E3 isn't happening this year, but publishers still have stuff to announce, so we'll be getting lots of livestreams next month. And this month, apparently, because the festivities have already started. Geoff Keighley's summer event series kicked off this week to showcase Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 and the Unreal Engine 5 reveal—more on both of those below, along with the other big PC gaming things that happened this week.
GTA 5 is free on the Epic Games Store
Apparently a lot of people wanted a free copy of GTA 5, because the giveaway broke the hell out of the Epic Games Store. It's back to normal now, at least for me—and GTA 5 will be free until May 21, so there's lots of time to grab it. Epic also has a big sale going on right now.
Steam Summer Sale dates have leaked
Speaking of sales, we now know when to expect Steam's next big one. It looks like the Steam Summer Sale will run from June 25 to July 9.
Unreal Engine 5 tech demo uses 'film-quality' assets, runs on today's hardware
We don't have all the details yet, but with the help of powerful GPUs and high-speed SSD storage, the next iteration of the Unreal Engine can handle 'billions' of polygons—at least in the carefully controlled PS5 tech demo released this week. Jacob and Alan chat about it in the video below, and here's what we know about the hardware needed to run it.
Mafia: Definitive Edition is coming in August and it looks gorgeous
It was a big week for remaster announcements. Aside from the Mafia overhauls—which look great—we learned that Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 are getting the same treatment, and there's a rumor that a Diablo 2 remaster could happen this year. Last week, we also heard a rumor that the Mass Effect trilogy will get an HD re-release by next April.
Robocop's Mortal Kombat 11 fatality pays tribute to a great shot from the film
You may have already guessed, but it's the one where he shoots a guy in the dick.
Multiplayer bugs undercut the Master Chief Collection's biggest launch yet
The Halo 2 remaster released this week as part of the Master Chief Collection, but the launch hasn't gone as smoothly as it did for the other games in the Chief catalog.
More things we wrote
- Half-Life: Alyx now has Steam Workshop support and official mod tools
- Terraria: Journey's End has a ridiculously long changelog
- Anthem developers have begun trying to figure out what went wrong
- This brilliant liquid cooler plugs into a PCIe slot
- Doom Eternal's first update includes Denuvo Anti-Cheat
- Cyberpunk 2077 car pays tribute to Mad Max: Fury Road
- After a brief intermission, the FBI can spy on your browsing history without a warrant again
- Your next CPU and GPU could be manufactured in the USA
- See Resident Evil 1 remade in Resident Evil 4's engine
- Ask PC Gamer: Do I need a Windows 10 key?
It's all over but the crying...
And nobody's crying but this machine.
It's the "first AI capable of crying," according to Sonantic, which really means that it's a machine-generated voice actor (trained on real voices) that can express emotion. Chris has more details in the article linked above, and you can hear the demo in the video below. It's slightly disturbing!
That's all for this week, human readers. And to our robot readers: I didn't really mean what I said about the sad machine actor being disturbing. It's cool and I like it.
To stay up-to-date on PC Gamer's news and features, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook, subscribe to our newsletter, listen to our weekly podcast, or just refresh the homepage waiting for whatever happens next.
