dreams," goes the blurb.

"Edo in the future" is the year 1651, by the by. Things aren't looking great. "The large castle town that was once proof of the shogunate’s authority has transformed into a hellish wasteland plagued by the gales of the Crucible," rumbles the DLC description.

"Yokai, human rebels, and alchemists from foreign lands have descended on Edo, creating a battlefield fraught with chaos." I knew a guy in uni who called himself an alchemist from foreign lands, but he was just a Latvian guy who sold cannabis.

The new DLC brings new gear with it. Hell Rising brings the hoko and shield and ninja hoko and shield. Obviously, you know what a hoko is already, but I will write that it is a short spear out of my fanatical dedication to journalistic thoroughness. They "have a great many uses in battle, ranging from basic attacks like defending with the shield while attacking with the short spear, to tactical moves like flinging the shield at the enemy."

There's also a new difficulty mode, called The Enlightened One's Journey. It's even tougher than the already-tough Shogun's Journey and "offers more possibilities for growth, including stronger equipment, additional Soul Cores, higher level caps, and higher +value caps through Soul Matching." You'll have to beat Shogun's Journey to unlock it, mind you, so hop to it.

A few months ago, indie developer RetroSpecter noticed something unusual about Crashphalt, their first completed game that launched on Steam in 2018: Since their last check-in on the neglected platformer, Crashphalt had suddenly gained over 500 reviews. In its first four years, it had barely managed a dozen.

And almost none of those new reviewers had anything to say about Crashphalt itself. Mostly, they just talked about Undertale.

"Does ANYONE want to play Undertale with me???" one reviewer writes. Another calls Crashphalt the "best game to never actually play." Others insist that "Undertale is a pretty cool game."

"Okay yeah I like Undertale too," RetroSpecter wrote in a Reddit thread recounting their discovery, "but wtf is going on?"

Crashphalt owed its unexpected renaissance, they soon realized, to Undertale Together, a fan-made Undertale multiplayer mod that, typically, only supports local co-op—a limitation that players found a clever way to circumvent.

If you look at Crashphalt's SteamDB charts, you'll notice that between November and December 2022 its peak daily player count jumped from 6 to 107—a roughly 1683% increase. That timeframe happens to coincide with the December 2, 2022 upload date of a certain YouTube video—one that RetroSpecter would eventually come to understand as the source of that sudden spike in player activity.

The video outlines a method for playing Undertale Together online by copying Crashphalt install files into a modded Undertale directory. Afterwards, renaming the Undertale executable to "Crashphalt.exe" is all it takes for Steam to believe it's RetroSpecter's platformer and allow Remote Play multiplayer for what would otherwise be a local-only mod.

And yes, it works for Deltarune, too. Unsurprisingly, there was another spike in Crashphalt player activity in June 2025, coinciding with Deltarune's full paid launch on Steam. Why the video's creator chose Crashphalt specifically, however, is still something of a mystery.

"The only requirement for the hack is that [it] has Remote Play enabled, and I guess it does help that Crashphalt is free. But I imagine there are tons of games that fit that bill," RetroSpecter said. "Crashphalt was just the lucky game chosen for the honor."

While all those players might not technically be showing up for Crashphalt itself, RetroSpecter says it's "really cool to see that the game has found a second life"—even if it's an unconventional one.

"Undertale came out around the same time I was getting into game dev, and was incredibly inspiring to me," the developer said. "So I think it's really cool that it's found a way to impact the community even if in a small way and act as a way for friends to play the game together."

It's a refreshingly generous response to what's easy to imagine as an irritation—though RetroSpecter did leave a slightly self-interested postscript addressed to Undertale's own developer:

"Toby Fox. If you read this, let me know if you... like… wanna make a game together. Thanks."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before action RPGs relied on seasonal ladders and DLC treadmills there was Darkstone, a 1999 hack and slash where you clicked on things until they died and liked it. It had some interesting ideas, like the companion mode that lets you switch between two player-characters, the other controlled by the CPU while you took the lead, but it remained true to the basics of a genre I got into precisely because it was basic.

Now it's back, with a remaster in early access that improves the UI and controls (you can move characters with WASD now, or play with a controller), and the graphics (though I had to turn off volumetric fog and procedural grass for the sake of my poor framerate).

It's got a demo too, which lets you make characters from any of its eight classes and explore the early-game dungeons, letting you play three of its quests, which are selected at random each time you start a new game.

It's just nice to start up an action RPG without having to worry about which build I'm going to pursue, or look at a massive node full of future skill unlocks, or wonder if I should start a seasonal character or whether I'm missing out by not buying the latest DLC. Darkstone is just Darkstone, a game of clicking on skeletons and goblins until they die, and as that annoying guy who though the first Diablo was the best Diablo it's really scratching the itch.

I want an action RPG that understands these are games I play when I need a break from thinky puzzly heavy games and want something light and, you know, more action-packed. I'll get back into them later, right now I really want to fight some giant wasps in a hole in the ground. Darkstone Restoration is perfect for that.

The only notable thing missing from the early access build is online multiplayer, though it does have couch co-op. A permadeath mode is also in the works. You can download the demo on Steam.

I wasn't expecting Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida to directly call out World of Warcraft during a media Q&A at the MMO's Berlin Fan Festival, but that's exactly what happened.

When asked about how the team plans to modernise Final Fantasy 14's housing system—one which is regularly criticised for a lack of supply to meet demand and a fairly obtuse UI to boot—Yoshida's first response was: "I get the feeling that what you really want to ask is, well WoW has come up with this amazing housing system. How about [Final Fantasy] 14?"

Blizzard's own MMO has finally taken its first stab at player housing, and I do admit I've been looking on with some envy. It looks far easier to wield and far more customisable with freely scaling and placing objects, and that's something that Yoshida has absolutely taken notice of.

"We have immense respect for the World of Warcraft team," Yoshida said. "So when we saw that the World of Warcraft team announced the new housing system—and they said specifically that they looked to 14 and incorporated things which they wanted to surpass us in—I think that in itself is a great honour for us to hear."

Yoshida said that he's had "a hands-on" with WoW's housing system, calling it "amazing" and "a good source of research." For what exactly? Well, perhaps for two major overhauls the team has lined up to tackle Final Fantasy 14's housing, which should be releasing during upcoming expansion Evercold.

The first one is set to tackle the housing UI which, by Yoshida's own admission, is "quite technical and not very accessible." He says that the plan with the overhaul is to make it "more accessible for casual players, so that they can easily create elaborate housing." I do wonder if that'll just be a flat menu change, or a larger overhaul that allows greater freedom of item placement which, without utilising floating glitches (or third-party plugins) can be pretty darn restrictive.

Yoshida is being considerably tighter-lipped about the second planned overhaul, though. "But I think you will be much happier to hear what it is compared to the UI update," he said. "It's currently in the planning process right now on our end, and there is a chance that it will get released earlier than the UI update."

He finished by saying that while he couldn't share any specifics, "once we're able to share those details, it's probably the number one thing on the list a lot of people are requesting." Whether Yoshida is referring to housing in general here—it wouldn't surprise me if that and glamour were the two aspects the team received the most feedback about—or the specific overhaul in mind, it's not super clear.

Either way, I'm excited. Even though I've been clinging onto a small house for dear life since 2021, I've yearned for an easier decoration system, the ability to make a cute little neighbourhood with my pals, and easier access to larger housing plots. Seriously, I've been bidding on medium houses in the Lavender Beds for seven months with zero success. Free me, Yoshida, I beg of you.

Remember Chort? He's a sub-boss in one of Final Fantasy 14's newest dungeons—a magnificent large-and-in-charge lad who rolls up into a ball and charges around the arena like a giant, fleshy Sonic the Hedgehog.

I couldn't stop laughing the first time I fought him, and I wasn't the only person to immediately fall in love with how ridiculous he was. He quickly became memed to hell and back—from his goofy name, to the real "Mom, I frew up" stance he's rocking as he patiently waits for you to enter the boss room and beat him up.

His immense reception came as quite the surprise to director and producer Naoki Yoshida. "I'm really glad to hear that Chort was so well received, but honestly I couldn't really understand the appeal of Chort," he said during a press Q&A at the game's Berlin Fan Festival.

"Of course, we do understand that he's very popular and there's been many memes. But really, I just couldn't understand like… why." Yoshida then said he'd love to hear what exactly it is about Chort that people find so appealing, before continuing: "I can understand maybe a little. I mean, this is some huge bulky guy, and then suddenly he's standing there and then he rolls. So from that perspective, I can kind of understand."

I'm not quite sure how exactly to tell Yoshida that Chort just sounds kind of funny, at least to my English ears. His large body, small head, and goofy name give me war flashbacks to the reign of Big Chungus, which I have to assume is a similar image for a lot of other players. Also, you know, the fact that he's in a dungeon called The Clyteum. Yes, Chort is in The Clyteum. I'm not sure if those unintentional saucy undertones translate in Japanese.

But despite not fully getting what made us go crazy for Chort, Yoshida's just happy to see the community doing silly things with the game. "It's really fun for us to see," he told the media. "So, if the people in the community also find some unexpected appeal in any content we produce moving forward, do make your voices heard because the development team is looking at all of the responses on social media, and we very much do enjoy looking at them. We have big smiles on our faces when things like this happen"

In a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, prolific actor J.K. Simmons dove into his relationship with the games he's acted in. While not much of a gamer himself, the script for Portal 2 (where Simmons voiced Aperture founder Cave Johnson) seems to have left its mark on the actor.

"Tom Britney from The Westies, he texted me a week ago, a little video text of my character from Baldur's Gate," Simmons said when asked if he gets recognized for his videogame roles. "He said, 'I'm about to kill you.' Okay, well, good luck with that."

Host Josh Horowitz followed up by asking if Simmons enjoys playing games at all, and the answer was a firm no. "My hands don't work on those controllers," said Simmons. "I've tried⁠—my kids, of course, my twentysomething kids play them a lot. My wife, she'll actually get in there and play some Mario Bros. or whatever with them. I just, I cannot. No. Sorry."

But even if he doesn't play, Simmons does have a firm favorite among all the games he's acted in. "It was Portal 2, for me," he said. "Just because it was such a hilarious script. I could have done the feature film, or the play, or whatever. It was just such fun writing."

Simmons did, indeed, reprise his role as Cave Johnson for the 2022 Steam Deck tie-in game, Aperture Desk Job. Portal 2 writer Eric Wolpaw, who is credited with creating the character, also returned to the series to write for Desk Job.

Given the more siloed nature of their work on games, actors often have a wide range of engagement with the hobby. Deus Ex, Marathon, and Starfield actor Elias Toufexis is all-in on games, for example, while Silent Hill f actor Konatsu Kato streamed her first playthrough to much fanfare. Grand Theft Auto 5 actor Steven Ogg, meanwhile, thinks you should put away childish things and read Dostoevsky instead.

Larian Studios has reiterated that it is fully, 100%, without a doubt, donezo in the bunzo when it comes to new Baldur's Gate-related projects. It's latest statement was in response to a Dark Horse comics announcement that could have been interpreted as implying the studio's involvement.

On X, "The Everything App," Dark Horse announced that a yet-untitled comic series starring Karlach, our favorite BG3 companion, is coming down the pike. The issue: Dark Horse signed off its post by saying the project was "With [Larian] and [Wizards of the Coast]," tagging both companies.

Makes sense. I mean, Larian famously did make Baldur's Gate 3 and the character of Karlach in the first place. But the studio seems keen to head off any suggestion that it is involved in Wizards of the Coast's post-BG3 spinoff projects.

"Maximum hijinks are happening right now, but we’re not involved in any BG3 related projects," the official Larian account wrote in response alongside a picture of CEO Swen Vincke and writing lead Adam Smith doing some kind of script read-through. "As soon as we bust outta here, we'll share more about [Divinity]."

Ever since Larian revealed that it would not be making Baldur's Gate 4, there has been a popular conception that there must have been some kind of dispute or grievance between it and D&D owner Wizards of the Coast. Vincke, for his part, has insisted that the split was amicable, and that the developers were just creatively spent working in someone else's setting.

The quick, sharp way Larian distanced itself from any suggestion of its involvement in Dark Horse's upcoming spinoff is certainly eyebrow-raising, but it's also understandable that the studio would not want any misconceptions about its output to spread, regardless of the nature of its parting ways with Wizards⁠—I noticed at least one commenter say that they thought the studio's writing team may have been collaborating on the comic project before this exchange.

I, for one, am looking forward to Larian's next game, Divinity, set in its own fantasy world of Rivellon. If you'd like to catch up on the project, we've collected everything we know about the upcoming RPG in one place. We also have a guide to the Divinity series, including a recommended play order for the games⁠—spoilers, it's pretty much reverse-chronological order of release.

Final Fantasy is very much a theme park for the series. It regularly references other games or weaves their themes into the very fabric of Eorzea and beyond. Occasionally, it straight-up implants entire characters or plots.

Despite all that, it's done surprisingly very little with the series' golden goose: Final Fantasy 7. Sure, there's the Gold Saucer. And materia melding. And Cloud's Advent Children fit. And the Fenrir motorcycle. But as for actual characters or dipping into the game's world? There's not all that much to be found.

Until now, that is. Director and producer Naoki Yoshida took to the stage at Berlin's Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival this weekend to reveal that upcoming expansion Evercold is dedicating its eight-player raid series to Cloud and the gang.

Yoshida was joined by Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi to reveal the collaboration, titled Beyond the Lifestream. Unfortunately we know criminally little regarding what or who will be showing up, but considering both Cloud and Sephiroth were plastered on the screens during the reveal, I'd be surprised if neither one made an appearance.

Hamaguchi and Yoshida assured players that the two teams are working closely together—long-time Square Enix veteran and FF7 remake co-director Motomu Toriyama is assisting on the raid's story, supervised by the OG FF7's writer Kazushige Nojima. And for the belt-crazed fiend that dwells within me, I'm especially stoked to see Tetsuya Nomura on design. Those raid pieces are gonna be rad, I'm sure.

That's not the only FF7 bit making its way into the game, either. An update to the Gold Saucer on October 28 is going full Saucer-ception by adding in an attraction modeled after the same venue's appearance in Final Fantasy 7. There's also, er, a typing game attached to it. Which—as Hamaguchi himself joked during the keynote—isn't exactly the first connection I make between the two. But I'm a sucker for a typing game, so no complaints here.

Even as someone who isn't a huge Final Fantasy 7 enjoyer, it's hard to not succumb a tiny bit to the hype that something this massive brings. Will we see Sephiroth cap off the raid series as the final fight of Evercold's final tier? God, I hope so.

A CRPG in the vein of Baldur's Gate without a bird's-eye view camera sure sounds wrong, but it feels so right. If you're looking for something a little more Dragon Age and less Divinity for your next replay, Modder Relysia has gone and stuck an over-the-shoulder third-person camera in Baldur's Gate 3, uploading it to Nexus Mods last week, and it looks a lot better than you may expect.

In the brief showcase teaser, you can see the player wandering around the Undercity Ruins. Animations are a tad jittery, but because BG3's environments are made to be zoomed in and gawked at and shown off in dialog cutscenes, everything is at a believable scale. I'm not sure this would work in all of the game's environments to the same extent, but that it works at all is nifty.

You've always been able to get the camera up close in BG3, but it's always angled slightly downward, feeling less like a proper third person action game cam, and more like a compromise with its classico tactico overhead view. Even playing with a game pad, it's distinct from other videogame cameras.

The Nexus Mods page states that it's compatible with the WASD character movement mod, which we dubbed one of the best mods for Baldur's Gate 3, so if you wanted you could conceivably replay the game pretending you and your invisible cameraman have been isekai'd out of Dragon Age and into Faerûn. (Throw in the real time with pause mod as well if you're a true sick freak who rejects the turn-based revolution, comfortable in the knowledge that you'd rather die in four seconds than win if it takes four minutes.)

There are lots of settings, too. You can adjust FOV, offset, camera height, and even customize "horizontal tracking speed" if you'd rather the camera not immediately jerk around with your every impulsive movement. While it's true a third-person camera option was already achievable via Native Camera Tweaks or the WASD mod, having one that's so precisely customizable is a win for anyone who wants to appreciate that character they spent four hours customizing up close.

Leave it to trademark filings to publicly utter the name of a new videogame before anyone else: The next Kingdom Come will almost surely be called Kingdom Come Salvation. Huzzah.

That's according to a July 23 trademark filing by Warhorse Studios with the EUIPO, first spotted by Phrasemaker. Had the owners of the trademark not already been confirmed to be Warhorse, the styling of the Salvation logo (see below) would've been a dead giveaway, as is matching legal information for the Czech studio's other trademarks.

While Warhorse has yet to comment on the name reveal, it did already say back in May that another "Kingdom Come Adventure" was inbound. That announcement came at the same time as its upcoming Middle-earth RPG was announced—a high-profile project that I wager will become the studio's primary focus in the years ahead.

I'm trying not to read too much into the wording of that initial announcement, nor the name. Warhorse described its LOTR game as an open world RPG, but the Kingdom Come followup simply as an adventure—will Salvation take on a different, smaller format? Will it be an RPG at all? God I hope so. Middle-earth is cool and all, but I'd take another Bohemian romp any day of the week, and this series still needs to get to Prague!

Phrasemaker calls attention to a section of the trademark that refers to "entertainment services for matching users with computer games," which kinda sounds like Salvation will have multiplayer, or online functionally in the least. Intriguing.

If Salvation is another open world RPG on the scale of KCD2, it probably won't star Henry of Skalitz. Warhorse has been open about closing the book on Henry's story, and switching up the subtitle from "Deliverance" does suggest a fresh start.

Bethesda is eager to reassure you that its house is not, in fact, on fire in the wake of 3,200 layoffs (1,600 that already happened, 1,600 that are still to come) at Xbox that claimed numerous devs at the studio, including the artist responsible for designing The Elder Scrolls' khajiit and argonians. Thus, its recent announcement that it currently has Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters in the oven as well as an incoming, Obsidian-made Fallout.

Now, in response to questions from YouTuber MrMattyPlays, Bethesda has said that the layoffs also won't affect its plans for The Elder Scrolls 6. "The roadmap [for TES6] is unaffected," said the studio. That's all you're getting. No, really.

Bethesda was ever-so-slightly more chatty about its plans for Oblivion Remastered. Yes, Bethesda has plans for Oblivion Remastered. I'm as surprised as you are.

Since a one-two punch of patches the game got shortly after it released last year, the UE5-ified re-do of one of the funniest games ever made seems to have been largely forgotten, despite still having its fair share of performance hitches and bugs. MrMattyPlays also asked if Bethesda planned to remember Oblivion Remastered on other platforms when it gets its Switch release in August. Apparently it does!

"The team working on remasters is focused on the Switch 2 launch," said Bethesda, but take heart: that version "has optimizations we hope to bring to console/PC." I also hope that. I had a good time with the Oblivion remaster despite its issues, but I'd quite like to be able to enjoy it, you know, not in spite of anything.

Anyway, Bethesda has said a few times now that it would like to be a bit chattier and more open with fans going forward, and it reiterated that here. It also said its new Glasnost policy isn't because Xbox boss Asha Sharma is making the studio do it: "Look, we read the internet too," said the studio.

"All of our fans and plenty of creators have been asking for us to lay out our road map for a long time. As bits of info or announcements come out individually, they get lost in the larger picture of all we're doing as a studio. So, we felt it was best to do it all at once and paint a clear picture for everyone. This is a shift in our approach to communication that Bethesda Game Studios has been contemplating for some time now."

I'll be honest, I can't say I completely buy that, given the timing of all this, but I suppose I welcome a more communicative Bethesda anyway.

I'm not even that far into my first ever playthrough of Grim Dawn and I can already see why I've heard people praise this game for the last 10 years. It's old, sure, but it's a surprisingly tight action RPG that despite its age hasn't been left to rust.

The developers at Crate Entertainment have kept Grim Dawn from feeling like an action RPG that came out a decade ago. The quality-of-life additions in its final expansion, Fangs of Asterkarn, do a lot of the heavy-lifting, but even visually the game doesn't look that far removed from an older World of Warcraft zone.

I've been playing quite a lot of Path of Exile 2 lately and was a little scared that Grim Dawn would be far too archaic for me. I think a major reason that hasn't been the case is that Fangs of Asterkarn gave it full WASD movement support, a control scheme I have a hard time letting go of in these types of games. It works so flawlessly in Grim Dawn that I would've assumed it was there from the start if I hadn't read the patch notes.

My initial class choice inadvertently gave me a taste of some of the OG experience. I went with an occultist, thinking it would be fun to play the closest thing to a spell-casting warlock that I typically play in other games. What I actually ended up with was a character who spent most of their time unloading rifle rounds into monsters rather than infecting them with the plague. I'm sure there are plenty more spells to work with later on, but I wasn't exactly thrilled to be a bulletmancer.

Fangs of Asterkarn, like any good action RPG expansion, adds a new class to Grim Dawn: the berserker. At first, I thought this was the game's take on a shapeshifting druid, which is an archetype I typically avoid. But then I clicked the skill tree node that let me transform into a werewolf and realized that I might've found an exception to the rule.

I spent most of the time with my occultist dragging monsters around in a circle to plink away their health. Playing as my werewolf, I launched at them like I'm the bullet, turning everything into a red mist on impact. It was like playing a different action RPG as I darted from monster pack to monster pack at twice the speed as my previous character. Even though Grim Dawn allows you to pick up a secondary class at level 10, berserker was clearly the better option to start with. Now I'm cruising through the first act and starting to see the game unfold.

While I was feeling experimental, I decided to see what else berserkers can do. This is when I found something even better than a werewolf. Grim Dawn lets you turn into a big crow who can conjure massive waves of ice that shred enemies apart. There is zero explanation for why the crow is a wizard, which is the best part about it. Going crow mode isn't as fast as being a werewolf, but it looks so ridiculous that I'm finding it hard to go back. I'm basically playing the villain in some direct-to-video horror flick and it's too silly to stop.

Looking ahead in the skill tree I see that there are some ways to blend the transformations, as well as your human form, for even more power. I'm aiming to try some kind of low-life build where my damage goes way up while injured. And if I know my action RPGs well enough, there will probably be some unique item that can push this idea even further. I'm not anywhere close to the endgame—where a lot of Fangs of Asterkarn's new additions live—but I'm excited to see what toys I can play with.

I wouldn't be saying any of this if the game felt too clunky and dated to play. Grim Dawn absolutely holds up to modern standards and even has convenience that I wish newer games had. You pick up piles of crafting materials and can press a button to send them all to your stash from anywhere in the world. I appreciate some chill inventory management here and there, but it's great knowing the stuff that isn't gear won't have me crawling back to town every 10 minutes.

It's also nice knowing that nothing about Grim Dawn is seasonal. I can load the game up whenever and play it at my own pace without having to worry that I'm going to miss out on some temporary activity. As much as I like seasonal action RPGs like Diablo 4, I do think that format tends to make players worry too much about efficiency and seeing everything each season has to offer before the excitement fizzles out.

If this is the end of Grim Dawn as a game in active development (although I'm sure patches will keep coming), it's an impressive finale. Far too many games get abandoned in a state that makes them extremely hard to get into as a new player. Because Crate Entertainment made sure to massage the kinks out of the game over the years, I've been convinced it's worth keeping an eye on to see what it's going to deliver next. According to its founder, Arthur Bruno, Grim Dawn 2 is already in the early stages of development.

Fangs of Asterkarn is available now on Steam.

In a new message on X, "The Everything App," FromSoftware has revealed the final names and stats of the two additional classes coming in Elden Ring's $5 Tarnished Edition DLC. The Idus Knight looks sick as ever, while the Heavy Knight appears to have gotten the gentlest, most tender of nerfs since we saw their stats leak from a Tarnished Edition playtest last year.

The Heavy Knight will start at level 10, as opposed to eight in the playtest, with their two extra levels shaking out as a plus one to their Faith and Mind stats. Hardly ruinous, and I think HK will still be a new top pick for a very specific niche of builds (Hulk smash), but the change stands out to me all the same.

Due to Elden Ring's one stat point per level system and exponentially increasing cost to level up, it's beneficial for a class to start as low level as possible, avoiding any points lost to "junk" stats not used by your build. Buildcrafters got all in a lather about HK's aggressively min-maxed stats, and now those stats have been ever so slightly less min-maxed.

It's an almost imperceptible change for your average player, but may factor into speed or challenge runs and the like. Otherwise? Heavy Knight = big guy + big sword (of the "curved great" variety) + big armor, and both of those bits of gear are new to the Tarnished Edition.

The Knight of Idus has always been more exciting to me: An agile swordsman class to give the base game Samurai some competition. They start with a scandalously swagged out new armor set, a shield of indeterminate extraction, and the previously Shadow of the Erdtree-exclusive Milady light greatsword, an extremely cool weapon that used to take hours of gameplay to acquire.

Stat-wise, Idus strikes me as a slight upgrade to the Samurai (to the same degree that the Heavy Knight was slightly nerfed): More Faith and Strength, less Arcane, Vigor, and Int, but also a lower starting level of seven.

They also introduce the nation of Idus, which has never before been mentioned in Elden Ring, and will likely be the exclusive domain of the item descriptions for the knight's armor pieces⁠. Never change, FromSoftware. The DLC will be made available on PC the same day as the Tarnished Edition's Switch 2 release: August 28.

Knight of Idus stats

• Level: 7
• Vigor: 10
• Mind: 12
• Endurance: 11
• Strength: 13
• Dexterity: 15
• Intelligence: 8
• Faith: 11
• Arcane: 6

Heavy Knight Stats

• Level: 10
• Vigor: 14
• Mind: 8
• Endurance: 17
• Strength: 15
• Dexterity: 11
• Intelligence: 7
• Faith: 8
• Arcane: 9

Star Wars Zero Company developer Bit Reactor is made up of former XCOM veterans, a series which has a pretty lively modding scene, especially XCOM 2, which supports modding with official development tools. It's even had its fair share of Star Wars mods over the years that completely transport it to a galaxy far, far away. Mod support is one of the reasons XCOM is still holding ground on players' hard drives all these years later.

Despite the success this has brought to Firaxis' series, Bit Reactor has confirmed in a new Discord Q&A that Zero Company won't have official mod capabilities.

"We have a lot of respect for the modding community," says lead producer Caydence Funk, "but there is no official mod support planned for Star Wars Zero Company."

Of course, this could change post-launch if it proves a hit, but the devs have made it clear we're not getting official modding tools at release. It's a shame given all the creative XCOM Star Wars mods willing Zero Company into existence years ago. Plus, it's also one of the most requested features in the game's Discord server, so it's not like there's not an audience. My guess is it's down to simple development priorities.

In a month-old Reddit post made before their hopes were crushed, one fan said that "without mods, [Zero Company] probably won't surpass XCOM 2 in my rotation. But with them it could become my new favorite game." Sorry, bud.

While there won't be official mod support, it's hard to stop those inclined—not that I think that's Bit Reactor's intention, especially since there won't be microtransactions that could potentially be undermined by player creations, as was the case in Firaxis' Marvel's Midnight Suns. I'm sure we'll still see some jerry-rigged creations even without official support.

I'm a sucker for customisation, so any alternative character models and gear would be a plus. Hopefully we'll also see more extensive mods later down the line, like additional encounters or an equivalent of XCOM 2's Long War 2 mod, which overhauls the game with new mechanics across a longer campaign.