Game File reports that CD Projekt worked with AI company Respeecher to modify the voice of Geralt's Polish voice actor in the upcoming Songs of the Past expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The actor, Jacek Rozenek, voiced Geralt in the Polish editions of all the Witcher games, including The Witcher 3 and its two expansions, and the Game File report says his performances are highly regarded. But in 2019, he had a stroke that left him temporarily unable to speak; by 2021 he had rehabilitated enough to be able to provide some new lines for The Witcher 3's next-gen update, but the process left him "exhausted."

Still, he continued to train and was eventually able to return to work, and when CD Projekt decided to make a new Witcher 3 expansion it wanted him back for the role. But the stroke, and the passage of time, had left Rozenek's voice noticeably changed. Given that Songs of the Past will occur in the midst of The Witcher 3, that shift in tone—"lower [and] gruffer," according to Game File's Stephen Totilo—presented a problem.

So with Rozenek's permission, CD Projekt approached AI voice company Respeecher to rework his voice for the game. Rozenek is still providing the voice of Geralt in the Polish version of the expansion, but Respeecher is adjusting it to make him sound like he did a decade ago.

"The brief was simple: make Jacek’s voice sound alive, rich and young, like in the original game," synthetic speech artist Dmytro Vasylets said.

"Getting there took dozens of hours, training models, going through the details with the CDPR team, and dealing with AI artifacts that never fully disappear. The hardest part was Jacek’s emotional range: the half-tones, shouts, groans, anger, fear and laughter. Capturing all of that at the highest audio quality was the real challenge. I’d like to think we pulled it off."

Rozenek said he feels "very good" about returning to the role of Geralt because he's so familiar with the character; the issue was merely that his voice was different. Because of that, he's all in favor of the AI treatment: "The point is that this voice should be as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago," he said. "I have great trust…for the creators of this game."

This isn't CD Projekt's first time working with Respeecher: It previously used the company to reproduce the voice of Miłogost Reczek, who portrayed Viktor Vektor and Vesemir in the Polish releases of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3. Reczek died in 2021; in that case, CD Projekt had the family's blessing to use an AI recreation of the actor's voice.

The use of generative AI in voice acting is an incredibly thorny issue, one that voice actors have gone to great lengths to maintain some control over. CD Projekt itself has been ambivalent about AI; localization producer Mikołaj Szwed told Game File that "as a person working with voice actors over all the regions in the world, this is a big concern," although he added that "this was a special case" caused by Rozenek's health problems. The studio is not planning to do anything similar with the voice of Doug Cockle, who portrays Geralt in the English releases of The Witcher games, Szwed said; Rozenek's voice would also not be altered in any hypothetical future Witcher games set later in the timeline, because the vocal change would be explainable: "It's more about this specific situation here, where we have both the voice from 12 years ago and from now next to each other."

Interestingly, the news of Rozenek's AI-powered vocal overhaul comes just one day after veteran voice actor Stephen Russell appeared in a Nightdive podcast and discussed returning to the role of Garrett in the upcoming Thief: The Dark Project remaster. It's been more than 20 years since Russell last portrayed the character, in 2004's Thief: Deadly Shadows, which meant he had to be more conscious of his pitch and delivery while working on content for the new Tarnished Mirror expansion.

But while "the equipment changes," as Russell said, Rozenek's stroke created a more substantial change: Totilo said his untouched voice in the expansion "sounds deep and gravelly, noticeably rougher than his recordings for the original game," while the AI-edited voice is much closer to Rozenek's voice as it was a decade ago.

When I say the words "cozy farming game," it probably conjures a certain set of images: topdown sprites, daily crop-related chores, a cast of townsfolk primed and ready to be the focus of hyperfixation. What it probably doesn't conjure is the image of a burly lumberjack-wizard launching an anime-ass energy wave from his magic logging axe that splits a line of trees lengthwise so that their falling halves can instantly level the surrounding forest.

But now, I know that it should—and it's thanks to Spellogger, a first-person lumbermancy RPG being developed by solo dev Basti to serve as "the most violent cozy farming game ever made." And as you'll see in the video embedded below, Basti is making excellent progress towards that goal.

Like your various Stardew-likes, Spellogger starts with the player arriving at their newly-acquired farmstead. Unlike your various Stardew-likes, however, you're not a farmer: You're a lumberjacking wizard in a magical forest that grows infinite trees overnight, and your goal is to deploy your escalating arcane mastery to harvest as much lumber as possible through increasingly-absurd tree-felling spellcraft.

There are no enemies. There is no livestock. There is only a constantly-renewed forest of trees that shoot off damage numbers when you hit them and announce OVERKILL if you happen to hit them very hard.

I don't know why this is the specific game the Swedish solo dev decided to make, but I do know that I admire the commitment to the bit. Basti's X feed is a gleeful showcase for whatever wizard nonsense was most recently implemented as a Spellogger feature, from carving through saplings by throwing an enchanted axe like a boomerang, to detonating trees with bursts of chain lightning, and even summoning a meteor from orbit to give entire groves the dinosaur treatment.

I want to stress once again that this is a magic forest with infinite trees. So, you know. It's fine. In a fantasy setting, anything can be environmentally sustainable.

Spellogger doesn't have a release date, but it's due to launch on Steam sometime in 2027. It does, however, have a demo available—though you'll only get to progress through the first 10 levels of lumbermancy. The meteors will have to wait.

November 11, 2026—that's today—marks the 15^th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. And if you thought Bethesda might use the big birthday to drop a surprise update on the state of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel, sorry, but it's not happening.

The wheels of hope began turning a couple days ago, when Reece Reilly of the Kiwi Talkz podcast took to X to tease "an awesome announcement happening in the next 2 days that gamers will be happy about."

That, naturally, led to a thread on the TESVI subreddit speculating that something Sentinel-related would be happening on the Sentinel front—despite Bethesda specifically saying when Sentinel was made official that it will be "some time" before it was ready to share more information. Hey, eight days is "some time," right?

Well, yes, fair enough. But not enough time: Reece clarified on November 10 that "this announcement has nothing to do with Bethesda, Skyrim, TES:VI or even Mass Effect," and eventually Bethesda felt compelled to do the same.

"Hey everyone, wanted to pop in to say that we aren’t going to have any big announcements tomorrow," the official Bethesda account posted in response to the Reddit speculation. "We’re excited you’re excited but we will not be sharing anything new on Sentinel for some time."

Naturally, Sentinel subredditors took it exactly as you'd expect:

There's a little bit of frustration visible in some replies over the fact that Bethesda insists on remaining silent about Sentinel after all this time—eight years since The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, 15 since Skyrim released.

For the most part, though, everyone seems to be taking it all in stride: Comically twisted theories, hopes for Skyrim 2, and widespread pride that the community managed to force Bethesda to directly intervene.

It's too bad, but on the other hand Bethesda was quite clear that Sentinel isn't going to be one of those announce-and-launch games: Frankly, I'll be surprised if we see it drop before 2030. That said, this is in fact the 15^th anniversary of Skyrim, and it's not going entirely unremarked: Bethesda shared commemorative art by fantasy artist Karl Fitzgerald to mark the big day, and over on X it's giving away three limited edition Skyrim anniversary posters.

On this day 15 years ago The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released. Since that day the community has continued to grow into something truly special. Thank you for being a part of it.This beautiful artwork was created by legendary artist Karl Fitzgerald to mark the occasion. #Skyrim15

— @bethesdastudios.com (@bethesdastudios.com.bsky.social) 2026-11-11T20:12:31.682Z

A little less than two weeks after their multiplayer features were taken offline because of a mysterious "server issue," multiplayer functionality in Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 has been restored, meaning invasions and messages are once again working as they should.

Word of the service restoration game via a very businesslike message on the Dark Souls website: "Regarding the temporary suspension of the game server for Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3, the investigation has been completed and the fix has been applied. The game server and online features are now restored.

"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused, and thank you for your patience and understanding."

So what exactly went wrong? Well, that's the mysterious part. Aside from intermittent apologies for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience in messages posted to X, FromSoft's had nothing to say about it—and that remains the case now: It's back, be happy, speak of the matter no more.

Whatever happened, it clearly wasn't as serious a problem as the 2022 mess that saw PC servers for all Dark Souls games shut down for the better part of a year. In that case, FromSoft copped to the problem: A security vulnerability that allowed malicious code to be executed via the games' online services. But that fix was also long in coming because FromSoft was busy with other things, like finishing Elden Ring, which was kind of a big deal.

Anyway, aside from the relative brevity of the downtime, we had something else that made the outage a little more bearable than it was back in '22: The Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 Seamless Co-op mods that operate independently of FromSoft's servers. They also enable a far more flexible multiplayer experience than what's offered by the games themselves, letting players team up to run through the games at will, and without having to deal with disconnects when somebody dies or a boss gets smoked.

But if your preference is for the chaos of native Dark Souls multiplayer? Now that option's back on the table too.

Final Fantasy 14 players have been gathering en masse across servers today in the wake of the news that Eikichi Iwai—the bassist behind the game's band The Primals—has passed away at the age of 57.

A post went out on The Lodestone in the early hours of this morning (November 11) which read: "Thank you very much for your continued support of The Primals. As announced earlier today, we are deeply saddened to share the news of the sudden passing of bassist Eikichi Iwai.

"Having witnessed his truly unforgettable performance on stage at the recent Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival in Japan, the sudden news of his passing has come as a profound shock. The members of The Primals and the entire FF14 Development and Operations teams are overcome with deep sorrow.

"As we reflect on all that Eikichi-san has left behind, our thoughts are with him, and we offer our heartfelt condolences."

The Primals is Final Fantasy 14's in-house band, fronted by composer Masayoshi Soken and localisation lead Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, and accompanied by Tetsuya Tachibana, GUNN, and Iwai himself.

Iwai's bass in particular has elevated a ton of already-excellent tracks across the game's history: Stormblood's Amatsu Kaze, Shadowbringers' To the Edge, Endwalker's Scream and Close in the Distance, and Dawntrail's Ride the Rhythm just to name a few. The Primals has just come off the back of a strong year for live performances, too—from their usual appearance at all three Fan Festivals that took place this year, to even taking the stage at the UK's biggest rock and music festival as part of Download's lineup.

A quick trip through some of Final Fantasy 14's European servers have seen tons of players gathering in main hubs like Limsa Lominsa to pay their respects and share what it is about Iwai's work that meant so much to them. As I write this story, players and campfires line the perimeter of Omega's Limsa Lominsa plaza—a common practice for honouring the passing of key community figures and beyond, something which I've previously witnessed for the likes of Berserk's creator Kentaro Miura and Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama.

It's a small gesture, but one which is a pleasant reminder of why Final Fantasy 14 continues to maintain such an iron grip on myself and many others.

I spend way too much time on wikis reading about spin-off games made for handheld and mobile devices I will probably never play (there was a whole trilogy of Silent Hill: Orphan games that have lived up to their name by being orphaned on old phones). The Elder Scrolls Travels are a prime example—games made in the gap between Morrowind and Oblivion. The third in the series, Shadowkey, came out on Nokia's N-Gage handheld—a cross between a GameBoy Advance and a mobile phone that lasted two years before being discontinued in 2005.

This first-person RPG is about to return thanks to Dan Whelan, whose Shadowkey Reforged project will let us play Shadowkey in widescreen with controller support and upscaled graphics. You can choose to play in classic or modern mode, but you can also toggle individual features one by one. Modern mode isn't just a graphical upgrade as it also adds features from the later mainline Elder Scrolls games like stamina-based sprinting, stealth, and ragdoll physics.

This is one of those times where I prefer the original game's look, as the brutally abrupt draw distance leaves a lot to your imagination while the modernized version seems to show enemies looming unresponsively in the near distance. And it's not like the upscaled character models actually look good, despite being beyond what Nokia's taco phone was capable of displaying.

While Shadowkey was never particularly well-ranked in the pantheon of Elder Scrolls games, people did praise its use of the Morrowind soundtrack, which Shadowkey Reforged will continue. Point it to your Morrowind install and it'll borrow both music and sound effects from the best Elder Scrolls game.

To answer the obvious question, Whelan says in the FAQ: "I used AI to assist with coding and building the engine, and with debugging. I used AI image generation combined with Photoshop and some manual sprite editing to create most of the modern, higher resolution artwork."

Whelan plans to release Shadowkey Reforged on November 11, which is just 18 hours away at the time of writing. You'll be able to download Windows, Mac, and Android versions from the website, though you'll need the original game's files from your Nokia N-Gage as well, or whatever abandonware site you frequent.

Owlcat has released a new trailer for its coming Warhammer 40K RPG, Dark Heresy. The inquisition and investigation-focused RPG is now slated for a January 28 launch.

We've loved what we've seen of the game so far: Its focus on investigating heresy and closing cases represents something genuinely novel for Owlcat, which until now has focused on fantasies of rulership (with lite 4x/management gameplay) and quite good (and often very challenging) tactical battles.

One problem: I have a largely uncomplicated relationship with Owlcat games, because I've only ever played them a year-plus out from launch. PCG's other RPG heads, like weekend editor Jody Macgregor and online editor Fraser Brown, remain scarred by their experiences with pre-launch, review period Owlcat games. Jody, for example, lost hours of progress while working on his Rogue Trader review, and once told me that Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' extensive combat system "just didn't work" in the pre-release review period.

Hope springs eternal, though, and I'm a glass half-full type of guy. The corollary to Owlcat games launching rough is that they only get better over time, and the studio has done a phenomenal job supporting its games with both patches and massive story DLCs. Rogue Trader's final add-on, Processional of the Damned, is coming out a month from now on December 8, almost three years to the date after Rogue Trader's initial release.

And after Dark Heresy, there's still the matter of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. Owlcat is taking its own stab at a Mass Effect-style, sci-fi shooter RPG in the popular setting. How the team is juggling two projects of this magnitude (even at a vastly increased team size) is mind boggling, but I'm just happy to be along for the ride. You can currently wishlist Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy on Steam.

Last Friday, the very good RPG Nier: Automata underwent what the scientific community calls 'puffer-fishification'. That is to say, it suddenly and inexplicably ballooned to over 700% of its original download size, as an update magically transformed the game from a reedy 50 GB lightweight into a 366-GB behemoth.

But it has since hit the Ozempic and is now back down to its regular size. "We have identified the cause and now resolved this issue," tweeted the official Nier X account earlier today. "Apologies for any inconvenience caused."

Notably absent from the bugfix notice was any explanation as to just what had happened. It might be academic at this point, but I for one would love to know how you accidentally make a game seven times bigger without anything changing.

Squenix is keeping schtum, but Rick Lane suggested, in our article last week about the bug, that it might have been related to Nier: Automata's DLC packages. "When selected for download on Steam, each DLC appears to have the same file size as the base game", he noted. "Weirdly though, this is only true for the initial download and installation. Once the game is installed, the file reportedly reverts to a more appropriate size of roughly 50 gigs." Indeed, the suggested temporary workaround for the issue (before Square Enix fixed it) was to uncheck all the DLCs when you installed the game.

So it sure seems like, somehow, the base files for the entire original game got attached to each individual DLC package. That might also explain why the size increase only applied to the downloads and not its install size—the whole game got downloaded eight times, but it was simply overwriting the base game files over and over.

That's just my speculation though, and without more news from Squenix, that's all we're gonna get. For now, enjoy being able to once again download 2B and 9S' adventures without having to start the download two weeks in advance.

Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith had a wide-ranging chat with The Examined Game recently, touching upon topics like the importance of institutional knowledge, what he liked about Baldur's Gate 3, and what he wants to see in The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel. But he also dropped a pithy maxim (and less pithy explanation) about his—and Bethesda's—approach to design in general. Here's what he said.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a huge fan of the way YouTube encourages everything becoming a video that's over an hour long and doesn't have a text version available. There's a recent video putting the original Pool of Radiance into the greater context of the history of CRPGs that's almost 10 hours long, and the odds of me watching more than 10% of it are perishingly low.

Fortunately for you, we're here to convert video to text for your edification, as with The Examined Game's comprehensive interview with Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith. Asked how a game as successful as Skyrim came to be, Nesmith emphasized the importance of keeping the team together.

Speaking on a new episode of The Examined Game, Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith shared his big takeaway from Baldur's Gate 3, and contrasted the approaches Bethesda and Larian have taken in their respective RPGs.

PC gaming isn't short of multiplayer fantasy adventures these days, but there is still something alluring about the idea of playing Skyrim with pals. Some mods have facilitated small-scale Skyrim multiplayer in the past, like the cooperative mod Skyrim Together. But Aurbis goes several step further, converting Bethesda's RPG into a persistent online roleplaying server—essentially a Skyrim MMO in all but name.

According to its ModDB page, Aurbis transforms Skyrim's solo adventure into "a persistent world where player actions create lasting consequences", snythesising Skyrim's existing experience with a bunch of multiplayer and MMO-like systems. It's designed with roleplaying in mind, though the mod's creators stress that RP is not mandatory, and players can focus on other elements like cooperative dungeon runs or PvP play if they so choose.

The list of changes and additions to Aurbis is impressive, running from character creation outward. The retooled character builder is designed to let avatars "develop over time instead of becoming powerful immediately", though it also lets players start with vampirism or lycanthropy for roleplaying purposes.

Those roles are heavily defined by the player's choice of Birthsign, which affects how efficiently skills develop. Crafting professions are supported by a player-driven economy that factors in bank accounts, property ownership and player-created quests, while activities like combat are designed to be dangerous and reward "preparation, equipment, specialisation and teamwork."

Alongside these changes are entirely new, multiplayer specific systems. Players can form their own groups called Cohorts, designed to act as a "strong foundation for MMO-style social gameplay". This ranges from establishing parties and guilds to aligning yourself with Skyrim's existing factions, combining "familiar Skyrim content with custom multiplayer mechanics".

The list doesn't end there, either. There are more nuanced survival systems, complex horse management, MMO style death penalties, and much more. There's even a fully-fledged language and literacy system whereby players "do not automatically understand every conversation or know every location", so mastering language and literacy can provide a genuine roleplaying advantage.

It sounds wild, and this only represents an early access release. If you fancy investigating Aurbis, all you need is a legitimate copy of Skyrim that's downgraded to version 1.6.1170. The beta is invite-only, but a session key is listed on the ModDB page that should grant you access, while Aurbis has a custom launcher that downloads and maintains all required mods.

I've been playing Path of Exile for almost ten years and have put a ton of hours into PoE2 since it entered early access, and in all that time there's one feature that I've wished for more than any other. More than stash tabs, more than fancy microtransactions, even more than finally finding a mirror in the wild.

What I want more than anything is a death recap: a way to finally have some idea why my turbo powerful character that's blasting through a map went pop. At an interview at ExileCon this weekend, game director Jonathan Rogers confirmed that it's finally coming to Path of Exile 2.

I don't know whether Grinding Gear intended to announce the feature this weekend, but during the keynote's live demo of new content, Mark Roberts' character died. And there before our eyes, live and in person, was a death recap screen. After we all got done cheering, Rogers laughed and confirmed that the feature was present and would be included in the full 1.0 release coming up on December 11.

"I was really worried that it wasn't going to be useful enough or accurate enough, but we got it to a place that I'm fairly happy with," Rogers said when I asked him to confirm that the feature would be present at launch.

"The thing that's not quite good is the damage over time tracking," he added. "We do tell you that you took it but we don't know where it came from.”

Thankfully, it's a bit easier to parse taking damage over time in the game already, and he assured us that they're working on getting that sorted out as well.

One of the reasons that the death recap is such an important feature is that it can be incredibly hard to parse exactly what you should be focusing on with your character once you get to the endgame. A lot of times you've maxed your resistances, have a decent life pool, and a good amount of either armour, evasion, or energy shield, but still something comes along and explodes you. And since there are often many monsters on the screen, to say nothing of all the explosions or arrows or minions or ice comets that you yourself are spamming, it can be almost impossible to figure out what happened.

"The most important thing to be was like… here's the damage you took and how much of it was mitigated," says Rogers. "My goal was to drive you toward 'what is the thing I need to fix about my character to have avoided this.'" A big physical hit? Maybe some more evasion or life. Cold damage? Maybe grab a couple jewels with + to max cold res.

Sometimes though, the problem isn't with you. Sometimes you get a killer crab that kills hundreds of thousands of players due to a typo. He thinks the death recap will help here, too.

"This may sound a bit funny, but I think it'll actually give our players an avenue to complain about the correct things. Sometimes we just have monsters that have wrong balance values, it happens, and in the heat of battle you don't know what it was. Now you'll be able to say this particular monster is the one that has the damage that's off the hook and then it allows them to direct us to that."

Despite having their own internal systems to monitor monster behavior, nothing beats the urgency and immediacy of a legion of players crying out at once on the internet about killer crabs.

Mark Roberts went on to say that he anticipates that the feature "will 100% be asked for en masse" by Path of Exile 1 players, and if it is, they'll port that functionality over as soon as they can.

As for me, the death recap is but one of many amazing features I'm looking forward to in Path of Exile 2's full release. It will be available on December 11th.

"Not since the infamous debut of Daikatana has the release of a single game generated so much incensed indignation from early buyers." Our review of Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor didn't hold back. The 2001 dungeon crawler contained, our review said, "A multitude of outrageous bugs," including ones that corrupted saves, made quest items disappear, and most infamously deleted system files when you uninstalled the game.

SNEG's rerelease, available now on Steam and GOG, doesn't have those issues. It adds widescreen, controller support, adjustable combat speed, tooltips, an action bar, and sharpened visuals. If, like me, you skipped this one back in the day because of its reputation for being a hassle to play—even with the eventual patches and community fixes—now it's smooth and problem-free. I've played the opening hours without a single key item vanishing or save file going corrupt.

Don't get the wrong idea, though. Ruins of Myth Drannor isn't Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. This isn't an RPG masterpiece held back by its buggy release. It's a simplistic turn-based dungeon crawl that's mostly notable for being a spiritual successor to the first Gold Box D&D game, Pool of Radiance, and for adapting the then-new third edition of D&D's rules.

The 3.0 rules were a huge step forward at the time. Any character could choose any class, and Armor Class went up instead of down—you can't imagine how much of a drag it was explaining to new players that lower AC was better than high AC, and ideally you wanted a negative number. It also formalized the central mechanic of rolling a d20 and adding a number to beat a difficulty score. If you've played 5th edition, you'll recognize a lot of its DNA here.

Which is why it's a shame Ruins of Myth Drannor isn't a complete adaptation of those rules. You can't play a wizard—sorcerer is the only option for arcane casters—or a halfling or a gnome. You choose which class to improve when you advance a level, but don't get to decide where your skill points go or what feats to take. A couple of years later, The Temple of Elemental Evil would adapt the 3.5 rules update much more fully. Ruins of Myth Drannor feels rudimentary by comparison.

It's also not much of a story. Set 10 years after the events of Pool of Radiance, a new magical pool has opened in the ruined elven city of Myth Drannor so the evil sorceress and dracolich on the box art can get up to some shenanigans, and Elminster has sent a party of adventurers in to stop them. There's one fun twist to this otherwise bog-standard plot, and it's that you're not that first party of adventurers. You're the B-team sent as backup, but a magic portal mishap means you arrive too late to save the A-team and have to take on their quest.

Which explains why four level-one nobodies now have to clear out hundreds of orcs and skeletons from samey dungeon rooms. It's a slow-paced slog, especially in Myth Drannor's main halls, earning a drip-feed of experience points and gold coins from zombies and ghouls, hoping an orc doesn't score a crit and drop one of your party members in a single blow.

There are plenty of reasons not to like Ruins of Myth Drannor, but I've been enjoying it in spite of them. It's an undemanding RPG that offers simple pleasures. I get ambushed by skeletons, then realize my cleric is perfectly positioned to hit them all with Turn Undead. I meet a weird slug monster, try talking to him and find out he's friendly. I block doors to protect my sorcerer, while rushing enemy spellcasters before they get their big area-of-effect blast off.

It's junk food D&D, but then I mostly play D&D at a table covered in pizza and beer anyway. Between more demanding games, this is an ideal low-stakes guilty pleasure and I'm glad it's finally back.

We love a big RPG dilemma, don't we? Right up until the point where we actually have to make the choice and we stare at our screens for an uncomfortably long time, hoping we'll figure out a way to make a call and not feel absolutely terrible about it later.

For my money, the best—agonising, guilt-inducing—choices are the really personal ones. I love that Mass Effect lets me determine the fate of the galaxy in all these different ways, but it never gives me a reason to care about the rachni, for instance, or the council, so when I have to decide to save them or let them die, it becomes more of an abstract moral choice.

Disco Elysium, then, left me in tatters. It's more personal and intimate than a productive therapy session. There's a card you can read pretty early on, stuck inside a ledger, that opens the wound that Harry worked very hard—by abusing alcohol and drugs—to forget. If you toss it, you never get it back. That was a hard one. Is ignoring it a kind of liberation? Or are you just helping Harry hide from his trauma?

It's effective because it's powerfully relatable. You don't even need to have experienced a cataclysmic breakup to understand Harry in that moment. We've all got shit we'd really love to forget. Self-destructive choices that we made in a heated moment, leaving regret to constantly claw at us.

Relationship drama should be excellent fodder for RPG choices, but that rarely ends up being true. Usually they end up being friction free, but sometimes you'll be walloped with the classic trope of being forced to decide if they live or die—a cheap trick to force us to care about someone, even if they actually suck. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Ash.

That's why Geralt's romantic misadventures are so effective at spitting out challenging conundrums. The best thing about The Witcher 3's approach is that you can choose not to make a decision. It's so rare for games to recognise that indecision is another choice.

I desperately wanted Geralt to be happy. He deserved it. But I could not figure out the best way to go about giving him his happily ever after. The depths of his feelings for Yennefer nudge you towards making sure they have a life together, but god she's toxic. She regularly makes him feel like shit. Triss actually seems to make him happy, but is that just the safe pick?

So I never made the choice. I told both of them I loved them, and they left me tied to a bed while they went off to get drunk. My inability to make a choice was the worst choice. But it also ended up feeling poignant—Geralt so often gets in the way of his own happiness.

OK, what about you lot? What's the toughest choice I've had to make in an RPG? Let me know in the comments.

Todd Howard is one of the most recognisable names in game development, yet despite this, the Bethesda director's overarching thoughts on game design remain something of an enigma. Howard has admitted that he doesn't like talking about his games. As such, we rarely get much insight into his broader design philosophy.

Yet according to Bruce Nesmith, lead designer of Skyrim, Howard certainly has a specific set of skills when it comes to game design. In a wide-ranging interview with The Examined Game, Nesmith discussed his time working with Bethesda. During the chat, Nesmith was asked what it was like working with Howard, and he credited Howard with a knack for seeing things from the player's point of view:

"Part of what Todd has, historically for Skyrim and Fallout 3 and everything, been very good at is putting himself in the seat of your typical player," Nesmith explained. "As a developer, I sit in an ivory tower. It's inescapable … I think more deeply about games, definitely, than your typical player. And he's able to cut through that and see 'Oh yeah, they're looking for a little bit of joy here. Don't get in the way with your math and your complex decision here'".

When working up close with code and the day-to-day design of things, Nesmith pointed out that developers can overcomplicate things. "I would try to make things a little more complex, and he was more than willing to say 'No, no, that's not what the players are going to want. They're going to want something simple and more digestible here.'"

Nesmith clarifies that this isn't Howard's only talent and that he "thinks very deeply about games", while Nesmith himself can also "think from the player['s perspective]. But he says that both designers had a "bias" to see things from a particular direction, and in game development, it's often good to "find other people who have a counterbias to bounce your ideas off of so that you can get the well-rounded opinion."

On this subject, Nesmith cites an example of working with an artist who had an issue with the way The Elder Scrolls' 'detect life' spell worked in Oblivion. "He said, 'Look, this spell is cool. It does this really functional thing, but do you realise it ruins all the art? We take all this care in making these creatures and people and whatnot and making them highly detailed and look really great, and all you see is this smudge when you turn on that spell.'

"Well, in Oblivion it just stayed on for long periods of time. Look what we did in Skyrim. We made it a really expensive-to-maintain spell, so the way to use that spell properly was just keep it on for a second … we listened to what the artists were saying because they had a perspective we hadn't considered before."

This approach of seeing things from the player's perspective has certainly worked for Bethesda in the past. While it may not be everyone's favourite game in the series, Fallout 3 did an excellent job of making the RPG more approachable for players unfamiliar with the workings of oblique CRPGs. I do wonder, however, whether Bethesda took this design philosophy too far by the time Starfield rolled around, as the sci-fi adventure had such a simple roleplaying core that it lacked much of the dynamism and emergence that made the studios' previous RPGs so appealing.

Usually, it's a good thing when a patch makes an already excellent game substantially larger. But in the case of Nier: Automata's most recent update, bigger is most certainly not better. On Friday, the beloved action RPG from Square Enix received what should have been a straightforward update to add localisation support for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean languages. But as reported by Automaton Media, the update also increased the game's file size from 50 gigabytes to a staggering 366 (and a half) gigabytes.

"We have identified an issue following the latest update for Nier: Automata … where installation requires significantly more storage space than intended," wrote Square Enix in a Steam post. "We are currently investigating the cause and working to resolve the issue. We apologise for the inconvenience."

It isn't clear how this issue has occurred, but it may be related to Nier: Automata's DLC. When selected for download on Steam, each DLC appears to have the same file size as the base game. Weirdly though, this is only true for the initial download and installation. Once the game is installed, the file reportedly reverts to a more appropriate size of roughly 50 gigs.

Indeed, as a temporary solution, Square Enix suggests that anyone who needs to download Nier: Automata deselects all eight DLC when they do so. "As a temporary workaround, you can download the base game using the intended amount of storage space by going to "Properties" à "DLC" in Steam and unchecking each DLC item."

While 366 gigabytes is obviously a ridiculous size for a game, what's frightening to me is that games are on track to become that massive in the coming years. Big budget games regularly exceed the 100 gigabytes in file size these days, while several major titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, have surpassed 200GB.

One of the largest reported installations to date is for the combat simulator DCS World, which had a maximum file size of 250GB back in 2021. So although Nier: Automata's SSD-choking file-size is an accidental anomaly, it might also be an ominous glimpse into the future of PC gaming.

Path of Exile 2's full release is out on December 11, and coming with it are two new classes, two new acts, a new league, tons of new monsters, bosses, battles, endgame changes, gem updates, atlas and skill tree updates, a new pinnacle boss, base types, uniques, and, I don't know, probably a kitchen sink or something. Let's go over it.

First of all, we'll have two new classes: the Shadow and the Duelist. With them, we'll get all new skill gems for daggers and swords, with tons of new builds available. Daggers introduce new mechanics around stealth, traps, shadow skills with clones that attack with you, and classic skills like blade vortex and fire trap.

The Duelist will introduce swords, and with it fan favorite skills like cyclone and hemorrhage. With swords we'll be able to use stances like blood and sand or ready stance. Add to this being able to two-hand, dual wield, or sword and board and swords look to add a huge amount of mechanical complexity.

After two years of early access, the campaign will finally be fully finished. Acts five and six will complete our story of chasing the Beast through the world, with a return to Oriath and beyond. The campaign will also feature new bespoke rare monsters with their own abilities, appearances, and even mods. In addition, the campaign will feature an introduction to the league mechanic for 1.0, Conquerors of Wraeclast.

The league will feature a base building mechanic, where you recruit armies and build up a castle. As you progress through the campaign, you'll recruit armies to battle against enemy armies. There are over 70 points of interest throughout the campaign that let you recruit new types of soldiers for your army, and battle through to kill the boss and get loot.

As you progress your base, you can recruit commanders that will be able to take your recruits and fight battles for you. Like Kingsmarch in Path of Exile 1, these commanders can run maps for you, letting you convert your gold into progress through the atlas and lots of loot. Your castle gets upgraded just like Heroes of Might and Magic, with a beautiful base that you can spend gold to upgrade.

After all the pinnacle bosses and campaign, you can use your armies to battle against other players. Depending on which of the three factions you choose to join (Karui, Ezomyte, or Marraketh), you can battle to take control of various castles around the atlas. As long as your faction controls a castle, you can travel to it on the Atlas to skip around and get to sweet new maps, and you'll receive additional item rarity. It also unlocks hunting grounds nearby that feature rare monsters with increased loot. You'll be able to use currency you find in battle to craft gear, a system which lets you pick mods to remove and reroll into new fractured mods.

All of the new campaign areas feature new bosses, which you'll also face in the endgame in over 25 new maps.

The endgame has been updated as well—in addition to being able to use castles to jump around the atlas, the atlas skill tree has been substantially changed. Instead of 300+ nodes, it's been trimmed way down to about 70. If you beeline the skills, you should end up with about 50 of 70 by the time you battle against the Arbiter of Divinity.

Tons of gems have been updated. Not only are we getting new gems for daggers and swords, but they've added new skills for existing weapons as well. Support gems have been overhauled so that they're more useful as well, like all of the different elemental penetration gems being rolled into one called elemental penetration. Support gems like brutality are also better, with less of a penalty for chaos damage. Chain support becomes just an upgrade, without the penalty to damage on the initial hit.

The passive tree has had huge changes. In addition to a bunch of new nodes, they've changed how jewels work. Instead of always being located on the travel nodes on the outside of the tree, they'll be located in actual skill clusters. Hopefully this will prevent all of our endgame skill trees looking the same, with a big circle maximizing jewel slots and nothing else.

With tons of new items including base types and uniques, there will be lots of new loot to find. Some of the base types look insanely powerful, like an armor that makes you immune to curses. They've overhauled over 70 uniques and added about 40 more, which should make finding uniques way more exciting, especially in the campaign.

Taken all together, 1.0 looks like it will be an incredible moment for Path of Exile 2, both for players who've been waiting to play it, and for those of us who already have hundreds or thousands of hours in the ARPG. The full release of Path of Exile 2 will be available on December 11.

Today during ExileCon's keynote address Grinding Gear Games announced that Path of Exile 2's full release on December 11 will bring not one, but two new classes: Alongside the previously announced Duelist, 1.0 will also introduce the dagger-heavy, trap-wielding Shadow, capable of employing a suite of new stealth mechanics.

The Shadow's addition had been hinted at with a cryptic teaser trailer, which you can see here. The class's inclusion is welcome news to those of us—like yours truly—who very much enjoy playing these sneaky stabbers. On release, Shadows will be able to ascend as the returning Assassin, or choose a new ascendancy: the Infiltrator.

We know that eventually, every PoE2 character class will have (at least) three ascendancies. Whether the Shadow's third will be the Saboteur, the Trickster, or something new like the Sorceress's Disciple of Varashta is yet to be seen.

As has been the case with previous PoE 2 class additions, the Shadow's arrival will also introduce a new weapon type and abilities. In 1.0, alongside the Duelist's swords, we'll also be getting the dagger, and with it all new skill gems and supports. We should see an absolute explosion of playstyle archetypes on top of PoE2's already healthy build diversity.

The Shadow will introduce new mechanics like stealth, which prevents monsters from seeing you until you’re close by. It has a cooldown, but since it’s reset on kill, you should be able to use it to kill quickly from the shadows and get moving again.

Stealth interacts with the Shadow's returning trap skills, too. While PoE 1 traps were mostly just hucked at monsters' feet mid-combat, traps thrown from stealth in PoE 2 won't trigger until you reveal yourself, giving an actual feel of pulling off an ambush, There will be eight different trap types in 1.0, all of which interact with each other in unique ways.

There is, as ever is the case with Path of Exile, even more. When entering stealth, you leave behind a shade that blinds monsters and acts as a distraction. Your shade will also copy melee attacks you use, doubling up on your damage. And Shadows will be able to utilize a new Darkness resource, which can be collected from darkness-spreading skills to buff the damage you deal when emerging from stealth.

We’ll know more about these classes later, but between all these new abilities and ascendancies as well as two new acts, a new league, and endgame improvements Path of Exile 2’s full release is looking absolutely stacked.

Everyone's talking about Queen's Domain right now, but as someone who tried Queen's Domain and did not care for it, allow me to direct your attention to an alternative old-school dungeon crawler: Underkeep, which launched on Steam on November 5 and has been absolutely phenomenal through the roughly four hours I've put into it so far.

Like Queen's Domain, Underkeep is firmly rooted in the 1990s, but I'm talkin' the early '90s, and even before that: Classic grid-based RPGs like The Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, Wizardry, and Eye of the Beholder. In fact, as someone who loves Eye of the Beholder (specifically the second one, The Legend of Darkmoon), I noticed a lot of nearly direct lifts from that series: primarily visual, but also a few audio cues, that I swear I've heard before.

But my concerns that Underkeep might be a low-effort knockoff evaporated pretty quickly. After four hours of play I feel like I've barely scratched the game's surface: I still haven't found the titular village of Underkeep, where I assume the real action will begin, but I've crashed (literally, in a few cases) through multiple dungeons, all interconnected horizontally or vertically, and explored an overworld that's a whole lot bigger than I expected. At the very least, Underkeep looks beefy.

Underkeep's gameplay preserves the vibe of those old-time RPGs while eliminating most of their more objectionable nonsense. Its shared inventory is divided into categories that make managing and swapping equipment between party members extremely easy, the automapping is detailed while still allowing freehand notes (I know, I know, get some paper and do your own maps, but who has time for that these days?), and tools are used automatically without needing to be equipped.

And unlike so many games in the genre, Underkeep is entirely turn-based. This eliminates the cheese strategy of hitting an enemy and moving a step away before they can hit back, which carried so many gamers through so many fights in so many games over the years. But it also encourages more thoughtfulness: When I see an enemy in the distance, I can take my time to think about what I want to do, move to a more advantageous position, or even just go take a break for a while.

I'm free to do whatever I want until melee combat actually begins. Once that happens, everyone in the party has to finish their turn, and then let the enemies finish theirs, at which point we're all free to run away (and probably be chased) or launch another round of fighting. I'll always come down on the real-time-with-pause side of the argument for isometric RPGs, but the turn-based approach is ideal for Underkeep.

Character classes are a fairly standard mix—fighter, paladin, wizard, thief, that sort of thing—but the races are a bit more interesting. Humans and dwarves are on the menu, and "elk" are kind of like elves, but then you get the stoneborn, raven, and slugman, all of them nicely weird. Stoneborn, for instance, are basically golems⁠—extremely strong and tough, but they have the agility of a Mack truck and can't wear body armor. They're basically a boulder that can hit you really hard, which is great in some ways but has some real drawbacks too. Ravens, meanwhile, are subject to random mutations that can take them off in unforeseeable directions: My own raven character recently mutated a healing buff called Roommate from the Void: "Something moved into your body at some point and never left. It pays rent in blood."

Slugmen, well, they're just slugs who are also men. They look like this:

There's also no limit to combining races and classes: A stoneborn thief or slugman paladin may not be a great idea, but if you want to give it a shot, knock yourself out.

The encounter artwork is also lovely:

There's not a lot of reading to do in Underkeep, but the writing for those encounters is pleasingly evocative in an old-school tabletop way, and there are plenty of surprises to be had too. Depending on how you deal with the red-cloaked guy above, for instance, you may get a reward, you might get jumped, or you could find yourself facing some sort of bigger trouble down the road—that's not confirmed yet, but I definitely got some 'Be seein' you' stinkeye from him before he slunk off into the next life.

It makes me a little sad to say, but one of my first thoughts when I saw Underkeep was whether the assets were made with generative AI. I'm not the only one to have that worry: Multiple arguments about it are underway in the Steam forums right now. Unlike some people in those conversations who say they "can just tell" when AI is present, I cannot—but the Steam store page has no AI disclosure, and developer Rake in Grass has repeatedly insisted that no generative AI was used.

"All artwork in Underkeep was hand-drawn by our artists," an FAQ states. "Some variations in style are natural, as several artists contributed to the game. The occasional "mixels" are caused by dynamic scaling used to simulate 3D perspective and smooth animations."

It's unfortunate that debates like this are so commonplace now, because Underkeep is a joy: I haven't played a whole huge lot of them in recent years, but this is easily my favorite grid-based RPG since the great Legend of Grimrock 2, which is now 12 years old. (Quick correction: The original Grimrock will soon be 15, Grimrock 2 isn't quite there yet. Thanks to Sebastian for letting me know.)

Underkeep is out now on Steam for $19.50, a 15% launch discount on the regular price that's available until November 19. You can also sample the goods by way of the demo, which offers about an hour of highly compressed gameplay and some fun surprises.

David Gaider, the creator of Dragon Age's Thedas and co-founder of Summerfall Studios, has been moonlighting on The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, lending Owlcat Games his expertise.

Gaider revealed that he's been working with Owlcat on Bluesky today, saying, "Alongside my work at Summerfall, I've also been collaborating with the Owlcat Games team on The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, focusing on certain aspects of the game's narrative. The Expanse has long been one of my favourite series, and so obviously I jumped at the opportunity to be involved."

The Expanse is a bit of a departure for Owlcat, which is known for its elaborate isometric CRPGs like Wrath of the Righteous and Rogue Trader. The Expanse, meanwhile, is more of a cinematic RPG and third-person shooter in the vein of Mass Effect. That said, it's still full of skill checks and roleplaying, and when I played it at Gamescom Owlcat's CRPG legacy was still very much present.

While Gaider worked on Dragon Age rather than Mass Effect, he's got plenty of experience working on both classic CRPGs (he was a writer on Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights) and their more cinematic successors (he was lead writer on Dragon Age: Origins and Inquisition). I really enjoy Gaider's writing, so this sounds like great news.

Along with Gaider's announcement, Owlcat has also shown off the new voice for the game's male protagonist and their twin. The studio decided to recast the role after getting feedback from beta players, and settled on voice actor Blythe Melin. You can see him in action in the video below.

"Voicing both the Captain and J has been an incredible joy and a unique challenge compared to the rest of my work voicing in videogames over the years," said Melin. Two biologically related characters! It presented a difficult task in itself, because I find it very important to make sure neither character felt one-note-ey or too similar to the other. The more a character talks, especially in a multi-path dialogue route like for this game, the harder the task of making characters feel fleshed out while still having their own flavors and mannerisms."

Melin's previous work includes Wolverine, Aether & Iron, Painkiller and various Hoyoverse games.

As a fan of Owlcat, The Expanse and Gaider, I'm keen to get my hands on the game again, and thankfully it's not too far off. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is due in spring 2027.

Psst, hey kid, what are the big changes you'd like to see in The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel? Because all have them, don't we? We've all got our big lists for Todd Howard: Five Easy Ways to Turn This Enormously Profitable Ship Around.

You know who else has some changes he'd like to see in Sentinel? Bethesda alum and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith, who recently sat down with The Examined Game and said that the things he'd really like Bethesda to knuckle down on in TES 6 are mounts and ladders.

"I'd like to see a much better implementation of mounts," said Nesmith. "That's been a common complaint; I'm not alone in that." But mounts can be hard to get right. "They're really tricky, there's a lot of hard decisions to be made in those.

"You can ride a horse, but that's all you can do in Skyrim. That's it, you just ride the horse. Well, I should be able to do some other things too, maybe fight on the horse, or have it fight with me, you know, stuff like that." In fairness, Skyrim does have some fairly rudimentary mounted combat—though players had to wait for it to be added in a patch back in the day—but I suspect Nesmith would like to see something a bit less awkward in future Elder Scrolls games.

I imagine a lot of players would echo Nesmith on mounts. I'm less sure they share his concern about ladders, which strikes me as a very charming and very game-designer-y fixation to have. "You don't climb up and down ladders [in current Elder Scrolls games]. It seems simple, it seems stupid, but you don't climb up and down ladders!"

But you know what? I'm on board. Not having proper ladders, says Nesmith, "really limits the art team in terms of how they can do multi-layer things. You know, all the ladders in Skyrim, you click on the ladder, poof you're at the top, or you have to climb a stair."

Advanced ladder tech has its costs, though. "To do ladders, you have to deal with a whole host of questions, which our programmers very legitimately put in front of us, and said 'You gimme answers to these, I'll tell you how much programming time it's gonna take to make them'. And that caused problems, right there".

There are, it turns out, a whole lot of ladder questions that arise if you try to implement them in your game. If two people use a ladder at once, what happens? How do NPCs make strategic decisions about them? How do you create animations and behaviours for characters getting hit while climbing, or dying while climbing? All these things and more pile up, which is why Bethesda decided to spend its time on other stuff, historically.

Now, of course, it's not Nesmith's problem, and the man wants his mounts and ladders. Bravely, as someone else who also does not have to design The Elder Scrolls 6, I say give them to him.

Reader, a confession: each night, before I retire to my chambers, I light a small votive candle. Bowing over it, I clasp my hands and beseech the ghost of Josh Sawyer (who is not dead) to return to the Pillars of Eternity games and add the weirdly-decent gamepad support they got on console to their PC iterations. I am an old man who wants to play them on my Steam Deck, and the existing Steam Input templates don't cut it for me.

My prayers are answered. In an announcement yesterday, Obsidian declared that now is the time of the Pillars of Eternity and Deadfire: Controller Support Public Test. Both PoE 1 and 2 have ongoing Steam betas that will allow you to play with full, start-to-finish controller support. You can opt into them and try the new feature for yourself by visiting each game's properties and opting into their respective November 4 beta versions.

Being betas, they're a touch buggy right now. Indeed, one of Obsidian's very first notices to players in the public test's announcement is "This is a public test, so please expect bugs", but I'm nevertheless impressed by the limited time I've spent mucking around with the games on Steam Deck.

There are a couple of misaligned gamepad prompts, and a very slight amount of awkwardness with the analogue movement, but frankly my main takeaway is 'Dang, it's kind of wild how well these isometric CRPGs adjust to non-keyboard-and-mouse support'. Which, yeah, is how I felt about the console versions too.

The public test runs until November 25, and the devs will use the data gathered to iron out wrinkles like those I just listed for a full release.

It's not all about gamepad support, by the way. Just, you know, mostly. Obsidian also announced patch 1.3.10.0 for PoE 1 and patch 5.1.0.0 for Deadfire. In PoE 1's case, the patch mostly smooths out some minor niggling bugs with the UI and the game's recently implemented turn-based mode.

Deadfire's patch is meatier: that game's older turn-based mode has been rejigged to integrate the improvements from PoE 1's turn-based mode. Characters no longer take a single turn per round (instead, they move as much as their initiative allows), lethality has been greatly increased—that kinda thing.

I'm a die-hard real-time-with-pause guy, so it's all fairly academic to me, but PoE 1's turn-based innovations got a lot of plaudits from players who were very hopeful they would end up ported back to Deadfire. My friends, this one is for you.

Yesterday, after eight years of waiting, Bethesda finally gave The Elder Scrolls 6 a title: Sentinel. It then warned that, after eight years of waiting, more waiting is in store because "it'll be some time before we're ready to share more." Then Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, one of the industry's best-known and most reliable reporters, weighed in, saying the game is "still more than two years away."

You know what comes next, right?

Schreier's 'two more years' statement, echoed by Jez Corden of Windows Central, attracted quite a range of comments, not all of them of the polite sort. That led Schreier to Reddit, where he could elaborate on his statement.

Pointing out his record of accurate calls on previous Bethesda releases Fallout 76 and Starfield, Schreier wrote, "I'm a reporter. I am not telling you this because I enjoy watching people get mad about having to wait for sequels to their favorite video games. I am telling you this because it is true, and because my job is to report accurate facts and clear up misinformation. TES6: Sentinel is more than two years away."

Did this clarification calm the roiling waters? Well...

Many of the replies are understanding, grateful, and sympathetic to Schreier's plight, but there are plenty that express doubt or distrust, suggesting that the two year window was pure speculation. Others want to know why Bethesda would drop the title announcement yesterday if the game really is that far out, given that Todd Howard has previously expressed regret about revealing The Elder Scrolls 6 so prematurely in the first place. Why repeat that mistake?

A few optimistic souls are holding onto the dream of a 2027 release that emerged from the reveal trailer for Skyrim on the Nintendo Switch 2:

And then there are the Elder Scrolls fans operating on a whole different level from the rest of us. Redditor Reacryoum, for instance, thinks Bethesda is leading up to a surprise trailer drop on November 11—that's actually one of the more grounded theories to emerge over the past 24 hours. Casting back to one of Bethesda's old Twitter posts, Jayehemcee speculated that the theme of the game is "time," and that this is all part of the game's marketing. I'm not sure how that one works in practice, frankly, but I respect the ambition.

Minimum-Act-7571 put forth the idea that Bethesda is actually messing with Schreier by intentionally feeding him false information, because it's super mad at him spilling the beans all the time—although they also admitted that it's a "new copium theory," and so perhaps not meant to be taken entirely seriously.

I think the best of the bunch, though, is this one from Any-West7160, who believes the Sentinel title reveal contains the actual release date: November 11, 2027. I don't believe it, but I like it.

Here's the video in question—what do you see in the stars?

The best videogame conspiracy theories are always the most bonkers, but what complicates the situation just a wee little bit for Sentinel is that one such theory was actually correct: The Sentinel subtitle was stashed away in a Starfield easter egg for years before anyone noticed. Maybe it was just a coincidence, sure, but the numbers don't lie, as the saying goes—and those numbers said Sentinel. And they were right!

So there's precedent there, pretty certainly, but it's also a lot easier to drop in a reference to a locked-in-stone game title than it is to do the same with a relatively far-off launch date that's subject to disruption and delays. And as others have pointed out, including Schreier, it's extremely unlikely that anyone is just lying about the far-off release window for a little bit of PR pop: Evasion and word games are one thing, but straight-up dishonesty will leave your credibility in shreds pretty much instantly.

What it all adds up to, ultimately, is this: Two more years of waiting and maybe more, plenty of hopium and copium along the way, and a wise piece of advice from Vanquisher_84 which will almost certainly go unheeded:

See you in 2029?

When the Greybeards invite you to High Hrothgar in Skyrim, you have to climb a mountain to reach them. There's a messenger called Klimmek waiting in the village of Ivarstead at the bottom to warn you what an arduous journey this is going to be. To get to the top of the Throat of the World, he says, you have to work your way up The 7,000 Steps.

It's well-documented that there aren't actually 7,000 steps carved into the side of the mountain. Some of them are buried under the snow, making an exact count impossible, but the actual number is closer to 700. And even if you argue that The 7,000 Steps refers to the number of footsteps it takes to ascend the mountain, according to the dedicated researchers at the Ultimate Elder Scrolls Portal it only takes "approximately 2,400 footsteps" to get there.

As part of Bethesda's 40th anniversary, which included the reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6's subtitle, the studio reminisced about their previous work, which is how we know they really did try to get 7,000 steps into the side of the mountain.

Of course, like most open world games, Skyrim isn't designed to scale—otherwise the capital city of Solitude would have a population of less than 100 people. But in the same way that for every named NPC we should assume there are a bunch of people off-camera, distances are compressed so that it doesn't take a week to get anywhere. For every step we watched the Dragonborn climb there are another nine implied steps we don't see, and even more frost trolls.

You might be thinking, if you're the optimistic sort, that today's official unveiling of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel means that wheels are turning and things are happening and you're going to be off to Hammerfell soon—or at the very least, learning more about what's coming in Bethesda's next big RPG. Alas, in a follow-up post on social media, the studio made it clear that you shouldn't start holding your breath just yet.

"Thank you for 40 years of shared memories," Bethesda wrote. "We can't wait to make even more together with The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Development continues, and while it'll be some time before we're ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you."

Thank you for 40 years of shared memories. We can’t wait to make even more together with The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Development continues, and while it’ll be some time before we’re ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you.

— @bethesdastudios.com (@bethesdastudios.com.bsky.social) 2026-11-03T19:25:45.598Z

"Some time" is obviously not a defined span, but I find that generally speaking it's a nicer, more politic way of saying "long time"—for instance, you could say it's been "some time" since Bethesda first announced the Elder Scrolls 6, and yeah, that's true. It was also eight freakin' years ago, and we've heard basically nothing since.

That is, very roughly, the same amount of time Bethesda needed to make the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena, as well as Daggerfall, Morrowind, the Morrowind expansions Tribunal and Bloodmoon, and the spinoff games Battlespire and Redguard. If you're (relatively) new to the series, eight years represents the span between Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls Online, a stretch interspersed by Skyrim and five major expansions: Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles for Oblivion, and Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn for Skyrim.

Of course, Bethesda's had other things on the go over the past eight years too. Todd Howard said shortly after The Elder Scrolls 6 reveal that it was in pre-production, while Starfield was in full production. Starfield was Bethesda's top priority in the years leading up to its 2023 release; Howard later said that they'd just wanted to answer the fan question (are you making a new Elder Scrolls?) that came up every time they announced something else, like Starfield.

"Just pretend we didn't announce it," he joked. "Doesn't exist. No one's heard a word."

How long Sentinel will take to get from here to launch is anybody's guess, although Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said on Bluesky that it's "still more than two years away." When questioned about his prediction, Schreier asserted that it's not a prediction at all, and that he knows "the time frame the game is targeting."

Eight years after it was announced, it's finally officially official: The next RPG in Bethesda's long-running Elder Scrolls series is called Sentinel.

The title was revealed in a video celebrating Bethesda's 40th anniversary, narrated by Todd Howard (of course), who cast back to the studio's first game, Gridiron—Bethesda was big on sports games back in the day—before moving into The Elder Scrolls series, the games that would take it to the big leagues, in the early 1990s.

"As we're here in the 40th anniversary, we think about all of the games we've made," Howard says as the video draws to an end.

"And so even though yes, we're looking back,we're also looking forward to all we're doing, particularly with the Fallout franchise and obviously The Elder Scrolls. You know, everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6. And we thought, hey, given the moment, what a perfect time to tell you what The Elder Scrolls 6 is actually called."

And thus is the title revealed: Sentinel.

There's an interesting quote after the title is revealed: "The scroll offered only a shimmer, a veil thinly lifted to my eyes. A future lost. A victory undone. Sands of time scattered by fate." Those words were uttered by Yazar, Moth Priest of High Queen Iradne of Hammerfell in the year 4E 206, which was UESP pointed out puts Sentinel at least five years after the events of Skyrim.

No other details are revealed, but the title (and that quote) presumably also reveals the setting: Hammerfell, home of the redguards. Sentinel itself is one of Hammerfell's major kingdoms and capital of the Alik'r Desert—reflected in the teaser's sandy backdrop. It's something of a geographical shift from the flyover of the generic mountains seen in that 2018 reveal, although the Alik'r is bordered by the Dragontail Mountains, so who knows.

But, for those who like to dig deep in search of clues, here's the best image I could get of the jewelled whatsit revealed under the sand, just before it disappears. Mean anything to you?

So there you have it! The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel. Hopefully it won't take another eight years before we hear anything more about it.

If you are playing Morrowind in 2026, my recommendation is that you do so using OpenMW, its 18-year-old fan-made and open-source engine reimplementation that makes it run smooth as butter on any modern machine you point it at, whether you're running Windows, Linux, macOS or, hell, FreeBSD if you wanna get really sicko with it. It's simply the most convenient way to get a cromulent version of Bethesda's best game running on modern systems.

And now it has a new version. Or rather, a new release candidate that will prove the basis of its upcoming 0.52 version. Released a couple of days ago, OpenMW 0.52 RC1 contains a bunch of fixes, some new features, and one minor alteration to the fundamental forces of the universe. It's not the doozy of, say, OpenMW 0.50—which added gamepad support and thereby made Morrowind on Steam Deck dizzyingly easy—but it's still pretty meaty.

For instance, consider: "Water-walking actors now drown when knocked out" and "Implemented terminal velocity". Say what you like, but the second of those seems pretty meaningful for a game that contains Scrolls of Icarian Flight and the first is quite a funny sentence. The terminal velocity fix contains, within itself, a sub-fix for the basic laws of reality: "fixed gravity being 0.01% off"). We are free of our shared hell.

The biggest new feature in OpenMW 0.52 is probably the lighting stuff. It's called clustered lighting and it removes "the normal per-object light limit". I don't really know what that means either, but the short and tall of it, per an explanatory August blog post, is that "it has a dramatically lower performance impact than raising the limit to Aetherius. In fact, the performance can in some cases be better than with the regular light limit."

Morrowind, one of the best videogames ever made, continues to get better.

I tried the demo for Queen's Domain last year and liked it a lot⁠—though it definitely had some friction I wasn't sure about. The full game launched on October 30, and I eagerly rushed through the parts I'd already played in the demo.

Turns out, that demo cut out right when things were about to go nuts.

Five hours in out of an estimated 30+, and Queen's Domain is easily one of my top games of the year. I am only begrudgingly writing this, because I'd rather be playing right now.

Queen's Domain starts out resembling other entries in a growing subgenre of indie King's Field-likes, paying homage to the first-person dark fantasy RPG series FromSoftware put out before its soulsward turn. In its first half hour or so, Queen's Domain distinguishes itself similarly to fellow genre standout Lunacid: Fantastic art, maybe even better music, and a mastery of nostalgic intangibles (menu, UI, sound cues, etc.) After beating the first boss, Queen's Domain rewards you with a magic airdash sword, and it's at that point that the game truly begins.

Queen of the skies

Queen's Domain is a very deliberately paced game and, like a lot of first-person RPGs, it starts out feeling like your boots will always be on the ground. Think the difference between Doom and Quake: You can mostly tell when a game will let you get some air or not.

But once I was rocking the Holy Sword, Endu? Holy shit. Queen's Domain's first area opens up like some wonderful clockwork contraption. A lot of the verticality reminds me of Destiny raids, the way hidden paths blend into the environment, and reaching them feels like you're sequence breaking.

Endu can be upgraded with special gems throughout the game, with each giving you an extra dash while airborne. I'm up to three at the time of writing, and each upgrade has felt like it radically opened up my traversal options: There are parts of the first few maps I'm pretty sure I'll only be able to reach once I'm up to four or five dashes, zooming from one end of the map to the other without touching the ground.

Endu's a standout, but it's not the only tool available: Queen's Domain seems to have an expansive arsenal, and weapons can transform as they're upgraded. You upgrade weapons just by using them, and the game has no stat allocation on level up, encouraging experimentation with the arsenal⁠—PC Gamer hardware writer James Bentley managed to max upgrade 20 weapons across his full playthrough. You can effectively create a "build" via your choice of which weapons to hotkey (limit of three) and upgrade, a system that more resembles BioShock or the System Shock Remake rather than something like Dark Souls or Lunacid.

My favorite alongside Endu so far has been the Caestus, a type of medieval knuckle duster that's been a standby of the Souls games. Here, it's a fast-attacking blunt weapon useful against slashing-resistant skeletons. Instead of a horizontal dash like Endu, its special attack is an uppercut that launches my character into the air. Plenty of fun to use on enemies, but I've loved deploying it as an effective double jump to reach otherwise-inaccessible areas⁠—and there's always been a surprise or meaningful reward waiting for me when I do.

Don't give up, skeleton

My coworker, PCG staff writer Morgan Park, initially bounced off the pre-Endu, demo-equivalent portion of Queen's Domain. I'm here to say stay strong, prayer warriors. It is worth getting through that first half hour. While there's something to be said about it potentially putting new players off, I think the contrast between pre-and post-Endu gameplay is so strong, it makes the air dash feel all the more powerful. You know what it's like to be stuck on the ground, and you won't take it for granted.

It's the sort of contrast metroidvanias thrive on⁠—I always think of how dinky you feel before you get the wall jump in Hollow Knight⁠—and Queen's Domain's brilliant level design might leave it the best first-person metroidvania anyone's made since the first Metroid Prime.

And I think Prime's a strong comparison point overall here: The cryptic atmosphere, breathtaking vistas, and genuinely unique approach to first-person movement and level design speak to that. I'm already seeing hints toward game-spanning backtracking in my future, but I've got reason to suspect Queen's Domain's backtracking will be less frustrating and obtuse than Metroid Prime's.

I already love this game, and I am about to mainline it over the next 30 hours or so of my free time⁠—stay tuned for our full Queen's Domain review to come. Meanwhile, Queen's Domain is available on Steam for a launch price of $17, down from an MSRP of $20.

Persona tragics have been begging for remakes of the first two games in the series for ages (at least, the ones who aren't begging for remakes of the PS2-era Shin Megami Tensei games instead). After thoroughly milking Persona 4 and 5, series producer Kazuhisa Wada said in August, "personally, I think it's something we should definitely do."

Now, almost two minutes of footage from what sure looks like a Persona 1 remake has leaked via the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit. It shows some dungeon exploration, typically flashy combat, and a dialogue scene all in the modern Persona style.

Oddly, Tatsuya from Persona 2 is one of the party members, though it's possible this is a cross-promotional skin you can equip. Or maybe the remakes will incorporate some kind of Persona Q-style crossover?

While it's fair to be suspicious this could be AI-generated footage, it seems both a bit too long and too internally consistent for that to be the case. And it's not like Atlus hasn't got form, given that we found out the Persona 3 remake was real via a leak as well.

In a new Q&A vlog on his YouTube channel, Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer took a question about why there are so few RPGs in contemporary urban settings. Part of the problem, according to Sawyer: They're more difficult and costly to make than other RPG environments.

Elsewhere in this section, Sawyer cited Baldur's Gate 2's Athkatla, Disco Elysium, and the recent Zero Parades as RPGs that land the plane on believable, dense urban environments⁠—though Sawyer notes that the latter two have the advantage of not needing to work in as many believable combat encounters as other RPGs.

A few others spring to mind for me: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Cyberpunk 2077, and Baldur's Gate 3's version of the titular city. But all of those really highlight Sawyer's point about expense and challenge. Vampire and Cyberpunk were notoriously difficult development cycles for their respective studios. I'll always be a BG3 Act 3 defender, but it's definitely the part of the game with the most noticeable seams.

But even if they're hard to make, I love urban adventures in RPGs, whether as part or the whole of a game. Novigrad and Oxenfurt are two of my favorite parts of The Witcher 3, for example. For a real niche example of an urban RPG you should have on your radar, I highly recommend the early access Moves of the Diamond Hand.

It's easy to knock old-school RPGs, especially grindfests like RuneScape, for being games where you endlessly and sometimes mindlessly make numbers go up. But Melvor Idle, which self-bills as a RuneScape-inspired idle adventure game that claims to squeeze the genre into its "purest form," leans into that—and Jagex has partnered with developer Games by Malcs to make the RuneScape connection official.

The announcement blog from Jagex reads, "Melvor Idle takes a lot of inspiration from RuneScape and you can just feel it," adding that Jagex's support (and branding) is intended to help make the game "even bigger … while Melvor Idle 2 doesn’t take place in Gielinor, we think a fan-built idle game inspired by our MMOs is more than worthy of the title."

This isn't the first time Jagex has collaborated with Games by Malcs. It became the first Melvor Idle's publisher five years ago, albeit without a branding tweak. While RuneScape has had its fair share of monetization controversies over the years (you can see just how skeptical people were of the partnership when it was first announced on Reddit), it doesn't seem like Melvor has been compromised by trouble along those lines—the announcement blog proudly proclaims the sequel will have "no microtransactions."

Beyond that, it seems like a bigger version of the familiar idle RPG with overhauled visuals and a higher level cap of 120. You might find it a bit odd that it's a "RuneScape Adventure" that doesn't take place in the MMO's setting, but I'm not sure how many people are really invested in Jagex's games for the scintillating lore and worldbuilding. If you end up feeling like a stranger in a strange land, you can always hire someone to spam "buying gf" in a chat window while you get your idle on.

As reported by Eurogamer, FromSoftware has shut down multiplayer (invasions, co-op, messages) in Dark Souls 2 and 3 for an indeterminate amount of time due to an undisclosed "server issue." The company shared the news in an October 30 post on X, "The Everything App."

The closure affects all platforms for each respective game, and the company said that it would provide an updated timeline for server restoration once it had more information. This isn't the first time something like this has happened with FromSoftware's back catalogue. In early 2022, on the eve of Elden Ring's release, a catastrophic remote code execution vulnerability was discovered in all of the Dark Souls games. That resulted in PC servers for the series getting shut down for months.

But there are key differences here: It's only Dark Souls 2 and 3 this time around, while the issue extends to all platforms, not just PC. That gives me some hope that this issue is not only less serious, but it will take less time to resolve as well.

It honestly couldn't have happened at a better time for PC players, though: Legend modder Yui's Seamless co-op series runs on its own servers, separate from the official FromSoft ones, meaning the party's still going if you download the mod and play that way. Dark Souls 2 finally got the Seamless co-op treatment at the end of September (Dark Souls 3 has been covered for awhile).

As its name implies, Seamless Co-op makes it easier to play through the entirety of these games together with a friend or friends, offering shared progress and no disconnects on death or defeat of a boss. I've been loving Dark Souls 2 Seamless Co-op alongside my PC Gamer colleagues Tyler Colp and Sean Martin.

The case as presented by Rebelzize seems fairly open and shut: A volunteer team being sued by a former volunteer over contributions excised from the project? There are potential material benefits to consider: Skyblivion has a level of scope and popularity that could leave participation in it as strong a resume line as shipping a commercial game. Fallout London's developers even pivoted to being their own indie studio.

But that's not a clear-cut monetary incentive, and the clout of participation is contingent on productive contribution to the project. While it is worth noting that we only have Rebelzize's accounting of events, I think there are green flags pointing to his trustworthiness:

• The call to action is for pro bono legal aid in line with the project's overall volunteer nature, not fundraising.
• The former volunteer is not named, and Rebelzize urges against the sort of Reddit gumshoe sleuthing you see so often in these situations.
• Skyblivion as a whole has run for a long time without major scandal.

Unless you, the reader, are or know a lawyer with expertise in IP/GDPR cases⁠—check out Skyblivion's website to contact them, in that case⁠—there's not much for a given fan of the project to do. Rebelzize noted that he has paid legal help lined up should the call for volunteers fail. Even if a lawsuit is filed, it does not sound⁠—at least from this vlog⁠—like it could imperil Skyblivion's release. I have questions, but ideally this whole situation will resolve cleanly enough that we never know exactly what happened:

• What, specifically, did this volunteer work on in the game?
• Did redoing this work have any bearing on Skyblivion's delay from 2025 into '26?
• What happened here interpersonally? Was there an issue of crediting the work done? Are there any missing details that, if they don't justify the volunteer's legal threat, at least make it more understandable?

At last call, Skyblivion was still scheduled to release this year, but time is running short for that goal. We Elder Scrolls-likers at PC Gamer have been excited about it for years. Skyblivion promises a more ground-up remake of TES 4: Oblivion⁠—complete with radically redesigned dungeons and biomes⁠—in Skyrim's engine. This is in contrast to the more graphics-focused Oblivion Remastered we got in 2025.

As reported by MMORPG.com, Square Enix has delayed Final Fantasy 14's Evercold expansion to February 2 from its initial January launch window. Preorders for the add-on will open up on Wednesday, November 4⁠—those preorders also come with early access to the expansion on February 19.

The news was delivered by FF14 honcho Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida at the opening day of Final Fantasy 14's 2026 Fan Festival in Tokyo. Yoshi-P explained that the team was committed to its January window, and were even "just barely" on track to meet that schedule. Quality concerns led Yoshi-P to make the call on three extra weeks of development time.

One month isn't enormous in the context of most game development these days, but it is fairly impactful for the audience and overall pace of updates in a live service concern like Final Fantasy 14. Evercold will be the first new expansion for Final Fantasy 14 since the release of Dawntrail in July, 2024.

From the outside, Final Fantasy 14 has struck me as one of the more high-morale MMO communities out there, but I was permanently scarred by peak pandemic, Season of the Worthy Destiny, so my standards might be pretty low. In her 2025 state of the game writeup at the beginning of the Dawntrail era, PCG features producer Mollie Taylor observed that FF14 was in "a pretty weird spot."

But Mollie seems cautiously optimistic for Evercold's promised changes, while a recent roguelike mode added to FF14 has news writer Harvey Randall excited for the upcoming expansion's combat overhaul. Its new class looks pretty dope as well: A viking with two shields, laser cannons, and Wolverine claws.

'Tis the season, spooky season, and I am also one of PCG's RPG guys. Thus, scary RPGs to celebrate the Halloween spirit must be organized and expounded upon. In a genre that often delivers numbers-based power fantasies in no particular rush, it can be difficult to elicit fear from the player. So when that does happen, I am listening, learning, and taking notes.

I've organized the entries in escalating order of scariness, culminating in a game I want to try some day, but freaks me the hell out just by reputation alone.

10. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 - The Sith Lords

Kotor 2 is one of my favorite games, and it delivers this overall grim, grimy, hopeless atmosphere like nothing else in Star Wars. Many RPGs consolidate their horror into one or two super-freaky parts, and The Sith Lords boasts a few memorable set pieces in this regard.

The academy on Korriban is particularly affecting for me: This ruined, haunted school where untold suffering took place in the relatively recent past. Seeing it in its gruesome prime in Kotor 1 only adds to the effect. You've seen what the beast can do, and now you're poking its corpse.

Shout out as well to the opening bit on Peragus, specifically the part where ghost ship Harbinger docks with the station. The whole sequence is a very fun and loving riff on System Shock, and I'll always remember this gnarly audio log that introduces one of the game's main antagonists.

6. Fallout

Fallout is a series that has reinvented itself over and over again, but no other entry has quite matched the sense of desolation in the 1997 original. Even the most gore-slick, in-your-face edgy portions of Fallout 3 don't quite do it for me in the same way.

More than anything, I just think of the ethering, "nothing is scarier" sight of the Vault Dweller standing alone amid tiles of empty desert, the drone of Mark Morgan's ominous soundtrack your only company⁠—assuming you're not just left in utter silence.

The incongruity of jolly old radio bops used to be a far smaller portion of the Fallout soundscape, with the music more dominated by stuff like "Vat of Goo" and "City of Lost Angels." As far as the visual experience goes, the yawning crater of The Glow remains one of the most quietly disturbing images I've ever seen in a game.

That's to say nothing of The Master. New Vegas' lineup of morally questionable faction leaders are some all-time great videogame antagonists, but they're not as unnerving as The Master. This twisted, gestalt creature gives me pause no matter how many times I two-shot it with a Turbo Plasma Rifle (or talk it into killing itself), and the simultaneous tragedy and inhumanity of its vision creeps me the hell out. And that unique FEV mummy death screen? Fuhgeddaboudit.

3. Lunacid

Lunacid's lonely, forgotten world calls to mind FromSoftware's best, but it's somehow even more cryptic and offputting than the work of that legendarily cryptic, offputting studio. There are plenty of particularly scary levels, for a start: The Accursed Tomb is an early winner, a pitch-dark labyrinth inhabited by faceless zombies, the top halves of their heads removed in a voluntary procedure meant to deliver enlightenment.

But the real freak shit lives in The Mausoleum, a semi-hidden zone patrolled by Death itself. The Grim Reaper will spawn and chase you down whenever you enter this area, lending a frantic urgency to any exploration. Things only get worse if you craft a turbo-hidden sword to kill this otherwise-unkillable foe.

Killing Death messes up your game. In exchange for its powerful scythe, nearly all friendly NPCs disappear, and you'll constantly be chased down by spectre enemies unique to this mode. The Death state can be reversed, but only with a ton of grinding.

This hidden mode, which always reminded me of the evil playthrough of Undertale or Nighttime Anor Londo in Dark Souls, is one of Lunacid's deepest layers of creepy weirdness. But the game is full of stuff like it, a constant process of uncovering new icebergs of lore and mechanics that made me feel like I never fully grasped what was going on.

1. Skald: Against the Black Priory

Skald is one of my favorite RPGs of the decade, maybe all time at this point, and it works on so many levels. As former PCG editor Robin Valentine pointed out in his 2024 preview, there is nothing else like Skald's combo of high fantasy (not quite low fantasy, mid fantasy? That sounds like I'm saying it's "mid") with cosmic horror.

You play as a group of outsiders stumbling onto a Class 5 Cthulhu situation, and while it calls to mind Bloodborne with its portrayal of an outer god-worshipping society, things weren't always like this. Skald provides context, reminders of a world that hasn't gone mad, to elevate the sheer what the hell you're witnessing in the Outer Isles.

It's insane that a game with pixel art graphics can evoke so much dread, and Skald hits you with moments of cosmic revelation that crescendo in one of the most bonkers endings I've ever seen in an RPG, the sheer outer darkness of it all underscored by the lengths Skald goes to make you care about its world and characters. Demon King is more stressful and unpleasant moment-to-moment, but the contrasts of Skald, the rollercoaster ride of its story, owe a lot to how much of a classic-style CRPG it is.

Demon King is a really scary game with RPG elements, while Skald is all the more memorable and horrifying because it is an RPG. And that's why it gets the crown for me.

Too scary to even play: Fear & Hunger

Taking inspiration primarily from Berserk in the first game, Fear & Hunger is an unforgiving voyage to a dark, dark place, one where shocking sexual violence, mutilation, and utter negation of dignity and humanity are explored in lurid detail. There is no compromise with good taste. The fact that these games are allowed on Steam and not the far more tame Horses is just one of those funny things! I'd like both to be there, to be clear.

Fear & Hunger's low-fi JRPG graphics and anime-esque art create the slightest distance from its horrors. The games also, I think, justify their dizzying level of transgressiveness with nuanced storytelling and a uniquely hopeless fantasy world. Fear & Hunger is one of my favorite examples to point to for the value of transgressive art, particularly as it pertains to games.

I'm fascinated by this series. I've read about it, watched let's plays, and spoiled much of the plot. I'd still like to play both games some day⁠—I own them on Steam⁠—but the thought of immersing myself in so much misery and degradation for the duration of a full RPG, let alone two, makes me physically queasy. I'll get around to it eventually.

Honorable Mention: That one part in Fallout 3, and that other part in Fallout 4

The Dunwich Building and Dunwich Borers, respectively. Both twist Bethesda's engine until it screams to make shock flashbacks to before the Great War work, and I just love the deep pool of water with the freaky eye at the bottom in Borers. Stumbling onto these bad boys late at night for the first time, not knowing what to expect? That's Bethesda's capacity to surprise and delight at its best. The rest of these games just aren't that scary⁠, but these moments deserve a shout.

After three years of invite-only playtests, Soulframe is opening its doors to everyone next week on November 6. If you've been waiting to see what the developers of Warframe are doing with a fantasy action RPG, you'll finally be able to jump in and see for yourself.

The transition to an open alpha will be followed by a massive transformation to the structure of the game later in November. Midrath, Soulframe's big open landmass, won't be the verdant, almost chill, place it used to be: The entire area will be corrupted and it's your job to bring it back to life. "You're going to enter a game that is much more unforgiving and harsh at first glance," creative director Geoff Crookes explained in a recent presentation attended by PC Gamer.

This update, Prelude 17 or Verse of the Veillands, is a huge shift for Soulframe, but an important one that will help new players acclimate to the world. Crookes said the goal is to improve the onboarding experience and to give players "much more ownership" over their decisions early on. It won't be fully finished yet, however, so what's in there today is just "the functional bones" of what will come in the final game.

Feedback from players who struggled to reach the point of the game where they could freely explore the open world convinced the team there needed to be a more direct intro. In Verse of the Veilands, the main quest will teach you how to stop the siphons draining the world of its color. Enemies and resources you encounter will change as each zone is restored and side activities, like fishing, will become available. You'll also be able to raise a wolf pup into a full-on mount.

"The system is also helping the worldbuilding," Crookes said. Pages and pages of new writing for each faction leader will be added and you'll start to hear them radio in and fill you in on the history of the world. The team said it wants them to have a more "integrated" role in your journey as you work to cleanse Midrath of the corruption.

A new Pact, Soulframe's equivalent of a class (or a Warframe), will be added, too. The name of it was still undecided during the presentation, but the developers described it as a "hunter, poacher-type Pact" related to the alien Ode race. Equipping it will let you tie enemies together with a sci-fi bola, pierce them with a cone of spikes, and send them flying away by attaching a giant balloon to them à la Metal Gear Solid 5.

The developers stressed that there's a lot packed into Verse of the Veilands, so much so that they were still tweaking things days before the presentation. Crookes and McGregor nervously expressed that it would "hopefully" be done in time for today, but it seems it won't quite make it in time. That said, the plan is for the update to be out before the end of the next month, so new players might want to wait until then.

"I think this is probably one of the biggest, most violent changes we've made to the structure of the game in a long while," lead designer Scott McGregor said. "Paired with open Preludes is nerve-wracking and we hope players and the feedback stays positive."

The final (final_vfinal_finalfinal.exe) version of everything in Verse of the Veilands will be shown during a stream later today on the Soulframe Twitch channel.

Fallout 4's overworld was always missing something that the other 3D wastelands in the series offered me: a sense of bleakness and danger. There are areas of the map, like the Glowing Sea, that managed to dial up the oppression. But the unforgiving horror mod Whispering Hills makes the whole region eerie and mysterious. And I honestly love that.

My playthrough started the same way as vanilla Fallout 4, with a tableau of mid-Century suburban domestic bliss interrupted by a tense run to Vault 111. But from there, I almost started to think my hard drive was haunted. The post-nuclear world has been reimagined with constant, dense fog and occasional torrential rain that limit your view distance to only a handful of yards.

It reminded me of how Morrowind used its limited view distance to make Vvardenfell feel much bigger than it was, even if at the time it was also a technical necessity. Part of the problem with the Commonwealth overworld in unmodded Fallout 4 is that it's relatively flat and mostly green, so a lot of it feels very same-y. You can look off into the distance and not see anything so dramatic as the Nevada mountains or Washington DC's monuments. But when so much of the surrounding area is obscured, these gentle, rolling hills are suddenly quite effective at making my spine tingle.

The basic premise of Whispering Hills is similar to the base game. Your son Shaun was taken, and you have to find him. But this time, it sounds like he's been abducted by some kind of cult. I immediately ran into a mysterious man whose daughter had also been taken with a tip to go to the town of Whispering Hills to investigate. The locale itself is modeled on Centralia, PA, which was used as a reference for the live action Silent Hill movie and also happens to fit in quite well with the rural New England aesthetic of Fallout 4.

You won't be able to simply walk there, however. The first quest sends you to the Dunwich Borers dungeon, which is the site of one of the most memorable horror quests from the base game. And along the way, I could already tell something was very wrong. New enemies taken from and inspired by horror games and internet creepypastas show up alongside the usual raiders and mutants. Particularly upsetting was a towering Sirenhead who seemed to be broadcasting the distressed calls of a child Shaun searching for his mommy and daddy to lure me in.

Fair warning that this is a very tough mod to survive in starting as a fresh character. The enemies hit very hard, and some of them can soak a lot of damage, too. Sirenhead even managed to shrug off a mini nuke and send me running for the hills. I didn't bother to go progress the main quest long enough to get power armor, but I'd recommend at least levelling up a little bit in the open world before taking on Whispering Hills itself.

Journey to Hell

After fighting my way through the usual bandits in Dunwich Borers and unsealing that foreboding chained door, I started to realize just how deep this descent was going to go. The feral ghouls from the vanilla version are replaced by Eyeless Ones with hooks for hands who are completely blind, but don't care at all about the light sources that serve as a boon in the vanilla quest. And upon reaching what would have been the end of the dungeon in an unmodded world, I was presented with another red door, and a notice that all of my items would be taken away if I entered it.

Things get absolutely terrifying and surreal from here. You can keep your levels and perks, but you don't gain any XP for killing enemies past the point of no return, and are given only rags and an automatic pistol with a limited amount of ammo to defend yourself. It's not even nearly enough to kill all the enemies down here, so stealth and running become essential. VATS is also disabled from here on out, with a scrawled note somewhat comedically explaining that the whole game mechanic was part of some kind of mass delusion.

The lighting and sound design in these segments are very effective at selling the idea that we're not in Massachusetts anymore, with grisly tableaus of hanged cadavers and creepy radio broadcasts insisting you turn around only to see… nothing. The enemies are quite a bit tougher, too. At level four, some of them could kill me in only two hits, with the likes of mumblers and Silent Hill's horrible nurses joining the cast.

Throughout, themes of parenthood are laid on thick. You might see a rocking cradle in an inaccessible area behind grimy prison bars. Some of the enemies make distorted crying sounds. I haven't finished the mod's five chapters yet, but knowing how Silent Hill games tend to play out, it definitely seems like we're not going to find Shaun as an older man leading a science institute.

And at the deepest part of this charnel house, down a rusty set of stairs, you discover Shaun's rattle. And that's when he shows up. Pyramid Head in all his unholy glory will pursue you as you backtrack through the level to escape. I found this section to be particularly punishing, to the point that it's almost not that fun, at least at low level. But if you manage to make it out, the town of Whispering Hills and its unfolding story are your reward.

Pyramid Head doesn't just stick to the modded areas. Once you have the rattle in hand, he can randomly appear even if you return to the Commonwealth. The only way to get him to stop pursuing you is to return the rattle to where you found it in the depths of Hell. And unsurprisingly, he doesn't seem to care much about any kind of laser beam or nuclear weapon you might throw at him. I could at least see Sirenhead's health going down, slowly. Our polyhedral buddy simply seems immune to all damage, leaving escape as the only recourse.

Overall, I love what Whispering Hills does to the default overworld. I do think some of the linear Hell segments are actually too hard to be scary. The problem is, dying over and over sort of inoculates you to the illusion horror games seek to create, and simply hoping I have enough AP to sprint past enemies I can't kill without too many of them hitting me feels random and isn't especially compelling.

But if you're looking for a spooky Halloween experience that turns a familiar game world into something deeply cursed and wrong, simply exploring the Commonwealth with Whispering Hills' diabolical changes is worth your time.

Crimson Desert's Charting the Unknown has arrived, but rather than a focused story expansion, it's more about adding other elements to the existing world.

This includes endgame challenges, new housing options, a romance system, plus a sailing ship and ocean questline about exploring Pywel's treacherous coast and islands. Each feature has different unlock requirements, so here are the exact details for each.

Shipbuilding and exploring the ocean

• You can unlock the ability to buy or build your first ship after "Expanding the Camp" in "Gathered Will" during the "Grounds of the Sunrise" Greymane faction quest.
• The quest to build your first ship will unlock, and progressing this questline will lead to the new ocean story.
• You can upgrade to a medium or large ship for 1.2 million or 6 million camp funds respectively, or build either, which will cost less funds, but more materials.

Garden of Trials and new story quests

You need to complete the main story to unlock the new Garden of Trials combat challenges. Once finished:

1. Visit the Axiom Archive in the abyss, where you first met Alustin near the start of the game.
2. Turn right before the building's staircase and door to find a corridor into the new annex.

There are also new story quests for Kliff, Oongka, and Damiane, which start after the main story is complete in Pailune and Demeniss, respectively, including new combat encounters in the world.

Romances

Kliff, Oongka, and Damiane can each now romance specific NPCs:

• You can check via an NPC's interaction menu to see whether romance is possible.
• After you reach 100 trust, select the "seduce" option, then once likeability is full, you can "propose".
• The four witches have new faction quests that let you build trust and likeability with them as romance options.
• Characters you marry can follow you or reside at your house, and you can also divorce any NPC after marrying.

New housing and management

There is a new upgraded housing mode in the expansion, plus facilities you can now manage:

• Unlock the Greymane Camp on Howling Hill and complete Luke's request in "Grounds of the Sunrise" to unlock new housing options.
• Acquiring the Howling Hill camp will also unlock a number of "facility" icons around the map, which show what strongholds can be rented and used as new management facilities.
• You'll need to liberate the region and complete its faction-related quest before you can access a facility.

One year after the cozy witch-life sim Witchbrook was delayed from 2025 to 2026, it's happened again, as the game is now slated to come out in 2027.

The good news is that unlike that previous delay, this one comes with a solid release date, and it's not too far off: The game is now slated to come out on January 28, 2027.

"We have poured detail and care into every pixel, to create a truly handcrafted experience. We can’t wait to open Witchbrook College’s grand doors to new students in January, and introduce you to the town and people of Mossport," developer Chucklefish and Robotality wrote in today's launch date announcement.

"Thank you for all of your support and patience, especially within the last year, while we took the additional time to make a game we’re truly proud of. We hope you’ll enjoy immersing yourself in our magical pixel art world as much as we’ve enjoyed making it."

It's been a long road for Witchbrook, which we first covered back in 2017, before it even had a title: Chucklefish merely teased it as "something like Stardew Valley meets Harry Potter." In 2020, Chucklefish unveiled a dramatically overhauled visual style, and five years after that we finally got a release window, which didn't really work out. A year and a half after that, here we are, with fingers crossed that this new date—the first time Witchbrook has had a proper release date, to be clear—holds up.

Witchbrook will go for $25 on Steam, and Chucklefish is also working on physical editions, which will be revealed and released at some point after the initial launch.

Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of quests that feel resonant around this particularly spooky time of year. It has an elaborate haunted house that unravels a sordid saga of love and betrayal. It has vampires and vampire hunters. It has shadow monsters that hide in plain sight until you trigger an ambush. But none of these segments got my heart pumping as much as my trip down to the Iron Throne.

Aesthetically, this return to our old pal Sarevok's sunken stomping grounds isn't nearly the creepiest or most unsettling part of the adventure. That would probably have to go to the Mindflayer Colony below Moonrise Towers. It's a murky prison full of evil fish men and some unpleasant surprises, but the somewhat BioShock-esque decor isn't doing the heavy lifting on its own. The key here is that it's one of the only places Baldur's Gate 3 flips our mechanical expectations on their head to create genuine panic and terror.

The reason I feel my stomach starting to churn every time I approach this quest on a new playthrough is that diabolical timer.

If you haven't been here before, I'll keep it light on story spoilers. But basically, the party has to rescue a group of captive gnomes and a couple important plot characters from an underwater prison run by the Sword Coast's own Prince of Cringe, Enver Gortash. He's not exactly thrilled by your submarine escapades, though, and triggers a series of events that will flood the prison and kill anyone in it after six frantic rounds.

If that doesn't sound like a lot of time, it really isn't—especially not if you're coming into this for the first time without knowing what's about to happen or how to prepare. Anyone who hasn't made it back to the sub when that timer expires dies horribly by either drowning or the sudden, crushing pressure of an ocean compressing them into slush.

And of course, this being Baldur's Gate 3, even the gnome civilians who aren't relevant to the story have names, relationships, and recorded dialogue if they survive. You aren't losing generic pawns here. You're failing well-written people.

If you're not playing Honor Mode, party members who didn't make it out will have their lifeless bodies wash up on shore where they can be revived by Withers or whatever miraculous magic you might have access to. If you are, you can say goodbye to them forever. And everyone else who can possibly die during this sequence is simply dead as all get out. This can even include one very major NPC with a role to play in the story and a strong connection to one particular member of the party.

Can't save em all

In almost every other case, undoing a mistake or seeing a different path in Baldur's Gate 3 is a simple matter of reloading a save. And sure, you could reload back to the very beginning of the Iron Throne quest and try to do it better. But due to the structure of the quest, this isn't as simple as redoing a boss fight or picking a different dialogue option. This sprawling dungeon with locked cells, flooded corridors, and tough enemies is just grueling enough that the idea of trying again isn't particularly attractive. It's designed to make savescumming feel painful and daunting, encouraging you to live with the consequences of your actions.

On a first playthrough, and unprepared, you may find it's not even possible to save everyone. I've done it once, and it required hours of prep with haste spells, teleportation, portal scrolls, telekinesis—everything I could muster to give me any kind of advantage. You almost have to plan out every action for every character in advance. Even one mistake could mean you find yourself deciding who to leave behind.

As much as it made my heart pound and forced me to experience the cold sting of failure when I had to explain to one of my gnome allies that his loved one didn't make it, this was easily one of BG3's best quests. I'll never forget how it felt the first time through. And even as a very experienced player now, with hundreds of hours across multiple playthroughs, it never feels trivial. It never feels like something I can take for granted if I want everybody to survive.

By giving us a puzzle to solve using the turn-based action economy with lethal consequences for small errors, Larian created a deep well of fear beneath the sea.

Though I try to limit my savescumming, I've never had the stomach to brave it out in Honor Mode, where the consequences of all of my mistakes would become permanent. Maybe if I did, I'd come to feel differently about the Iron Throne. At that point, would it just become another life-or-death adventure like any other? Would wandering around the Underdark creep me out just as much as boarding that submersible?

While that may be, the fact that the Iron Throne works the way it does means players like me get to experience a little taste of that permadeath anxiety. It's easy to be a hero when the F5 key is right there. It's a true champion who can soldier on when you only have one shot. And so, while it might be Baldur's Gate 3's scariest quest, I also found it to be one of the most gratifying. Even though I couldn't save everyone the first time through, that bittersweet victory felt hard-won and honest.

I would love to see more developers try to instill fear by subverting expectations about failure and consequences. It can be far more effective than a jump scare or an unkillable pursuer like you see in so many more traditional horror games. Especially in an era where run-based games are ascendant, and every defeat is nothing but a new beginning, I long to have the threat of living with a bad outcome held over me. Even if I do succeed, that thrill adds a lot to the experience.

I've stood here before, and it never fails to make my throat feel dry. The waves churn. The hatch opens. Those prisoners are down there counting on me.

Here we go again.

Crimson Desert's first Charting the Unknown DLC is releasing imminently, despite its initial delay, a mere seven months after the base game released, during which time Pearl Abyss has updated it with content relentlessly.

Charting the Unknown releases on October 29 or 30 depending on where you live, but it's a simultaneous release around the globe. Here's when you can expect to play it:

• West Coast US: 3 pm PDT (October 29)
• East Coast US: 6 pm EDT (October 29)
• UK: 10 pm GMT (October 29)
• Europe: 11 pm CET (October 29)
• Australia: 9 am AEDT (October 30)
• New Zealand: 11 am NZDT (October 30)

If you're unsure whether you can run it, you can see the updated system requirements on the Steam page. The preload is also currently live, though it requires a pretty hefty storage footprint to install. The game itself is 135GB, though, so you'll probably want a headstart downloading it, unless your internet is more capable than mine.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: Community Edition must be what modders dream about—a big, impactful, community-driven project that enhances a beloved game, with full support from its publisher. It's effectively an official upgrade for the orc-kicking immersive sim, released for free. And it's heading to Steam.

The list of improvements is impressive, and includes:

• Linux and 64-bit support
• Restored content
• Console-exclusive maps and modes
• Co-op
• New Game+
• Adventure mode, with bonus levels and challenges
• New spells, weapons and abilities like sliding
• Randomly-generated levels
• Steam Workshop support

WiltOS Technologies ported Dark Messiah over to the latest Source engine and worked with the community and other modders to integrate existing mods and fan requests, culminating in this new version. And publisher Ubisoft has apparently been a great help.

"Ubisoft is actually supporting this project directly," the developer noted on the Steam forum. "This would not be possible without them." Indeed, Ubisoft invited them to visit Ubisoft Montreal, where they were able to get the console-exclusive features working on the PC version.

The new edition was announced back in March, but the arrival of the Steam page makes it feel a lot more imminent. It's due in 2026, and there's not much year left, so expect to see it soon. I don't really need an excuse to replay this classic, but this is a good one all the same.

And the launch of the new edition won't be the end.

"We love this game," wiltOS Technologies says on the store page. "We wouldn't be able to bring you the Community Edition if it wasn't for the love and support that we received from the community, so for the first time in the game's history we are inviting the community to develop it alongside us. While we do plan on remaining active in our creation process and communications, even developing new modes and features for people to enjoy, almost every aspect of Dark Messiah: Community Edition has been made to make sure the community who loves this game just as much as we do has the tools to make it theirs."

Instead of being framed as a definitive mod, it's aiming to be a new foundation for a new era of mods, and hopefully it will make the community even more vibrant.

Literally one day before it was set to launch into early access, the pixel art action RPG Emberville has been delayed so the development team can incorporate feedback from the game's recent Steam Next Fest demo. Instead of rolling out on October 27 as planned, Emberville is now set to launch on January 7.

"Many of you have played our Steam Next Fest demo and shared your feedback. This means a great deal to us, and we immediately started planning more improvements," developer Cygnus Cross wrote in a Steam update. "However, some of the improvements we want to make are systems changes that can't be done quickly. Reworking bow combat, for example, would take more time than we had prior to our Early Access release even though the team is working around the clock.

"After carefully considering our options, we have decided to move the release date and include some essential improvements in the Early Access launch build."

The last minute delay is particularly surprising given that Cygnus Cross reaffirmed the October 27 release just a week ago, with a "what to expect" post for potential players. That included information on Emberville's planned first early access update, which was meant to include the final boss of the first biome, controller support improvements, additional languages, and more, all within a month after the game's launch.

There's no overlooking the looming specter of Grand Theft Auto 6, which launches for consoles on November 19—an arrival that's caused no small amount of turmoil for other game releases in its proximity.

Frankly, though, I'm not sure how much crossover there would be between the GTA 6 and Emberville audiences, and Cygnus Cross made no mention of it in its delay announcement: The studio said only that its goal "is to deliver an experience that shows what makes the game distinctive, establishes its core gameplay, and offers a compelling glimpse of how the game will grow throughout Early Access."

For those who want to see what Emberville has to offer in its current state, the Emberville demo remains available on Steam.

As part of our ongoing coverage and commemoration of the closure of BioWare, we've been reaching out to RPG developers to hear what the studio meant to them. Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton got in touch with 16 devs who owe their careers to the legendary RPG studio, and today I can share the words of another, Skald: Against the Black Priory lead developer Anders Lauridsen.

I had a similar experience with BioWare RPGs as a substitute for tabletop growing up, lacking friends who were interested in the hobby until well into adulthood, and I'll wager that's not an uncommon experience.

Hearing Lauridsen say there's a lot of BioWare DNA in Skald made me smile. The game's art recalls those clunkier RPGs the developer initially bounced off, but its mechanics and combat are Baldur's Gate and Fallout to the core. I also gotta say I feel less bad about my own lack of facility with earlier generations of CRPG after hearing that a developer like Lauridsen struggled with them at first.

His enthusiasm is a heartening reminder that BioWare's legacy is more durable than EA's quarterly profits or private equity predation: The things we love about those games have dispersed into RPGs all over the world, and Skald is a perfect example of that.

It has the tight, low-level focus of the original Baldur's Gate, but with a shocking inflection of cosmic horror, plus Larianesque reactive systems I never would have expected from a pixel art game⁠—Larian's own Swen Vincke is a fan of Skald himself. It's $15 on Steam and GOG (half-off at the latter at the time of writing), and I reviewed it on Steam Deck, where it runs like a dream.

Today, October 26, is the 19^th anniversary of The Witcher, the groundbreaking RPG that introduced Geralt, and CD Projekt, to the world. To mark the moment, CD Projekt took to social to pay tribute to friends who made it all possible: BioWare.

CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski spoke warmly of BioWare last week in the immediate aftermath of the studio's shocking closure, crediting it as "a massive part of CDPR history." The Witcher was built on BioWare's Aurora engine, which it created for Neverwinter Nights, but BioWare did more than just share technology: It also worked to help bring the upstart Polish RPG to much wider attention.

"19 years ago, an ambitious dream to bring an iconic book series into the world of video games came to life with the release of The Witcher. It was the start of an unforgettable path, which wouldn't have been possible without our friends at BioWare," CD Projekt wrote.

"From lending us their Aurora Engine and sharing their knowledge, to giving us a spot at their booth at E3, their support helped turn our vision into Geralt’s first interactive adventure. Thank you to everyone who has walked the Path with us from the very beginning. Happy 19th anniversary, witchers!"

19 years ago, an ambitious dream to bring an iconic book series into the world of video games came to life with the release of The Witcher.It was the start of an unforgettable path, which wouldn't have been possible without our friends at BioWare.

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-26T19:05:28.197Z

From lending us their Aurora Engine and sharing their knowledge, to giving us a spot at their booth at E3, their support helped turn our vision into Geralt’s first interactive adventure.Thank you to everyone who has walked the Path with us from the very beginning.Happy 19th anniversary, witchers!

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-26T19:05:28.112Z

The first Witcher game, released in 2007 as a PC exclusive, was a critical hit and (eventually) a sales success, too. After that, CD Projekt leveled up, moving off of Bioware's engine and creating its own REDengine for 2011's The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Cyberpunk 2077.

Of course it's not really a happy anniversary moment. CD Projekt's kind words were prompted by last week's shutdown of BioWare by Electronic Arts, which had the audacity to call itself "the number one publisher in Western HD gaming" while simultaneously admitting that it couldn't figure out what to do with one of the most storied game studios ever.

Even in an industry as riven with layoffs, closures, and general instability as videogames, the end of BioWare felt different and more impactful, sending shockwaves in all directions. Tributes, mourning, and anger followed, and as more anniversaries like this one arrive, I have no doubt we'll see more memories of BioWare, and regrets over its loss, in the future.

With the closure of RPG standby BioWare, we've been consulting the PC Gamer rolodex and reaching out to developers for their thoughts and reflections on the legendary studio. Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton spoke to 16 devs who joined this industry because of BioWare games.

I was happy to hear back from Christoffer Bodegård, developer of our current RPG of the year frontrunner, Esoteric Ebb, on what BioWare meant to him.

I have always been one of those pro-Dark Souls 2 revisionists, but man, they really chafe your hams on this one. Iron Keep, Shrine of Amana, Dragon Shrine: Mention these levels to even the most hardened Souls veteran, and they're liable to break into a cold sweat, flashing back to waves of frustrating, overlapping enemies rushing them down to ruin their day. That's not to mention the co-op first DLC zones that mercilessly brutalize the solo player.

FromSoft is a longtime co-op innovator, but its focus has always been limited, diegetic systems meant to supplement solo play, not replace it. Enter legend modder Yui, whose Seamless Co-op series removes the speed bumps of FromSoft co-op, introducing shared story progress and a siloed system of servers and saves to protect your vanilla game progress from anticheat scrutiny.

Even though Dark Souls 2 is rapidly approaching its 13th birthday, it is the most recent game to receive the Seamless Co-op treatment. Its mechanical weirdness and lower popularity compared to other entries may help explain why it's gone last. As a longtime fan of this strange, prickly game, I'm delighted to have found a new favorite way to play it⁠—one with way less trial and error, and way more laughs.

I reunited with PCG contributor Tyler Colp and senior guides writer Sean Martin for this adventure. Together, our ka-tet burrowed its way to the maximum Depth Five difficulty of FromSoft's tied-for-most-frustrating game, Elden Ring Nightreign. By comparison, Dark Souls 2 in co-op has been a cakewalk, and I'm not complaining.

Take that Iron Keep area I mentioned: Its first zone puts you through the ringer, a gauntlet of lightning-quick samurai wannabes who swarm you on non-OSHA-compliant catwalks over a lake of lava. Your reward for getting through them? The Smelter Demon, a sphincter-faced lava golem whose most powerful trick is having a trailing, invisible hurtbox behind his every sword swing.

Even though we suffered a few deaths on the way, it never felt frustrating. Part of that is due to your progress not resetting if one player dies. Unless you're fighting a boss or a PvP invader, you just respawn back at the bonfire and can rejoin your fellows. During the two states of exception, you can spectate your still-living squadmates. If everybody dies under any circumstance, it's classic Dark Souls respawn rules.

The Alonne Poseur gauntlet (they're just nerds cosplaying my GOAT, Sir Alonne) became an easygoing war of attrition, as wars of attrition so often are. It's worthwhile to experience Dark Souls 2 "as intended" at least once, but if you've bounced off in the past or want to revisit it, I can't recommend Seamless co-op enough.

Goth WHAT?

One surprise boon has been a lively PvP scene: You can still get invaded even when undead in Seamless Co-op, and it's apparent that a stay-behind network of Dark Souls 2 PvP sickos has been activated, dusting off their Ice Rapiers and Chaos Blades for one last dance.

As in the base game, invasions make for an interesting complication to regular gameplay that I'm always happy to confront, and I really appreciate that Yui's mods make invasions more commonplace than in the vanilla experience. FromSoft typically has PvP be more opt-in, while Seamless Co-op requires you to consciously opt out of the possibility.

As a DS2 PvP old hand myself⁠—I got into a lot of duels on the Threshold Bridge back in 2014⁠—I like to insist we do things honorably and 1v1 invaders. Unless they're really annoying or break etiquette themselves; at that point, it's weapons free. I'm still not sure how I feel about the unfortunately-named invader "Goth Bitch," a naked woman who repeatedly cyberbullied us in the Harvest Valley zone. She was really good at Dark Souls 2 PvP.

There have certainly been technical hitches⁠—mostly weird latency or mismatched details between our instances of the game⁠—but Seamless Co-op mostly just works. Its smoothness and ease of use is especially impressive given that it's a free mod, and Yui was diligently, rapidly squashing bugs in the days immediately after launch. The mod will be there for you whenever you and your friends want to spin up a game, but I'd act soon if you want to take advantage of the reactivated PvP (or get harassed by a nude warrior woman in an evil swamp).

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin remains available, as ever, on Steam, while you can grab Seamless Co-op over on the Dark Souls 2 Nexus.

It's hard to discuss BioWare's demise without detailing the corporate meddling that led to one of gaming's most celebrated and enduring studios getting the axe. BioWare made mistakes, undeniably, but the buck stops at the executives who gutted its teams and never understood, for instance, the popularity of Dragon Age.

But things are bleak enough and you know all this already. So instead, I want to celebrate BioWare's impressive impact, which will continue for as long as studios are designing RPGs.

Even if BioWare ceased to exist after its incredible run of Infinity Engine games, it would still be considered an icon. Baldur's Gate was, for so many people, the CRPG, defining an era of roleplaying games and echoing across the decades. We're still talking about it, and studios are still designing games built on that old foundation.

Owlcat, Obsidian, Larian—three of the biggest RPG studios of the current era have all dipped into that well. Without BioWare we'd not have the Pathfinder CRPGs, Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny, and Baldur's Gate 3 certainly wouldn't exist.

Obsidian as we know it would likely be a very different studio without BioWare, if it existed at all. It formed after the closure of Black Isle Studios, which published Baldur's Gate, and it relied on BioWare's Infinity Engine for Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment. That relationship continued under Obsidian, with the team following up BioWare's Neverwinter Nights and KotOR with celebrated sequels, before making Pillars of Eternity, BG's spiritual successor.

The modern resurgence of CRPGs, born out of a love of BioWare and Black Isle's library, probably would not have happened if the two studios had not made such a huge impression. Disco Elysium, for instance, owes a great deal to Planescape: Torment, and if ZA/UM had never created Disco, we wouldn't have games like Esoteric Ebb or Zero Parades either.

Following Baldur's Gate, BioWare gave us Neverwinter Nights in 2002, a game that was still undeniably a CRPG, but one that catered to the demand for 3D graphics. Neverwinter Nights was solid, but its real legacy was the Aurora Engine and the Aurora Toolset.

BioWare gave players the power of game creation with the toolset, with which they spawned countless worlds, modules, mods and persistent servers—effectively community-run MMOs. It was my first foray into modding, when I created a D&D adventure for my flatmate's birthday. I was a broke student, so I couldn't afford a gift, but I could absolutely skive class and make a cool game.

Folks are still playing with the toolset today, in a community that has persevered for over two decades.

Also in 2002, a small Polish developer was founded. CD Projekt started life as a localisation studio, and it worked with BioWare and Interplay to create the Polish version of Baldur's Gate. From that relationship, it was given the job of porting Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance to PC. Unfortunately, that port was a victim of Interplay's demise, but bigger and better things were on the horizon.

The company formed a new studio to develop its own games, known as CD Projekt Red, and started work on the original Witcher. The studio then licensed the Aurora Engine from BioWare, which it heavily modified to create Geralt's first big videogame romp.

CDPR's joint CEO Michał Nowakowski paid tribute to BioWare after the closure announcement, saying, "Bioware has been a massive part of CDPR history. We befriended them when localizing and selling Baldur’s Gate games in Poland, Czech, and Slovakia. And later they were [a] great help when lending us their engine for Witcher 1, sharing their wisdom and even giving us a spot at their booth at E3."

As the popularity of CRPGs started to wane and consoles began to dominate, BioWare adapted and pivoted. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was still secretly a CRPG, but one that you could play on console with your controller, with so much of the classic CRPG complexity hidden from view.

KotOR kicked off a series that continued with KotOR 2, from Obsidian, and BioWare returned to the series for SWTOR, a MMO that continues today under developer Broadsword. At the time of its launch, it was the most expensive MMO ever made, and it continues to be an astonishing achievement in terms of the absurd amount of dialogue and voice acting.

With KotOR, BioWare really started to refine the features that would go on to influence so many RPGs (and games in other genres). BioWare RPGs have always featured big, game-changing decisions, letting you determine through your choices who lives, who dies, and who gets to become the protagonist's love interest. But in KotOR, we started to see this really become codified.

The romances, the alignment system, the ability to influence companions and even turn them to the Dark Side, these systems are part of the DNA of modern RPGs. Even now, we describe games that feature big, signposted story branches as having BioWare-style choices.

Jade Empire didn't make nearly as big a splash in 2005, but it's here we see BioWare experimenting with action-RPG mechanics. I love Jade Empire, and it further developed the BioWare-style choices, but it also felt a bit like it was following a trend rather than setting one. Story-driven action-RPGs weren't new.

With Mass Effect, though, it attempted something different, and it was duly rewarded. KotOR and Jade Empire saw the studio try to adapt to changing tastes, but with Mass Effect BioWare had finally figured out how to move on from CRPGs.

The studio that gave us Baldur's Gate developing a third-person shooter sounded like a disaster waiting to happen, but instead BioWare made something incredible. Never before in a BioWare game had we been able to play such a well-defined protagonist, but the studio maintained the player agency it was so loved for, letting us create all these different versions of Shepard. There's so much more to the character than the binary Paragon/Renegade system.

Mass Effect is also where BioWare's experiments with choice and consequence really paid off. Do we wipe out an alien species or allow one of the galaxy's biggest threats to survive? Do we betray the Council or risk the deaths of countless humans? Do we date Liara or the space racist? And then we got to see these choices reverberate across the sequels. Years of decisions culminating in a fight for the galaxy's survival.

With BioWare's closure, we'll never get to see what it was planning for the fifth outing, though after Andromeda I'm not sure we would have been happy with it—even though the leaked trailer looks rad. But Mass Effect lives on. The Amazon series is reportedly still going forward, and not one but two new games are on the horizon that are carrying the torch: Owlcat's The Expanse: Osiris Reborn and Archetype's Exodus. Both are coming next year.

In 2009, BioWare finally released Dragon Age: Origins, which had been in development for seven years, underwent some significant changes, and was framed as a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. And boy did it live up to those high expectations. A few months after launch, it had already hit 3.2 million sales. BioWare moved on from CRPGs, only to go and release this all-timer a couple of years later.

While the stuido would go on to chip away at series' the CRPG elements, culminating in 2024's not-so-great action-RPG The Veilguard, Origins at least showed the world that CRPGs were still viable, and that console gamers were perfectly capable of enjoying a more methodical, complex RPG.

Origins went on to influence a new generation of videogame developers, not just as an RPG, but as a successful blockbuster game that stopped pretending queer people didn't exist. Sure, Femshep could date Liara in Mass Effect, but BioWare obfuscated the queer romance by making the Asari genderless, even though Liara is absolutely female coded. It could also be argued that the Liara romance played into the fetishisation of lesbians, titillating straight men without actually depicting a queer romance.

BioWare continued to represent queer relationships in its other RPGs, sometimes with specific characters, and sometimes by making every character playersexual. And it got a lot of shit for this from the conservative nutjobs. Thankfully, those idiots were fighting a losing battle.

Just look at how many RPGs have followed suit. Not just in allowing the player to embark on a queer romance, but their depiction of queer characters in general. Even the fairly conservative Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, where the game director constantly complains about "wokeness", features a genuinely fantastic queer romance. Sorry, bigots, you lost!

That it was able to do so much of this while trapped inside EA's dev-killing prison is even more impressive. Mass Effect and Dragon Age came out of the previous era, despite EA being the publisher at the time of their respective launches, but BioWare continued to take big swings despite the less than ideal situation the devs found themselves in.

Yes, I write for PCG and I am about to defend Dragon Age 2. What a shock! But DA2 is a great example of what BioWare was capable of, even when EA was going out of its way to set it up for failure. Despite an absurd deadline that led to extreme crunch and so many cut corners, BioWare was able to put out some of its greatest writing, while introducing beloved and enduring characters like Varric, Cassandra and Hawke. The game was compromised from the get-go, but there's still so much brilliance in there.

BioWare just kept beating the odds. It was the same with Dragon Age: Inquisition. EA wanted all of its games to use a single engine, Frostbite, leaving BioWare working with new tools that simply weren't designed for RPG development. It was apparently a bit of a nightmare for the team, which once again had to crunch to get the game out the door. But again, it was fantastic—finding a middle ground between Origins and DA2, while also going mostly open world.

Inquisition was BioWare's last great game, but what an exceptional run! It sucks that its reward for all these achievements was death by a thousand cuts, and that it became a punching bag for the anti-woke mob. But I refuse to accept that this mars its legacy, or that its demise is anything other than incredibly sad.

And yes, I've been a pretty vocal BioWare detractor over the last few years. I could barely get through Andromeda, bounced off Anthem immediately, and I thought that The Veilguard was unmitigated rubbish, full of annoying characters, repetitive combat and a poorly constructed narrative. At the end of 2024, I said that I'd finally given up on BioWare. And earlier this year, I wrote about how BioWare could feasibly make a comeback, but that it never would.

None of this meant that I wanted to see BioWare's demise. What I wanted was to see that old boldness return. A new game, some big swings, the philosophy of the BioWare of old, even if so many of the people who made those games happen had left or been made redundant. It's a shame we never got to see what that would look like.

I don't want to dismiss the incredible work so many other developers have done elevating the RPG genre—they own their achievements. But at the same time, it's impossible to imagine RPGs without BioWare. Its importance cannot be overstated. You did well, BioWare, and even this grumpy old man will miss you.

Archetype Entertainment has unveiled a new look for the protagonist of Exodus, its upcoming sci-fi RPG. We at PCG didn't love Jun Aslan's original face, but it sounds like there was more widespread discontent over his supposedly homely mug.

After a brief intro by studio GM Chad Robertson, we got a brief cinematic trailer of the new Jun⁠—with a little cameo by Matthew McConaughey, in case you forgot he's lending his voice to this game. And, I mean, yeah: Jun's a real prettyboy now. My man's looking like an industry plant. Cheekbones that could cut glass.

Previously, Jun was, perhaps, a little schlubbier, but only really by the standards of showbiz. I contend that he realistically could have been someone's workplace crush. He was an LA 6.5, but a Chicago 9. Prettier than most people you know, I'd wager. I didn't love Jun's original look, but I figured, hey, it's an RPG. I'll just mess with the sliders.

But it sounds like we're restricted to one face per sex in Exodus, based on the new trailer's description: "You can play Jun Aslan as male or female, and options like hairstyles, hair color, facial hair, and tattoos let you add your own personal touch." That sounds reminiscent of the facial presets from Baldur's Gate 3, but with only two characters instead of that game's two dozen or so.

I like making a cutie pie RPG character as much as the next guy, but now that he's gone, I find something endearing about the way Jun looked before he got his work done. You were beautiful just the way you were, honey. On a more meta level, I wish studios would double down when there's a backlash over minor aesthetic stuff: I don't even have a horse in the s&box race, but I prefer that game's original, controversial, sausage character model to the new realistic ones.

At the same time, as a clear attempt at a Mass Effect successor, Exodus has to live up to the generational good looks of Dutch Model Mark Vanderloo⁠⁠—BioWare based the default male Commander Shepard face on him. Even with a full character creation suite, it's hard to justify a custom Shep who always winds up looking like a potato man when the real Handsome Squidward is right there for the taking.

What do you think? Should Jun have kept his original face, or does his new look suit him? Sound off in the comments (and we've got a poll after the newsletter block).